#where everyone is totally fine

[crushermyheart]

Happy Valley / Series 2 / Episode 6 / Catherine

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[front-facing-pokemon]

[seriouslyseravellan]

it's so fuckin funny to me that one of the devs was like "oh the combat in veilguard will be ACTUALLY FUN" like... bitch i LIKED the combat in origins and 2! it was actually fun for me! the issue was that you fucking CHANGED it for inquisition, and now you're changing it again! it doesn't even feel like dragon age combat anymore! what is wrong with you

[helv-ete]

Netherlands Rarepair Week day 2- Species

Fun fact about me in fall of 2022 I had a massive vampire phase because I started reading Dracula for the first time. This then inspired me to buy the vampire sims 4 pack because, another fun fact about me, I’m a sims 4 fanatic (like I spend all my money on this game it’s lowkey a problem) in which I created a save where I made the Netherlands a vampire and Germany a normal human who was his roommate and came up with a storyline I was so obsessed with that I decided to write it. I kinda ended up forgetting about it after I wrote a few chapters, but the basic plot is that germany, who has lived his whole life in Bavaria, spontaneously decides to move to Leiden for a job and ends up moving in with the Netherlands, who he doesn’t know at all and, unbeknownst to him, is a vampire. The whole joke of it was going to be that Germany was super oblivious about the whole vampire thing even though it was pretty obvious and when he does start to figure it out he totally freaks out about being murdered, which would be understandable except the Netherlands doesn’t actually do anything remotely threatening in the story. He also doesn’t want to move back home because his brothers thought moving was a stupid decision in the first place and he decides he’d rather be killed by a vampire than told “I told you so.”

[tearlessrain]

I mean years ago I really hoped that we might get some coherent dalish lore in this game that actually treated them with some measure of respect, and I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt that maybe people were right and the weird handling of their culture and beliefs thus far was a setup that would pay off when the veil crumbles and shit goes down and we see more of both the dalish and tevinter, and then we'd get some cool deconstruction of both the dalish gods AND the maker/andraste.

but that was years ago and by roughly the third time they re-announced the game I was starting to suspect that development had passed out of the hands of anyone who would give a shit about lore and setting and story payoff long ago.

and based on what people are saying so far it looks like that's true.

[hellishgayliath]

.

[starswirly]

[ * Pros of self indulgent art: making what you crave and want to see in the world! ] [ * Cons: It’s not everyone’s niche ]

[savage-rhi]

Magneta????

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

This week on "CJ needs to gush about DAO": Morrigan's dark ritual.

I adore Origins because depending on how serious you take roleplay, every decision you make is a thread that leads back to your origin, and in this case of the ritual, who you choose to romance can have a major impact on how you handle this choice.

For context, my canon run is with a female Tabris who romances Alistair and keeps him as a Grey Warden, and is close friends with Morrigan. It's more in character for my Tabris to reject Morrigan's ritual and not even bring it up to Alistair, which would result in her leaving him behind while she makes the ultimate sacrifice in killing the archdemon... however, agreeing to convince Alistair to do the ritual with Morrigan is the only choice in the entire game where I break roleplay because I'm selfish and weak and I want Tabris to live.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the ritual, like it hurts me. It makes me want to chew on furniture. I can talk about it until I can talk no more. I so badly want to be strong enough to remain in character and reject the ritual.

Let me explain: Tabris survives an origin that deals with sexual assault. She gets kidnapped on her wedding day, she watches the other kidnapped women and her husband get murdered, and then is too late to save Shianni from being assaulted... and Tabris carries that trauma with her throughout the entire game.

If the way to save her life is to ask the two most important people she cares about; one being her lover and the other being her best friend; who she knows hate each other, to have dubiously consensual sex in order to make a baby to absorb the old god soul... she's saying no. The last thing Tabris would ever do is put someone into a sexual situation where consent is at all dubious after what she saw happen to Shianni and nearly happened to herself. She'd rather die than force that upon Alistair and Morrigan.

That's what I mean when I say origin affects everything; I know some will side eye that with "Really? Your warden would rather die than let Alistair sleep with another woman? It's one time, and Alistair agrees to it, so no one needs to die?"

