#fallowhearth

[st-just]

The lore and missed opportunities make me sadder to think about but yeah moment-to-moment this is absolutely my biggest complaint with the whole game.

No matter what options you pick Rook just has this overpowering, like, goofy camp counsellor/therapist/youth pastor energy. The symbols for the three basic response types might as well be randomly assigned.

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by the mismatch between the labelled dialogue options and what Rook actually says. It feels like the game is chiding me for trying to roleplay in any other way than endlessly patient compassionate daycare worker/therapist to precious smolbeans, even to the point of baiting and switching. Like, I choose the stoic option "Sure." which seems fairly clear cut. But what Rook says is something like "I'd love to! Don't work yourself too hard make sure you get a nap before we go 🥰". Like how did those options to together. Some of the labels to actual dialogue are even contradictory. If you didn't want to allow players to have other personalities, why even present them as fake options?

[st-just]

🔥

A work cannot be said to successful satirize or critique an ideology or thing if its portrayal of the subject isn't compelling enough that some subset of the audience is convinced by or moved to defend it. We know e.g. Fight Club is a triumph precisely because of the much-reviled bros who think Durden is a badass whose right about everything.

Relatedly- making all the representatives of politics you dislike personally corrupt/cowardly/venal/monstrous is rank artistic and moral cowardice.

[flemmboyant]

Sending you a placeholder ask for whenever you have Sandwich Update. I am very keen to hear about Sandwich Success and/or Failure.

SANDWICH SUCCESS!!!!

I have a panini press for depression grilled cheese so i just used that, and was very generous with the amount of peanut butter and banana. I found it not only delicious but...... weirdly delicious????? So delicious i instantly made a second one! The banana slices melting in my mouth alongside rich peanut butter and bread crubch was ... Wow. This will for sure be one of my staple breakfastes/dinners with a glass of milk, so weird that I've never heard about this before

[sawthatmountainburn]

I can't gif boop you because your asks don't allow pictures, however....

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(formatting please...)

OMG I NEED TO CHANGE THAT RIGHT AWAY

anyway thank youuuu <3

[literary-illuminati]

@fallowhearth

I'm not sure she ever portrays cultural imperialism as good, but she definitely never really portrays it as bad? Like, there's a real sense that Teixicalaanli oppression of native cultures tops out as being analogous to, like, 'local cinemas playing marvel movies with better special effects and higher budgets than anything your local movie industry can afford, so it ends up withering while everyone watches American moves instead'.

Which is, in the annals of cultural imperialism, pretty fucking weak tea. No Teixicalaanli Sun Priests going around and burning every work in the Lseli alphabet they can find, that's for sure.

[theaudientvoid]

Pick Your Faves from my Faves

Tagged by @crowns-of-violets-and-roses

Challenge: make a poll with five of your all time favourite characters, and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone’s favourite.

tagging in: @artbyblastweave, @fallowhearth, @fipindustries, @lipstickchainsaw, @verminfang

(Obviously ignore if uninterested and do it anyway if you're interested and I didn't tag you)

[shadoedseptmbr]

tagged by @dandenbo, thank you! (i already did the remix playlist one but for funsies i took all these off my Earthborn/Aedan Shepard playlist :D )

RULES: write one song for every letter in your url and then tag as many people as there are letters in your url

S- Sabotage: Beastie Boys H- How Deep is Your Love- Calvin Harris/Disciples A- Alabama Cold Cock- Black Pistol Fire D- Destroyer- Phantogram O- O Children- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds E- Eat Sleep Rave Repeat- Fatboy Slim D- Drive- The Cars S- Sour Times- Civil Wars E- Eat Your Young- Hozier P- Paint It, Black- Ciara T- Tick Tick Boom- The Hives M- Many Shades of Black- The Raconteurs B- Born Alone Die Alone- Madalen Duke R- Runaway- Aurora

