#which feels devastating because part of the joy of dragon age was the choices! and different world states! and the connections!

[shadowglens]

does anyone else feel like there’s little to no replayability for datv?

[thegeminisage]

taking a swing at the hornet's nest under the cut nobody be weird at me please do not send me death threats about a video game i have a long day at work today

i'm gonna make a polite and private reply to this post instead of engaging with op because, respectfully speaking, the notes on this post seem to indicate that neither of us would enjoy that. i wish OP nothing but joy and peace in their life and i want zero people to be harassing them for video game opinions, which everybody is allowed to have. also, disclaimer that there was a lot of stuff i really liked about veilguard.

THAT SAID,

it makes me feel crazy to see SO MANY PEOPLE agreeing so vehemently w this take BECAUSE...

first: tevinter

a very big fucking deal was made about the setting of the last game finally going to tevinter, which is a very big fucking important location in dragon age canon. tevinter is the reverse of the rest of the world. everyone else hates slavery but loves oppressing mages. tevinter is happy to participate in slavery but they let their mages rule things. there's two different chantries. tevinter used to own the entirety of northern thedas and some of southern thedas too. tevinter conquered and colonized the elves. it's different from any dragon age place we've ever seen, maybe the MOST different.

but when we get to dock town, it's...actually the most uninteresting location in the game. i can't tell you how many "poor part of town but make it fantasy" settings i have traipsed through in DRAGON AGE ALONE. alienages in denerim and kirkwall, other sections of denerim humans live in, dust town, and lowtown and darktown in kirkwall. aside from a few floating buildings and a bunch of cats, dock town isn't even VISUALLY DISTINCT from many other dragon age settings; we can't even see the big floating ring most of the time. tevinter has been sold to us as "ancient rome but with fantasy" and yes, obviously ancient rome had poor parts of town, but so much of what makes tevinter different and interesting has been completely left out of veilguard; so much of what makes it CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to this universe's lore is just. not touched on at all.

second: neve

while a lot of the choices in veilguard felt like they didn't matter very much (should harding face her past with anger or calmness and does this emotional outlook matter at all whatsoever to the current dwarves? should taash, a character who is about not choosing between binaries, choose between rivainni or qunari culture and does that impact the world at large in any way? should lucanis forgive his cousin or not forgive his cousin, resulting in illario being alive and lucanis being the first talon either way?), i think neve's suffered the most. should dock town have a protector or should it have hope? demonstrably there's...no difference?? neve's gonna keep on protecting dock town either way, and her doing so will continue to give the people she protects hope either way, so ???

but one SINGLE LINE line from neve's quest teases at a much more juicy storyline: when aelia says, "minrathous is broken, but you like it. does it flatter your ego to leave the city as it is? to prove your cynicism right?" neve loves minrathous, as evidenced by her devastation if minrathous is not the city saved during the dragon attack. but minrathous is, obviously, majorly flawed. we see some of this in dorian's character in inquisition: he has extremely complex feelings about tevinter, because he loves his homeland, but he knows it needs to do better. meanwhile if you go "yeah, fuck slavery!" dorian is like "wait what i didn't mean SLAVERY. i just hate our reputation." it's the ULTIMATE cognitive dissonance. it is also true to real life. i am from a place that is awful (south carolina). it is a place with an awful history filled with awful people who do awful things. and i am not the only person on earth living in a place with values and history that i find reprehensible! what do you do when home is bad? how do you cope? do you leave and publicly condemn it, or do you stay and try to change it? which one is easier to do? which one is easier to live with? this is a story that could have had massive relevance and impact...

...but this line from aelia is never brought up again in neve's story, save for one banter with lucanis. what does it MEAN to witness horrible things happening in minrathous every single day and still love it, and still hope for change? i don't know, because the only thing we witness is some strung up bodies if you save treviso. DOES neve hope for change, or is aelia right about her? in a world state where she is blighted, she can die if she's not hero of the veilguard - shouldn't that hero status mean reckoning with that cognitive dissonance, especially because her "fuck you" line to elgar'nan is "this is MY city"? what does it mean for neve, a human, to say something like that, even as a human who frees slaves and fights for the oppressed and powerless? DOES minrathous deserve to be saved or should we let the blight wipe it out? it would be nice to find out but we can't because the game goes out of its way to mention slavery as little as possible!!!

