#GOD OKAY HERE WE GO

[hayleykiyopioids]

Page 1

wait shit why does it want me to enter a name again? was there a reason? what's this guy's actual name again?

P.S. Thanks @transgendercrt for getting me to download the unofficial homestuck collection ur so real for that

[egophiliac]

(almost) four years in, and I finally had time to draw something for the anniversary! woo! 🎉🎉🎉

[deoidesign]

I'm so mad that post was misinformation because there is actually an EXTREMELY important conversation to have about the production schedules artists are forced into. There's no need for exaggeration, the conditions are bad.

I work for webtoon. My publication schedule is weekly. While publishing I'm required 10-15 pages a week. Fully colored.

This means I'm finishing a 150 page fully colored graphic novel every 10-15 weeks.

When my comic is not updating, I am not getting paid. Any time writing, editing, or off is out of my own pocket. I don't get healthcare. They do not provide any assistants. They expect me to promote myself; they chose to deprioritize me before I even launched and gave me an end date half a year in. I never had a chance.

And this is the industry standard! Every company has artists forced into crunch hours, overtime, and burnout. Artists are literally dying early due to it. So many of my friends can't afford to go to the doctor.

It's unsustainable and untenable, and it's also the expectation our audiences have.

If we want to have this conversation, there's plenty of conversation to be had with the realities of the situation. It's bad as is.

[usertoxicyaoi]

"Do you want to see some adult stuff?"

THE ON1Y ONE (2024). EPISODE TWELVE.

[apnourry]

it was hot at work, i was hot at work, i forget the rest

[bakudekublogblog]

kacchan there is actually a way you and izuku can be together forever i have this crazy inventive solution for you it's called a marriage license

[luck-of-the-drawings]

EDYN TIDESTRIDER, CHALLENGER OF THE UNDERSEA, RIVAL OF THE DEEP. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOUR BROTHER WAS CHOSEN TO BE A WEAPON OF THE GODS? HOW WILL YOU UNDO WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO HIM?

[luclfrog]

I made this in celebration for the release of season 2 🔥

[vigilskept]

gnashing my teeth thinking about how veilguard talks about the gods only as a joke when they could've gone somewhere truly crazy.... you're so right.

Yeah... you get it. It's just such a missed opportunity!

I don't even mind the jokey tone they use a lot of the time, because we all joke about things we struggle to understand/cope with.

Except Veilguard refuses to let you even try to broach the subject beyond that surface level. In fact, when it does let you engage with it at all, it manages to make things even less nuanced!

I'm just going to talk about Bellara's quest here since it's the most directly linked with the elven gods, and it's already a lot. Fundamentally, her companion quest is asking us two things:

Should elves be blamed for the actions of the Evanuris?

Should they preserve any of their past at all?

The first one is absurd to even begin with. It's not even a good or interesting take on the (very christian!) question: "Are we responsible for the sins of our ancestors?"

The Evanuris are not the ancestors of modern elves. Dalish religion implies that modern elves descend from those who the rebels never freed from slavery to the Evanuris.

This setup is already awful without looking at any of the parallels Bioware has (intentionally) drawn between the elves of Thedas and Jewish/Indigenous people. I have to put the rest of this under the cut because I genuinely don't think it can be shortened without making it sound flippant. In the context of the coding of the elves, the theological/social implications of all of this are so much worse.

TLDR: the indigenous/jewish coding of the elves makes bioware's treatment of elven religion in veilguard thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. they did not have to write themselves into this corner. there was a way of handling this lore reveal without the implication of elven religion (again, jewish/indigenous coded) being obsolete

So, the religion of the Dalish was part of their enslavement. It's the belief they were forced into by the cruel gods they are still devoted to. That's already pretty bad. How could it get worse, you might wonder?

Whether Bioware deviated from their initial inspirations for the elves or not, the implications for these lore reveals in light of those parallels are particularly cruel. Those two core questions in Bellara's quest? Yeah. Those have both been levied against the oppressed groups that Bioware chose to draw inspiration from. Both historically and presently. To justify atrocities against them.

And to be clear, Bioware does not deviate from or subvert the usual indigeous and jewish-coding of the elves in their writing here. If anything, they end up actively endorsing a very significant element of antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiment.

