#my meandering

[perfectfangirl]

a lot has talked about it now but i am never getting over cooper denying dogmeat was his dog with such quickness, lucy could barely get out the question. and when roger said lucy was cooper's smoothie. that man said nothing. all he does is talk. and he said nothing. the camera didn't even pan to him or his face or nothin'. they didn't even pan to lucy's. it really is foreshadowing, i'm sick

[perfectfangirl]

no wait, not only did cooper taunt hank twice in that confrontation but he did it a third time by shooting him in the face, i knew there had to be some reason he just grazed him in the face and this really brings it home omg---

Something occurred to me about The Ghoul's confrontation with Hank where he grazes his cheek. 'No...' I thought, 'they can't have gone there, that's just too good, I must be misremembering...'

No one holds a grudge like Coop, son of a bitch...

[hinamie]

long way home

[mizzyislost]

youre interrupting them

[thenationofzaun]

It really is crazy how much they defanged Jinx this season. Season 1 Jinx went out of her way to murder enforcers. The kills were methodical, brutal, bloody, and Jinx showed no remorse for the violence she committed against Piltover's goons. Because why should she? Meanwhile, Season 2 Jinx only knocks them out and splatters their home with paint. Yes, I'm aware the paint was mixed with the Gray and she essentially blew their attack right back at them which is cool and definitely something Season 1 Jinx would do. But then that turns out not to be a big deal - one kid is shown with a mask and red eyes, no one else is shown with injuries, there are no casualties, and then the story moves on to other things and the Piltover vs Zaun war is forgotten. Fishbones is a much smaller deal than it should be too - only 3 minor characters get taken out and then Fishbones is destroyed before Jinx can do anything else with it. It's also likely the next Act will have her helping Piltover fight Noxus. All her hatred and brutality against Piltover has been toned down. They've made her completely toothless this season.

[everchased]

elf boutta pounce..

(this is what pops into my head every time he's in the background of a dialogue... quit starin at me i'm shy)

[mamawasatesttube]

superboy (2011) #3

do u ever think about how ridiculously cute this is. he just shows up!! kon calls and hes like. ding! here i am. hes perfect. the only thing about this i would change is that bart shouldve slammed directly into him with a huge dust cloud looney-tunes style (and when the dust cloud cleared they shouldve been hugging). you know. unstoppable force meets immovable object or whatever

[galedekarios]

seeing a post that basically confirmed the obvious disparity in content made me think more about a scene i would have liked to see with gale and that i've been thinking about for a while now.

i always felt a bit sad that his condition is so often treated as a joke by the fandom and to a lesser extent by the game itself. i always thought that this is partially down to the fact that we don't truly get so see gale actively be in pain due to his condition, other than brief glimpses and hints:

we do hear the urgency in his voice when he explains when and why he needs an artefact and the relief in his voice when the protag chooses to help him.

we see it, too, when he is afflicted by the arcane hunger condition:

we get glimpses of it when he consumes an artefact:

he mentions it, too, in his dialogues, but it's very much downplayed by gale or phrased in such a way that is meant to overplay it with humour, or perhaps even to distance himself from it by using metaphors:

that is until we actually get to see it through his eyes, if only for the briefest of moments:

*Its teeth, its claws, it's unstoppable as it digs through and becomes part of you. And gods, it is ever-hungry...*

gale also has an idle animation where he--quite often--reaches up to touch the orb, perhaps because it flares with pain, like an old wound is wont to do:

(gif by @bladeofavernus)

from the last conversation we have with gale, and after catching all of these little moments of things he says or does with how the orb affects him, we learn that consuming the magic from artefacts no longer has any effect at all. the only solution that tara and he were able to find no longer works:

it would scare him and imbalance him, and it would finally destabilise the orb, make it more volatile.

but what happens in the game after that? the orb becoming volatile enough for the artefacts to no longer have an effect has no consequences at all: you are able to do the tiefling party, all quests in the underdark, the entirety of the grymforge, and, should you choose to do so, the entirety of the mountain pass and rosymorn monastery without an incident at all or any mention of the condition itself/any discomfort or fear it might cause.

there's no urgency here, no follow-up, to what the narrative set up... and then we meet deus ex elminster and the orb is stabilised, and the urgency that came before literally is handwaved out of existence.

what i would have liked instead to happen--or at least to bridge the gap between the artefacts no longer working and elminster stabilising it to be used on mystra's behalf--is the following:

i think it would have been nice to have a scene with gale where we do get to see--on a much smaller scale--him losing control over the orb, have the protag and the companions see what he is trying desperately to keep contained within himself, what gnaws at him, what continues to haunt him.

it could happen perhaps after a particular gruelling and intense fight--and there are enough of that in the underdark and at the mountain pass. it could have been a ! conversation, providing both friendship and romance content.

have the orb act up after expending so much energy to manipulate the weave to the fullest of his abilities, have gale manage to reign it in, but barely, show that it takes a lot of power and effort for him to do so.

that it hurts, with none of gale's metaphors to hide behind or jokes to play it off.

have the audience truly see the gravity of what he is going through.

