#well.... i need another opinion

[cinamun]

[yeonjune]

Yeonjun about the strain he felt while preparing for his debut solo project ✙ "GGUM" MAKING FILM

[imerian]

My (very old) loscar brooch (?) that i just now made doodles for

More pictures under cut

[markantonys]

my show-first friend has been reading the books for the first time in the wake of s2 and is now on TFOH, but unlike me when i first dove into my readthrough, she knows nothing about the general Fandom Opinions™, so every now and then i like to drop a relevant bad Fandom Opinion™ on her and be vindicated by her utter bewilderment

and even this was after i undersold it by being like "oh a lot of people think he's dumb / think he's the worse brother of the two" i couldn't bring myself to say "he is the #1 most hated character in the entire series" because that would sound completely insane to someone who is normal djkfjg and would create some very false expectations for her about gawyn's future actions (shoutout to my pre-reading prediction that he was going to murder morgase and fight elayne for the throne or something, just based on the sheer vitriol i saw towards him). i WILL be interested to see if her opinion of him changes as she goes along, but he made it through the coup unscathed in her esteem and she's also thus far been all in favor of him becoming egwene's love interest, and i'm sure his upcoming onesided homoerotic rivalry with rand will amuse and delight her rather than annoy her, so i have high hopes!

[lizzybeeee]

(Same anon) It's also just a lot harder for me because Solas in Inquisition was trying to take down the Veil in a world that was genuinely shitty to elves, mages, and spirits (nvm that until this game I was 100% sure that he was trying to do this more for the ancient elves, like why else imply there are more out there to Abelas? I guess he was just being polite?) Veilguard depicts Thedas as being largely okay with mages and spirits even outside of Tevinter and pointedly doesn't depict racism against elves outside a handful of throwaway lines. So they had him going at this with the same conviction from DAI, of a man trying to reverse the slow genocide of his people, but they've boiled his motivations down to "The Veil is unnatural" Like. How much more awesome if we could have convinced him not to destroy the world because of a culmination of choices in this game and all the others that made Thedas a kinder place idk man. ngnegnwgnf sorry for ranting in your inbox, I still liked Solas enough in this game but it was really bittersweet that they just dumbed down his motivations. I love your idea for influencing the Inky though, it definitely should have been a choice closer to the end and allowed for more variations (ideally all Inkies should have that, not just the Solavellans)

Hello again, Anon! :)

100% agree that the sanitization of the world and lore absolutely hurts Solas's motivations - especially if you look at it solely from what Veilguard gives us and with no background from previous games. All of the previous games, mostly Origins, were really effective in conveying how shit life could be for an elf - and how inbuilt this prejudice against the elves was in all aspects of Thedas.

The chant of light removing the canticle of Shartan, the march on the Dales, the struggles of the Dalish to simply live, the treatment of elves by the ruling class/chantry/ and others in general...it all painted such a bleak outlook for the elves and showed how ingrained this prejudice was in all aspects of Thedas. They had no way out - the structures of power in Thedas would fight them at every turn - which was why Solas being set up as a way for them to fight against all these systems was so compelling! You want the elves to win - but it will be at the cost of everything else if Solas goes ahead with his plan.

(You can definitely also make an argument that perhaps he's using them just to restore the world from before -> Felassan argued with him about this: to see the world as it was as real and worth improving.)

DATV felt divorced from the previous games, and its reluctance to meaningfully go into issues surrounding the lives of elves in Thedas - all the ugliness that brings - really did nothing to add to Solas's motivations for bringing down the Veil. If anything, I got the impression that he does not see anyone in Thedas as being 'real' and that he's simply doing it out of regret and to soothe his own ego/guilt. If this game wanted me to be sympathetic towards Solas it didn't do a good job of making me feel it, especially when you look at the totality of everything that Solas has done.

What I took from Trespasser was that Solas wanted to heal the wound he had left on the world - the Veil - and what he had inadvertently done to the elves. He had given everything he had to free the elven people from oppression and tyranny, only to inadvertently leave them vulnerable to the same oppression from others -> taking away their magic and long lives in the process. He was so blinded by his goal (stopping the evanuris) that he failed to see what his own actions might have wrought in the process.

Trespasser set up the 'Elven Rebellion 2.0' with a Solas who was torn between the world he once knew and the world it had become in spite of his intentions. Does he truly care about the elven people in current Thedas? Or does he just care about the world that came before? In DAI he was such a fascinating character because he could be so polarizing! People loved him! People hated him! Both were correct!

But starting the game with the ritual, sanitizing the world (no real signs of conflicts about spirits, mages, elves, anything really etc...), and simplifying his motivations to "fix fade -> be immortal/magic -> profit"...it just feels so shallow.

Solas: "Long before we met, I failed my oldest friend. She died for that failure. If I leave the Veil in place, I am destroying the world she wanted."

