#and it's not just that taash is clearly a character who does not appeal to bioware's target audience of gamer bros idk what to tell you

[taamlok]

i'm not gonna lie the whole "trick weekes is playing 4d chess with us" argument about every fucking thing about taash is getting old, they've written more than just solas

[wizardsix]

hope you don't mind @whats-your-initiative (I'll untag if you want) but you made good additions and I wanted to add on.

I don't use twitter anymore but I do remember when I last used it a month or two ago I saw all kinds of stupid discourse on datwt and one of them Was the age gap between rook and emmrich. how it was weird and all that shit. it made no sense other than the fact that a lot of new da fans are young, and now bioware is trying to appeal to them by forcing rook to be young, thus making it weird themselves for no reason. people are going to be stupid no matter what, but fandom discourse should stay within fandom walls. else, it'll have a influence on your writing whether you're aware or not (a lot of writers get hung up on how their work will be perceived by the masses instead of just focusing on writing a good, coherent story that They want to tell. it's your story, not theirs).

something so painfully obvious about bioware (and even larian) is that they let modern culture and discourse influence their games without thinking for themselves if this makes any sense especially in a fantasy world. (for example how in bg3's early access larian changed wylls personality because of a few people complaining about racist writing, they did not check any sources or talk to any black people if this was true, thus wyll was stripped of all personality and conflict. another example is literally taash, did they ask a diverse amount of trans people if their story was alright? if using the terms non-binary/trans/genderfluid etc made any sense? taash doesn't need to represent every single trans person bc that's obviously not how it works, but the bare minimum was not even achieved in giving them agency and a personality beyond being nb. sure, you can write what you want, but sensitivity reading exists for a reason).

about solas now. as a bisexual myself, I've seen and experienced my share of biphobic bs, so i can confidently say the evil bisexual trope is the least of our problems. it seems like they don't understand the basic idea that if you have a diverse amount of well written characters, it's not homophobic or racist or misogynistic to have evil characters of these groups as well. da2 is full of bisexuals, zevran and lelianna (though I've heard they were supposed to be gay which.. that last minute change is questionable), then inquisition and now veilguard. we have a good amount of non-evil bisexuals, so I can assure you bisexual solas would not have made us go on a rampage.

I personally think his romance would have had more depth if he wasn't locked to female elf, especially bc of what we learn about the ancient elves in veilguard. the reason back then of "oh he misses the ancient elves so so much he only likes elves" (even tho he clearly didn't like anyone especially the dalish until the inquisitor "proved themselves") is weak bc then why does male lavellan not work? I cannot stress this enough, especially given what we now know about the ancient elves. it's fine if they wanted him to be straight, but using us as the sensitive snowflake reason is not a good one, try again.

and yeah we need to stop letting people who don't know how to write romance, write romance.

that one conversation between emmrich and harding and the argument between emmrich and rook..... why is bioware trying to make the age gap an issue and why is their age even mentioned. why are they trying to make rook a fresh-faced adventurer. what if someone is playing as an older character huh. idk what's so wrong about two consenting adults in a relationship but ok