#i just wonder what happened to the side characters

[vaguely-concerned]

the things it adds to both of the characters involved that lucanis used to have a thing for viago could not have been more tailor made to be for me. literally the ideal thing to come out of this game for me personally and specifically and spiritually. I mean I'm teia x viago trash until the day I die and nothing will ever change this (and with the best will in the world and even the power of lucanis' big beautiful soulful eyes, that would never have worked out even if viago DID somehow understand he was being propositioned. which I'm not convinced he did. the mutual 'so. snakes are pretty cool huh. and. knives. also' awkward energy without someone of teia's charisma and people skills involved to mitigate it... it would have been dire), but on so many levels I find it so incredibly charming for what it says about them both that the (one-sided) attraction was there once.

what's more, it means the man about whom this legendary paragraph was written:

Viago was not a typical Antivan. He liked facts—checklists, numbers, precise measurements. Heart palpitations, clammy hands, tight pants—Viago did not like these things. In fact, he would go so far as to say he hated them. Mild curiosity was his favorite mood.

has got some of the hottest coolest deadliest people in thedas down so catastrophically bad it's got them acting unwise. teia had to wait a UST-drenched decade for him to be ready to take his fucking gloves off for her. and she did!! the tetchiest most neurotic least approachable little vetinari knockoff of a man you ever saw has game for days and days and lives rent free in heads for years. in eight little talons viago consistently feels so inadequate up against dante and it's like. man I'm shaking you by the lapels you have what he'll never have. the ability to bewitch body and soul with your terrible personality and long thin legs. do not waste the gift you've been given go get her she's waiting!!!

(lucanis is really good at reading people, so I wonder if maybe he saw through all of that to some of the steadiness and incredible capacity for warmth and tenderness in specific interpersonal relationships you see viago have with teia when he finally opens up enough, and maybe that was part of it. either way it's so perfect that both he and teia have regarded viago with this affectionate intrigued amusement. lucanis still seems pretty fond of him in a 'viago continues to be exactly himself no matter what else happens or goes wrong. comforting universal constant' sort of way, he brings him up quite a lot in party banter.)

you've seen lucanis' game in this day and age, arguably or at least hopefully older and wiser -- can you imagine how catastrophically bad it must have been back when he presumably handed viago, most paranoid man in thedas all years running, a knife like this expressed everything it needed to. people give him so much shit for the cake moment being his big romantic lock-in, but considering where we started that is GROWTH and I for one am so proud of him fhsdkjaf.

also I wonder at what point vis-a-vis that whole Situation teia and viago met for the first time, leading us to ask... just how much was it a matter of lucanis simply being ignored out of a lack of interest on viago's part (tbf, not entirely unlikely). how much was it lucanis truly not managing to make himself understood. (all but certainly. literally how would one understand that. I think it says some sweet things about rook and lucanis' dynamic that they -- somehow -- DO pick up what he's putting down in a similar scenario presumably b/c they know him pretty well by then haha.) how much was it viago interpreting the romantic move as a death threat from one of the most dangerous people alive and freaking out. (1000% and indubitably.) and how much was it andarateia steal-your-girl cantori turning up and thus setting off whatever spectacular, volatile, awesome-in-the-original-sense chemical reaction between the substances of her and viago's souls that goes on to this day and makes everything else kind of a side note at best. a gentle mix of several of these things, perhaps. ...god I love all these characters so much

[murfpersonalblog]

Thank you for the video! I ran it through a transcriber:

Daniel Montgomery: Rolin Jones, you are the showrunner for Anne Rice's Interview with The Vampire, which aired its second season this past year.... The two seasons are based on the first book, Interview with the Vampire. What did you most want to capture from the novel over the course of these two seasons?

Rolin Jones: Yeah, a very particular romance. The strange war that happens between a 78-year-old man and a 148-year-old man, who still have some stuff to figure out. I wanted Anne's language to make an aggressive appearance; the prose that's so lovely in there, which is sometimes the thing that falls first when you're adapting. And then, yeah, I wanted an almost operatic experience for an audience, as well, to go with it. Emotions are really, really heightened. And yeah, I don't know. Just general, you know, I wanted it to be a nervy, vibrating, weird-ass show. God bless AMC for letting us make it.

DM: And how do you decide where to deviate from the source material, you know, what to expand on, what to leave out? Like, you know, I imagine those are difficult decisions in any adaptation.

