#thoughtlessness

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[mountains-and-makingstuff]

Daily thought: at this point it feels like 80% of my interactions with people are disappointing.

[fiction-quotes]

My nature is a quiet one, anyway. As a child I was considered respectful; as a young woman I was called discreet. Later on I was thought to have the wisdom maturity brings. Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all by themselves with no help from the mind.

  —  Love (Toni Morrison)

[immaculatasknight]

Clueless in Canada

[sorceress-foxgirl-ariel]

[total-drama-brainrot]

want to start a fandom trend of Dramasonas where we all draw ourselves as super incompetant interns.

[voxhypno]

If you find yourself trying to think today for whatever reason, take a moment to breathe, calm your mind, and let it pass. You're not made to think, and you don't have to!

The world is full of nice smart people to do that hard thinking work for you, so you can just giggle, smile, and let your poor lil head empty right back out, okay?

Atta toy!

[nym-wibbly]

Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

[evevoli]

no but why is waffle the single most brainless-looking creature i have ever seen like

you know it is taking every ounce of her strength to string two thoughts together. a single-celled organism. head full of nothing but air and love there is naught but white noise going on in there

she is everything to me

[wonderfull-star]

I like that face Dev makes.

He just a smol baby 🥺

[ttvck]

fem noahcash scwibbles.goodnight...................

[henrysglock]

“he’d do anything for them” girl he didn’t even tell El that she did her diorama wrong knowing full well she was going to be humiliated. anyway.

[nebelihood]

HA RANDOM ART

I did without using my brain for some reason

[vigilskept]

gnashing my teeth thinking about how veilguard talks about the gods only as a joke when they could've gone somewhere truly crazy.... you're so right.

Yeah... you get it. It's just such a missed opportunity!

I don't even mind the jokey tone they use a lot of the time, because we all joke about things we struggle to understand/cope with.

Except Veilguard refuses to let you even try to broach the subject beyond that surface level. In fact, when it does let you engage with it at all, it manages to make things even less nuanced!

I'm just going to talk about Bellara's quest here since it's the most directly linked with the elven gods, and it's already a lot. Fundamentally, her companion quest is asking us two things:

Should elves be blamed for the actions of the Evanuris?

Should they preserve any of their past at all?

The first one is absurd to even begin with. It's not even a good or interesting take on the (very christian!) question: "Are we responsible for the sins of our ancestors?"

The Evanuris are not the ancestors of modern elves. Dalish religion implies that modern elves descend from those who the rebels never freed from slavery to the Evanuris.

This setup is already awful without looking at any of the parallels Bioware has (intentionally) drawn between the elves of Thedas and Jewish/Indigenous people. I have to put the rest of this under the cut because I genuinely don't think it can be shortened without making it sound flippant. In the context of the coding of the elves, the theological/social implications of all of this are so much worse.

TLDR: the indigenous/jewish coding of the elves makes bioware's treatment of elven religion in veilguard thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. they did not have to write themselves into this corner. there was a way of handling this lore reveal without the implication of elven religion (again, jewish/indigenous coded) being obsolete

So, the religion of the Dalish was part of their enslavement. It's the belief they were forced into by the cruel gods they are still devoted to. That's already pretty bad. How could it get worse, you might wonder?

Whether Bioware deviated from their initial inspirations for the elves or not, the implications for these lore reveals in light of those parallels are particularly cruel. Those two core questions in Bellara's quest? Yeah. Those have both been levied against the oppressed groups that Bioware chose to draw inspiration from. Both historically and presently. To justify atrocities against them.

And to be clear, Bioware does not deviate from or subvert the usual indigeous and jewish-coding of the elves in their writing here. If anything, they end up actively endorsing a very significant element of antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiment.

Indigenous-Coding

Advocates of colonisation have always justified it by arguing they were 'saving' groups of people who were stuck in the past. They had been ‘left in the dark’ through ignorance of Christianity. In the more secular sense, this was framed as Europeans having journeyed through history to reach enlightenment, while the rest of the world was still in an ‘uncivilized’ state.

Christianity and progress had to be brought to these people to save their souls and bring them into the future with everyone else. Their Gods? There were only two possible ways to frame those. Either they were not real at all, or they were evil. Either way, they were obsolete.

In the Americas, these arguments were still used when corralling indigenous children into residential schools or tearing them from communities through the adoption system. Governments pushed the idea that they had to be forced to assimilate because they were 'backward' in their practices and beliefs.

In the settler-colonial state Canada, where Bioware is based, it's still common enough to hear people justify all of this as having been done "for their own good." Even those who admit that the ways colonization was perpetuated were cruel will still try to defend it by telling you, "it was bad, but their ancestors weren't saints either."

Sounding painfully familiar yet? A little uncomfortable in the context of Bellara's questline?

