#I'll sink with this ship

[dreamsandstars24]

*Gwyn holding Azriel's arm because they were practicing dagger attacks and she accidentally grazed him and drew blood*

*Gwyn in a whisper while staring at the wound*: I can't believe I made you bleed.

*Azriel worried*: it's okay, you didn't mean to hurt me---are you smiling?

*Gwyn with the biggest smile ever*: I can't believe I made you bleed!

[eldrtchmn]

黑水 Black Water

[respectthepetty]

It's all fun and games until the colors hurt my feelings.

Alexa, play the New Found Glory version of "King of Wishful Thinking"

[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

[tsukiharu]

Guess who started playing genshin and chose a NPC to date the Main Character 🥺

[darksvster]

Do you still ship daemyra after that scene? lol it was harsher than i thought, maybe he will be better with nettles🤞

yeah lol, i clearly do since i watched it 2 years ago and i'm still clearly shipping them today. as are my friends who read this script with me in january. i would question any daemyra shipper who held on for this long, only for the written script to say something basically identical to what we see on the screen, and for that to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

if this is what breaks daemyra for you, then i hate to say it but you have been misinterpreting that scene since the beginning.

he's choking her. it's as harsh as i expected and remembered. people who were expecting some kind of redemption via the script were deluding themselves. i said there were romantic scenes in this episode, i didn't say it was a whole new script.

i don't consider the script drafts canon, but that scene plays out pretty much how i interpreted it from watching the show: daemon being jealous and infuriated about viserys and the prophecy, rhaenyra shocked at the attack and by the fact that daemon knows nothing about it after 10 years. (i'm not going to go into a full analysis of the episode, no one would read it and honestly i've had some version of this conversation a thousand times.)

do i like the scene? no, ofc not. do i get annoyed when antis throw it in my face as a gotcha? yes. you know why? this isn't real! daemon is not a real human being, with a full pattern and history of abuse, rhaenyra is fictional, she does not exist in any world. of course, i can still ship it, just like i would ship any other problematic couple. antis act like shipping them means you support abuse, so i don't bother reasoning with them. they don't want to debate, they want to scream until they're the only voice in the room and call it a victory.

personally, i don't believe nettles is going to be on this show, since there were already rumors circulating about that as far back as 2 years ago, and the fact that they did not cast her confirms some of those rumors to me. however, it would be 100% worse with nettles. anyone shipping those two who want to point to the choke as a daemyra breaking point, well... i would say that nettles would be a teen who daemon would be both raping and grooming. so anyone who wants to seriously romanticize that and say it's morally superior to daemyra, well lol good luck with that one.

[beillus]

*Shimmies into the Zolu fandom*

Hi, new convert to the ship here! I've liked OP before the OPLA release but the live-action just cemented my love for these two as a pair. So I present my first contribution (and reference) lol

Talk to me on Twitter <3 Support me on Patreon ^^ Buy me a Ko-Fi :3c

[benevolenterrancy]

Do any NieYao (or general 3zun) shippers follow me? I've been tossing around the idea of a nieyao fic but I'm getting tripped up by timeline shit because good lord JGY's life is a nightmare... is there anyone who wouldn't mind either:

a) chatting with me about timeline/canon stuff to help me get sorted

b) sending me recs of their favourite nieyao fics 👀 for, uh, strictly research related purposes for sure for sure

[lloydfrontera]

what is 'cpsm'? and what is it about? and do you know where I can read it

cpsm is tged's more ambitious little sibling. even a bit gayer than it too. which is saying a lot tbh

serious answer now, cpsm or Crown Prince Sells Medicine is a novel written by bk moon set in the same universe as The Greatest Estate Developer and I Became The Dragon King's Chef!

it is set 300 after the events of tged, with our protagonist being Lee Han, a korean doctor who after falling from a bridge wakes up as Rakiel Adria Magentano, imperial prince and background character who dies one chapter into the novel he just finished reading the other night.

him <33333

and if the name and silver hair didn't give it away he's also a descendant of lloyd and javier.

unfortunately the body he just possessed is terminally sick and so rakiel now has to cure other people in order to gain bonus lifetime one day at a time.

