twist-shout-and-shells

[twist-shout-and-shells]

shows should have 22 episodes a season again where half of them are low stakes silly fun shit happening. this i believe with my whole heart

[twist-shout-and-shells]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: 2x03 - “Finally Got The Name Right”

[twist-shout-and-shells]

I’m in tears

Edit: the tears have increased

[twist-shout-and-shells]

fuck baby ur so hot i wanna do the dishes with u and make u hot tea when ur sick

[twist-shout-and-shells]

i'm actually so mad we didn't get any additional crow content in veilguard esp about the rest of the crow houses. what's the cantori symbol?? what abt the de riva house symbol??? who was the head of house de riva before viago???? how did teia manage to become the youngest talon in history???? how are the other houses doing after the events of eight little talons??? is house kortez behaving after teia/viago/caterina/bolivar killed their talon????? is house arainai still part of the talons or did they drop to cuchillos after what happened in eight little talons???????? WHO ARE THE NEW TALONS???

[twist-shout-and-shells]

No one from House Dellamorte kneels.

DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD (2024)

[twist-shout-and-shells]

I'm realizing there are 3 types of Dragon Age fans.

1) Gamers who play latest big flashy action game

2) UwU kissy dating and besties simulator

3) Interested in the sociopolitical and theological themes and thesis statements the series is historically known for

Veilguard is not made for fan #3. It is a very pretty game that has absolutely nothing it wants to say--to the point that what it says by saying nothing is often times pretty offensive.

[twist-shout-and-shells]

i am no longer joking. what happens inbetween the end of wigmaker’s job and about a year before veilguard that makes illario decide the brother he loves is worth less than the seat of first talon

[twist-shout-and-shells]

"Honey and lavender cream. Sweet, intriguing..." This started off as a leyendecker style study, ended up as lucanis drinking his coffee and me rendering that cloud of smoke for wayy too long rip -☕🪻🍯🐝-

[ get him as a print here!]

[twist-shout-and-shells]

Rook: [Fumbles and does something dumb] Spite: They're so stupid. We have to fuck them. Lucanis: What do you mean WE!?

[twist-shout-and-shells]

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[twist-shout-and-shells]

So, my brother and I are gonna do a full Veilguard rewrite focusing on Solas (as it should've been). If anyone wants to get tagged when it comes out (in about 300 business days), lemme know

[twist-shout-and-shells]

ISABELA SHOULD HAVE GOT VARRICS JACKET. Like. This game can barely reference da2 because of its refusal to engage with any non-solas related choice but THAT IS HOW YOU FIX IT. You have Isabela get Varrics jacket and wear it in the final battle. Can you imagine the impact that would have? What it would imply and how it would feel? To see her in it and know that there is real grief there? That Varric is remembered by someone that we remember being so very close to him?

[twist-shout-and-shells]

Varric and Harding recruiting Davrin, crossing their fingers: please be a real Grey Warden! please be a real Grey Warden! pleas—

[twist-shout-and-shells]

I think what people mean when they say "I wish the companions were mean/hostile to each other in Veilguard" isn't "I wish Davrin would tell Lucanis to kill himself for being an abomination" but "I wish these companions had some deeply held beliefs about the world they live in that made them clash ideologically with other companions, creating meaningful conflict that would be solved throughout the game and through exposition (like the banters in DAI) instead of minor disagreements that can be solved in five minutes and with me standing between and explaining to them like toddlers why they need to get along".

Like, I really wish these grown adults from wholly different factions with wholly different views of the world and morality would argue about more than, I dunno, what to bring to a camping trip that wouldn't even happen because the south was getting torn up by Blight.

In fact, I wish these grown adults with deeply held beliefs would disagree with me and argue with me about whatever choices I made that conflicted with their view points instead of just going along with whatever I decide, like, say, teaming up with a crime sindicate or supporting a companion becoming undead or not letting the wardens keep the griphons after centuries of history. When I say "I wish I could be mean to the companions and I wish they'd leave me for it" I'm not saying I would be so mean to them as to make them leave me, but I sure as fuck would've liked to have the option to do that so that my choice to not do it would feel meaningful. When DA2 gives you the choice between returning Fenris do Danarius or fighting for him, fighting for him feels meaningful not because it's the right thing to do, but because I choose to do it. If I find Cassandra drunk in a tavern questioning all her life choices it's because of what I chose to do throughout the game.

Few choices in Veilguard feel truly meaningful, and that's because feel choices in Veilguard are actually choices at all.

[twist-shout-and-shells]

And I was right!

They're gonna do the Inquisitor as dirty in Veilguard as they did Hawke in Inquisition, huh?

[twist-shout-and-shells]

Nice article, it really spells out one of the game's main issues: there is. no. conflict. between companions. Conflict brings depth. It makes characters feel real. Amd Veilguard just falls completely flat on that.

Pretty good article by Lauren Morton - it articulates the lackluster character writing in Veilguard quite well. She brings up some of the in-universe debates of past games for comparison, and I think it really encapsulates what is missing from Veilguard:

“I really miss some of the touchstone debates of past Dragon Age games. Fenris and Anders in Dragon Age 2 are both messy loose canons who resent one another and disapprove of Hawke's leaning too far for or against the rights of mages in Kirkwall. Origins gives its hero the awful choice of what to do with a child who's been possessed by a demon, and Alistair is livid if you choose to handle it in a certain way, culminating in a steep disapproval hit. I even enjoy Vivienne in Inquisition, hotly debated as she is, for effectively being a scab who believes her fellow mages should be relegated to the Circle towers. Those are just a small sample of the ways that Dragon Age heroes have wrestled against the morals of their party in the past.

“[…] By the end, Rook's companions are all pretty much goodie two-shoes characters with uncomplicated beliefs. There's a ton of groundwork to each character that could have made them morally complex and interesting but, frustratingly, that all goes unrealized.”

I guess I wouldn’t be so hard on Veilguard if I didn’t have the far more compelling writing of the previous games to compare it to - its writing is pretty mediocre in my estimation, but I’ve seen worse. But the main thing I liked about Dragon Age was the character writing and the sociopolitically complicated lore, and both have been extremely minimized (and sanitized) in DATV to the point where it’s deeply boring.

The only thing that feels consistent with the Dragon Age Experience is that the gameplay still kinda sucks. So uh, that doesn’t help much.