#but god what a shitty thing for bioware to do to us

[pentaghast]

i still miss alistair tho. saw some screenshots of him in inquisition w the original alistair mod and almost starting crying

[spainkitty]

Okay. I think it's time now to talk about how increasing uneasy and disgusted I am by how Bioware just dropped the ball on the Rebel mages being in Corypheus'/the Venatori's thrall rather than the red templars. I already hinted at why. Look again at that sentence.

The mages and the red templars.

The mages are not red. They are not stuffed full of poisonous lyrium that destroys the mind and will of the addicted users. They are not even being controlled by a singular blood mage like Erimond and the Warden mages.

And it's fucking INFURIATING.

The other night I had to murder Fiona in the game in cold friggin blood and I want to know why. I WANT TO KNOW WHY, BIOWARE. WHAT THE F--

Okay. Okay. Calm down. Lemme explain.

The red templars are fucking morons. It is totally their own damn fault for blindly following their commanders and chugging down red lyrium. I made a post about that already. The templars were stupid and let themselves be bamboozled for a myriad of reasons that don't excuse their actions. BUT, but they are in some ways just as much victims, or at least portrayed that way to an extent. They are taught to trust their officers, they did what they were told like they've done for most of their lives. Most of them had no idea about Corypheus or just what this red lyrium would do to them (though they DID know it was bad, they didn't know specifically HOW). They became mindless violent monsters, almost completely unrecognizable, and horribly, irrevocably addicted to this poison they were tricked into taking by commanders they've been taught to trust. It's shitty. It's horrible. And they have no way out if you don't do Champions of the Just. They are unsaveable. Even if you can get them out, even if they realize it's wrong later and try to leave, they'll just die slowly and agonizingly.

But the mages don't have that reason for staying with the Venatori!!! They are not being compelled or corrupted or forcibly addicted to the only thing keeping them alive even while it's killing them! Their minds are not being bent and rent and torn inside-out by this super-heroin-opium allegory. One person (Fiona) made a deal with one dude (Alexius). And a shit ton of people didn't like it!! They only agreed to go along with it because they thought they had no other recourse, that the templars were about to break down the doors and murder them all, and the Tevinter Imperium, for all its flaws, would accept them in a way most of Thedas would not.

But the moment, the FIRST MOMENT, they saw the Elder One-- Hell, the first moment Fiona realized the Venatori were a world-ending cult worshipping a FUCKING DARKSPAWN MAGISTER, she should've been outtie! There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, holding her to the contract! THEY HAVEN'T EVEN LEFT FERELDEN!! They outnumbered the Venatori when they were still in Redcliffe! Fiona was a Grey Warden! A Grand Enchanter! Why didn't she refuse to go? Why didn't she refuse to fight for them? Why did all those mages, so many of which didn't even like the contract and were not legally bound to it anyway since Fiona accepted it on their behalf without their approval, just not go?

'Oh, Corypheus had a fake archdemon.' Okay, but did he fly it to Redcliffe? Did he use it like a border collie herding the little sheepies? I think a whole lot of people would've noticed that!!! So no.

'Oh, there were so many Venatori!' Yes, and there were hundreds of mages in the Rebellion.

'Oh, the Rebels didn't want to fight!' No, they didn't want to fight the TEMPLARS. They didn't want to tear up the countryside and get innocent people killed. But how is that the same as not wanting to fight a cult of Tevinter supremists wanting to sacrifice them to their Elder God's war effort!? THAT'S A VERY DIFFERENT BALLGAME. They were at Redcliffe because they didn't want to fight in a war, so I'm pretty sure they would not want to fight Corypheus' war, either.

Okay, finally, let's say they managed to get tricked all the way to wherever Alexius shuffled them. Let's say they made it all the Corypheus and realized "oh shit, this is NOT what we signed up for", but it's too late because NOW they're outnumbered, NOW they're outgunned, NOW there's a fake archdemon. Sure. Okay. But then. The attack on Haven. THEY WERE UNDER NO COMPULSION TO KEEP FIGHTING. They could have easily given themselves up and surrendered to the Inquisition. They could've turned on their Venatori enslavers and betrayers because NOTHING WAS FORCING THEM TO FIGHT. There is no reason why Fiona, FIONA, MAKER-FORSAKEN FIONA, would fight to the death against the Inquisition/for Coprypheus!! She has no loyalty to the Venatori. She thought she was getting her people to TEVINTER, a legitimate if problematic empire to the north, using a legally binding contract with a magister, but the moment the jig was up, there's nothing legally binding her. It was all a sham. SO WHY THE FUCK DID I HAVE TO KILL HER? Hey, couldn't I at least STOP HER? TRY to reason with her??

I hate it. I hate it. I HATE IT. Bioware you're so fucking stupid. This doesn't make any sense, and I'm even madder about it because the Envy demon shit SLAPPED and the mission with Leliana (and Dagna) fucking rocks. HOW DARE YOU, BIOWARE.

[sl33pyperson]

threats on the table: solas (ofc, hes the name of the game), venatori (gotten stronger in power after inquisition apparently? ive frantically been reading wiki pages), red lyrium templars (meredith wants to Wipe Out tevinter.)

this rant got kinda long and im just spitballing so

super scared we’re gonna get the venatori/tevinter vs templars plot treated really similar to the general mage n templar war, “wow inquisitor you chose One Option and now its over congrats! dont think about the consequences or ripple effect of any of these actions it doesnt matter! you just have a different skin on your soldiers!“

solas taking the red templars and using them to cause general chaos? yeah? hes used the venatori for his own means before?? i might just be misremembering what solas actually wants, but tldr its tearing down the veil to bring back old days where spirits n magic was everywhere? red templars seem P Bad for that plan then

WAIT THE BOOKS ARE ACTUALLY IMPORTANT IM JUST. GONNA COPY PASTE ALOT OF THINGS FROM THE WIKI 

“The Carta assassin says that Solas wants the lyrium idol, retrieved from Meredith's statue thanks to a potion” “The Orlesian bard claims that he saw Solas retrieve the idol from an auction house“ “Their stories indicate that Solas has already started the ritual he intends to use to restore the elven empire, that it involves and has already started to affect the Fade, and that it requires the lyrium idol.“ theres another book where a venatori danarius has stolen the idol from something but the wiki says thats probably Before The Dread Wolf Take You

solas is literally using red lyrium to break down the veil!!!!! having meredith and her soliders everywhere would be so useful as conductors for whatever the fuck he wants to do???

screaming crying but its also the taint!!!! if theres another fucking archdemon im going to die!!!! but the wardens literally wanted to prematurely bring along the rest of the “blights“ by killing the sleeping archdemons so aoudhssdafiuhdf

bring along the world you destroyed previously by destroying the current world!!! fucking THANKS solas!!!!!

i got so fucking. distracted by solas i forgot the main bit of why i started this.

Who You Choose As Divine Is Really Important For How Many Templars There Are

also considering that REALLY good post going around about “why tf did divine justinia even make the inquistion in the first place“ “so she could destroy the mages and have the seekers as better templars but everywhere“

LELIANA: destroys circles as a whole, templars would still be around as a form of “security“ and shitty cop sbc i really doubt the chantries everywhere would give them up. theres still demons and possessions and ppl dont let go of the old ways. CONSIDER!!!! you can literally kill leliana in dao. she could be a spirit. shes also in the absolution mission scenes (still think she would do that even as divine but whatever) i really fucking doubt they would choose leliana as biowares canon, bc they hate mages, u can kill her, circles in nevarra are still mentioned in absolution.

CASS: reinvents a new form of circle and templar order. templars still around. she is STILL working for the inquisition tho, so like, i really doubt shes the canon one purely bc of absolution. if they didnt show cass giving those orders i would be less hard about this.

VIVIENNE: hardens up both circles and templars in the old way. oh my god. so many templars everywhere i bet, i forgot specifics its been a really long time but like. it seems like most likely at this point. vivienne is around no matter what, she doesnt care for the inquisition, shes the most “Eh, doesnt matter that much to other character choices“ one around

tldr oh my god if the red templars are actually able to go and infect other templars, and if vivienne is divine, they’re gonna have a huge fucking army and that makes them scary!!! i also hope who is divine changes the number or the tactics of the red templar army in game. but its bioware so prob not alas

[rubecso]

I liveblogged that Greg Ellis video and now you can suffer with me

So I did not intend to watch the whole of Greg Ellis’ rant, but I guess I’m a masochist. I ended up liveblogging it so here, you can get the highlights without having to sit through 37:55 like I did. ETA: Holy shit, it got privated in the time it took me to copy this out. I might be one of the last people to watch it. What did I do to deserve this honour.

holy shit I'm on the video that Greg Ellis did in Cullen's voice and the like-dislike ratio is 124:1.4k

What the fuck this is 37:55 long?????

How did he bitch for 37:55??????????

HOLY SHIT 56 seconds in and he's talking about a 'mob of social justice warriors' wtf????

guys my soul has left my body

"Integrity is earned in turmoil, not simply asserted in comfort" what the fuck is this hasfdk;lsfdajlksfda;lksfda;sfda

HE IS TALKING ABOUT TWITTER DRAMA LIKE ITS A FANTASY WAR I CAN'T

"Join us on this most magnificent morality quest" WHAT

"Help us banish the reputation savages ((savagers?)) and cancel culture hedonists"

sfdsajklsfda this keeps getting weirder what the fuck

"Intellectual glitterati" he can't keep doing this

he can't keep making it weirder

i can't take it

i just can't

he's literally reading an Intellectual Dark Web manifesto in the voice of his character with Dragon Age background music and a bunch of hamfisted references to the dragon age world and general fantasy tropes

HE'S TALKING ABOUT THE CHIVALRIC CODE

"How can men and woman, who are profoundly different from one another, be equals? ~~Chivalry~~~"

I can't he's still voice acting he's acting this like he's actually voicing an emotional scene in the game i fucking can't

THE FUCKING MUSIC RAMPING UP UNDER HIS DRIVELLING BULLSHIT

"Join me, for this new adventure. Like. Follow. Subscribe."

If you aren't listening to this please please just imagine all this said with the upmost sincerity. Like, if you've done Cullen's romance picture it as the voice he used for the really emotional scenes.

Oh fuck I'm gonna listen to this whole thing, aren't I?

He's... he's talking about Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean

In Cullen's voice

Why is Cullen talking to me about Johnny Depp

He's talking about some time when him and another voice actor tried to hold an event where I guess they could try and launder their image after supporting JK Rowling?

Anyway this leads to him saying: "None of the mob showed up. Why..... WHY???"

THE PREGNANT PAUSES

THE INTERSECTIONAL MOB

OH god another "WHY???"

His voice quavering with OTT emotion

Fuck he really does want to be JBP, huh?

