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coriphallus · 6 months ago

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DA: The Veilguard Spoiler review pt2 - The Grime

this is a hard one to tackle without strawmaning anyone because itll be a direct response to alot of defense ive seen for the games morality system so ill just start by saying, iykyk

never a genre has been better equipped to discuss ethics than the interactive medium of games and yes, bioware games have been doing it since baldurs gate and no, theyve not always been 'centrist' and 'conservative'. im not even gonna entertain that idea. do you remember the cultural landscape DA:O released to? the landscape it was developed in? dont give me that just because zevran doesnt write in his little notes -that you can conveniently read- 'gay good. not me but me bisexual'

Thedas is a flawed world and its a world thats just as desperate to hang on to its status quo as our own. every time you play an elf thats thriving, or a human thats queer, or a mage thats not institutionalised you exist in a world that doesnt want you, it is an act of defiance that you do.

im sure we can all see why these games were so popular with the audience they can only weakly try to pander to today.

derailing time again; so one of my favourite paintings of all time is saturn devouring his son. it makes me feel so uncomfortable that it gave me nightmares as a child, and i still cant look at it without feeling this knot in my throat. i hate it. i hate how it makes me feel, how that man looks at me in terror like its begging me for help while cannibalising another. weird story but i was bewitched by that painting as a little kid.

it is not a well drawn painting, the proportions are all over the place, brush strokes crude and inelegant. it doesnt even have a deeper story nor was it intended for an audience. i will never know what goya thought of when drawing it.

i thought alot about that painting later in my life when i was struggling with mental health problems, i thought about goya alot too as an adult and after learning about his life. i stared at his paintings and remembered when i told my dad that i hated [saturns] big eyes and hed jokingly said "it would be scarier if he didnt have eyes"

i know what the drawing looks like now, nearly everyone with a little access to the internet does. if somebody removed saturn from it, we'd still be left with a brutalised headless carcass of a man in a canvas too big for itself. if we removed that too all we'd be left with would be void.

i dont want to live in a world where all i know of goya is his rococo work, i dont want to stare at the painting of a void knowing what filled it before. i hated every second of germinale but i never wanted it to be anything other than itself, the story it tells could never hold credence otherwise.

DAV has done its best to paint over it, but its still on the old canvas and i cant look away from the negative space its left, i know whats under it and it unsettles me, infuriates me. it hands me a palette with baby blues and pinks and tells me to paint over it to make a prettier painting. didnt i hate the eyes? wasnt it gross before?

i am not going to write why we need some grime in art, but its absence is disheartening. and to those who say hanged people in the streets or blighted villagers is dark and mature ill say no. its a kids idea of maturity, its the aesthetic of it with no substance. it means nothing to me if rook can just drench themselves in gallons of blight as they crawl through it. the horror of blight has never been the black goo and slimy tentacles, or the monster woman with way too many tits. it is watching people you love slowly fade away, it is a woman who was forced to cannibalise the contaminated flesh of her friends because the woman she loved betrayed her, it was the sheer scale and inevitability of it.

one area we go to is overrun by it and the game begs me to feel hopeful that flowers are growing again when it never let me lose hope. people have already prevailed, they have roofs over their heads and a steady supply of food on their tables. their spirit is unwavering.

its bad, everybody says. the sky is grey and soil is blackened, as my rook turns some statues to access a haunted house whos inhabitants are long gone and the only story they could ever tell is gone with them.

if the question is do i want to see famine? plague? misery? abuse? assault? the answer is yes. yes. i want to see it all of the filth. i rather face the fucking monster head on with its big bulging eyes and misshapen limbs than stare at the abyss its absence leaves on the canvas.

and if nothing else, this bastardization is disrespectful to the people who gave the IP its fame.

Why choose to be good?

back in the bsn days ive wondered why, even in a fictional universe where your choices have no real-life repercussions what-so-ever, players had more 'good' playthroughts than 'bad'?

what happens when you start killing NPCs, when youre needlessly mean to them? the game actively closes off its own content. you get less out of the game. just as, completely incidentally, you'd get less out of your life if you just started killing everyone around you. The world would be emptier, youd be alone.

in that quote i stole from good place chidi doesnt ask "why be good?" the wording is painfully deliberate. doing good is always a choice, and often not the easy one. what makes the act matter is that you chose to do it, even when given 6 other options not to. did i stop in the middle of an important quest to help a man retrieve an heirloom from a darkspawn infested hut? did i hear what that heirloom meant to him?

i cant stop thinking about that speech ever since playing this game after knowing its predecessors.