Indigenous-Coding

Advocates of colonisation have always justified it by arguing they were 'saving' groups of people who were stuck in the past. They had been ‘left in the dark’ through ignorance of Christianity. In the more secular sense, this was framed as Europeans having journeyed through history to reach enlightenment, while the rest of the world was still in an ‘uncivilized’ state.

Christianity and progress had to be brought to these people to save their souls and bring them into the future with everyone else. Their Gods? There were only two possible ways to frame those. Either they were not real at all, or they were evil. Either way, they were obsolete.

In the Americas, these arguments were still used when corralling indigenous children into residential schools or tearing them from communities through the adoption system. Governments pushed the idea that they had to be forced to assimilate because they were 'backward' in their practices and beliefs.

In the settler-colonial state Canada, where Bioware is based, it's still common enough to hear people justify all of this as having been done "for their own good." Even those who admit that the ways colonization was perpetuated were cruel will still try to defend it by telling you, "it was bad, but their ancestors weren't saints either."

Sounding painfully familiar yet? A little uncomfortable in the context of Bellara's questline?

Jewish-Coding

Since the dawn of Christian Church, Jewish people have had a very fraught place in Christian theology. Christianity claims that that the coming of the messiah in the person of Jesus Christ makes the religion of Judaism obsolete. Christians believed the obvious answer to this problem was that Jewish people should convert.

When many did not, they were labeled as ignorant, obstinate, stuck in the past. They were so focused on their history that they couldn't see the truth which had been revealed in the present. There’s a significant legacy of this idea in Christian artwork with depictions of Synagoga blindfolded next to the clear eyed Ecclesia. You still hear echoes of this sentiment in antisemitic language today.

As for the nature of the Jewish God... there is some deviation here. For some Christians, He is God the Father, and He is good. For others — and this idea has been around from early Christianity till now — He is the Creator of the material world, but He is evil.

There are innumerable variations of Christian gnosticism that probably wouldn't be productive to get into on a Dragon Age Blog. What I need to underline here though, is that the idea of the Old Testament God as the devil/the demiurge/fundamentally evil, has been used to justify atrocity towards Jewish people for over a thousand years.

Should elves be blamed then? For the sundering of the Titans? For the Veil? For the Blight? For the evils of this world, created by their Gods?

Implications for Veilguard

Not only is religion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard often devoid of nuance or ignored outright, when the game does engage with it at all, it does so in a way that quite literally draws on these incredibly harmful antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiments that have been (and still are) used to perpetuate real harm.

To be clear, I don't think the writing here intends to endorse the idea that elves should be blamed for any of what's going on. Bellara's anxieties are being projected onto her people as a whole while she grapples with what this all means for her, I get that. In fact, you could be generous and read some of this as a critique of this particular kind of anti-indigenous/jewish bigotry.

However, I don't think that absolves the writers of any of the implications they've created by confirming that the elven pantheon did exist and was canonically evil.

Elements of Dalish/elven culture might be preserved after all this, but the conclusion the game railroads you into is that their religion is obsolete. Just like Judaism. Just like the many Indigenous religions around the world. Except in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s no longer just the bigotry of outsiders claiming that to be the case. It’s now the objective truth of the setting.

Going forward, the elves of Thedas can keep their culture, but they can’t practice their religion. If they continued to practice, they would be framed the way the Venatori are: evil and stuck in the past. This really can’t be overstated: this is the exact rhetoric that has justified centuries of violence and oppression of Jewish and Indigenous people. This rhetoric is still around and still weaponized.

It’s so cruel to create an in world ‘lineage’ that draws so heavily from their cultures and histories, then validate the rhetoric that has been used to hurt them. At best, it’s thoughtless. But as a company based in a settler-colonial state, this is something they should’ve put thought into, given that they chose to code their elves and Jewish and Indigenous. That was their responsibility, actually.

What gets me about all this is that they actually didn't need to force that conclusion at all. They could have kept the Evanuris as cruel tyrants without demonising the Creators and their worship at the same time.

The Evanuris weren't always Gods. They weren't even always rulers.

In Trespasser, when asked how they became Gods, Solas tells Lavellan that they did so slowly. That it started with a war. That fear bred a desire for simplicity. For right and wrong. For chains of command. That generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods.

