i dont really talk abt this outside of discord bc ive not liked datv from the very beginning and theres typically nothing critical i could say that others havent said better, but the 1920s paper boy trying to escape a gas explosion level backpedaling and blame shifting trick weekes has done on bluesky lately is a rare highly-concentrated level of insufferable
trick weekes, on a public panel and then again on discord: erm actually ☝️we DID did have slavery depicted in veilguard. if you blathering simpletons wouldve just looked at the 10 seconds of the venatori using the narratively inconsequential elven npcs as furniture, during a quest that rushes you through the experience as fast as possible so you can hear two characters arguing that we actually wrote the quest to show, ermmmm, you would know. and anyway, we didnt even NEED to do that, because erm, OBVIOUSLY☝️every character in the game taking place in slavery city knows that slavery bad, so ermm, methinks theres no need to hammer it in when it takes screentime away from me and my friend's ocs going shopping. and also if youre going to write about dismantling the status quo, erm, methinks you should instead be thinking about the regular people that are free to go outside and complain about the price of buying bread, which is why i wrote it like that, i wanted to write about my - i mean regular peoples experiences, who are struggling too yknow, when they slip and fall on a pile of slave corpses rotting in the sun on their way home
trick weekes, less than a month later: i actually dont have hands. guys. i dont have any hands. i didnt write it like that. it wasnt because i was on board with shipping a fantasy friend group simulator instead of a dragon age game. how could i have when i do not have any hands. i had absolutely no power over the writing, as lead writer. i had to write things bad because my boss was physically standing over me saying WRITE EVERYTHING BAD NOW which he could do because i was just the lead writer i barely even worked there. and then when we got rid of matt goldman 3 entire years ago we could write dragon age again. but then when i gave my script to corrine busche that had dragon age in it she ripped it up in front of me and said UGH! I HATE DRAGON AGE! there was nothing i could do guys. and even if there was as i established i dont have any hands. so. actually it was because of saudi arabia. actually it was because of the VA strike. actually its because you hate friends. you hate friends and you wanted a dragon game with no friends or happiness in it. actually you hate non binary people. actua
I am in my third year master degree in cosmetology and the more I study it the more I hate it. I can't wait to enter into regulatory affairs so I can pursue my dream of constantly being a pain in the a*s for people in the industry.
Piece of advice to all writers who need a cover but don’t have the money to hire an artist: use the public domain.
Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.
But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!
When you use such images, always make sure that
1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but not the photograph you are using!),
and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.
Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.
[Prompt Calender: April 23rd, World Book and Copyright Day]
The horror inherent in how we (don't) talk about covid anymore. Everyone is constantly getting infected at school, work and health care facilities and many of us are getting more & more disabled. At the same time, work from home jobs are disappearing and wearing a mask is stigmatized. People are sending their kids to school without even thinking about it. Workers are peer pressured not to mask. Try showing up to a job interview with a mask and see if you get the job. All that during a cost of living crisis & mass unemployment in many places. Choose between eating & avoiding brain damage. It's the black lung of our time. One of the worst tendencies of humanity on full display, on a global scale and nobody but disabled people even gives a shit anymore.
Look Caitie, if you didn't pick up that it's gross as fuck how BioWare spent over a decade coding the elves as Indigenous, only to double down in Veilguard what began in Trespasser, saying the ancient elves are the evil behind all evil in Thedas but the colonizers of Tevinter are actually a haven for queer people under attack by a single cult or whatever, that's between you and your lack of media literacy.
I would truly love if we could knock it off with this stuff.
I don't know Caitie, so I hope I'm reading this with more condescension than perhaps was intended, but this strikes me as an incredibly bad faith take. Nowhere in this thread or the one quoted do I see evidence that the person being spoken of made any claim that their fan project wasn't fanfic. Fix-its and rewrites are a perfectly common genre, and we can understand that's what this person is doing even if they haven't used the precise term.
More importantly, the level of toxic positivity I've seen in the DA fandom in the past 18 months is truly wild. A divisive installment of a beloved series doesn't necessarily kill its community. But treating people's enjoyment of that installment as some kind of purity test - either of their status as true fans, or of their moral character - absolutely will.
Part of fandom has always been accepting that people in your community will not enjoy the same things you do. Your favorite character, scene, game is going to be someone else's least favorite. And maybe they will rewrite it, or ignore it, or create something you don't like. That shouldn't have any bearing on your own enjoyment. And you also don't need to take to social media to put them on blast for it.
DA fandom shrinks every day. It will continue to do so naturally because the series is done. Making fun of people who want to continue to engage with the media and make transformative works about it is a great way to ensure the community will only get smaller.
I don't want to go too, too deeply into it, but all day I've been thinking about how blatantly unfair and mean everyone is to Solas in Veilguard. (And we all know why, but I'll let that particular sleeping dog (mostly) lie, I guess.)
