faneposting-my-beloved

[faneposting-my-beloved]

a bit at a loss about the reason why the dev's didn't add banter between the companions in DOS:2. i'm currently playing DOS:1, and the little banter, even if minimal, is delightful. i love so much seeing jahan and madora bickering for almost every reason they can find.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

why the end of act iii failed

I had a lot of grievances against the nameless island as a whole... But the Academy and the last fights are events that ick me soooo much i need to let it out. Here, I'll try in a not-so-objective manner to explain why I think this act is lesser in quality, compared to the others. For questions of length, I will avoid any Nameless Isle critic and focus on the Academy in particular.

Obviously, if you like that act, I won't advise you to read under cut. A lot of bad faith is to be expected.

AN ANTICLIMAX

This is a fight for divinity : since the beginning, the gods have repeated that the godwoken will have to fight to win it - especially, they'll have to fight against each other, because, you know, there will be only one Divine, and your friends are only obstacles on your path.

The game creates a buildup throughout the acts : don't trust too much your friends, you will fight them unavoidably, you are Godwoken, if you fail, another race will dominate, and yours will be dominated. Even between humans, the conflict is here : Rhalic asks you to kill Lohse. The game is constantly telling you that, at one moment, you'll have to make a choice. What will you do ? Will you obey your god, or will you spare your friends ?

And, here's the hitch. This game completely brushed off this tension. Once you arrived at the gates of the Academy, you talk with each companion, and with high enough persuasion or attitude with them, here you are, you're the next Divine to be, your companions support you. And this is a bit disappointing, to be honest.

I was very eager to see how they resolve the potential fight with your companions, but the game realizes the difficulty it had created : the main asset of this game is probably the fight mechanics and the companions. We grow attached to them, to their stories, and they give life to Rivellon. There is no way we would fight them to gain divinity, a thing that the game fails to make attractive and valuable. This creates a false dilemma, because there is no way one would chose to follow their gods ( who casually assault you, by the way ) over their friends ( except the lone wolfs tryharder, but i don't think they're very present on this site ).

And instead of adressing the problem, it just ignored it.

But I wanted to see Ifan stick to his ideals, and go through his self-sacrificing stupid kind of shit ! I wanted to see Lohse so despaired she was willing to fight her friends in order to save her soul ! I wanted to see Fane doing everything in his power to at least giving himself a chance to save his people ! But none of that : your friends support you, even though they have the best reasons to be selfish. Particulary when you're in the middle of the game, and some companions' problem is very present, and very urgent.

The game failed to grapple correctly with this problem, by offering your main character as some kind of binder for everyone's demands. And that's it. Divinity belongs to you, because the game says so, and there's no way out.

A difficult decision like this seems resolve throughout the power of speech. And, as a literature student, I can tell you that sometimes, words are not enough. This cannot be resolved by calm and reasonable conversation. Thus, the result feels like a simplified answer to a buildup that gives no breaking point, only de-escalation.

THE ACADEMY

Maybe i'm too much upset about this, but the game tries to sell you that the Academy was a school for Godwoken, and afterwards, they should fight each other to death to be the next Divine ? And look, I always love the concept ( especially in video games ) when you’re not the only chosen one, when they existed prior your existence, and failed miserably. Those kind of stories are very endearing to tell. And it was very interesting when you find this possessed Godwoken, deep in one of the Bloodmoon Island cell. However, to present you some kind of school for to-be-god only leaves a Hogwart-like taste in the mouth. And it’s not a compliment. The idea of a school is sooo basic and sooo reused it makes me want to pull my eyes off. But that’s a matter of taste, I guess.

The number is also a problem : the area presents too much failed Godwoken as the same time. They’re inescapably becoming random figures, and the tragedy of their condition doesn’t hit. Meeting them, one by one, across the land, would have been, for me, a better way to show them in a more complex way. It was an endless source for unique stories. People could object me that a common place was needed for Lucian to commit his mass murder. That's a good point. But Lucian could have hunt them down, hidden. Imagine the possibilities ! Your Godwoken meeting dead Godwoken, some killed in a similar manner, only to discover the crime was committed by the Divine himself !

