#you guys basically made slavery a canon event in your story without knowning it
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warwickroyals · 3 days ago
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I like how royalty simblr collectively cast "Sulani" as "the colonies" without even thinking about what that means. In a lot of stories it's just a cute little destination for tropical photo ops, which is insidious.
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crossdressingdeath · 4 years ago
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Okay yes I will ask your thoughts on Anders :D
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Well, to start with something simple (and I assume not particularly controversial): the sequence of events we’re given for how Anders ended up in Kirkwall makes no fucking sense. I mean, it makes sense that the Chantry would ignore the Right of Conscription and try to drag him back to the Circle, but where the fuck is the Warden in all this?! If memory serves in some piece of the canon it’s implied or outright stated that the Chantry went over their head to get Templar agents into the Wardens, but they’re still the Warden-Commander? We’re expected to believe that the Warden, someone who will in most saves count Anders and Justice as dear friends and can be adamantly against the Circle, the Templars, and the Chantry as a whole, would just let a bunch of Templars run the two of them out of Amaranthine? The Warden would permit the cat they gave Anders to be taken away from him without so much as a fight? They may have to answer to Weisshaupt but even so! If Weisshaupt was interfering in the running of the Ferelden branch that much I’d expect it to be at least mentioned! If you played your Warden as someone who cared about the people under their command Anders and Justice getting forced out by the Wardens makes no sense. Honestly even if they don’t give a shit about their people Anders has friends! At the very least there should have been some mention of how exactly this was allowed to happen (maybe the Warden and the Awakening companions minus Anders and Justice were called away for some extremely long mission or something), or preferably Anders and Justice should have been chased out of Amaranthine through means entirely unrelated to the Wardens; you could have a bit about Anders being scared that after merging with Justice he’d bring trouble down on the Wardens that they couldn’t weather, it would be good and give him an element of connection to the people we spend the entirety of Awakening watching him bond with, and most importantly a connection to the previous player character that both Oghren in Awakening and Varric in Inquisition get but he doesn’t. Like, think about that for a second; Oghren obviously already knows the Warden and Varric pretty much waxes poetic about how great Hawke is every time they come up, but Anders doesn’t even react to learning about a fucking assassination plot against the Warden! Give me some friendship points for dealing with that, at least! And when you run into Nathaniel if memory serves Anders doesn’t even ask about the Warden, who Nathaniel is presumably still serving under! He doesn’t ask Zevran about the Warden either, even if you romanced him in Origins! Basically just the fact that DA2 doesn’t acknowledge your approval value with Anders even while remembering such things as whether or not you slept with Isabella in the Pearl irks me. This is your carryover companion, Bioware! Try a little harder to remind us of that!
Anyway, moving on. Honestly so much about Fenris and Anders’s dynamic bothers me? I remember seeing a post about how maybe actually after a while they settled into actual discussion and learning from each other but Varric decided to spice it up by keeping them super aggressive in his storytelling, which I do like better, but in the canon story? I mean, they’re just playing hot potato with the misery poker at this point. And do not get me started on the guy with the spirit of justice in his head approving of selling someone into slavery. I don’t care how much he hates Fenris, Justice disapproved of having a pet cat in Awakening! And Bioware seriously expects us to believe that the guy with, again, the spirit of justice in his head would wave off fucking slavery because “mages have it worse”? I do not buy that. It makes far less sense now than it did in Awakening, where Anders had spent most of his life in a tower where elves were at least nominally on equal footing with humans and was only just getting out in a way that was likely to be permanent.
