#International PR

[lizzybeeee]

THE ENTIRE DRAGON AGE AMA IS A DUMPSTER FIRE

They avoided all the high-rated questions with genuine criticism (not blind hate!) and went for questions that were safer and allowed them more leeway. After that awful IGN article and that treatment of Davrin...God, just put it down. I have no faith that BioWare will be able to continue Dragon Age or Mass Effect with the respect it deserves.

Edit - They had an opportunity for genuine discussion with fans who were concerned/unhappy with the way Veilguard was -> people unhappy with the story, the marketing, the lack of 'RP' options in an RPG, etc... Instead they just doubled-down even more, avoiding those critical questions, with no real acknowledgement that fans have very reasonable problems with this game.

Some Highlights & My Initial Ramblings Below:

The Executors

"They attempt to manipulate events in the most subtle way they can manage."

So, very clear that they're not simply observers of what is happening in Thedas: they're manipulators...

"Magical Illuminati Confirmed! Lizard People Did 9:30 Dragon!!!!"

All that complexity of character -> his hatred of Orlais, his experience as a general, his relationship with Cailain, and the influence of Howe...all diminished. Any influence from a shadow cabal is too much influence - all the humanity of Loghain's choices/consequences...God, what a waste.

Not to mention what this does to other events/characters in the series -> they imply they've been intervening as far back as the magisters breaking into the golden city. I do not find this compelling! At all!

2. Solas and the Executors

Oh my god, he sounds like such a fucking Mary-Sue I'm so sick of Solas at this point -> "Actually, I know more about the Executors than anyone alive - not even the rest of the Gods know as much as me."

("I'm also, like, an Ancient Elven God, I'm responsible for the Blight and the Veil, and I kind of locked the Gods away cause they were evil - but, like, I'm really sad about it. Also the Herald of Andraste thinks I'm cute <3")

<- Previous comments: massive oversimplification, obviously

But I miss the days when not everything was about Solas. It removes so much interest and wonder in this world when the fucking egg is behind it all. I loved him as a character in DAI and now I just feel this bone deep tiredness when I see his stupid face.

Don't you dare threaten to bring Gareth David-Lloyd back -> keep him away from this mess!

3. The Fate of the Rest of the Evanuris

Yay. I'm so looking forwards to "The Return of the Elves: Electric Boogaloo 2" - it was done so well the first time!

"It was the elves all along!"

The only character with any potential to be interesting is Andruil*, but how they handled all this lore was done so shallowly and so poorly that I find it hard to give a damn anymore. Not to mention that the game literally mentions Ghilan'nain mourning Andruil - so is this a retcon/redirection/or have you confirmed that one of the most interesting members of the Evanuris' is dead?

*interesting in that she's established in lore to potentially have a tonne of really cool things attached to her (the void armour, the great weapon she has etc...). The rest of the evanuris are nowhere near as well established as she is.

4. Southern Thedas, Sociopolitical Issues, and Future Games

NOW YOU WANT TO INCORPORATE GEO-POLITCAL EXPLORATION?? You avoided any meaningful discussion like the plague in DATV but now you're acknowledging it?? OkaY. okAy.

They couldn't even give us the long-term ramifications of the mage/templar war how the hell am I supposed to believe that they will be able to pull off 'elven gods are real' etc...? For a game series that totes : your choices matter -> they have not proven that they have been able to show that in a meaningful way. They literally cleaned the slate with this game to avoid doing that.

So, what, does that mean that the Veil is never going to come down now? Or are you going to have the entirety of Thedas build themselves up again just to have the Veil fall and send things into chaos once more?

What a fatalistic, miserable outcome for Thedas -> why the fuck would anyone bother to live in Thedas if you're going to keep throwing meteorites at them? By all means, change/conflict has to happen for the series to move forwards...but this is just so miserable at this point.

(The Elder Scrolls, at least, gives people room to breathe between crisis' or sets them up in different areas of the world! Bethesda treats past installments/your decisions with greater respect than DATV does.)

Even, then, if the Veil remains up, that means that the spirits are just trapped in the Fade being miserable for the rest of existence. The entire series has been humanizing spirits, from Justice to Cole, and now they're just throwing in the towel? I guess they can stay in the fade now! Problem solved!

What do you mean the Evanuris are not a threat anymore? IN A PREVIOUS QUESTION YOU LITERALLY SAID SOME ARE STILL POTENTIALLY KICKING AROUND THE BLACK CITY?

Weakened, sure, but Solas was 'weak' in DAI. You're giving yourself an out if you decide to go back to the elves again. Please do, I'd love more content on how the elves alone fuck everything up!

