#shit fuck how are you supposed to raise a dragonlord?

[dafodils-on-the-moon]

!!!! So many questions bc I love this with all my heart <3 First, it's freaking hilarious that he became jester because he was "difficult to handle." LOVE that. Second, I gotta know, what does everyone else think about him? Arthur? Gwen? Morgana? Is Morgana doomed to die by the hands of a COURT JESTER?????

Ok so. Crucial part of this Au: Uther knows Merlin in Balinor’s son but does NOT know abt the magic. Merlin does not know about being Balinor’s son. Uther kept him cause he thinks it would be a good idea to have a dragonlord on hand that's loyal to Camelot, given what he's keeping under the castle.

Also I'm very aroace and don't wanna write romance for a while, so no romantic Murther.

Instead, Uther raises Merlin and Arthur as brothers. He deeply encourages the loyalty to one another as keeping Merlin loyal is essetail and Merlin is a very valuable asset that bears protecting. He emphasises to Arthur that as the eldest, Merlin is his responsibility and he should take care of him. Merlin is his younger brother.

Arthur takes to this role like a wildfire. Protective as SHIT over his new baby brother (Merlin is two years younger), esp. Since he was… not doing too hot when he first got to the castle. He was greiving and seemed *terrified* and didn’t speak at all for months. He was sickly too, for reasons no-one could pinpoint. Arthur had made it his mission to cheer Merlin up, as no one should be that sad. He and Merlin communicate at first via drawings.

He only seemed to improve after he started talking quietly to an imaginary freind he named “Kiggah.” It seemed to help cause merlin slowly started talking to Arthur and then in general and his health imrpved too.

Yeah… Merlin’s imaginary freind is Killgarrah lol.

Killgarrrah, or Kiggah as a now 5 year old Merlin could pernounce, is getting a major overhaul in this AU. His is going to be far far less of a bastard. Cause dragons are too cool for him to be the absolute worst.

In this AU Kiggah actually cares more THAT HIS ENTIRE RACE WAS ERADICATED than that he was trapped under the castle. Cause, fr, that is not the part id focus on. Also I gave him a family before, sorry man. Kiggah was also really really fond of dragonlings and hatchlings and was very excited to see the hatching of his first great-grandhatchling before the purge. Ow.

Anyway, Merlin is TERRIFIED of being in Camelot. He’s terrified he’s going to say something wrong and reveal his secret and die. He blames himslef for his mother’s death (cause he’s like 4 1/2 and thats normal for kids that age) and more specifically, his magic. So he supresses the shit out of it, which is why he’s so sickly.

Kiggah senses Merlin basically killing himslef and tries coaching Merlin into using his magic again. Adopts Merlin as his own hatchling. Kiggah doesn’t know Merlin’s dad is Balinor, but he DOES know he’s emrys, magic itself. As a result, Kiggah views Merlin as a fellow magical creature and raises him accordingly. He… doesn’t really get how human hatchlings are supposed to work.

Merlin starts acting weirdly dragonlike. His growling, he’s biting people, hee’s climbing everything, hoarding things and has a major fixation with fire. He is gettign “difficult to handle” as UTHER, assumes this is just how dragonlordlings are, (good gracious), but needs a way to coverup the fact he’s raising one.

Fooleswurth, nuerdodivergent in ye-old times, sees Merlin and his like “haha verily. Reminds me of when I was that age, I was just the same. He must have “The Jester’s Spark, haha.”’ Uther goes “yes and” and now fooleswurth has an apprentice and Uther has a way to explain why his ward is so weird.

Anyway, Kiggah is NOT excited about Merlin’s new older sister, but Merlin loves her. He is very excited for whenever Morgana’s magic manifests. She grows on Kiggah. (Esp. With all teh trouble she gives Uther). Morgana’s going to be fine.

She and Merlin get on like a house on fire. Gossipy bitches. Morgana sics Melrin and his “jester’s privolegde” on bothersome nobles to insult them into the ground.

Gwen becomes Morgana’s maidservent, and she Morgana and Merlin are great friends.