[corseque]

I honestly just wanted one single plot step that I could not predict given the 10 year wait. More behind the cut, I talk about Emet too, and I'm comparing his writing favorably to Solas' writing and why it worked better for me personally, but I am just talking about the writing skill that went into the games and not the dudes themselves, I love them both dearly of course. idk this is a mess and I am not going to edit it for clarity

For me, the game was a series of me saying

"ok I knew that. cool."

"oh yeah, I knew that. I guess it's good that the larger fandom knows about that now."

"nice, but yeah I already knew that too"

"that was something we've been talking about a lot for years"

"this thing they are acting like is a huge enormous reveal that the characters could not possibly have deduced through simply thinking about it in depth over the 10 years... the fans easily figured out by thinking about it in depth 10 years ago. So you would think his girlfriend would be able to figure it out more easily than we did. Like, why couldn't the game have been like 'oh lavellan already figured that out a while ago' it would have cost them nothing"

"this is something I've been thinking about for years, and now that it's being revealed, the companions' reactions to it are very irritating and jarring and unnecessary and I really dislike the experience I'm having right now, in this, the hour of my greatest triumph"

"this thing that is happening on my screen right now is something that I wrote an essay about 2 years ago describing how it would be a letdown if it happened without the correct setup"

"this way that they're characterizing Solas makes him less likable and less interesting than I have been finding him for all these years, and I have had people tell me 'no, he's simpler than you think' for years but I guess I was wrong, he really is simpler than I thought, so that fucking sucks. I wish I could take that information out of my brain."

"this thing is a retcon of information I have been thinking about for 10 years, and so I don't know how to follow along with this new direction, and I'm not sure if I even want to because it's not particularly interesting anyway"

"aw that was sweet"

"why is it like, so very impossible to have an honest back-and-forth with my favorite character about the dilemma that was most interesting to me about the previous game"

and then, as soon as, like, the other fans had caught up to the Solas lore that was really obvious from the other games, the game was.... over without anything surprising happening, or introducing a new element or plot point or perspective, or a real true twist (or two, or three) for those of us who have thought about it too hard for too long. It was very simple and easy, much, much, much, much easier than I was imagining. It all felt sort of like that Nicholson quote:

The thing was, the whole story was so interesting to think about because in 10 years, I couldn't figure out a good solution to it!!!!! It's why I was never able to write post-game fanfic about it. So I was stoked to find out some reveal we never knew about, some new information, in maybe a SERIES of steps of new information, that made the situation more complicated but also something that could be navigated by everyone involved. I know it was asking for a lot, but they had TEN YEARS, and they seemingly had set up the things they did in DAI on purpose, so surely they had some idea of a complex and satisfying narrative that would reconcile everyone.

The reason why I was expecting this is because FFXIV did a very similar story arc, which was started AND concluded WITHIN those 10 years (so it took the FFXIV team far less time to deliver as well). And the conclusion to the story in FFXIV did what I was expecting Dragon Age to do. So I thought, "holy shit, if this is the FFXIV version of this plot, how much more complicated is DA4 going to be!?!?" The DA devs also PLAYED FFXIV so they were completely aware, several years ago, of a satisfying story ending that was pretty darn similar.

People are probably going to think "oh, well Chelsea was disappointed because she spent too much time building it up in her head" but that's exactly it - I actually speculated and thought about FFXIV's story IN DEPTH NONSTOP for a year+ before its ending came out, and the ending absolutely blew me away. FFXIV Endwalker managed to introduce information and new story elements that I was not able to figure out in the YEAR I spent speculating on the ending of FFXIV's story. It took a complicated situation and revealed several several more facets to it that I was not able to predict, but were very interesting and thematically compelling, and took us all to surprising and climactic places that we could not have predicted.

Endwalker ("end" is in the title on purpose) too, was written to be THE ULTIMATE SATISFYING ENDING for a very long-running story in the exactly way that Veilguard SHOULD HAVE for Dragon Age, so while this complexity is being explored, FFXIV also gave catharsis to many different plot threads that have been built up through the previous expansions, until finally it ends with a bang. The story is desperately good to me, I loved it, it gave me closure for Dragon Age long before Veilguard was even revealed, and going back and looking at its story has made this whole thing far less painful for me.