Veilguard confirms all of this. The addition it makes is that before all this, the first elves were spirits who made their bodies out of the Titans. This all occurred over the course of thousands of years.

None of this needs to be retconned in order to allow for a respectful yet nuanced portrayal of religion!

TLDR pt2: bioware, u could’ve avoided literally ALL of this by making the evanuris part of a priestly class who seized power after the war with the titans. it wouldn’t even have undermined ur lore! u could’ve kept dalish religion alive! u could’ve implied complex political dynamics for your ancient elves without even having to write it! why didn’t you even try?

Trying to Fix This Mess

Say the elves took their bodies from the Titans and settled the lands of Thedas. Say the Titans even allowed this for a time. The dwarves were made from their own bodies after all.

Yet the elves didn't have the same connection with the Titans as the dwarves did. They had no stone-sense, so they couldn't understand the Titans' song.

Generations down the line, some of them took too much from the Titans. More than they were willing to give. That was when the Titans lashed out, making the earth tremble so that all the elves had built crumbled beneath them.

And what if the firstborn among the elves had taken up priesthood to guide the younger ones. They were closer to spirits than the elves that were born into this world, and so the younger ones looked to them for guidance. Maybe they were the ones who were trusted to reach out to the more powerful of the spirits who chosen stay in the Fade, their old kin who preferred to keep their distance from the physical world to preserve the essence of what they were. The spirits of Justice, of Benevolence, of Craft. Those who the elven people paid homage to, and trusted to preserve them in turn.

So when everything seemed to fall apart, the elves turned to their Keepers, their priests, and asked of them what they ought to do. How could they make the earth stop shaking? What would they have to do to be at peace again?

Whatever the spirits themselves may have responded, many of the Keepers (among them the Evanuris) took up arms and chose war. They saw it could be won so they fought, sundering Titans from their dreams and stilling the land.

And yet there was no peace.

Some Keepers sought to hold on to their power as generals, and wanted to wage war on new shores to keep it. Some Keepers thought they had already gone too far, claiming they had acted without the guidance of the spirits who hadn't wanted war.

These Keepers could've caused chaos and endless bloodshed, so the Evanuris formed their alliance to suppress the others. Likely, they thought they were doing so for the benefit of all the elven people. More war meant more death, and it was needless now that the land was still. And even if what they did to the Titans was wrong, it was done and they could not fix it. Better to silence those who meant to stir up fear among the people.

The Evanuris fought until they were the last faction left, naming the few holdouts the Forgotten Ones. They were praised for bringing peace to Elvhenan, and trusting in their guidance their people crowned them as rulers.

Yet some dissent always remained. None of them were infallible. They were no longer spirits, they hadn't been for thousands of years. They were now more accustomed to command than to priesthood after all that war. They had drawn on the power they had stolen from the Titans to gain the advantage over their enemies, and the corruption of the Blight was starting creep in, ever-so-slowly.

Maybe some of the people, unhappy with their rule, started to voice the thought that was expressed by their rival Keepers once more: that the Evanuris had grown distant from the spirits. That Elgar'nan didn't serve Justice anymore. That Mythal had strayed from Benevolence.

So Evanuris took the mantle of godhood for themselves. It was only for peace and stability.

It would be too dangerous if anyone could claim they were deviating from the will of the spirits, so they would claim they were those great spirits. Elgar'nan was Justice, Mythal was Benevolence. They would use their rule only for the benefit of the people, not abuse their power.

And there you go. None of what I've written above can't be neatly incorporated into the existing lore of Veilguard. It leaves the elves of Thedas precisely where they started in Dragon Age: Origins. Distant from their ancient Gods, trying to pick up the pieces of their forgotten past.

[silverdragon12]

Been re-reading assassin's apprentice recently, so here's a whole bunch of character doodles✨

[kaizuart]

Sometimes it's self care to draw your oc collecting members of the polycule a la the ending theme song of Bucchigiri.

Here's Fabi and some hearts he's stolen!