third: slavery

slavery has been the ghost haunting the narrative SINCE ORIGINS. even outside of tevinter, where it's illegal or the pope will kill you (i guess technically that can also happen in minrathous when he's moonlighting as tuxedo mask, but you know what i mean), people are still bought and sold. example: zevran and other crows. example: the elves in denerim's alienage. fenris's experiences as a slave color his outlook on mages so deeply he may turn against hawke during their hour of need if you haven't earned his respect. in inquisition, calpernia's history is just as present, the frustration of her situation causing her to ally willingly with the enemy; krem's own father had to sell himself into slavery to escape poverty, and tevinter is a place he can never return to. for fifteen years we heard stories about how tevinter is backwards and mages rule instead of remain oppressed and slavery is legal and we're about to meet the final boss of game locations...

...and then we don't actually grapple with any of that. we don't even see it. "show don't tell" is the oldest rule in storytelling. no, i'm not after "exploitation porn," and we don't need to walk past the fucking auction block every time we go in or out of the eluvian - what we needed were the perspectives of people like zevran, fenris, and calpernia (and by the way, all of these characters viewed their situations differently and reacted to them differently; zevran and fenris, for example, could not possible be further apart in terms of personality and how they cope with trauma).

people wanted a rook with a slave backstory because THERE IS NO ONE ELSE TO SPEAK FOR ENSLAVED PEOPLE. a lord of fortune rook gets a single, throwaway line and it is never brought up again. a shadow dragon rook makes a LOT of sense as a slave because a former slave would have every reason to fight against systems of oppression in minrathous. it SUCKS that the only npc we know was enslaved was the shopkeeper lorelei, a ferelden elf, who is outside doing work, while people like dorian and neve and maevaris (tevene human mages), are all inside making the big decisions about who's going to be the next archon and how they'll tackle the issue of slavery. we ask the viper (the pope) and we ask tarquin (not magic, but still human), but at no point do we ever ask anyone who has been enslaved, because those people DON'T EXIST. how many lines does lorelei have? what do you know about her? who does she think should become archon? how can you denounce slavery without talking about it? where are the slaves? why don't they get a voice? why aren't they in the room?

fourth: mages, elves, and crows

i don't really know a polite way to say this but i think the people who say veilguard DID show us dark and gritty stuff and DIDN'T sanitize itself if you are a smart player who can read between the lines are either extremely sensitive to this content in fiction or are maybe not being wholly honest with themselves. case in point: slavery isn't the only systemic evil in thedas. you've also got the oppression of mages, the racism against/colonization of the elves, and the buying and selling of people to turn them into crows.

mages: i'll never forget the post floating around awhile back where the anon asked someone what the circle of magi was because they'd only played veilguard and didn't know...how often does veilguard mention templars and mages? it was the entire subject of da2 and the first half of inquisition. why is a mage rook allowed to wander around freely wherever they want? why is emmrich? what happened to the mages when the circles were abolished? WERE they abolished? lots of mages preferred the circles; what happened to them? what happened to the templars? have they stopped taking lyrium? did some keep taking it?

elves: this, arguably, has the most content in the game...though the oppression of elves is largely hinted at as a vague, abstract concept. the evanuris are bad because they used to enslave people, but all that is ancient history, and they were elves too. aside from davrin and bellara's banter, we never really see or hear about how hard it is to be an elf in thedas, and it is also wack that we can walk around in a place like minrathous as an elf without being bothered; in dragon age absolution, just sitting at a bar with a drink on the stool a human wanted was enough to almost get miriam turned in to the city guard. sera's internalized racism is so severe she'll dump a dalish inquisitor who insists on sticking with her religion. but in veilguard, there's never any tension between the elf and non-elf party members, we have no city elves to talk to, no formerly enslaved elves, no elves who agree with solas, nothing. it's two dalish elves and they barely get to grapple with the idea that their gods used to be slavers, let alone say anything about what it meant to be an elf in thedas before that.

crows: lucanis and illario have had shitty, fucked-up lives, but they were born into those lives, not sold into them. meanwhile, nearly every other crow...? just joined up out of patriotism, i guess? like, viago's sitch is its own thing, but what about teia? jacobus? chance candide? rook themself?? the crows don't seem very intimidating or cruel in veilguard, but they BUY PEOPLE because that makes them money. zevran was bought for three gold and he remade that amount thousands of times over, and the life he led as a crow was so cruel he was trying to commit suicide by warden when you met him. what was teia's life like before veilguard? why is she so close with caterina? what was a crow rook's life like before veilguard? where do the crows come from, if they're not bought?

we don't talk about that stuff because someone in the executive department decided to scrub out the more controversial elements of thedas in veilguard. which means no more tough decisions, morally gray characters, or nuanced worldbuilding.

and THAT is the kind of enrichment that would have contributed to my enclosure.

