tragicblondie

[tragicblondie]

dead man walking

[ -> prints 💙 ]

[tragicblondie]

Two years dead and everyone arounds you act as if it was your fault, as if you coming back to life disrupted their mourning.

And I get i, I get it. But to Shepard, it was only a few weeks. They were lost in space in anguish from the pain of choking as their lungs burned. The vacuum of space sucking whatever life left out of their beating heart as their final moment before their eyes closed.

Then they open them and find themselves on a medical bed. Two years passed in a blink, a second to them. Their body is the same, except for a few missing scars. Everything about them is the exact same as if they were plucked out of space during that moment and thrown two years ahead into the future.

But everyone else has changed, moved on. And no one wants to explain themselves, close friends treating them like strangers, news mentioning their name as one of the past legends, left to collect dust in the history books and memorials.

Like crashing their own funeral just when everyone else was done crying, and people feel upset at you for somehow beating the odds and surviving. Then it's Immediately back to duty, you don't even get to announce the fact you're alive again publicly. It gets spread in rumours and witness accounts.

And no one acknowledge how lonely it must have been to die surrounded by friends, knowing at least you died for them to survive. Only to wake up alone and remain alone, for everyone you've known died, or changed beyond recognition.

[tragicblondie]

memento vivere

[tragicblondie]

I thought I had something

But it quickly fell apart...

[tragicblondie]

Dancing is hard, but some invitations are simply irresistible.

[tragicblondie]

the black mold told me to draw this

[tragicblondie]

"The Dalish gifted an Eluvian to the Grey Wardens so we can get in Weisshaupt" is just so emblematic of my problems with the game, because you can tell--it feels to me--that the thought process was "We need to have an Eluvian in Weisshaupt, Eluvians are an Elven(TM) thing, the Dalish are the Elven(TM) faction, so let's just say they were the ones who gave one to the Grey Wardens".

The Dalish have been established over all three games as a people who have spent the last thousands of years desperately scrounging for whatever scraps of their culture they can find, a struggle that has cost them dearly as typified by Merrill's plight trying to restore a single Eluvian which had previously Blighted two of her clan mates (an Eluvian that she can't open or use, and doesn't actually know what it's for by the end of her quest line). Multiple Dalish in Inquisition are killed trying to regain their history ("The Knight's Tomb") or trying to prove themselves by regaining even a talisman related to their culture ("Someone to Lose"). They are an insular and guarded people because outsider interactions frequently invoke a heavy toll in Dalish lives, up to and including entire clans. And yet, we are supposed to believe in a single throwaway piece of dialogue that in the 10 years between Inquisition and Veilguard, the Dalish have (offscreen) gained enough access to Eluvians as a piece of technology that they can afford to just "gift" one to the Grey Wardens without explanation.

There are constant revelations of this kind where pre-established parts of the lore are just thrown out the window. Things that had great emotional weight or impact in previous installments of the series are used for cheap thrills or plot-hole fills without explanation, justification, or even gravitas from the game. You have a moment in one of Emmrich's quests where you stumble through a portal directly into the Fade that Hezenkoss opened in Blackthorne manor, and you're tasked with closing it again. All of this is done entirely without the Anchor or even an implied blood sacrificial ritual, and it is never commented as anything particularly groundbreaking (when going into the Fade physically through tearing a hole in it was a Big Fucking Deal in Inquisition). You encounter a Compassion spirit in a side quest investigating the deaths of citizens in Tevinter who were murdered by a demon of Despair, and it is strong enough to not only retain itself through sensing the (unanswered!) suffering that these people experienced, but it also resolves to protect others to keep them from the same fate (when Cole was so traumatized by a single person's death that he completely reshaped his entire being around them). So on and so forth. Don't even get me started on Bellara's comment that the ancient elves "made most of their buildings in the Fade".

I'm not asking for someone to hold my hand and spoonfeed me information. I frankly don't care if an obscure codex entry, a reddit AMA question, bluesky tweet, or headcanon exists somewhere to patch in or bandaid over all of the jarring details like this, because it doesn't change the fact that the game itself should be doing this. The game itself should be taking the time to explain this in a way that is not missable, the game itself should be taking these things seriously, it should recognize when it is doing contradictory things and rush to justify itself accordingly, because these are things the emotional beats of previous stories hinged on. Like, when the game has Taash say a line like "The Qun isn't a prison, you can leave if you want", it's the responsibility of the writers to show that this is Taash being misinformed, not because I'm too stupid to headcanon that this is the case, but because this line is a symptom of how the entire game's writing seems to have forgotten about the Ben-Hassrath as a thing that exists in this setting.

Previous Dragon Age games are no stranger to "We quietly removed Solas' network of agents and spies offscreen"-style writing, but it usually didn't feel like a constant deluge periodically uprooting my emotional investment and immersion. There's only so much I can take in good faith before I realize that this game was just not written with any care towards ensuring that the worldbuilding made sense and felt right to the player, leading to awkward backpedaling in reddit threads like "no the Crows haven't changed as an organization, these are just the unique Good Crows and we forgot to mention it".

I just can't look past this shit anymore.

[tragicblondie]

« Our influence will stop Saren! in the battle today, we will hold the line! »

A kind of poster for the Virmire mission. My favorite quest from the first game! So iconic. Now I thought that the picture shows the characters that can die during this task. So much responsibility on Shepard!

[tragicblondie]

now that i have a little gay hoop earring i understand anders' perspective and think we should take his hoop earring into account for the way he acts in awakening. imagine youre fighting darkspawn and get that shit stuck in your robes

[tragicblondie]

On Friendship.

[tragicblondie]

in a worldstate where the HOF survived slaying the archdemon, the extent of davrin’s horror that he failed to die killing razikale, and his suggestion that it might mean he isn’t a real warden somehow, imply a MASSIVE dispute between weisshaupt and the HOF, right? it implies that the HOF’s achievement and whether or not they’re even a true warden is so regularly questioned and criticised that the idea has pervaded the wardens’ ranks to get to someone as level-headed and quick to question authority as davrin. things must be pretty fucked! which is probably to be expected, given that the HOF was a fresh recruit whose continued existence completely undercuts warden history and poses a threat to all warden authority, but still wild to think about

[tragicblondie]

[tragicblondie]

do you think the iron bull ever looked at the shit the rest of the party got away with and was like man i didnt even need to say all that

[tragicblondie]

[tragicblondie]

a talented man

[tragicblondie]

rb's are appreciate so this gets as far outside of my bubble as possible

[tragicblondie]

Quick study of Garrus Vakarian