#'we have dragon at home'

[lizzybeeee]

When you spend 20 years attempting to bring down the child slavery, murdering, human trafficking exploitation ring that stole your childhood, murdered your friends, and killed countless innocents only to have them rebrand as 'Noble Freedom Fighters™' off-screen.

[vaguely-concerned]

the fact that irving canonically survives through the end of asunder to be at wynne's funeral is so fucking funny to me. nothing but love and respect for MY unstoppable cockroach morally grey machiavellian mage dad!!! he's survived in his position through multiple attempted rites of annulment and blood mage plots popping up left right and center around him. the chantry keeps trying to stamp him out but his dodge game is simply out of this world, divine. civil wars, political machinations and minefields, chantry atrocities, this wily old motherfucker is dodging and weaving his way through it all, not-quite-no-hits-taken-running-it-but-honestly-close-enough-under-the-circumstances style. if solas does succeed in tearing down the veil I would fully believe that one of the like three people still alive at the end of it all would be a very weary 90 year old first enchanter irving going 'oh this shit again huh'. the maker has cursed him for his hubris and his paperwork is never finished (affectionate, it's fine he canonically loves paperwork)

[pokemonbattletournament]

Announcing: the We Have Pokémon at Home battle tournament!

We are proud to present the follow-up to the Pokémon Battle Tournament: the We Have Pokémon at Home Battle Tournament! In this tournament, monsters from the monster taming/battling/collecting genre that are explicitly Not Pokémon will duke it out in a one-on-one battle tournament. This tournament will take on the same format as the Pokémon Battle Tournament, asking “who would win in a battle?”. For this tournament, we are taking submissions for which monsters to include. Monsters from non-pokémon franchises, pokémon parodies, fakémon and beta pokémon are eligible. Your own fakémon creations and unique outside the box suggestions are especially encouraged.

Submissions are closed, thanks everyone for submitting!

Answers to any questions you may have under the cut.

Q&A: Which monsters can I submit as contestants? Monsters eligible to be included in the tournament are:

Monsters from another monster taming franchise. A non-exhaustive list is included below, monsters from other franchises are eligible as well.

In-universe Pokémon parodies (think, for instance, of the Voidcritters from the Sims 4) are allowed and encouraged, provided individual species are documented somewhere online.

Fakémon are allowed and encouraged. Especially your own creations are encouraged as a special treat. Mons from published fangames are allowed. Fakémon variants of existing Pokémon are allowed. Fusion designs are allowed.

In the light of the recent leaks, beta versions of Pokémon are allowed. For leaked pokémon, any link to a post discussing the leak is sufficient as documentation.

Anything else you can think of that fits the criterion of “we have Pokémon at home”. Outside the box suggestions are encouraged.

Monsters ineligible to be included in the tournament are:

Official Pokémon or any of the canon variants thereof.

Monsters that lack an image or online documentation of an individual species.

Monsters not submitted as individual species.

What do I need to submit a monster? To submit a monster, you need an image link and a link to information about the monster, preferably a wiki page or an introduction post by its creator.

How many monsters can I submit? As many as you like. Go nuts.

Which monsters will be included? As many as are needed to round up or down to the nearest power of 2. Preference will be given to a variety of origins, so if a specific franchise or fakémon creator dominates the submissions not all of them will be included.

When are the submissions due? Submissions will run for two weeks, until December 20th. Depending on the rate of submissions, I reserve the right to cut off submissions early if the number of submissions runs in the thousands.

When will I know if my submission made it? When the polls for round 1 go up! A huge part of the fun of the first round is, to me, the element of surprise, so you will find out at the same time as everyone else who is in the tournament.

The pre-approved non-exhaustive list of franchises from which monsters can be submitted is as follows. New franchises may be added to the list as submissions come in:

Digimon

Monster Rancher

Shin Megami Tensei

Spectrobes

Bakugan

Bugsnax

Coromon

Dragon Quest Monsters

Neopets

Robopon

Telefang

Temtem

Yo-Kai Watch

Monster Hunter Stories

Nexomon

Yu-Gi-Oh

Palworld

Slime Rancher

Casette Beasts

Ooblets

Loomian Legacy (Roblox)

SquisherZ (Hypnospace Outlaw)

Fossil Fighters

Voidcritters (The Sims 4)

Beastieball

[marictheirins]

Baldur's Gate 3 x Dragon Age: Origins( main mods used I II III IV ) / do not reupload

[freyadragonlord]

How do I explain how married Han Yoojin and Sung Hyunje are in the post-epilogue Side Stories without sounding like I am exaggerating or making things up...

