#some places physically can’t fit her stage and there are other logistics at play

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

I understand fans being upset and disappointed in Taylor not coming to where they live, but to act like she’s entitled to come to their location because of x, y or z and get genuinely mad as if it’s a direct attack when it’s something that is likely out of her control feels off to me. I’m sure she truly wants to be able to perform to as many of her fans as possible but she also doesn’t want to sacrifice the sake of the production to do so; she wants to give everyone the same Eras Tour experience.

[carelessgraces]

okay so the point i was going for yesterday:

    this series thrives on its difficult choices and origins was hands-down the best developed to handle questions of grey morality and impossible options. it didn’t always play out perfectly with the mechanics of it being a video game, so you know you’ve gotta be okay at the end of it, but: choosing whether or not to leave a possessed connor behind in an absolutely ravaged redcliffe, for the two-plus weeks it would take to get to the circle and come back with mages? it’s “save a child” versus “save an entire town.” bhelen is genuinely terrifying in that he has all the makings of a complete tyrant — actually literally officially executing his political opponents, repeatedly, and shutting down the only avenue for effective discussion and disagreement — but he’s also exactly what orzammar needs in terms of both social and economic progress. the brecilian forest was a little easier for me — “kill the dalish” isn’t a good option, ever, and when it comes down to kill zathrian and lift the curse vs. kill the werewolves, the former is clearly the choice you’re meant to make? to limit damage in the future, and continued damage now. the mage tower is the hardest, i think, to call effectively morally grey, because there really isn’t anything to suggest that the tower HAS to be annulled? because there’s no indication that if it’s not, the people outside the tower are in serious danger. and by the time you’ve finished everything, you know who is and isn’t possessed, you’ve literally seen it, so annulling the tower at that stage is just kinda evil.

    choosing anora or alistair is another really difficult one because anora proves time and again that she’s either not as competent as she says she is, or she has no moral backbone of which to speak ( because it all comes down to the tevinter presence in the alienage: if she isn’t aware that an agreement to sell elves into slavery has been signed by her father, who does not have an official title besides the one he’s given himself and certainly not one that would be recognized by most foreign powers, that means that she’s not paying a lick of attention to the sudden influx of money in the treasury, to pay for a civil war of her father’s making, or to the actual literal slave trade happening literally under her nose. if she knows and does nothing about it — which seems a lot more likely given that she a.) erects a statue in loghain’s honor after the blight if she rules alone, enslaved elves be damned and b.) has violent clashes with the alienage due to food shortages only if she rules alone, all of which indicate a measure of indifference at best toward the most vulnerable people in ferelden, but i’ll yell about that on my da multi rather than here — she’s willing to bide her time and allow elves, including elven children, to be shipped off to tevinter and enslaved, or she only cares when she can use it politically. but anora is also better trained than alistair, anora has more experience than alistair, and what the country needs is some measure of stability. however, ethically, she really has no place in power over anyone. choosing alistair is potentially disastrous because despite the fact that he’s a really, really, really good man, he has no political training, no experience, and will likely be manipulated by eamon, who we really should be able to let die.

    and the anora / alistair choice is probably the one most similar to the templar / mage choice in inquisition. on the one hand you have a force that will fit in neatly with the structure in place, that will most likely get the most done the quickest, and that will provide some measure of consistency for the people and in gaining allies across the board. this force has proven itself cruel, either through the active choice of cruelty or indifference to the point of cruelty, and offers the most effective results but only if you’re willing to really, really do the ethically fucked up thing. on the other hand, you have a group of refugees fleeing centuries of violent oppression, whose organization is better suited for a university than for a war, who genuinely terrify most civilians, and who would need to be heavily trained. they are, hands down, the ethically correct choice — protecting the oppressed rather than siding with their oppressors, bringing about real change and progress — but logistically and politically speaking it’s kind of a crapshoot. and i think, i think, that if this had been built up in much the way that anora vs alistair was built up — one is a good moral choice, one is a good political choice, you can’t have both at the start but you can hope they’re influenced in the right way — it would have been a lot more effective? and on the fan side: i have a lot more trouble getting people invested in a pro-templar inquisitor than a pro-mage inquisitor, which is fair because i agree that allying with the mages is the right thing to do, and i don’t blame anyone at all for their discomfort with a pro-templar inquisitor. but i think that it’s because this got pitched to us as a moral dilemma when it wasn’t one, and the way that this was made into a “moral dilemma” was by rewriting a lot of 2. 

