#possible game spoilers??

[kraefishh]

figured i'd post mine and my friends wols on main for the time being while im still stockpiling stuff for when i eventually make that side blog for em

basic stuff is - 1) there's more than one wol 2) by more than one i mean there are seven of them 3) each one/two of them are designated for a specific expansion 4) i have so much stuff planned for them all and have not even finished stormblood (please help me)

also im putting them under a cut so the post isnt naturally extremely fucking long

SO WE'LL START IN ORDER!!!!

Alidae Mendica -- ARR WoL. only one without a "traditional" name convention. SMN/MCH/GNB. bloody banquet happened and she got to ishgard and went "NOPE. I'M DONE." and goes and spends most of her time at the skysteel manufactory with garlond ironworks.

i love her very much she was the first i made. i nearly played an elezen but then really wanted to be small. so after finishing the opening cutscene i restarted and well!! shes here!! shes ready to kick some ass!!!

T'lyr Kho -- 1/2 Heavensward WoLs. is half miqo half garlean, possesses the third eye as well (hence the shaggy hair+forehead coverings). PLD/DRG/DRK/SGE. is never doing well at any given moment. he is (not) coping.

he's the one who made me spiral and make 3 more characters. i love him so so dearly.

Touya Kawa (@twisted-solace's wol) -- the other Heavensward WoL. WAR/DRG/RPR. the most shy and well spoken but will not hesitate to cleave you. works himself to death (quite nearly literally!).

i wish i had more to say about him other than he is very silly. him and t'lyr picked up lancer as a bonding experience and then got roped into dragoon lore (whoopsie!!)

Koren Cadoret -- 1/2 Stormblood WoLs. has 1v1'd Zenos too many times to count. very very protective of his sister and friends. MNK/SAM (plus blue mage and soon to be viper!!).

I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM I LOVE HIM!!!! punch first ask questions later. wants to be everyone's friend. separation anxiety got his ass in shadowbringers cause he was the last wol to be summoned to the first.

Raana Cadoret -- the other Stormblood WoL. took her brother and left her village the moment she was declared to be the next matriarch. DNC/AST/RDM. likes to give koren shit about his poor decisions.

she makes me go :) !!!!! we really cant decide if she picks up astrologian on the first or if she does it beforehand.

Sthallona Dhemskyltwyn -- 1.0 WoL and also Shadowbringers at the same time?? shes going through it. WHM/BLM. grew up the daughter of a famous pirate. Thancred's childhood best friend.

feigned death after the calamity until she gets pulled to the first and is like "AH SHIT. HERE WE GO AGAIN." she gives me perhaps the most brainworms.

AND FINALLY

Sarangerel Malqir (@trying_to_cosplay on insta's wol) -- Endwalker WoL while also being a whole can of worms by herself. was her universe's only WoL before shit collided in shadowbringers and she met everyone else

the love of my life-- ahem. currently only Warrior canonically because my friend is not even halfway through ARR. very much younger sibling energy to the rest of the scions/wols.

last notes - 1) t'lyr and touya are gay (lovingly referred to as 'the boyfs' by me and @twisted-solace) touya nearly fucking dies for t'lyr and t'lyr proceeds to go oh wait fuck i dont want to lose you. normal shit for their line of work. 2) koren canonically says "you wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid" to zenos. and zenos proceeds to get very confused. zenos isnt even who he ends up with koren just likes fucking with him. 3) raana went through 4 different wol/npc ship ideas before we finally landed on hien. that was hell. 4) alidae and cid are best friends!! stamp of approval right here!!! alidae also hates nero's guts. 5) if biggs and wedge (who i lovingly refer to as the 'lab boys') are around, alidae is not far behind. 6) alidae was named before i realized there was a character named alisaie. this is canonically a struggle for everyone. 7) sthallona swam her ass to sharlayan upon realizing that thancred had been taken under louisoix's wing. insert LET ME IN. LET ME IIIIIIN gif here. she wrote a thesis on how to combine conjuring and thaumaturge magic before ever knowing what a red mage was. (she is very stupid but also unnaturally smart). 8) t'lyr can't use magic. point blank. his third eye fucks that up for him. only reason he can be a Sage is because the magitek does it for him. on the bright side he's really good at parkour!!!

anyway if you got down this far thank you for looking at my blorbos. i am working (not very) hard to get that sideblog set up for these weirdos. i appreciate them very much they consume my every waking thought.

[kocho15]

Safety.