Let me be clear in saying this isn't a "Morrigan slept with my man" issue. Sure, that part's awkward and it sucks, but that's not even breaking water tension, let alone diving into the deep waters to the core of the issue.

For my Tabris, this is about betrayal, consent, and accepting fate.

The person offering Tabris this deal is someone she thought of as a trusted friend who has actually been lying to her the entire time. It doesn't matter what Morrigan's intentions are now or if she genuinely wants to save the wardens. She knew from the beginning why Flemeth sent her with them, she admits as much. She knew a warden would need to make the ultimate sacrifice and then leveraged that to get what she wants. Morrigan waited until the night before, when Alistair and the warden learn one of them has to die to defeat the archdemon, and took advantage of the high running emotions and possibly the fear of dying to make the warden agree to her ritual.

At least, that's how my Tabris interprets this confrontation. She feels betrayed by someone she came to love like a sister and went out of her way to help Morrigan with her mother upon learning what's in Flemeth's grimoire. And then that someone tells her no one needs to die, she just needs to convince Alistair to sleep with her... which is a huge fucking problem.

The Alistair and Tabris romance is slow; it took a long time for either of them to be comfortable with being emotionally vulnerable and trusting each other with basic intimacy, let alone sex. Tabris is mortified at the idea of putting Alistair in this situation. Not only would it feel like a betrayal on her part to ask that of him, but she knows the last thing Alistair ever wants to do is father a bastard who then goes on to grow up without him. How could she possibly ask him to do that?

Then you consider that ritual or no, there isn't a guarantee that they'll survive anyway. Say they do the ritual and Tabris dies anyway; she made Alistair sleep with Morrigan in order to save her and then she died anyway. Or if Alistair dies then Tabris gets to live with the fact that the last person Alistair was with was a woman he hates because she asked that of him… and either way, Morrigan gets to walk away with what she wanted.

Tabris led the group, and she's accepted that if Riordan dies [which he does] then she'll be the one to make the sacrifice, even if it means breaking both hers and Alistair's heart.... except she doesn't because I'm a coward who doesn't want to lose her because my worldstate isn't good without her in it but I also refuse to lose Alistair so I just pretend it plays out differently in my head it's fine-

But... that's how I play Tabris and view the situation. My friend @pi-creates and I have discussed the dark ritual at length. While I play a Tabris who romances Alistair, Pi plays a Mahariel who romances Morrigan, so we have vastly different interpretations of the ritual itself and Morrigan's intentions.

Which yeah, it makes total sense that someone who romanced Morrigan with a different origin, and has the option to do the ritual with her rather than asking someone else to do it, wouldn't see this the way I do.

To quote Pi: "Playing as a male warden in the Morrigan romance makes the whole situation feel different, and maybe it’s because she’s presenting it differently due to the emotional connection, but it feels more like she’s opening up about her initial instructions (that she had been given by Flemeth) and offering a solution to avoid the possibility of death. And for my Mahariel, the constant threat of sudden death has haunted him from the start – he caught the blight and was ripped away from his clan (something he did not want to do in the slightest), got forced into a Grey Warden ritual that could kill him, was forced into a battle that could kill him, going on this whole quest that he never wanted but has now become responsible for regardless of his thoughts on the matter… the dark ritual may be one of the few moments where he is presented with an option to decide if he wants to walk into certain death, or take actions of his own volition to stop it.

"The idea of the ritual still feels like a dodgy thing to do since the ultimate outcome is unknown at that point, he’s taking Morrigan at her word that it will save the warden and that this child would be unharmed, just with an old god soul that she isn’t exactly clear on why she wants that and is determined to runaway immediately after the battle to secure it properly. It could be interpreted that it’s purely a preservation thing, but I’m biased to wanting Morrigan's intentions to not be power based.

