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lol

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Listen I support women's wrongs but the Venatori are a Eugenicist cult and therefore I cannot give Johanna a full pass vis-a-vis joining up with them HOWEVER. By the time Johanna encountered them they were essentially Elgar'nan's minions, like full on little yellow men who say banana type shit, and it would not surprise me if she just did NOT absorb the whole Eugenics thing. Like yeah yeah the glory of Tevinter whatever that means. Help me move these chambers IDIOTS. I need the funding to build THIS [points] 125 foot tall skeleton. Okay yes mages are cool OBVIOUSLY I am one. Now help me build THIS 125 foot tall skeleton. Okay use blood magic if you have to. Get the blood wherever you normally get the blood. Whatever. Wait until Emmrich fucking Volkarin sees THIS 125 FOOT TALL--

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Aloth being the first companion you get is great because his introduction is insane (guy gets into a barfight because he tells a guy to go fuck his sister and then backpedals and goes 'oh uh no I Did Not Say That' and then immediately goes 'I did say that' but in a different accent) but then from his perspective the introduction to the Watcher is just as insane. Rando who helps him out during a barfight wakes up in a cold sweat, makes a beeline for the corpse tree, and stares intently at the body of a dead dwarf for 15 minutes. freak matched at unparalleled levels.

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did someone say dragons?

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Alistair/Zevran/Morrigan

Aveline/Isabela/Anders

Cassandra/Varric/Solas

Taash/Lucanis/Neve

Fave character of each class from every game, go:

Warrior

Rogue

Mage

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Look I know I usually do very sincere analysis. But equally sincerely:

There’s really nothing quite like watching a teenage girl flay alive one of the men who’s tried to own her power.

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Low-key tempted to write a fanfic one day where the Lords of fortune actually HAS a pirate ship that they travel on, and Taash takes Rook on a journey on the ship where they explore ruins, islands and new lands for a few months. To go full on pirate!

Of course, this is after the events of Veilguard, because Rook deserves it

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I love Taash, and I fully believe this is how this part goes:

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Do you think Varric heard the song of the stone as he died

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I think there is no better illustration of the more intimate, internal angle veilguard chooses to approach its characters and themes with than the fact that like... listen in this game we get to follow so much pain back to its source, and we find it really does permeate everything in thedas today on a level that evokes a kind of cosmic horror. the bones of the earth itself are broken open and drenched in trauma; the world is mired in suffering down to the core and the marrow. as above, so below. as outside, so inside. on the big scale, and the small. all of creation is a throat gone to bloody shreds from screaming in agony, when you allow yourself to listen. (maybe that's why we usually don't, or can't, bring ourselves to listen.)

...and yet the thing that makes me personally so desperately gnaw-my-own-arm-off sad that it feels like I could die from it is that in a run where you save minrathous, lucanis never gets out from the ossuary in his mind. what's worse, no one even knows he's in there. he's still in there. and there is no rescue on the way, because he's locked down so deep inside himself this time that there's no way for anyone to even understand there's a need for it. would he be able to welcome one, if someone did realize it and tried to reach him? You know him -- you can open the door, but he won't walk through. He won't move. There's nowhere to go. the way he says 'it doesn't matter what I want' with such utter, leaden, final resignation in the wrecked treviso cutscene is going to haunt me forever. it makes perfect sense to me you can't romance him after that, I'm not sure he's ever really here completely in that version of events, at least within the timeline the game takes place. he's just standing in the shitty awful ossuary torture room all alone, and no one's coming to find him.

and what is that, next to the millennia of suffering screaming through all of history and creation? well. nothing, of course, not really. a single plucked string in an endless deafening symphony of despair. one singular trapped and broken soul among the untold millions that have gone before and the untold more that will surely come after, that are being made as we speak in the conflicts and tragedies unfolding through the game. but more importantly it's also everything. to me. and to the game too. the game says this also matters. just as much as anything else, this pain matters and deserves to be loved and comforted. even in the face of all the suffering in the world, beneath the systems perpetuating all the banalities of evil, for good or for ill sometimes, we matter to each other. and what would be the point of anything, if we didn't? that's where hope lives. as long as you're alive, the right key might still arrive to gently open the locks of your mind, the right hand might reach out one day and you will bring yourself to take it. you don't know what tomorrow's going to be. if in the meantime the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other -- isn't that enough? isn't that everything? why does this one guy saved mean the world saved to me, a little bit? hello. hello. hello. there's stuff going on in the deep here.

when I say that the deep thematic spine of this game is so good and solid that the occasional clumsiness and false tones of the writing on top of it simply cannot hurt me... I think this is part of what I mean. works for every single one of the characters of course! lucanis' is the predicament that speaks to me most viscerally. for. uh. personal reasons there simply is no time to get into at this juncture lol. but just as much the idea that davrin can die before he could see the world freed from the blight and the need for wardens, or that harding can get cut down right at the beginning of a great revelation that could change everything and heal things no one had even dreamed could be healed. all of them are like this. each and every one of us has a world and so many stories inside that matter, and it's not to dismiss the larger systemic forces and evils that create so much of the suffering in the world to focus in on that for one installment of the series -- only to view it from a different angle that brings other things to light than what we're looking for normally in this series. it's worth looking at what's actually here.

(have you ever heard the poem 'good light' by andrea gibson? it's very good. you should check it out if you haven't, you can find it on youtube. it has these lines:

Come make it count Our finding each other like we found God Come root for the salt Come believing we can heal it all, even everything Even everything that has ever been done I know how much the pain of this world weighs But I can still tip the scales in light's direction Whenever I have your name on my tongue

and yeah. I think that's basically what I'm trying to say here.)

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Tumblr fandom sitting through female protagonists going through the most epic, harrowing, emotional storyline ever committed to page or screen waiting for the first two male characters who so much as make eye contact with each other so they can stop pretending to care and make the whole fandom about them.

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Taash <3

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Is that ABALONE ARMOR?????

That face tho