#and i'm the first person to be like - fuck the lore !

[hetrosjistin]

No you know what, I thought I was done, but I'm not.

The problem with this shit is that it misses the point of having shit like the crows in Thedas at all.

You can't sanetize stuff and have it have the same impact, it's not just the hollowness, it literally reduces the conflict to a nothing burger.

You know why Dorian is, perhaps, one of my FAVORITE goddamn characters in the entire DA game series?

BECAUSE HE LITERALLY HAS TO GO THROUGH DEPROGRAMMING HIMSELF OF HIS RACIST SLAVER CULTURE! It's not enough that he wants to oppose the Venatori and all that nonsense. It's not enough that in inquistion, he literally went to the part of the world where he's taught they ENSLAVE people like him and burn out their brains if they're not good little obedient pet mages.

He goes there because it's right and that doesn't make him magically a perfect and good person. He's STILL flawed, he STILL has the baggage of his culture, and ADDRESSING IT is a constant fucking undercurrent of his dialogue and interactions throughout the game. How he is both proud of everything his civilization, the oldest extant civilization in the world, and horrified by the excesses of it's bad actors, and as time goes on his REALIZATION of how horrific each and every element of it is.

Like, when the Venatori take over minrathos. It's depicted as something ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE but frankly? That implies things were pretty okay before that!

What would ahve been SO MUCH MORE INSIDEOUS, would have been to show how LITTLE things had changed. Oh, have the burned out ruin of the hide out, have a few ventatori guards standing here and there, but now show how ABANDONED AND CALLOUS they all are. They don't -need- to set up a fucking police state, Tevinter already HAS IT IN PLACE. You don't NEED fucktons of venatori guards around docktown.

But by doing it the way they did they robbed so much of the substance of Tevinter from the game.

Like I'm actually on board with some of the changes. The Broodmother thing about the darkspawn was handled just about as well as it was ever going to be handled in Origins, so them all but abandoning them from the lore as time went on is a smart move IMO. Making significant changes to the dark spawn with the blight is a big deal, and a smart move.

But the draining of life from all the rest is unpardonable.

Have the Lord of Fortune -not give a shit- about other people's culture. It's pretty, it's bling, if it was so important why wasn't it better guarded? Why was it so stealable? Have that be a FLAW in their goddamn thing as FUCKING PIRATES.

Have the found family elements of the Crows, have them have a whole blood debt and true contract society thing. Have us confront the fact that if someone fails a contract their life is FUCKING FORFEIT. Play up the whole idea that found family can be JUST as toxic. Play up the idea that these orphans and street kids taken in by a fucking -assassin cult- effectively are molded to SERVE the interests of the nation as members of the 'family'.

I was -so- incredibly happy with inquisition where they CONTRASTED Blackwall so hard with the order at large. The Grey Wardens are a -death cult- created to fight the APOCALYPSE through wrote tradition and absolutely seething loyalty to the idea that they are the thin line against the darkness.

Play that up, show how god awful the anderfels are scoured of life by the blight and still infested with dark spawn. GIVE THE FIRST WARDEN A NAME AND WHY THE FUCK IS THIS GUY IN FUCKING MINRATHOS?! Play up the ENTIRE IDEA of what's wrong with them and contrast it with -our- experience of wardens from, basically, wardens who never actually underwent the indoctrination process.

Someone else on this hellsite said that the longer you think on veilgaurd instead of playing it, the worse it gets and goddamn is that the truth.

Problematic fiction is good because it coaches us through stories on how to fucking DEAL with actual bad things.

By sanitizing your fiction you rob it of it's ability to -teach- the audience any lessons beyond 'bad people bad'.

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[arcane-ruined-my-gut-flora]

Please tell me I'm not the only one who has problems with this season's pacing, especially act 2. I'm still enjoying the show but I'm so sad they didn't get more episodes to take it slow with the narrative, especially considering they're adding a ton of new stuff to the story and the lore.

