#that would probably end me

[mellounir]

a face too pretty to live ... oh, wait

[greykolla-art]

Charlie: “I’m so glad my most villain-coded friend is at full power again! 🥰💕”

*throws this to you angst goblins like raw steak* ❤️

(No I will not do a part 2!❤️)

[egophiliac]

So.... what are your thoughts on Ace's UM, if you haven't been asked this already?

sneaky magic for the sneakiest boy

no but really, I think it fits him really well! I had thought his UM would probably involve something kinda sleight-of-handy or pickpockety! and I looooved that it made such a nice loop-around back to episode 1. ❤️ I was. kind of half-expecting him to just run out and punch Riddle in the nose again. but instead this time 'twas he who offed the queen's head! it was great! and he did it while stone-cold terrified out of his mind! because Ace is the only remotely normal or well-adjusted person at NRC and therefore the only one who is like "we're going to literally die, this is super effed up". but he did it anyway!!!! I AM SO PROUD

[akanemnon]

That's two jailbreaks in one day!

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A procession of confessions.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[iwoulddieforienzo]

Personally I think percabeth is at its best when Grover is in it. I don’t necessarily mean in a polycule way I just think it’s great when he’s around

[bacchuschucklefuck]

while teen while goblin while aroace while injured while doing your best

[quixoticprince]

*In the voice of someone who's only media experience is jjba*: Wow, getting a lot of jjba vibes from tf2

Amidst the chaos and disappointments that encompassed my last two months, I had a fun connection about two of my favorite brain rot comics - you got an immortal(ish) with a harsh backstory who spirals into obsessive hatred that ends in the stealing of their obsession's bodies and subsequently haunt those family lines and those adjacent to them for generations - and I liken the Zeppelis, who shares the Joestar's generational curse by Dio/immortal creatures in general, to the Conaghers who I also see as helpers to the Mann line Its a really cool angle to look at Engie in, who since I was 14 was my least favorite character lol, this really elevated him for me

And so if the Manns are like the Joestars, that means like, Olivia Man is the equivalent of Joseph lol which is very funny to me

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Imagine you kiss the girl of your dreams and she reacts like that 😭 anyway I've been thinking a lot about. Nhnmgmh amphibia role swap AU and the unrequited sashannarcy love wheel.

The love wheel in question:

[lesiasmadness]

Nobody move I'm dressing the kids up all pretty

[jays-doodle-spool]

someone should write a story where there’s ppl stuck in a time loop, but the pov is from someone who rlly doesn’t care. there’s a whole ‘protagonist group’ or whatever trying to figure out how to escape the loop but this dude has just kept living their life so no one has noticed that they’re also stuck. they’re just sipping the exact same coffee order for the hundredth time watching the group strategize at an adjacent table and thinkin “man, wonder if they’re gonna figure out how to fix that today.”

[eri-pl]

Wait, no, Orcs from Elves makes perfect sense!

"But"— you say —"Are the Elves not immortal? And the Orcs perish after but a few years."

Nay. The Elves are, indeed, immortal, but they do die from grief. And what is the orcish existence if not grief, spread out on days and months and years? They do not die from reaching their alloted end (though it does seem so to those who behold it), they perish from the amounted torment of their corrupted bodies.

[mayasaura]

Hey, anyone else think it's super duper suspicious that the Reverend Parents kicked off their abominable baby scheme pretty much simultaneously to Gideon Nav, key to the Tomb, landing on the Ninth? Gideon's more than a year but less than two years older than Harrow. So give it nine months gestation, a few months for prep and planning, and Gideon's arrival lands at exactly the place on the timeline you'd look for an inciting event to the creche massacre

And like, the Revs didn't seem shocked when they heard Harrow had opened the Tomb. They listened solemnly to Gideon spill the beans and then quietly shuffled themselves off the mortal coil, intending to take their pint sized single-serving generation with them. As far as we know they never pressured Harrow to continue the Ninth, either. They checked to make sure she was a powerful necromancer, and that was it. It's almost like they'd been waiting for this.

It's just a hell of a lot of coincidences piling up. Makes me wonder what they knew, who they'd been talking to. How much didn't they tell Harrow?

[flowersforthemachines]

Some facts about Taash (and also the Lords of Fortune, the Qunari, Dragons and other related things) gathered from the banters

Featuring Shathaan's stories about the Crows!

