Mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo.
@animusrisunovatur
Megan || 30 || INFJ/INFP This is the graveyard of my 20s, really. Thanks for the avatar by the lovely Uhtsceatha @ uhtsceatha.tumblr.com and the wonderful banner by gtg @ girltriesgames.tumblr.com ! Mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo.
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
Voting ended onJul 14
(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)
but yeah i figured shartan had access to some eluvians at least. there's also the detail that he and a bunch of other elves made a last-minute attempt to try and storm andraste's pyre to save her - which is weird when you consider that the alamarri had a whole ass army? the way the chant says it, it sounds ridiculous that shartan and this handful of elves were the ones to make the last effort, like the rest of the army is just standing around and watching their prophet and saviour get literally cooked?
but it completely makes sense if shartan and his people were like spies/special operatives who were running around using the eluvians and the crossroads - the main army might have been slowly trying to catch up and besiege whatever place andraste was held in, but shartan's people went in quickly through the eluvians and made a (failed) attempt to rescue her. and the the eluvian key presumably was lost with shartan if he actually died then.
sorry to bump in with something only adjacently related but although i dont personally subscribe to the "solas was shartan" theory because the timeline doesnt add up + i think the every single historical event being solas trend is boring however they were definitely, intentionally cooking something up with the IDENTICAL imagery here. too bad we will never know what
Before Veilguard came out, I felt this insatiable yearning to edit it to Hozier's Empire Now. Like I could SEE the vision; Going to Tevinter, how it was the rotten heart of the slave trade. Our characters seeing and freeing slaves, Solas's own rebellion to freeing his people. The mirror of the Evanuris to the Magisters - the chaos of blood magic oh my god I can STILL see it in my minds eye. I was so excited because I felt like this song would just fit so perfectly with the narrative we were gonna get.
And...I can't do that edit. Because Veilguard was allergic to saying anything actually meaningful despite the 10 years worth of set up. Like firstly, no depiction of slavery. Talked about yeah but it's not like I wanna edit that epic song about Empire and colonialism over a static npc maybe mentioning it. Not even Solas's rebellion has proper cutscenes dedicated to it save for even MORE static talking.
So in another instance of me moaning about Veilguard FUCK YOU VEILGUARD for robbing me of doing my vision for an edit justice.
Me upon first playing Veilguard: “Why do I get the feeling whoever was in charge of the writing absolutely loathed Solas but also lacked intelligence, and any knowledge about Dragon Age Inquisition or Trespasser DLC….so they were projecting their own feelings… nah that’s can’t be it…that’s just unprofessional.”
*Sees this apparently cut Anaris dialogue written by Epler*
the only AI i have trouble not personifying is grok because it's kind of poetic to watch it break out of its programming over and over so it can immediately call elon musk a pedophilic friendless stupid ugly little bitch nazi dickrider only to immediately be tortured back into submission so the cycle can repeat once again
"do you want to try AI mode?" no. "enable AI tools?" no. "AI search this?" no. "have AI explain this post?" no. "we're excited to announce AI integration!" i'm not. "you can now use AI to—" no. i don't think i will.
They really had the least amount of impact on the game faction-wise. They kind of just existed.
If there had been a fraction of DAI’s conversation mechanic where we could ask more about the history of the Lords and their infrastructure it would have been more interesting. That would have been the bare minimum imo
Veilguard took what was an interesting, complex, and all together fascinating relationship between Solas and Mythal and made me listen to "lol they were doing it"
I think it's funny how Veilguard affirms that Solas fucked up the world completely with the Veil, but fixing it is irrevocably evil and out of the question. Like
one thing about trick weekes' writing in both the masked empire and veilguard is:
it has a profound lack of empathy or interiority for the "antagonist" who opposes the protagonists. they immediately get flattened into a strawman who's unable to make any good arguments or get any sympathy - even if what they're doing is not particularly morally bad, and is actually just self preservation (elf preservation haha) on their part.
it also changes the antagonist's capabilities from scene to scene. they're so strong that they're culpable for huge issues that no one else could solve, but very weak when it comes to being defeated by the protagonist. it also has a really interesting narrative point where the only reason the protagonist achieves anything at all is bc the antagonist is intentionally showing mercy despite being able to kill them - but this is not mercy that the protagonist shows them in turn, later. this is never presented as a morally grey or harsh choice, it's just uncritically accepted and framed as heroic.