And of course, the big one: the whole thing where the narrative flattens Anders forcing a confrontation by blowing up a building that’s closed at night and only really has a couple people in it even during the day to kill the woman signing off on the mass slaughter of innocent people with the expectation that if the Templars are really interested in justice they will execute him instead of killing the mages of the Circle to just “crazy mage blows up a building and kills huge numbers of people to force everyone to go to war” pisses me off. This is a series that allows you to justify abandoning an entire town to be killed by skeletons! In this game you can sell your friend to slavers! And yet there is no serious moral discussion about Anders’s actions. It’s bad, case closed, no possible justification for it. And... other people have made this point more eloquently than me, but it seems pretty obvious that they made it a big, dramatic (and incredibly nonsensical, what the fuck is even happening with that explosion, was the point not to do it without magic, why did it look like that) explosion to set off that knee-jerk “explosion = terrorism” response that most people have; a public killing didn’t have to involve blowing up a church, now did it? I don’t believe for a second that a man who could plant a bomb in the Chantry without anyone noticing despite being a known apostate couldn’t find a way to get Elthina out of the Chantry and into a public area where she could be killed dramatically and without any risk of collateral damage from his own actions, especially with the situation reaching the point where she was having to directly interfere to keep the chaos from going too far. Hell, even burning it down would’ve been better (and honestly more satisfying I think, given how much time every other part of Kirkwall spends in flames)! Note also that in Trespasser, which would’ve been written well after 2 came out and people started talking about how Anders had a point, they have a bit where Varric talks about massive death tolls and enough rubble to change tidal patterns in a port city. The destruction of one building cannot do both those things! I don’t actually think it could do either given we’re shown that it is practically empty when it goes up, but it certainly couldn’t do both! We were not supposed to actually... think about this explosion. We were supposed to conclude that Anders was wrong because explosions are Bad and then when people didn’t come to that conclusion they crammed in a bunch of nonsensical bullshit about death tolls and tides without considering whether that made any sense from a logic standpoint in an attempt to push us to stop questioning it. And... in a series that put so much thought into complex morality in the first game, that was just a massive disappointment and step back in the complexity of the morality. And almost certainly the first step towards Inquisition’s “Well actually in this conflict where one side wants to be allowed to imprison and torture people and the other side wants to not be imprisoned and tortured both sides are just as bad as each other” bullshit, which just makes it even worse.
Basically at the end of the day Bioware took a complicated character with every reason to hate the Chantry and a brilliant plan for exposing just how uninterested the Templars are in justice (a plan that works, may I add; the Circles didn’t rebel because the Chantry blew up, they rebelled because the Templars proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would use anything as an excuse to murder their charges even if they had the actual perpetrator of whatever they were using as that excuse right in front of them) and flipped the narrative to “crazy terrorist mage who killed infinitely more people than logic would suggest was possible while still doing all the other shit they claim that explosion did”, and I hate that.
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superduperfandomgirl · 7 years ago
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Hamilton: A New-Found Obsessio-I Mean, American Musical
Sooo, if you couldn’t guess from the title, I’m obsessed.  Like “wow help me from the feels and humor and gaaaah” obsessed.  And this textpost is basically me just proclaiming (or rather, writing incessantly -- to keep with the theme of Hamilton) my love for Hamilton: An American Musical and especially my love for Aaron Burr.
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Lemme just start off by saying, yes, Aaron Burr is presented as the main “villain” of the musical.  And yes, he did some bad s--t (just look at what he did in real life, tho; the guy was a total skeez, although he did support some really cool causes like women’s rights and ending slavery).  He made mistakes like killing Hamilton in their infamous duel.
He was a shitty guy many times.  But, to be fair, so was Hamilton.  There’s the whole Reynolds affair (pun intended), not to mention Hamilton’s comments on the poor (”How can you trust people who are poor and own no property?” -- kinda rude, dude).  But, in my opinion, that’s kind of the point of Hamilton, and part of why I love it so much, despite the historical inaccuracies and overwhelming feels.  As an amazing YouTuber pointed out in their video (their name is Make Stuff and the video is called “Hamilton and Motifs: Creating Emotional Paradoxes” -- I highly suggest you check it out because it is so amazingly well done and makes fantastic points!), Hamilton is chock-full of characters who make mistakes but also do great things.  I agree, and I would argue that one of the main themes of the show is that you should honor your heroes but never idolize them.  No human is perfect, and the characters who represent some of American history’s biggest idols definitely aren’t.  To quote Burr himself:
“We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes.”
Burr definitely makes mistakes throughout the musical (and in real life), and many of them can never be redeemed.  But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve the same amount of compassion that we show for the “hero” of this tale, Alexander.  In fact, I personally found it easier to empathize with Burr, for whatever reason.  Possibly because I often get the feeling (and I know others do, too, so if there are any Burr fans reading this, I would love to chat ;D) that I am being left behind in life, too scared to take chances and seize the moment like Hamilton.  Perhaps it’s because, like Burr, I often feel like I am being unfairly bullied for my personal approach to living life.  I can’t really say, because there always seems to be a lot of factors that go into me choosing a favorite character in a fandom.  All I know is, once I choose one, I am bound to that character.  Their sadness, their pain, become mine in a way I am pretty sure is emotionally unhealthy. :P
So, where does this leave us other than me ranting at the Internet when I should be sleeping?  Well, the whole reason I started this rant was because I was reading an absolutely SPECTACULAR fanfiction series by allonsy_gabriel on Archive of Our Own called “History Obliterates (the Hamilton Reincarnation AU No One Wanted)”, and there was a part where Laurens makes fun of Burr.