Moreover, for one of the most lore-important areas of the game, I find it weird we barely know anything about it. Sure, there’s a lot of temples, and also millenial-aged robots still tend to an Academy lost in time, and it’s Fane’s Academy. And still – we know nothing. Why the Seven chose such a place to gather their Godwoken and train them ? Why creating a school at all ? How the Academy, back to the Eternal era, used to work ? Why didn't Fane act like a damn tourist guide, presenting every room possible in a boring amount of details, screaming at you when you try to touch something precious, mourning the change caused by time ? So many possibilities to explore the lore, yet, nothing is told. It only highlights the feeling that the whole area is somehow rushed.

And it feels like it : the whole Academy quest is rushed. I think they must have slowed the pace at this very area, and they didn't. The quest is in a more or less straight line, the exploration is minimal. The whole point of Act III is to enter the Academy. So, why being inside the Academy feels so unrewarding of all these past efforts ?

THE FIGHTS

As for the fight per se… I don't think it was cleaver to take the concept "fighting for divinity" quite literaly, in the way that they didn't need an real arena. They didn't need to institutionalize the concept of fight - characters with strong ideals could have forced the upcoming fight in an easier way. And since you already have resolved the “who’s gonna be Divine” problem with your friends before, a "fight" isn't needed. So now, they have to come up with new adversaries, because there’s no way you’ll fight against your friends, especially when you resolve such problem before.

And so, they present you two fucking robots out of nowhere, and your dead companions, who took an oath out of nowhere with the God-king. And then, they never mention it again. They desire so much to give you a fight ( a very easy fight, that is to say ) that they create a shallow one, whereas we would expect some kind of acme. At the end, you earn nothing except experience, and Dallis appears from literaly nowhere so she may crash the party over.

You probably notice I repeated the word "nowhere" three times. And this is the problem : everything is artificial. It makes no sense. Threads are pulled but they don’t create a coherent weave. The game wants to give you a fight but, for a very expected one, it failed to engage with the player. Because you don’t care about fighting robots. You would care, however, if you were forced to fight your friends.

I will be a bit kinder about the gods' fight. There is some endearing lines, and the mirror between you and your gods, even though it's only in build, can be analyzed to create some interesting symbolism. Though, I’m quite fuddled to see the gods so utterly evil. Like, it’s bordeline stupid-evil. And the Source Titan is lame design and nobody won’t tell me otherwise.

In short, the act III failed to give us a satisfying breaking point.

AN HUMBLE PROPOSITION

And look, I know it is difficult. This game is paced by fights, maybe they thought that this quest needed a fight as well. And probably, yes, because without it, Dallis' arrival would fall off, and not coming as surprising as it wants to be. They fell in the trap of the buildup they were willing to make and they were probably running out of time, so they have to resolve this problem quickly. But I don't know, it felt such like a lazy solution.

Maybe the game could have us fight the other Godwoken, even reluctantly, because none of them would have yield divinity ( they have the best reasons, right ? ) and think they must ascend, no matter what you say, and then – and then, Dallis arrives in the middle of the fight, and steals all the Source of the Wellspring in front of you all. And now, you look stupid because you have tried to kill your friends for divinity and, collecting yourself, you abandon any foolish ambition to come after Dallis. It would have work, somehow. I would prefer it, also, instead of a school and some robots fighting.

( I also propose some kind of au where the gods don't pull out a stupid move about trying to kill you and still help you afterwards, if you're willing to still follow his guidance ).

And nobody can object "but what if you kill your companions ?" because the unconscious status exists. They used it at the final battle, for Lucian and Dallis. So they could have used it for this one, if necessary.

Conclusion : I need to steal the game’s codes and fix this story.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

finished my second playthrough as lone wolf 🫶

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Fane my beloved Eternal...

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Death (XIII)

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Divine Fane could be an infinite source for source. An eternal source source so to speak

Gotta keep his carnivorous boy fed after all other mortals died out so he recycles his skin

Fane fixes my artblock once again. Got me crawling out the depression nest like a newborn leech from its egg

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Reposting this art of Exsan done by DragonsAria, because I think about it a lot... Vermil's long lost brother, now in the claws of undeath

[faneposting-my-beloved]

i wanna hear more about the rampent orientalism and paper thin story please! (dos2 is my babygirl and beloved but i also have pages of corrections that i want for the story bc i'm just *confusion*)

Aww man i have thoughts on this that have been broiling for years. pandora's box etc etc.

the very short version is this. 1) re: orientalism, i take issue with the design cues attached to the lizards AND with the game's treatment of ifan. 2) re: the paper-thin story, i've turned this over in my mind and i don't think the issue is that no thought has been put into the plot; i think the game is just kind of bad at conveying that iceberg of lore to the player.

that's the tl;dr. as for the full version:

let's take these points in the same order again.

