#I've started my 8th new playthrough

[stormofneurosis]

I placed a window without really thinking about the position, now my Junimo gets god-rays

I think this is the best accidental aesthetic thing I've done in this house.

[cyberstudious]

monday, april 8th, 2024

it's the last week of studying before my certification exam! I haven't been studying very much, but I'm in the final stretch now so hopefully I can motivate myself to study a bit more!

notes from today:

I watched the eclipse! it was really cool. my phone camera picture of totality is really bad so instead I included my pic of the funky shadows haha

I made some decent progress with my code at work

I'm going to do a "knowledge share" with my coworkers once I finish this certification, so worked on some slides for that as a way to review

I'm going to play some stardew valley right after I post this bc I started a new playthrough for the 1.6 update! I've also been having a good time watching kickthepj's stardew streams on twitch :D

[fuckyeahdwarffortress]

Can you tell me how to get started with dorf fortress? Like, how to get into it. I am thinking to try it but. I am bad at video games and i am worried it may be overwhelming given its complexity.

This ask came in on August the 8th, 2022, and I would first and foremost like to humbly and deeply apologise for my tardiness in getting around to answering you.

I've been asked this question a lot over the years. I had been going back and forward and umm-ing and ahh-ing at a few details - generating a brand new world, taking screenshots, being as to-the-point as I could. What you see above is about the tenth iteration of the work, and this will probably be the twelfth or so.

Here is the general setup for a successful Fortress:

Create a Small to Medium World.

Select Very Short to Short History.

High Civilizations are a must.

High to Very High Sites to keep things interesting.

Medium Number of Beasts so you won't starve.

Low to Very Low Natural Savagery so you don't get killed by Elephants.

Frequent to Everywhere Mineral Occurrence so you're never short on metals.

Settle in a Mountain tile.

In the preview, make sure you're next to a river.

Make sure when you examine the area, there's no Aquifier.

Check the Temperature, and make sure it's either "Warm" or "Hot".

[e]mbark!

Make sure you [d]esignate some Dwarfs to cu[t] down some trees.

[b]uild [w]orkshop fis[h]ery, two of them, next to your river.

[d]esignate a Dwarf to [d]ig up the stone to lay your foundations.

Every step I just listed is the quintessential "How to play Dwarf Fortress". In fact, if anybody wants to play Dwarf Fortress, this is all you need to follow - this, and the Wiki. You can reach it by going to the official Dwarf Fortress wiki, or use the In-Game Help menu by pressing [?] at any time during your gameplay to figure out the basics.

After writing all of this, I asked the community - mostly because I felt it was far too dry. This was pretty rough content, not at all interesting, and while helpful to most, it can be difficult to go into DF by rote instruction. Amongst them was my original suggestion: Watching Vargskelethor's Dwarf Fortress playthrough.

Some other suggestions from the wonderful community:

Use a "Lazy Newb" pack, such as PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack. These packs are tailor-made for newcomers into Dwarf Fortress, allowing for quick setup, texture packs, and a great deal of utilities.

Use the Dwarf Fortress Wiki's "Quickstart Guide". In fact, just use the Dwarf Fortress wiki in general! The whole wiki is tied to the game itself, so you can find it via the [?] Help! menu.

Use DFHack. DFHack, or Dwarf Fortress Hack, provides you with a console that runs detached from Dwarf Fotress, one that allows you to input commands to modify the game. It automates quite a fair few features for you, making the gameplay far easier.

Watch Let's Play's, Let's Learn's, or read some Dwarf Fortress stories. They're all excellent ways to learn the game - as mentioned previously, I personally figured it out watching Vargskelethor's Dwarf Fortress playthrough.

This covers basically everything you need to know. Everything relevant ends roughly here. This is the definitive, mechanical guide of starting Dwarf Fortress.

If you would not mind, however, I ask you to not leave yet. I have a story to tell you.

This is how to play Dwarf Fortress.

If you've made it to the end, this work was heavily inspired by what initially caused me to be interested in Dwarf Fortress: the Quantum Artefact known as Planepacked.