and he also has to find a way to stop the world-shattering disaster that's coming by finding damian cayenne, the protagonist of the novel he's now living in, and keeping him safe by all means necessary. he's the cutie in the back <333

this is just. the very beginning. so much happens in this novel. it is even more fast-paced than tged which, again, is saying a lot! the start of the novel is a little slower and i do think it takes a bit more to get attached to all the characters, but goddamn, once it gets going it really fucking gets going.

i don't know what more can i say without giving all the fun surprises away but. god. dear fucking god. it is,,, it is so good.

it has its issues, i won't deny it but also don't ask me what are they because right now i am drunk in serotonin from having just finished it. it is also 613 chapters long so like. it would take me a long time to give a full review lol

all in all i really, really recommend that you read it if you like tged. it is so worth it imo.

there is also a manhwa adaptation of it! it is just starting, it has less than 30 episodes as of rn, but it seems to be going pretty well! as always, the novel is better, but it does a good job introducing and endearing the characters to you! i recommend you read the manhwa at the same time as the novel to get a better experience!

anyway. i love my little guys very much <33

[imminent-danger-came]

honestly the best parts of eldritch abomination mk is sun wukong desperately trying to make mk feel loved and accepted without coming off as smothering or coddling him in training/finding ways to keep bugs outta his fur without mk suspecting anything. and also pigsy just finding this random random child and accidentally adopting the end of all things and making him work food service. honestly pigsys method is either going to bring him closer to ending the world or give him the patience not too

WHAT I'M SAYING.

"accidentally adopting the end of all things and making him work food service" I'm crying this is so funny. Pigsy built our boy up strong

I'm also crying from "sun wukong desperately trying to make mk feel loved and accepted without coming off as smothering or coddling him" Like. Literally. That is peak EAMK (Eldritch Abomination MK), it's how I interpret the characters, and it also makes me think of this scene:

MK: "Bu- but you can't just leave! What if someone attacks the city!? *terrified gasp* WHAT IF THE SPIDER QUEEN COMES BACK???" Sun Wukong: "Awww you'll figure it out! It's adorable how nervous you are—but don't be! You've come a long way."

(2x01 Sleep Bug)

-

Wukong has unshakeable faith in MK, which a lot of the time can come off as dismissal or being aloof, but he really does just believe in MK that much.

[mint-ty]

Today I received an email with another job application rejection (👎), followed by ao3 email sending me kudos (👍). Kinda cancelled each other out.

[absolutebl]

The promo teasers for Red Peafowl kinda made it look like Max Nattapol might be paired with Earth Katsamonnat, and after Tul Pakorn I dunno how I feel about that. It's not so much the MaxTul ship running aground (though I will miss them together), but rather – if EarthMax were actually to be a pairing – well, it's an unsettlingly new dynamic as Earth's more delicate energy is so different from Tul's. Of course nothing's confirmed till it's confirmed, but... with echoes of the macho-macho feels that MaxTul brought to the screen still sounding, do you think Max and Earth might work, or is my sense of dread not unfounded?

I'm thinking it'd be MaxEarth but

go on

you interest me strangely.

I think MaxEarth might be tons of fun.

They both seasoned and solid actors. They fit the classic yaoi dynamic nicely. Perhaps they will get handed a yaoi adaptation?

You know me, (or maybe you don't, but) I absolutely love seeing a ship busted, if only because it reminds everyone that these are branding choices, not actual relationships.

Can't you just see Earth running after Max peeping Phi with those big big eyes, all pathetic and ready to cry as soon as Max's character is mean to him. And you know he'd be hard gangster mean for some dumb arbitrary reason.

Frankly it's not that far off from KaoEarth and they were lovely together.

[dont-offend-the-bees]

Not to continue my recent trend of oversharing on tumblr dot com, but I am very much struggling not to feel like I'm doing everything in my entire life wrong at present

[ladyinfierno-art]

"He's a pirate, I don't want to associate with him."

[itookyoudown]

me and the mutual respect i have for the old school first generation renaissance raylanboyd girlies. nothing can break this bond 🖤

[violetlunette]

Pal saw a few clips of Silver and Lilia together and was like, “Aww! Cute! I ship it as long as the vampire’s the dom.” Then I told her they’re father and son and her little world broke.