#I think given a bit more time

[blade-that-was-broken]

Needless to say after that end conversion there is going to be to some awkward conversions in the future. I mean how do you recover from someone acknowledging that

I'm going to guess you mean the one towards the end of "Moment to Be Real" with JD knowing where his brothers were and that whole... depressing conversation. It's possible they might talk about it but also possibly unlikely as well?

Maybe they talk about it, maybe they don't. JD would have very little intention on starting up that conversation, for sure. He didn't want to have it in the first place. If it eats them up alive, yeah, then they'd have to talk about it. If they are able to put it in the past and shift that mindset as they learn about the new people that they are now, they might not really have to talk about it because that sort of "change" would be pretty palpable.

I think you recover by trying to be better; to try and shift your mindset so that something like that wouldn't happen. They have been angry at one another for twenty years and most of that time was mostly just petty grudges for far too long. They were all dumb kids when they left and none of their actions - JD's or otherwise - were done out of malice.

It's moving forward and trying to become a family again with all of your family. They are adults now, they know themselves better now and who they are now. Clay's not the goofy little kid doing dumb pranks anymore. Bruce is a dad and very into what he does, very different than he used to be. Even JD - both in my au and in canon - is not the same person that he was when he left. So they learn about each other, learn to love one another again and this time with more of an ability to understand their own feelings as well as other's actions.

They've got work to do both in themselves and their relationships with one another but it isn't entirely lost.

[hinamie]

realizing how much i like drawing him a million years too late :<

[beastwhimsy]

I'm completely enamored with this wizard who is in like 5 episodes total and gets barely any lines and I have found THREE other artists who have ever drawn fanart of him. anyway I have decided that I will rectify this injustice by getting even more unwell about them. here he is I love you life giving magus

they're the kind of wizard to say "wonderful!! ^_^ 🌼🌷💞" and "HOT DOG!!!!!!!!��️💥🤯" in the same 10 seconds <- he has done this canonically

ID in alt, please consider reblogging thank you I love you

they're so silly I love you gnc wizard teacher who enjoys road trips and making yummy treats with their friends

[cobaltfluff]

so i started playing persona 4

where are the QoL features

[kagoutiss]

as if it was never there at all.

[potatobugz]

may i have this dance

[meamiiikiii]

vtuber loop !!!

[reverse entry au? the reverse isekai part of it? tangentially related to this post here, and also the last part of this post too]

[bagheerita]

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "A Time to Stand"

[fl00mie]

testingggg.. i may post a clearer reference of the character later or, these days

[sweetandglovelyart]

[saints-who-never-existed]

Okay so this might be glaringly obvious to everyone else but it's only just sort of struck me the more I've thought about it:

The ambiguity that so many of us seem to have found in that shot of the smiling Marines in the hunting blind actually makes so much sense if we think about it as being directly from Goodsir's perspective.

Like, it actually does a really good job - whether intentionally or not - of putting us in his position and his mindset.

Goodsir is, as the script itself says, 'socially helpless' at the very least and I know there are many out there who perceive him as more explicitly neurodivergent too. Either way, it seems likely and not unfair to say that he himself mighty not be fully picking up the social cues he's getting from the Marines.

And I think that does matter! I think that contributes - even in some small, unconscious way - to the feeling we the audience get from that scene. Like, we're not entirely sure of how to take the reaction of the Marines because we're seeing them from the perspective of a character who isn't entirely sure of how to do that either.

[moeblob]

@chormine-mutacerta

buddy, help me, your designs.... they are such a chefs kiss.... I hope I did okay with an outfit for Nessa.

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[buttered-toasty]

Consequences of marriage? Something else? What happens when you marry the worst parts of yourself anyway?

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another little digital thing for inktober :) as a treat :)

I have many many thoughts on The Ring tm

[buttercup-barf]

Blesss your heart for making so much content of Boy and Girl! Every social media site I've looked at has been a dry desert for new art for those two, and the sheer quantity/quality I've found here has earned ya a follower! Hoping to see more soon, grinning real stupid till then!

I'm very flattered! Please check out the work of @/a-not-so-sure-artist, if you haven't already, she made a lot of super charming and silly stuff featuring those two, and her art style is generally Baller.

Anyway, I see those old posts on your blog. I know what you are, or at least were. Hence the thing above.

And a more light-hearted doodle. (They are marching along, fully prepared to make some kid's night Awesome.)

[hplonesomeart]

AUUUU STOP THIS MOMENT WAS ADORABLE AND SWEET AND PRECIOUS AND MY HEART MELTED FOR THEMMMMM 😭💕

(lots of writing under the ‘read more’ btw incase you want my personal thoughts on things!)

Before the episode started I has been bracing myself for the genocide route, but it seem like what we ended up getting was the pacifist route because NEVER would I have anticipated such an empathetic twist??? I was dead convinced that my hopes/dreams of Puzzle redemption were squandered and left to rot (they probably still are to some degree actually lol but oh well I can accept that he’s a lovable psycho). And yet this episode does the impossible….giving us an unfathomably wholesome scene that helps heal his dejected inner child, even just a little. PLEASE this wasn’t something I was prepared for and it’s gotten such a strong grip on my heartstrings right now. I love themmmmm holy shittttt <33

I didn’t think Meggy would step up and try to connect with him like that especially since she was so aggressively defensive when he initially reached out. And I like that even when she gets to speak to Little/Kid Puzzles her behavior is very stern at first lol. Kinda like a disappointed older sister who can’t be bothered to put up with him for too long. But using Leggy as a way to build that bridge again was so clever of her—and hey it helped lure him into false sense of security so he’d get jailed up jskjsksp. Everyone wins I guess!! ALSO can I just say whoever composed the soundtrack (Zach Preciado for the rap segment specifically) deserves just as much praise as the voice actors because DAYM the layering of all those instruments and the seamless transitions into different emotional tones was superb :))