I came across this whilst looking for video game glitches to laugh at during a moment of deep depression in 2012. Shortly after reading about this ludicrous artefact, and all it's unique, inter-locking, self-referential stacks of history, I found the story of Boatmurdered, which made me laugh myself deep into the school nights.

This year marks my 10th year of playing Dwarf Fortress, and it also coincides with the premium release of Dwarf Fortress on Steam. I joined this little page after my endeavours with speedrunning Dwarf Fortress in 2016 came to a crashing halt after my ambitions got the better of me, and I wrongfully stepped out of line with another member in the speedrunning community.

I only contributed little commentary, but have been continually impressed and proud of the tumblr Dwarf Fortress community - from its incredible artworks I've always wanted to join in on, to the sheer volume of incredible Fortress Stories, to trying to help with complex and complicated problems I felt only I could solve.

This answer has taken a colossally long time to complete as I could not answer it with good faith until I felt all grounds had been absolutely covered, and all possibilities explored - not because Dwarf Fortress is a hard game to play, but it is very, very hard to get into, and get people into.

Thank you, if you've made it this far, for reading over my story, and checking out my guide.

Love, always,

Mod %

[dravenxivuk]

I've had a nap, and have woken up to find my brain firmly aboard the good ship Squirilla, and unfortunately intend to make this everyone else's problem (thank you @bittersweetbark for the name)

The thing about being on my 8th playthrough of Witcher 3 is I mod the shit out of it to keep things fresh, and now I have a new modding target for all the female characters.

And i know, i know, this started as a crack ship. I know that.

But the more I think about it, and especially now I've slept on it, I can really see Ciri and Iorveth getting along.

Both stubborn Both have strong principles Both fight for people weaker than themselves Both willing to make personal sacrifices to make that happen ("I am who I need to be" and Ciri sacrificing The Path for the greater good in the Empress ending parallels anyone?) Both have pretty green eyes and enjoying sassing Geralt...

The list goes on!

Edit: Both have been fighting to stay alive while really just wanting a stable home to sit and have a rest in

[delta-orionis]

Tuesday Again No Problem 4/2/24

I feel like this is one of those weeks where I was extremely busy but accomplished very little...

Listening

Earlier this week I felt compelled to go back and listen to some of the songs by AURORA that were featured in that Sky: Children of the Light concert from a while ago.

This song in particular is one that I'd love to create a music video for if I had the skill or patience.

Because I have Rain World on the brain, it brings to mind a slugcat (Survivor and Monk in particular) who are just focused on survival but slowly start to become aware of exactly why the world around them functions the way it does.

Watching

My Well There's Your Problem marathon continues. The most recent episode I listened to was this one about the Y2K Bug:

(Again, it's kind of cheating for me to put a podcast with slides in the watching section, but I haven't really been watching anything else...)

Reading

Fallow this week.

Playing

I'm back to playing Rain World.

I was putting off beating the Artificer campaign, so I finally said "fuck it", and killed the Scavenger king in a very anticlimactic way by just chucking a singularity bomb at them.

In other news, I started a Hunter playthrough. I'm going to admit up front that I cheated in extra cycles for myself because I know for sure I will not be able to beat the game in under 25. To be honest I kind of wanted to do a relatively normal run where I can take my time and also be a carnivore.

Oh, and I have slugpups unlocked, so I keep finding the little guys everywhere. (They're hard to keep alive, unfortunately...)

My adventures have so far included...

Getting bullied by squidcadas,

Watching vultures beat the shit out of each other,

And witnessing one of the strongest enemies in the game get electrocuted to death right in front of me.

I finally reached Five Pebbles today. I got to him by climbing The Wall by way of Chimney Canopy, which isn't the route I usually take. I also made the (probably foolish) decision to take the long way out and go through his interior to access the Underhang. That might have been a bad idea, but Five Pebbles is one of my favorite areas in the game and I didn't want to miss an opportunity to pass through it. The Underhang sucks, though. If I get too frustrated I might just go back up through the inside (since fast travel isn't available for Hunter).