[nidbaesenpai]

Dare you say this love could just save you

[felassan]

EuroGamer: 'BioWare knew the deepest secrets of Dragon Age lore 20 years ago, and locked it away in an uber-plot doc'

Original creator David Gaider on how "some of the big mysteries are being solved".

Rest of post under a cut due to length and possible spoilers.

"As I write about the secrets hidden in Dragon Age's mysterious Fade, and as I uncover some of them playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, one question keeps rising up in my mind. How much did BioWare know about future events when first developing the series more than 20 years ago? That's a long time, and back then BioWare didn't know there would be a second game, which is why Dragon Age: Origins has an elaborate and far-reaching epilogue. Why lay so much lore-track ahead of yourself if you don't think you'll ever get there? But look more closely at Origins and there are big clues suggesting BioWare did know about future Dragon Age events. There are obvious signs in the original game, such as establishing recurring themes like Old Gods and the Blight and Archdemons. But there's also Flemeth, Morrigan's witchy mother, who's intimately linked to events in the series now - more specifically: intimately linked to Solas. Does her existence mean Solas was known about back then too? There's only one person I can think of to answer this and it's David Gaider, the original creator of Dragon Age's world and lore. We've talked before, once in a podcast and once for a piece on the magic of fantasy maps, where we discussed the creation of Dragon Age's world. And much to my surprise, when I ask him what he and the BioWare team knew back then, he says they knew it all. "By the time we released Dragon Age: Origins, we were basically sure that it was one and done, but there was, back when we made the world, an overarching plan," he says. "The way I created the world was to seed plots in various parts of the world that could be part of a game, a single game, and then there was the overall uber-plot, which I didn't know for certain that we would ever get to but I had an understanding of how it all worked together. "A lot of that was in my head until we were starting Inquisition and the writers got a little bit impatient with my memory or lack thereof, so they pinned me down and dragged the uber-plot out of me. I'd talked about it, I'd hinted at it, but never really spelled out how it all connected, so they dragged it out of me, we put it into a master lore doc, the secret lore, which we had to hide from most of the team.""

"This uber-plot document was only viewable on a need-to-know basis, he says, and only around 20 people on the team had access to it - other senior writers mostly. And even though Gaider left the Dragon Age team after Inquisition, and then eight years ago BioWare altogether, meaning he didn't work on The Veilguard at all, he believes - by looking at the events in the new game - his uber-plot lore "has more or less held up". That's impressive. What's even more impressive, or exciting, is that back then he also envisaged a potential end state for the entire Dragon Age series - a point at which it would make no sense for the series to carry on. "I always had this dream of where it would all end, the very last plot," he says, "which I won't say because who knows, we could still end up there. But the idea that this uber-plot was this sort of biggest, finite... That the final thing you could do in this world that would break it was there as a 'maybe we would get to do that one day'... There was just the idea of certain big, world-shaking things that were seeded in that arc, some of which have already come to pass, like the return of Fen'Harel." You've read that correctly: the idea to have Fen'Harel, also known as the Dread Wolf, reappear, was seeded all the way back then, way before Inquisition - the game in which he does actually reappear. But the concept for Solas, as a character who was Fen'Harel in disguise, was a newer idea. "That spawned from a conversation I had with Patrick [Weekes] and a number of other writers," Gaider says, "as an idea of 'what if you had a villain that spent an entire game where he's actually in the party and you get to know him?' Now, the god version and his larger role in the plot, yes that was known, but not that he would be presented as a character named Solas." Fen'Harel being known about means the other elven gods were known about, which means all of that stuff Solas reveals about his godly siblings - that they're not gods at all but evil elven mages he locked away behind the Veil - was known about back then too. "Oh yeah," Gaider says. "Everything that Solas tells you [at the end of Inquisition DLC, Trespasser]: it's all part of that original uber-lore - that was all in our mind." But why have so much lore if you're not certain you'll get to ever realise it? Well, to create a believable illusion. By creating an "excess" of lore, as Gaider describes it, Origins made Thedas feel like an old and believable place. A place with history, rather than a Western set that was all facade and no substance."