[gamearamamegathons]

Dragon Warrior III: I Retroactively Get Credit For This Peace Also

Circe here! So, now we come to the end of Dragon Warrior III. All that's left to do is to storm Baramos's castle and beat the shit out of him. At this point, how much I retain from particular dungeons is starting to lessen as I just follow a guide instead of mapping them myself. But Baramos's castle is pretty much as you expect, a big mean dungeon with monsters who are obnoxiously strong. Naturally, I spent most of this dungeon just fleeing over and over again and hoping I make it to Baramos in roughly one piece. Baramos himself is this angry crocodile face guy, and he's pretty tough, but with sufficient levels, the standard boss fight approach works pretty well for this guy, bolstered by the fact that we now have an array of support spells like Barrier (magical protection), Increase (defense boost) and Bikill (attack boost). After a couple tries, he goes down, and I head back to Aliahan to celebrate that the world has been saved.

The end.

...

...

Okay, just kidding.

Actually, once we enter the throne room, a voice echoes in the room, telling us that he is the true archfiend Zoma, and he's going to take over the world anyway. The king laments that he doesn't know how to break the news to his subjects, so he orders us not to tell anyone. What a leader. I guess we're gonna have to figure this out by ourselves. But we've pretty much explored every corner of the world. What's left? Well, there's two important places we need to go. First is the Castle of the Dragon Queen, a location tucked in a little ring of mountains that can only be reached by phoenix. There, if we poke around a bit, we can meet the Dragon Queen herself, who gives us a Sphere of Light. Hmmm. Anyway, the second place is the Great Pit of Giaga, a location near Baramos's Castle that previously just had a big pit with a wall around it. Well, now the pit has cracked open and split the walls apart, so we can just hop in, something which is clearly a very good idea.

In the pit, we find ourselves in a new land, where we immediately find a boat. Traveling a bit east, we come across a familiar town...it's Tantagel! That's right. The world of darkness beneath the earth was Alefgard all along. Now, this is cool and all, but it might raise a more pragmatic question: where does this leave our EXP curve for this new leg of our adventure? Glad you asked! The answer is that we're fucked for the rest of the game, basically. We'll be able to level up and ease things a bit, but basically the overworld has endgame-tier monsters, the ocean has endgame-tier monsters, the dungeons have endgame-tier monsters, everywhere we go for the rest of the game we're not going to want to spend too long in combat because almost every encounter has the chance to inflict massive damage to the party.

But leaving that aside for now, what do we need to do next? Well, you may remember that in the original Dragon Warrior, we had to get together the items to acquire a rainbow drop, so we could summon the Rainbow Bridge leading to the Dragonlord's castle. Here, the quest is roughly the same. Unlike in Dragon Warrior II, Alefgard isn't just a cameo, we are in fact re-enacting the quest of the first game in compressed time. And as much as I'd love to recount every quest item in detail, the effect of compressing and simplifying the entire original Dragon Warrior quest is that it's all just kind of a mush of poking around Alefgard in my head. I will say, despite the overly strong monsters, it's decently fun to go around and see what Alefgard is like and accumulate quest items like magical barnacles. There are a lot of important differences, though. The landscape is very different. Hauksness, the ruined desert town, is prospering. Garinham is just a single house, and Garin is alive. A lot of little details suggest not-so-subtly that we might just be, in fact, in Alefgard's past rather than its future. And that might lead you to a suspicion of who our hero is supposed to be.

But let's not worry about that for now. Aside from poking around the towns and collecting quest items and trying not to die a lot from every single monster, the only noteworthy dungeon before Zoma's castle is a tower west of Kol. It's absolutely brutal too, full of ruinously powerful monsters who can take out one or two party members very rapidly. It does have a very important monster in it, though. This tower is one place among many in Alefgard where you can find Metal Babbles, which are stronger, meltier versions of Metal Slimes. These things are EXP pinatas just like Metal Slimes, but they actually give an order of magnitude more EXP, in the neighborhood of almost 15K. The catch is that they're very, very difficult to kill. One good way of killing them off is a hilarious wizard spell called BeDragon, which...does what it says on the tin, I guess. Your spellcaster becomes a dragon and starts breathing fire everywhere. This attack ignores all defenses, so it's a guaranteed kill for all Metal Babbles on the battlefield. That requires them to sit still for two entire turns though, which is...not terribly likely, unfortunately. Still, it's worth it, even if it does make the experience of grinding fantastically tedious. Grinding is unfortunately not optional, though, as you need to get to around level 40 at least, before you really have a chance of taking on Zoma. And I kinda suspect that I was underleveled even by the time I got sick of this process.