That's 14, lol. as i tend to shorten it to sept, howabout - @pastelroyce @laelior @fallowhearth and @korblez and then feel free to feel tagged! <3

[bibliolithid]

Tag 9 people to get to know better

Tagged by the lovely @toasthaste and @fallowhearth

3 ships: Shipping isn't a thing my mind spends much time on but I'd say Skitter/Tattletale, Breq/Seivarden, and Kvothe/Bast

First ever ship: Belle/Gaston, don't judge me, I was like, five @_@

Last song: Ionic Grid by SayMaxWell (recommended by spotify based on a playlist)

Last movie: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Currently reading: Several things, uh, Amber Skies, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Nona the Ninth mostly

Currently watching: I just finished Over the Garden Wall so I'm kind of between shows right now?

Currently consuming: Sugar-free root beer

Currently craving: Executive function, restablishing my habits, and my leg to stop hurting so I can run again. ALSO MORE DAMN SUNLIGHT

tagging @bellowingwhack @phaeton-flier @avulleonastick @regexkind @koito-yuu @tanadrin @keynes-fetlife-mutual @vacuously-true @endreal

[verminfang]

tag 9 people to get to know better

tagged by @fallowhearth

3 ships: Not a huge shipper I guess in the sense of like, IP characters in a fandomy way? Like I can get deep into ship talk about OC stuff with friends but I think I can get a bit too engaged with actual canon to have answers that aren't kind of boringly the thing that is just canon.

I guess Sy/Lamb Polycule, Avery/Nora (I like Avery/Liberty a lot but this is where the aforementioned canon gremlin jumps in and I just get too sad thinking about what that would do to Nora) aaand, struggling to think of anything else at the moment so just another boring vanilla answer is the mains from Love is War are cute but also I will say were way funner when they were doing the actual high-school romance as Death Note mind games premise and then they kind of lost steam a bit.

First ever ship: racking my poor memory of the youngest years and gonna guess Raven/Beast Boy, Rachel/Tobias or Kitty/Bartimaous

Last song: The Summoning from Nerdy Prudes Must Die. Really enjoyed the musical and this song specifically is just such an ear worm.

Last movie: Does Nerdy Prudes Must Die count as a movie? I'm going to say yes, this is also because I genuinely can't recall what that would be otherwise.

Currently reading: Rhythm of War from the Stormlight Archive

Currently watching: Making my way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer mostly to get into the vibes for an upcoming MOTW game and also because a lot of mutuals on the dashboard propaganda. Very very slow going because every time I start watching again Xander is there.

Currently consuming: Nothing. Am going to rectify that by being incredibly exciting and grabbing a big 'ol cup of tap water after writing this.

Currently craving: Chinese Food specifically because @shillelagh had to cap off bragging about her country having legalised gummies by talking about how much better it makes food taste and that her Chinese food had arrived

the game is to tag 9 people to get to know them better but most people I can think of have done this meme already or don't do tag games so anyone who reads this post assume I tagged you specifically (you're welcome) or politely didn't (you're welcome) as fits your vibes

[booksandchainmail]

thanks for the recs everyone!

@apollo-cackling The Marrow Thieves was really good

@spoonierbard I read the first Lord Peter Wimsey, very strong Miles energy! I was surprised by the amount of character work, especially at the end, not something I generally associate with mysteries

@fallowhearth unfortunately for some reason the only ebook copy my library had was a pdf that took forever to load, so I gave up a few pages in

I'm also still looking for a rec for "book with a number in the title". I also still haven't filled out the memoir or poetry collection squares, but I have options lined up for those

Seeking book recommendations:

I'm doing a couple of summer reading bingo cards, and looking for recommendations to fill a few squares:

book from the 1920s

memoir

book under 200 pages (probably a novella?)

book by an indigenous author

poetry collection

banned or challenged book

book with a number in the title

[fallowhearth]

I have up to this point avoided defining what this blog is for, and have kept all my interests in one place. But, I want to post more regularly about my art, and it's not really of interest to most people who follow this main blog. (Not that I necessarily post things of interest to anyone but me, and I'm not likely to change that!)