5. More Southern Thedas, the Chantry, and Tevinter

Thanks for the confirmation that things in the South are so fucked up that they have to work alongside the 'Slave Capital' of the known world to rebuild!

Slavery was one of the biggest things that caused a rift between the north/south chantry system -> one of the reasons why there were exalted marches -> a uniting belief in the south is that slavery is fucked. They didn't address slavery in DATV - what hopes are there that they will do so effectively in a future game?

Don't tell me that Dorian fixes everything off screen either -> either he solves slavery off-screen or the south is being forced to work the slaver-capitol because their land is nuked and they have no ground to stand on.

I'm so thrilled.

6. Solas and the Idol / The Blight

I will never get over Solas fucking curing the Blight off-screen and no one asking questions/giving a shit. Hello?? The Hero of Ferelden would like a word with you???

So the Blight is calcified in Minrathous, at least, but everywhere further away is still fucked! Once more, the South is doomed to suffer from the long-term effects that regular blights have -> not to mention the red lyrium (which still exists according to the AMA) across the south.

I don't care; it's lame. It's a lame way to conclude the blight and I hate it. This game did not earn 'cure the blight from thedas' at all. You could have had us learn how to soothe a titan and see how that can diminish the blight but you did it this way.

Another 'magical ritual' because Solas has such a good track record with them lmao.

7. The Agents of Fen'Harel / The War with the Qun / The Crows

Turned him against the idea of being a leader???!!

Fen'harel's Call to the Elven People After the events at the Winter Palace, elves left the Inquisition under mysterious circumstances, as did elven servants across Thedas. None could say where they went, but those who believed the Inquisitor's story about Fen'Harel wondered just how large the Dread Wolf's forces were... and what the ancient elven rebel had planned. This is from the Trespasser Epilogue, Epler!

Your concept art for Joplin literally had him as a leader of a faction of elves. Just be honest that it's a retcon and you changed course - don't try to save face with this reasoning.

About the Antaam: "We needed some big mindless bad guys to fight and so we did this because we didn't want to address the Qunari War/Invasion we set up in Trespasser".

You had to canonize Sten as being alive and Arishok in order for this reasoning to work -> you didn't even come up with an alternative Arishok to take Sten's place.

Yeah, the exchange that set up the Crows we see in the game as "idealists" did not make the game. I can confirm that!

I'm sorry, "Caterina kept Illario in check?" as in, 'kept him an idealist and not the usual Crow'? The woman that beat him with a cane and starved him and his cousin to train them as Crows. Fuck off.

lmao -> tell me you're coming up with this on the spot without telling me that you're coming up with this on the spot.

8. World State Discrepancies - Isabela

Outright ignores the very real criticism about the marketing from this game and World States.

"there are absolutely places where we unintentionally suggested there was a hard canon (...that Isabela is always assumed to have joined Hawke's party.)"

Unintentional?

Excuse me, you have her talk about Merrill and the Kirkwall Crew as family - that was not unintentional in the slightest. Not to mention Sten, Blackwall, Sera, and Cole are canonized as being part of your world state no matter what.

You had a story you wanted to tell - one that only fit a few world states - and you went ahead with it and disregarded those choices. Don't try and lie about this all being a big misunderstanding.

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Edit - They could have taken the opportunity to address the very reasonable criticisms that people had with this game but they cherry-picked questions and avoided/minimized anything remotely critical.

They could have provided us some insight into the game development time but each time they approached the topic they settled for "we're happy with what we delivered and it was well optimized."

They had an opportunity to acknowledge that people were bothered by the handling of the lore/stories (to potentially mention they could course-correct/ rethink their plans) but instead they doubled down on everything that they did and even 'justified' some decisions. They doubled down on the Executors, Solas's changing motivations, the destruction of Southern Thedas, and the elves/Solas being at the heart of everything etc...

This AMA basically confirmed that the only reason they did what they did to the south was for a reset -> It's not a compelling or fulfilling narrative to have everything we've done reset back to ground zero off-screen. BioWare games differentiate themselves from other RPG's by their import system from previous games - it was compelling and exciting! With DATV they set the expectation that BioWare can outright throw out entire games worth of choices/build up, not solely retcon them.

Justifying your choice to water down the lore/world of your story by saying you'll address it in the 'next game' does not instill me with confidence, BioWare! It doesn't explain that lack of it in this game either!