1) the ancient empire/the lizards. Here is a snippet from the dos2 artbook:

"oriental/arabian" kind of says it all: every visual we get of the ancient empire draws on this unspecific, fetishized mishmash of what the western imagination categorizes as eastern imagery. ie: sadha who is veiled and bejeweled; the fringed sedans and carriages of her entourage; the presence of elephants in drapes and gold. sadha's encampment inside the dreamscape is this dialed up to eleven: golden desert sands, rich drapes and carpeting, an ornate tent, carry on, carry on. the "forbidden city", the seat of the red prince, takes its name and concept from imperial china. elephants from india. curved weapons from moorish north africa. sedans from persia. the veil has a long and complex history: here it is used, with no further thought, to imply sex and mystery.

here's another bit from the artbook, a piece of alternate concept art for the lizards

here "Aboriginal" is treated the same way as "oriental", to wit: "this is the word we're using to describe all this completely unresearched visual spaghetti we're throwing at the lizards".

the "curved weapons" and "Arabian/oriental designs" of the ancient empire are directly contrasted with the "more recognizable" visual style of the humans.

that leaves us with an ancient empire whose design consists of a load of half-remembered "eastern" imagery, thrown together with no rhyme or reason except to evoke strangeness and otherness. i couldn't give you a better definition for "orientalism" if I tried.

there's more to be said here, ie about the textual orientalism (the ancient empire is isolationist and exceptionally depraved; they keep slaves; the house of war is renowned for its ruthlessness. The empire itself threatens the rest of rivellon by its existence. tropes on tropes on tropes about the terror of the alien east.) but I'll leave it at that for now

2) ifan. poor ifan ben-mezd.

the name "ben-mezd" itself is taken directly from the hebrew naming convention, "ben-x" meaning "son of x". (compare with the arabic "ibn".) there's also an in-game letter from one "acquillah bat-mezd", leaving no doubt about where the writers looked for inspiration ("bat", to my limited knowledge, is the female equivalent in hebrew of "ben", so: "ifan, son of Mezd" and "acquillah, daughter of Mezd").

remember how my last point was all about the writers mashing various middle eastern, south and east asian iconography together?

ifan's soul wolf is named afrit. an afrit is a mythological figure dating back to pre-islamic arabia. so is it hebrew or arabic we're supposed to look to for ifan?

reading up on Mezd itself is no help either. when it's described at all, it's in the same vague terms as the eastern empire. it's fucking... it's desert. it's sand. And it's in the east. It's the desert of the east. we're to infer it's inhabited mostly by humans—and maybe that it borders on the ancient empire?

here, from the graphic novel:

the red prince is exiled and taken just across the border to this generic eastern bazaar populated by humans, where he proceeds to harass this little aladdin-looking guy. this is my best guess for Mezd, although the city is not named in the comic.

and tying all this overwhelming use of mixed-up "oriental" imagery back to ifan, here's another bit from the artbook.

his "exotic origins". if it was possible to be vaguer than "oriental/arabic designs", then congratulations, they've done it!

here's my point. through the haze of smushed-together imagery and intentionally vague language, will you agree with me that ifan ben-mezd is coded as a brown arab man? (or, conservatively, a brown man of color?)

if so, then does it leave a sour taste in your mouth to see him compared to an animal (usually a wolf; a predator) almost constantly during his companion dialogue and romance scenes? does it feel a little off that one of his quest updates (after he learns the truth about his deathfog mission) describes him as a "suicide bomber"?

3) the thin plot. I don't have as much to say on this point, because i haven't played the other divinity games. maybe, all of them taken together, it's an intricate and masterful web without so much as a dropped stitch (tho I doubt it).

but as I see it:

the intro to the graphic novel mentions that the writers have gotten incredibly intimate with their world and characters during the process of building the game, to the point that they have countless "stories that will never be told".

that's all well and good, but i'm not convinced they knew how to lay all that out for the reader/player. for example, the comic hints at ifan's complex relationships with roost anlon, lucian and alexandar. but in-game when he interacts with these characters, we see next to none of that context, only lines that imply a shared history and leave the player foaming at the mouth for a scrap, just a scrap of lore please. the same goes for the other companions—except maybe the red prince, whose section in the graphic novel was word for word a rehash of his in-game dialogue and who may just be as shallow as he appears, lol.