"BioWare also did something canny with the lore it did relay then, too: it shared it through the voices of characters living in the world, making it inherently fallible. In doing this, Dragon Age veiled its truths behind biases. The church-like organisation of the Chantry proclaims one truth, while the elves and dwarves proclaim another. Sidenote: you can experience this yourself through different racial origin stories in Dragon Age: Origins. This way, there's no one, objective, irrefutable, truth. "To get the truth, you kind of have to pick between the lines," Gaider says. So even though elven legends are coming true through the existence of Solas and The Veilguard's antagonist gods, it doesn't mean that's the one and only truth. There's truth in what the Chantry teaches and what the dwarves say, he tells me, which ignites my curiosity intensely. BioWare has also been tricksy in how it's rubbed out the lore the further back in time you go. "In general, the further the history goes back, we always would purposefully obfuscate it more and more," Gaider says - "make it more biased and more untrue no matter who was talking, just so that the absolute truth was rarely knowable. I like that idea from a world standpoint, that the player always has to wonder and bring their own beliefs to it." It leads into a founding principle of Dragon Age, which is doubt - because without it, you can't have faith, a particularly important concept in the series. It's where the whole idea of the Chantry's Maker comes from and with it, the legend about the fabled Golden City - now the Black City - at the heart of the Fade. This is the very centre of the lore web, and, I imagine, it's close to the series endpoint Gaider imagined long ago. All secrets end there. Did Gaider know what was in the Black City when he laid down Origins' lore? That's the question - and it startles me how casually he answers this. "Oh, yeah," he says. "What was in the Black City: that's the uber-plot. I knew exactly. "Was it as detailed in the first draft of the world?" he goes on. "No. I had an idea of the early history because that's where I started making the world. So the things that were true early-early: I knew exactly what the Black City was and the idea of what the elves believed, and what humans believed vis-a-vis the Chantry - that was all settled on really early. Then I expanded the world and the uber-plot bubbled out of that.""

"Gaider shows me the original cosmology design document for Dragon Age: Origins as if to prove this - or rather for the game that would become DAO. The world was known as Peldea back then. I can't share this with you because I see it via a shared screen on a video call, and because Gaider doesn't want me to, mostly because the ideas are so old they're almost unrecognisable from what's in the series now. But I can tell you it's a document that's just over a page in length, and that there's a circular diagram at the top showing the world in the middle and the spirit realm ringed around it. And on that document is reference to the Chantry's beliefs about a God located in a citadel that can be found there. Gaider says BioWare knew about Fen'Harel (the Dread Wolf) 20 years ago when it was developing Dragon Age: Origins, and that he'd one day reappear. The Fade wasn't known as the Fade back then, either, but as the Dreaming, because it's the place people go when they dream - an idea that lives on still. And if that sounds familiar to any fans of The Sandman among you, it should. "I'd say The Sandman series was probably fairly prominently in my head," says Gaider. "I liked that amorphous geography that was born from the psyche of collective humanity. I'd say yes, if I was to point at something specifically, that's probably where the very first inspiration of it took root." It's a lot to take in, but it reinforces the admiration I have for Dragon Age. Just as I have when hearing about the creation of my other favourite fantasy worlds, such as A Song of Ice and Fire, I begin to understand the magnitude - and the deliberateness - of the plotting that went on. I wonder if one day the Dragon Age series will end in the way Gaider first imagined, albeit slightly altered by the many other pairs of hands shepherding it along now. What a curious feeling it must be to know, so many years in advance, where things might go. Where that end is, I don't know, but I do know we'll take a significant step towards it in The Veilguard. After all, we're coming into contact with gods who were there at the recorded beginning of it all. "Yeah - we have access to people who can tell us the truth from first-hand experience," Gaider says, "although again, it depends on what the writers did with it. But if they continued the tradition of Dragon Age, you never know for sure if Solas is telling you everything, or what you're learning is the entire truth. "But yes, some of the big mysteries are being solved. I mean, will they one day definitively tell you about the Maker? Will we crack the big mysteries of the world and just make them answered finally? And does that ruin one of the central precepts that Dragon Age is founded upon? Maybe," he says. "Ultimately, that lore, when you make it big and you hint at it and hint at it and hint at it, it becomes a Chekhov's Gun of sorts. Eventually you got to pony up.""

[source]

[egophiliac]

now that I can think semi-coherently again...whooooo's ready for Friday WEEHOO

[dykedvonte]

I think about the fact Anya locking herself in the infirmary with Curly to kill herself and how it is in way reclaiming a space that was initially hers from Jimmy.

Not to mention how she must've been aware of Jimmy's obsession with Curly and the idea that he would lose his power over the both of them (based on the fact she likely thought they would never get the door open) and having to face the responsibility of two deaths being on his hands as acting captain.