Now, I’m usually pretty upset with the way Hamilton treats Burr.  Don’t get me wrong -- there are plenty of times Burr is an absolute a--hole to Hamilton.  But I also feel like there are a lot of times Hamilton just comes out of the blue and insults Burr and (especially) his “wait for it” tactic with no provocation, from the time they first meet during “Aaron Burr, Sir” to “The Room Where It Happens”.  Like, seriously, I love ol’ Hammy, but he has no chill, especially when it comes to his first friend/enemy Burr.  And Hamilton’s friends are no different.  “Story of Tonight Reprise” is an extraordinary song, but it always makes me sad when the Hamilsquad starts saying things like, “You’re the worst, Burr”.  It’s all in good fun...but is it?  Burr is known and despised by many throughout the musical, and while this conversation may just be formed from drunk ramblings, it might also be an indication of how most conversations between Burr and Ham&Co go (especially given the amount of vehement hatred that is aimed at Burr by Lafayette during his line).
So, when I saw the part about Laurens making fun of Burr, I took it as the standard Hamilsquad Hate and felt a twinge of sadness for my baby.  But then, something miraculously, incredible, and astounding happened -- Hamilton stood up for Burr.  And this is something that has happened earlier in this epic reincarnation series, too (although I won’t give any spoilers, because you should definitely read it).  At first, I was like, “Aww, I wish this was canon, but unfortunately, Hammy never stands up for Burr like this in the musical”.
But then, I felt a little tingle and was like, “Actually, wait, this moment seems familiar”.  And it should be, because this is almost exactly what happened in “Story of Tonight Reprise”.
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The guys were all heckling Burr about his love life and insulting him (Lafayette, sorry buddy, not to throw you under the bus, but it’s true), and Hamilton turned them away so that he and Burr could have an actual heart-to-heart (or the closest the two of them can get, at the very least).
This moment warmed my heart, and I realized that, even though they didn’t have your conventional type of friendship, Burr and Hamilton had their own unique way of interacting with each other that wasn’t exactly friendly but wasn’t exactly hateful either.  Of course, this all went to s--t when politics got involved, but I think if they had both been without the pressures of the political lives they led, they might have been able to be friends.  Or, at least, not have entered the f---ed-up relationship they did that ended with a bang one eventful day in July.
To sum up, I just want to say that this musical, Burr, Lin, the entire Hamilsquad, the fandom, and basically all the characters in the musical are beautiful in their own way!  I think that it is so wonderful that Lin created Hamilton so that it gave everyone a voice, even characters who were only known as “the damn fool who shot him”.  Burr got to be represented, to be understood for the human he was.  Eliza got to become more than just Hamilton’s wife, more than just “that wife he jilted that one time”.  Hamilton was seen as more than just the Reynolds Pamphlet; Lafayette’s extensive help during the Revolution was shown to be even greater than what I had already thought; Hercules (a man I had never even remembered before I listened to Hamilton) got to show off his incredible spying/sewing skills; Laurens’ struggle for a brighter day for the enslaved and his tragic death were put to light; and Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and so many more were shown as the imperfect Founding Fathers they were.  
Yes, there are many parts of the musical that don’t match up quite well with reality, but the whole musical is designed to show off the good, the bad, and the ugly of all its characters.  In its own way, Hamilton is very, very real, because it goes more than skin-deep with its heroes and villains.  It provokes thought into its watchers and listeners and makes them want to look deeper into the stories we’re all told in history class.  It helps us see more than just the black-and-white version of events, where Hamilton was Burr’s enemy and could never have defended him or sat and talked in peace with him.  In the end, it really depends on who lives, who dies, and who tells your story, because so many facts get mixed up depending on the narrator.  And sometimes, even with its own imperfect version of events, it’s brilliant to have narrators like Lin and all of the talented people behind Hamilton: An American Musical who can tell the story from multiple perspectives.  Life doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints, after all...so why should our view of history?
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