He's literally just bitching about people not showing up to his events now

“THE CANCELLATION OF CULLEN RUTHERFORD”

I CAN'T THIS IS JUST TOO FUNNY

OKay now he's just playing a propaganda film he made about the BLM protests??

Okay back to the cringe now

"In response to one angry mobster, Greg stated that every life has value~~~~~~..."

Okay I have now heard Cullen Rutherford say "All lives matter" with 100% sincerity

"We are living in an era of woke capitalism, in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism."

Okay but like... you know that the 'capitalism' part of that is the problem and not the 'social justice' part right?

"Vile and LIBELOUS messages followed. They were posted online by a SELECT FEW..."

ooooooooh he's on to bitchiing about Mark Darrah this ought to be good

"Not to defend Greg or Cullen from the libelous and ridiculous aspersions...."

DUDE YOUR CHARACTER DIDN'T NEED DEFENDING WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON ABOUT????

Okay my chances of ever not hating Cullen have dissolved now, sorry this is all I'll hear when I hear his voice now

"And giving these negative nnnnnnincompoops exactly what they demanded..."

He literally drew out the 'n' in 'nincompoops'

"This post... had 6 likes. One of two comments.... was posted...." *dramatic reveal voice* ".... by MARK DARRAH"

"Mark Darrah... is the worst kind... of corporate coward. He has :’( no code..... of honour :’("

there are 10 minutes left i'm going to die

OKAY i have now heard Cullen Rutherford, commander of the inqusition, say the words "Go woke, go broke"

"One doesn't challenge The Maker.... without consequences"

I think the Maker here is Bioware?????

"Greg and Cullen were summarily lumped together.... and generalised!!!"

DUDE CULLEN IS NOT REAL

YOU CANNOT LUMP HIM IN WITH ANYONE

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

HE DID IT AGAIN

HE PUT "THE CANCELLATION OF CULLEN RUTHERFORD" TWICE

"The racist trolls came out of the woodwork to cancel Cullen, once... and for ALL!"

"I stand... for HUMAN... RIGHTS :’’’’’’’’’’’’(“ IT'S A VIDEO GAME CHARACTER

"BLACK.... LIVES... MATTER.” *long pause* “AND THEY DON'T MATTER MORE..... THAN ANYONE.... ELSE’S."

Yes. Correct. You are correct. Well done.

*insert the ‘You’re Correct Horse’ video*

"I love.... I ~~~~~love~~~~~~.... everyone "

"So yes.... alll... LIVES... DO... INDEED.... MATTER.... TO MEEEEEEE~~~~~~”

"This moment of history is harsh and merciless.... and in this moment.... I'm choosing.... LOVE"

HE'S LITERALLY JUST REPEATED THE 'WOKE CAPITALISM' LINE FROM EARLIER WORD-FOR-WORD

"Mobbing.... is social murder!"

"And by definition.... people cannot survive their own murder!"

(Again, just imagine his voice breaking with ~~~~~~~emotion~~~~~~~ on that line)

"How do we move from hateful to grateful????"

(The worst part is I know that this shit is going to be convincing to some people and that makes me actually sad)

"Exercise from the neck-up, during this.... PANIC-DEMIC!"

HE'S QUOTING CULLEN I FUCKING CAN'T

"As fans eagerly and patiently await the release of Dragon Age 4, and hope for the inclusion of their ~~~~beloved~~~~~~ Cullen" 

*vomit*

okay now he's just telling Cullen's backstory?

I'm guessing this is going to lead somehow into the whole "DON'T BE MEAN TO ME FOR THE SHITTY THINGS I DID IN THE PAST!!!!" thing?

Okay no he just... said it and then moved on?

"Only time.... and the Maker... will tell”

THAT’S IT

what the fuck i am going mad help

this video should come with a warning I got sucked in and trapped for half an hour

[nuwanders]

if one more person comments on that post saying ‘mass effect has always sexualised women, what did you expect?’ I swear to god

that’s such a non-argument, it’s fucking 2021 and it makes perfect sense to expect them to treat their female characters with a modicum of respect. Someone literally said ‘mass effect has never been a politically correct game’ and it’s like, ok, but Bioware acts like it is, Bioware gets credited with being a ‘woke’ company all the time, bioware made a massive fucking deal out of removing Miranda’s butt shots, so to then turn around and actually make a female character look MORE sexualised than they did in 2007 is heinous. and we’re not being whiny by simply pointing out the hypocrisy in that.

and I do not care that it’s the model from me3. I know, and I don’t care. It’s a fucking remaster, they should have made the me3 model less sexualised in the first place, not transplanted it into the other games. You can improve the texture of clothing without vacuum sealing it to your character’s tits. There is no excuse for their laziness here.

‘What did you expect to happen?’ idk well it’s a remaster so I guess I expected things to be.... different from the first time round ? given that they’re remastering a game which came out 14 years ago? and attitudes to women have changed a lot since then?

the same person who made some of these comments also went to an obscene amount of effort to prove that me1 kaidan hadn’t been whitewashed, and I just want to ask. Why do you feel the need. Why have you taken it upon yourself to be the bioware defence brigade. You treat this company in such good faith when they have proven time and time again that they don’t deserve it. Whitewashing is an observable pattern in all of their games, not just mass effect but dragon age too. It’s not whiny of us to complain about that, and the fact bioware has a history of being shitty to POC and women is NOT a reason to not also be mad about that trend continuing into me:le?? Like some of you are really saying ‘they’ve always treated women like dogshit, so why are you complaining’ as if that makes any sense whatsoever.

[senseandaccountability]

what would've been your dream finale for lucifer? like, if you could rewrite it, how would you have the show end?

I’d have gone for a more ambiguous and vague ending, for sure. Answer the big questions and let the details be left to the imagination. Another loveable dumpster fire show in my heart is Angel - which left us on a perfectly dark, sort-of-vague and in-character note that made sense within its own universe and for its characters.  But this is a personal preference and I think I’m a minority here. I feel like fandom often wants a lot of detailed questions answered, or specific things handled on screen but I’ve always enjoyed making up a lot of stuff on my own or keeping it sort of inexplicable, as long as canon provides me with overarching themes and lore that feels reasonably consistent. I’m always more about characters and philosophy and willing to forgive plot holes. (See: Angel, Buffy, Bioware et al.)

Like, for me it’s never been interesting or important to know exactly what the writers meant by making Chloe a “miracle.” Or how Hell is organized. I also never wanted dates or domestic Deckerstar or whatever, I just wanted the characters Chloe and Lucifer and their choices to make sense in their universe. Chloe’s stupid reaction to Lucifer becoming God? Not a good example of that.  I wanted the show to address why Hell exists, if they want it to continue to exist and if yes then answer me why. Similarly, they also kept telling me a God is needed - why? What does God do in their lore? 

I also wanted them to end on a completely different note re: humanity. As it stands now the show says lol human life, so brief, whatevs, but you’ll have pie in the sky etc. Yet all the previous seasons have shown us how fucking superior Earth is, how humanity has provided Lucifer with compassion for himself and others - he even tells Michael this at the end of S5. Season 6 reads nothing like that. As for Deckerstar, I would have kept it open-ended, I guess. Ended with Lucifer, Chloe and TRIXIE acknowledging that they’ve got a lot of work to do on Earth, so let's get to it. Deckerstar has been endgame since the first episode, all I would have done is to keep them an item as the show end and the viewers can imagine the rest. Love is always partly bittersweet, it’s always up in the air and there’s no locking it in anyway, so the ending also felt shitty to me because of that. Way to trap Chloe in a non-existent long-distance romance until her death just because you wanted your bittersweetness and your ridiculous Queen of Hell gimmick, penned by ***¨¨SuPErDrAmAtIc^^^^^GOTHGURL875734. *cries tears of blood*  Or, if I wrote the ending I truly wanted to see I would have had them shut down Hell. Earth is where it’s at, this is where change can happen and has to happen. You have to be a good person, not to avoid punishment after your death or to satisfy the viewers’ cave-man urges for revenge but to actually make a difference. If Lucifer went to war for free will, he could come full circle helping out dealing with its consequences. In the comics he says that he never wanted the souls, the show could just simply have him refuse them. Don’t come here, I’ve closed. This place is wrong. As it is now, nothing will change on Earth, for the living, but we’re all spending our afterlife navel-gazing our way to what? Forgiveness from God? Who knows because the show didn’t care to answer that. I’d like to think that if I decided to write about sin, the devil and human suffering, I would have spent QUITE SOME TIME thinking about this particular bit of lore. 

[crossdressingdeath]

Well, if we're doing this (JC, Anders, Cullen...), then we're doing this. What's your opinion on Solas? Take the question as you will: his romance with Lavellan, his past, his plans, his—whatever you're interested in talking about.

...When you put it like that it kind of feels like my sole purpose on this site is to disagree with the loudest opinions of every fandom I'm in, huh.

I like Solas, he's great as a character. The sass, the fashion sense, the voice acting, all very good. His personal quest feels real and important (which should be an easy bar to clear but not all of them manage it), his positions make sense for his character... He gets hit hard by Inquisition's "You're not allowed to argue with your companions or encourage them to grow as people except in very specific circumstances and otherwise you can either tell them what they want to hear or insult them in a way that has nothing to do with what your character would actually be having an issue with" nonsense, but that's not really his fault as a character; it's more visible with him in places (at least if you're playing Lavellan), but it's an issue all of the Inquisition cast has at some point. I can't speak to his romance because I... still haven't done it (one day I will romance someone who isn't Bull or Dorian. One day), but as for the rest...

Honestly my biggest issue with Solas isn't actually an issue with him, because the whole "oh yeah the Dalish gods were all totally evil and the Dalish are stupid for believing in them" bullshit is tied so heavily to him that I can't help but conflate them. (God I hate that plot point, I'd actually be fine with Bioware retconning it to at least "only some of them were slavers" at a minimum, also can they at least be less blatant about the whole "Oh only the Christianity allegory isn't confirmed fake, awful or both and that totally doesn't have any real-world meaning", honestly at this point I'm just embarrassed they're being so obvious about it.) Other than that... yeah, I like Solas's past and plans, it makes sense from a story and character perspective and makes for a nice setup for the next game. The whole survivor's guilt thing, his desire to bring back the past, the fact that the story hasn't immediately condemned you and in fact gives you the option to say you're going to save him from himself (Bioware do not turn this into "he's evil and crazy shut up", if you do that again I swear-)... It's good! And honestly after the "Everything's morally grey if you want it to be, even a conflict between abusers, rapists and murderers and people who don't want to be abused, raped and murdered, here have this really obvious evil darkspawn slaver guy to take your mind off of the complete bullshit we're calling moral complexity while we tell you which parts of the grey morality you're supposed to side with" thing Inquisition had going for it it's refreshing to have actual grey morality again.