So, my main blog @fallowhearth will continue mostly as normal: books, comics, fandom meta, auspol, general political and social commentary.

My new side blog @fallowhearth-art will now be the place I post about my art. I may also post more about fashion there, since it's something I'm very interested in, but I know many of the people who follow my main are not. I'm mainly interested in traditional mediums so that's what you can expect in terms of original work and reblogs - watercolour, ink, oil, pastels, pencil, etc.

Hopefully I will see some of you over there! To everyone else, hope to continue discussing all the regular topics with you!

[st-just]

Listening to Pax Britannica and for the first time realising that Nova Scotia means New Scotland 🤦🏻

I forget this is not something 99.9% of people in, like, literally grade 1 as a fun bit of trivia about where you live lol.

But yes! The tourism board leans into it and possibly the easiest course I took in high school was a 'Gaelic Studies' local history credit. There's an attempt to revive Scots Gaelic out on Cape Breton that's, like, non-zero amounts of credible, too.

[this-is-my-jaam]

Cultural Representation in Dragon Age/Fantasy in General pt.1

So I made a post not too long ago about my gripes with the aesthetic design with the Dalish in Dragon Age. A user by the name of fallowhearth then introduced me to the work of Bret Deveraux and his breakdown on the historical inaccuracy and generally racist design of the Dothraki in got, which got me thinking about something that bothered me, but I hadn’t been able to figure out why until I read the essay.

A lot of people claim to have based fictional races/societies off of real cultures, but the actual representation of said cultures, mostly non-white cultures, is based more on stereotypes of a culture than the real culture. The steppe peoples and nomad societies tend to be the most insultingly incorrect from my own observations. Really, any culture that lives in away that the modern western society would consider unconventional.

So I’ve already done a dive into Dalish fashion, but it occurred to me that practically nothing of the original aesthetic design for the Dalish seemed to have any relation at all to the cultures that the Dalish were based on. In fact, I can’t really place where any of the design is pulled from apart from the medieval fantasy chainmail (which is a European style chainmail btw). There are plenty of cultures that wore fur throughout history, but none that I could find use it exclusively for pauldrons. Which makes sense because what would be the point even. I know I already complained about it but the fur shoulder pads are so truly baffling to me. We’ll get back to this later, but the main point is that just throwing together random tidbits of a culture together without any understanding of the original purposes of literally anything that you are ‘representing’ sits really wrong with me. 

So lets dissect the cultural designs of Dragon age and their presumable real world design inspirations. Strap in again folks because this one’s going to be long and in multiple parts or else you’ll be scrolling for an hour to get past this post. Again, this is all my opinion and I mean no offense. I don’t intend to speak for any of the ethnic groups to be mentioned in this rant, only to point out a commonality in fantasy worldbuilding that really bothers me. You are under no obligation to agree with me, constructive criticism is awesome, but please keep it civil.

The Dalish  

Since we’re already here, let’s break down the Dalish. I’m going to approach this from a few directions: 1) The Jewish, Romani, and Native American people that the Dalish were based on, 2) Cultural bias and stereotyping in pop media and 3) Fantasy design tropes.

Just to clarify, this isn’t meant to be criticism directed specifically at Bioware’s art team. Artists build the image of the game, but ultimately answer to an Art Director who answers to Corporate. I’m sure the artists that worked on these games and designs are lovely people, and meant no harm in any way. They just worked with what they were given, which was not a whole lot if we’re being really honest. I think this was in part because the Dalish were already present in DA:O before a lot of the lore was super established and they only had so much money for development. You can clearly tell that a lot of thought was put into many of the other cultures’ designs for DA:2 and Inquisition, but the Dalish were in DA:O so they had to design around that to keep the canon somewhat consistent. So no beef to Bioware’s creative team, I’m going to place the blame on EA because they ruin everything that they touch. The writing team however, I have some questions for. Namely, why? Actually, I know why and it’s also EA. Moving on.

