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Solas giving up being a spirit for Mythal will never not hurt my feelings

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kisses and almost kisses :>

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Sacrifice.

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I wondered if anyone had requested this yet on Cameo and then remembered that I have money to exchange for goods and services

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have this old cassandra WIP

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Welp. We can always replay the old games…

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It looks like Trick Weekes was just let go. BioWare is really done, huh. 🥲

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in case you were wondering, mentally I am still here

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Vhenan

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It would be such a shame if people were to flood the special email account (DEIAtruth@opm.gov) dedicated to receiving reports on US government employees who are resisting orders to eliminate DEI programs with unrelated emails about our favorite blorbos, omegaverse fics, steamy art, etc, thus filling it with spam and burying the actual reports.

It’d also be such a shame if people who want to be instantly aware of what’s going on sent “YES” to the email address hr@opm.gov and got signed up for a federal employee communications mailing list.

Such a shame it would be!!

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You get trapped with two Dragon Age characters (spin the wheel) in one room for a day.

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i think what people need to understand is that no amount of essays assuring me of veilguard's strengths, of which i agree there are plenty, is going to change the fact that the emotional experience veilguard prompted within me (and for many others) while i played it was a deeply negative one. discomfort at best, painful at worst. im talking stomach aches. visceral, somatic creeping disappointment and dread that i tried to fight for hours and hours but eventually had no choice but to accept. i stopped wanting to play entirely around 30 hours. i felt vaguely ill. i felt anxious. i could not sleep for a few days. and im not saying i felt sick because it was so bad, but that i felt sick because of the sinking realization that i was about to be terribly, horribly disappointed after so, so long. you could call me dramatic and im sure someone will. idk what to tell you. my emotions manifest physically long before they become decipherable or understandable to me mentally, especially when they're 10 years in the making. probably an autism symptom. regardless, it was genuinely pretty awful, especially because i had immense good faith for this game. i was so hopeful and optimistic and generally thrilled and literally anyone who followed me before october 31 would know that. the emotional whiplash and crash was intense and devastating, and i was reeling for days. you cannot tell me that this experience was "wrong" or "toxic" due to it's negative nature. it was entirely involuntary and outside of my control, as i would expect many people's joy was. emotional reactions are not beholden to fandom discourse.

any post i have made criticizing the game since is attempt to make sense of the emotional roller-coaster of the past 10 years, this summer, and finally this game's release. i do not come on here and write out my criticisms of veilguard because i want YOU to dislike it too. the nature of my essays are not persuasive. if they do persuade you its just because i am a well-trained essayist. sorry. if they dont, great! that wasnt the point. i have no desire to change anyone's mind on the game, in fact i actually would not wish the disappointment i felt on anyone. the fact that i have a lot of followers who agree with what i say and who spread the thoughts i express across tumblr is literally out of my control. when i write out my long-winded criticisms, it is out of a need to express and externalize that sinking, cold feeling i had while playing, in pursuit of understanding exactly why playing that game felt that way to me. identifying, analyzing and verbalizing is the only way i have been able to process my experience. its confessional and therapeutic more than anything. it helps other people understand their own difficult emotional process with the game. its not an attempt to ruin your fun. my negative experience with veilguard does not invalidate anyone else's positive one.

i see so many posts acting like all criticism is an intentional, targeted hate campaign and i dont understand that assumption. to what ends? what would that achieve? why would i bother with such a thing? maybe that is some people's intention in the deep hater corners of this website, and im blissfully unaware. if it is, fuck them. its certainly the intention of annoying grifters, but i feel the distinction between transphobe grifters and devastated fans is pretty clear, so im not sure why the lines are deliberately blurred as if those groups are remotely similar. some of my criticisms come from a more objective place. the writing comes to mind, and it's a consistent criticism from thousands of players. but just because i consider it to be poorly executed, does not make it unlovable. and when i say that i think its poorly done, i am not saying that you cannot or should not love it, or that you are stupid for loving it. maybe someone out there is saying that!!! but i am not. things do not have to be perfect to be enjoyable. they dont even have to be well executed to be enjoyable. "i think x aspect of veilguard is poorly done for yz reasons" is a completely different sentence than "you should not like x aspect of veilguard for yz reasons". these are not the same statements. i see so many posts that are so vitriolic and acting like two experiences of this game cannot coexist, that one has to win and be objectively right, moralizing them on a false axis of positivity = good and negativity = bad, and acting like the existence of one negates the experience of the other. and why? why would that be true? i literally love so many things that other people think are absolute ass. i also love plenty of things that i myself think are actual ass. i love them anyway. this is allowed and really fun. i am not sure who told you that it is not.

however, i have just as much of a right to express my disappointment as you have to express your excitement. i am genuinely happy for everyone who loves the game, i am glad it resonated, or that you saw yourself in its characters, or that it just scratched your hyperfixation itch. but whatever je ne se quoi it had for you, it did not have for me. i have written out so much criticism about so many aspects of the game, but fundamentally what it comes down to and what i cannot express in words is that while i played after waiting 10 years for that moment, it felt wrong. it wasn't that i had specific expectations for game story that were not met, in fact, it exceeded my expectations in a lot of ways. i mean that in terms of how i felt, something was off. it did not resonate. it did not land. it did not hit the right cord with me. i did not have enough moments of joy to outweigh the feeling of emptiness. i did not walk away from it feeling the way that the previous games made me feel. and ive been trying to figure out exactly why that is for three months now by talking about it with people who feel similarly. i am not sure that i will ever be able to analyze my way into figuring it out. it might just have to simply be that it left me bereft.

and so my posts are not anti-veilguard hater propaganda to make you feel like shit for loving the game. rather, they are me verbally processing exactly why i feel like shit so i can hopefully stop feeling like shit. to assume that people who are trying to process these negative feelings are toxic and intentionally malicious is a projection made in bad faith. i love dragon age, and it is because i love it so much that it disappointed me, and it is because disappointed me that i have to verbally process it on tumblr.com so that i dont go absolutely insane. i tag my posts properly. i do not go into tags where i do not belong. i do not rage-bait. i am participating in post-partum dragon age therapy between me and my followers. if it ends up on your dash, sorry. my therapy is popular i guess. so please for the love of god enjoy the game, freely and enthusiastically. i am happy for you. i will sit here and be jealous that it spoke to something in your soul that it unfortunately did not speak to in mine, and nothing i say can take that away from you. please stop interpreting it as an attempt to.

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Sive Lavellan living out her Princess Mononoke dreams in the Fade

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The court is his natural habitat

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Since I'm back in my Dragon Age Era™ I'll upload some of the stuff I've been sketching lately (and it has to do with spirits, of course)

I'm living in the Necropolis arc forever now, and dreams about Cole meeting Manfred (and Emmrich) don't cease to torment me (in a wonderful way).