(I am increasingly bitter about all of this, and while I genuinely enjoyed Veilguard for what it was, and for the catharsis and closure of the Solavellan ending, on repeat playthroughs I am getting really frustrated by the illogical, unsympathetic, and outright cruel way Solas is treated by the narrative. You don't have to like or romance him to see that none of it lines up properly.)
Solas is not an idiot, he knows people are after him and people don't agree with him. But this particular bit is just mean. It feels like it's meant to read as an understanding nod towards the audience. Like a "Yeah we know you hate this guy, we do, too - everyone does."
Let's not talk about the fact that his plan was to actually stabilize the Veil by moving Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain to stronger prisons.
Let's not talk about the fact that Varric bulldozed his way into a magical ritual he didn't fucking understand to pretend he was saving the world (talk about a hero-complex) and distracting the person currently wielding the energy of 8-10 nuclear power plants.
Let's not talk about the fact that Rook and their reckless carelessness are the reason why the ritual failed and Solas threw himself (and the world!!) the only lifeline he could in that moment - a blood magic connection.
No. Let's instead be schoolyard-bully mean to a heavily traumatized man while refusing to hear anything he has to say.
Sure, Rook. You know better than the millennia-old, immortal being trying to sort out your mess.
I bet this line hurt Solas more than he admitted to even himself. Once again willfully misunderstood, misinterpreted, misconstrued, and bitterly reminded of a time when that was his life for centuries.
We continue with this:
Really? Really? Yeah he fucking burned the corrupted lab, Harding. There was and is no cure for the Blight. God-like powers or not ("Come on, be the god she needs." - wtf), he wasn't "too scared of the Blight to do anything" - there literally wasn't anything else he could have done.
This scene makes me so angry. I would pay good money to have access to information what the writers' room looked like on this.
But then again, the whole game is mostly just a complete character assassination of Solas in an effort to a) comfort one man's fragile ego (how ironic, the parallel with Elgar'nan), and b) make the story make sense somehow for people who disliked Solas in DAI.
Sure, let's call Solas a coward for not performing divine miracles on demand. Let's pretend it's willful cruelty or indifference and not a sheer and obvious lack of power.
How fucking cruel to accuse him like this, when this confrontation alone probably ripped his heart to shreds knowing he was responsible for all of it. But instead of empathetic understanding (Rook also caused a cataclysmic event without meaning to and is currently confronted with the consequences of their own actions!), all they do is sneer.
Once again, the game itself is only giving us half the story. On purpose. This "discussion" makes it seem like Solas only wanted to stop Elgar'nan (and only him) because he didn't want to see him in power.
But that's not it. Solas started rebelling and freeing slaves for ideological reasons, yes - but what really pushed him over the edge and towards the creation of the Veil was the Evanuris using the Blight. Something Solas knew would endanger every single living thing in entire world. Not a petty power squabble or a difference in politics - a necessity of raw survival.
The game tries to paint Solas and Elgar'nan as "two politicians", "just like Tevinter nobles", because recognizing that Solas did something necessary nobody else was able and/or willing to do, bloodying his hands and blackening his conscience, and losing his dearest friend and lover over it, would make him sympathetic.
And if there's one thing Solas isn't allowed to be in this game it's sympathetic. Because this is one man's quest for vengeance against a video game character that made him feel a negative emotion once.
(To be Fair And Balanced(tm), you can steer Rook in a sympathetic direction via dialogue - but the companions just always snap back into their default anti-Solas mindset.)
Oh fuck all the way off, Morrigan. Treacherous. Who conned the Warden/Alistair/Loghain into making an Old God Baby for your own ends? Who absconded without a word like a thief in the night, leaving the people you claimed were your only friends behind? Who snuck her way into the fucking Imperial Court of Orlais, only to weasel herself into the Inquisition in hopes of grabbing power and artifacts of a culture that isn't yours?
Oh, what's that? That was necessary? You were protecting yourself and your child?
Hmmmmmh!!!! It's almost as if sometimes, subterfuge is necessary!
I have nothing against Morrigan as a character. I love her. But the way she is wielded in Veilguard is terrible. She's just a vehicle through which the writers (we know who in particular) let the audience know that yes, everyone hates Solas, and the audience's hatred of him is Justified(tm).
Just like her snide little "Speaking from the heart, Inquisitor?" later at the final war council. God, I wanted to punch her. I bet a lot of people felt really vindicated by those lines and Morrigan's behavior, and I bet that was the plan.
(Sometimes I wonder how Trick really, in their heart of hearts, feels about all this. We'll never know, I don't feel I'm entitled to know, I would never ask - but I wonder.)
This whole scene is also terrible. Mostly because some people just don't have enough media literacy and sheer reading comprehension to understand that Solas is doing a bit here.
The game plays it off like he's "finally taking off the mask" - but that's not it. He's playing a character (look at those hands behind his back, he does that when he's insecure), he's performing the role of the villain that Rook needs to see to push them deeper into their own regret. They "lost to the villain and failed everyone". It doesn't work if Solas doesn't play the part. It doesn't work if it's a calm discussion.