So, as before, we get together the Staff of Rain and the Stones of Sunlight, and we scrounge together a sacred amulet or something to satisfy the mean old guy, who is weirdly not that mean this time, and finally, if we do all that, he will give us a Rainbow Drop. This lets us access Zoma's castle. Once again, this is kind of a retread of the same kind of constantly-running-away experience that characterizes late game Dragon Warrior dungeons. Along the way, though, we actually encounter...plot! Remember our dad, Ortega? He fell into a volcano fighting a dragon? No? Well he's here. Turns out that he didn't die, he just fell into Alefgard, and now he's fighting a monstrous hydra! Ortega's doomed battle plays out in real time as a non-interactive fight, which I feel is a...questionable design choice, seeing as this battle goes on for quite a while. Unfortunately, he dies, which seems like...I dunno, kind of an unceramonious way for things to go after the game strings out the chance that he might've been alive all this time. With his dying breath, Ortega, not recognizing you, instructs you to tell his daughter what happened to him. And then he's gone, leaving me with the impression that...not...much has changed, actually. I mean, it's not like we were questing to find our dad. We just thought he was dead, and just kind of incidentally found out he wasn't, except now he really is, actually, dead. Shrug? Okay.

Further into Zoma's castle is an important item that actually changes a lot about how we can approach the dungeon. It's a Sage's Stone. This item, when used in battle, casts a free healing spell that recovers a lot of HP to the whole party, and it can be used repeatably. This single object instantly obsoletes a huge swath of our Pilgrim's spells, which is hilarious. It also means that, since it can only be used in battle, there's actually a good reason to stick around in battles, since recovering HP faster than we can take damage will leave us in a place to spend less MP than if we tried to run and came out of it all beat up. But it reveals another problem, which is that this approach to the dungeon slows things down quite a lot. It is, objectively, the better strategic choice, and in theory, it's closer to the intended way to play the game than to run away from every single battle no matter what. But it makes the game seriously drag, which I think is honestly kind of telling. It's also still possible for your characters to get wiped out even though we're healing back ~100 HP per character per turn, which I think is *also* telling. You wouldn't think the boss would be takeable in this state, but don't be so sure. After crawling our way through the dungeon, surviving with minimal MP use by constantly waving a rock around, we finally get to Zoma. He's kinda huge, like, he's actually four times bigger on the map than a regular character, and of course he has a big dramatic speech about taking over the world, pretty conventional evil overlord stuff. He throws three bosses at us before we even get to fight him, but that's not a big deal, because the Sage's Stone is seriously just that powerful.

Zoma himself is brutal. He has a wide array of heavily damaging spells, does a ton of physical damage, and takes two turns per round. My first attempt at killing him went miserably. But then I remembered something I totally forgot about: you're actually supposed to *use* the Sphere of Light on him. Doing this causes the screen to flash and turn Zoma rainbow colors...for a while...but after that, he turns blue, which of course is the universally understood color of weakness. He's a lot easier now, especially since we're able to build up a ton of buffs like before, letting us deal tons of damage while my Pilgrim keeps furiously waving that rock to keep everyone alive. Zoma does have the ability to dispel all buffs, which sucks, but with perseverence, we pull it off, and Zoma falls dead.