RJ: Well...there's a lot of wonderful stuff in our book, a really beautiful book to work off of. I think the challenges were a little bigger in season two, mostly because there was a lot less plot in that book. The book is almost like five meditative conversations between vampires, and then some crazy events, and then, and then you're out! And we had to kind of create a lot of plot out of that. But for the most part, yeah, we try to put as jam as much Anne as we could in there. And the basic, the basic changes you make for anything that was beautifully written as a novel and the choices that you'd have to make to turn it into something that is, you know, for actors to speak. And for it to cut over 15 episodes. I don't know, I think we cannibalized that book! There's like, there's not a lot left. It's a couple of characters that fell off, for this reason, or that reason. We made some decisions about the timeline. But I'd say, I think it was done with a lot of love. And a lot of collaboration with Anne, who is no longer with us.

DM: And Season Two, you introduced the vampire troupe led by Armand. What most excited you about bringing those characters and storylines from from the book to the screen and, you know, folding that in?

RJ: Oh, well, anytime you can shove theater into the face of TV viewers is always a good thing! I hire a lot of playwrights, and a lot of actors from the theater. So I think if there's anything we were just trying to restrain ourselves from making a lot of insider dumb theater jokes that nobody could care about. I think, we always kind of had the specter of the movie behind us ,and they did that part really, really well in the movie. So a lot started out just as, like: Oh, how are we, how are we going to do it? How are we going to justify doing this again? I think there was a caveat from AMC too: Don't repeat the movie! We've seen it! It's beautiful, it's out there! Our timeline really opened up a lot of opportunities to make it a grittier, dirtier, slightly more dangerous Theater of the Vampires than the movie, or even in the book. And the joy of actually setting something in post-war Paris. You see Paris going over the war, you see a lot of Paris during the war, and then you don't see a lot of stuff done in those those first four or five years afterwards. Which was, I think, for all of us, was a nice way to feel like you were, you know, coming into Paris in some kind of a side door. And also just numbers! We had a season one was like a chamber drama between three characters. And we got to expand it, not only with just the bodies, but in space and time to with, you know, what was going on with Dubai; and what what Louis was coming to realize was his truth along the way. So, you know, I got to cast Ben Daniels again! Ugh! <3 Best!

DM: And what was it like writing for him? Ben Daniels, in the role of Santiago? You know, that character being such a highlight of the season?

RJ: Well, we knew that's our that was our guy from the day one! Even if he was already scheduled to go be on Lord of the Rings and our dates weren't working out to begin with. He is somebody we had up on the wall. I worked with him on a TV show previously about like seven or eight years ago, seen his theater work, and know what he can do. He's just one of those really wonderful actors that can sort of turn on a dime, and take something that is very, very funny and then make it very sinister, just like that. The instrument is really huge. And we had a really hammy role for him! Which was, you know, he's just he's one of the really delicate butchers--just the right slice of ham on top of given circumstances and stuff, what a joy. And he also acts like a naughty 14 year old boy when the camera is off too. So it's a nice energy on on Sam. And he gets it like, you know, sort of like the grandad of our theater trip because they were all a bunch of theater actors who had known him growing up in the theater too. So that was a treat. You'd see it on stage. I mean, you see in the camera, there's a lot of joy. There's a lot, it feels like a theater company there. You know, nice to be with it.

DM: Now, there are more than a dozen books in The Vampire Chronicles. You're going into Season Three, you know, and you'll be covering The Vampire Lestat. Would you cover them all if you could, or is there like a specific endpoint that you have in mind?

RJ: I mean, like anything else, you're supposed to take a really good hard look at yourself and go: Do you have anything left to say about vampires? And, you know, they pay you to do this. So that's hard. And I have a three year old child and all that stuff. And who doesn't want a swim in the pool? But I think if you're really honest with yourself, you've got to say: Can you still bring it with the same energy that you brought it the first time? And for Season Three, I believe I can. And I believe our staff can. For 12...for TWELVE books!? Man! I think somewhere along the way, you got to hand that thing off. Because you're just, when you're up to writing the 540th scene of Louis, uhhh...you really need some new blood in there. I think that's a while off. You know, if I had my brothers, we'd do this, figure out Queen of the Damned, Tale of the Body Thief, maybe Memnoch? Somewhere there. And at some point, there will be somebody who already says: Oh, it clearly should be this person. And also! Vampires was--I mean, by that time, who knows how old Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson will look! They might not even look like immortals anymore! So we're just going to try, as long as AMC gives us the dough. We're trying to make aggressive things with it--we're very privileged to do it. But yeah! Look, I'm in the heat. It's hard for me to talk about Season Two, I'm in the heat of Season Three right now! I got Season Three Head in here right now. So I think I hopefully none of this all sounds really canned. It's just that I'm already in the next season.