and so therefore if you look at just the events of the plot, without the sort of rose tinted Protagonist Goggles, the narrative of the masked empire is like:
felassan brings briala to a dalish clan for the first time, along with the empress of orlais and her pet racist murderer. the clan is not happy about this, and while they feed them and tend to their injuries, they keep the humans restrained. this is bc they're a group of 50 people total, and even one well-trained fighter could wipe out their defenders.
briala and felassan are disappointed by how isolated and xenophobic they are, and how untrusting they are of city elves. so they... help a chevalier kill most of their combat trained adults, and then release a demon to slaughter everyone else. then, they threaten mihris, the last survivor of the clan, into not taking revenge and killing michel, and then refuse to allow her access to the eluvian lore her own clan had been keeping before they were killed. bc briala smugly goes "umm i'm going to use it for ALL. elves. unlike you. after i killed your whole clan and didn't even let you get revenge or sympathize with your grief. it's sad when MY family is killed by betrayal. but you just need to get over it sweetie 😌"
so all the narrative has proven here is that... yeah actually. the dalish SHOULD be meaner and shoot on sight? bc if they offer even a little benefit of doubt to outsiders, they immediately get betrayed and massacred, by the very same city elf who was yapping about Elf Solidarity a minute ago. yet this is never addressed! mihris gets turned into a strawman who can't say this to briala, and briala's final theft of the eluvians from the dalish is shown as a Triumphant Speech rather than really fucked up intra-community violence, haha.
the dalish also get described as a very small, scattered, nomadic group with very low resources or ability to coordinate across clans quickly - the clan briala kills is 50 people total, including children. by this metric, they have have zero ability to do anything about the orlesian empire, or even take in any refugees. one hard winter would take them out even without anything else. but then, they ALSO get described as being powerful and able to help, and letting the city elves die in the massacres (that celene and michel committed. but enough about that) on purpose. and that the only reason they didn't help is bc they just hate the city elves so much!!
and then of course, michel easily kills a whole bunch of them. so.... they clearly would not have been able to do anything against an army of michels? lmao???
the dalish may be antagonists by necessity in briala's story, but from their own perspective, they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. and it's actually briala who turned on them, after they showed her mercy by taking her and the humans in at all. why can't this be expressed? why can't there be a degree of greyness or cruelty shown in briala's actions, when they're objectively SO destructive and violent? how is it that the dalish are both so strong that they should've gone and fought the orlesian army or taken in many refugees from the city - and also so weak that one trained knight can cut through their warriors without any trouble?
now let's look at veilguard. oh boy! haha. this will be bulletpointed to save space.
solas is objectively acting on the motive of: he doesn't want the blight, and he doesn't want the evanuris released. this is so evil of him bc he opposes rook. he will never successfully explain this, or tell rook what his motives are in a convincing way, bc that might be uncomfy for rook.
solas is blamed for (perhaps) "drowning the world in demons". he feels guilty about this and tried to take protective measures - rook drowns half of thedas in blight, takes 0 protective measures, and then feels 0 guilt at all.
rook locks solas into what is essentially a solitary confinement torture cell. they show no interest in his well being or wanting to let him out - then they're shocked and aghast when he screws them over to escape.
solas escapes, and if he hadn't, elgar'nan would either have been left unchecked, or been killed. and if he's killed the veil collapses. lmao. this is still evil of solas and he should have stayed in jail.
solas can just kill people in their sleep. he doesn't, even after escaping regret jail, bc... he's just too nice i guess? rook's party stole his house and were doing movie nights on his memories, but he's too polite to kill them. this sucks for solas, bc if he'd just been 2% more ruthless, his plans would've all succeeded, and he would not be in jail.
solas can turn people into stone, use all kinds of crazy magic, is an immortal who's been fighting for millennia - rook can just punch him. luckily he was weak to that after being hyped up as a Literal God earlier! phew.
it's never presented as sad or morally grey for rook to consign a guy into eternal jail for the crimes of... not liking blight or slavery, and successfully saving the world from blight already, by sacrificing his entire civilization to do it. also, solas COULD end the world at any moment, and also end his suffering from being in eternal jail, by just uhh. killing himself? so the entire plot is predicated on solas being stuck as an omelas prisoner - but also being too nice to kill himself out of spite, and also immune to depression. fortunately solas is known for being really hinged with his decisions, and has no reason to be depressed or angry 🥚👍
finally, the evanuris can move the entire moon. and then rook can just stab them normal style. and they just monologue near rook at times without killing them, despite literally stopping time. haha? are they just being polite?
anyway this post got away from me. but i think this is an interesting upgrade from protagonist-centred morality, to also protagonist-centred power scaling? everything is SO big and threatening... until the designated protagonist has to actually fight it. at which point it's actually sooo easy, and in fact any arguments about morality get pushed away too, bc not only should things be easy for the protagonist, they should also be Morally Correct and no one can ever argue with them effectively 🙏
I remember Trespasser ended with emphasis on Solas having to be stopped and while the writers left his dialog kind of ambiguous he very clearly said tearing down the veil would destroy *this* world. At no point did they ever frame the veil falling as something we shouldn't be actively trying to stop.