He spells his motivations out pretty clearly at the end and it's just...Mythal? He doesn't seem to care about the elves that are currently living in Thedas - not even Lavellan. Like you said, in Tresspasser I also got the impression that he wanted stop the slow genocide of his people. But apparently it was 'Mythal All Along'!

The lack of supporters/agents really gives him no credence to say that this is anything that the elves want - elven Rook can even call him out on it and he doesn't care. For a character whose own trauma began with bring coerced into a body he didn't want he doesn't give a shit about doing the same to thousands of other elves.

It's far less compelling, to me at least, than what I felt was set up in DAI: the Dread Wolf, god of rebellion, rallying elves after ages of systematic abuse and oppression with the goal of liberating his people and restoring the world that was - the world he inadvertantly denied them with the consequences of his actions. Instead it's just Solas doing his own thing because he's right and he needs to fix what he did wrong for Mythal.

It would have been great to be able to convince him to change his mind/ pursue another path as a result of the culmination of our actions throughout the series. It could be a nice nod to our past decisions and a nice conclusion to see the results of those choice in missives/codex entries. Same as the 'south can repel the blight' counter idea, have their be some kind of 'convince Solas to pursue another option' tally that demonstrates that this world is willing to change and he should be too.

[goryhorroor]

I’ve been seeing a lot of hate for “artsy” horror and let’s not act like this is some modern horror creation I mean this goes back to carnival of souls in the 60, vampyr in the 30s, haxan in the 20s, and house of the devil in the 1890s. I get that the artsy horror crowd has had a tendency to hate on non-artsy horror but let’s not act like having these artsy horror movies are a bad thing or are some modern day horror thing (they’ve existed for a very long time)

[headfullof-ideas]

Okay, someone tell me if I’m the only person who thinks this, but I think if things had gone differently, Vi and Sevika would actually get along kinda well? Like, their biggest aspects to them is loyalty, even though it looks a little different between them. Sevika is more to the Undercity while Vi is loyal to the people she loves, but my POINT STANDS. And they’re both fighters, they have that in common, AND they’ve already beaten the snot out of each other twice now. That’s how you get to know someone.

Idk, I just feel like if things had gone differently and they hadn’t wound up on opposite sides, like if Sevika stayed with Vander instead of Silco, things would have been better between them and they might have actually gotten along

[novantinuum]

gnawing at the bars of my cage

can we please Stop telling SU blind reactors all the fandom drama and SU crit that came out of every episode so we can allow them to just enjoy the show like a normal person at their own leisure and make their Own opinions thank u

[iratusmus]

fiona fox is the love + light of my life . also no i am not taking any criticism on her questionable tshirt collection i can and will defend all of my choices.

also bonus artist commentary in the alt text

[sskk-manifesto]

Next time we should just skip over ep 3 and do a chapters 84-87 reread

[rotisseries]

opinions about the storytelling of arcane season 2 aside you guys have got to stop saying it's a victim of the too short tv seasons phenomenon. do the math its seasons are about as long as any other cartoon you guys just aren't used to getting that handed to you in 9 40-minute episodes instead of 18 20-minute episodes. if you think it needed more episodes then it needed another season

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

Pakal-Ná in Chiapas in Mexico is a poem, a bloodletting, a roadside memorial, a wish. Laughter echoing from inside a dark place. Blinding heat. Clothes wet with jungle. Railroad ties shiny and smooth from a million frantic footsteps. It is the sun reflected off sharpened metal. A rooster screaming. A man screaming.

–jason de león, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (x)

[mars-ipan]

so funny to me how ppl on tumblr will read a post that says, within the post, SEVERAL times, “hey this isn’t super well-thought out discussion and shouldn’t be treated as such i’m just sharing an individual opinion and my word should not be taken as fact” and then refuse to understand that whether they agree or disagree with the op

[dollypopup]

interesting how polin is all here for multishippers when it comes to penelope being shipped with literally everyone and their father, but the second someone ships colin with marina, it's suddenly controversial and bad and wrong and they should be totally fine with people talking shit about her and acting like she's the worst and how dare you post anything in the archives about it or in the tags, don't you know that he'd be miserable and the two of them would never work and I HATE HER AND AND AND.

this fandom will lose their shit over penelope with literally every bland whitebread man in her general vicinity and fics on fics on fics get written about her with OCs and his brothers and his sister and people she's never so much as shared a room with but heaven forbid you think Colin and Marina were cute during their canonical courtship

[solar-halos]

i think the craziest part of the percy jackson series—(warning i’m gonna be talking about child abuse)

—is that sally married gabe. “she was using him to hide percy’s demigod scent.” she married a man who physically abused her child. like. i get it’s a very nuanced situation and that demigods literally don’t even exist but yk what does exist? moms who marry men that abuse their children… like girl. there are plenty of bum ass men who smoke weed and eat pizza and looove their ciggies and instead of abusing ur kid they would straight up ignore him and if they were a demigod their scent would STILL be hidden

[verflares]

i Wish i had some degree of sewing/plushmaking powers because honestly that might be the only thing between me and diying my own light dragon plushie. if i can be so real