#i wish they happened more often

[mythicalcoolkid]

You don't wish your disability was worse or more visible, you wish your disability was taken seriously. Please stop confusing the two, I guarantee you would not get the support you need JUST by being more severe or more visible. Please listen to visibly disabled people when we tell you it isn't better on our side

[vaguely-concerned]

My two cents on how much of Mind!Varric is Rook’s mind trying to fill the blank space and how much is Solas actively talking through a convenient blood magic paper doll of the mind: I think it's a mix of both, a truly collaborative psychosocial horrorshow if you would, but waaaay more towards the second. It feels too directed and tactical at times to be anything else. Rook's mind is willing to go along with the denial phase as far as it can fucking carry them to not have to face the grief and regret and does its part in papering over details that don’t make any sense, the way brains will strive to create coherent meaning even out of deeply confusing input, but to my understanding it's a collaborateur in how that plays out, not the instigator or control center. Solas is using it as a path to agency and to gather insight into Rook as a person unguarded as he can't count on in his own guise. (That stoic option that leads to him being like 'oh I see you're cautiously denying me access to your inner life. well. at least you still have Varric to talk to. y'know as an outlet :)'. You absolute BITCH Solas! That alone convinced me that he HAS to have an active hand in it on some level.)

My guess is that it takes considerable effort on Solas’ part to make Mind!Varric do anything more involved or complicated than seeming to sit up in bed and give casual commentary, and that’s why he keeps having eerie five minute shallow pep talks with you before he announces he conveniently needs a nap aaanyway good luck kid you got this haha. When he’s just spouting NPC lines from his bedrest, I’m ready to believe that could be Rook’s mind being allowed to improv lines for him more freely because it’s less about Solas trying to get something out of them or working an angle and more ‘Still here! Still totally alive and fine and the mentor figure you know and love and trust :) don’t even worry about it! Thankfully there is no war in Ba Sing Sei, as we all know’ upkeep work lol. Rook’s mind is allowed to set the tone of Varric, the outlines, but not always the content. 

AND, on a (beautifully fucked up) character psychology level, I feel like Solas is indulging in actually getting to be the good supportive mentor figure to Rook with one hand to assuage the guilt he feels about what he's done -- and what he's going to do -- to them with the other. Same internal logic as he uses in Trespasser about the Qun. ‘Almost everyone is going to die from the course of action I’m doggedly pursuing eventually. But at least I can make their last years happier and freer and kinder than they would have been otherwise. and that kind of makes up for it right. a little bit. doesn't it. doesn't that make it better at least. I need that to make it better)'. Did I really take your beloved mentor and friend from you if you don’t know yet that I did? Some philosophers would argue not really! So it’s probably almost ok actually. Isn’t it even a little noble that I’m taking all this grief and guilt on myself and shielding you for now. With undertones that I’m not sure he would realize himself (and might be mortified by if he did) that he is so incredibly lonely, and even a dishonest and indirect emotional connection is more than nothing when you’re that desperate. In this setup he gets idk. Both the control he craves so incredibly badly in relationships and over himself, and the scraps, the fading afterimages, of intimacy and warmth and companionship, even second hand. The one thing Solas and Rook agree on deep deep down is that they really wish Varric weren't gone. They're handshake memeing this in the saddest and most creepy way possible.

I think an important element too is that Solas needs Rook and their team to *succeed* —  up to a certain point. He needs someone to hold the two other elven mean girls off until he can get out of here. Ideally, in a perfect world, even do all the hard work of killing them so he can swoop in at the end and do his thing when both sides are exhausted and out of resources to stop him, and then Bob’s your uncle! Same logic as he was using with Corypheus, and after that worked out so well, too! King of choosing to never learn from a single solitary mistake he’s ever made even though i fully believe he could have the capacity to Fen’Harel <3 The underlying idea isn’t flawed, you see, it was just unforeseen circumstances getting in the way. This time for sure it’ll all work out the way I cleverly imagined it in my head beforehand. Cue By Talos this can’t be happening etc. in the form of a statue almost crushing him like a bug. 

So he's providing guidance and forging Rook into a leader from two angles: one Rook might not trust, and one they probably will. Shaping them into what he needs slowly and carefully. He’s helping you hone your team into their most effective state, as he might have done with his own agents back in the day, setting up his chess pieces even if he has to squint through two glimpsed realities to do it haha. Pincer maneuver of an insidious stealth mentor you never asked for. Also… at one point mind Varric gives you a whole little monologue about how Solas' problem is that he’s always seen his interpersonal connections as flaws and see where it’s landed him, all alone and the worst part? it hasn’t even worked. it’s all been for nothing he’s back where he began with nothing to show for it but his mistakes. Like...that has such strong 'uh okay happy to play your therapist from two rooms away here what the fuck kind of traumadump is this' energy to me, I’m not sure Rook like. Thinks that much about Solas as a private person. So much of Solas' self-loathing and futile insights into his own flaws seem to shine through in Mind!Varric's dialogue all the time — I just can't believe that there's no guiding hand behind it as it were. 

