[durgeapologist]

my plan was to dip and simply not say anything to anyone but i do have beloved moots on here that i don't want to think i'm ignoring them, so:

i'm not going to be on here for at least the rest of the year. probably longer. i might not ever be back, if i'm being honest.

before this past january (or if we're being generous, before last july/august with reddit), i had taken a big fat step back from being involved with any and all fandom spaces. 6 years? i believe?

and let me tell you: getting back into fandom, and more specifically that fandom being dragon age, has made me more miserable than i can ever remember being lmfao. (and i was in the bts and one direction fandoms. those? were brutal. da fandom? literal torture.) i'm constantly stressed, constantly on the look out for yet another doxxing, and constantly begging tumblr to fix my inbox so i stop getting sent threatening asks that call me all sorts of heinous names and slurs. i have no drive to create (for a multitude of reasons) and i'm at a point in my life where, frankly, i'm too fucking busy to be keeping up with a ship blog.

i want to be happy again. i want to find the joy of real life and not have to worry that ship wars, hating ai, or enjoying a fucking video game will put me in a direct line of fire to be forced to read the most vile things i've ever had the displeasure of being sent or coming across. there is so much horror and negativity already in real life, and it's becoming so normalized to be a shitty fucking person that it's permeating fandom spaces. all of them, btw, not just the da fandom. and it's exhausting.

i've watched too many of my friends be bullied off of here, be doxxed, be sent death threats and suicide baits, and be called slurs. i've watched too many of my friends' mental healths go down the gutter because of trump apologists, right-wing rhetoric slinging losers, racist assholes, and terf cunts who have been made to feel comfortable in spaces full of lgbtq+ people. it's affecting me just the same with all the bullshit i have to deal with just to post about a ship or game certain people don't like. i'm sick of it. i'm beyond tired.

so i'm leaving. i'm going to go touch grass for as absolutely long as i need it. these mini hiatuses don't do shit. a clean break is sorely needed.

i wish i could say you can reach me elsewhere. truth be told, you can't. i respect and value my own privacy too much to start doling out other forms of contact. i won't be on discord, i won't be checking my email, i won't be on ao3 or bsky or anything else. social media really is an absolute hellscape nowadays, even the ones that lean far left, and i am just ready to get back to enjoying real life and finding peace. i'm sorry, and i love all my friends and moots dearly, but this is the only solution that makes sense to me. i hope you all do wonderfully and live peacefully, and i hope you think of me everytime you see durge. for no reason at all. smooches

[insert-this-fire]

hey everyone! Solroktober is right around the corner and I opened up the collection found here Mainly because I know me and I would forget to open it for submissions. Can't wait to see all the new solrook content this october!

[ceaseless-tosser]

its about the mutual capacity for harm your honor

[cogneartive]

when the persona you made eats you; when the performance youve been putting on eats you; when the name they gave you eats you; when the image people made of you eats you; when the role you were assigned eats you; when the you that other people see or even made for you or you made for them takes over the you that you know and eats you alive.

[durgeapologist]

The Fallen Rook

my dear dear friend @sacredashes did a gorgeous piece of my rook as a surprise birthday present and i need everyone else to see it :')

[freakasaurus-rex]

"google ai" "spotify ai dj" "ai assistant" "enhanced by ai" what if i just start beating people over the head with a rock

[izzibeeb]

[specialagentartemis]

“whatever the fuck these two characters had going on” is a vastly underrated character dynamic

[sdwolfpup]

“Weird about each other” is how I’ve always put it. It’s my favorite thing.

[durgeapologist]

y'all it's my birthday as a present i would like every veilguard hater to shut the fuck up for once.

[durgeapologist]

they didn't shut up. they got worse. stop putting these untagged crit posts on my feed i'm on my knees begging

[durgeapologist]

y'all it's my birthday as a present i would like every veilguard hater to shut the fuck up for once.

[dionysian-mystery]

Are you becoming what you've always hated?

Isle of Dogs / Game of Thrones / Painting by Jenn Mazza / Unknown / Ancestral Memory by Hari Alluri / Unknown / Venetta Octavia / Emma Tranter / Unknown / Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo / @ machineryangel

[megthemariner]

@ryebreadgf / The Truth About Grief, Fortesa Latifi / bone deep, m.v.e / Sidewalk, Richard Silken / @fridayiminlovemp3 / 60 hours, m.v.e / @itsblackleader / Salt, Nayyirah Waheed / @heavensghost

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Coughing up blood doesn't make sense for 99% of injuries and illnesses in fiction but it's HOT and I think the sexiness of whump outweighs the medical accuracy most of the time. I WILL die on this hill and I will be coughing up blood as I do so.