So, why do it then? Why choose to be good, every day, if there is no guaranteed reward we can count on, now or in the afterlife? I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.

i cant stop looking at this game that spits on its own legacy and think how could they have missed what fundamentally makes us human so bad, what makes us relate and empathise with eachother. what makes us pick the option to interact with an npc who openly hates what hawke is, and allow us to see the traumatised man underneath.

these characters of fiction are written by real people. i have absolutely nothing in common with a guy from canada yet for a brief moment in time i feel a sense of camaraderie as ive felt with goya that i couldnt articulate as a kid.

Nothing too terrible

DAV says it over and over again -as its wont to do with every piece of its flimsy morality- that people can change, people can be redeemed yet it shines as the game with most static characters in its franchise. it simply says things, and since it has nothing to show for it it makes sure to say it repeatedly, in case you missed it.

so when i first played DAO i was in high school, i started with a human noble because fresh out of dark side edgy kotor fame i wanted to be a posh brat. also because, ya kno, we were poor my entire life up until that point and i wanted to have power.

i committed to it, even as the game stripped cousland of everything he had, because i thought a man like him would. i picked the racist options, the sexist options, the options a man in couslands place would. halfway point of the game as i exhausted the initial dialogues something happened; this man who got paid to kill people, who showed no remorse nor care for his victims, begged my cousland to stil his blade.

and i did. i thought maybe he would be as confused as i was, maybe he had a moment of clarity but from thereon bit by bit he was less of an asshole. the characters grew around me, and my character grew around them. i chose to be good because -textually- we were in this together, at the end of all things.

rook is not a character, theyre a mascot. and quite frankly i think they may be a very evangelical mascot because they remind me of evangelical preachings of jesus more than the man from the bible (and i say this as someone whos only exposure to christianity has been through foreign media and the bible ive read that one time). they are the epitome of do no evil and their existence hinges on the frail concept of moral purity. theyre not a person trying to do good, who wants to be good, they are 'good'

-and lemme tell you its a wild choice to have someone like that locked in a prison of 'regret'-

rook can be mean to only one person in the game, and thats someone they dont even have a personal beef with for the most part. but even then they would be shouting at a wall because the game doesnt only undermine them with its narrative, but also every npc in the game suddenly gets possessed by the ghost of wattpad rejects past for a moment to tell them everyone can be redeemed. and i believe it because i played the other games, i believe it because i know zevran and sten and morrigan, isabela and thom and iron bull and dorian. i know it because i can see the vague shapes behind the new coat of paint but i am not rook.

so no, the game fails to get people-can-change points by its own merit, and it cannot gain points from its prequels because it destroyed them. none of those characters i watched grow exist in this universe. zevran cant exist with DAV crows, fenris` story cant exist in an imperium with invisible slaves only glimpsed through empty cages and broken chains left scattered on the ground. i dont know which morrigan this NPC is, is it the woman who grew to learn kindness, who begged to sleep with her friend just to save them despite knowing it would play into the plans of a destiny she so desperately tried to break free from? or is she the clever puppet her mother groomed her to be who wanted to harness the power of a god? i dont know her, i dont know this dorian or this isabela beyond their names ipso facto this is not a sequel.

bellara asks an assassin why he is trying to save the world and his answer is "ive done some things in the past im not too proud of. nothing too terrible, but some of it was bad." and i can hear the games desperation for me to not engage with its material in that 'nothing too terrible'

lucanis never killed anyone innocent, taash never harmed an animal they could shoo of or reason with, emmrich venerates the dead and is friends with every wisp he pulls to use in menial labour, davrin joined the wardens willingly because he wanted to do good...

rook tells harding that her anger is justified when shes not even allowed anger of her own.

nothing too terrible.

aside from creating boring and nonsensical and static characters it creates a dreadful echochamber that we're forced to sustain. No taash is not valid, their gender is but their behaviour is not and for the character to grow and mature it needs to be addressed. lucanis doesnt need to be pampered in shock blankets he needs to see how repressing his problems and jeopardising his health puts people around him in danger etc etc. they are adults and they need to learn more complex ways of healing. and if rooks flaw is that theyre an enabler, then that needs to be acknowledged by the narrative in some way too, and not mindlessly endorsed because they say some buzzwords.

none of these interpersonal relationships feels real because none of these people feel real beyond some draft of themes and tropes. some interactions literally remind me of two bots in facebook comments

i look at this dialogue wheel with familiar symbols and all im reminded of is hawke telling carver he carries every death with him, of him telling his uncle that he wasnt fast enough, of him begging the person he loves to tell him that his mothers death wasnt his fault.

and they dont. they just sit there with him.