So, I actually did not have a picture in my mind for how things SHOULD go. I just had the thought "I hope it's complicated and there are points of view or facts that we haven't before been exposed to, and the situation is resolved respectfully for Solas, not making him look like a fucking idiot (lol, the only thing I asked for). I don't even care what happens to Solas and Lavellan, I just need the story to be complicated and interesting to think about. Please, god, don't let it be "solas is wrong and he just needs to be convinced" because that's like the simplest story you could tell with this setup"

(btw they managed to tell Emet-Selch's story without making him seem like he's being an idiot on purpose or can never get anything right, and in fact the more the story goes on, the more you think of him as smart and capable and cool, so it is possible to write.... I wasn't asking for the entire moon)

And I played it and... yeah. Most of the story beats were more simple than I wanted them to be, a lot of them didn't make sense in my heart given the writing from Inquisition. (This is another essay, but if Solas' thematic story arc was always about him needing to let go of regrets, why was his personal quest the way it was? After that quest, doesn't he end up regretting not doing more....? Why did he never really talk about regret during Inquisition? If he was so trapped by regret, why was he able to do so many actions? It doesn't mesh well to me. The whole regret thing was very quarter-baked to me, I don't even like thinking about it.) His story never seemed like one that was as simple as being about one man's regrets, but then, I guess, it was always just about one man's regrets.

Emet-Selch's personal storyline (and the way it interacts with and affects the larger story) is very similar but much more cohesive and satisfying to me. It would be difficult to explain why without the aforementioned 5-hour essay. Emet-Selch's story IS about grief and anguish on a world-shaping scale in a similar way that Solas' was apparently always about letting go of regret, but Emet's story was also very pointedly and beautifully about that one theme for the entirety of his story from every tiny detail, from beginning to end - meanwhile, it seemed to me that they tried to introduce 'regret' as the main thrust of Solas' story only in the short story with the Regret demon onward.

From Inquisition just by itself, the closest I personally could get to a story theme for Solas was his inability to trust others hurting him and the world, but his trusting others in DA4 wasn't really addressed to my satisfaction. He is never required to trust anyone before the ending, he never opens up or makes himself vulnerable at all. People find out information about him, he never really dynamically opens himself. So the personal story I thought he had was never addressed at all, while a new one about regret was introduced that never made a ton of sense to me. And I don't think this is just because of my expectations - my reaction to FFXIV proves that I am able to meet good writing where it goes in surprising directions, as long as it's interesting and thoughtful and clear.

And I think this might be part of what people felt was off about the ending - Solas is sort of uninvolved in the revelations that are about him, and doesn't do much to be part of his own ending. Part of what I loved about Solas in Inquisition is that he is not controlled by you in any way, and so he feels like his own person with a very strong sense of character.

Anyway, Emet-Selch, in a very comparable and arguably more extreme plot position, is very involved in the revelations about himself, he always feels like a very strong character who cannot be affected by the player, and the whole situation is handled with deft emotion and care and delicacy. The story is comparatively very uninterested in litigating Emet-Selch or putting him on trial - the story allows you to simply feel the way that you feel in an organic way, and Emet's story spends that energy instead actually exploring his thematic material about grief and legacy, and the larger story theme of existentialism instead, in a way that is very refreshing and interesting. I've seen a lot of western stories tie themselves in knots over "redemption" and frankly it's almost never been interesting at all. Who cares about any of that. lol

(Now, I guess this is a matter of preference, because some people really like being able to shape a character's story, but idk I rewatched the ending of FFXIV and even though there wasn't a choice with Emet, because it isn't a branching story, his story felt more satisfying to me, maybe because there isn't a patronizing choice to be made for him. He is who he is, and he fulfills a very beautiful narrative role and purpose that no other character could in the story.)

I don't know how this could have been improved to me and still allowed players to choose Solas' ending for him, but I can actually think of a few different methods, none of which involve Rook condescendingly and patronizingly lecturing Solas as if Solas had never thought about a single aspect of this horrible situation he's in before that very moment that Rook lectures him lmfao.

All this to say... idk I'm writing this and I am not going back to edit it so it's stream-of-consciousness. But yeah

I just wanted the story to be complicated on a few more levels than I could have predicted. I genuinely don't care what happened, but I thought of a few twists like the Veil coming down and yeah, I was expecting A Single Twist or reveal to happen. In a Dragon Age game.

I wanted Solas to seem cool and capable and noble and smart, and actually feel like he was as old and experienced as he is.

I wanted a clear theme I could sink my teeth into

Like notice I didn't even say anything about Solavellan. Like I never in 100 years thought they were getting a happy ending where they were both alive in bodies, and I like that we got that, but I would honestly trade it for a more complicated story. To me, if a story is sad you can always write fanfic, but if a story isn't COMPLICATED, that's a much more urgent issue.

These 3 things DA4 didn't give me in a way that satisfied me but FFXIV did. anyway idk the way my hyperfixations work, I completely switch to a new subject so talking about Dragon Age is actually hard for me right now.