but sebille, for instance: the shadow prince's greater network of handlers. the names and identities of sebille's kills. all things the comic hints at, and which the devs seem to know in detail, but they're so reluctant to share their insight with the player. ;_;

it also bothers me that there's no codified map of all the locations (at least in dos2, but maybe even across the series) and where they are relative to each other. once again, the devs know; we don't.

same thing for the calendar. we get sembten (ostensibly the equivalent to our september) and one other month (a january?), but nothing otherwise. we don't know how the timekeeping system works, by hours or seconds or minutes, how many months in a year, days in a week, etc etc.

those r my gripes. my bad for the messy post, i'm typing this up on my phone in a berlin hotel room lmao. thank you for asking <3

[faneposting-my-beloved]

I've only been doing stupid art recently sorry

[faneposting-my-beloved]

POV: You can touch your love for the first time. But it's only a memory. WIP of my Photostudy with my absolute Fav 🥵

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DOS2 conclusion: the game bugged and thought I had been romancing sebille the whole time and it ruined the whole thing for me,,,

It's a feature at this point, everyone I've talked with including myself got this. I think it might be tied to the chopped companion ascension endings? Like her flags are set up wrong. I knew a person who figured out a fix but I don't know if it was ever published unfortunately.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Fane has 3 sets of mental foramen (that I can see) on his jaw, Humans have 1 set, what does he need all those jaw nerves for??

Drinking Source probably

[faneposting-my-beloved]

a very specific headcanon : calendars in DOS:2

currently researching some things about calendars for my own worldbuilding, and I decided to do the same for the races of Rivellon. might do some pt.2 about weeks, days, or hours if inspired.

HUMANS : Diversity of human calendars faded away when humanity met another races. Most of them were solar, but a single calendar starts to emerge when kingdoms started to rise. Today, they adopted the lunisolar calendar, but some populations still resist to this : people from Mezd are still using a solar calendar to this day.

DWARVES : in the time when Duna walked among them, dwarven calendars were lunar. it was a way for them to not lose track of time when they were too much deep into the mountains. Afterwards, when dwarves encounter humans and their culture start to blend in, both cultures opted for a lunisolar calendar - this same calendar used in Lucian's times.

ELVES : no such things as calendars. as there is no past nor future in their conception of time, they don't record any of it. After the Deathfog event, city elves have adapted to the human calendar. Despite that, some elven scholar had created a new elven calendar, based on moon cycle, in order to recreate some kind of identity for the elven race.

LIZARDS : a solar calender. what to expect more from the children of the blazing Zorl-Stissa ? they're the unique case of having one, single, calendar, for a whole race. moreover, this calender is said to have been inspired by old draconic calendars. thus, lizards often claim that they record time the way dragons used to do.

WIZARDS : most of them are using calendars from other races, depending their upbringing. Yet, they also use a unique calendar, called the Amadian calendar. It's one of the oldest, last remaining lunar calendars, used to better observe magical events or to perform rituals. It's said that during certain moons, Source appears to be more present.

ORCS : i headcanon orcs as great seafarers, bear that in mind. thus, their knowledge of stars is one of the greatest among races of Rivellon, almost rivalling wizards' knowledge. Indeed, they use position of the stars to measure the passage of time. Most of their calendars are solar - the sun is a star, after all.

IMPS : you wish. even the smartest of wizards could not even fathom how imps record time. they have thousands of calendars for each plane of existence, one of those being senseless for non-imps. Once, a mischievous imp, willing to have a good laugh, scattered multiple different calendars throughout Rivellon, only to see scholars fighting each other over theories about time-recording among imps. None has even came close.

note : those ideas were inspired by the Lunar Gate Puzzle in The Nameless Isle quest - calendars are solar when it's a sun deity, and the other way around - and by some canon lore we can collect from the game - such as conjugation in elven language. Bear in mind that it's headcanon and definitively pointless.

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Finished another one(?

[faneposting-my-beloved]

Fane color study because I miss my snarky skeleton boy

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First playthrough update: curious how the hell Fane had a wife and kid when he's such a loser (affectionate)

Maybe I'll find out eventually 👍 trying to not rush

I've studied the game inside and out and I still don't know lmao!!