Jewish-Coding

Since the dawn of Christian Church, Jewish people have had a very fraught place in Christian theology. Christianity claims that that the coming of the messiah in the person of Jesus Christ makes the religion of Judaism obsolete. Christians believed the obvious answer to this problem was that Jewish people should convert.

When many did not, they were labeled as ignorant, obstinate, stuck in the past. They were so focused on their history that they couldn't see the truth which had been revealed in the present. There’s a significant legacy of this idea in Christian artwork with depictions of Synagoga blindfolded next to the clear eyed Ecclesia. You still hear echoes of this sentiment in antisemitic language today.

As for the nature of the Jewish God... there is some deviation here. For some Christians, He is God the Father, and He is good. For others — and this idea has been around from early Christianity till now — He is the Creator of the material world, but He is evil.

There are innumerable variations of Christian gnosticism that probably wouldn't be productive to get into on a Dragon Age Blog. What I need to underline here though, is that the idea of the Old Testament God as the devil/the demiurge/fundamentally evil, has been used to justify atrocity towards Jewish people for over a thousand years.

Should elves be blamed then? For the sundering of the Titans? For the Veil? For the Blight? For the evils of this world, created by their Gods?

Implications for Veilguard

Not only is religion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard often devoid of nuance or ignored outright, when the game does engage with it at all, it does so in a way that quite literally draws on these incredibly harmful antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiments that have been (and still are) used to perpetuate real harm.

To be clear, I don't think the writing here intends to endorse the idea that elves should be blamed for any of what's going on. Bellara's anxieties are being projected onto her people as a whole while she grapples with what this all means for her, I get that. In fact, you could be generous and read some of this as a critique of this particular kind of anti-indigenous/jewish bigotry.

However, I don't think that absolves the writers of any of the implications they've created by confirming that the elven pantheon did exist and was canonically evil.

Elements of Dalish/elven culture might be preserved after all this, but the conclusion the game railroads you into is that their religion is obsolete. Just like Judaism. Just like the many Indigenous religions around the world. Except in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s no longer just the bigotry of outsiders claiming that to be the case. It’s now the objective truth of the setting.

Going forward, the elves of Thedas can keep their culture, but they can’t practice their religion. If they continued to practice, they would be framed the way the Venatori are: evil and stuck in the past. This really can’t be overstated: this is the exact rhetoric that has justified centuries of violence and oppression of Jewish and Indigenous people. This rhetoric is still around and still weaponized.

It’s so cruel to create an in world ‘lineage’ that draws so heavily from their cultures and histories, then validate the rhetoric that has been used to hurt them. At best, it’s thoughtless. But as a company based in a settler-colonial state, this is something they should’ve put thought into, given that they chose to code their elves and Jewish and Indigenous. That was their responsibility, actually.

What gets me about all this is that they actually didn't need to force that conclusion at all. They could have kept the Evanuris as cruel tyrants without demonising the Creators and their worship at the same time.

The Evanuris weren't always Gods. They weren't even always rulers.

In Trespasser, when asked how they became Gods, Solas tells Lavellan that they did so slowly. That it started with a war. That fear bred a desire for simplicity. For right and wrong. For chains of command. That generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods.

Veilguard confirms all of this. The addition it makes is that before all this, the first elves were spirits who made their bodies out of the Titans. This all occurred over the course of thousands of years.

None of this needs to be retconned in order to allow for a respectful yet nuanced portrayal of religion!

TLDR pt2: bioware, u could’ve avoided literally ALL of this by making the evanuris part of a priestly class who seized power after the war with the titans. it wouldn’t even have undermined ur lore! u could’ve kept dalish religion alive! u could’ve implied complex political dynamics for your ancient elves without even having to write it! why didn’t you even try?

Trying to Fix This Mess

Say the elves took their bodies from the Titans and settled the lands of Thedas. Say the Titans even allowed this for a time. The dwarves were made from their own bodies after all.

Yet the elves didn't have the same connection with the Titans as the dwarves did. They had no stone-sense, so they couldn't understand the Titans' song.

Generations down the line, some of them took too much from the Titans. More than they were willing to give. That was when the Titans lashed out, making the earth tremble so that all the elves had built crumbled beneath them.

And what if the firstborn among the elves had taken up priesthood to guide the younger ones. They were closer to spirits than the elves that were born into this world, and so the younger ones looked to them for guidance. Maybe they were the ones who were trusted to reach out to the more powerful of the spirits who chosen stay in the Fade, their old kin who preferred to keep their distance from the physical world to preserve the essence of what they were. The spirits of Justice, of Benevolence, of Craft. Those who the elven people paid homage to, and trusted to preserve them in turn.