Making

I haven't made much progress on my crochet projects this week. I am getting close to finishing that granny square tote bag, though. I started the tedious process of weaving in all the loose ends.

I've also been revising that post I mentioned last week about trying to estimate how big Rain World's iterators are. My initial estimate was WAY too big, I think, and I've been debating even keeping it in the post at all. For the sake of clarity it might be best to delete it, even though I went through the trouble of making some diagrams for it... I'll think about it some more.

In addition, I’m continuing to worldbuild for my iterator OC. I made a rough layout of their facility grounds:

The idea is that they sit on top of a mountain, where their rain freezes into several glaciers which flow down to the base. At the base are twelve dams which collect the water, arranged like a big clock.

This “clock” is broken up into six sectors which serve different functions, and have analogues to the regions from the game (noted above in parentheses). I’d like to make a more polished map, maybe some time in the future.

I also posted some doodles the other day (featuring the same OC being smacked in the face)

--

This coming week, I'm traveling to the path of totality for the April 8th solar eclipse. Because I'll be traveling, I can't imagine I'll have much to report in terms of the Tuesdaypost, but I guess we'll see.

[soulsxng]

🎮 — favorite video game(s)?

🎶 — favorite song at the moment?

@arcxnumvitae | Munday asks | Accepting!

🎮 — favorite video game(s)?

My favorites change pretty often actually, so BEHOLD! My list of games that I tend to recommend to people, and games that I keep going back to here and there:

Po.kemon Yel.low/Cry.stal/Em.erald (Yellow was the very first videogame I ever owned when I was like...5 or maybe 6 tbh yeah I started really young video games were actually a huge part of the reason I learned to read so well at a young age, and then Crystal and Emerald were the first ones that I was actually old enough to understand how to actually progress through and beat.

Pok.emon Stadium 1 & 2 (I still have my N64 and stuff SPECIFICALLY FOR THOSE, OG OCARINA OF TIME, AND DK64 OKAY?)

The World Ends With You & NTWEWY (Actually the og game might be my all time favorite game. It came out when I was but an angsty...god, I can't remember if it was in 8th or 9th grade, but you get the point. Anyway, because of that, the premise really hit home. Even after I got older, there were always new aspects of it that really stick with me for different reasons)

Dra.gon Age series (Listen. LISTEN. I know it gets a lot of heat, and YEAH there's a lot of problems with them. But some of the characters are just very near and dear to my HEART OKAY LET ME HAVE THIS)

Hol.low Kn.ight (*cue sobbing in "I love those goofy little bugs"*)

Bl.oodbo.rne/El.den R.ing (*cue sobbing in "I promise I'm not a masochist"* But also that lore though????? Spoiler-ish, but ER's stuff on madness and "outer gods" is what made me want to start fleshing out what's happening in the blog's current arc. Amyg.dala from BB is what initially gave me the idea for some things I wanted to include in Ezzion's other form when I first made them, too. not me outing how long I've had some of these muses for)

End.er L.ilies (Okay but listen. If you haven't ever heard of this game before? It's a little difficult, so I won't demand that everyone play it, but at least watch a playthrough of it! So good! There's one boss fight in particular that took me forever to beat, but between the moveset and the music, and the stage the fight takes place in, it's soooo satisfying)

C.ode V.ein (Again, shhhhhhhhhhhh. I know it's anime d.ark so.uls, but the story actually has a lot of really interesting aspects to it. Plus, again, and unsurprising to literally everyone, the characters drew me in orz)

FFXIV (I play with Kei a lot, and I'm attached to my little wol siblings, okay?)

Spi.ritfarer (This one is a fairly simple game, but it had me and Kei and two of our friends that recommended the game to us originally legitimately CRYING at a few points. It's pretty wholesome, but definitely has some really powerful messages to it, too.)

Lobo.tomy Corp./Lib.rary of R.uina/Lim.bus Co.mpany (I'm gonna preface this by saying that this series gets really dark, and fucked up really fast, so don't go deep diving into it if you're not good with that. But there's a lot of really interesting stuff lore-wise, and I love so many of the characters. Will also say that for the first two games I definitely love the story more than the gameplay at times)

🎶 — favorite song at the moment?