They avoided every question that, rightfully so, pointed out the misleading comments made by devs in the pre-order period of the game:

the fact that there were only 3 imported choices from previous games was leaked by a reviewer -> BioWare was vague from the start about choices

that this game was the most 'romantic' in the series

that world states/ headcanons wouldn't be disrespected

that there are 'lore' reasons for bad darkspawn design

that there are lasting, impactful choices/consequences to be made in this game

that the lore/world was not watered or toned down

that companions are deep and you can disagree with them etc...

BioWare's behavior towards their customers in the lead up period to this games release was downright scummy. I absolutely felt misled after playing the game for myself and recalling what I read in interviews put out. While EA is undoubtedly poison, you can't hold them solely accountable for this.

I feel for the individual developers who worked on this in what was undoubtedly a toxic environment from EA - but I feel that it's pretty clear that BioWare itself has a lot of problems within and in their leadership/executives. Working for EA does not give them an excuse to mislead their customers.

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I already had a very grim outlook on the franchise from the end of DATV but this literally look my interest out the back and sent it to God. What a disaster.

[realtapiocafan]

🥺 i just let out the softest whimper

[dcdreamer23]

As a casual Watcher fan, it's too little too late.

First off, I want to say that if you're happy with the apology video, that's great! I'm honestly happy for you. I personally don't feel the same, and I wanted to share my two cents.

I think it's a great apology video that addresses all fan concerns... from Friday. The truth is the response took so long to come out that the community dug out a lot of not-so-great things to light. Everything from homophobia, to entitled behaviors, to cost-breakdowns of productions and the company as a whole. Obviously it's impossible to address all of that at once and maintain any kind of focus, and there's plenty of things that frankly could never truly be discussed with the public.

But by waiting so long to respond these questions did arise and are still in the air. If fans are happy to move on for now that's fine but I get the feeling it'll still bite Watcher sooner or later. How will Watcher address the disconnect between their apparent ambitions for large productions and their audience's desires for small, personality-driven content? What new shows do they hope to produce? Will they reconsider their release schedule to create more content? Will fan-provided content appear behind the pay-wall at all for any length of time???

But for me the biggest question is whether they truly originally wanted to remove ALL of their content from YouTube to a new paywalled platform and give viewers one-month notice. To me, judging by the language in their video, their original statement to Variety, and the fact that they did start removing content after the video dropped all points to yes. Yes, they were going to move all their content to an unsecured platform (with no app, captions, international accessibility!) for $6/month. And they never addressed that in the apology video!!!

I personally just can't get past it on top of all the other things that were brought up in the last 72 hours.

[jayflrt]

if you use newjeans in your fics or smaus min heejin will jinja kill you

[destinysbounty]

Me as a kid, age 13: and im gonna make an oc whos super special and has amazing powers and goes on adventures with the ninja and -

Me now, in college: what if the ninja had a sleazy PR manager

[jmdbjk]

And another thing...

Korean news media hyping how BTS has continued to release content with no gap even while enlisted in the military.

Yonhap News.

KBS News.

"Is this BTS' military service?" astounded, like... what kind of military service is this where the members are still active while they are enlisted??

They've even coined a new term to describe it: Rubber Shoe Content.

Apparently this sort of thing has not been done before, at least not to this extent, when an idol group is on break fulfilling their military obligation and release things for the fans while they are away.

"They are creating a new activity model to fill the gap with so-called 'rubber shoe content' for fans waiting for BTS, from music videos and entertainment documentary films to offline events."

The planning that had to have occurred and length of time it took for all of this to be produced... BTS and their staff, along with their agency BigHit and the resources available to them via Hybe, were able to carry out this extensive effort so that we would continually have things to look forward to while they are away. They worked hard before enlisting for us.

And we know more is coming! Wait until K-news sees Jimin and Jungkook doing MMA in their sleep!!

[sparklyshakespeare]

the case for hyper-femme hotspur

this is my tumblr blog and this is like kind of just what we do heresies

OK so basically okay so

first of all i think anytime there is a character who is so strongly associated with an extreme form of gender expression in our collective zeitgeist (i.e hotspur and hyper-masculinity) there’s something not only extremely fun to play with but incredibly valuable about analyzing the story from the opposite end of the gender performance specturm. also canonically there are like 3 female characters in 1h4 and that sucks. also also don’t you want to see hotspur in pink glitter? i know i do and this tumblr is not a democracy!!

in this hypothetical dream sparkly version of the play, both hotspur and worcester would be women. not played by women, i mean textually explicitly women. this is important!! 