It was her final act of agency stuck on that ship with her abuser and it says something that she chose to die next to Curly, despite his inaction, leaned against him as if they were just in a casual conversation before her death. Despite everything, Anya made the final decision on her own terms and it speaks volumes considering her treatment and demeanor up until that point.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

love how Solar Opposites started out as a sitcom about two aliens who can't stand each other, stuck with their teenage clones (whom they also can't stand) & a toddler antichrist (whom they view as a sort of self-sufficient free-roaming hamster?) on a stupid planet they can't stand

and 4 seasons later it's a sitcom about a family of genderqueer aliens, headed by a gay couple in a happy & horny open marriage (with a graphic off-screen sex life, despite their canonical lack of genitalia?) teaching themselves to be okay parents to their 3 kids (whose Sci-Fi Antics now slightly-less-frequently revolve around wreaking havoc on human bystanders, and slightly-more-frequently revolve around alien-clone-sibling-bonding*), to the point that the central plot point becomes "We need to provide our toddler antichrist with a stable home environment."

(also the grumpy alien husband is too busy ingratiating his family with their suburban neighbors to even remember whom or what he dislikes. what is this show)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Reasons to play In Stars and Time: Canon Pronoun Warfare.

[asykriel]

It'll only be a taste, I swear

[go-learn-esperanto]

Grian is a danger to have on your team not because he'll kill with no problems (well, he will probably do that) but because he has a way of subtly convincing people to do the stupidest thing imaginable. Things that normally you'd think "What?? That's stupid! I'm gonna die!" but Grian is like "let's play a game!" And everyone is always like "alright," And he'll say "Let's all get eachother with a fishing rod and I'll push you of this high pillar" in Double Life or, in the first Limited Life episode "Let's dig straight down!" or "Let's set fire to the building and who lasts longer wins ;)" and the people, who should know he's the person with most kill counts on the whole series, still go “that sounds like a perfectly reasonable and fun game. I'm in!"

[phiklimz]

They’re such insane narrative foils I could talk abt it forever

[aq2003]

has anyone gotten the idea that odysseus' storyline in hades 2 is a depiction/exploration of trauma over his SA and how he's blaming himself for things that were out of his control? because that's the impression i'm getting from what i've seen. he talks about "goddesses" as his "greatest weakness" and that "he's not one to say no to them"...

when mel invites him to the bath, he brings up mortals having different standards for intimacy than gods and how it usually has a more romantic/sexual connotation. she then asks if he's uncomfortable and he has a startled reaction and brings up circe and calypso again (but never actually by name)

(this isn't ship/romance bait btw. odysseus knew mel as a kid and they're stated in-game to have a sibling/uncle-niece relationship)

also he grew apart from penelope after his return, but the game makes a point of showing that his love for penelope and telemachus is what drove him on at all so that element of his character isn't brought into question

[vaguely-concerned]

having seen at least the rough outlines of all the romances now I have to say that I think emmrich's is probably objectively the best in terms of coherence and completeness of story arc (with the understanding that ultimately the 'best' romance is whichever one makes YOUR heart sing anyway so objectivity is a silly thing to claim that way, it just felt like it's the arc with the most well-paced focused content and the least dangling threads)... but lucanis' is my favourite haha. just. the whole kneeling before your beloved full of reverence but without any of the distance that usually implies??? his complete undramatic certainty and calm in every scene with rook after this, having spent the whole game caught between fear and longing???? mr. lives in a pantry but it says nothing about my psyche don't worry about it it's purely for tactical reasons that I keep myself contained in a small dark room not entirely unlike a cell, love among the parsnips -- finally coming to rook in their room and it's so comfortable and comforting???? after all the times rook supports and comforts him through the game he's finally able to return the same to them when they need it while being so calm and steady and it's so fucking sweet and feels so effortless and with no price attached?????? he basically assigns himself the role of your bodyguard and he WILL stab a god over it??????????????? the turn to protector (which was in his heart all along longing to get out and find a place) of it all????? he sounds like he's found himself unexpectedly stumbling into such a soul-lightening state of revelatory existential relief, full on 'you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves' mary oliver style, and he goes and he shares that with rook and protectively envelops them in it when they're hurting??????????????????????????? hello for the maker's sake hello can anyone hear me?????