I don't have a favorite song, so uhhhh, I'll just say that a lot of my playlists are primarily composed of video game music. I have a really wide range of music genres I listen to, from all kinds of different places, so I can, at any time, just whip out whatever songs suit the Vibe of the Day™

I also sing, like...a LOT. Like...A LOT, a lot. So I can also get really into broadway/musical stuff, and other things with really powerful vocals where I can just unleash the kraken regardless of my mood, usually. For example, I just got Kei really into Epic last week or the week before.

[gaoootic]

Today marks one year of when I started learning jp sorta just because. Well I think it was on the 8th but the 365 days are up so whatever!!!

This isn't actually a jp learning blog but I guess I'll frame the post for someone who's tryna get into it for ease of writing. (no silly mspaint doodles this time around for lack of time sadly)

Things I learned: ☼ shit like basic grammar, apparently I'm up in the N3 trenches fighting for my life right now, but I still feel like I don't have a good enough solid foundation. This will likely fill itself out in time with actual use. ☼ Roughly between 2500-3000 words (though I'd say most are barely at 'seen' level rather than learned) ☼ Around 600 isolated kanji (though again mostly just recognition, in reality I'm basing most of my so-called knowledge on whether I could stare at it for 5 minutes and go "OH ITS THAT... FUCKIN THING, MAYBE" off the top of my head) ☼ I am way more stubborn than I thought I was and I already thought it was plenty. ☼ You don't actually have to be organized and keep everything nice and pretty to be studying, if you get it done you get it done and that's that. ☼ YOU CAN DO FUN STUFF WITH YOUR IME LOOK AT THIS ※↓↗☞☆彡 it's so good they made a bunch of unique little unicode characters or whatever they are and decided to gate them all behind esoteric weeb knowledge ｙｏｕ　ｃａｎ　ｅｖｅｎ　ｔｙｐｅ　ｗｉｄｅ

Things I liked: ☼これはペンです ☼ I've been reading nichijou with a lot of lookups and all, and though I do feel confused most of the time still sometimes I look at stuff and just straight up understand it which often warrants the good old 'huh cool.' reaction. ☼ Calling it a routine may be a bit much but checking "doing the jp stuff" off my mental to-do list for the day feels nice ☼ Watching number go up in terms of stats is fun ☼ A bunch of nerds made so many tools and books and videos and more to learn this thing I'm like a thief scurrying about taking all their knowledge they just left out by the window to cool down what fools. ☼ Seriously, even when I'm making the most sluggish of advances through hordes and hordes of sentences and textboxes, playing a game in its original language or reading a volume of manga is really cool. At the moment of doing it I don't really think about how strange it is to be able to do so, but reading something while abiding by rules you don't fully grasp and still coming out with an adequate understanding of what was going on is oddly entertaining. ☼ I managed to get through a full playthrough of Tokimeki memorial 1 which, although I believe it has an english fan translation, is a JP only game with relatively simple writing. I recommend it if you don't vomit at the sight of dating sims if only as a way to test whether you understand like 80% of stuff and get some new vocab in. Careful with the text scrolling speed tho ☼ It is nice to have something to be a little ambitious about ☼ anki and kanji