[dragon age masterpost]

edit: i forgot to add this in the initial post, but scrubbing 99% of mentions of slavery and racism against elves is why nobody got to talk about the viper secretly being the black divine. the viper feeling like he can't do enough from within the system to enact meaningful change (and so he goes outside of the system, and works both angles), is incredibly interesting! it's deeply relevant to the conversation of who should be the next archon (maevaris, who wants to work from within the system, and dorian, who want to work outside of it). unfortunately, it's not at all explored in the game because in order to even explain why there's two divines to begin with you'd have to explain why one chantry is different from the other (one is ok with slavery but not locking up mages, the other loves locking up mages but hates slavery, and also they both hate elves), and we can't get that deep. like, there is an entire plotline - a really good one! - that got censored because this game is afraid to depict slavery in any meaningful way. it's not about exploitation porn.

[aion-rsa]

Wonder Woman 1984: Ending Explained

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains major Wonder Woman 1984 spoilers for the ending of the film. We have a spoiler free review here.

Wonder Woman 1984 fits a lot of story into its 2.5 hour runtime, especially in its action-packed third act as Diana faces off against not one, but two villains: Cheetah and Maxwell Lord. While audiences have been encouraged to think of the DC blockbuster as a relative standalone, there’s much about the sequel that harkens back to the first film (Steve Trevor, most of all) and there’s much about the movie that hints at what’s to come for our eponymous hero.

If you have some burning questions coming out of Wonder Woman 1984, you’re not alone. What happens at the end of the superhero sequel? What might it mean for the future of the franchise? And which characters might be back for future installments?

We have those answers and more ahead…

Will Steve Trevor Be Back?

Coming into Wonder Woman 1984, one of the central plot mysteries was: how the hell is Chris Pine back as Steve Trevor? We now know the answer: After Diana wishes on the Dreamstone for her dead beau’s return, Steve’s spirit or soul or something is resurrected in the body of a local engineer played by Kristoffer Polaha, credited only as “Handsome Man.” While the rest of the world sees the body of “Handsome Man” when they look at the Steve-possessed body, Diana only sees Steve.

Unfortunately for Steve, Diana must renounce her wish to save the world, sending Steve back from the apparently nice place from whence he came. The movie ends with Steve once again dead, probably never to return. As he tells Diana in his final scene, “I’m already gone.” 

But will he be back? It doesn’t seem likely. Wonder Woman 1984 goes out of its ways to maintain the weight of death in its world, creating a very specific scenario in which Steve and Diana can be temporarily reunited. If Wonder Woman 3 were to bring Steve back again, it would be even harder to maintain the stakes and logic of the world and, honestly, Patty Jenkins is too good of a filmmaker to make a mistake like that.

Sorry, Steve fans. Chris Pine has to go play Dungeons & Dragons now.

Wonder Woman Can Fly Now

In her heartbreak over losing Steve (again), Diana runs. Then, she flies. Using what Steve taught her about how he understands flight (“It’s so easy, really. It’s wind and air, learning how to ride it, how to catch it,”) she uses her Lasso to snag the tail of a plane that pulls her far and fast up into the sky. She spreads her arms, and catches the wind. She uses her Lasso to snag clouds and the occasional lightning bolt to propel her forward, and then she soars.

New power: unlocked.

It’s Diana’s accomplishment, but it’s also a symbol of how much Steve has affected her life. In the beginning of the movie, we see how much Diana still thinks about Steve. She tells Barbara that she still sees him sometimes, in the sky. Later, she tells Steve that she’s always thought of flight as his gift. In this way, flight becomes Steve’s parting gift to Diana. Before, she would look up to the sky and think of Steve as a plane flew overhead. Now, she gets to be the one in the sky, thinking of Steve as she does the thing he so loved.

