#i lack grit

[toytle]

a lot of comic art styles are so genuinely, distinctly ugly in a way that i desperately wish to capture

[revvethasmythh]

So I went and watched all the possible endings, and it confirmed something I had been thinking, which is that the redemption ending choice is, perhaps, the most immediately regretful one--but that they all come with some form of regret. In the redemption ending, Rook has to knowingly deny themselves the catharsis of retribution (should they desire it, which, at least for me it felt difficult not to) in order to offer Solas one last, painful chance to do the right thing. That willful denial of your own catharsis feels like an immediate regret. Giving Solas the opportunity to pursue atonement might very well be the best choice all around, but it is also incredibly painful to offer that to someone who has done so many terrible things (not a small amount to you personally). Why does he deserve another chance? Especially when so many dead (including a beloved mentor) lie in his wake? Which, I suppose, is the point: he doesn't. But you offer it anyway and it SUCKS ASS, because how could it not?

I don't know how this plays with other story choices (a sacrificed Davrin or a Harding who embraced her anger, for example), but within the context of my own choices, I can imagine an immediate satisfaction to either tricking or fighting him--especially the trick ending, where you can actively name drop Varric--but it feels like the sort of thing that would feel worse as more time passes. Once you've calmed down and are able to ask yourself if that's what the people you've lost really wanted. Varric, in Regret Superhell, didn't want vengeance. He just wanted his friend to walk a better path. And Harding always believed there was another chance for anyone, so long as you kept reaching a hand out for them--even when it sucked ass. So the redemption ending feels like a sort of indignance, an instant regret for not doing worse, for not getting comeuppance, for being forced to eschew satisfaction (related: I wonder if the Inquisitor feels those things as well coming out of this ending, considering how long they've lived under the shadow of Solas' actions). Conversely, the other two endings feel like an immediate satisfaction, because you got to trick the trickster with all the wits Varric taught you, or because you finally got to punch him in the face and it felt really good. But I feel like those endings would come with a creeping regret, something that sneaks up on you later, especially when remembering the fallen and what they would have wanted you to do. Ultimately, because of that, it feels like no ending is devoid of regret. Which I suppose, is rather thematic.

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[rox-of-iu]

no thought only MQF in brain* (*even more than usual yeah.....)

ok lads listen up. i love allllll Mu Qingfang designs ok? all the interpretations are cool and valid and dear ok BUT. whenever I personally try to draw MQF without a 'stache he just looks to me like a first-year med student ok hjdfhkfd

but anyway. when i was scrolling around and being completely normal about MQF i saw a lot of ppl say stuff like 'this is my 'mqf is actually pretty' agenda' and its alwaysss about peeled mqf SO I HAVE A POINT TO PROVE OK. mqf with a moustache can be also a prettyboy ok?? i can prove it 😭😭

so here are my qingfangs where i turned up the babygirl vibes to absolute max as i could hsdfjkhdskfh 💜

[etourvol]

go here. go in the lake

[fjordfolk]

so this might seem like a kind of random question but I remember a while back you were saying that Luna finds the concept of puzzle toys offensive, while Sparta is absurdly good at them, and I was wondering: how does Troja feel about puzzle toys?

Troja has had a bit of a journey regardig puzzles (and training in general) where a couple of years ago, being faced with unclear situation and doubt she would become increasingly uncertain until she decided she didn't want to do it at all.

Hence why, around her last fear period, if I asked her something she wasn't 100% on or handed her something to figure out, she would go to the bedroom and would refuse to come out until dinnertime.

Now that her confidence is up, she likes it. And she often ends up solving them, but it's 50/50 whether it's on accident and if she's able to replicate it next time. She does her best though!

[adrift-in-thyme]

Gonna try to finish one of the fairy Time fics today

[neilphen]

these are my contributions to fuck that old man friday hope u enjoy

[anoddopal]

I need to talk about my Nasty Rotten Freaks™️ [☠️☠️☠️] or I’ll die—

[gentlethorns]

you know what? i'm gonna say it. i miss being seventeen. not for the "glory days," bc they weren't, by a country mile lol. if i had glory days i'd say they were in 2020. but i miss the electricity, the constant undercurrent of euphoria and deep plunging black. i miss the fight i had. i was literally known for being scrappy. i was self-destructive and coping poorly, but goddamn if i didn't burn bright and long. it took me until my twenties to finally start to fizzle out. does the candle with its wax melted down to the base of its glass cage miss when the wick was lit?

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Comparing the stylistic direction of P3R's cutscenes to the OG P3 cutscenes is the same as comparing the original Naruto cutscenes to either Shippuden's remaking of that scene or the 20th anniversary video.

It's just.....the SAME VIBE. Like if you know you know.

