#they fight dragons like yeah it is

[hayleysayshay]

oh god, im so excited for the new season of tlovm. i am HYPED. saw the IGN review and the worst thing they said was the many liberties with the source material and that it's tropey. i love tropes, and i already had guessed this season would have large departures, only confirmed by the reorganisation of the episode order.

like a massive appeal of the first season (once it got going past the first two) was the tropeyness of it. when i was an actual kid i used to watch cartoons and wish for more real stakes, i hated how things were undone. My favourite episodes of doctor who were the ones where the doctor or companions were in very serious peril. And tlovm has the stakes but it's also pretty fun and feels like an epic adventure, it's adult whilst still feeling like a fun cartoon, whereas most adult cartoons are just funny jokes. I really enjoy that aspect of that. So yeah full on tropes please I want that.

and place your bets on what the changes to campaign 1 will be (other than just rearranging the order a bit). unhinged take is vax causes vex's death not percy's (which i don't think they'd do as it would honestly gut percy out of anything to really angst over in season 2 and vax has enough angst already).

[waterghostype]

shit postings

[cable-salamdr]

Continually in awe over how well of a mentor Kai is to Wyldfyre— The fact that it takes him a moment, but as soon as he realises that she loves competition and that the best way to get her to do something is by giving her a difficult role or challenging her he becomes incredibly good at actually training her. It’s not just that Wyld reminds Kai of himself, but also that he uses that as a way to help her become better.

[dazzlerdrawer]

my wip so far... ahHHHH its taking too long for me.

[alicentflorent]

“Team Black or Team Green?” What about team smallfolk overthrowing the monarchy that are are carelessly flying around on weapons of mass destruction and committing war crimes because of their entitlement over a damn chair when neither side are giving two shits about the people they are supposed to govern

[ganondoodle]

rough beast ganondorf design + sketches + notes design combines the typical boar form (dark beast + cloud form from botw), the oni one (demon king gan) hint at the draconic one to come but keep part of his humanity with his clothing being mostly intact

as the battle with Demon King Ganondorf comes to an end, the sages previously knocked out start to wake up again, he is cornered and hurt and as fear of being imprisoned, tortured and exploited overwhelms him he transforms into the Beast form, breaking the arena you were fighting him in and him going for Zelda as she is the biggest threat (he remembers her destroying dark beast gan and she reminds him of sonia, who is the one you sealed his human body back in the day)

you and zelda flee through the cracks of the earth as more earthquakes happen with a beast at your heels thats now truly only out to kill as fast as possible as he burrows after you (first sketch)

the path takes you both just below the surface and as you are trapped in a dead end zelda shields herself and link with her light shield ability, which protects you both from immediate damage but cant soften the impact from gan charging at you, the impact of which breaks you all three to the surface and the battle takes place in the same spot as botws dark beast fight-

fight is very challenging as gan is smaller than the dark best version, jumping and charging at you while still able to cast spells, now truly throwing everything he can at you in the hopes of ending you both

fight ends with you shooting an arrow at zelda, her deflecting it at the right angle and it shooting off the enigma stone on gans forehead; he falls seemingly defeated and as zelda runs to take the stone away gan through sheer panic lunges for the stone triggering his dragon transformation and making way for the final fight

(summary of the end: in the final fight gan snatches up both link and zelda once he transformed into the black dragon and takes flight toward the sky, zelda falls from between his teeth and knowing that she cant get to link and help him in any way from the ground she, while falling, takes out the enigma stone she has kept in a save container in her backpack all this time and swallows it for her own transformation, in her white dragon form she takes active action and charges at gans head so link is freed, then supports him in the fight itself; at the end link plunges into dragon-gans mouth to reach the stone on the inside where he makes use of the 'medicine' previously made using the moonbloom taked from kogas secret lab, link and the stone are spit out and as gan reverses into a human and falls link is caught by zelda and he uses the second charge of it on her to bring her back as well; as all three fall from the skies as the sages have made their way through the tunnel that beast gan made earlier, they help link and zelda getting to the ground safely while the yiga do the same for gan - final end end isnt determined yet but this is waht i got so far and even if i have written this once before i felt it was fitting to do it again and no you cant tell me this is too much of a wishfulfillment thing bc it literally is just that as i cant actualyl change whats in the game, so even if im trying to make it all fit well together i can still do what i want nhakjdbgshdbhsjka)

(totk rewritten project)

[forgetriestowrite]

i rewatched HTTYD 1 the other night (for the millionth time lol) and I was fully aware of my love of Toothless being a giant cat, but I kinda forgot how awesome it is when he gets to be OP

like this guy shoots nuclear blasts out of his mouth REGULARLY

he took down the evil tyrant dragon almost entirely by himself

He blew up a glacier and took down the alpha in the second movie to save his best friend

he was the most terrifying thing in Viking lore for hundreds of years because no one could see him and he'd just fly by and, again, NUKE EVERYTHING. AND THEN LEAVE.

