#she has so many conversations about dreams with lucanis

[agent-smiley]

rook: why do you make me listen in to harding asking emmrich about sex dreams. why.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

The writing the writing I need to rant about the writing

The issue with companion quests and rendezvous is that they're, to a great extent, conversational, with some very basic mechanical filler to give player the illusion that they're doing something. So the brunt of character development falls to conversations we have with them. This wouldn't be the problem if conversations themselves weren't sooo all over the place.

I wrote before that the beginning suffers from severe first draft syndrome and most conversations could have been singular lines. Early exchanges between Neve & Harding are just fluff, and taking note of their differences could have been a single line. It... gets a little better in Act 2, but it's still padded with generic conversation fillers and painfully repetitive about the only points that matter. I swear I've had so many conversations where the same expository sentence was said to me twice or thrice about 2 paragraphs apart.

It's like they want to say something, they are able to pepper in some genuinely touching moments, but then the dialogue wheel minces it all into the blandest mix of responses you've ever seen, or it unnecessarily polarizes issues that already have buildup into simplistic choices. Examples: we encourage Taash to embrace a syncretic, multicultural identity and BAM! A CHOICE APPEARS LATER that further polarizes it in a way that's totally uncalled for. We build Harding up to overcome her fawning tendencies, to embrace her anger and to let herself feel justified in it so she can handle the bond with the Stone, or we can make her feel weird and unaccepted with her new abilities - and BAM! CHOICE because what would we do without reminding survivors that compassion and forgiveness are the socially expectable ways to go? I fear Emmrich is going to feel the same, after lichdom is built up as the pinnacle of his expertise and his greatest dream, only thwarted by the terrifying risk of him permadying in the ritual (because the risk of corruption of character, like it happened to Johanna, is quickly dismissed as something OOC for Emmrich). Choices that pop up in the middle of otherwise fairly linear arcs feel manufactured.

I thought I would begrudge UI explaining to me what my choices mean, but I started to need it at times, becuse the dialogue options by themselves fail to inform me what I'm about to do half the time. I'm in romance with Neve but the only input Rook has ever given in the Flirty options was "We have problems... but we are not alone..." I have genuinely no idea what the dynamic between characters is there. According to the Character tag line, Neve has "fallen unexpectedly".

Maybe it's because Rook feels completely disjointed from whatever is happening to them. The Zara/ Illario twist almost makes them stupid on purpose because the plot can't advance yet. My Shadow Rook had nothing to add when Zara almost uttered "amatus" once before Illario choked her, no, that exposition had to happen on Emmrich's dissection table.

I also don't understand this game's urge to summarize everything for the player after the proper conversation -- not just in the UI, not in the mission quest summaries, but also in the final cutscenes in Lighthouse after most our rendezvous. These are always the most awkward, low effort reiteration of the conversation that was held minutes ago. I feel like this was supposed to be the space to form some logical conclusions, but all they do is revert whatever poignant points have been made before to very superficial takes on the problem.

I also roll my eyes on the later Lighthouse "quests" where Rook is the HR department for companions' petty grievances that can be solved by minor communication adjustments. Only the Davrin/ Lucanis conflict feels like it has any meat because it involves ambitions tied to the main quest. Taash calling the old man Skullfucker is funny but it boils down to both parties needing to be better listeners. And why would Harding and Emmrich plan a trip to Ferelden that is being consumed and ravaged by the Blight to end all Blights in real time??? Did no-one proofread this???

My point is, I wouldn't be mad if companions were generally agreeable. I love hanging out with the girlies and nonbinaries because they get along so well. The banter heard throughout the map traversal is so, so, SO much better in this regard. It's structured like relational mini-arcs that feel really satisfying to witness. The Lighthouse mini-conflicts feel manufactured in comparison.

It's like the moments that matter occasionally poke their heads above a nondescript sea of grey goo and get dragged right back down by the ugly, eldritch tentacles of filler and redundancy.

It really, really, REALLY does not defeat the allegations that some points game wanted to make through that writing were explicitly prompted as a guideline... while everything else was left to a complex form of algorithm... that combines random generation... with imitation of holistically preserved states... of complex statistical operations... done on pre-collected source material...

[inthebeginning-rebellion]

i wanna blather about my rook and i have nobody to talk to about her so whatevs

this is thora ingellvar she was found in the crypts as a child with autopsy scars which was a massive red flag for the watchers who found her. for some of her youth she thought she was perhaps half dead/some sort of spirit that had been transposed into the body of a person. in an attempt to sort of cope with her traumatic start to life, she decided this meant she had a grand destiny and mysterious powers that would someday manifest.

this Did Not Happen and eventually the watchers tracked down her mother, a mortalitasi conducting experiments on living subjects, who had become fanatical and resorted to opening up her own daughter.

thora never reunited with her mother, but with assistance from the spirits and mourn watchers who were collectively raising her, she was able to come to terms and deal with her repressed memories. she trained as a Reaper, and many of her duties involved cleaning up the more rambunctious demons, hauntings, and manifestations around nevarra city and the grand necropolis. she sort of poured The Horrors into becoming as ferocious of a warrior as she could be, especially since she was not a mage.

encouraged to leave following the battle of the banners, thora was... not super thrilled having to leave home. but she got a lot of traveling in, met varric, and was doing pretty okay for herself and had grown quite confident in her abilities out on her own. stopping a ritual to bring down the veil felt like very suitable mourn watcher activities, so she was happy to sign on.

she is 34 she is a six foot slab of boot leather with a smile. she's not super chatty but if you get her going she's a very good conversationalist. she is approaching this entire evil gods thing with as much taciturn good humor as she can manage. she romanced emmrich and became very good friends with lucanis.

she is tired a lot but does everything for other people, often at the detriment to herself. her sense of self worth is not the best and she struggles with expressing her insecurities, which make for her and emmrich having several. complicated conversations. she sees him becoming a lich as a very lofty ambition, and ends up admitting to him that she fully expects to die at the end of this journey they're on. so mortal or immortal, he was always going to outlive her. ultimately she feels its selfish to ask him to give up his dream, especially when she doesn't think she's going to be around for much longer. emmrich sputters and flounders a lot at that and realizes he has not been considering the fact that rook may be younger, but she also is the one spearheading into danger 99% of the time, AND has a blood magic elven god curse in her head, and nobody knows what THAT's doing to her life expectancy.

she's a blunt instrument, but emmrich makes her feel like something delicate to be treasured.

anyway she's carrying him over the threshold when they get married.