Also I'm still mad that Lavellan can't be like "You. You're my dad now" at any point, why don't you love me Solas, why do you love Cole and not me. But anyway, ignore my brief tangent about Bioware's shitty, shitty choices... Yeah, Solas is a good character, it's nice to have a character who has genuinely grey morals, his goal makes sense, I'm glad they've set up the possibility of an ending for him that involves talking him down or helping him find a less dangerous solution instead of just killing him, and my main issues with him are issues that he shares with the entire cast because the writing in Inquisition... wasn't great. I'm... cautiously optimistic about his role in DA4, although also very worried because he does share some elements of his character with Anders and we all know how that ended. Also I'm realizing it's been way too long since I played Inquisition, because I'm sure I used to have more detailed opinions on Solas.

[revasnaslan]

Give us your Thane thots

how i feel about this character: thane my beloved 💜💜 he is not my first choice of romance option, but i still adore him with my entire heart. his design is great, i love the drell as a species So Much, even though it's clear they only exist because he does (but we won't get into that today). his backstory is heartbreaking to me, and i'm not just talking about his family, i'm talking about all of it. and the worst part of it is that he doesn't seem to realize just how mistreated he actually was by this system he was raised in, like he made his first kill as a twelve year old thane what the hell. i'd get really REALLY heated if i started going on about the compact, so we also won't get into that today but sufficed to say thane sweetie you need therapy. i do think it was uh... shitty?? of bioware to cut his mlm romance in development.

all the characters i ship romantically with this character: love him and irikah to bits, especially how they met. or well, "met" cause she didn't know who he was at the time. but if there wasn't so much ship hate and die for our ship in this fandom i think they'd be way more popular, considering they're canon. as for other ships... i really like the idea of him and garrus too! idk why but it compells me. him and shep (any gender) is good too!

my absolute favorite for him that isn't him and irikah is him and kaidan though. i'm honestly shocked that this one doesn't pop up more considering they're stuck in the hospital together in 3 for several weeks, and thane outright states they were together when the coup started, implying they hung out during that time. there's also thane promising shep to watch out for him. it has all the makings of a slowburn, one that you can make as tragic as you want depending on if you want thane to die at the end. but i guess it's more fun to write them squabbling over a girl like a pair of teenage boys when they're both in their mid-to-late thirties?? *cough*

my non-romantic otp with this character: looooooooove him and kolyat. they have such a compelling relationship to me, i just wish the fics made it as deep as it actually could be. people seem to skip past the work they'd have to put into fixing their relationship because i guess it's not fun to write about or something.

i also love him and fshep just being friends too! like i like them in a romantic relationship just fine, but ohhhhh my god, the idea of them being best friends who are super close but have no actual interest in getting together is just *chef's kiss* i would love to see this more in fics where she has another romantic relationship going tbh.

my unpopular opinion about this character: he has short person energy and i will not take criticism on that, i see so much fanart where he's like a foot taller than fshep but i personally headcanon him as being around 5'6, or roughly the same height as her per my headcanons. irikah towers over him and he's only interested in people taller than him, don't @ me, he just is.

one thing i wish had happened with this character in canon: this might seem a bit confusing, but i don't actually mind his death so much as how it went down. we knew thane was dying of a terminal illness, so like, we were kind of prepared for it. but i do find it questionable how he just went to c-sec headquarters simply because. idk what he thought he could accomplish there, considering he didn't even know the councilor was there until shep was in the building. and i think this can be chalked up to the writers knowing how they wanted him to die, but not actually thinking of a reason for him to get there. i think they missed a golden opportunity to show his growth by having kolyat be in danger at headquarters, because he's still working on his community service. like it's not a perfect solution, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense for him to be tearing off across the citadel to save his kid than to just go???? when he's literally struggling to breathe???? also sir how could you miss kai leng, he was three feet in front of you and you are an infamous assassin.

my otp: oh god... my favorite ships for him are him and irikah and him and kaidan so

my cross over ship: don't have one

a headcanon fact: after the war, he takes up crocheting. everybody gets a sweater. did you just announce a pregnancy? well congrats because he made you a baby blanket and a set of booties because he went into a crocheting fugue state at 1 am as soon as he heard.

[the-desolated-quill]

Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2019

Congratulations! You’ve made it through another year! You’ve faced many obstacles and overcome many adversaries to arrive here, at the dawn of a new decade. So as we prepare to leave the 2010s and make our way into the 2020s, lets take a look back at the challenges and hardships of 2019. And by challenges and hardships, I of course mean shitty fiction and media.

Yes, it’s time for yet another edition of Quill’s Swill, where we mark the absolute worst stories that the industry had to offer over the past year and proceed to tear them to shreds. Think of it as like voiding your bowels before the New Year.

As always remember that this is my personal, subjective opinion. If you happen to like any of the things on this list, that’s fine. More power to you. Go make your own list. Also bear in mind I haven’t seen everything 2019 has to offer due to various other commitments. So as much as I really, really want to, I can’t put Avengers Endgame on here. I know what happens. It sounds fucking terrible, but I haven’t seen the film, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to put it on the list, even though it would most definitely deserve it.

...

Seriously, read the synopsis of Endgame on Wikipedia some time. It’s like fanfic written by a nine year old. It’s truly shocking. And now it’s the highest grossing movie of all time? Give me strength.

All In A Row

Don’t you just hate it when you’re expected to parent your autistic child? Like actually show love and care and consideration to your offspring. Look at him, expecting you to treat him like a human being. Selfish bastard! If only there was a play that explored the horrors of having to be a decent person to your own flesh and blood and how objectively awful it is. If you’re one of those people, then the play All In A Row will be right up your street.

Premiering on the 14th February at Southwark Playhouse in London, All In A Row was a total shitshow to say the least. The playwright, Alex Oates, claimed to have ten years of experience working with autistic children, which you wouldn’t have believed if you saw the play as the autistic child at the centre of the play, Lawrence, seemed more like a wild animal than a person. In fact two of the main characters compare him to a dog. And if you thought this wasn’t dehumanising enough, Lawrence isn’t even a child. He’s a puppet. Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.

All In A Row seems to place all of the blame for the family’s predicament on the autistic child, who’s presented as barely functional, bordering on bestial. There’s no effort to really make an emotional connection with Lawrence (how can you? He’s a puppet!) as the play instead focuses on how this kid has effectively ruined this family’s life because of his autism and aggressive behaviour. Speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I can say quite confidently that this play is fucking despicable. Badly written, badly conceived, insulting and downright mean spirited. I wouldn’t want Oates looking after my autistic children, that’s for damn sure.

Anthem

EA is back and this time they’re dragging the critical darling that is BioWare down with them.

Anthem was a desperate attempt to jump aboard the ‘live service’ bandwagon, trying to replicate the success of other video games like Overwatch, Destiny and Warframe. They failed spectacularly. The game itself had more bugs than A Bug’s Life, loot drops were often stingy and unrewarding, loading times were farcically long, and the story and worldbuilding was fucking pitiful. Oh yeah, and if you played it on PS4, there was a good chance it could permanently damage it. Thankfully I have a uni friend with an Xbox One and they allowed me to play the game on that. It was a crushing disappointment, especially coming fresh off the heels of Mass Effect Andromeda, which didn’t exactly set the world on fire back in 2017.

It didn’t help that EA’s reputation was in tatters thanks to the lootbox controversy of Star Wars Battlefront II and having to try and win back the trust of fans, but worse still reports began to service of what went on behind the scenes at BioWare during the game’s development. Apparently the game’s story and mechanics kept changing every other day as the creative directors and writers didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of game they wanted to make, and the developers were often forced to work obscenely long work hours in abusive crunch periods to get the game finished for launch. It got so bad that, according to an article on Kotaku, some members of the team had to leave for weeks or even months at a time to recover from ‘stress casualties.’ 

To think this was the same company that gave us Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Knights Of The Old Republic. Thank God that Obsidian Entertainment is there to pick up the slack on the RPG front because I think it’s safe to assume that BioWare won’t be around for much longer at this rate.

The Lion King (2019 remake)

Here we go. Yet another live action remake of a Disney classic. Excpet it’s not live action, is it? Well... it’s live action in the sense that Dinosaur was live action (remember that film? Don’t worry if you don’t. No one does). Real locations but CGI characters. Millions of dollars spent on cutting edge tech to create photo realistic animals... and the film ends up duller than a bowl of porridge that really likes trainspotting.

It’s not just the fact that The Lion King remake is yet another soulless cash grab from the House of Mouse, it’s also the fact that it’s done really badly that upsets me. The Lion King works as an animated film. Bright colourful images, over the top song and dance sequences and vibrant character designs. As a ‘live action’ film, it just looks awkward and stilted. None of the animals are very expressive, leaving it up to the poor voice actors to carry the film, and to cap it all off the CGI isn’t even all that convincing in my opinion. At no point did I look at Simba and go ‘oh yeah, he looks like a real lion.’ It’s so obviously fake. In fact it reminds me of those early 00s movies like Cats & Dogs or Stuart Little where you see the jaws of the talking animals moving up and down like some messed up ventriloquist act or something. And here’s me thinking cinema has evolved past this.

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds

Remember Peter Harness? That guy who wrote that Doctor Who episode about the moon being an egg? Yeah, he’s back and he’s doing an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds. And guess what! It’s fucking ghastly! :D

The three part BBC mini-series was without a doubt some of the worst telly I think I’ve ever seen. It’s staggering how clueless Harness is as a writer. For starters he managed to achieve the impossible and somehow made a Martian invasion of Earth boring. I didn’t even think it was possible, but somehow he pulled it off. Then he sucks all tension out of the story by revealing the ultimate fate of the Martians at the beginning of the second episode, so now any threat or danger has been chucked out of the window because we know that the main female protagonist Amy at least would survive. And then finally he takes a massive dump over the source material by having humanity weaponise typhoid to kill the red weed rather than just having the Martians die of the common cold like in the book. Because God forbid us Brits should be presented as anything other than heroic and dignified.

So what we’re left with is a poorly realised allegory with ineffectual horror tropes full of OTT progressive posturing in a pathetic attempt to make Harness and the BBC look more liberal than they actually are. There’s no effort to really explore the themes of imperialism and colonialism outside of casual lip service, and we barely get a glimpse of the dark side of humanity. Everyone is presented as flawed, but basically awesome or, in the case of Rafe Spall’s character, utterly gormless. Our TV license fees help fund this shit, you know?!

And if you think this was bad, just wait till New Year’s Day where we’ll get to see Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ butcher Dracula. Can we stop giving these beloved literary icons to these hacks please?

