#blood is a given

[whumpfish]

I always get so uncomfortable when I see this in whump circles. Why is "lady whump" and "minor whump" a thing, let alone a controversy? Pain doesn't care about your gender or your age. You do not need to be This Tall --- to ride this ride. I came to this subgenre as a woman with chronic pain to be in a place where my pain would be accepted instead of offensive. This puts every woman like me - and every child who went through the institutional violence I did, for that matter - in the realm of taboo in what is possibly the only socially acceptable place for us to explore and embrace pain. I write a lot about women experiencing pain. I write a lot about children experiencing institutional violence. Both these things are part of me and part of many femmes in whump.

In the name of pearl-clutching purity culture suddenly our pain is offensive again. How dare we write about it, we're such bad feminists. How dare those of us who experienced violence and pain as children write about it, we're terrible minor-exploiters. We have to slap warning labels on ourselves in the genre that is our best if not only suitable outlet just like we do everywhere else.

This was not a thing when I joined this community. And I resent its sudden introduction.

If only conventionally attractive adult males are allowed to be in pain in fiction, if someone must be suitable for objectification by adult straight women to be allowed to experience pain in fiction, if anyone else being shown to experience pain is offensive simply because they are not conventionally attractive adult males, it ceases to be whump and turns into a weird fetishy situation that just makes my skin crawl.

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

[hellspawnmotel]

I looked into my heart and asked what would I draw if I could draw anything I wanted and my heart said you would draw your favorite deltarune characters with angel wings

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather

Previous / Next

trigger warnings: blood

[river-mort]

ah yes. Famous omen twins

[kathrenax]

Bad Omen

[heynhay]

mercy, are you still with me?

[from where the apple falls by europa_report]

[sahaquiel43]

[Elden Ring DLC spoilers] sir Ansbach, what an absolute CHAD.

[MAJOR SPOILERS]

.

]

one thing Shadow of the Erdtree did was write a delicuously hatable villians, and the assorted heroes to rally against it.

stayed loyal to the end to Mohg Mogh, pierced through Miquella's deception, and even challenged her, trying to Free Mohg from his Brainwashing.

he even forgives us for killing Mohg given the situation.

and he follows us in to fight against the god that ruined everything.

what would have made it even better is if Morgott, or at least using a margit projection, also went in to avenge his brother.

"Lord Mohg will have his Dignity".

damn that's a raw line. I used to actually dislike mohg, genuinely. I admittedly also disliked his fanbase that flanderized his gross actions. And even after this, it's a toxic blood cult, but taking Ansbach's actions alone.....PURE CHAD.

like his brother, the Omen twins deserved Better!

damn.

[nightmaresyrup]

Brother, what have you been rolling in?

[eiraeths]

soap: hey lt you’ve donated blood, right?

ghost: yes

soap: you could be in someone’s boner right now

ghost:

[winter-wise]

That edge of resentment when Morgott talks of the "twin prodigies". Because Malenia and Miquella were, officially, Marika's only set of twins. The twin prodigies. They were twins and they were brilliant.

And Morgott had to live with the knowledge that he and his brother - both twins, both talented - would never be "the twin prodiges" even though they came first.

[fellomen]

Morgott was left immobilised, staring up at the Erdtree as it was set ablaze, and died thinking his entire life's work was for nothing

Mohg's final moments were spent envisioning his perfect dynasty, only for his soul to be forsaken, his corpse desecrated and made into a vessel for the one miquella actually wanted

[jubishii]

child ver.

wip (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Warden: You've never killed an innocent?

Zevran: Now there's an interesting word, "innocent." How many men do you know who can claim to be truly innocent?

Zevran: But if you're talking generalities, such as children and relatives and bystanders and such… never on purpose, but it happens.

Zevran: It's unfortunate, but death comes to us all. If not me, then some wasting disease. Or a fall down the stairs. Or at the hands of a darkspawn. It's all relative in the end.

Zevran: "Death happens," as we like to say. And when I get paid for it, death happens more often.

-

Zevran: In Antiva, being a Crow gets you respect. It gets you wealth. It gets you women… and men, or whatever it is you might fancy.