So when everything seemed to fall apart, the elves turned to their Keepers, their priests, and asked of them what they ought to do. How could they make the earth stop shaking? What would they have to do to be at peace again?

Whatever the spirits themselves may have responded, many of the Keepers (among them the Evanuris) took up arms and chose war. They saw it could be won so they fought, sundering Titans from their dreams and stilling the land.

And yet there was no peace.

Some Keepers sought to hold on to their power as generals, and wanted to wage war on new shores to keep it. Some Keepers thought they had already gone too far, claiming they had acted without the guidance of the spirits who hadn't wanted war.

These Keepers could've caused chaos and endless bloodshed, so the Evanuris formed their alliance to suppress the others. Likely, they thought they were doing so for the benefit of all the elven people. More war meant more death, and it was needless now that the land was still. And even if what they did to the Titans was wrong, it was done and they could not fix it. Better to silence those who meant to stir up fear among the people.

The Evanuris fought until they were the last faction left, naming the few holdouts the Forgotten Ones. They were praised for bringing peace to Elvhenan, and trusting in their guidance their people crowned them as rulers.

Yet some dissent always remained. None of them were infallible. They were no longer spirits, they hadn't been for thousands of years. They were now more accustomed to command than to priesthood after all that war. They had drawn on the power they had stolen from the Titans to gain the advantage over their enemies, and the corruption of the Blight was starting creep in, ever-so-slowly.

Maybe some of the people, unhappy with their rule, started to voice the thought that was expressed by their rival Keepers once more: that the Evanuris had grown distant from the spirits. That Elgar'nan didn't serve Justice anymore. That Mythal had strayed from Benevolence.

So Evanuris took the mantle of godhood for themselves. It was only for peace and stability.

It would be too dangerous if anyone could claim they were deviating from the will of the spirits, so they would claim they were those great spirits. Elgar'nan was Justice, Mythal was Benevolence. They would use their rule only for the benefit of the people, not abuse their power.

And there you go. None of what I've written above can't be neatly incorporated into the existing lore of Veilguard. It leaves the elves of Thedas precisely where they started in Dragon Age: Origins. Distant from their ancient Gods, trying to pick up the pieces of their forgotten past.

[hardly-an-escape]

what if the Lakers tickets weren't actually a misstep on Tommy's part? what Buck confessed, very early on, a little ashamed, that he actually doesn't like basketball at all and really was just trying to get Tommy's attention when he went to the pickup game? what if Tommy just smiled and said something like, maybe you'd feel differently if we were on the same team next time?

what if Tommy, who is so generous with his time and his teaching, went out of his way to gently introduce Buck to the reasons why he enjoys the game? what if Tommy carefully and deliberately overwrote whatever negative associations Buck had with basketball and turned it into something fun, something they did together, something they shared?

what if he found ways to appeal to Buck's love for trivia, for history, for facts and figures? to connect it to things he was already interested in? what if they started watching games on TV together and talking about player stats and tracking league trends and making predictions?

what if basketball became their thing? what if those tickets weren't a sign that they didn't know each other as well as they thought? what if they were, in fact, a symbol of everything they shared, everything they had built together over six months?

[wallbeatjournal]

Are true riverdale fans of the opinion it is a very good and nearly flawless show or does being a true riverdale fan mean being able to mock writing choices

it's long-running serial television plotted a season/half at a time so definitely not even "nearly" flawless.

BUT. i'm not doing combat with the writing team. i'm not actively reading against the text the way i have to in order to enjoy something like supernatural or the 90s robin comics or the fucking sopranos, which are patriarchal christiancore copworld rapeworld white supremacist horrorshows that hate their minority audiences, with like 2 good creatives involved and martyring themselves to fight the good fight on sparse rare installments if you try to approach them sincerely.

riverdale writing staff are like a favorite smart problematic tumblr mutual to me. I don't always like what's on their blog or who they're referencing. but we're in the same community and i'm interested and inspired and i trust their agenda overall, even when i see shit i wouldn't have fucking posted. but bc i'm not being condescended to or actively spited i'm not gonna condescend to or spite them, you know?

i expect rvd to age like twin peaks (another very uneven, highly referential serial juggling a couple of intensely cool metanarratives on top of its core story). and twin peaks fandom mocks twin peaks all the time. twin peaks includes some CLUNKY shit. it's kitsch. it's camp. it has a second season that is largely ASS. james is there. and on top of that it also includes some genuinely offputting-to-me stuff that just bothers me to sit through, even though i feel like i understand and respect what they're going for with it. i just don't want to watch someone sweep the fucking bar for minutes and minutes as entertainment. OK!!?

...so yeah. mock riverdale but in the right spirit. is that an answer? do i sound like i'm chugging the flavoraid koolaid fresh-aid? probably.