Glass

I liked Split. It wasn’t an amazing movie, but it was entertaining with some good ideas, a great performance from James McAvoy and was a true return to form for M Night Shyamalan. That being said, I wasn’t keen on the idea of it taking place in the same universe as Unbreakable. I feared it would be a step too far and we’d end up having something like... well, something like Glass.

On paper, Glass isn’t a bad idea. The idea of superpowers being a delusion is legitimately intriguing and could have been a great post-modern deconstruction of the superhero genre. Except Shyamalan never actually does anything with it. The first act drags on and on with absolutely nothing happening, none of the characters really grow or change over the course of the film, Bruce Willis in particular is basically only here for an extended cameo as his character does pretty much nothing for the majority of the film, and then the entire film is undermined by that stupid Shyamalan twist. Turns out superhumans are real and there’s a big cover up. Oh great! So not only does it render the entire film pointless, it also undoes what made Unbreakable and Split so good. They’re no longer people capable of extraordinary feats via rational means. They’re just superhuman. They can do anything. Sigh.

Shyamalan... maybe it’s time to give up the director’s chair, yeah?

Cats

Oh come on! Don’t act surprised! Did you honestly think I wouldn’t put Cats on this list?!

Cats, without a doubt, is the worst film of the decade and, yes, the CGI is terrible. Not only are there these sub-human cat mutants running around, we also have mice and cockroaches with child faces, James Corden coughing up furballs, Taylor Swift trying to give the furries in the audience boners, Idris Elba looking disturbingly underdressed and Rebel Wilson being... well... Rebel Wilson. It’s a disaster of a film. And really, should we even be surprised? We all knew this was going to suck. And no it’s not because of the CGI. I thought the CGI in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu was creepy as well, but at least it had a decent script and good performances to back it up. No the reason why Cats sucked is because... it’s Cats. It’s always been that bad. No amount of ‘advanced fur technology’ was going to change that. It was still going to be a confused, plotless mess with one dimensional characters and bad songs.

The only consolation I had was that I didn’t waste money buying a ticket. A friend of mine snuck me into the premiere and we watched it in the projector room. The plan was to make fun of it and have a laugh, but we didn’t even do that because honestly there’s nothing to really make fun. There’s only so many times you can take the piss out of the CGI and honestly the film was just boring more than anything else. It doesn’t even have the distinction of being so bad it’s good like Sharknado or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It’s just bad, period.

I just hope we don’t see something similar happen to Starlight Express. Just think. Anthropomorphic, singing trains on roller skates. Shudder.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker

Finally we have yet another cynical cash grab from Disney.

I confess I didn’t exactly go into The Rise Of Skywalker with an open mind. I was never all that keen on a sequel trilogy in the first place, and neither The Force Awakens nor The Last Jedi ever convinced me otherwise. Admittedly they weren’t bad movies. Just derivative and painfully uninspired, and I was expecting more of the same for Episode IX. What I got instead was quite possibly the worst Star Wars film since Attack Of The Clones. Yes, it’s that bad.

This film is very poorly made, filled with plot contrivances and logic holes galore. I lost count of the number of times the protagonists got into a dangerous situation because of Rey constantly wandering off like a confused toddler lost in a shopping mall. Oh and we finally find out who her parents were and it was quite a twist, but only because it was really stupid. Of course we didn’t see it coming because nobody would have guessed it would be something that moronic. I feel JJ Abrams’ stupid ‘mystery box’ philosophy is to blame for this. It’s derailed countless franchises before such as Lost and Cloverfield, and now Abrams has fucked up Star Wars because he’s obsessed with mystery for the sake of mystery and Disney are so lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to plan an actual trilogy out properly beforehand. Instead they just wing it, making it up as they go along, which led to Rian Johnson ‘subverting our expectations’ and left Abrams desperately trying to pick up the pieces. 

In fact a lot of The Rise Of Skywalker seemed designed specifically to appease people of both sides of the wide chasm The Last Jedi had created. The roles of characters of colour like Finn and Rose were significantly reduced, Poe and Finn don’t end up together because of homophobia, but we do see two women kiss in the background of one two second shot that could easily be cut out when they release the film in China, Kylo Ren gets his stupid redemption even though he hasn’t fucking earned it, Lando Calrissian shows up for no fucking reason, Rey is given ‘flaws’ relating to her parentage in order to combat those accusing her of being a Mary Sue, but they’re the boring kind of flaws that don’t have any real impact on her character, and that ghastly ship Reylo is made canon even though it makes no sodding sense in the context of this movie, let alone the whole trilogy. They even go to the trouble of baiting us with a FinnRey romance before pulling the rug out from under us. Then, just to add insult to injury, the film retroactively ends up making the entire original trilogy completely pointless. All because Disney wanted more dollars to put in their Scrooge McDuck money bin.

The Rise Of Skywalker, and indeed the entire sequel trilogy, should serve as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hype and nostalgia. The reason The Force Awakens was successful wasn’t because it was a good movie (because lets be brutally honest here, it really fucking wasn’t). It was because it gave gullible Star Wars fans warm fuzzies because it reminded them of A New Hope whilst tempting them with the vague promise that things might get more interesting later on. And when that didn’t materialise, quelle surprise, the fanbase didn’t take it very well. I would love to think that this will serve as an important lesson for the future when people go and see Disney movies, but who am I kidding? I guarantee at some point we’re going to get Episodes X, XI and XII and we’ll have to go through this sorry process all over again.

So there we have it. The worst of 2019. May they rot forever in Satan’s rectum or wherever it is stories go to die. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the other end of the spectrum. Yes it’s the Quill Seal Of Approval Awards! The best of the best! Who shall win? The suspense is killing me! Ooooh, I can’t wait! You’ll be there tomorrow, won’t you? Of course you will. How could you not?

[lokeanrampant]

Spirits of the Fade

Mouse and Imshael and company have been all over my feed of late.  So I’m tossing down some HC and ideas that have been wandering around in snippet-form in documents on my laptop.  

I think, in general, demons are supposed to be the worst aspect of an emotion.  The pure desire to be something more…

Neither spirit nor demon have the humanity (barring whatever you call what qunari, dwarves, and elves have…we’re simplifying here, damn it), the soul essence that creates life in our world.  They have SOMETHING, or they simply wouldn’t exist.  There is a spark there, those shiny lil wisps, but it’s…like a draft.  It’s unfinished.  And that’s why they reach out.  Spirits are more content in what they feel they are.  Demons?  Demons WANT. They feel very acutely that something is missing and they hunger for that.  It’s why the Fade is a replica of our world, why they are part of our dreamstate. They are mimicking that for which they long and attempting to fill in the missing pieces.  

So why are spirits okay with their lot and demons aren’t?  Good question.  Now, do I have a good answer?  I’m going to say that it’s because each spirit, or demon, or any Fade entity, is the personification of a particular emotion or state of being.  If something is felt acutely enough, if you believe something strongly enough, it becomes its own thing, takes on a life of its own. In this case, it’s fairly literal.  I would imagine that the Fade is a place of magic and bits and pieces of souls.  Unfinished matter and snippets of ideas.   This is particularly strong in places of extremes - battlefields would be overflowing, as they are, with all manner of strong emotions that literally thin the Veil.  When something is felt strongly enough – terror or rage or love or compassion – by enough people, especially by enough dreamers, they coalesce into either spirit or demon.  They become more.  They become self-aware.  But because they are fragmentary by nature, they are lacking something.  

For the more, shall we say, lighter and compassionate fragments, they are more, by nature of their essence, predisposed to being content with what they are.  Justice is righteousness.  Valor is simply that (and a bit of a dick, but I digress).  Faith is belief that there is a reason behind it all.  And so long as we believe in those concepts, they will exist.  It is only when they are placed outside their environment do they begin to change.  

For the darker emotions? Oh, they are very well aware that they are missing pieces of themselves.  They feel unfinished and empty.  Which of us hasn’t?  And if you haven’t, you are one of the few and extremely fortunate.  Unlike their lighter halves, they are not content to simply be unfinished.  They want more.  They have seen and tasted more and it’s cruel to have that just out of reach.  They want what every sentient being wants – a life, a purpose, to experience things.  They aren’t evil by nature.  They simply don’t have the experience to know better.  They are essentially toddlers who know what they want and they know they can do these actions to get it.  Admittedly, they are very smart toddlers.  They are mimics.  They simply do not have the same set of social interactive skills as society would demand.  So they do what they can, take what they can, manipulate as they can for their ultimate goal – to feel complete.

It’s actually horrifyingly sad.

So let’s talk Imshael and Mouse.  Cause I can. Cause I adore them both.

Imshael.  Oh honey…that boy is pure Trickster.  He’s old-world pagan Trickster.  He’s not really nice and he can do some damned shitty things…but it’s always the CHOICE of those with whom he interacts.  Tricksters are all for change and change can be ugly, it can be brutal, but in the end, it is NEEDED.  They will play the role of the villain with ease, because people are terrified of change, so who better than a villain to give them the nudge that is needed to make the decisions that will keep the world moving, to keep it from stagnating?  

Were he evil, he would happily take the choices of children.  But he doesn’t.  Why?  Because they don’t understand choice and consequence. Demons have no issue tempting children, as we have seen with Kitty and Connor.  So why doesn’t Imshael?  Because that’s not his motive.  He’s not a demon.  He actually IS a spirit…or a god.  He’s listed as a Forbidden (or Forgotten) One.  He’s more than some simple spirit and BioWare has a big-ass problem with shitting on pagan gods.  What they’ve done to the Dalish pantheon is damned rude.  

He’s personable and has personality.  He can be called out and he can laugh about it.  He can do nice things.  He can do totally dick things.  Or he can be absolutely brutal.  A trickster’s path is never easy.  And would he like those individuals who make the hardest decisions?  Absolutely.  He would adore those people who make decisions that cause ripples throughout the world, a cascade of change.  It’s why I HC he’s wearing Anders’ coat.  That was a decision that was open.  It was talked about, gossiped, spread throughout Thedas…it was VISIBLE.  It wasn’t the only turning point by any stretch; there were uprisings in varied areas for the mage revolution, the rebellion. But Kirkwall?  That was BIG.  That was SEEN.  And more than that, it had visible history.  Anders didn’t just wander in and decide to make a statement.  He was there for years.  YEARS.  He was known to the citizens of Kirkwall.  He was known as a healer.  He was known for trying to help so many.  The downtrodden of Kirkwall had a vested interest in their healer.  There is impact there.  It’s massive on multiple levels.  It’s a ripple that touched not only mages and templars, but the entirety of Kirkwall and their descendants.

