I mean, if we really wanted comic book movies to be faithful to the source material, rather than spending $100 million on one movie, what you’d do is give $20 million each to five different directors, release all five resulting movies in theatres at the same time, and make sure that each movie’s plot refers to the events of all the other movies’ plots in such a way that whichever of the five movies you watch first will be entirely incomprehensible and every possible viewing order is wrong.
it's crazy how many super duper patriarchal things get retroactively justified in the name of being about love. yeah I'm sure women taking their husbands surname has always 100% been about recovering from trauma and distancing yourself from abusive family or whatever and has absolutely nothing at all to do with women being seen as property. great work here everyone, marriage as a concept has been redeemed through the power of pop psychology
but seriously you can talk about how wildly sexist that tradition is and people will come out of the woodwork to be like "well as someone with a bad relationship with their family I actually think my partner giving me their surname would be really healing" as if you were talking about individual reasoning and not patriarchy.
personally i feel like not doing all the patriarchal family stuff might be a bit of a better idea vis a vis people not being harmed by their family but I'm glad you specifically have found a use case for this!
also if i may... you can change your surname in the same way you can change your given name. You don't have to get married to change your name, I did not want to carry my father's name anymore so I legally changed my surname to get rid of it. you can just do that
I agree with everything above, but have to say about the last bit: That highly depends where you live. In Germany, it's next to impossible to change your last name except through marriage. (even more difficult with given names.) Doesn't invalidate the points OP made, but it doesn't hurt to be aware that laws are not the same in every country.
Tfw when men do that thing where they pretend they have no control over their temper. LOL It’s so funny like am I supposed to pretend that I don’t know you’re completely self-aware and present during this rage performance. Or should I pretend you’re the tortured hero in a movie, possessed by a series of fabricated flashbacks of the war and your father
"Abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology... An abuser tries to keep everybody - his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives - focused on how he feels, so that they won't focus on how he thinks, perhaps because on some level he is aware that if you grasp the true nature of his problem, you will begin to escape his domination."
I was worried about the trial. Hopefully it's one of those episodes that you can watch a couple of times and see there's a few different layers to it. There's a performance layer, there's a memory layer, and then there's bits where whoever's remembering it, you're like, well, why was he wobbling? Why couldn't he stand up straight? He is injured, but is the injury physical or is it psychological? I think it's more interesting, and Rolin probably thinks it's more interesting too, that all of the major injury is psychological because when they're so powerful, does it really take you 20 years to recover from a slit throat? So, it is more psychological damage, but [I was] always wanting to make sure there is a level that he is weak.
I think the strangest criticism of queer ships is when people say “they’re best friends” or “they’re better as just friends” like bitch they are still best friends. They’re just also fucking. What’s not clicking?
Kind of insane of Babylon 5 to say that the extant impulse towards Fascism and Authoritarianism exists within all peoples and cultures, and yet that a better world is still possible and achievable in spite of this impulse. That no matter how dark and bleak the state of things becomes, we can still rise above, and perhaps even succeed in finding and building that better, brighter, world.
Proposing a feature for future games called a "no media literacy mode" where the rat from horrible histories pops up at key moments with a sign outlining the writers intentions and how the scene is intended to be interpreted so that people don't have to think about it for themselves.
The fact of the matter is, both Zachary Quinto and Ethan Peck are objectively attractive men but they look stupid as fuck in Spock hair & makeup, while Leonard Nimoy somehow becomes even hotter with pointed ears and a bowl cut. This is the universe's way of telling us only Nimoy is the true Spock vessel
This got long, so parts went behind a cut, still no plot spoilers there.
Let’s get the first two points out at the start:
I‘m still not done with Veilguard (I reckon about 3/4 in) and no, at the moment, I wouldn‘t recommend it - or only under specific conditions.
What I enjoy so far: The gameplay is a lot of fun. It‘s quick, versatile and enjoyable, battles are fun. The visuals are stunning, much more so than I thought from the trailer - it‘s really beautiful to look at.
The problems start with the writing. DAV is a game about preventing the apocalypse and learning the inner workings of a rebellion and it is completely devoid of any conflict. You cannot disagree with anyone, there is not a single question of morality, not even a slightly-hinted-at problematic situation (like being a religious leader in DAI).
DAV is not an RPG. At best, it‘s an action adventure with a shallow and set player character that is very thinly disguised as an RPG and you can see that best with the characters, more importantly YOUR character. Yes, you can choose the looks and background of the player character, but it has zero impact on the story and doesn‘t change anything apart from mild flavour commentary. Worse even, you‘re the lesser one from your faction - bc you get a companion from each faction too, and they‘re definitely more important and better than Rook.* So what‘s your role?