What is the comic book precedent for this? In her original comic book incarnation, Diana couldn’t fly, but Wonder Woman has never been a character to accept limitations. During the Silver Age of Comics, Diana learned how to glide using the air currents, but it wasn’t until after the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot that Diana full-on flew. In her post-Crisis origin story by George Perez, Diana was gifted the ability to fly from Hermes. In Wonder Woman 1984, it’s a skill she learns in the World of Men.

Patty Jenkins told Den of Geek and other outlets during a recent press junket: “I love that she learns how to fly in this emotional way, and that that metaphor stands for something for all of us, which is you have to let go and embrace the truth and things for what they are to understand that it’s just wind and air.” 

Maxwell Lord Uses a Satellite to Grant the World’s Wishes

While Diana is going on an emotional journey about Steve, Max Lord is continuing his quest for MORE—more wishes, more power, more everything. After visiting the Oval Office, he has gained access to the government’s Atmospheric Satellite Defense program (which POTUS tells us uses Star Wars technology). Using Marine One (with Barbara in tow), Lord travels to the satellite facility where he is able to simultaneously hijack every broadcast signal around the world to deliver his message: make a wish, and I will grant it.

The logic here is all a bit hand wave-y. The Dreamstone rules require that people be touching the Stone, in this case Lord, when they make their wish. Screenwriters Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, and David Callaham seem to be making a statement about mass media with this plot point (which isn’t so surprising, given their professions): that media has the power to “touch” people.

Regardless of the logic, people around the world start wishing, not understanding the power of their words. A Chinese woman working in a restaurant wishes to be famous, and is immediately recognized through the window. An Irish man wishes that his partner would drop dead, and she does, only moments after she wishes that all of the Irish people in the U.K. would be sent back to “where they came from.”

Elsewhere in the world, a man wishes for nukes for his country. The world erupts in chaos. The Soviet Union launches nukes towards the U.S., in retaliation for the new weapons POTUS wished for; the U.S. fires back. It’s a mess.

Wonder Woman Faces Off Against Cheetah in Asteria’s Golden Armor

Before Diana can stop Max Lord, however, she has to get through her friend, Barbara, who has entered full-on Cheetah mode. While most people only got one wish from the Dreamstone, Dr. Minerva got two. After Barbara saved him at the White House, Max told Babs: “I’ve never been one for rules … Tell me, what do you want? I’m feeling generous.” So she wishes for even greater power: “I don’t want to be like anyone anymore. I want to be #1. An apex predator, like nothing there’s ever been before.”

Yes, friends, she is now a cat.

While Barbara pretty easily dealt with a wish-weakened Diana at the White House, tossing her around like she was nothing, Cheetah ultimately proves to be no match for Diana at her full strength, in Asteria’s Golden Armor. As we learned earlier in the film, Asteria was the Amazonian’s fiercest warrior. When the Amazons escaped to Themyscira, someone had to stay behind to keep the encroaching men at bay. That person was Asteria, wearing armor forged from all of the Amazonian armor. Diana found it when she came to the World of Men, but she never found Asteria…

Cheetah claws her way through the armor’s wings, but Diana doesn’t need those—not really. After a swinging battle, Diana gives Barbara one last chance to renounce her wish. Barbara doesn’t, and Diana uses a nearby downed power line to electrocute Cheetah into submission. Does she know this won’t kill Barbara? Honestly, probably not. Who even knows the limits of a half-human, half-cheetah creature that, by wish definition, has no precedent? It doesn’t kill Barbara, though, and Diana leaves her weakened on the ground outside of the satellite facility.

Diana Uses Her Lasso to Show the World the Truth

Midway through the movie, Diana tells Steve (and us) that the Lasso of Truth doesn’t just have the power to make people tell the truth; it also has the power to make people see the truth. This comes back in a big way in the movie’s climax, when Diana furtively snakes her Lasso around Maxwell Lord’s ankle while he is broadcasting to the world in order to speak to all of the wish-makers herself, in order to make them see the truth of what their wishes are costing the world.

“The world was a beautiful place, just as it was. You cannot have it all. You can only have the truth ,” she tells them before also recognizing and validating their pain. “You’re not the only one who has suffered, who wants more, who wants them back, who doesn’t want to be scared anymore or alone or frightened or powerless … Because you’re not the only one who imagined a world where everything was different, better … But what is it costing you? Do you see the truth?”