Look at his fucking face:
That's not a sneering villain. That's sadness. That's pain. That's guilt. Funny how the character artists and mo-cap people knew exactly what they were doing, even as the narrative tries its damndest to work against them.
And the final nail in the coffin:
Yes, let's get this guy's former literal slave owner to talk him down. Let's act like even now, even millennia later, she is who gets to decide his fate.
Fucking look at this final, complete humiliation. In front of everyone - Rook, Morrigan, Lavellan/the Inquisitor, a bunch of other people - he is reliving all his trauma in real time and forced into submission. Because Mythal tells him to leave it.
As if to tell even an adoring Solavellan audience - who this ending was supposed to be for! - "Look how weak and pathetic your guy is, look how your love wasn't enough, watch us kick him in the ribs one last time!"
Don't get me wrong: I love the moments between Lavellan and Solas. I love his breathless little "Vhenan." I love their kiss. I love how she kneels down to him so their faces are level. I love that he's too afraid to take her hand as they walk through the rift. I love this ending.
I just hate that it all came with one last back-handed kick in the shin for Solas and for the Solavellan-minded player.
Okay. I'm done. I just had to word-vomit this somewhere, finally. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for enjoying Veilguard. I'm not saying people aren't allowed to enjoy Veilguard. I myself did enjoy Veilguard ffs. I played it twice, back to back, 160 hours. I have 4GB screenshots and a whole notebook with lore notes. My critique is coming from a place of genuine, deep love for the series as a whole and Solas specifically. So I hope people take it that way.
I just wanted to add one little thing to this great post, (and salt to the wound), the way that Rook & Crew treat him is a perfect example of what Solas talked about in Inquisition (dialogue only with Low Approval Inquisitor)
Here's the audio as well (with some bonus Inquisitor snark 'cause I couldn't help myself)
Solas has been treated so poorly for so long and the Inquisitor is essentially the one person (as a friend or Solavellan, besides Cole) that can treat him kindly and with respect.
my copium: pretending Veilguard was Varric's shitty fanfic to cover up what really happened
Does anyone else have a problem with obsessively listening to the Lost Elf theme from Trespasser on repeat? I have been listening to it for days. It has basically become my brain at this point.
And can I say how fucking inspirational it is? It is driving me to create art like I haven't in years. Thank you Trevor Morris. 😩
The worst, most insulting thing about Veilguard is that I’m forced to play a protagonist that emotionally abuses my favorite character in the Dragon Age universe.
I am not OK with how my own fucking character treats Solas.
I keep thinking about Solas, what else is new, but just this recurring thought that DA4 was taunting and bullying the player if they held any sentiment for Solas. John Epler wrote Rook who is his own self insert because his ego is that strong. This isn’t a “I wanted to mollycoddle or be all lovey-dovey with Solas” at least not for me. I wanted to engage with the educated and quite frankly dangerous and ruthless Solas. I didn’t even need Inky to be the main protagonist, in fact I can get why they would imply someone Solas doesn’t know because he and his followers will be sabotaging. But I really get the impression that Epler thinks only women like Solas (not true) and romancing him is their only personality. Why else would anyone like him if they don’t want to bang him and be with him.
We already know the very concept of “romancing Solas” seems to madden him…his energy in his writing was so insecure and oozing with this nonsensical loathing of a fictional bald elf to the point I’m wondering does he imagine Solas stealing his wife? His mother? Nothing to do with the things he has actually done in the game which are a lot. The whole thing reeks of misogyny, which unfortunately is sneakily in the game (see Morrigan, Harding, Bellara, Neve, the Inquisitor, Lucanis, Mythal…etc). It is very much a theme in the game being a soft-core male power fantasy that becomes a parody and breaks the fourth wall.
Epler in his writing -which I noticed in playing Veilguard for 100+ hours because I wish to be an educated critic of this game - hates Solas but he also really hates people who like or even love Solas. It’s a strange choice on BioWare’s part to make him creative director of a game that was meant to be about The Dread Wolf and stopping him. Solas was meant to be the antagonist and even then he could not bring himself to do it because 1) skill issue 2) he brings is the same energy that certain individuals have whenever women like something. The mocking, the belittling, the ridiculing…right up the bullying etc. It’s giving - and I will say this till the end of time because it’s tragically funny - Epler will burn Solas’s funkopop on a barbecue as well as his plushie vibes.
The game is bound to the age-old tactic to mock and belittle anyone romancing with their Inky or just loving Solas as a flaw character, as a villain, as an anti-villain etc. But anyone can like Solas. He can be anything the player’s head canon so desires. Yeah he has done bad things and will need to be dealt with accordingly but that wasn’t even allowed. An Inky that romanced him is reduced to being a loyal wifey who will give up her life for him. That’s the only option. An Inky who didn’t romance him is thrown in a “we were comrades” box and good friends. There is no Inky who dislikes him or an Inky who wants closure, because they aren’t important. This game is about Rook and how they feel about Solas and bringing an end to a franchise.