Heavy spoilers ahead!!

I feel like Ambessa is taking too much space, for one. I love her, but with all her screentime she's not even doing much. We could've had more Caitlyn time, some introspection, a look at how she feels about her "relationship" with Maddie. Does she have nightmares about Jinx? Does she dream of Vi? Does she see Vi's eyes in Maddie's?

Or, we could've gotten Caitlyn's thoughts about Ambessa and everything she's doing. Does Cait feel guilty for endorsing her methods? Does she see some sort of twisted maternal figure, someone who guides her like a seasoned soldier while also appearing as an overall stable, mature figure she can rely on?

I'm also sad we didn't get actual Emo!Vi. On YouTube it felt like it was a montage of multiple scenes, but turns out that's all that there is to her. What's her relationship with Loris? What does Loris say about her declining condition? Does Vi see Vander in his face, in his company?

And don't get me started on Isha. I still grew to like her, despite the short screentime she has, but I feel like they wasted her by killing her off now in the last episode of Act 2. We saw her with Jinx, but not enough. Did Jinx flinch away from her in the beginning? Did she try to put some distance like she tried to push her off during the fight in Act 1? Did Jinx let her in begrudgingly, telling herself she doesn't want to curse another person but knowing she's actually curious and maybe even fond of her company?

And who the fuck are the members of the peanut patrol? We saw Loris, but barely heard him talk in the beginning. Vi would never open up to a stranger, let alone an Enforcer (even though it wasn't exactly clear he's one), but the first time they met and drank their asses off we could've had something meaningful. Loris asking a question that makes Vi think, maybe regarding Cait's proposition, or offering an external point of view whether it's to convince her to join or not.

Maddie does it, by mentioning the fight Caitlyn put up to get the badge, but some more convincing wouldn't have hurt. Vi is infamous for her stubbornness after all. And who is the other guy? I hope they'll come back in Act 3 with some more information, but even then it feels too late if you consider everything that's happened with Maddie and Loris off camera.

The Black Rose. That's it. That's my umpteenth problem with this season. I have nothing against this new part of the plot, it's actually pretty interesting, but it's clear we don't have much space for it with everything that's happening. It's cramped in there, it's the reason why we have so much Ambessa and so little Mel. It feels like we're watching two different series/seasons edited together, because the "arcane waking up" was pretty much enough of a twist for me.

The arcane waking up, Viktor becoming Jesus, Jayce becoming Judas. Yes, we'll see more in act 3, but it means we won't see as much of everything else as we could've.

This series was about Zaun and Piltover, about the collision between these two very different worlds that are also two faces of the same coin. We don't see much of the Jinxers and their rebellion, we don't see how Piltover is reacting to the new administration. We talk too much about Noxus and I don't feel the tension between topside and undercity even though it's theoretically growing to the point of snapping.

It's extremely sad, because season 1 left a brilliant, positive memory in my mind. Its writing was top level, and it still would be if only they had a little more time, a couple episodes more, a bigger canvas to work on.

I still love the show, I'm still in love with the characters and I know it's not complete so I can't judge it in a definitive way. Yet it stings.

[moe-broey]

One day. I will be able to find the words. To explain what the difference is between Lif and Mani. There is a Core Difference between them. Of what they Are. Today apparently is NOT that day though.

[ga1adriel]

me, to me: i know that the kiss between elrond and galadriel was a plot device, a deception to cover up the passing of his broach/lock pick so that she can later use it to escape from adar's prison. i also know that elves are exceptionally emotional beings, so in this desperate moment where elrond thinks he might never see her again - of course he wants to kiss his friend, to let her know the strength of his feeling. obviously. obviously. wow i love having to perform these mental olympics as well as having to unlock my media literacy ! hahaha also me (outloud, looking straight down the camera) : ...were the writers smoking crack ??