Zevran: But that does mean doing what is expected of you, always. And it means being expendable. It's a cage, if a gilded cage. Pretty. But confining.

-

Davrin: Lucanis, how do you decide when one of your targets deserves to die?

Lucanis: Usually when the client pays up front.

Davrin: I'm serious. Do you just kill anyone?

Lucanis: No. There has to be merit.

Davrin: "Merit?" Who decides that?

Lucanis: The Talon of the house.

Davrin: And then you just carry out the order?

Lucanis: It's my job.

Davrin: Must be tough to sleep at night.

-

Lucanis: You kill for a living, too, Davrin. How do you sleep at night?

Davrin: Like a baby. The things I hunt are pure evil. Monsters. There are no shades of grey with darkspawn. But you...

Lucanis: Provide a service.

Davrin: What if your target doesn't deserve to die?

Lucanis: Who does? Good, bad, everyone dies eventually. We just speed things up.

-

Emmrich: Do you have any say in your... targets?

Lucanis: You want to know if my victims deserved it.

Emmrich: Forgive me, I shouldn't have asked.

Lucanis: Everyone wonders.

Lucanis: I've never killed an innocent, by my count.

Lucanis: I cannot say if yours would agree.

-

Emmrich: Lucanis, do the implications of your work never trouble you?

Lucanis: Everyone on this team has killed before. I'm hardly unique.

Emmrich: Yes, of course. But in your case, it's a profession, rather than an act of necessity.

Lucanis: I'm not sure the Venatori or the Antaam see the distinction as you do.

-

Emmrich: I find it extremely interesting, Lucanis, that you consider the point of view of your enemies in battle.

Lucanis: I have to. It's much more difficult to find and kill them, otherwise.

Emmrich: Exactly! A utilitarian attitude towards death, and yet you extend empathy to your victims.

Lucanis: Not that much empathy.

Emmrich: Enough to wonder how the Venatori and Antaam view your actions.

Lucanis: Death comes to everyone, in time. I get paid to deliver it. Like a letter not everyone wants to read.

-

I think about this a lot. I'm always... surprised when I see the talk that they're supposedly trying to make Lucanis into the perfect "cinnamon roll" in Veilguard, because his sweet personality doesn't "match" his profession and background. Like, no? That's a very surface level of looking at it, I think.

Zevran is like this, too. He is an incredibly chill guy, and when you romance him, he is also very sweet and vulnerable, despite being an assassin. They're not that different in that department. They were both trained to be assassins since they were children. They're both traumatized in various ways. But neither of them acts like a bloodthirsty, evil freak. But they both also take pride in the job they do (or did), and how well they can do it, and have no intention of stopping. And yet they both express surprising empathy. (Zevran argues against annulling the Circle! Quite extensively!) And they make pretty much the exact same arguments about being killers for hire, as shown above.

Death is a natural part of life. Sometimes it just comes sooner, because we're there to deliver it. There's (almost) no such thing as an innocent person, so my victims aren't innocent people. Therefore, I've never killed an innocent in my entire life, as far as I know. (At least not intentionally.)

And that's interesting and fun about them! It's beautifully deranged. Lucanis completes an assassination mission, slitting somebody's throat or what have you, and then goes on his cosy coffee break, satisfied with a job well done.

The fact that they both say that they've never, in their opinion, assassinated "an innocent", so it's all good, doesn't automatically make it true and doesn't mean it's not complicated, however. Not every line of dialogue can be taken at face value. As video game players, we're rather desensitized to this, but hearing this should normally be at least a little alarming. For a regular person, at least. And it is for the people in the game! Like Emmrich and Davrin. Davrin has several banters with Lucanis about it. Like, who decides when somebody deserves to die and which contract's going to get carried out? Well, the "CEO" of "the company," of course! What could ever go wrong that way? Emmrich tries to coax Lucanis into saying that he does feel something about the whole thing, because he really wants it to be true. While Lucanis is very matter of fact about it. He knows what the Crows are, and that's it. He doesn't glamorize or demonize it.

