#but with a layer of absurdity and sarcasm ofc

[bogunicorn]

like tl;dr from my last post but i would absolutely be interested in reading/writing a re-telling of veilguard that has more darkness and grit and more and bigger consequences to rook's actions, but not from a place of "i hated it and i'm fixing it" that inevitably layers misaimed personal grievances and bitterness into it that asks me to kind of passively agree that the devs are cowardly, cruel, bigoted cretins whose work must be scribbled with red pen by Fans Who Know Better. it's the same reason i tend not to be charmed by "deconstruction" narratives that are actually just bashing the genre they're deconstructing, or movie musicals that feel ashamed to be musical theater, or the "wow THAT just happened" style of a lot of late stage marvel/pixar projects that are trying to pretend they're not in the same sandbox as the lamps they're hanging big, embarrassed, bitter shades onto

i'm in fandom because i like things, and creating art from places of bitterness has its place, definitely. but i find that letting that bitterness and disappointment be the main driving force of what someone puts into fandom spaces tends to go sour incredibly quickly. anger, offense, and bitterness can very quickly turn into emotional poison that demands more and more and more of itself to keep the wheels turning, and i've just been Very Online for far too long not to see how ugly that gets and how little i want it to be a regular part of my own experiences.

i don't read fic to "fix canon" or replace it in my mind; canon and fanworks are two completely different mediums, beholden to two very different social structures and general purposes, and there is a level of mess and complexity that fanworks are afforded because they're made for free and by a very limited number of cooks in the proverbial kitchen. being realistic about canon when it's being produced in an extremely corporate environment, enjoying it for what it is, and then engaging with or creating fanworks that get to be more complicated or darker or meaner or whatever is kind of a value neutral thing? and i don't feel the need to ascribe the very real critiques i do have of veilguard onto the malice, cowardice, or stupidity of the small handful of bioware creatives that i know the names of because, like, i don't need to and i don't think it's a cool thing to do

but, you know, i'm also the kind of person who immediately identified DA2 as The Best Dragon Age Has Ever Been and hasn't wavered from that opinion in over a decade, and have never and will never expect the series to hit the kind of vibe that only a criminally short development period, a shoestring budget, and the second draft of a script that had minimal corporate oversight aside from the money people saying "we can't afford that, change it" can produce. i guess in that light you can say my expectations were "low", but frankly i just think they were realistic lmao