[secretagentspydetectiveninja]

can't get over how fucked up and weird nahyuta is... like i don't mean in the surface-level haha "what's crack-a-lackin homie" way, i mean this kid who grew up on the run as essentially a wanted criminal, who got separated from his brother in the middle of his childhood, throwing himself into monk training and religion to find some semblance of peace and meaning to his suffering, only to end up tortured and held hostage by his own aunt and having years worth of blood on his hands from all the people he sent to their deaths... helpless and drowning with his sole hope being that dhurke would save him, then finding out that dhurke was already dead and he'd lost his chance to ever reconcile... and not wanting to lose apollo on top of it too, but not able to bring himself to sacrifice rayfa for it!! watching his mother get shot in front of his eyes!! his family members all being used against each other as chess pieces to control him!!! and there's nothing he can do!!!!

and like even just as a person the way he's so down to just infodump about whatever he's been researching and how his interest in science alongside his deep spirituality complements his partnership with ema, who he is way nicer to than literally any other prosecutor ever treats their detective, he's so weird and curious and genuinely sweet under the cruel façade... he is so much. can't get over how he's a prosecutor AND a monk and even a prince. he's literally the actual prince regent of a country. he's THE androgynous icon. and he's hot!!!

[perfectfangirl]

fallout is nominated for sixteen emmys 🥲 [and one of them is for walton goggins] https://discussingfilm.net/2024/07/17/emmys-2024-the-full-nominations-list/

[mystical-one]

music conspiracy tumblr in 1967

🎸 blondeonblonde1966 Follow

lets be honest bob dylans ass did NOT get into a motorcycle crash like he didnt even try to make it real. there was literally no ambulance no records of the crash NOTHING. shes sucha faker but i respect it

💀 cranberry-sauce Follow

he was jealous of paul mccartney

🎸 blondeonblonde1966 Follow

ok

72 notes

🍓 wheres-the-bus Follow

Paul McCartney, 1942-1966

7,235 notes

🐒 clarrksvilleee Follow

why does michael nesmith seem so hostile towards peter tork irl...honestly i think they should settle it like men and make love in the green grass like god intended

7 notes

🎹 catch61 Follow

honestly i cant believe people are still dumb enough to be watching/posting about the m*nkees. i will fucking block you. it is literally appropriating youth culture and monetising it for their own gain ffs

🎹 catch61 Follow

SOMEONE JUST TOLD ME THEY LOCK THE ACTORS IN A MEAT LOCKER BETWEEN TAKES COME ON 😭😭 have any of you realised that you are actively giving money to a studio thats literally evil. i dont care about the actors or their stupid fake music but come onnnn

17 notes

🍒 tuttifrutti reblogged valleyofthedollies

🍓 wheres-the-bus

Paul McCartney, 1942-1966

#HES LITERALLY ALIVE?? #what the fuck is going on rn

7,235 notes

💊 valleyofthedollies Follow

woke up today and everyone is posting that paul mccartney died..i dont want to believe it but theres so much evidence for it :(

7 notes

🎱 coffeecolouredcadillac Follow

10.8k notes

[thefaiao]

Recent Meanderer drawings. Monk girl and Tuto.

[mizzyislost]

apparently theres some rain world fandom discourse going around?? thats crazy anyways heres my gourmand and artificer as one of my favorite pieces of sonic fanart (its the last one)

[meanderingcomic]

(Page 258) chapter five: page 6

[whatsitzface]

The way Annabeth was thinking so far ahead of Percy that Percy was confused. The way she refused to elaborate on anything, and then was like; 'I'm surrounded by idiots' whenever someone (Percy) didn't understand her. The way she looked so smug after she pushed Percy into the water and he got claimed. THE WAY SHE WAS SO BLUNT!!!!! ("ARE YOU STALKING ME??" "yeah lol")

Sorry, but that's the most accurate Annabeth in the world holy smokes Leah did such a good job. All my forgotten love for Annabeth's character that I felt while reading the books just crashed into me full force and I'm frothing at the mouth with obsession.

“-You’re gonna expect me to know how to do something I don’t know how to do, and I end up falling flat on my face, I- I can’t really have that right now.” “You still don’t get where you fit into all of this, do you?” SHE’S TALKING ABOUT THE PROPHECY AND HOW SHE KNOWS HE'S A POSIEDON KID, BUT SHE HIDES IT AS HOW HE DOESN’T KNOW HIS PLACE IN THE CAPTURE THE FLAG GAME!!!! BECAUSE SHE WON’T TELL HIM!!!! AND ITS EPIC BECAUSE IN THE CAPTURE THE FLAG GAME HE DOES FALL FLAT ON HIS FACE, BUT IN THE PROPHECY HE DOES GET HIS DAD TO SEE HIM!!!! And then she fixes his armor plate, making sure that its secure. Making sure he won't get hurt. That's not part of her plan, and things always go according to her plan. She's the game master. IM SCREAMING