Zoma's castle dramatically crumbles apart, as they do. We escape through a...hole that spits us out the bottom of a different dungeon...okay, I guess? Then we leave and go back to Tantagel to celebrate. This time, really for real, the evil is defeated. The way back to the surface is sealed off, though, so it looks like we're going to be here forevermore. The king of Tantagel bestows us with a title, though -- he names us the Hero of Erdrick. Yes, that's right! Erdrick is a title, not a name, and it's the moniker our hero will be remembered by for generations into the future. So...that's the big twist! This is the story that precedes everything that happened in the first two games. Admittedly, I was kinda semi-aware of that from the start, because it's hard to browse a wiki without accidentally stumbling upon this sort of information. But it's kinda neat regardless, and it makes for a nice way to tie up the Erdrick Trilogy. Even though the storytelling of these games are very simple, I can appreciate that, within its own context, it's built up a little mythology that's meaningful within its world.

So how does Dragon Warrior III stack up? Well...as I've said, it's very similar to Dragon Warrior II. Admittedly, a lot of my experience was eased by the fact that I moved to digital mapping, which means that it wasn't quite so slow and laborious mapping out things as I went. But putting that aside and focusing just on the experience of the gameplay...well, it's pretty clear that the game repeats its predecessor just a bit too much. The moment of getting boat in Dragon Warrior II was huge, but it really only takes one repetition for it to feel formulaic. Dragon Warrior II is a game that's being pulled in two directions. It still has a lot of the puzzle box design of Dragon Warrior, but it's also just way too big and way too open. Much like the search for the five crests, the search for the six orbs is something of a midgame slump where the devs clearly want you to see this big wide open world they've created, but it's so huge and meandering that trying to find and navigate the threads of half a dozen different mini-quests is overwhelming.

As much as I got excited about the new class system at first, it runs counter to a lot of the game's design. The game is so demanding in terms of grinding that taking a huge risk like starting a brand new character, or starting a character over to move them to a new class, feels ridiculous. As much as the game might suggest that you want to change your party over time to adapt and grow, you don't *have* to, and the game never gave me a compelling reason to try. At the very least, it's good that it lays the groundwork for future class systems in later Dragon Quest games, but here, it feels almost superfluous. I had my four party members and that was it, pretty much.

That said, I think I was too hard on this game's combat when I described it early on. Over time, you get a pretty expansive range of combat options...or at least, enough to feel like a standard RPG. By the end, the combat didn't feel quite so one-dimensional, although that isn't to say it wasn't still pretty simple. This game's repertoire of spells is pretty expansive as well, with at least a vague gesture at an elemental system, an actual multi-target healing spell, solid and useful support buffs, and a couple actually usable oddball spells like BeDragon. As a system, what really holds it back more than anything is all the cruft it still has to clear away from the NES era of RPG design.

And that's it for Dragon Warrior III. I think I want to do a post after this, taking a moment to look back on the Erdrick Trilogy as a whole. After that, we'll be moving on to Dragon Quest IV, the final game on the NES. And boy, you'd better believe I'm not going to miss the NES era once we're good and properly out of here.

[lilbreck]

AGoT Chapter 5 - 8

If you want to follow along, I'm tagging my ASoIaF reading as tonya rereads asoiaf. As I said last time, feel free to comment, I'd love to talk about stuff. Point out some things I missed, whatever.

There are a lot of questionable parenting skills in this group of chapters. Robert's a bad king, Jon is angry but still loves his family, and the Starks are fucking northern fools, even Catelyn.

Chapter 4: Eddard

Age 35

Not even gonna lie, Ned's first description of how Robert used to look sounded a bit like he had a crush. No offense, but Ned has bad taste in men. How he looks now… If there's perfume coming off Robert, is it supposed to be Cersei's, does he wear perfume himself, or did he seriously visit some brothels on the way up north? I'd believe any of it. Also, as much as everyone loves Ned… he seriously says he loves Robert because, after fifteen years, the man is still obsessed with his sister?

We get a hint here that the cold (which I commented on in Bran's chapter) is potentially unusual. Though Ned says that late summer snows are common enough, I'm not sure how much to believe that.

You know, the more we see of Robert, the less I like him. I shudder to think what Lyanna would have gone through if she had married him. She may or may not still be alive, but she'd be married to a drunken, abusive (IIRC) ass who sleeps around on her. If Robert had been a better man, I wonder how differently all this would have turned out.