worcester should be very nancy pelosi hillary clinton-esque in the way that this is a middle-aged woman who has been taught that to be successful in her field (politics) she will have to strip herself of most of her femininity and perform a certain level of masculinity in order to be taken seriously. this creates a whole other layer to the hotspur/worcester dynamic when all of a sudden this young, hyper-feminine woman is being taken more seriously and being given more praise than someone who has worked and fought through the bullshit and done it all “right”. she hasn’t earned her place, she hasn’t had to struggle - and worcester resents her for that. (there’s like a whole dissertation to be written about how much of 1h4 changes when only worcester is genderbent, i love you queen worcester you are everything not in this version here you kind of suck lowkey)

henry iv is just a misogynist he just kinda sucks but like this is something we all knew screw that guy

ok now we can talk about hal because i know hes like the one all you little gay people care about. 

to me, it’s never made sense why the Henriad is framed as hal’s hero’s journey. maybe it’s because i’m queer (i’m like actually positive that’s why), but leaving home and finding acceptance and family from a group of outsiders who society has deemed as worthless is the path i’ve watched so many friends walk. having to leave that and return to your shitty dad because “duty calls!” and THEN leaving behind and disavowing the same community that opened its arms to you? i don’t see that as an awesome coming-of-age about learning how to handle responsibility, that’s deeply, deeply tragic. and far farrrrr too true a reality for most members of our LGBTQ+ community here (Bible Belt). SO guess where this version of 1h4 is set!!!!!! anyways, its the Medieval Revival of the ‘70s in the Bible Belt south, the Boar’s Head is a gay bar, and hal is trans. 

hal is trans-masc in some way and this needs to be incredibly explicit (like pronouns pin with trans flag on costume explicit). and then when the news breaks, when “I’ll to the court in the morning.” (we’re cutting the text so this is where that scene ends. cool? cool. cool!), hal takes the pin off. it needs to be like A Moment. it should make me cry, and i cry really easily so that’ll probably be pretty easy to do, but this is a gut punch. 

oh and lady percy is still a woman, they’re gay, because i said so. blah blah blah because look hotspur and hal really were so alike all along and look hotspur is fighting so voraciously because she’s hungry for a world where she can openly and unabashedly be with the person she loves but ultimately because i love lady percy and i love lesbians and this play doesn’t need another man. but also because look hotspur is fighting so voraciously because she’s hungry for a world where she can openly and unabashedly be with the person she loves. worcester and vernon should also both be women and have the blossoming of a relationship but be a lot more discreet about it (worcester should be extremely hesitant). now we get a cool split between younger and older generations of activists in both the feminist and the gay rights movement oooo themes oooo motifs oooo lady gagita 

as far as hal/hotspur parallels go, it’s probably pretty obvious at this point. your dad constantly praising someone who represents, at least in his mind, the ideal concept of a woman, disappointed you can’t be more like her, all the while you’re coming to terms with the fact that you’re not a woman, but he’ll never see that, so what the fuck are you supposed to do?!? it’s a LOT! but i think there’s also something to be said about the less obvious parallel. which is that hyper-femininity is NOT an attempt at ideal polite womanhood or self-Stepfordization, hyper-femininity is in fact the extreme performance of womanhood in rejection of that. hyper-femininity is queer in nature (also hotspur quite literally has a wife but i guess hal wouldn’t be able to tell that just by looking at her) there’s something to be said about the moment hal and hotspur see each other, and then the moment hal and hotspur seeeeeee each other. and go hey, you’re just like me. this person who you’ve been constantly compared to and made out to be lesser than  because you dare to be deeply wildly madly truly you is in fact exactly the same. we’re the same. and oh my god, in another world wouldn’t it have been lovely to just like go dancing together? sucks it’s not another world now we’re going to gay fight each other i guess

[limetimo]

reporter: In your first year as a collegial athlete, you called for then Edgar Allan's coach Tsetsuji Moriyama's resignation after practicing under him for two weeks. Would you say the same today, after experiencing the challenges of coaching yourself? Neil: As an Olymphic level athlete and a coach I can confidently say that Coach Moriyama should've been shot like a dog. reporter: *visibly remembers Neil's parentage* Neil: He's not worth the money or favours it would take to arrange it

[ectonurites]

oh holy shit

[cxsmikaiyo]

Have I finished my marketing advertisement and PR degree with a minor in business? No.

Am I still aware how atrocious of a business and PR decision this was for watcher entertainment? Hell fucking yes.

[grogumaximus]

i need max vercareless with his 🥰 gimmick to stop right now <3

[messfcbi]

they are acting like he’s the first person to ever lose a trophy race like come onnn now 💀 also the way they are ignoring their other 2 teammates

[anyataylorjoys]

Chappell Roan is going to be "cancelled" this year that's my 2025 prediction.