And in the midst of the rebellion when you meet Imshael in DAI?  Hell yes, he’ll wear the coat of the most visible and known linchpin.  Abso-fucking-lutely.  Tricksters have more than a touch of drama queen.  They will play to expectation, they will play to the party line…until they flip it on its head and turn you in the direction they want or need.  Imshael is the type of spirit or god you want on your side…because you sure as hell don’t want him against you.  And humans always make the most interesting choices because everything is so “right now” with humanity.  Human decisions are bigger and bolder because of the amount of time we have to decide them.  It’s a very “Go Big or GO HOME” attitude.  Oh, he’ll play the long game without a doubt and he’s probably got plenty of irons in the fires across Thedas and across time.  But there is so much room to play with all the goings-on right now.  It’s exciting for him.

You’d think I’d have more on Imshael, but dude, I have tricksters all over my blog.  It’s kind of a thing.  You want more?  Ask me.  :D  Trickster goals are renewal and change.  They are the blazing forest fire destroying to renew.

Mouse?  Mouse is more fun in his way because he is less obviously anything.

So why does Mouse play with you in the Fade, if you’re doing the Mage Origin?  This is a trapped demon…how the Circle has trapped them, I’ve no clue.  But it’s been given a role and more than likely, it has witnessed more than a few Harrowings.  It knows how the play the game.  Demons are terrifyingly smart and adaptive creatures, always looking for whatever it is they believe is missing from themselves and they have absolutely no moral guidance preventing them from doing whatever they like to try and find it.

You never really get the sense that Mouse is actively try to harm you.  It’s legitimately a test…he’s watching to see what you do, observing.  Leading you, giving you hints, but ultimately, just seeing what type of person you are and how much interest you are going to bring to his time during this Harrowing.  Mouse is actually fairly neutral, though he has the options to choose a variety of actions and shapes. So being that Mouse isn’t actively trying to mess with the mage and possess them, it makes far more sense that he isn’t a demon at all.

He’s a gatekeeper, an interactive observer.  You do get the whole spiel of letting him slide out with you, but I wonder.  Would he actually do it?  I get the feeling that he wouldn’t, that he would just have some random demon do so.  It wouldn’t be interesting for him.  What is of interest is the participants of the Harrowing.  He is another form of trickster – being neither good or evil, but shaping the world events around him.  Were he to actually possess someone, he would lose the power to observe and shape the mages as they come to him.  Each Harrowing brings him new information, new stories, new everything. PLUS, he KNOWS the templars are watching and waiting.  

It’s very obvious he doesn’t like the Circle.  I think part of it is they somehow, ages back, managed to leash him to the Harrowings. He’s learned so much humanity from these events, more than most demons will ever learn from a simple possession. He learns frailties and strengths, fears, weaknesses, desire, bravery.  He uses the Harrowings as learning experiences as much as the mages.  Yet, overall, he’s still a Spirit of the Fade – not demon, not spirit guide in the ultimate sense.  The Circle would’ve tried to trap a demon for their purposes, but they really don’t have a good concept of what separates a demon from a spirit, now do they?  They would naturally assume they trapped a demon, but perhaps the trap they laid was appealing to more than just demons.  After all, they consider all spirits demons and all those possessed by piggybacking spirits to be abominations, and we know both are untrue.  Both the Avvar and Rivaini disprove that on multiple occasions, as do Wynne and Anders (don’t make me fight you on this).

So Mouse learned and became what they needed, each time.  

But ahhhh, he is still leashed is the question?  How could the Circle and Templars routinely put themselves at risk by trying to lasso a demon for EVERY Harrowing?  It doesn’t make sense for that.  I’d wager pretty heavily that they bound a demon – or what they thought was a demon – to their font for the Harrowing.  It could be that it’s individual for each Circle or perhaps, it’s bound to the stones within the Circles that allow the sendings between Circles, something that keeps them all in an internal network (whee…Circle Intranet is so a thing).  Is he still leashed?  I HIGHLY doubt it, but it totally suits his purpose to let them believe it.  He learns more than any spirit or demon could hope to achieve from an actual possession and could, legitimately, free himself at any time.  He enjoys this and I think there are those mages he feels deserves more from their Harrowings, like the Warden, like Anders, like those whose Harrowings we actually get to read about or experience.  These are the mages who have fates beyond the everyday.  He can sense there is something more in their lives because, after all, he has been around a very long time.  

So does that mean he is both Mouse and Anders’ cat?  Absolutely. He can take multiple forms and if he gets to play at multiple Harrowings, or at least, the ones where he feels particularly drawn?  He has this total air of a teacher.  He knows how the Circle works.  He knows how the Templars work.  He’s not fond of either.  He’s highly disgruntled, but he seems quite content to dismantle from the inside-out, putting ideas into the heads of young mages who pass his tests, not the tests of the Harrowing itself, but HIS tests.  He knows far too much for this to be his first dance.  

Did he start out as a spirit?  Likely.  He could’ve started as demon, even.  But he LEARNED.  He EVOLVED. Over the centuries and countless Harrowings, he has become so much more.  He’s a clinician, a scientist, an experimenter.  He watches and involves himself, setting up tests and variables, predicting and learning from the outcome.  He is theory and testing, trials and errors.  He is a literal trial within the Harrowing.

So here’s another neat idea. It’s not just the Harrowings.

Mouse is in the Fade. He’s not bound.  Mages are interactive in the Fade…it’s part of what sets them apart from non-mages.   So Mouse could easily seek out the mages of interest, those who have that glimmer around them that says these people have something of interest in store for them.

And for him.  

After all, fade spirits watch dreamers.  It is no surprise if he found himself fascinated by a few and interacted.  He would be testing variables and theories. And if he liked a particular mage? He would absolutely be sure he was the one at the Harrowing, if there was a potential for another to be there. He can mold them.  It makes him more like Flemeth.  She definitely finds those who have the potential for such great impact, great change in Thedas.  Flemeth has interacted with each major protagonist in the series, mage or no.  Makes you look at Mouse a little differently in that light.  If he’s looking at all of those dreamers and finds anyone of interest?  He would absolutely interact, mage or no.  The Fade is open to most everyone aside from dwarves, so Mouse can be anywhere and interact with anyone.  

He’s not just a trickster, changing outcomes, manipulating players, putting a touch of chaos and rebellion in those he touches.  

He’s a weaver.  He’s a FATE.  He’s the Spirit of Fate.  

Fate is all about trials, perseverance, overcoming odds to a final destiny.  It explains the warnings.  It explains the interest in specific Harrowings that we actually see and hear about. Most are probably fairly bland to Mouse, but not a few.  Not the ones who will change the path of Thedas to a significant degree.  It explains the not-quite clinical detachment as if he’s leading you.  He’s urging you to take a path, to accept it.  

Of course, Mouse can’t account for every variable.  People are people and throw random variables into the equation right and left.  Which is why Fate is so damned fascinated with these particular threads.  The weaving takes on a life of its own.  It’s novel.  It’s exciting. It is outside the norm and creates all these new threads and possibilities.

There’s even an HC theory out there that Mouse is one of the Forbidden Ones.  That has some serious potential in how he interacts with everyone.

[pixelrenaissance]

A DA:I rant

I understand Bioware wanting to create complex characters with complex ideologies but I cannot help but hate Dorian with a passion in my heart. I try to not but as a black person who grew up in the south, hearing the retortic of how he feels about elven slaves makes me fucking sick. I do not understand why everyone like him. Actually I do understand, because he’s gay and we want more gay characters and representation.

I feel the same about Viviane, shes so beautiful but she’s terrible. Like I cannot talk to her without getting big disapproval.

I just want minorites, poc, and gay people to not always have the catch that they fucking suck in these games. Like, with Bull, he can have an honest to god character arch in which he leaves the Qun and realizes that hey maybe their kind of oppressive way of life isn’t okay.

Like I wish you could TALK to them about it, like use idk my fucking brain and facts to explain to Dorian that being a slave is not better than being poor you fucking idiot.

I hate how one of the few people who doesn’t have the worst opinions is Blackwall and he turns out- OOF

I like feel like it just sucks that for some fucking reasons almost none of these oppressed people can realize that they are oppressed or that others are opressed more than 1 thing at a time. Everyone has a shitty side.

Like honestly with Dragon Age, I really cannot judge people for what characters they like like other stuff because they are all shitty and it’s all we got. Bioware really pretends to be “hip” and “woke” but deadass is doing the bare minimum and I hope they do more in the next game.

[glowyelfboyfriend]

How did they ruin elven lore? I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about the games as other people

I didn’t call this blog ‘Elf Salt’ for nothing

-cracks knuckles-

I have a number of issues with how bioware handled elves in Dragon Age and they all interject to create this terrible mess of a mishandled race allegory that should never have happened. The frustrating thing for me is that most of the fandom is content to kinda just skip past these discussions but as someone who is first nations it actually hits real close to home for me.

Anyways...

Elves in dragon age are very clearly ‘inspired by’ if not completely based on racial experiences and history of Jewish, Roma and Indigenous peoples. (I can only speak to first nations knowledge so its what I will discuss the most).  Historically in Thedas the Elves lived across most of the land and were more or less the dominant race (I’ll get back to that later...). After a massive war they were nearly completed wiped out and enslaved by the Tevinter nation that defeated them. Elven culture was absolutely wiped from Thedas, language and history was completely lost, their cities and holy lands were either destroyed completely or overtaken by the people who know enslaved them.

Their experience as slaves has them widely stripped of any of their culture, their language, they are not permitted to learn how to read and are considered more akin to animals than to other humanoid races (sound familiar to American history?). In other parts of Thedas slavery had ended but elves were only permitted to live on designated chunks of land such as The Dales (does that sound familiar? Hm?) until the human authority decided they shouldn’t be allowed to have it anymore since they didn’t follow their christian-inspired religion, thus swooping in to wipe them out again and remove land promised to them.

In modern Thedas, Elves are still kept as slaves in Tevinter and are kept under such tight authority and law in other kingdoms that they are not much better off. In Denerim it is illegal for elves to own weapons. Elves are stuck living in alienages (which resemble both ghettos AND reservations) where there is no work, they are routinely abused/harassed/raped/murdered by humans (and have literally no legal standing to defend themselves as its illegal for an elf to assault a human whereas there are no laws protecting them) and the alienage is routinely locked up so the city guards can completely wipe out the elves living there. 

There are Dalish elves who attempt to recobble together their culture and history, traveling nomadically with the constant danger of humans deciding to try and attack them (this includes templars, city guards and country folk btw). They contend with constant fearmongering that they are doing evil and malicious things for their traditional religion as well as stereotypes of them being thieves (sound familiar???)   