I love when we get reminded how formidable of a force Toothless is

[gomzdrawfr]

when in doubt, shiny au

[le--monde--est--stone]

my personal theory is that people who endlessly make fun of yamcha and hate on him never watched the og dragon ball series/read the manga

[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

[silverhalla]

alright single digit days so it’s time for last-minute baseless + unfounded veilguard theories!!!!!!! I’ll go first: the reason spite can’t take over lucanis’ body is because that body is ALREADY being possessed by lucanis, who was in fact dead and buried in the wake and rebound to a new form in the ossuary

[moongothic]

You know when I originally suggested that maybe Dragon is the one who gave Crocodile his scar and/or took his left hand --if only because [Dragon not recognizing the big scary man with a baby when he was supposed to go see his wife, assuming the worst and acting accordingly] would make for an A-Class tragedy and great fucking drama (something which I would expect to see in One Piece)-- I wasn't fully convinced with the idea, I just considdered it just another option on What Could Have Happened between those two to get us where we are ...But the more I think about it, the more I've started to kind of believe it. And for two key reasons, first being kind of everything we know about Whitebeard, and the second being the basic logistics around the suggested scenario to begin with

By which I mean; if Dragon had indeed gone to see his wife so he could deliver their newborn baby to Garp, but instead came face-to-face with a man he had never seen before but who just happened to have the exact same and very specific facial scar as his wife and/or the same god damn hook... Like I can't say he SHOULD be able to recognize Crocodile instantly, but also, surely either of those features would make him stop for a moment think and/or talk before he'd jump into action, let alone if the man had both the scar and the hook. Of course, there is an argument to be made that maybe Crocodile had a smaller hook originally that no longer fit on his wrist after getting jacked so maybe Crocodile just wasn't wearing any hook at all, and a missing limb isn't an unusual disability on its own, at least not enough to faze Dragon. And who knows, maybe the two were supposed to meet on a dark and stormy night, in which case between the low light and the rain it could've been hard for Dragon to see any scars on Crocodile's face from a distance. These are both reasonable arguments, absolutely. But, as I have mentioned a few times before, sometimes the path of least resistance might be the most likely option as far as story speculation goes. If Crocodile had both his hands and no scar on his face, then Dragon wouldn't have had any way to immidiately and instantly recognize Croc (aside from his fashion sense) as he would've been missing (what we would now considder) his most distinquishing features. Which would it much easier for Dragon to jump into action and attack the strange man without a second thought.

And then there's Whitebeard. Whitebeard, who was kind of famous for stomping rookie pirates only to invite them to join his crew as his "sons", but who also had a weird thing about not having women in his crew (his nurses aside), because he believed "women do not belong on a battlefield". For one, that actually kind of supports the "Crocodile is openly trans" theory because, again, how the fuck would Croc have been pre-t AND stealth as a Wardlord getting his shit kicked in by Whitebeard? Like it's not impossible, as we have discussed many times before (and that is not the point of this post!!), but once again it would be easier to just assume Crocodile was still living as a woman at this point in time. And indeed, that could answer the question of "why would Whitebeard not invite Crocodile into his crew to be one of his children like Ace and everyone else?". If Croc was still living and presenting as a woman at this point, Whitebeard would not have even wanted him in his crew. (Sidenote but since Whitebeard seemed to have no issues with Jinbei hanging around the Moby Dick despite being a Warlord I don't think Crocodile's Shichibukai status should've had any impact on WB's ability to invite him to his crew. To be fair though, Jinbei did join the Shichibukai much later so it is possible WB could've just changed his position on the subject over the years) And that leads to this question; if Whitebeard has that kind of views on women, then would he ever go as far as to severely injure and scar (someone he viewed as) a woman right on their face? With an attack that could have very easily chopped Crocodile's entire head in half like a god damn burger bun if he weren't careful? Do you think Whitebeard would have chopped Crocodile's left hand off and left him permanently disabled if he viewed him as a woman who shouldn't be a fighter to begin with? Yes, to be fair, we do not know the circumstances under which Crocodile challenged Whitebeard into a fight and what kind of a pirate Crocodile had been up until that point, what his reputation had been and if he had done anything in particular to invite Whitebeard's wrath (much like Kid and Barto with Shanks). Like for all we know he could've done something truly heinous and fucked up enough that Whitebeard thought teaching him a lesson was justified.

Just, looking at all of these notes together, I can't help but to feel that it's actually very plausible Dragon could be the one responsible for one of Crocodile's injuries if not both (if Crocodad Real).

[moghedien]

Shipping Cassandra and Leliana is so funny because I feel like the only people who actually do it have either only played Inquisition or don't think much past "Well they're the Left and Right Hands of the Divine" because you KNOW they only get along to the extent they do in Inquisition because they've never had an actual conversation because the second Leliana opened her mouth about her theology in front of Cassandra, they would have been trying to strangle each other

[mandarinasart]

Old but gold 🤌💕

I drew this last year for inktober and I am still in love with the outcome. Also last year I fell in love with the 'Like a Dragon' series thanks to @veilody .

Majima Goro is a fan favorite and rightly so. Personally I love him in Kiwami 2 the most with his helmet and Nishida as sidekick. Also I was addicted to his substory . Damn, I really need one of those helmets myself.

[niofo]

the thing i was thinking about yesterday when i had fever, was: wouldn't it be super fucked up if zara actually had another one of lucanis' phylacteries hidden somewhere else, just in case. maybe i just want lucanis and morgan have an abomination brawl while the rest of the team is scrambling in panic to find the other phylactery and destroy it. a true unstoppable force (perfect killer) vs immovable object (unkillable cockroach).

[tritoch]

i like people who are like "ugh zenos is so annoying i hate him he's like a git gud video game guy" because like. on the one hand this is a reductive read. and on the other hand there's no crime in being a git gud video game guy in and of itself. i wish i could explain to you the holistic joy of finally embracing the idea of gitting gud.

but also YEAH he's a git gud video game guy. this is a video game. "grr he's wrong i don't like doing ever harder fights and dancing on the precipice of defeat" well okay! you can maybe forgive his mistake since you bought the base game and four expansions to the game where you level up and do dance fights against ever harder bosses! he has to be a git gud video game guy who treats combat like a game in order to properly be a foil to you, because combat literally is a game to you.