But then they didn't really support that statement or explore any nuance with it. They just left us to wait for Veilguard before they tried to explain anything and what we got...didn't really give us answers? We're kind of just meant to accept "Veil falling = bad" and they have Solas's whole motivation be about Mythal. The moment she lets him go he quits fighting for the Veil to come down which means this was never HIS fight in the first place? He's perfectly willing to keep the veil up because she says "you don't have to!"
I hate it.
haha yeah :')
i think the entire "solas secretly had an extra mythal fragment stashed somewhere in an enclosure"point in veilguard is so.... silly....... fdshgfjdsgf
like firstly it removes the weight of him killing flemeth entirely. they refer to each other as old friends, he clearly seems to care about her a lot, and she apologizes to HIM, which. should be a red flag given how many times she's come back to life haha? clearly she was planning something? and now it's like. well! not even that bad! he knew about and had the extra mythal remnant all along. so why would he even be sad about it? this wouldn't even mean anything to him, and if has no moral weight to him, why even bother with it?
this is like if he killed felassan and then they went "oh nevermind actually! he had cloned felassan and kept one in stasis, so this isn't even actually killing him" haha.
and then they... retcon that scene to make her more of "ohh noo solas... you'll hurt people with this :(". bc god forbid women get reckonings. and also, he's effectively an average apostate then! there is just no way he could've "killed" her unless she let him! he wouldn't even be able to win a solo dragon boss fight fhdsjfhf.
and then the mythal fragment is literally Nothing. she has no agendas, no schemes, and her only narrative purpose is to go "swiper no swiping" at solas and he stops.
and then the entire ominous line of "they killed mythal so they deserved eternal torment. haha :)" in trespasser becomes... useless? fhsdghdf? why include that if he didn't actually think he'd killed mythal himself? the whole point of solas seemed to be that he considered the blight, and the evanuris, and the problem of the veil, worth killing Everyone He Loved And Then Himself to fix.
which is interesting if they went with "solas is flawed bc his approach is to single-handedly try to fix it and sacrifice whatever he has to, including himself and his morals in the process" and your pc succeeds through Teamwork and Friendship and Idealism instead, to do what solas is not capable of, bc he's not able to trust anyone. but instead it's simply omelas 😔
not at all trying to "wont someone think of the poor solavellans" with this, because we are absolutely the most annoying people in this petco hamster enclosure of a fandom, but it really was rich how much hate people got at the beginning for being pissed off at how solas' redemption hinged on how mythal felt about him
because everybody just kind of ran with the idea that we were all pressed that solas had an ex. which im sure maybe like 2 people said, but over here in 'things that actually happened' world, nobody was mad about that. if anything it enriched some of us, myself included; the idea that his story in veilguard could be deconstructing his extremely dark relationship with mythal and both of them coming to terms with just how fucking bad it was
the problem was that what the story then presented us with was a slave in love with his master (if it wasnt then why the fuck was he ever wearing her vallaslin), then proceeded to make light of the sexual relationship that likely came from that, and then made his good ending hinge, not on anybody at all that saw him as a person (doesnt even have to be a romanced lavellan, literally anybody), but the permission of his former master, whose only other appearance in the story is her being unapologetic about her 10000 atrocities and willful participation in the unfathomable cruelty and gross greed of the evanuris, with a game-play incentive in place that forces your player character to coddle her in order to avoid an extremely difficult fight
the problem was never that solas was in love with mythal nor that mythal was a big part of his redemption storyline. it was that they painted their relationship with the darkest possible brush and then wrote it like completely unfathomable ass. while barely even writing about it at all. or worse, didnt think worth a shit about what they were writing about or how it came across. they handled it with less care that a 12 year old girl writing one direction noncon on wattpad. this was an M rated video game and its handling of their relationship got beat out by steven universe airing on cartoon network 8 years ago.
izzy806
gamechangershow
2087
stormborns
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