So here is the thing, up to this point, this is just world flavor and world building. There are critics who find the inclusion of these stereotypes and the ways in which they are represented to be an issue in and of itself. I don’t disgree but its not my actual issue. I think fantasy settings can be an eye-opening and cathartic practice, it can give people who don’t experience those racial themes or hardships a chance to roleplay and maybe understand it a little bit more. As someone who is first nations I find getting to play a Dalish elf in Origins and taking people to task for their balant racism and save the world to be incredibly satisfying. 

The issue is.... once you created a fantasy world where this sort of racism exists you need to be EXTREMELY careful with how you use it. And while I think the writers of this series are talented and did the best they could with the limitations of ‘video game’ I think there were some GRAVE errors, particularily in Inquisition and Trespasser that completely ruined any goodwill they had. 

In Inquisition it felt as if they wanted to try and retcon the race issues they had established, or else had completely forgotten that those race issues were based on real-life issues. The two elf companions you get are, frankly, extremely anti-elf. You have Sera who has tons of internalized racism, which in itself is a really interesting concept to explore, except there is no character arc or closure for this. If you romance her as a Dalish elf you never have a chance to bring her around to stop hating on her race and culture, instead she insists you give up your racial identiy and heritage. Solas... oh gods where do I even begin? To keep it short, Solas’ entire point in the plot seems to be to completely undermine and ridicule elves and all the world building the game devs made. He refers to Dalish as ‘children’ and even mocks city elves, both of which are just coping with racial injustices/slavery/genocide over a couple hundred year history. 

If you play Inquisition as any race other than an Elf you will be presented a picture of elves as nothing more than stupid, misguided, shameful people that take what they have for granted and want ‘more’. Which... let me tell you... as a person who is first nations... that is insanely close to what racist pricks think of us today. Painting indigenous religion as ‘savage’ or ‘primiative’ and infantilizing those who follow it, shutting down people who are trying to find some justice for generations of abuse and trauma all while lifting up characters who are willing to throw their fellows under the bus....... its a narrative that is present in modern day real life race issues. This is all presented as Fact with no solution, no exploration, just ‘how things are’. And I think that’s extremely misguided of the writers, and I wonder when they forgot that these themes were based on real life.

Finally, we get to the cherry on top - Trespasser. Before this game we had humans being widely dismissive of elven religion, but in a way where it was clear that they were just ignorant of a religion outside of their own. In this game they decided to take the history of the elves, their culture and religion and completely tear it apart.

It’s revealed that the Gods elves worship are actually not gods but were just Really Powerful Mages. It turns out the facial tattoos (which is totally a reference to indigenous tattoo practices my dudes) that were devotional to these gods were in fact just slave markings because elves enslaved their own race, and Tevinter had never actually taken them down in war - the elves just destroyed themselves.

I shouldn’t have to describe why taking the most oppressed race in the world of Thedas and undoing their culture/religion and history is a shitty move. I shouldn’t have to, especially with the context of the CLEAR real-world parallels. But everyone seems to miss out on how disgusting this really is.

From my own experience, I have heard this shit about my own heritage and people. I have heard white people say that the injustices first nations people faced ‘wasn’t so bad’ because they were ‘already’ killing and enslaving each other. I have read books written by white ‘researchers’ from only a hundred years ago trying to imply the wrong meanings on sacred tattoos and culture. I have heard these arguments to defend colonialism and genocide. 

If you don’t have these real-life experiences, or you decided to play as something other than a dalish elf who might give a shit about their entire history/culture/family/beliefs/identity you will not notice this. It’ll just be an interesting ‘twist’ and I hate it. I hate that dismantling the ONE THING this systematically oppressed, enslaved and genocided culture had to cling onto has been used for a cheap ‘twist’.

Will they do something interesting with it in the next game? I don’t know, maybe. But kicking down and making elves be the sacrifice for something so identity-destroying is just... its bad. It was a bad choice. You know they wouldn’t do that with Andrastianism, they wouldn’t come out and be like ‘Oh the Maker was actually just some guy who enslaved humans for his own benefit’, and you know why. 

The issue is taking ‘inspiration’ for your fantasy world racial pain and then tossing it aside for shallow twists. Yes, its a fantasy video game, but as someone who IS affected by these REAL-WORLD ISSUES I felt completely betrayed and gutted by my fave escape telling me that my in-game equivalent was a fucking dumbass for believing in the culture of their heritage.

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

Lore vs Narrative

One of the clearest moments of fan outrage being short-sighted I've seen was when Trespasser had come out for Dragon Age Inquisition and the nature of the ancient elves was revealed to us. The Evanuris were slavers, God-King mages who were drunk on power. This resulted in fans calling Bioware out on making the Dalish's beliefs based on slavery when the elves of Thedas still face slavery. The tone of these arguments was as if Bioware had decided between DA2 and DAI to make them like that.

As far as I know, however, this was not the case. Bioware had made the mythos for DA long before they started writing the actual story.

This is actually something that I have seen a lot of on Tumblr and I feel I should address it as someone who loves world building and writing.

The simplest way to put it is, that you have your universe lore and then you have the story. Those two are separate things, as one is basically the rules of the world and the other is what the characters do in the world itself. Like an iceberg, you only see a part of the setting lore in the narrative, if the writer knows what they are doing. Info dumps are treated as a bad thing for a reason, as they slow down the story for walls upon walls of explanation. Instead, it is often better to showcase the lore through how the characters react to it.

However, in serialized works, people can see the new revelations of lore as the writers making things up as they go. Rather than the information revealed being just another aspect of a developed world. Or people can take the opinions of characters as lore, which depending on the character can be farthest from the truth.

Now, this does not mean the revealed lore is always good. We all by now know how J.K Rowling is messing up her own world by randomly revealing facts of the Harry Potter universe that can ring very tone deaf. Not only, because they were not used in the narrative, but also because some of it is very offensive. As a writer, your lore shouldn't be beyond editing or fixing. Your job is just to keep everything consistent.

Consistency, in fact, might be the biggest obstacle a writer might face. One of my favourite examples of a creator saying something and the setting telling a different thing has to be Cole from Dragon Age and is he a sexual being. The writers for him both say no, the actual text in the game says yes. If you don't want your non-human character to be seen as sexual, please do not make him focus on sexuality so much in the work itself. A very weird example of showing versus telling, you can say what you want about your character outside the work, but in the end, the work itself tells the truth.

On the opposite side of things, Rose being Pink Diamond is a great example of lore being used sparingly in the setting to tell a story. People at first were convinced she had to be Pink Diamond (as some people pointed out afterwards, "Pink is Pink.") Only for that theory to be sidelined by the red herring of Rose shattering Pink and Pink's mural not looking like Rose. The clues, however, were never hidden from the audience despite the distraction. The evidence kept piling up, it was even addressed in the show itself in a freaking court of law. Until the truth was revealed, Rose was Pink. She faked her own shattering to live as she chose.

This is where the role of the characters reacting to the lore comes in, as the reaction to the revelation was far from positive. I'd say at best it was an awkward 'okay then' because no one likes to have lied to on such a massive scale. The biggest positive that came out of it was that the Crystal Gems were not killed by the Diamonds coming to collect a blood debt.

Through all of this, the actual lore didn't change a bit. Rose was always Pink, it was planned from the start. But the information the characters knew was varied and that in itself ran the plot beautifully for two seasons as everyone reacted to it how he or she would.

Like with everything artistic and narrative, please give the creators the benefit of the doubt. Unless you know for certain things were changed in new additions to the series, it possibly was planned from the beginning. Does it mean it is good? No, but then it was shitty the whole time.

[saltineofswing]

Celair

I got a couple for Celair, which is really nice!

Full Name: Celair Eshgalweth, The Smile ThatHides The Wrathful Wail, Silverqueen, Scimitar Dancer, Divine Patron of Elves

Gender andSexuality:Female, Bisexual

Pronouns: She/Her

Ethnicity/Species: Hmm… well it may surprise youto learn that Celair, despite being the Patron Deity of Elves, is not herselfan Elf. Celair was tasked with the job of ‘Patron of Elves’ by thecreator deity of her home plane; she was actually a fairly terrifying-lookingFae being, a giant insectoid thing visually similar in some ways to a prayingmantis. Her job, and the amount of time she has spent doing it, has changed hertrue form considerably but it’s still pretty terrifying to look at in that‘beautiful and horrible’ kind of way that Elves do. This, incidentally, is whyCelair has insectoid features; I haven’t drawn them but Celair does have wingsthat she can ‘stow’ in her spine, and those ‘horns’ on her head are actuallyantennae. She effectively ‘folds’ herself into the relatively benign-lookingmeatsuit that everybody knows and loves as Celair, which she puppets with heressence like a doll. This is why she is so absurdly strong and fast despite thefact that she has the physical appearance of a late-teens-early-twenties youngadult. The closest anybody could get to seeing her original true form is theWrathful Wail, Celair’s divine Enraged Mode, when she transforms into a massivebluish-hued silver-streaked monstrosity with gangly multi-jointed limbs, anabdomen and thorax, and mantid raptorial arms created by the way her hands fuseto her meteorite-steel scimitars.

Rusty, whileusing a device that allowed them to peer into the Veil and therefore gave themthe ability to view the ‘true forms’ of anyone they came across, spied onCelair as she truly appears; the image they saw was a tangled swath ofinsectoid limbs and dragonfly wings, a series of silver lines floating in anarc around a svelte torso composed of paneled wood, her head adorned with abeautiful silver mask in place of a face. So, take that as you will.

Birthplaceand Birthdate:The ‘Ethereal Plane’ (The Unknown) of an extrauniversal planar system calledKith, Dawn of Time.

GuiltyPleasures: …Killing stuff, honestly. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Celair was effectivelyforced into the position of ‘Planar Greeter/Butler’ by the other divines in thepantheon, and served in that position for thousands and thousands of years.Because Kith is an extrauniversal planar system, it’s effectively ‘in’ theUnknown and therefore basically open for any schmuck who has figured outinterplanar travel to shlep their family into; Kith leaned into this, andbecame a ‘tourist destination’ of sorts for nearby dimensions. So for Celair, acreature with a horrifically short fuse, her guilty pleasures while on the jobwere the minuscule opportunities for her to really cut loose. And since shejoined the Hunt, she’s been able to indulge her guilty pleasure quitefrequently.

Other thanthat, though, she is way more fond of mortal fashion than she lets on. And she reallyenjoys alcohol. You think you can drink? Celair and her elves preferredto drink pure wood-grain alcohol. Celair could drink paint thinner andcomplain about the taste with no other ill effects. Her favorite drink isEshgalán Absinthe, which is elven wood-grain alcohol made from wormwood. IRLabsinthe doesn’t make you hallucinate but Esh-brewed Absinthe DEFINITELY doesif you’re not Esh. There was a funny scene we did early in the campaign, beforethe Hunt proper started, that involved Celair at Gol Gringorn’s bar with a hugehandle of 192-proof alcohol vodka in her hand, just swigging it like Tennesseesweet tea, and asking if Geeg had ‘anything harder’.