Things I didn't like: ☼ Grammar. hell. ☼ Typing ん still, fucker ☼ By the gods if you ever decide to take this chungus ass hobby up consider VERY, VERY CAREFULLY if you want to interact with the surrounding community. Everywhere I look it's people meticulously calculating the single best possible way to study down to the microsecond. It is insane to me that people are playing ranked on this language and aiming for world record holy fuck. On the surface I understand the sentiment of wanting to be efficient and productive about it, but some seem to take it so far. You cannot learn a language in a month. Hell, not even in a year, probably not in two either. I think so, at least. ☼ Your yt recommended videos won't stop giving you jp learning related stuff which is a difficult hole to claw out of. Not actual jp stuff, jp adjacent content. I had to make a second account for actual jp stuff and change location to japan every time I use it otherwise I'm almost certain it would further mess everything up. This isn't necessarily the fault of the japanese language itself, but it has bothered me for so long. It's all like... beginner blackhole too. Which makes sense due to the nature of bigger number of people = bigger number of profit, but nevertheless it is rather irritating. ☼ The overabundance of tools there are for learning gets a bit overwhelming at first because you don't know wtf to pick and stick to and people will always debate "no this is good" "no this is bad" "dude you literally cannot learn grammar off of the back of a cereal box you are delusional" ☼ I forgot languages, specifically in casual speech, tend to just omit like half the rules because you're assumed to already know how it works. In jp alone you see things like particle omission, conjugation abbreviations, the usage of stuff like pronouns, etc etc. And like, sure it's fun once you actually GET what is going on but when you think about it it's a little funny how languages just make up a bunch of rules and then go "yea they take too long whatever lets skip these unless we need to look fancy" ☼ I also forgot words have very specific nuances that you can't easily grasp when you first get started ☼ anki and kanji again

Things I want to try to do in the future: ☼ First contact already was sort of a disaster (Word by word I believe I was told ビジネスっぽい in good nature but I couldn't help getting flashbacks at when I got told I sounded or used an archaic expression in english class and thus I got utterly obliterated instantly (not even ashes left behind)) but it'd be nice if In the future when I'm not as absolute dogwater at actual production I could find jp speakers to once in a blue moon write a message to for 8 hours and then have them go ???何これｗ because I wrote it in ultra keigo (DO NOT USE THE KANJI FOR YOROSHIKU DO NOT DO IT) with broken grammar. If I pluck up enough courage for it, that is. Or enough stupidity, either works. May whatever deity help whoever I end up crossing. ☼ I'd like to venture more into watching actual youtube videos in japanese. However, for that, I sorta need to think pretty deliberately on what type of video I want to watch. Not only because I'm sure it'll range widely from level to level in just about any topic, but also because thinking about what to watch is a bit of a hassle. More rewarding, though. ☼ I'll keep reading manga first because it's what I'm more comfortable with, but I'd also like to get started on listening comprehension because man do I absolutely suck ass at that. ☼ Reach the level of a 2-year-old kid's proficiency ☼ 上手になりますよ‼️‼️MAYBE ペラペラ that one's still up in the air

Some advice if someone stumbles upon this post: ☼ Take stuff one day at a time. And I seriously do mean this. Do not focus on your goals or objectives and get discouraged unless you feel like you really have to, I found just going "HELL YEAH +5 WORDS TODAY" to be more rewarding (even when I wasn't feeling all that accomplished) compared to busting my own balls over whether I fully grasped each and every delicate grammar point in a sentence. Believe me it doesn't feel like it at all when you're in the middle of it but the thing about learning a language is that every little footprint you make ends up mattering more than you'd initially think. ☼ Not everything will have furigana, hell I doubt most things will, so get some sort of OCR thing to take screenshots for kanji lookups on yomitan or whatever, you will go absolutely batshit insane if you use jisho.org's radical lookup tool or try to draw them by hand. HOW are you meant to use that if you do not even know stroke order, the recognition in those things is godawful. ☼ Anki word reviews hit 100 times harder than new words, if you're studying other stuff at the same time seriously be mindful of your limit and lower how much you do in a day or you will go mad ☼ Streaks ARE helpful but ultimately don't let them define your behaviour ☼ If people tell you this is easy they are either lying to you because they want your money for some course they're selling or they aren't expressing themselves very well. Learning jp is "easy" in the sense that the activities you do to attain that goal aren't exactly overly strenuous, but it is a time sink and a braincell sink also. or idk they're doing that thing where they go "HMPH.... WHAT A PEASANT......... HOW DAREST THEE NOT BE COGNISANT IN THE WAYS OF THE BLADE.... FOR ME IT WAS QUITE SHRIMPLE, REALLY. 🦐" just to flex that some people enjoy doing. I think it's entertaining personally maybe a little endearing ☼ Whenever possible be more pragmatic than idealistic or rigid as regards usage. Sounding like a textbook is fine its what you learnt probably, doing the wrong pitch accent I'm sure is whatever in 99% of cases, stringing together an entire sentence with only words and 0 grammar linking them is probably worth doing provided you can be understood. If it works it works. ☼ Golden rule is halfass it then go back sometime later once you're more advanced and fullass it. As long as you sorta understand and get the gist of it, move on and keep going. Otherwise, you will get stuck. For the longest time I struggled to remember stuff like い adj and な adj "conjugations" but you do this thing where you're forced to revisit concepts anyways later on so you can just do lookups then. ☼ Actual golden rule is just do whatever works best for you ☼ but don't use chatgpt lmao