"But also, taking part in the ritual isn’t as outlandish for my warden since he and Morrigan have already been involved in an intimate relationship. It’s the future of the ritual that is scarier – the idea of this old-god baby, and the idea of Morrigan insisting that she’s leaving afterwards when Mahariel and her have a loving relationship. He’s hurting, but he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want Alistair to die, he doesn’t want Morrigan to leave, he definitely doesn’t want pregnant Morrigan to leave on her own… it’s complicated, but for completely different reasons."

And I find that fascinating. I want to know how other players approach this part of DAO, what origins they play, and who they romanced. Seriously, this is an invitation to anyone reading to share their thoughts.

What about a warden who doesn't even have Alistair in their party because they made Loghain a warden? Is there anyone out there who has Loghain do the ritual with Morrigan and why? What about male wardens who don't romance her? Do you choose to do it with her anyway, or do you ask Alistair or Loghain to do it? Do you tell Morrigan to fuck off with the ritual? Why? Who makes the ultimate sacrifice in that case? And what about Morrigan herself? How do you interpret her intentions/motivations? I want to know.

I'm telling you, this is a discussion that gets me excited, as most discussions about DAO do.

[starlooove]

What I really like about Damian is that instead of one big interconnected friend group he has many separate friends idk it’s cute it’s different

[whimsicalcotton]

Max: yeah no one really likes me haha i don't really have friends at blackwell

Kate & Warren: [so astronomically worried about her that it transcends the timeline resetting]

[itspileofgoodthings]

you know what I’ve realized lately? that’s really helped? the axiom: it just doesn’t really make that much of a difference. Or at least it doesn’t when you’re talking about good things and not, like, doing good vs. doing evil. Big choices, little choices, decisions, decisions —it’s not just that they don’t matter in the grand scheme of things—because they do! —but just. It won’t make that big of a difference. Life will continue to be wonderful AND difficult, fascinating AND hopelessly mundane, full of roses AND thorns and all the other cliches whether you walk down one road or another. And you’ll get used to the joys and sick of the sorrows whatever they are, and you’ll be ungrateful and bored and dissatisfied in some measure some of the time and you’ll have to work on all the things you have to work on anyways and just. Yeah! It doesn’t make that big of a difference! Even the biggest things!

[heretherebedork]

Having all of this happen so quickly and with so many flashbacks but not the taxi fear flashback is fascinating. Because I think a lot of this is Day's fear of the person he sees himself as in memories he has and how he can remember how he feels in those moments but it feels totally alien to him.

He loves Itt but he doesn't trust his own emotions and so he keeps fighting with his own feelings and that creates this dichotomy of how much he is remembering their relationship and his love but not remembering himself. And the fully clothed shower? Yeah. There's a lot going on as he slowly regains memories and bits and pieces of the person he became.

Right now, Day is in an inbetween, between who he was and who he became and who he is and that has turned him, in a lot of ways, into a monster. And he is awful and he is being awful on purpose because he looks at what he had, what he has, and he doesn't believe it because it doesn't make sense.

And the show isn't shying away from how awful he's being and how everyone else sees that and how the people around them are telling him he's wrong and are protecting Itt as much as he'll let them and it's an interesting examination of how far people will go for love even when it's actively hurting them.

[designernishiki]

y3 has made me feel many things but one of the things that lingers with me the most about it is how majima takes every possible opportunity and makes every possible gesture to say “please don’t leave me alone again, please take me with you when you leave, I WANT to be right next to you when you need me, I’ll literally do anything for you, just don’t leave me alone again” always indirectly but in strong enough ways that i think it’d be obvious to anyone paying attention EXCEPT Kazuma Kiryu, The Densest Man On Earth, who he’s pleading to in the first place. it’s. frustrating to watch. someone needs to grab kiryu by the shoulders and tell him. for the love of god. this man loves you so much and you keep leaving him when all he wants to do is help you and be with you please just take him to okinawa oh my god

[neonsix67]

"don't waste your money getting a diagnosis for the car if nothing is wrong" hey, just because it ran fine on a small drive doesn't mean there isn't problems, and while you claim to know exactly what wrong with it you never disclose that information to the person who drives it every day. Weird, huh? Believe it or not, I want to be able to fix problems, not just ignore them until the thing is completely unusable.