[pegasusknightsonly]

my problem is that more than anything else i feel so personally slighted by clinclardt not happening. tell me why intsys. i wont get mad i promise can you just tell me why

[squuote]

THINGS ARE HAPPENING THAT SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING

[gailynovelry]

When you suddenly become aware of a plot hole that probably 90% of anyone who ever looks at your stuff will not notice, think, or care about, but now it's in your brain and you need to dig up an old story to edit it into submission again.

[adzukiins]

sion (upper right) and his sister liezette (lower left)

i feel like most of their fashion has sort of an 19th century style (its a regional thing)

[mushroom-for-art]

I ran so fast lmao, reverse Pip belongs to @blues-sues once more!

Not so different

Mud and grit rubbed against his fur and skin uncomfortably in a way that made his skin crawl, the texture was unpleasant for him, though he was thankful he hadn't gotten too much of the mud in his wounds let alone his eyes. He felt his eyelid twitch in discomfort at the thought of it. A wet cloth didn't bring much comfort especially with the cold water it brought but it cleaned him off, slowly but surely.

Her aura flickered faintly in waves and rolls dancing and fading from his psychic sight, he didn't know the name of the color of her shape but it didn't look like the others, it felt fuzzy and softer making him feel a bit more safe and comfortable. The clean water splashed in its bucket as she dipped a new piece of fabric in, wringing it off and wiping away more of the mud he was coated in, the texture of grit on her own fingertips was unpleasant but she continues on, faintly they could hear others talking arguing about something that didn't concern them right now and he'd found he was getting a lot better at tuning out background noises even with his hearing being heightened.

Water droplets slid down his arm falling off of him into the sopping wet ground beneath, Muddy Water had certainly done its job. His head twitched and jerked as he felt a water droplet forming on his temple slowly sliding down to his eye sockets head twitching uncomfortably trying to shake it off, he wanted to paw at his face but his hands were still filthy and being cleaned off he could put grit in his sockets, the thought of a water droplet pooling in his eyes caused his twitching to increase.

He stilled feeling a hand move to his shoulder, water droplet still threateningly moving as his brow furrowed before a dry towel brushed past the side of his face slowly and gently up to his horn, and then it passed over his forehead collecting up the offending water droplet and any more moisture and then against the other side of his face to his horn on that side, his fur still felt moist but the thick droplets of water were gone and his anxiety began to lessen. It was a simple act but, used to having his discomforts being ignored it did bring a rush of relief.

He felt the wet cloth carefully return to cleaning off his arm of the persistent mud, cleaning the back of his hand and fingers. He swallowed quietly in thought, mouth opening and shutting again with barely a hum or croak.

".....tha….aank…" channeling his inner thoughts to be outer thoughts was harder than he had thought it would be, he could feel his temple already beginning to ache from the strain of projecting his speech, "yooouuu," it was something of a breathy exhale despite not being pushed through his lungs, he couldn't even recognise his own voice but it should have been enough. Judging by the stilling of her hand he must have heard her and it wasn't for naught.

Unfortunately he could not see the smile nor the mouthed "you're welcome," before she returned to cleaning off his hand cleaning grit from between his fingers gently. His mouth twitched awkwardly and he felt his eyebrows furrowing as he wondered why she wasn't responding to him, was he not really worth it?

As she cleaned his hand the frown on his face was noticed, as was the subtle attempt to pull his hand away from her wanting to pull away and just dunk the clean water over himself and hope that it got the dirt off and he could be alone. He felt her squeeze his digits gently and he stilled just a little as he frowned to himself before she moved his hand which was strange. He allowed it though. His damp digits made contact with skin. She was warm as she put his fingers carefully to her throat she could feel his knuckles under her chin, he wasn't sure what to make of it until he detected the texture difference.

Without her guide his finger tips traced up and down a small section of her throat feeling over the scarred tissue compared to the unscarred tissue, he stopped on the scar tissue slowly feeling across one way and then feeling across the other feeling the size of the scar. He pulled his hand away slowly and touched his fingertip to his own neck feeling the scarring there before moving to put his fingers back, attempting to find her scar again and with some guidance his fingers bumped against her scarred tissue once more.

She couldn't talk either, just like him except humans don't have telepathy. He tilted his head a bit as he stared forward without seeing as though looking at her, her hands took his and moved his touch away but he felt her softly pat the back of his hand and she squeezed his hand with hers once more and this time he didn't feel as though it was a weak attempt of crushing his hand bones. There was a quiet moment as she held his hand squeezing it softly with hers, the warmth seeming to travel up his arm through him before returning with a slosh of clean water and cloth to clean the mud from his person as it still uncomfortable caked his chest and other arm.