And now for some stats.

no clue what any of this shit means.

whoaaa look at this cool graphics I hit 40k reviews whoaa

Wonder how accurate some of these are because 9.53s per card does not sound right and considering the usage of other tools 106 hours is nowhere near right

shoutout to those 1 am reviews I did once Random thoughts and other tidbits ☼ N5 AND EVEN N4 TO AN EXTENT CONTENT IS SO BORING!!! I swear if I have to read about that one chihuahua again bro oh my god. Most of the time you'll end up reading something that's a bit too hard for you because it uses grammar found deep within the mariana trench cuz that's the only stuff I seemingly find fun. I've been rereading my alltime favorite manga again this time in jp and I swear even if it has furigana this shit is throwing hands. Still, I don't mind reading something a little more out of my level if it means not dying of boredom. Maybe I just didn't find anything particularly engaging and it was a skill issue on my part though. ☼ ヰ looks so cool why did they get rid of it canonizing it now Avvino's name in jp would be アッヸノ regardless of whether its some sort of aberration of the language whatever I get to play with it because you threw it away EXCEPT FOR THE WORD WHISKEY SOMETIMES LIKE- ☼ Ateji and rendaku will haunt my nightmares. Sometimes the language feels like a slot machine but its fine because gambling keeps me on my toes i guess ☼ I was such a little fool back then. What an innocent man. Thinking "wow why don't they just use their phonetic alphabets and spaces for writing?" You absolute cretin. I tried so hard to play the old pokemon games but I am too weak to face full hiragana writing. god. the sorrow. ☼ I wonder how long it'll take for someone to go "OMG WOW YOU'RE LEARNING JAPANESE??? SAY SOMETHING :O" but I guess for that to happen I kinda need to meet people first. I haven't even been told うおおお日本語上手ですね yet why do i even bother ☼ IMAGINE ALL THE REVENUE I COULD'VE GOTTEN IF I MADE MY OWN SHITTY CLICKBAIT SERIES.... GOD......... ☼ Physically restraining myself from using kenjougo internally in my brain every time I try to come up with a sentence even if it would be broken and not even remotely correct has proven difficult but i WILL sound like a normal human being. eventually. with some luck. I hope. please

☼ Talking to yourself like some sort of little creature in a terrarium works again! It is a wonderful method and it even makes you look absolutely insane. what's not to love? ☼ 2k6k deck is... wtf.... I mean its whatever ultimately since you just want a baseline of words to then be able to read most of what you actually want to end up reading but the more I do of it the more......... wtf......... guess it goes with me being a salaryman (100% factual btw) ☼ I wonder if there are actual learners who do handwriting like... legit. Like they learn the stroke order and practice each and every single kanji they come across. I would die. I can't even write kana as evident from the mirrored の half a year ago on that post I did from memory. ☼ JP is a really fun language to play around with actually. Like yea sure you WILL have people staring at you with dread because of your creations but so what? a little horror has never hurt anyone ☼ Why do people even like duolingo I cannot use that thing for shit I find it so annoying ☼ the amount of little quirks japanese has is so vast there must be like an iceberg for this. Things like は sounding like わ as a particle at the top and then stuff such as forbidden kanji version of words a little below. Best way to jumpscare me would be with a random 此処 encounter, look at that beastie. ferocious Im sure of it ☼ everywhere i look people treat jp and jp stuff so weirdly lol not me though Im different and one of the good ones and built different so its fine (true and real) ☼ oh I should check out if I can read Ib in jp I fucking love that game ☼ one time I used the word dust but not the word dust itself rather the word dust that meant garbage in japanese and then someone pointed it out because it was a silly self deprecating joke I think and I will never live that down I erased whatever it was I wrote and never showed my face around that discord server ever again in my life this is what exile felt like in the middle ages. I haven't even read what was said I bet it wasn't even that bad. ☼ typing in japanese in minecraft is such a pain in the ass for some reason ☼ One year isn't that much time even when you're crawling day after day ☼ I learned to play riichi mahjong btw not well but I guess I thought "sure I mean I guess might as well" not in like real life but online game rules and it's decently fun enough honestly, I thought it was way more complicated than it really was but it helps when you can see what number kanji shit is. why is 5 different though