[crickit-song]

So many friends and yet,

Not a single one a normal human being

[ghilankisser]

Playing inquisition and seeing Solas walk around so casually and being able to just go up and talk to him makes me upset. He’s so distant now. How did he go from being that hobo looking guy who hangs around painting the walls to becoming this scary guy who is trying to end the world

[tidetower]

Qarl & Laenor // Daeron & Addam

If I had a nickel for every time a Velaryon was in a same sex relationship with someone of a different social class and the culmination of said relationship was the lowborn one killing the highborn one, I would have 2 nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

artwork by 0723ytin

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Veilguard vaguing:

It's not automatically a good thing, actually, that the game de-emphasizes or even outright removes racism against elves, and bigotry against other groups, from the story

[lafaiette]

Bioware fans finally getting the new DA game after waiting ten painful years:

Bioware:

[samsamsonart]

Created this outfit in a Dragon Age frenzy over the last few days!

[luposlipaphobya]

There's an old song about an undying love between the sun and the moon. It ends with the world burning during an eclipse.

Here is the art cover for the zine "The Eclipse" I made with @d-cybele about Echo, my tiefling knight of the dark moons, and Galahad his bff/ennemy/lover (it's complicated).

Galahad belongs to @d-cybele

[vaguely-concerned]

I hope this game knows that I have never blocked or deflected a single attack in my entire life and by god I don't intend to start now. I'm running this shit in my usual fromsoftware style (I dodge or I die I will not sit meekly cowering behind my shield waiting for the end to come I shall meet it head-on on the field of glorious combat). living on adrenaline and i-frames. L1 might as well not exist to me. ah yes. the coward button. I've heard tell of it. the button for people afraid to die. for people unwilling to tank a lethal blow to the face for no reason when it's totally avoidable if you use the game mechanics the devs have handed you. you know. like a real man

[pokemonbattletournament]

We have Pokémon at Home!

Round 1 matchup 6

Propaganda for Lazy Frog:

"It does not defend itself, it is also a frog."

Propaganda for Blue Eyes White Dragon:

"One of the strongest monsters in YuGiOh. I think Kaiba had it."

"This legendary dragon is a powerful engine of destruction. Virtually invincible, very few have faced this awesome creature and lived to tell the tale."

More info under the cut

More information about Lazy Frog:

More information about Blue Eyes White Dragon:

[oswaldthatendswald]

This is not a new observation, but I think One Piece handles Doflamingo's backstory-- how it continues to affect his behavior and choices, as well as how it fits into the overall story-- exceptionally well. The villain who is evil due to a tragic past is a very well-established trope, but it is increasingly done quite poorly. Attempts to flesh out a villain and garner sympathy for them can become misguided justifications for their actions or goals, muddying the themes and tone of a story. My point isn't that morally complex characters can't be interesting when done competently and purpose; it's that when the villain with a tragic past is meant to be evil but his past becomes a justification, the writers' intended dynamics of the story are damaged.

Doflamingo's story never has that problem. His backstory makes it perfectly clear why he does the things he does, but it never implies that he is right to do them. It is a reason, not an excuse. The reader gets the sense that Doflamingo is very much the product of his childhood: first the golden excess of a Celestial Dragon, then the abrupt fall from grace into hatred and pain. It's the perfect storm to set a person down the worst paths possible.

But I think the reader might also feel (or at least I did) that this wasn't a fate set in stone. Doflamingo could have unlearned the ideology of a Noble and perhaps that the harm done to him doesn't justify further harm-- except that the only guidance he ever got was worship by Trebol and the other Executives, who were the nail in the coffin for any redemption Doflamingo might have had. Their appearance only validated and affirmed the beliefs Doflamingo already held regarding his place in the world.

Instead of ham-handed sympathy bait, Doflamingo's backstory is a beautifully executed extension of the worldbuilding and themes already present in the story. It is another tragedy in a world of tragedies, another story where children are put through hell. But without the external guidance and support the heroes get, Doflamingo takes the other path, becoming another perpetrator of tragedies, and a reminder that our heroes are the people they are as much (or more) because of the love and mentorship they had than due to innate goodness. It's the road less traveled, but they still might have traveled it.

[justashamwithwastedpotential]

Lucanis Dellamorte why are you so mad with me personally for going to Minrathous instead of Treviso that you refuse to use support moves

I literally sent HALF the team with you. Both of which who are archers only for you to tell me that you couldn't fight off the dragon bc it was... flying around???

Seems like a skill issue to me sorry /j