#veilguard critical #da:tv spoilers #bioware critical #personal #long post

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3liza · 6 months ago

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everyone arguing with material analysis/assertion about how art is a "luxury" has rarely if ever spent rent or food money on art, if they even pay rent or buy their own food, and if they did that would be considered extremely dysfunctional, and thats what i/we mean. artists are not providing a necessary service.

our plane crashes in the Andes and you are not particularly excited about my "can draw that Playboy centerfold of Marge Simpson from memory" like that is not an essential survival skill. lots of extremely skilled workers work in luxury artisan and craft jobs, it's not an insult to say even a very famous and very talented and influential artist is not producing a commodity necessary for the furtherance of human life. none of us are doing that, no matter how we stretch and strain the definitions of "essential" or even things like "morale" or "group identity". i will burn my copy of Finnegan's Wake to stay warm and thats what it comes down to.

i get foamy crazy snarling and biting about the idolization and obfuscation of what artists actually do because it is a labor issue! the public conception of artists as people possessed of a divine talent they dont consciously work to develop like any other skill, and the public idea that we are simply pleased and privileged to make art all day and "not work", something people say to my face every time i get asked "what i do", is largely responsible for the absolute dogshit reality of how subsistence and working class artists have to survive. we usually dont have health insurance unless we're so poor we qualify for medicaid AND live in a state that will enroll us. most of us are too disabled or crazy to go to a real job every day. most of us have tried, over and over, to enter the normal workforce, and have failed, and been forced to develop alternate skills that allow us to make rent in the ten hours per month we're actually functional. many of the artists i know work from bed because standing up is dicey. this has been turned into a charming eccentricity of famous artists and writers instead of people wondering why a person would need to stay in bed all day and take the enormous bother of bringing their stupid pens and paper and writing board or typewriter or whatever to their bed instead of just getting up and getting dressed and going to work. ive done this, i spilled ink in my sheets. its a huge hassle.

and artists play along with this mystique because people dont want to buy paintings from sadlords! they want to buy paintings and books and marge simpson nudes from cool guys who get a lot of chicks and wear rockstar outfits and party a lot, because of the transitive properties! of course!!! this is basic marketing!!!!! and if the artist doesnt play along they turn into Sad Story Artist where they're doing emergency commissions and posting about how sick they are all the time. this is not cool or fun or sexy. it's a sand trap and its very hard to recover from. im struggling with this right now!

famous and successful artists and writers are constantly ending up 60-90 years old with cancer and multiple sclerosis and dementia, being the subject of some sort of public, last-ditch, humiliating GoFundMe because painting paperback covers fr 60 years means you dont get a pension, you often dont even have kids who can take care of you, you dont have life insurance, you dont have health insurance. 'died penniless and alone' is one of the stereotypical artist endings for a reason, that is not fiction. this happened to more artists than i can list on two hands. look up what happened to Peter S. beagle, the guy who wrote The Last Unicorn. you write a book like that you should be set for life, right? NO. thats not how it works

i'm not saying 'all artists are disabled and working class or poor' because that isnt true, observably. nepo babies and trust fund artists exist, obviously. but they take an outsized portion of the spotlight when the public thinks of the concept of "artist". they are not actually the norm. the average artist is probably making under 40k and living in extremely precarious circumstances and has had periods of homelessness, illness, extreme debt and/or bankruptcy.

this is true even for the 'successful' artists. having one or two or ten good projects and being a household name does not save you from just not having the safety net provided by a normal career path. i was very close with a major, famous 2000s network television creator and team that you have heard of. they won awards, they changed culture entirely, they were a big deal. one of them was turned down for a half dozen projects by the same network that made millions or bilions on their franchise over several years (each pitch is completely unpaid btw, imagine carefully preparing a PowerPoint for morons for months at a time for no reimbursement and thent he morons ask you if you can put a teenage witch looking for her lost cat in the alps in it and you're like, haha, well, it's a 4 part hard sci fi miniseries set on Europa and takes place entirely inside a pressurized lander settlement, i mean Ridley Scot said he was interested already and he pitched a bottle episode about a carbon monoxide poisoning, soooooo....and the executives look at each other and they're like "it's jst not really what we're looking for right now, thanks for coming in" and you go to coffee bean and tea leaf and kill yourself and thats sort of what its like. i made that example up it didn't actually happen i'm using an illustrative example), worked on a canceled film, and just. gradually ran out of money. thats what happens. that guy ended up slowly selling off all his belongings, getting roommates in a one bedroom apartment, and then eventually having to just live on a friend's couch for years. famous guy. you probably know his name. another major member of that same team ended up in GoFundMe/commission hell for years (might still be there) because they had to take care of their two dying, dementia patient parents by themselves. these are people who go to GenCon and sign autographs for four hours at a time. THE PUBLIC IS NOT AWARE OF THIS SHIT and i'm sick of it. im sick of going to a gallery opening night ("vernissage") and drinking bad wine and having a guy with an email job that pays six figures and benefits tell me being able to push "undo" on the computer is cheating. that's a real example, that has actually happened to me. more than once.