It’s a particularly strong message on a thematic level: the idea that we, as a world, need to see through the lies of capitalism and consumerism to the truth. That “more” doesn’t come without a cost, one that is hurting not only ourselves but the entire world. From climate change to global and domestic inequality (both complex issues that represent the devastating human cost of late stage capitalism), it’s not hard to see the real-world applications to this theme.

Max Lord is Saved By the Power of Fatherhood

With Diana’s help seeing the truth, people around the world begin renouncing their wishes. And, eventually, so does Maxwell Lord. Diana helps him see the truth of what his wish is costing him: his son, Alistair. Then, it is an easy choice for Lord. He chooses his son, over power, greed, over more. He chooses the joy and love of his present and future over the pain of his past, which we see in flashbacks: The trauma he suffered watching his father hurt his mother, from being poor, from being socially isolated growing up.

With Diana’s help, Max recognizes the truth of all that he already has in Alistair. In the film, fatherhood represents a kind of sustainable abundance that the Dreamstone could never give. Because of this, Max is finally able to be truthful with Alistair: “I’ve been lying to you. I’m a pretty messed up loser guy,” giving his son a truth that we get the impression Young Max was never granted: “You don’t ever have to make a wish for me to love you.”

In return, Alistair reminds Max that he doesn’t need to earn his preciousness. He has always been worthy of love, even when the world failed him and the people in his life weren’t able to give it to him. “I already love you, Daddy,” Alistair tells Max. “Because you’re my dad.”

Does Barbara Renounce Her Wish?

Max Lord definitively renounces his wish at the end of Wonder Woman 1984 in order to save son Alistair, but the choice is much murkier when it comes to Dr. Barbara Minerva. In her final shot of the film, Barbara is no longer in Cheetah form, but we also never see her explicitly renouncing her wish. According to Patty Jenkins, the ambiguity was intentional.

“I have my reasons for making it ambiguous, and I think it’s not clear what her point of view [is] on everything that just happened …  I love that we wrap up Max Lord’s point of view, and that you see the culmination of that storyline, I think is so important. But the truth is there may or may not be more to come [for Barbara].”

It sounds likely that we will see Cheetah again.

Why Does Wonder Woman 1984 End at Christmas?

Originally, Wonder Woman 1984 was supposed to be a summertime release. No one could have predicted the circumstances that would lead to the many delays, and an eventual global release during the Christmas 2020 season. However, the film’s final scene is very Christmas-y. Patty Jenkins told Den of Geek and other outlets during a recent press event that she had thought about re-filming it, but ultimately decided against it. Now, it works perfectly!

Interestingly, it also means that this final scene takes place roughly five months after the events of most of the movie, which takes place around the Fourth of July, as we see from the Invisible Jet scene. Emotionally, this works really well as it makes sense that Diana would need some time to get over losing Steve again, and might not be ready to fully embrace the wonder of the world around her right after having to say goodbye. In other words: this feels more truthful to the character.

The Mid-Credits Scene: Reveal of Asteria

Hopefully, you stuck around until the very end of the film, as Wonder Woman 1984 snuck a scene into its credits. In it, we see a woman who looks like Diana from the back save a baby and its mother from a falling telephone pole on a busy market street. When the woman turns, it is Lynda Carter, the actress who played Wonder Woman in the 1970s TV series. 

In the show, Carter played Diana Prince. Here, she is playing Asteria, the warrior who stayed behind when Themyscira was built in order to keep humanity from following the rest of the Amazons. Earlier in Wonder Woman 1984, Diana told Steve that she searched for Asteria when she came to the World of Men, but could only find her Golden Armor. Now, we know Asteria is still around and still saving people.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Asteria tells the baby’s mother in the mid-credits scene, before Carter winks at the camera. Hopefully, this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Asteria.

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[redscullyrevival]

Fool’s Fate: The Tawny Man Rundown

@sonnetscrewdriver I’ve moved on to Dragon Keeper!

Plot/Setting/Narrative

Jesus

Okay

Holy shit???