[lunesart]

I’ve been on a lmk kick as of late, so here are some of my favorite screenshot redraws I did in my sketchbook

[the-one-who-lambs]

Chapter 1: How Narinder Takes His Tea

The Lamb has defeated The One Who Waits and inducted him into their cult, and they aren't sure what to think about that. As they get a grip on their new godhood, they realize they need his expertise and allyship, but since they've robbed him of his last flicker of hope, tipping the scales in their favor isn't going to be an easy feat. As Narinder, formerly The One Who Waits, adjusts to mortal life, he's unwilling to let the Lamb's claim on his crown remain unchallenged. With the Lamb at his side, and his emotional turmoil cloaked beneath a thick layer of divine rage for a millennium, their rivalry shifts to an arrangement neither of them can quite pinpoint. The Lamb meets his sharp anger with outward mercy, bitter as they still may be at his betrayal. It's the complete opposite of everything he's learned should be true. A "director's cut" rewrite of the slow-burn, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers series I originally posted in the fandom's very early days, this revamped multichapter fic complicates the original plot elements and character dynamics, incorporates new Relics of the Old Faith content, and commemorates every moment I've cherished writing for my readers, for my new best friends, and for myself.

[spookulators]

Here's a doodle of all the horror movies I watched for the first time during October !

Couldn't do every single day of October and missed out on a lot of films i planned to watch due to work and such, most were watched with friends, some (like the obvious scream-binge I had) were by myself! I plan to continue this chart for every Horror movie I watch after this post!

AWARDS:

I got an A in film studies so my opinion is obviously fact

WORST/LEAST SPOOKY:

Obviously Jennifer's Body got the worst points, but I didn't even choose that one so Jennifer gets a mere participation award, I'm not even going to talk about that one.

Besides her, the winner is the Exorcist! Congratulations????

I'm sorry, I do not care for exorcism horror, I think religious horror is badass, and posession/exorcism should be too, but it's lame. This just felt like my priest was wiggling his fingers at me with a flashlight under his chin. HOWEVER - I CAN appreciate the impact it had on horror and pop culture, and its theme is awesome.

BEST/MOST SPOOKY:

oh oops it's a top 3 lol...well anyway,

*opens the palm of my hand*

I liek these ones..... :) they scare me

okay well Sadako not as much, she's too cute to spook me, as well as the film being mostly buildup and story than spooks. The well scene though? EOUGH. It's like touching wet food while washing dishes but x10 worse. I love Ringu and dear little Sadako very much!

Texas Chainsaw Massacre was slightly horrifying, everytime Bubba showed up I went AAH even if it wasn't a jumpscare, maybe I'm just afraid of hillbillies? Lmao. Everything about Bubba's house just creeps me out, especially that red room with all the animal heads, why did any of the victims willingly go in there???

The spook factor went down pretty hard when I saw Bubba interacting with his family though, but that's not a bad thing for the film itself. I just couldn't be scared with how much I sympathised with Bubba, the 6"5 stroganoff of a man turned into a confused child in front of my very eyes. I love TCM a whole lot, my only complaint is that it was too short, I wanted it to be LONGER.

So My Bloody Valentine gets the TRUE Spook Award, and I thought Harry Warden was pretty adorable to look at, but no, he's beastly. I was creeped out almost the entire film. The gore was scarily creative and brutal, even if I didn't go AAH as much as something like TCM, I was cold when things got tense.

But eh...thanks for reading....here's a bonus award *opens my other palm*

The Autism Award

It is literally his fault I'm talking to you right now. All of this. Everything that's ever happened. It's his fault.

[howtodisappearcompletelyand]

20/10 stars little guy

[katetorias]

yes a sense of unity and collective “You” is good for systems to have but why are some people on this website acting like letting alters have individual sense of selves is going to tank your chances of recovery. denying parts their selfhood would involve not listening to them, accommodating or helping them feel happy (which is really hard to do as part of a system!!! for obvious reasons!!!!!)

forcing them to consider themselves just one person when their lived experiences do not match up with that is literally making things worse. some systems feel like they have been just one person their whole life, some don’t! some systems are very differentiated from each other, some aren’t!!

systems are as uniquely individual as literally every person on earth! everyone on this planet has lived different lives from each other and in turn will experience the same things differently from one another. that is like a very simple thing to grasp. it is very easy to not be ableist.