The first Lords of Winterfell had been men hard as the land they ruled. In the centuries before the Dragonlords came over the sea, they had sworn allegiance to no man, styling themselves the Kings in the North.

I just want a story where the ghosts of the first Lords of Winterfell reign down terror on those in the South. Maybe someone who writes ASoIaF/GoT fanfic could write that and link me.

So, I had heard conflicting reports of how the Starks were killed by Aerys. Apparently, Brandon died first (strangled, and just a few days before his wedding!) and I'm assuming his father burned after. We haven't touched on that in this chapter yet.

I'm assuming (and correct me if I'm wrong) that Ned not wanting to trust a child to Tywin has to do with the Targaryen children that died and Ned and Robert's split. It's the only reason I could think of that Ned would think speaking of it would open old wounds.

“They say it grows so cold up here in winter that a man’s laughter freezes in his throat and chokes him to death,” Ned said evenly. “Perhaps that is why the Starks have so little humor.”

The cold seems to give them subtle sass to spare, though. This chapter is full of damn good quotes. I'll leave it off on this one:

For a moment Eddard Stark was filled with a terrible sense of foreboding. This was his place, here in the north. He looked at the stone figures all around them, breathed deep in the chill silence of the crypt. He could feel the eyes of the dead. They were all listening, he knew. And winter was coming.

Chapter 5: Jon

Age 14

Okay, this Jon is a bit different from the serious and solemn young man that we saw in Bran's chapter. Of course, the circumstances are different, so that could be some of it. We do get a lot of description from Jon's POV. I'm going to copy his descriptions here, save Tommen (because he's pretty much a non-entity to Jon) and Tyrion because it says nothing about Jon's perception of the man, just how fascinated he is by his appearance.

< His father helped her up the steps to the dais and led her to her seat, but the queen never so much as looked at him. Even at fourteen, Jon could see through her smile. >

< The king was a great disappointment to Jon. His father had talked of him often: the peerless Robert Baratheon, demon of the Trident, the fiercest warrior of the realm, a giant among princes. Jon saw only a fat man, red-faced under his beard, sweating through his silks. He walked like a man half in his cups. >

< He had the Princess Myrcella on his arm. She was a wisp of a girl, not quite eight, her hair a cascade of golden curls under a jeweled net. Jon noticed the shy looks she gave Robb as they passed between the tables and the timid way she smiled at him. He decided she was insipid. Robb didn’t even have the sense to realize how stupid she was; he was grinning like a fool. >

< Sansa looked radiant as she walked beside him, but Jon did not like Joffrey’s pouty lips or the bored, disdainful way he looked at Winterfell’s Great Hall. >

< Ser Jaime Lannister was twin to Queen Cersei; tall and golden, with flashing green eyes and a smile that cut like a knife. He wore crimson silk, high black boots, a black satin cloak. On the breast of his tunic, the lion of his House was embroidered in gold thread, roaring its defiance. They called him the Lion of Lannister to his face and whispered “Kingslayer” behind his back.

Jon found it hard to look away from him. This is what a king should look like, he thought to himself as the man passed. >

Looking at that, Jaime is the only one who Jon doesn't dismiss in one way or another. I wonder if it's a coincidence that Jaime is getting a kind of (kind of) redemptive arc. I'm not really sure about Tyrion, I'll have to get back to you when I read further.

Also, Jon may or may not have a crush on Jaime.

So, given that Theon ignores Jon, I'm thinking Jon's dislike is also returned. How long has Theon been there, and when did the dislike start? Was there one instance, or did they just take an instant dislike to each other. Is this answered later on? Guess I'll find out.

His eyes stung. Jon rubbed at them savagely, cursing the smoke. He swallowed another gulp of wine and watched his direwolf devour the chicken.

I have a feeling that isn't from the smoke. Fuck, poor Jon. Beyond that, Ghost is out here intimidating dogs three times his size.

Given how very angry and hurting Jon is concerning the fact that he's a bastard, it does say a lot about him that he remains so loyal to his family later on.