DM: Now the show is getting a spin off about the Talamasca, who tied into Season Two. Does it complicate the storytelling process to have to factor in storylines that are happening in the same universe, but on another show?

RJ: It's fun, we're communicating with each other. You don't want to be the person that says: You can't do that, you can't do this. You want like John and Mark who are working on the Talamasca show to have as much freedom as I had. That being said, we have a couple of characters that are crossing over. So there's some communications between the two about, like, what those characters need to do in the next season of Vampire, and make sure that those things don't conflict. If anything, make sure that they can help build a better story. Like I'm reading the scripts, and grafting on the given circumstances of their show into ours. And that's cool! That's fun. And they're lovely guys too. So that makes it easy.

DM: Well, I want to congratulate you on your work on Seasons One and Two, going into Season Three of Interview with a Vampire. And thank you so much for talking to me about it!

RJ: Oh, a pleasure! A pleasure! *kisses* Gold Derby!

Interview with Rolin Jones.

Full video here 👇🏻

[sonknuxadow]

COMPUTER. ENHANCE

^ omega spotted

[blue-eli]

Ink October day 3: Sophistry

An argument that seems plausible, but is fallacious or misleading, especially one devised deliberately to be so.

[spacedlexi]

speaking of fucked up overly hated female twdg characters i find it Super Interesting how people will say carver was the best villain in the whole series, but when lilly is literally just a successful carver (iron fist leader of a community turning children into soldiers) suddenly shes a bad/lame villain for some reason 🤔

[dragonfoods]

I will have to read a romantasy book written by a straight man or a lesbian someday just to see if a certain tone is different because a lot of the romantasy books written by women that are attracted to men are just…sometimes…interesting in a bad way

“She was the strongest, most compassionate, most intelligent, kindest, most generous woman that ever existed. All the wise older characters like to pull her aside to tell her this. Unlike all the dumb evil cows that just wanted MMC for his hot body and deep pockets, FMC wanted MMC for his mind and his beautiful soul” just gives off a weird vibe

[waywardsalt]

i think elden ring will always be my favorite game in terms of environment. every area is so impressive, even the copy-paste stuff manages to be impressive with atmosphere, and the amount of just. stunning-looking locations is wild especially with how natural even the most amazing looking shot you can find is.

just the fact that you unavoidably see this when you walk into leyndell is incredible. one of my favorite environment views in all of the games ive ever played

[napstabl00k]

Those sonic prime gjinkas from my day out today

[5hrignold]

I LOVE HIM

[csphire]

Okay, I'll say it. I don't like the idea that post epilogue, Dammon is just banging away at his forge alone, still holding a torch for Karlach. This isn't some comment made in jealousy at all, but one meant to say Dammon deserves better than to be some kind of thirst joke afterthought.

At the epilogue party, the game makes it pretty clear she's with Wyll if alive and not romancing the player.

In a DLC, Dammon is the perfect candidate to become an Artificer companion-hells maybe even become an origin option too! But most of us would settle for him to be simply a companion and romanceable like Halsin and Minthara or just a romanceable NPC that's not some one-time fling. He's someone we can visit on the daily most of the time, so yes, it can work.

But why? Because he deserves to be wooed and romanced by Karlach, Tav, one of the other companions, or hells all three at once. To say he can't be romanceable because he would lose his mystery is pure bullshit. Sorry Frazier, but it's true.

Gaw! It's so frustrating when a solution and an opportunity are all right there, and it's overlooked or ignored. He can be BOTH romanceable and mysterious when all that's needed is to write him in a way that leaves the player yet not Tav or Durge in the dark.