I went through all companion banters on DanaDuchy's channel after playing the game to write down all facts about companions/the world that I haven't seen brought up anywhere in the game as a writing reference (and for funsies).

Note: This list may not be exhaustive. I might have missed some something or didn't write it down because I considered it common knowledge. If you have anything to add, please DM me or send an ask! (do specify what banter the information is coming from, though)

Note 2: Posts from this series (mostly) don't include information from banters specific to quests or between companions and faction members. I plan to do another playthrough to capture more of those and will add any relevant info to the character posts.

Other characters' posts: Bellara, Davrin, Harding, Lucanis, Emmrich, Neve. I'm also planning a post about just the Lighthouse some time later

About Taash

General: 

Taash gets grumpy if they stay inside for too long

Taash may polish their treasure hoard or clean the dishes (even somebody else's) to get out of their head

When Taash is feeling sad, they ask somebody else about how they are doing, so they can focus on somebody else instead of themselves

Taash doesn’t like talking about their feelings because it makes them sad (Lucanis can relate)

Taash doesn't read books before bed because they have a tendency to stay up past their bedtime to finish the exciting parts

Taash seems to care quite a lot about fibre and digestive health (they are so real for that). For example, they enjoy the smell of coffee but don’t drink it because it’s bad for their guts

Taash drinks alcohol 

Taash once requested Bellara/Lucanis to cook them a demon (the suggestion was disregarded) 

Taash liked Lucanis’s deep-fried peppers 

Taash liked Bellara’s stir-fry 

(If Rook is in romance with Taash) A spirit of devotion appears next to Taash after they enter a relationship

Taash doesn’t want to look for more dragonfire tablets because “they are just more orders”, and they already have enough  

Taash doesn’t kill in cold blood and needs to get angry in order to kill someone

Taash has good taste in gemstones, knowing which colours match which (based on the banters where they recommend gemstones for Emmrich’s lich helmet). They say it’s a Lord of Fortune thing, they have to know how to make gems look good 

Taash isn’t afraid of the Fade, because the spirits there mind their own business and don’t try to possess anyone (or anything) 

Taash thinks that even if the Nevarrans almost brought their dragons to extinction, they will still come back eventually

Taash is extremely excited to hear that Morrigan can (potentially) turn into a dragon and wants to ask her about it next time they meet 

Taash doesn’t mind finding no loot when hunting dragons because as long as you survived an encounter with a dragon, you have a new story to tell 

Taash doesn't think of dragons as monsters since they are a natural part of the world and have been around longer than anyone else

On fire-breathing: 

Taash started breathing fire when they were a toddler

Taash needs to eat greens after breathing fire, or they get headaches 

According to healers, fire breathing hurts Taash’s lungs

Taash accidentally set their first female partner’s hair on fire during their first sex

Taash once tried to cook with their dragon breath and accidentally melted a pot and set the kitchen on fire 

On Taash’s sense of smell:  

Taash got their heightened sense of smell after they got sick and couldn't breathe through the nose for a couple of months. After they recovered they could suddenly smell everything

Tassh can smell when someone is ovulating. They can also smell who had been in the room before them, and who is hungover 

Taash could also tell Neve got together with Rook or Lucanis from the smell even before anybody told them

To Taash, Minrathous smells rainy and ‘like rich people hurting poor people’

Early life and the relationship with Shathann: 

Taash learnt to swim before they learnt to walk

Shathann sometimes wouldn't let Taash play/go swimming until they finished their studies (like being able to tell the difference between some pottery shards)

Shathann gifted Taash axes during one of the gift-giving holidays when they were younger. They were simple kindling choppers, but Shathann helped decorate them to make them look like Qunari weapons. During a conversation with Bellara, Taash realises that may be the reason they are still using axes to this day

Axes are also good at lodging between dragon scales and allows them to climb up

Taash grew up poor, though they didn’t realise it because Shathann always made sure they had enough food, even at her expense (like pretending she didn’t want to eat because “Rivaini food is too rich for her”)

Taash spent the money they made from their first job as Lord of Fortune on buying Shathaan a dress. Shathann didn’t appreciate it, instead urging Taash to buy themselves boots or some other useful things 

Shathann hated apples because their skin would get stuck in her teeth (“Evataash, that fruit is stupid!”)

