#ruining my life over here

[starlit-miasmas]

[mayloony]

~ Mother spore ~

From Desert Duo vigilante au by @kitsuneisi and @xmaruu11

[unfortunatelyevent]

thinking about essek thelyss "my entire life goal is and has always been the search for knowledge, the uncovery of mysteries, and I'll do it before everyone one way or another, no matter what I have to do, no matter the cost, but meeting you turned my life around in such a way that I would turn away the opportunity to uncover the greatest time mystery of all that's right in front of me and fix every mistake I made, just by the mere possibility that changing any of the choices I made would take you from me, nothing would make me give away any of the moments I had and will have with you.... unless it's for you, then I would do it in a heart beat" and going just a little bit more insane

[loverln]

i stayed up until 6:30 in the morning to finish From the Sidelines

i have so many thoughts

[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

[doodledrawsthings]

Mad At Yi Why Anon - Thanks for explaining! It makes more sense now lol. I never expected them to be grateful for being "saved," I'd just think it's certainly a choice for them to Most Mad at the only guy who wasn't going to let them rot. But if it's a "we need someone to blame" then that makes sense.

Even if he wasn’t gonna let them rot, he WAS gonna take them out with him had his True Ending Sacrifice gone as it had in the game. They don’t know this, this is just extra DoobYi characterization. But he wasn’t expecting to be alive, either tbh.

That said, he takes the public opinion of him and the Sols very seriously and doesn’t blame them even if sometimes the grievances are heavy-handed. This is a Yi who will apologize many times over for the actions of the council, for the failure of the project, for the lies and the lives ruined, both apemen and solarian, and for the individual hurts he’s caused to Kuafu, Goumang, Shaunshuan and Heng. If Eigong and many of the other Sols are not here to share the responsibility, then he will shoulder the blame, as he believes he should. Even if, y’know, everyone who IS glad he didn’t die is telling him to knock it off.

[kalirya]

genuinely don't know what to do with myself post jayvik because I became frothingly rabid over a ship I barely registered as something I'd be into featuring a character I did not like in the span of like two hours and now I just have to live with the fact their ending was so perfectly transcendent and universe-rendingly beautiful and tragic that I don't even know if I could consume normal content about them now, I'm just left with insane feelings and a desire for more that will never truly be fulfilled

[ruvviks]

Following the chilling conclusion of All That's Left's first season, Mac and Layla and their friends find themselves scattered across a divided Los Angeles a year after their successful return to town. Matrix Corp has taken control— "With humanity's best interest in mind"— but with our protagonists' knowledge of Opportunity's destruction and Houston's unexpected fall, they know better than to trust the corporation and its near military-sized security force. Closed district gates separate them from one another and a new threat lurks just outside the city's walls— but resistance is on the rise, and it is only a matter of time before truth comes out. [SEASON ONE HERE]

taglist (opt in/out)

@shellibisshe, @florbelles, @ncytiri, @roseeway, @stars-of-the-heart;

@lestatlioncunt, @katsigian, @radioactiveshitstorm, @estevnys, @adelaidedrubman;

@celticwoman, @rindemption, @carlosoliveiraa, @noirapocalypto, @dickytwister;

@killerspinal, @euryalex, @ri-a-rose, @velocitic, @thedeadthree;

@kanos, @swordcoasts, @ordinarymaine, @claudiawolf, @strafethesesinners

[skunkes]

the bad: i have been raised without much warmth from my parents in childhood, but also pressured to conform to familial authority, doubt myself always, and value familial connections above all else (<- failed at this, and feel guilt about it.)

but also in experiencing this i have been so isolated from the entire rest of the world and others, that it will be nearly impossible to create my own "family" -> find safety and comfort in anybody else once my family is Gone. despite dis i find it really difficult to break away from the familiar, disobey and disappoint, because, well, why are my wishes more important than anybody else's. why would I cause upset and distress in anybody, and exert so much effort into my doubt filled half decisions, for my meaningless little Wishes. being away would also mean less time with these people who I'll never see again once they're gone. being raised this way is definitely paying off for those who did so.

the good: yaaaay adjacent inspiration for writing talon lore

[oceans-beloved]

IT'S INTERNATIONAL VINCENZO DAY!!🥳🩷✨️

I maaaayyy have been late-ish with posting this but Dunyazad's 100% the type of person who'd wake Vincenzo up at mid night (if wifey's toxic bestie even let's him sleeps that is 👀) to wish him happy birthday and make him go through the whole scrapbook she made for him while cuddle attacking him~

The without anything written on it version because I worked hard on this and I'm gonna make it everyone's problem😤✨️

Mwah mwah~<3

[murdleandmarot]

@emimii per your request! (There’s one more under the cut)

[simplegenius042]

Music Monday

Tagging @socially-awkward-skeleton @shallow-gravy @direwombat @derelictheretic @adelaidedrubman @g0dspeeed @nightbloodbix @carlosoliveiraa @corvosattano @cloudofbutterflies92 @chazz-anova @voidika @onehornedbeast @softtidesworld @minilev @titiagls @wrathfulrook @afarcryfrommymain @aceghosts @turbo-virgins @deputyash @purplehairsecretlair @florbelles @inafieldofdaisies @josephseedismyfather @josephslittledeputy @ladyoriza @megraen @skoll-sun-eater @snake-in-the-garden @starsandskies @thewanderer-000 @strafethesesinners @strangefable @la-grosse-patate and @shellibisshe + anyone else who is interested. Here's the taglist for those who wish to be continued to tagged or not.