Dammon could even be written in a way where the player questions if our fav blacksmith could be up to no good. Let the fandom sweat over and argue about whether or not we should help him with some mysterious mission. Have him outright refuse to elaborate on it. Let him be equally tight-lipped about all he was forced to do or willingly did to survive in the hells when working on infernal machinery. This way, Frazier can play what he loves to play the most, and that is at least a potential bad guy. Well, not mean to the player but instead a character some might find almost as sketchy as Astarion is viewed would be fine.

*sighs* Why does he need to be romancable to everyone too? The simple answer, all of us could use a little bit more sunshine.

If I could say one thing to Frazier, it would be, "Karlach is not the only touch or affection-starved character out there. There are so many real people who need a Dammon in some form in their lives, even if it's only fictional. Karlach and Dammon's story is important to us. A Dammon and Tav/Durge story is just as important, too. These stories of love and friendship all need to be shown and celebrated. Plus, Dammon comes off as warm, thoughtful, and supportive, and so many of us out there really desperately need that-the more the better. We need it to feed our hopes to keep trying and open up our hearts again. So let him help fix heal more than just one heart, please. We all want to see him grow just a little more because he's such a fantastic character so far."

[camelspit]

wrote out all the characters in preparation for the upcoming favorite keeper character poll and there are 185. so. im probably going to cut random ass foxfire prodigies, gnomes, mentors, etc that were mentioned once, and just keep the ones whose names are somewhat familiar.

[bereft-of-frogs]

Me: wow I’m looking forward to getting back to the main timeline and getting answers to some questions, including but not limited to whether Indeera recovers and her reunion with Bell, something that is explicitly discussed as something he hopes for and looks forward to in Fallen Star…

Phase III: who?

Like did I get that that wrong? Did I read Fallen Star that wrong? I don’t get it, I feel like I’m going a little crazy with this someone tell me I’m not insane

Like I am not insane right? I did hallucinate this? You are all reading the same thing in the highlights? Did something happen between writing phase I and phase III? I vaguely know the comics sort of answers the recovery question but like what happened with the book authors? Why is the only mention of her name drops as if they’re strangers? This is a genuine question I am really puzzled (and kind of disappointed)

[note-boom]

Higuchi and Ranpo are just such interesting author-based characters in BSD.

I know it's weird to connect the two but hear me out...

So far, the only authors I can remember that don't have a known ability are Aya, Higuchi, and Ranpo. Aya and Higuchi will likely get an ability (latter has been confirmed to have one, at least) while Ranpo...probably won't? Though you never know.

But the reason I bring Higuchi and Ranpo together is because the latter is an author who is heavily implied to be the son of one of his IRL counterpart's characters. And meanwhile, the former is someone who has one of the real people in her IRL counterpart's life (that is to say, BSD Higuchi's sister) brought into the manga. Yeah, Tanizaki and Akuatagawa have their sisters be based off characters, and we also have Haruno based off a Tanizaki character, plus Fitzgerald's characters in the eyes of god story arc.

But I really think that it's interesting that Ranpo is the child of his own character. And that Higuchi is I think the only one with a family member that is based on IRL Higuchi's own family situation. That we might actually have a BSD character based on a real life person that wasn't a significant writer of some sort (to my knowledge, at least).

I don't really have a point with this, but it is interesting and aghhhhhhh Asagiri I'M BEGGING you to do something with Higuchi that doesn't involve Akutagawa! There's so many things about her and I want to know!

[dangoulains-devotion]

grips you by the shoulders

give FFXIII a chance

as much as I adore the game I will accept the gameplay isn't for everyone

but the story is so worth it

[newlydeparteddog]

I need more time/energy after work to explore these ideas weh. Anyone else feel super drained lately? Like is it just BC it's so damn dark now after work?

But anyway some things I've thinking about. This conceptual sketch of this idea I had, which idk I'll not explain too deeply yet BC I wanna polish it first, it will accompany smth else.

And what the fuck these twos dynamic be like? After watching so many body cam videos of drunken adult toddlers I need to know, I gotta get a sense of this. The show doesn't provide and I need answers, one episode of Clay acting out isn't enough to satisfy me. (Sorry it's bad lmao, I drew this like 10 seconds before dozing off and the words are illegible.)

Bloberta mug hahah. Wtf. Just on its own (comes with a Santa one blah) I really might have been tempted, just for the lol of it but my bf would kill me for wasting money, and I also like money being in my pocket instead. (Paint job is shit anyway for the price)

[amelikos]

Sango being associated with food really intrigues me.. wonder if there is something deeper to it.