I need a moment

Alright, so lets start easy

Being the Age of Sail nerdo I am this book’s voage bits were amusing and then a bit dissapointing; an apprecaition of sailing and living the sailor LifeStyle isn’t really a Six Duchies thing it seems, huh?

I was SO excited with getting a glimpse of my precious Bingtown babies in the last book that I was stoked for a high sea adventure in this book but wah waah mostly it was sea sickness and brooding 

Honestly I let myself down because this is a Fitz story and, well, how else would the sea be depicted?! LOL 

Poor Thick

Poor everyone for the most part, yikes

Farseer had a lot of mystery to it, a lot of slow burn world building/concept reveal with answers eventually given; Liveship Traders showed it’s cards on the table for the most part but thrived of the suspense of all the threads coming together or possibly unraveling; Tawny Man is the first series where I understood events before the characters did, the results of which made the series much more subdude than the last two. 

Not in a bad way, just, ya know, different. 

“Life Is Change” is very obviously the big overarching connecting theme between the Realm of the Elderling series and I only have praise for the fact each series has it’s own distinct tone and approach to the same (and shared) characters - it’d be a hallow utterance if the book narratives themselves did not change and grow series to series. 

The change in Tawny Man is big; it’s big for the narrative space and it’s big for Fitz and it’s big for the reader.

And you can accept the change or reject it, that’s a option we as the reader has.

I choose to embrace it.

But oh man, oh my god, I will miss The Fool. I’ll miss “Fitz and The Fool” as a unit. I know there is a new series and I’ll get to it eventually but I’ve got four Rain Wild books (YAY!) before I come back to Fitz and his part of the map so this is a solid goodbye for a while and it feels odd to part with them in the place we do.

Odd, but new. 

I’m talkin’ out my butt - I’m a little sad okay?! But I’m happy too. 

And I think that’s what this book was going for; a kind of reaffirmation that life and change is hurt and happiness and a lot of effort went into guiding readers through feeling that message as well as understanding it on an informative level.  

Ultimately I enjoyed Tawny Man more than Farseer, it’s just much more my-type-of-story. 

I never really agreed with/bought into Fitz’s choices within much of the Farseer Trilogy. I understood Fitz’s logic of course, so his choosing to let expel his pain and hide away (and all the other choices along the way) were not make or break issues for me; there is much to enjoy simply being along for the ride.

But with Tawny Man it was very satisfying for me to see Fitz come back again and again to his past decisions and not cast them off as impervious to change or impossible to face. 

That’s a beautiful message.  

I embrace that message very much in my mind and I will try to embrace it within my own life as well. 

And this isn’t relevant to anything but a little thing I’d like to preserve for my own amusement: This was the first book I’ve ever read on a Kindle! Lee got me one for my birthday for my “Year of Book” project. It took a little time get use to but once I adjusted I really enjoyed it - particularly the fact that if you are reading a borrowed book from an online library it shows you what others have highlighted as they read! I found that very interesting and I enjoyed highlighting my own favorite bits (which, not shockingly, coincided with many other people’s favorite bits).

For Rain Wild Chronicles I may start a new section for these write ups where I relay some of my highlighted sections, ‘cause why not? These are already long and useless, might as well really own them. 

Fitz

I know there is a lot we could talk about when it comes to Fitz in this book 

But I kinda already covered him in the setting/plot/narrative section above

And I really just want to let anyone bothering to read this know that I’ve never liked Fitz more then when he cleaned up and donned fancy Jamaillian digs and walked into Molly’s family chaos to tell a grieving family he is FitzChivalry Farseer and he’s gonna look after them.

I was shocked and horrified and thrilled and laughing

Fitz truly changed! It wasn’t just description of his inner change (although that was lovely, good for The Fool, thank you Fool) but the end of the book drags a bit as it does so as to allow Fitz to act on this inner change - which is something I’ll never hold against Hobb. 

So many books end quickly after their narrative climax but Hobb likes a good post cuddle and god bless her for it. 

Cutting a story off after the final movements have played is dramatic and can help events stand out as an experience in an audiences mind; but there is unique pleasure in seeing the individuals of an orchestra pack up their belongings and shuffle out isn’t there? There is a true affection for humanity’s relentless plodding along in those final chapters. Fine by me. 

The Fool

): 

So I freaked out towards the end there, ya know? 

And much like with when it happened to Fitz, a part of me thought it a cruel thing to do, to bring someone that far gone and that brutalized back.