Phobias: This is not a gal easily shaken. If you were amillennia-old Fae-natured goddess who swings your twin meteorite-steelscimitars so hard and fast that they hum, would you be scared of much?She has a couple of deep existential fears, but predominately she is terrifiedof losing Ophelnwol and Mizzimet, the two Eshgal clerics that she brought withher when she joined the Hunt… and the last two living members of the Elvenrace on Kith. They are the only things keeping her from failing in her DivineTask, and they were her most faithful servants so she does truly love them. Oneof her worst fears has already been realized during her time on the Hunt,actually; on Greenbrier, she had a hand in the instantaneous extinction of theLapinine, Rumenthlay Redbud’s species, when Ethem-Cailo landed the killing blowon their creator goddess Halarenu. Being involved in a genocide on that level,accidental or not, really fucked her up and was the first event that put her onthe path to defecting.

Additionally,she has a… complicated relationship with Ethem-Cailo that I will go over inmore detail later. Suffice to say, her fear of him doesn’t manifest the sameway people typically manifest fear, but deep in her heart she is truly scaredof him.

What TheyWould Be Famous For:Celair was the patron deity of the Kith-Esh, the elven races of her home plane– she was the sole deity assigned to the three elven lineages: the Wood, High,and Dark Eshgal. And boy howdy, did they all love the shit out of their patrongoddess. Her surname translates to ‘Beloved of the Elves’, and every single elfin Kith had a shrine to Celair. Her usual appearance belies the Wel-Esh, theWood Elves, but she was capable of appearing as Stal-Esh (High Elf) orCimer-Esh (Dark Elf) – the three different lineages of elves got on like catsin a bag but they all had one thing in common, and that’s how much they lovedtheir mom Celair.

When Celairjoined the hunt, she got very famous for being very savage in her fights. Someof the most popular and well-rated fights of the last 2,500-hunt block havebeen Celair’s fights and she’s only been with the Hunt for 247 hunts. Herextreme temper, merciless combat pragmatism, and raw brutality won her quite afew fans amongst the members of the Wild Hunt and the viewing public back homeon Threnghelleon.

What TheyWould Get Arrested For: Any of the ones about hitting.

OC You ShipThem With:Because of the afore-and-hereafter-mentioned issues Celair has withEthem-Cailo, we decided very early on that we were going to Definitely For Sureavoid pairing her with Wybjorn. And then, god damn it, they had reallyspectacular chemistry. Weirdly, they bonded over Ethem-Cailo’s tendency to sendhis ‘Effigy’ (Wybjorn before he was rescued) to serenade Celair or give her hisshitty poems when he couldn’t be effed to do it himself, and their earliestpersonal interactions were commiserating about what a dogshit guy EC was. Soright now that’s kind of the leading ship; aside from him, I think Celair wouldbe good with Amaryllis (who already has a girlfriend tho and also is currentlydead), and probably Wynrael of Wild Magic (Whitty’s mom). Sadly, I don’t thinkshe has even the faintest trickle of interest in August; just because he’s notone of ‘her’ elves doesn’t mean he’s not one of her elves, if that makes sense,and she just sees him as one of her children so to speak. I bet she findsHoratio very strikingly handsome, but I don’t think they’d have very goodchemistry.

The bigproblem with shipping her with other people is that Celair looks really young.This is a problem I was cognizant of when I made her, and something I knew Iwas going to have to finagle; Eshgal are just a very young-looking race,because that’s the way ‘long lived’ works for them – they look like they’re18-24 until they’re 500, and then they are suddenly weird toad-people like someshit outta Rankin & Bass. There is a race of ‘half-elves’ on Kith that havea stable breeding population, so two half-elves will pop out a half-elf, butinter-species romances rarely happen between the Esh and the other races ofKith, and contributed to the infantilized/servile role into which Celair andher elves were forced by the other divines and races of the plane. Celair canmake herself look a little older, but the magic that binds her to her patrondomain is engineered such that she will always look like a youthful elf, and soshe is kind of stuck looking like a trendy college sophomore forever.

And… well, that’swhy Ethem-Cailo was attracted to her. He is also stuck looking anywhere between14 and 19, and when Celair came along he saw it as his chance to finally havesomething with someone that wasn’t by its nature time-gated for failure. But heblew it harder than a Satchmo solo!

OC MostLikely To Murder Them: Ethem/Jovix-Cailo. There’s a lot of bad blood there, and he doestechnically owe her one because once she stabbed him. He really, reallydeserved it, but he could never admit that. It was really more of a warningstab anyway.

FavoriteMovie/Book Genre:You may be unsurprised to learn that the fae-natured elven patron is fond ofcomedies, specifically slapstick and anything where people are making absolutefools of one another. She loves the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, andCharlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton silent film stuff. She’d probably be really biginto Chris Farley, too. Basically if it features mortals making idiots ofthemselves, it will appeal to her fickle, fae proclivities. She doesn’t muchlaugh out loud anymore, but it makes her smile.

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche: Nice Guys. Karma Houdinis.Fridged and otherwise injured-for-men’s-sake women. Elves as stuck-up,impenetrably nebulous and enigmatic embodiments of the White Ideal. Or,conversely, Elves as the long-suffering punching bags of the rest of the worldand used as thinly-veiled stand-ins for other minority groups (lookin’ at youBIOWARE). Really if you’re going to show her a media property, steer clear ofanything containing ‘traditional’ elves or she’ll just get pissed.

Talentsand/or Powers:Celair’s powers are fairly intuitive and don’t require a ton of explanation,thank god, so this will be fairly quick. First and foremost, without any of themagic or her divine physical abilities, Celair is a master swordfighter. Sheinvented the Eshgal art of the Scimitar Dance, a technique that makes use of anintricate and high-speed set of graceful dance-like steps to capitalize on themomentum of an enemy and the weight of her swords. It excels in combat againstany enemy in melee range by virtue of the footwork, the twirl of the blades,and the incredible weight of the blows.

Her speed isextremely remarkable, on par with the Witherwound’s, and she is physicallystrong enough to chuck cars one-handed. She has incredible endurance andstamina, a remarkable tolerance for pain, and can fly thanks to thedragonfly-like wings that she can hide and reveal at will. Magically speaking,Celair is a master-tier illusionist and has a very wide array of illusions,curses, and debuffs. Celair also has dominion over silvers and other preciousmetals of the earth, so she can generate and control silver in its raw, ore, orprocessed form with ease and in great quantities. Her ‘signature’ spell is calledSilver Darts of Esh, which summons a hailstorm of silver throwing darts.Celair’s huge swords, Gladhaedrel and Caedwhelnor, hum with the speed at whichthey pass through the air when Celair’s dance is in full step, and at herfastest and angriest she has been known to hit people with her swords so hardthat they aren’t cut by the swords so much as burst open or apart by them.

Now take allof that and bring it up by about 500%, and fuse her swords to her hands likemantis arms. That’s the Wrathful Wail, and while she inhabits this form shealso sings the Eshgalmuldrath, the titular ‘wrathful wail’, a horrible andunfathomable noise that is not only loud enough to be heard for miles aroundbut also summons a scouring gale of wind full of silver dust.

Why SomeoneMight Love Them:At her best, Celair is proud, clever, and graceful; she has a coy and teasingsense of humor, enjoys revelry, and in true elven form will absolutely get youmega-sloshed if you want to party with her. When she’s relaxed she is willingto try almost anything once, and is very encouraging of people trying to facefears or looking for new experiences. She’s fiercely protective of her friends,and will keep her eye on them at all times. She’s not really a ‘mom friend’,but she looks out for people on principle and is extraordinarily loyal. She’snot really all that stuck-up about her divine origins or her age, and treatseveryone she meets as equals until she’s given a reason not to. She’ll stand upto anybody, for anybody. Although she can be a little stubborn, she is open tointrospection and will admit when she’s wrong, and she will earnestly try tochange her behavior when called out.

Why SomeoneMight Hate Them:At her worst, Celair is bitter, violent, and has a hair-trigger temper. AndCelair has been at her worst for a really long time. Trauma has made her anempty, angry person with a grudge and a few hundred thousand years of repressedrage to work out, preferably via Stabbing. She has also learned nothing fromher treatment on Kith, and will bottle up her emotions until they pop. She isvery aware of her own power and will belittle or outright threaten people whorub her the wrong way. She’s stubborn, biting, and has a bit of a problem withauthority. And just like in physical combat, Celair is a pragmatist inarguments. She’ll go for the low blow if it gets her the ‘W’. When she getsreally stupendously angry she snaps a little bit and has been known to go ontirades about how pathetic and tiny other beings are to her – she’s severalmillion years old and has sneezed more times than you have cells, how Dare youyadda yadda yadda. God, her temper is so bad. It’s always been Not Great butsince she uncorked it all for the Hunt it has just been the fucking worst.

How TheyChange: IfDrell’s change graph was a steep valley, Celair’s is the heart monitor of aperson in the middle of a heart attack. Celairwas originally a very good person, all said and done. She was the light of herpatron race’s existence and did a lot of good for Kith. Ostensibly, she savedKith with the sheer ferocity of her resistance. And the thought of beingupstaged by the girl who hung up the visitor’s coats galled her fellow Divinesso much that they and the mortals went on a campaign to exterminate every lastelf. And then Derog killed them all again for committing what he saw as a‘party foul’, leaving Celair the last Divine on Kith. So Much happened in sucha minuscule time frame that Celair had no way of processing it. She couldn’tbottle it up. So she didn’t. She joined the Hunt with her favorite clerics, thefinal two Esh anywhere in existence, and their unborn child. And she tried toKill the anger away.

Celair never really tried to fit into the Hunt’s ranks, only makingfriends with Gol Gringorn because she was at their bar so often and getting toknow August because he was an elf. Otherwise she spent her time awkwardlydancing around Ethem-Cailo’s awkward attempts to catch her interest and tryingto drink herself into a hole in the ground. Ethem-Cailo eventually wore Celairdown and she decided to try and help him become a better person – and for awhile, it seemed to be working. But after the Wild Hunt’s first visit to TheRoad and a nasty encounter with one of the Road’s native gods, Celair was basicallytold off for being a huge bitch and given a portent: one day she would putanother world through the genocide that ruined her life. She was justperpetuating the cycle. And she couldn’t shake that off. When Greenbrierhappened, Celair just kinda… gave up. Ethem-Cailo’s complete lack of remorsefor obliterating an entire race and admission that he was kind of just doingthat nice-guy thing where he fed her Niceness Coins in an attempt to make sexfall out pushed Celair to drop him like a bag of bricks.