     because pushing “anders was a terrorist” is... lazy at best? and i’m sorry for being pedantic but this is a major pet peeve: anders does not engage in a campaign of terror. he engages first in peaceful protest, then in physical defense of people, and the explosion at the chantry is both a last resort and is actively timed to avoid collateral damage. terrorism, by definition, requires the terrorist to engage in that kind of act with the explicit intent of terrorizing civilians to force a state or institution to grant the terrorist’s demands. anders set off the explosion at a time when there were few people in the chantry — not during a service of any kind, not when people were paying attention to the chantry, but when their attention was elsewhere. he made a point of limiting casualties, and the act was done exclusively to prevent a slaughter, after nearly a decade of trying literally everything else. ( on the flip side, in inquisition we literally have sebastian inform the inquisition that he intends to invade kirkwall — not because he thinks hawke and anders can be found there, but because he wants to terrorize the civilians until hawke and anders surrender. so we do have an example of how this can be used in warfare, in-game, with the same players, and they’re two vastly different approaches. ) so to make the “anders was a terrorist” line make more sense they insisted on massive numbers of casualties from the explosion, they undermined hawke’s support of anders by default, and they made the explosion at kirkwall out to be the spark for the mage rebellion, when we know from the books that this wasn’t the case at all. so it’s a lot of retconning to try and make the mage-templar choice in 2 a morally difficult one, when we know it isn’t, and when the game doesn’t allow it to be. because love or hate anders, senselessly slaughtering a tower full of mages after a decade-plus of rampant abuses, which are horrifying and canonically confirmed by templars every chance the game has, it really doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny. the only real moral dilemma in “the last straw” is whether or not to execute anders ( tho i’ve never been able to do it, it is set up to be a difficult choice, and it’s much more effective ). 

     anyway i’m not sure how to sum this up tidily but the gist of it is that i think the mage-templar choice in inquisition is best understood as a parallel for the anora-alistair choice in origins, rather than the mage-templar choice in 2?

[tearsdrownedyou]

Who & Why, Part 6

This series should be a single essay, but I’m not that organized, so I’m just writing up random chunks as they occur to me. Last one is here.

I’ve already written several posts about why Jaime does not make a good candidate for the Valonqar. I’d like to say I’ve run out of reasons why Jaime isn’t the pre-ordained killer, but that would be premature.

Today I’d like to talk about a couple of other candidates that don’t make the cut.

I used to think Jaime was the Valonqar; yes, I really did. I thought he would kill his sister and then get on with his life and be with Brienne, none of this “we were born together and we’ll die together” crap. But I did think he was the killer, up until some time between Seasons 5 and 6.

The first alternative Valonqar I considered was not Euron. Before I watched Season 6, I did some re-reading and I noticed certain patterns emerging and I decided I liked Loras Tyrell for the job.

Yeah, we all saw how that turned out in the Season 6 finale.

At the time, I thought Loras was a good fit for the prophecy because he made a very tight parallel with Jaime and TBH Loras didn’t have all that much else going on in his story. He was not a POV character, and if he died in the process of killing his queen to keep her from committing some atrocity, that would suit his role just fine. Book version, he’s a recent addition to the Kingsguard, and he’s the third of three brothers, so that works for the “little brother” aspect.

The problem that I really should have given more respect at the time was that Loras was always on Cersei’s shit list. All the Tyrells were on Cersei’s shit list. She didn’t know the actual reason why she should hate the Tyrells (namely: Grandma Olenna conspired with Littlefucker to kill Joffrey), but she treated them like her enemies simply because she can’t fucking handle ANY other family getting their mitts on her precious babies. Ser Loras was part of that family, so Cersei always saw him as an enemy. So, he would have supplied a good reasoning for the Valonqar clause, but his identity failed the smell test.

Even so, I’m grateful for the time I spent with Loras as my preferred candidate because it freed me up from having to twist the narrative into pretzel shapes to support the idea of Jaime the Twinslayer. It was a mistake, but it was like a gateway drug to a better answer.

The next candidate I want to bring up is Ser Robert Strong aka FrankenGregor. I’ve seen a good argument for how FrankenGregor would be a handy fit for the “little brother” role, and while I was never really emotionally invested in the idea of the giant zombie as the queenslayer, it was an interesting case and I respected that. 

FrankenGregor the giant zombie is compliant with logistical concerns. He and Qyburn are among the few men still in close physical proximity to Cersei at the latest stages of both books and show versions. FrankenGregor and Qyburn are among the extremely few people Cersei has ever really trusted since the story began. As FrankenGregor is Cersei’s primary protector, that puts him in a good position to kill her by strangulation or other direct-contact means. As FrankenGregor is also a recent addition to the Kingsguard, that puts the “little brother” label on him. It would be pleasingly ironic for the giant zombie to strangle Cersei, as she made him her protector because he was the perfectly obedient killing machine of her dreams. She decided to build this fanatically terrifying enforcement system around herself because she spent all her life trying to thwart the prophecy, and her mad scientist’s special gift to her is what ends up fulfilling the prophecy.

It makes great sense, up to a point. Where it falls down is with FrankenGregor’s reasoning for killing Cersei. The problem is that he has no reasoning. If he kills Cersei, it’ll be because he malfunctions in the worst possible way, or because Qyburn uses him as a weapon to get rid of his boss. Either way is totally doable. The question is: how should Cersei have seen it coming? If her giant zombie malfunctions, when so far he’s done a very good job of being exactly what she needs him to be, that’s like fulfilling the prophecy as an afterthought. Deus ex oopsie. Whereas, if Qyburn uses him as a weapon when he’s all done being Cersei’s mad scientist, then FrankenGregor isn’t really the killer; Qyburn is the killer. That would still be plenty ironic, as Qyburn definitely occupies a place of trust for Cersei, But there...again, where’s the “oh shit” factor? What’s the reason for killing Cersei that makes sense for Qyburn’s story in particular, and that Cersei should have seen coming? Where’s the part where we cackle in vicious joy because Cersei played herself? 

With Loras, we have a good “why” but not a good “who.” FrankenGregor is just the opposite; the “who” makes sense but the “why” falls flat.