I understood the thematic ouroboros of The Fool’s return and as a fan it was a relief of sorts but there is still that small part of me that found it cruel all the same.

I’m floored with how moved I was by the aftermath of the Fool’s death. Fitz’s quest to find the body and then to restore dignity to his friend - that was some rough stuff. 

It wasn’t “true grief” like with Nighteyes (for me anyways) but rather a form of anticipatory mourning, but in reverse? Hard to explain.

The point is yes, I cried.  

Oh oh oh how I hope The Fool can learn to manage in a world they can’t see into or shape. I hope to see the Fool again after visiting the Rain Wilds. 

Hap

lol

fuckin’ Hap

I love this idiot 

I love how all around Hap epic and fantastical things happen and his story is just him coming of age and figuring his shit out

Good for him

Does he know who Fitz really is though?! This was never addressed?! 

Prince Dutiful

Dutiful cracks me up

I love how he’ll go into PRINCE MODE and be near perfect Sacrifice and royal and awe inspiring 

then he laughs at boogers

Dutiful is hilarious to me, how I see him switch back and forth between mature young prince to out-of-his-depth-survivor brought me much joy

I love his friendship with Thick; I love how he falls for Elliania’s transparent baiting; I love how he’d be cool outwardly but skill “WTF is happening?!?”

What a joy! 

Chad

In the last book Chad really slipped through my fingers but now we’re back to our normal rocky relationship.

I like Chad

but then I don’t

And I think, finally, I’m okay with that duality 

Thick

My sweet little man

Everything about Thick is my favorite thing

I especially love how he is often described as being bored

Discussing intrigue and espionage and dragons? BORED 

Hahaha!

No wonder he and Nettle get along so well

I especially loved how he decided, for himself, to stay with Fitz on  Aslevjal

I’m excited to come back and hear more, learn more, about Thick

Nettle

I wouldn’t wanna be on Nettle’s shit list, would you?

What a storm of a person!

Nettle isn’t very defined still, she is a bit reactionary and never quite gets totally fleshed out by the end of the book. 

Which is a bit of a shame.

But! Nettle of the Dream World is a different story. 

She feels much more defined there and I dunno, maybe that’s intentional?

I like her but I’d have to spend a lot more time with her in the solid narrative space rather than the abstract dream/skill narrative space to really have opinions or emotions over her as her own character rather than her as a character and how she relates/involves/moves Fitz, Burrich, Molly, or Thick.  

Elliania

Elliania has a similar disadvantage as Nettle does but at the same time she still has more definition (to me) then Nettle; her motivation and actions are followable and her personality is filled in with Outisland society.

And she ain’t afraid to smack a bitch up with her titties out.

So she gets some mad bonus points right there.

I really felt for Elliania’s struggle and she totally won me over in the scene where she comes up from inside the Pale Woman’s domain dragging her forged sister and mother with her.

One of those scenes where the grandure, emotion, and awe of it all was very powerful

loved it, love her

Web

YEAH

Don’t need permission to do what’s right - fuck yeah

Web’s the friggin’ best guys

I want a spin-off of him teaching Old Blood children and Fitz

Swift

This little shit

I love him, I love all of Molly and Burrich’s wild children, but Swift gave me anxiety lol

I’m actually really intrigued by Swift but he’s too brief and wild at the moment, I hope he mellows out a bit but still keeps that confrontational fire and uses it for good

Burrich

NO. 

God

Damn

It

When my man showed up on Aslevjal I was shocked

I was so mad 

I was also very happy of course but ughgughgu

I WAS CONFLICTED and had good right to be

Oh this man, I really adore Burrich even though he is a flawed person - that’s what is so compelling about him though.

We kept learning things about and from Burrich up until the very end. 

I’ll miss you, Heart of the Pack.

Molly

I’m devastated for Molly

I’m Happy for Molly 

I’m very pro-Molly in general even though she is a bit vague

Like, she is more than just a plot device but not by a whole lot, ya know? 

What I wanna do though is sit her down and have a real heart to heart; ask her if she really thinks Fitz will ever be truly free himself of his duty, from his duty to the Farseers or from his own idea of honor.

That man is going to leave off on some quest or some shit you know it, I know it, she must know it! 

Be safe Molly, but happy, but alert