Ethem-Cailo’s attempts to woo her began to creep into unsavoryterritory, and eventually reached a point at which he repeatedly andshamelessly violated her wishes, her trust, and the boundaries she set for him.He was truly despicable to her near the end, after he crossed his moral eventhorizon, and since he was kind of in the Big Shoots Club, nobody did anythingabout it. Like I said, she even had to stab him, once, in self-defense. Henever raped her, but it got bad. By the time the present game rolled around,Celair was kind of hollowed out – too proud to just let any old fucker killher, but actively fighting with a deathwish. The home team reached out to herand offered her the chance to defect, giving her a timetable and a choice tomake. When she decided to make her move and defect, she did so too early out ofsheer panic and an oncoming mental breakdown… and the hasty exit causedMizzimet and Ophelnwol to lose the baby.

Right now, Celair is a little… inaccessible. She’s been through alot of crap, and hasn’t worked through any of it – staving off having apersonal reckoning in favor of drowning her pain and sorrow in the blood ofwhatever hapless bastards the Hunt puts in front of her. Now that she’sdefected, she’s buried under almost two and a half centuries of repression andendless bloodshed, and she doesn’t know who she is anymore. She wants to findher way back to the person that she was… but that person hasn’t reallyexisted for thousands of years even before the Hunt. Being forced to live inCustomer Service Mode against her wishes because the other members of herpantheon were too fucking lazy to figure out a better way took its toll on herlong before the Wild Hunt arrived. For the first time in a really really longtime she’s free to be whoever she wants to be… and that’s pretty heavy. Shehas a lot of trauma to unpack. I’m interested to see where she goes from here.

Why YouLove Them: She’sabout a billion tons of badass crammed into a 90-pound frame. I love Celairbecause she is so god damn defiant and so uncompromisingly competent and youwould have no idea from looking at her. I kinda love the concept of her; thistiny-looking fae elf with dragonfly wings and a dress made out of magic leaves,big ol’ doe eyes and soft wavy hair, but then you make the mistake of judgingher by appearance and she starts screaming at you and oh! Turns out she has amouth full of sharp teeth and she smokes and drinks and Stabs As A Warning.When she went to fight Dreamer, the despicable bastard responsible forsabotaging her escape pod and causing the accident that killed the baby, sheshowed up to the launch pad in full SWAT tactical gear with a shotgun, twopistols, and a grenade bandolier, ready to rock, and I love that image so much.I’m excited to work her through who she is now, because it’s a personcompletely different from who she was before, and a lot of it is going to beshaped by the way she interacts with the rest of the cast.

[carriagelamp]

what don't you like about the bioware fandom?

Mostly that it seems set to hate everything.

It is friggin exhausting my dude.

And yes, I get that this is a skewed perception from manydifferent people disliking a few individual things each rather than a singleentity hating every single thing about the entire b//ware library but I swearto GOD that’s what it feels like some times.

Seriously, every game seems to be hated for some reason or another and I’m honestly dreading the release of the next game because i know if i don’t block the hell out of it people are gonna do their damnedest to burn it the the ground. you should have seen my blacklist when the newest m/ss e//ect game came out, like sure, there are always things wrong with new media, but give me a hot second to actually enjoy it first smh.

I suspect what makes this fandom particularly… volatile? is thefact that there isn’t really a “true” canon. As much as we in fandom loveeschewing canon, it does, ultimately, act like an anchor. Of course there is adegree of fixed plot in the b//ware games, but there is also a lot of personalchoice – which is fun gameplay, but a treacherous fandom dynamic. The waycharacters acts, which characters like which characters, what events happenedor should happen or couldn’t have happened, it all changes depending on theperson, with a healthy layer of personal interpretation thrown on top. But whenyou’re looking up fanart and fanfiction, the truth is that we are generallylooking to see works that reflects our own understanding of “canon”, to continueon the story we know and love, and so when those fan works DON’T reflect what aperson considers a fundamental part of their own canon, things get… tricky.

At least, that’s my theory. And it ties horrifyingly intothe fucking awful and aggressive ship wars. God listening to people bitch aboutwhich relationships are and are not abusive makes me want to lovinglysmothering the entire damn fandom. Yes, I get it, you prefer Protagonist with RomanceableCharacter A, that’s fine, great, live your best life.  Just search the relationship tags you likeand c h i l l rather than trying to attack people that prefer the Protag withRomanceable Character B – or, heaven forbid, those that prefer RomanceableCharacter A with NPC 1. People don’t seem to realize their own preferences,their own “canon”, isn’t being diminished by someone exploring a different dynamic.

Another thing that makes b//ware buckwild is the fact that alot of the dilemmas ARE moral dilemmas, in which you need to weigh your own beliefswith those of your player character and be willing to acknowledge the shades ofgrey that exist within a number of these questions. Tumblr, as I’m sure we allknow, is not particular fond of this concept, and goes hard for puritypolitics. So people get really pissy about people that like characters or plotchoices that push against their own decisions about what is the morally rightchoice.

I’ve seen people get upset that a “morally wrong choice” is even an OPTION. Like… this is a roleplaying game? The characters don’t necessarily have the same life experiences and beliefs that you the gamer do. If you want to play the game only going by your own meta understanding of the series, go for it, follow your bliss, but we don’t all want to play that way. My characters can vary a lot and so can their responses because my dalish elf doesn’t have the same knowledge as my human noble or my vashoth mage. And then people will go a step further and decide it means that b//ware itself is #evil for providing that option… somehow forgetting all the other options and social criticism they also offer? Like, just because every npcs doesn’t immediately renounce the chantry’s wicked ways doesn’t somehow mean that the company itself endorses slavery what… what are you talking about. It’s giving a glimpse into the minds of characters who have grown up with a very different set up ideological beliefs than us and… and I get tired just thinking about this.

TL;DR: basically you get this shitty combination of a massive ship war, tumblr’smorality politics, and no firm canon… and then wrap it up in a 30-100hr game that people get invested in and put it in the hands of a bunch of video game nerds, and this is what comesof it: a fandom that is determined to vocally and aggressively tear down everyelement of the games, the creators, the fanwork, and their fellow gamers.

Thisfandom has taken vows of mutually assured destruction and it’s gonna take everyonedown with it.

[ladymdc]

20 Questions

@dismalzelenka, @kawakaeguri @a-shakespearean-in-paris & @gugle1980 tagged me! Thanks lovelies! :D

1. One thing you would change in your personality?

I am inherently a quiet person. Not necessarily due to shyness. I am just not a fan of forced conversation even with people I’m close to. I’d rather text than call & if I have nothing to say, I don’t talk - simple. 

2. What is your DA rare pair?

I know this is probably super weird - but Anders & Carver (especially Templar Carver, trying to keep his LI out of the Circle.)

3. A song that made you cry?

Headlights by Eminem is the last song that made me cry. Some personal shit rings with me in that song.

4. The best movie ever?

I don’t know that I could pick out a movie & say it’s my favorite. I don’t watch a lot of movies... I’m more of a show binger. But the last 2 HP movies will always be high on that list. Big Hero 6 is fun. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was beautiful even if watching it pregnant was possibly the worst thing I could have ever done in life... 

5. Food you will never eat?

God I hate cilantro -- and gin.

6. Your celebrity crush?

Chris Pine - that face... that voice... Oh God & put a beard on him & I am DONE.

7. Your favorite DA location and why?

Emprise du Lion. That place was NOT given enough attention in DA:I. 

Bioware: “Oh, here is this red lyrium stronghold & this demon & everything is frozen & terrible, but we’re just going to toss it in here sort of as an optional sidequest but not ever say with clarity wtf is happening.” 

It was maddening how much I wanted more from that place.

8. You’re a night or a morning person?

Mornings are less stressful in my house. 

9. You have any tattoos?

Nope, but my husband is actively trying to convince me to get a mustache tattoo on the side of on my finger because of how I hold my head up sometimes. 

I am considering this, but I am a small person with small hands & I don’t know if that’s even doable. Plus I’m a pansy.

10. How many languages you speak?

English. 

I can understand minimal French & Spanish - better at reading both than listening/speaking. 

11. Where would you most like to visit?

Ireland. 

And anyplace else that has rocking seafood - any cuisine doesn’t matter as long as it’s awesome (I am a massive sushi fan as a result)

12. What’s the best book you’ve read?

Cannot pick just one... 

House of Leaves [Mark Z. Danielewski] will always be a favorite because it was creepy and awesome. 

The Count of Monte Cristo [Dumas, Alexandre]

The Worm Ouroboros [Eddison, Eric Rucker]

American Gods [Gaiman, Neil]

The Magus [John Fowles]

Flowers for Algernon [Daniel Keyes]

The Witcher Books [Sapkowski, Andrezej]

There are a million others I’d pick up and read again on my shelf, but this list will have to do for now... 

13. Who is your favourite BioWare character?

Leliana. She was my Warden’s BFF & I headcanon she was the sister Trevelyan never had.

Honourable mention: Shale because she was awesome. 

14. Who’s your least preferred BioWare character?

Basically, anyone that was mean to Alistair lol. Amell came out swinging for that guy lol

15. What’s your favourite game?

FFX, Skyrim, Toejam & Earl (anyone ever play that shit on Sega?! Awesome...) anything Zelda, DA, ME, Witcher 3. Wait... This said list right?

16. What’s your patronus?

A weasel. Sure, it may look cute and cuddly, but it’s also a fierce little furball.

PS. Spirit animal is disrespectful to the indigenous people.

17. Cake or ice cream?

Cake hands down. Chocolate &/or Rum.

18. Dogs or cats?

Dogs. 

19. What was your favourite DA romance?

Contrary to what someone would think based on my heavily influenced Cullen blog -- it’d be Fenris. He was dealt a very shitty hand in life & his romance arc was rocky and frustratingly sad (rightfully). My canon character is ALWAYS a mage in all 3 games (I love being involved in that story arc just as some prefer the elf/dwarven aspect) and despite how much Fenris hates magic, it eventually isn’t the problem, his feelings are of "not deserving” are & he’s so soft & squishy inside/under all that prickly pear armor I just... Ugh!!!! LET ME LOVE YOU <3

20. Do you prefer sunshine or are you a winter person?

Um? Sunshine and winter aren’t opposites? (leaving this gem from @kawakaeguri because it’s TRUE) I live in the US south and I HATE the heat even though I am a naturally cold person (I have about 5 layers of clothes on right now like a weirdo considering it’s abnormally warm tonight). I prefer autumn as a season, and who doesn’t love sunshine?

Tagging: @gowombat83 @arvelehem @evrolia @ocean-in-my-rebel-soul & @pestiset because why not!? 

Do it or don’t, my feelings will be unhurt! :)