Most of all. I feel like people underestimate the degree to which Solas is incredibly funny. As in, he has a very consistent and recognizable sense of humour. It’s one of my very favourite things about him. We must remember — it is crucial that we always keep in mind — Orlesian accent and wig Solas from May The Dread Wolf Take You (my beloved, the explanation for why I love this dude even with the. All of the everything else. No one does it quite like him). He is not at all above doing things or adding little flourishes for his own obscure amusement, in fact that seems to me to be one of his most consistent traits. The Randy Dowager Quarterly comment Varric has? The ‘Maybe this is the Dread Wolf’s revenge. Forcing us to house sit for him’ thing? To Me this is 100% Solas amusing himself in his boring Fade jail surrounded by the screaming hellscape of all his regrets. Source: it came to me as divine revelation through pure vibes trust me bro 

If nothing else I find it much more narratively interesting personally if the connection between Rook and Solas really is that defenselessly intimate and entwined (and so unbalanced!), and the sense of violation and invasion and betrayal afterwards consequently all the more nauseatingly intense. Even if you kept him at arm’s length in the open, he’s been under your skin the whole time, looking around, gathering what he needs to destroy you, wearing the face of a friend. Regretfully, probably, but choosing to do it every step of the way anyway. (Sound familiar, Inquisitor? Solas doesn’t have that many tricks when you actually look at it, he keeps returning to old tried and true ones like a dog with a bone haha.) Maybe he even genuinely meant some of it as mercy, which only makes it so much worse. It makes his sin against his own core principles of autonomy and the freedom of all beings in mind, spirit and body so much more juicily grave if it’s something he pursues actively and consistently, rather than it half-falling into his lap as a happy accident mainly orchestrated by Rook’s own subconscious. Solas, too, is at his very lowest point, the closest to giving in and becoming his own antithesis fully that he’s ever been, and it makes the choice of whether you still reach out your hand to him one last time or not all the more impactful and difficult.

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[ghostorbz]

I love when his glasses do the anime thing

[heartistii]

» gullible, naïve, foolish

[nazarbabe]

repost bc i'm a fucking idiot and deleted it

Original

[fromtheseventhhell]

Remember George's outline notes that had "joy of giving" and "mercy at the gate" for Arya? Mercy is crossed out and we obviously have that as her sample chapter, so what if Arya's next alias is "Joy"? Over-thinking the significance of that phrase and how it could apply to the rest of her Braavos arc🤔

[gomzdrawfr]

We are getting words in as I wrestle with my brain

this mtf (points at myself) loves stars and galaxy imageries

also random thought, does any fic writers do the thing when writing from art like this? xD I always like to pick things I've noticed from the piece itself, putting it in bullet points and then expand my ideas from there then try to connect them to paragraphs

[luck-of-the-drawings]

oh the dread, oh the worry! you love your sister so much and you need to know shes okay. you trust her but you cant trust the world, and more than anything else you cant trust yourself

[joshuaalbert]

kai winn’s relationship to religion really is just so interesting to me in a way I come back to sometimes like. she’s the leader of a faith and her gods will not speak to her. they will speak to other people in front of her and they will make a human from a society that did not interfere with her planet’s suffering their emissary but they will not speak to her. and I’m sure she can do a lot to justify it in her mind because she would have to be able to in order to keep any faith, and she has to keep her faith because she says herself that’s all she had in the camps, but that’s still a terrible thing to experience. and I’m sure a lot of people would argue that it’s not real faith, it’s ambition, but I think it’s some of both, and most importantly I think on the most immediate levels she believes it’s faith.

and like I think she and a lot of other bajorans have a reason to have a really complicated relationship with the prophets because the more demonstrably real and powerful they are, the more they’re willing to interfere in things like the dominion war, the harder it would be for a lot of people to justify to themselves why the prophets didn’t do anything to stop the genocide of their chosen people. I think the pah wraiths plotline ultimately fell kind of flat when it kind of boiled down to “dukat’s weird cult” and it was also a victim of the season’s pacing issues, but it has some interesting implications regarding this divide in the bajoran people, particularly when their religious leader’s faith is being so seriously called into question.

[milenaas1]

૮ . . ྀིა⁩

[abrahamvanhelsings]

"goodsir is neoliberalism bc he tried to kill those guys blah blah blah" they kidnapped him and then they made him cut up men to be consumed as an act of control and pure humiliation by threatening to kill probably the last man he still liked in that party, forcing him to be complicit in an act he is viciously against, and to be complicit in the survival of the very men who betrayed the whole expedition and who are using him like a tool. and then the guy he's trying to protect comes up to him to sob and monologue at him about cannibalism and religion and acts of survival and belief as some kind of justification for the fact that he's an absolute pussy ass bitch who'd rather lie down and take it than stand up in the face of acts and circumstances he finds abhorrent. and goodsir was supposed to not be a cunt abt that? lol

[noisytenant]

Being reminded once again that a lot of people have fucking sleeper cell agent triggers that make them instantly fail to see the human being in front of them, regardless of any personal history they have or any rapport. instantly, that person is an Enemy that cannot be reasoned with. Permanent fight or flight.

And that instead of this being seen as, you know, a rather maladaptive attitude to bring to your relationships that will permanently strip you of the capacity to experience full love and companionship, there is a dominant strain of thinking that this is a reasonable, righteous, moral good.

That a "boundary" looks like building an impenetrable wall that nobody can see but you; That conversation, negotiation, and collaboration aren't just avoided--They're treated with contempt. The very notion of trying to understand why another human being that you care about may suddenly act in an unpleasant or even monstrous way is spat upon and trampled underfoot. Complete abandonment is considered a first line of defense rather than a last resort.

I think we all need to do our best to get over this kind of thinking. And I don't mean that we should be push-overs; In actuality, moving away from this kind of rigid "boundary" often means advocating for yourself and fighting for what you think is right. I think we all deserve friends and allies who can compassionately challenge us when we adopt ways of thinking and behaving that hurt others without immediately assuming the worst.

[lemongogo]

[sinnettini]

i came out as nonbinary to my therapist and it feels good 😭😭

[cuntftmtf]

i noticed ive stopped using the misgendering kink tag in my posts... probably because being called a girl no longer feels like misgendering 💕