Rook is the therapist of the group. You can never start a conversation with a companion on your own; only when they want to talk can you talk (not like in DAI where you could initiate scenes and ask questions). Your answers can either be „friendly nice“, „nice with a joke“, „stern nice“ or sometimes „flirty nice“ (whereas flirty is barely distinguishable from nice nice). There is ZERO conflict in this game. Your job is to be Supportive(tm), even if your companions say bullshit. There are zero options to disagree, and sometimes the options on the dialogue wheel say more than Rook does. You‘re a coach and therapist, no leader or even friend of your companions. The companions talk (with very rare exceptions) only to each other, not to or about Rook. This can also be seen in the romances, if you can call them that - but truly, they can mostly be ignored, there‘s so little content. I have committed to an exclusive relationship - without so much as a kiss. The dialogue was not even flirty, it felt like there was a heart put on a normal conversation choice. There is no change in how the chosen companion talks to you or how the others talk about you.
* Honestly, Rook is largely irrelevant. You could play as Varric or a mute ogre and it wouldn’t change a thing.
The worst moment is after a truly EPIC scene and battle at ca 1/3 of the game (amazing plot point, truly a high point) where you don‘t manage to quite get what you hoped for, and your gang sits down and everybody says „ah, I was too distracted by my Personal Problems™️, woe is me“. So your next move is to hold everybody‘s hand while they moan about their Problems. 🤦♀️ Instead of connecting the personal quests with strengthening your allies, you‘re told that your companions need your support and please listen to them, okay? (I truly ragequitted that evening, it was so ugh.)
The lore about the ancient elves they put in is AMAZING and everything else they established in previous games is completely ignored. Nothing you did in another DA game has any impact whatsoever.
Again, BioWare just ignores the dwarves - instead of giving us the dwarves as an allied faction, they push (the truly mindboggling) things they did lorewise into a halfassed companion quest and we get the Lords of Fortune who are… treasure hunters and in the scheme of things irrelevant yet somehow your Rivaini connection?
And I want to explode at them for what they make the elves say. They always had elf racism problems in all games, but this time the elves themselves say „maybe everybody is right to treat us so“ and I screamed at the screen at that.
The writing of quests and factions varies from AMAZING to extremely bad. A lot of things fall apart the moment you look at them for two seconds, especially if you know your DA lore. The pacing is… not good. Instead, they have narrated cuts in between - like they did in DA2 where it made sense bc the game is being told in retrospect - that even spoil some plot points that are still to come, as if they deliberately want to take out every bit of suspense.
I still want to finish the game, but mainly because I‘m a Solavellan player and I want to know how it ends for them. Allegedly, the endgame is awesome, so I‘m looking forward to it, but atm, it‘s a bit of a drag to get there.
If you approach the game with an action adventure and a set protagonist in mind, you might enjoy yourself, but don‘t expect an RPG or even a proper DA game.
Transcript of Tiktok by stevetomjohn, in response to a stitch that says “but I am not going to hang onto every CNN breaking news…”:
This is one of the few times when I’m actually going to weigh in with my expertise, I did my PhD dissertation on North Korean propaganda. North Korea is, contrary to popular belief, a right wing authoritarian ethnostate, and there are a lot of reasons why that is that I’m not going to get into in this video.
But as someone who thought a lot about propaganda, I have some things that I want to share. The main thing is exactly this point, that it’s a bad idea to pay attention to every little thing that you see. A lot of people think of propaganda as something that’s trying to teach you something that you end up believing, so it’s like “profits are great now, profits are great now, profits are great now!” and then all of a sudden the audience is like “oh yeah, profits are great now,” but that’s actually not the case most of the time.
One of the articles that really broke my brain about this is, again, this is a very academic article in 20th century music, called “Stalin and the Art of Boredom” by Marina Frolova-Walker who specializes in soviet propaganda of sort of the mid 20th century. And she argues that the point of a lot of propaganda is not actually to convince you of anything, but to bore you into submission by basically filling up your brain to the point where nothing else can take up that space. So like, if you see a statue of Stalin in the courtyard, it doesn’t actually inspire any feelings about Stalin, but what it does do is fill up that “statue” position with something of Stalin so you cannot image something else being there.
So, if you’re someone who wants to see a different world, staying on this outrage wheel, obsessing over the people that you don’t want in that position, actually has that effect on you, it prevents you from sort of imagining and planning what you would actually want the world to look like, because you’re spending too much time obsessing over the way that it looks now. Just one of the many ways that I would advise you to protect your mental health in the world and help you build the world that you want to see.