Closing thoughts.

So, congratulations shitass. You made it to one year. I'll be generous and grant myself full credit this time. Even if time goes on regardless, it is no small task to accomplish to do this each and every day, however easy it may technically be. 上出来でしたぜ。

Final verdict was this a waste of my time? are my results up to this point disappointing? am I gonna give up anytime soon?

fuck if i know but for tomorrow i'll keep doing it, and then after that day I'll ask myself if I wanna continue again, and so on. It's just a hobby at the end of the day, it is what you make of it.

[azdesertwillow]

I think the most annoying thing for me about the current Dragon Age/Cullen discourse is that so much of the hate and ire directed at Cullen fans act as if we are ONLY Cullen fans.

I've been in this fandom since December 2009 a month after the game came out, way back on live journal (shout out to my swooping_is_bad mutuals) and the shit show that was the old Bioware boards. And the most consistent thing I've seen (beyond the fandom wank) is that most people rarely ever just likes/ships one character.

These hot takes of saying "fans of This Character are just X, Y, Z" act like most of us don't have multiple play files for all the different romances and routes you can take. I think we're so far out from a new game that we've forgotten that rush that happens in the first few weeks where everyone is all "oh god that scene if you play as ____ is so much more dramatic" or "they do what now if you make this choice?!" or the "well my mage romanced this character but my rogue romance the exact opposite." We've settled down so much that some characters are slipping through the fandom cracks and new fans aren't seeing the love those characters got when the games were new. But I remember the bann-hammer days. I remember the Merric + sheep days. Jim the poor hapless Skyhold guard. The amazing posts about the chargers.

And not just that you can like more than one character, but that your faves can just be pure contradictions. My two favorite DA:O characters? Alistair and Morrigan. My guilty ship that I would never actually want to see? Anders/Fenris. Some of my favorite fics for this fandom have been just absolute pure crack fics for the DA2 kink meme that were so far from anything I would normally call "good".

This series is about exploration and choices and is designed for multiple play throughs. Your interaction with a character in one playthrough can go so completely different in another (god I loved the rivalmance mechanic, that shit was fucked up). It contains nuances and no easy answers. And it's only a video game. Actual people are even more complex.

So I just don't get why we are allowed only one defining character.

And I really don't understand why that character and what you do/don't like about that character and the various fandom takes on them somehow says everything about you as a person.

You can just like a thing. It doesn't have to be a deep reflection of your inner most thoughts. And if it is, that's okay too. My complex feelings about Anders is because of my family's own dark history with terrorism. My love of Fenris started because Gideon Emery voiced Balthier in ffxii. In both cases it isn't about just those single points.

If you're new to the fandom, Cullen fan or not, just know that when a new game comes out it's going to feel wildly different than these boxed off fandom corners we all seem to falling into. You'll discover characters you love that you didn't even think about during your first play through, simply because someone made a really great comic. You'll romance a character first, get betrayed, replay as a whole new character just to spite them. You'll be locked out of choices the second time that you wish you could choose again. You'll watch all the cut scenes for a specific type of play through because you can't be bothered to go through your 8th play through but that one popular post keeps referring to it. You'll reload so many save files because you don't want to be limited to just that one dialogue option.

One facet of the game that you liked is just that. It's a facet, both for the game and for yourself. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.