artists currently have zero labor protections whatsoever. all of us are undercutting each other in an unregulated market and relying on welfare and private insurance and not having families or buying houses. zero security until we get so old all our illnesses and dysfunction finally ground us permanently and then we get turned into a charity case by fans (humiliating) or just fade away into ghosts and die

whats my punchline? idk i dont have one. it's possible and likely that any given artist you meet is permanently in precarity and will be until they die, even the famous ones. the culture of selling art demands that artists do not admit to this in public unless shit gets really really bad. i guess my point is you should know this, as a person who looks at or listens to or reads things that people have made for your amusement, not for your survival

#blog

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moexycodone · 2 months ago

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youtube

this video sucks ass lmfao

so heres a list of things i found ass about this video:

the video suggests that the best way to handle modern nazi sympathizers is through ridicule, but that alone isnt rlly helpful. laughing at them doesn’t actively counter their ideology, dismantle their rhetoric, etc. "pointing and laughing" doesn’t challenge the structural and ideological foundations that allow nazis to persist.

literally just fifteen minutes of dancing around the idea of engaging with reichblr members, at one point saying, "use your judgment" when it comes to harassment [1:40]. and then saying "if theyre adults, um, someone needs to punch them in the face" [3:52] casually encouraging assault against innocent people

"holocaust is not a joking matter in any way whatsoever it's it's straight up awful and I disagree with anyone turning into a joke" who joked about the holocaust. who??? nobody on reichblr, as far as ive been here, has joked about the holocaust

the creator claims to respect history and historical research while dismissing entire parts of the history community (reichblr) they personally don’t like. for example, preferring "smart people" in certain history communities while dunking on the reichblr community, this comes off as arbitrary.

the video spends more time ridiculing the artistic quality of fan art but not a single second addressing actual nazis. which i personally think is a waste of time & was supposed to be the point of the video but okay.

"to this day there is still a very vocal minority of individuals that like them [nazis]" no, no there isnt. if there are, theyre not in the reichblr community.

also they use artwork, some from my moots, without permissions. pretty sure thats not ethical. oh and they called their art a "waste of time & skill" which is just a dick move and such an unnecessary comment to make on a video that discusses (or atleast tried to) something so serious as nazis.

"like glorifying nazi germany is horrible" [4:55] no proof of anybody glorifying nazi germany. then continues to say "nobody needs to be drawing that [anime hitler]" which makes me think their supposed idea of a nazi is somebody who just draws nazis then support them.

overall the video feels so confusing. it’s hard to tell what the creator’s actual point is because they’re jumping between mocking random nazi-related fan art and discussing extreme online subcultures without a clear direction. it sounds like they’re mostly frustrated with people who romanticize nazi imagery online—particularly the niche reichblr stuff—but then they go off on tangents about how these people might be dumb, or how their art is bad, without actually addressing the deeper, more dangerous parts of neo-nazi ideology.

the video seems to be trying to say that anyone who engages with or posts nazi-related content (even as art or a joke which ninety percent of the reichblr fandom does) is problematic, but then doesnt make it clear where the line is. are they talking about people who simply appreciate history? or those who glorify nazi leaders and their actions? its unclear.

plus, the mocking tone just adds confusion because they mock the fan art but also say that mocking them isn’t enough, but then the creator doesn’t really offer any solutions or actions beyond "laugh at them."

i did watch this video while half asleep (im also writing this half asleep but shhh), but if i can still find bullshit in ur video with one of my eyes closed and my brain struggling to work i think u may be in the wrong.

in summary the creator js rants, makes unnecessary comments about art they dont like, and cannot even be bothered to point out any real nazis amongst the reichblr community by simply generalising all of us into being a nazi.

its crazy how they claimed artist on reichblr were wasting their time and skill on their art whilst the creator of this video actually wasted their time making this dumbass video that didnt proove or disproove shit.

#reichblr #flesh & fangs

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