[royal-ki]

I support women's rights but also women's decades long revenge plots

[durgeapologist]

i'm going to forever wonder why people watched the ending scene of trespasser, where the inquisitor point blanks says "then find people he doesn't know" when leliana points out that "solas knows everything about [the inquisition]", and are still somehow pissed off or in disbelief that inky wasn't veilguard's protagonist.

never mind the fact there has never been a repeating protagonist. just the sole fact inky said they were not going to be tracking down solas should be enough of a clue that they were not going to be anything more than an advisor.

i always see these kinds of posts (always untagged, of course) riddled with character cameos they think should have happened, even though said characters have endings where they can die or leave a previous protagonist's party, ie., alistair, zevran, fenris, merrill, the iron bull, or even sera. or pc cameos like the warden or hawke.

as heap would say, these are reasons fanfiction exists. cater to your world state! go wild! but please remember, when you're maliciously criticizing rook and dav or sitting there whining that inky should have been the protagonist and all your faves should have made an appearance, that not everyone has your worldstate. everyone's worldstates are different. that's just how it is.

atp i fully believe y'all wanted a better written inquisitor and dai. dai is the reason those plot points were introduced and immediately dropped. that has nothing to do with dav, which again, is a story set ten years into the future and set in a completely different part of the continent, where the south's influence is extraordinarily small. these writing pitfalls lie with dai, not dav, and some people hate acknowledging that, i guess.

[durgeapologist]

me, wanting to engage in good faith debates and discussions about whether solas was actually enslaved to mythal and whether vallaslin possibly represented something other than slave markings at the beginning of the ancient elven empire

also me, knowing if i straight up ask, "can someone please show me where the fuck it says solas was enslaved to mythal and don't use either of cole's two easily-missed and ambiguous lines in dai?" i will be brutally beaten with sticks

[idontevenlikedragonage]

Sorry for reblogging this with a wall of text.

This is one of those instances where I find some of the criticism towards Veilguard’s or Mythal’s/Solas’ writing genuinely fascinating.

I generally find the way we understand text fascinating. Even with a classic novel, what you take away from it is highly influenced by your background and life experiences, among other things. A classic example would be the Bible, which, you know, I think we all know has been understood differently by different groups of people. That’s basically hermeneutics: the idea that interpretation is never neutral but always shaped by context, history, and the reader’s own position.

But in the case of choice-based RPGs, what you actually experience as the text, and in what order, is highly influenced by your choices and how you play the game.

In this specific example, you only hear one particular line of dialogue if you take two characters out at the same time under very specific circumstances. I’ve played Dragon Age: Inquisition twice, and I never triggered this line. I only became aware of its existence through Tumblr.

Now, this line might be the remains of some creative process before the writers had fully conceptualized the outlines of a possible fourth Dragon Age game, or it could be connected to elven lore that was never really explained further. But we can agree that this line never really went anywhere, and I would even argue that its exact canonical meaning is questionable. We don’t know if Cole was actually right, we don’t know if vallaslins were always only markings of slavery, and we don’t know if Solas wore a vallaslin as a sign of enslavement. We don’t even know if this line was meant to be analyzed in this way at all.

After Inquisition came out, however, the fandom ran with this line and created a very specific narrative around Mythal and Solas’ relationship. In this interpretation, Solas was a slave and Mythal was his master, and every single point of their relationship was conceptualized in terms of abuse because, as a slave, you don’t really have agency. I don’t know if this reading was intended by that line in Inquisition. I don’t know if it was something the writers originally planned. I don’t know if it was something later dropped. But when the fourth game came out, it became clear that this was probably not the relationship they had. Instead, it’s implied that they shared something like a friendship, a parent-figure bond, a creator-and-worshipper dynamic, or maybe even a lovers’ relationship. I think it’s a very fun dynamic, and a compelling one canonically, but a lot of people who had spent years building a fandom interpretation really didn’t take this revelation well.

Now, I want to take a few seconds to say that even in my interpretation of the Solas-Mythal dynamic, it was always a little dark, there’s something uncanny there, not in a sexual assault way but in a different, stranger way. This is the type of dynamic I find interesting but also a little unsettling. And I believe people are allowed to enjoy dynamics that aren’t just, “Oh, we’re a happy couple, the same age, and the purest vanilla romance.” Even in other fictional works, there are abusive or complicated relationships that you can enjoy engaging with as a fan, because fiction isn’t just about finding wholesome mirrors of reality, it’s about exploring narratives that are fascinating, whether they’re comfortable or not. And isn’t Dragon Age generally praised for its dark tone anyway? This is just an aside.

So, this rupture between fandom interpretation and what we now know to be the canon dynamic of their relationship led to people making all kinds of assumptions about the game, about the writers, and about the fans who actually liked it. This is also how I realized that, by some people’s definitions, I would apparently be a rape apologist. But at the end of the day, I think this is a great example of how interpretation collides with canonical text, and how studying this isn’t just for the Bible or novels, but also for the way we read, misread, and re-read video games.

[restinpiss]

Did God tell you to block me ?