[mohntilyet]

rook being such a nobody and surrounded by more influential companions right after the obviously well known inquisitor could be really cool actually. that conversation w solas 'what will they call you after this is done' <- NO FUCKING CLUE LOL!! the idea that this millennia long, world-ending story of gods and a herald being controlled for a moment by a nobody is incredible. they start as an irritant and end having saved the world. nobody thanks them. they go back home. maybe they're literally wiped off the face of the world when they're trapped in the fade with the dread wolf! and most of all, their name is not remembered. literally, because they become a 'rook' to the inquisitor's king.

like i’m actually really liking the idea that the inquisitor and rook get conflated into the same person by the public and by history, and what little agency they had is taken away. you were never in control of this story. your narrative will be written by other people, just like every figurehead that came before you. you are not the chosen one. the choice to have faded out and see the irrelevancy as a boon, or struggle to make your name known (not rook, not the nickname, not the title) would have been so. interesting.

veilguard is a heroic story (and the game doesn’t even let you be rude most of the time) that has to end heroically (the evanuris are defeated in some way, the last archdemon dies, and most rooks climb down from minrathous to literal cheers and applause) but the hero themself is forgettable. narratively that could have been so funnnn. but it wasn’t on purpose so it just feels hollow.

[cannibalisticskittles]

so much of the wigmaker's job continues to stay with me but especially this bit.

like. do you think illario hearing lucanis brush off the possibility of his death again and again contributed to illario giving lucanis to zara.

because yes, of course there's jealousy. of course there is. lucanis is primed to get everything illario wants and nothing illario does seems to change that in the slightest. he can never be good enough, not when there's lucanis to measure up to.

but. not only does lucanis not actually want what's coming his way (he does not at all want to be first talon but they both know caterina DOES want this and lucanis could never tell her no), he's also throwing himself into these jobs with such disregard for his personal safety that there's a sense of inevitability that surrounds the idea of his death.

this conversation feels like... it may not have been discussed like this so clearly before, but they've at least poked around the edges in the past. thought about it. and this moment might have been a turning point, in a way -- illario coming to terms with the fact that lucanis really just will. not. stop. for ANYTHING. his cousin WILL get himself killed doing this and lucanis won’t have any regrets. he’ll leave illario to go this alone. (no one to follow after anymore.)

i wonder if he started to think -- if lucanis is going to die anyway, maybe it’d be better to have that happen sooner, rather than later.

lucanis wouldn’t be happy as first talon (+ honestly, maybe this part is a stretch, but illario seems to see that what lucanis is NOW isn’t so much ‘happy’ as it is ‘obedient and content to accept the scraps that gives him’), and he’s GOING to get himself killed doing this, anyway…

so yeah, he could wait it out. wait for lucanis to do something foolish enough that he can't just walk away from it. maybe he’ll even last long enough to be made first talon (if caterina can bear to loosen her grip from the title) and be miserable for a while. years even, maybe! before lucanis, again, does something he can’t walk away from.

or.

illario could cut through all the pointless waiting and get right to the point. go straight to where this was always going to end up. and if illario is in charge of this, maybe he can benefit from it, and salvage one good thing from this whole mess, instead of being caught up in it later down the line.

(which then might tread into the territory of anticipated grief, too – lucanis' loss will be agony, but, if illario controls when and how it happens, he can control his grief. …except he hadn’t accepted the inevitability of lucanis’ death quite as well as he’d thought and when he gets sloshed at the wake, real grief seeps through the cracks)

just... something about this conversation. both of them viewing lucanis’ death as a foregone conclusion. lucanis accepting that easily, and illario struggling with that more -- and maybe having that shape his actions. not exactly a healthy expression of grief, but since when has anything this family done been healthy?

[egophiliac]

hello! i wanted to say first that i'm a MASSIVE fan of your work hehe. but i'm curious if you've ever said it before-- who are your favorite twst characters and why?

thank you! 💚💜💚

honestly I like pretty much all the characters a lot, but diasomnia definitely holds my heart (and my art). all four of them are my special little guys. episode 7 has been such a delightful treat for me and me specifically. >:)

pre-episode 7 I would've said I couldn't choose between all of my beautiful morons, but getting Lilia's backstory did shoot him up into the #1 favorite-of-the-favorites boy slot! he's an old man who's done with all that war and tragedy business and is now focused on the most important part of life: playing video games and wearing cute outfits! he's 5'2" and built like a twig but he can suplex anyone in the room! he's really bad at pretending to be an Average Teen! what's not to love

also I just. really enjoy how main story Lilia is all:

and every-other-story Lilia is more like:

the duality of grampa. it's real good.

THAT SAID I am also extremely fond of our esteemed headmaster-slash-horrible bird dad. he's a fancy goth with the soul of a harried accountant. he might be the mastermind behind the entire plot, or he might just be an idiot. he might be both at once. he's awful. he's magnificent.