Chapter 6: Catelyn

You know, we get a very different view on how political marriages can go in this world. Robert and Cersei have a hellish marriage where she's very obviously not happy and he doesn't care a bit. Meanwhile, we've got Ned and Catelyn who really seem to have a good marriage with, apparently, a satisfying sex life on both their ends.

“Robert would never harm me or any of mine. We were closer than brothers. He loves me. If I refuse him, he will roar and curse and bluster, and in a week we will laugh about it together. I know the man!”

Okay, first off, it's very obvious that Ned has a (potentially willful) blindness to who his friend really is. I also wonder if he thought he was protecting his wife by not telling her about Jon's real parents? Because the Robert we're introduced to, the one Catelyn is obviously very aware of, would not spare his family because they didn't know if he found out Ned had commited the treason of hiding a Targaryen child. Especially if that child was Lyanna's, and he wouldn't care that Lynnna was Ned's sister.

I think this is going to call for a "fucking northern fool" tag. I have a feeling it will come in handy.

I would just like to point something out:

“And in mine,” she blazed, angry now. Why couldn’t he see? “He offers his own son in marriage to our daughter, what else would you call that? Sansa might someday be queen. Her sons could rule from the Wall to the mountains of Dorne. What is so wrong with that?”

“Gods, Catelyn, Sansa is only eleven,” Ned said. “And Joffrey … Joffrey is …”

She finished for him. “… crown prince, and heir to the Iron Throne. And I was only twelve when my father promised me to your brother Brandon.”

Everyone likes to rag on Sansa because she was excited to marry a prince and refused to see what Joffrey was. However, this conversation hints to me — speaking on assumptions from the perspective of a long marriage — that Ned had concerns about Joffrey (or reservations) that he had probably spoken to his wife about. She ignores all that in favor of how Sansa could be queen.

Not in a power grab, mind you, but in the way all mothers want their children to have the best possible chance in life. She would have filled her daughter with stories (as would have everyone around her). They would have told her what an honor it was and how lucky she was. She's eleven and sheltered, just as all the Stark children are, even the bastard boy, of course she's going to cling to it.

I'd also like to point out that Catelyn is so thrown by how scared she feels and how much she knows shit's about to go wrong that she straight up hops out of be naked to the shock of both her husband and the Maester (who has been trying to get out of that damn room of naked and half naked people). I need to find my small amusements where I can.

Just… I have to question what they thought would happen if they found out and were able to prove that Cersei and her family had killed Jon Arryn? Did they think that Sansa would be fine married off to a prince who would probably resent her father? Did they think they could back out of it? You know what, Catelyn is now roped into my "fucking northern fool" tag.

I mean, they didn't have much of a choice, but she didn't even see what dangers could come with all this. Not for a second do we see her think "Hmmm, a boy might not be happy to marry the daughter of the man who got his mother (probably) executed for the murder of The King's Hand, who was also a good friend of the king." For fuck's sake!

Chapter 7: Arya

Age 9

Okay, Arya's resentment of Sansa rings clearly through the first few paragraphs of this chapter. Also, she straight up mentally blames Sansa for attracting the septa's attention… when the septa didn't look away from the princess until Arya raised her voice. Hell, Sansa even tried to placate the septa by saying that they were talking about how happy they were to have the princess there.

Everything in this chapter speaks of her being both overdramatic and jealous of her sister. Down to thinking to herself that no one except Nyperia loves her. Now, I'm not saying that as a dig at Arya. She's 9. This is how she should be. I do have a problem with people who use her very obvious unreliable narrator POV to say that Sansa was somehow in the wrong here. I'm still waiting on this great scene that proves that Sansa is a bully to Arya.

I really do like Jon and Arya's relationship here.

Chapter 8: Bran

So, wait, when does Bran's direwolf get a name? It doesn't matter, that poor direwolf was trying to warn Bran not to climb. I'm assuming that Bran's in-depth knowledge of how to get in and out of Winterfell is going to come in handy. Like I said, it's been more than a while since I've read this.

You know, I'm sitting here laughing about the lengths they're all going to try and get him to stop climbing and he's all "whatevs" about it. But then I remember what's about to happen and I'm sad again. I don't want to read this.

Yeah, shit's only going to go wrong from here.