So, it definitely isn't that "Veilguard says that Lucanis has never done anything wrong ever in his life," just like Origins doesn't do it with Zevran. Both the men's attitude towards killing is warped in an interesting way, completely in line with their background and upbringing. It shows when Lucanis argues with Davrin about them both being killers, because it completely escapes him (or maybe he ignores it for the sake of the argument) how the killing he does (contracts where the targets tend to be people) and the killing Davrin (a monster hunter, a darkspawn slayer) does is of different kind entirely. His logic is flawed at that point. But to him, it boils down to the fact that "it's just a job," and "killing is killing," and "death is death" regardless of form, and that rightfully baffles Davrin to no end. If anything, it shows how the Antivan Crows are taught to hand wave the issue, because the arguments Lucanis and Zevran both present are too similar to be anything else.

Of course, Lucanis, unlike Zevran, as the grandson of the First Talon and her favourite, might have had some extra privileges and wiggle space in comparison, which might have allowed him to bend the rules sometimes, give him space to show more compassion and act more heroically, because people are complex and there are many layers to what each person might consider right and wrong (e.g. killing is okay in various circumstances, and slavers in particular can get fucked - hell, we do it in video games all the time), but still. The fact that his grandmother wanted to tap a new market, so she made Lucanis specialize for hunting mages, which ultimately led to him killing a lot of Venatori and blood mages, makes it cleaner, which is nice, but then again, we hardly know the full extent of all his work. Moreover, when you ask Zevran to tell you stories about his jobs, you don't get much dirt out of him, either. He talks about some of the goofiest ones he's had. One of his targets that he (unsuccessfully) participated in taking out, a royal that got his position through plotting and murder, he also describes as somebody so immoral he basically deserved it. Also very clean. (Compare both these guys with somebody like Blackwall who truly committed a despicable act of murder for money that we do know of. And this single crime sounds so much more upsetting than anything either Lucanis or Zevran describe. None of the things Zevran says is as awful, besides the murder of his lover, which is framed like it wasn't really his fault, because he was misled.)

It's also worth noting that Zevran talks about how he was the best the Crows had before he left and how it brought him respect, wealth, women, men, or "whatever it is you might fancy." All in all, it comes with benefits. By his own admission, he was well off. But of course that came with a catch, as well. The "gilded cage" Zevran talks about. But that's not what made him leave. It was the plotting, backstabbing, and ever present distrust in the end, which led to the biggest mistake he'd ever made. Much like him, Lucanis also mentions that he had a comfortable life before getting captured, in the same quest where he also talks about how he didn't actually have full control of his life. ("Even before I was captured, my life was not really my own. So much had been determined for me.") The gilded cage comes up yet again. And it was plotting and backstabbing that made him lose a year of his life in the underwater prison.

My point is: Lucanis and Zevran are both assassins, because that's what they've always been, they were trained to be assassins since they were kids, they have a very pragmatic approach to death and killing, which they were most likely taught or perhaps were forced to develop, and they both take pride in how good they are at their job, and express no intention of ever stopping. And yet they both show that they have a good heart in various other ways, turn out to be friendly and incredibly loyal, and even very sweet as lovers. Because people can be complex, and so can be fictional characters. Yes, they're very different men, with different problems and personalities, yet also not that different.

You can't think that Lucanis is "too good" without also thinking that Zevran is "too good." You can't have this problem with Veilguard unless you also have it with Origins, is what I'm saying. And I think this may also apply to some of the other Crows we meet in Veilguard.

[hinamie]

choke you back like fingers

[river-mort]

King Morgott the Grace Giving and his quite suspicios advisor that tend to appear out of nowhere surrounded by some blood cultists. We only hope he doesn`t have any bad impact on our lord

Not realy a "human au" but a disguise versions for different occasions. I like to think Morgott sometimes have to appear in front of people as, well, Morgott the King and Mohg simply likes to be part of Morgott`s ruling because A) he doesnt see a king but this messy homeless looking brother that trying his best to pretend he`s a king which includes to look good and wear proper king clothes and he hates every second of it B) anything interesting can happen and who knows how he can use it I have a very bad time with human-Mohg because every time i color he looks weird with that beard, some random pirate that has nothing to do with mohg lol

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Turtle hunt gone wrong.

[First] Prev <–-> Next