1) Jewish, Romani, and Native American Culture

Now, I am by no means an expert in Jewish, Romani, or Native American history/culture, so I apologize for any inaccuracies that there might be in this post. If you see something inaccurate or you know of any other parallels that you want to talk about, feel free to add to the conversation. I try to reply to all of the comments that I get and I appreciate learning new stuff and being corrected on things that I am wrong about. Again, please be civil.

None of these cultures exists in the aesthetic design of the Dalish. At least not that I’ve been able to tell. The writers claim that the original inspiration for the Dalish are the Roma and Jewish people. I’m pretty sure that this is because of both the nomadic lifestyle of the Dalish, and the persecution they face in lore. The Romani people are believed to have originated in India and migrated Westward, the rich culture unique to the Romani people being a melting pot of cultural elements as people married into the culture and it expanded. I don’t think too much of the Dalish was inspired by the Romani people aside from the travel culture, the persecution and ostracization they faced, and their mysterious historical origins. We’ll get into my beef with westernized views on minorities and mysticism later though.

As for the Jewish people, I’m not entirely sure which parts of Jewish culture the writers were using for inspiration, but I definitely see the historical parallels. I think that the early Elven Kingdom was probably inspired by the creation and fall of Babylon and/or Jerusalem. And the current treatment of Elves within Thedas and the Exalted March itself is likely inspired by the Church endorsed Crusades, where the Jewish people were the target of mass genocide for ‘killing Jesus’ because the Church is fucking awful and war makes money. The ‘leaders’ of the crusades were usually religious nobility, committing war crimes because religion. Both offending armies even used the Templar name. Fucked up history fact: Pretty much all of the crusades weren’t actually about religion so much as stealing territory or making money. Just look up the Children’s Crusade. So the clearest common thread that I can see is the blatant discrimination and persecution, so if that’s all that the inspiration is, then Y I K E S. I was already unimpressed with the alleged Jewish inspiration in the Dalish culture but holy shit.

To be clear, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with using history to inspire your writing. Some of the best stories are the ones inspired by real historical events and figures. But when you’re building a culture for a story and you chose to pick only the darkest parts of the culture’s history and none of the beauty of the culture itself, it rubs me the wrong way. This is all speculation seeing as how I was not in the writing room for these games, but I honestly can’t find any other parallels to the Jewish people with my limited knowledge, and if I dedicate myself to fully researching all of the potential parallels then this project will never end. Anyone who knows more about the Jewish culture and history, feel free to share your own opinions and thoughts. I really hope that I am just too uneducated in Jewish culture to see better parallels but all the ones I’ve found so far are not great. I’ll get back to this later, but I need to move on to discussing Native American cultural parallels because this post is already way too long.

My assumption is that the clan structure, philosophy, and spiritualism is inspired by the Native American people. The clan structure of Keeper > First > Second > other professions is probably based on Chiefdoms. Many tribes also hade roles specified to individuals, like hunting or weaving or building and so on, and others were more loose. Philosophies like the Vir Sulevanin or the codes of living based on individual gods are probably inspired by various religious practices and law structures. It’s hard to tell specifically where any inspiration was taken because there are a lot of nations that exist under the term Native American and as far as I know, the writers never specified any tribes. I don’t take much issue on the clan structure and the idea of the Dalish cultural lifestyle being loosely based on Native American culture. The execution is ass. For one, we barely get to see any of this stuff in practice, in game. You get to do a little with Hawke and Merrill in DA:2, and you get bits and pieces from DA:I, but overall, It’s a lot of tell, not a lot of show. What bothers me the most is how the culture is presented to the player. Most of your companions and NPC characters treat Dalish culture as lesser or too different to even bother trying to learn anything about it. If you play a Lavellan in DA:I, your own character acts very surprised that Josephine knows even two words in Dalish, and yet all of the Dalish that we meet speak the King’s language (I think that’s what English is called in DA, but I could be wrong). It makes me uncomfortable on a number of levels to have the culture presented this way to the player, especially when your responses usually make you complicit or an active participant of this problem. Sounds a whole lot like the oppression and discrimination that Native Americans deal with today and have been dealing with for centuries now. The biggest problem that I have with creating a parallel between the Dalish and Native Americans is how Dalish history is presented, particularly through Solas.