[tortoise-teapot]

me: (is not a writer)

my brain: hey what if like, we get obsessed with the hardest to write character and we write it in the most complicated setting ever and if you don't get your little story out of your head you're going to explode?

me: 👍

[gen-is-gone]

hrgh every time I think I've come close to forgiving lance fucking parkin I skim the gallifrey chronicles. and then I remember the Horrors.

[streetcornertwoam]

OH my god...

I just actually had to go back relisten to the last several minutes of the latest ep ‘cause...I can’t believe I didn’t get the hints...

the fucking robes... ‘servant of the seven’ ‘one of seven in battle’...even BUMBERSHOOTS! 

goddammit Justin McElroy I’m so furious but I’m cackling

[quilleth]

I'm going to need a dlc to go fist fight mystra, mizora, and zariel. IDK how we get to deal with Shar or Vlaakith so might need to throw them in there too.

I'm on a quest to fight some gods, devils, etc for fucking with my friends. Like no, fuck off. You already had a chance to not be a dick, now meet me in the fucking pit bitches.

[nyaacatboy]

hey aros/aces of tumblr has anyone else figured out to express the sentiment "I hate it when people complain about being single to me" to allos without them launching into the perfectly valid ways in which they are unhappy with their singleness or conflating "complain about being single" with "talking about dating or being attracted to anyone."

[aromanticasterisms]

read through alien space for star rail context and every frame himeko's in you can faintly hear me in the bg trying hard not to think about how much she looks like diluc

[black-rose-writings]

We're babysitting my little cousins this weekend (ages 8 and 5), and I am so very grateful for growing up in the early 2000s, because I only had severely restricted access to the internet until I was 12, and the most fucked up thing I did was playing cult with my (of-brand) barbies. I made potions with leaves and flowers and burried little toy figurines in the sandbox, like a normal child.

I did not make anyone around me wonder why the hell is my 5yo cousin clutching a plushie of a character from the "human experiments on orphans" game, who a) is an orphan who was experimented on and b) gets torn in half and then canibalized alive by other human experiment orphans within that game, ya know.

[slime-crafters]

It's honestly funny to see people say that Link and Zelda cohabitated in Link's Hateno Village house since there's two of everything but there's only one pillow. What kind of couple shares not only a twin-sized mattress but also a small pillow.

Therefore, I think Link sleeps on the floor to guard Zelda like a dog while she sleeps in the bed. Like... Link's the kinda guy who'd say, "why do I need to take a bath??? I swim in rivers and lakes, doesn't that count????"

[silverselfshippingchaos]

man.. shipping with characters from movies is so hard..

[kuiinncedes]

ty for tagging me @justgleekout teehee 🥰🥰🥰🥰 it's been so long since i did smth like this lmao

Rules are post gifs from your 10 favorite shows without naming them, then tag 10 people.

also idk if i even have 10 shows i would like enough to put here but we'll see lol c:

that's 7 but i don't rly have others i would say are favorite tv shows atm so i'm just gonna repeat from these LMAO

beep beep boop boop i'm not gonna tag anyone bc i feel like i barely interact here anymore and i feel awkward abt tagging lol 😭😭😭 naur but if you see this and want to do it at all i tag you fr <33

[socialbunny]

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽some of my skipy lore in the tags i was supposed to bridge it with something else but i forgot what i wanted to say 😭

[zoekrystall]

Did that fav pkmn thing on a whim and I'm sorry for all my babies I didn't choose bc I really like too many by some.

Love how it's mostly pretty ones and then there's clodsire. Even tho I got it in my team since the beginning of violet do I continuously forget its name bc I just call it by the nickname blobby (one of the rare times I didn't spend hours googling the perfect nickname but it nonetheless is a perfect one)

And for fun without any legendaries as fav

Reg nicknames I even write all down so I only spend decades once for each pkmn (unless I don't like the prev one anymore). Need to update that someday since it's mostly old revolution ones but hey. Blaze do I use for arcanine nowadays more and ninetails got others. Gardevoir got soteria nowadays which I prefer more. Etc.