Songs for Far Cry The Silver Chronicles, Life, Despair & Monsters and A Radioactive Calamity Of Love, Bombs & Gore. Music below the cut.

Vega, my Fallout 76 OC, is one of the "Residents" of Vault 76. Originally a settlement planner, she is now on a quest of revenge against the other residents of Vault 76 for "wrongfully" leaving her behind in the vault. Truthfully nobody wanted to deal with her bullshit and didn't want to wait on her when they had a job they'd been waiting 25 years to do, so they left her to sleep in (because she had a bit wee too much to drink during the night of Reclamation Day), thinking she'd catch up to them later. Vega did not take it likely. She also has a particularly concerning obsession with Vault 76's Overseer, viewing the older woman as her rival (even if the Overseer views Vega as merely a minor annoyance at best and always poking holes in Vega's delusions). This song pretty much sums up Vega's POV regarding the Overseer (and her fellow Vault 76's Residents).

"Oh, wherever you go You know I will follow you You know I will run to you Oh, the sun and the moon It don't matter what you do You know I will run to you

Can't believe in all this time I'm hurting for you But you feel like hold down The love you give it lift's so high I'm dying for it I'm dying for it And I can't let you go

Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Or you'll lose, or you'll lose Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Or you'll lose, or you'll lose

If you hide away I'll hunt you down And follow you to the end of the Earth My heart beats with yours My lungs breathe with yours You're a piece of me I can't hide away

Oh, I'm under your spell I'm making and I'm fading And nobody can see I'm your heartbeat You're part of me

Can't believe in all this time I'm hurting for you But you feel like hold down The love you give it lift's so high I'm dying for it I'm dying for it And I can't let you go

Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Or you'll lose, or you'll lose Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Hide away, hide away from me Or you'll lose, or you'll lose."

Have a lovely ship song between Mercy Omar-Seed and Carmina Rye (the former is the daughter of Silva Omar and Faith Seed, the latter the daughter of Nick and Kim Rye). While Old Dusk (the WIP of the New Dawn arc) can be quite bleak (not as bleak as Silva's Hope though) due to the circumstances, this relationship is one of the most heartwarming highlights that I've been developing.

"Let's go below zero and hide from the sun I'll love you forever where we'll have some fun Yes, let's hit the North Pole and live happily Please don't cry no tears now, it's Christmas, baby

My snowman and me, hey My snowman and me Baby

Don't cry snowman, don't you fear the sun Who'll carry me without legs to run, honey? Without legs to run, honey? Don't cry snowman, don't you shed a tear Who'll hear my secrets if you don't have ears, baby? If you don't have ears, baby?

I want you to know that I'm never leaving Because I'm Mrs. Snow, 'til death we'll be freezing Yeah, you are my home, my home for all seasons So come on let's go."

Imagine being amongst a group of individuals who have been brutally mutilated, experimented on or in general fucked over by the same short dude who's not only from another dimension and can travel through it to other worlds, but also runs a cult-like science organization dead-set on ruining humanity's life to help them "evolve" and laugh at their despair... well, that's the crux of Life, Despair & Monsters, a group of individuals, some of whom sure weren't the greatest (but still didn't deserve what happened to them), whose lives were negatively and irreversibly impacted by that of one Sir Enigma Malvolio and his Ruins of the Midnight Rise. All because he wanted to see how humans could cope with erratically spontaneous and disastrous change to their livelihoods.

"You say I'm craving hope in this darkness You say I'm just a joke, just a joke

Shivers my spine so much Swimming in the river styx too much They try to let go of us But the truth is... Once you're in then You're one of us

Truth is... Once you're in then You're one of us One of us Truth is once you're in then You're one of us

My darling in fire My darling rolls in fire You liar You say my darling rolls in fire, in fire You say my darling burns in fire You're a liar."

[lexithwrites]

.

[dreadfuldevotee]

Going to just admit rn that my spotify wrapped this year has been irreparably damaged by loumand edits. which will surprise exactly zero people

[ilovefredjones]

where are the jim x la’an enjoyers at. the noonirkers. the ja’ans. the ka’an enthusiasts. who else is losing their minds over the 50 minutes total screentime they had

[theclaravoyant]

hi, do you have a minute to hear the word of my lord and saviour , multishipping