If Solas didn’t exist, I wouldn’t really have a problem with how the Dalish culture was built around lore and oral tradition. A downtrodden but proud elven people is kind of a refreshing inversion on the typical High Elf fantasy trope actually. Until you introduce the High Elf himself and he shits on the entire culture for reasons that I still can’t fully understand. If you talk with him in Haven as a Dalish elf about the Dalish people, he relates them to ignorant children. This does not change throughout the game. The only time he actually expresses that he might have misjudged the Dalish has nothing to actually do with the Dalish, just that he likes hanging out with your Inquisitor. Um, what the fuck? Solas’ whole guilt over the past thing translating into ‘I hate the Dalish because they’re not like the old elves wah,’ fucking pisses me off. I get that the Vallaslin bother him because they were originally slave markings and unnamed Dalish clans chased him off for trying to tell them ‘you’re whole culture and history is wrong,’ but if that’s all there is to him hating the Dalish then I have problems. He acknowledges that his actions led to the elves suffering, but he isn’t willing to accept the elves as they are now. He’s mad at the victims rather than the problem which is ridiculous. But now, because the game decided that Solas is a tragic villain and most of the elves side with him, it validates his belief that the Dalish culture is wrong. And if that don’t scream Manifest Destiny then I don’t know what does.

So, the thing that all of these groups have in common, and the thing that shows up the most often in media, is that fantasy minority groups are based almost entirely on real life minority groups and are depicted almost always as victims in need of saving or extinct. I’ve got a fun fact, minority groups weren’t always minorities, and weren’t always persecuted. I’d like to see that in media for like at least five minutes or something because this sucks. And framing these groups as victims for a western coded player character to rescue is the classic white savior shit that I can’t stand. Again, I’ll go deeper into that later, but I’ll end it on this last note because I need a nap now.

Culture is not defined by suffering. The Jewish people and Native Americans have faced trials and persecution for centuries, but their culture is not defined by that. The people within a cultural group are more than just their hardships. It isn’t inspiration from a culture to fantasize only about their abuse. And choosing to focus explicitly on the hardships and then turning those oppressed people into the ‘bad guys’ bc of some forced grey morality bs makes everything so much worse. If you create a society ‘based on’ existing ones, you need to actually address the positives of a culture as well. Do not present the people in a way that implies ‘less than’ to the player character. And most importantly, Do not write an oppressed people based on an oppressed people only to try and justify any part of their oppression. 

And this is only part 1. Send Help. I haven’t even finished with the Dalish Art History project I already started.

to be cont.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Thank you and @fallowhearth!

That's not too long. I'm going to give it a proper look soon so that if it grabs me I can follow along while it's still updating live

I keep seeing Time to Orbit: Unknown reced on here. Two quick questions about it:

Does anyone know the current wordcount (even approximately)?

Do we know how close to complete it is (even very approximately is fine)?

[argumate]

fallowhearth said: Who is ‘we’?? Is this anon a tradcath or a woman with poor reading comprehension?

spoiled for choice in terms of meme image reactions to this one

[literary-illuminati]

#would read the lighter tone screwball comedy spinoff of Kippa and Ren sailing the ocean blue

Right? Look at these two and tell me they wouldn't be great at being decopunk fantasy scooby doo.

This is a really interestingly distinct style from most of the issue covers. Also Kippa is adorable.