If Taash chooses to pursue Rivaini culture and wear Shathann’s horn as jewellery, they have a blacksmith do runes in the old Qunari language along the edges and get a Seer to bless it

Shathann stopped telling stories about the Crows after Taash once climbed on the roof to play as a Crow

The things Shathann taught Taash about the Crows:

Antivan Crows make themselves invisible to dragons by imitating the dragon's shadow

Antivan Crows coat the beaks of actual crows with poison so that the crows can kill people by pecking

Antivan Crows can slow down their breathing until they become invisible

Antivan Crows come through houses at night and kill children who aren’t in bed

Antivan Crows can do a special move that stops their enemy's heart

Antivan Crows can strangle a Qunari with their own dar-saam (but only if it’s tied incorrectly)

Relationships with companions: 

Bellara gives Taash advice on cooking dinner for their mother

Davrin teaches Taash to use buckets filled with water and sand for lifting

Taash has never flown a kite before and asks Harding to teach them

Harding's mother sends Taash a letter with homemade candies after Shathann’s death, calling it “a hug from afar” (Taash appreciated the gesture and liked the candy) 

(If Rook is in romance with Taash) Taash asks Lucanis about what Rook likes to eat, and Lucanis offers to teach them how to make coffee/tea/chiocolata calda 

Taash isn’t scared of Spite, and even convinces (or more like intimidates) him not to talk about how other people smell without their permission

Lucanis agrees to teach Taash how to kill targets with flair (with varying degrees of success when it comes to cool one-liners) and then plans to ask Teia to make a Crow cape just for them (Taash is very excited about it, as they love crow capes)

Taash insists Neve should get some trophy from Aelia (a ring, or an amulet with her name) to show everyone she beat her, and doesn’t understand why Neve isn’t interested in something like that 

Taash offers their blood to Neve for blood magic purposes (Neve doesn’t take up the offer)

Taash thinks Neve’s ‘dresses’ are pretty

Taash thinks nobody can go toe-to-toe in magic with Neve

Taash offers to hook Neve up with their jeweller to get her a discount (in case she wants a new leg) because “Neve deserves nice things”

Lords of Fortune:

Lords of Fortune have a drunk game where they throw a goblet made from fool’s gold into the water for others to find. Whoever finds it gets free drinks for the rest of the night. The game has only one rule: no punching in the junk

There is also another drunk game where drunk Lords jump off a giant cliff. The only rule is not to hit the water face-first

Even if those are “drunk games”, you can participate in them sober, as long as you are willing to be as stupid as the drunk people

The Lords of Fortune pick new jobs by Isabela throwing daggers at a map or racing nugs (the winner picks the job - could be its owner, or the nug itself)

The lords used to blindfold Mateo (the faction merchant) and spin him around in circles until he tripped on something like a map. They stopped doing that because a Seer told them to quit (the whole thing gave Mateo headaches) 

After Shathann is gone, Taash is in charge of appraising Qunari artifacts for the Lords until they find a better expert

The Lords of Fortune work with a Dalish clan keeper Shivanas (Taash calls them ‘Shiv’) who appraises artefacts for them (tells them what’s okay to sell and not to sell etc.) 

After losing his hand, a Lord named Bernst got a lock-pick hand prosthetic decorated with gems

About Dragons:

Different breeds of dragons can mate and produce offspring. That’s how ice- and lightning-breathing dragons came about

The muscles of dragon wings’ are vulnerable behind. Another weakness is the underbelly

Fighting Dragons is all about making them come to you, either by having them see you as a threat (so they come down to assert dominance) or prey (so they come down to eat you) 

There is a dragon called Wildervale Spitter, which can breathe fire or poison gas. The “fire breath” is actually just poison that burns when the dragon breathes. Most dragons always ignite their breath. The Spitter's special for being able to choose whether to light it up.

Dragons have an extra eyelid that they shut while breathing fire in order to protect their eyes

About Qunari etc.:

Eb-ketarra means something like “growing memories.” When you graft someone’s horn onto yours, you also add their strength to yourself

Qunari food uses a lot of oil for frying

Qunari have a much better sense of smell than humans

Qunari can bury their dead with large jars inlaid with a flame pattern. It’s called ‘issalatar’ and is empty inside, representing that the deceased’s body is also empty now that their spirit is gone

The Rivaini armada can hold its own against the Antaam fleet, but only in good weather. They can’t match the Antaam in firepower, but they can outsail them

Isabela is apparently still a captain of the Siren’s Call