okay i know the indians and the bollywood aficionados get it when i say the coolest thing zohran mamdani has done to date is make his fucking walk-off music the dhoom soundtrack

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@lordbrosca
okay i know the indians and the bollywood aficionados get it when i say the coolest thing zohran mamdani has done to date is make his fucking walk-off music the dhoom soundtrack
>scenario: you have just run into solas. words are coming out of his mouth.
some tweets re: chucklefish for those of you who have been out of the loop like i have. many, many artists were exploited and never paid a single cent for their work on starbound.
while stardew is 100% a creation by concernedape and he split with chucklefish last year (which was the game’s former publisher), i think it’s important to know since CF is currently in charge of the switch and mobile ports (though sickhead and secret police are the actual porting teams behind it).
and some stardew specific info from twitter user @magiclueless: “For a case like Stardew Valley's, if you don't want money to go to Chucklefish, buy the PC/PS4/XB1/Vita versions or directly support ConcernedApe by buying his music on Bandcamp.”
"#i do have a theory that she barred carver from the guard because he would challenge her authority #hard to get away with being a corrupt leader when someone holds you accountable" *Rests chin in hands* Tell me more?
I’m not the best at articulating my thoughts but I’ll do my best!! Sorry if it gets a bit long!
In short, I believe Aveline just used the fact that he’s around 19 - 20 years of age in Act 1 as a way of getting people to not take him seriously and calling him too immature, despite the fact the he was a soldier just like she was.
It’s true Carver’s not the epitome of maturity at this point, but he’s not a child nor is he any less qualified for a position in the Guard than Aveline. And in a city where no one knows them, it would be easy for Aveline to go behind his back to the guard and convince them he’s unfit for the role.
It’s no secret that Carver, despite being very vocal on his opinions, was very much a respected soldier while at Ostagar. From World of Thedas Volume 2:
He voices what on his mind even if it wouldn’t earn him any favour, yet he was well respected and mostly talked about at a high regard.
And Aveline was at Ostagar. Though he didn’t recognise her, she recognised and knew about him - she says as much in the Prologue. She would’ve known that he was respected among his fellow soldiers. And she even admits in the Prologue that he’s a skilled soldier (though Carver shoots down the praise but I feel like that’s impostor syndrome coming into play here).
By Act 1, she’s had a year to get to know him better. He’s a skilled warrior and is able to earn the respect of his fellow soldiers while also being vocal about things he disagrees with, and thus he’s a threat.
Their dialogue with each other during Act 1 is very telling. He sees right through her, and she tries to deflect by seeing herself as above him (and this sort of attitude also extends to the other companions, too).
He makes jabs at her relating to the Fereldan refugees. He knows she only cares about herself and her social standing.
She acts like his situation is a result of a flaw of personality instead of her own doing to frame him as a brat and too immature for real work. Carver makes a point to say that she knows that this is the only chance they have, especially as she holds a great deal of blame for that.
Another example of Carver calling Aveline out on her bullshit acting like she’s somehow a better soldier than he is, despite the fact that Carver has been stated to have been on par, if not more skilled, than the trained officers at Ostagar and was able to single-handedly carve a dent in the darkspawn hoard.
(Note: as it’s not easy to tell in text, the “Yes ma’am” was said in a sarcastic tone.)
Aveline time and again actively belittles Carver and tries to get rid of him. If she can get people of her choosing to not take him seriously as a soldier and act like he’s out of control and unworthy of honest work, then he won’t be in the picture to hold her accountable for whatever she does in the Guard.
Also, a good point to make in relation to your gifset of the conversation:
Aveline: There is a lot of pressure to make the city guard more like the Templars. Cage potential troublemakers just in case. Can’t imagine you’d like that.
Hawke: You’d be a fool to try it. People would revolt.
Aveline: Criminals would revolt.
Hawke: They aren’t people? How big would your gallows be?
The people who are the most vulnerable to get into criminal activities for survival are refugees - just like Hawke and Carver when they arrived in Kirkwall. The very people she sees as would-be criminals are also the people she fails to protect.
She coddles her guardsmen and allows them to pick the easiest areas to protect, leaving the places that need the most help to be vulnerable. But hey, the more refugees to become criminals, the more people lock up, right?
And Carver saw this from the start. Granted, had he’d known that Aveline would rather avenge a rapist guardsman instead of holding him accountable, or how her incompetence and disregard to Emeric’s investigation was a factor in the gruesome murder of his mother, I’m sure he’d call her out for it. And if he were a guardsman, I personally believe he would take matters into his own hands.
But, of course, at this point, Carver’s not around to do so because he’s either a Warden or a Templar.
Now, I’m not going to claim it’s any more than a theory that Aveline actively tried to silence, belittle and get rid of Carver so that the most likely person (aside from Hawke if in rivalry) wouldn’t be able to be able to question her authority and hold her accountable, but to me it seems like she actively tried to sabotage him.
I’m not sure if I were successful in getting my thoughts across, but I hope any of this makes sense!!
(eyes emoji)
- By the Ancestors, what’s gotten into you, my boy? - Enchantment? - That’s more like it.
WHAT THE FUCK EVEN IS SANDAL????? WHY DID EVIDENCE OF HIM SHOW UP IN TRESPASSER AND WHY DOES HE PREDICT SOLAS SUCCEEDING???? WHAT IS HE? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING???
Enchantment?
10 facts about and around sandal that ought to make you fucking quiver before him:
two kinds of people enchant in da: dwarves and tranquil mages. dwarves enhance weapons and stuff while tranquil mages give them magical properties, eg a permanently sharp blade vs a burning sword. dwarves cannot do magic. which brings us to item #2
sandal froze an entire darkspawn ogre. now, had this been with a frost rune it would have been extremely suspicious to begin with because dwarves don’t do those kinds of runes, yeah? except this fucker willingly admits that he didn’t do it by enchanting something. so how?! how did he do it?!
it’s like cluedo- sandal in the deeproads with ????
HE HAS BURNED HOUSES DOWN WITH ENCHANTMENTS. DWARVES ENHANCE WEAPONS AND ARMOR, THEY DO NOT USE MAGIC
sandal was found in the deeproads, so we assume he was put there by his castless biological mother. what we actually know is that sandal came from the deeproads. that leaves A LOT of possible origins. titans, old gods, born to wardens who heard the calling, who knows.
some carta dwarves talk about him looking like the bastard son of one of the aeducans that went missing, supposedly the mother was an elf or a human. doesn’t explain why he was in the deeproads though
they talk about him being lyrium addled but lyrium is the blood of titans. dwarves aren’t even supposed to be affected by regular lyrium so why would he be if he was a regular dwarf? supports the aeducan theory.
he talks about dreaming about what’s most likely flemeth. which should also scare you bc the only other times dreams are brought up like that in DA are 1. darkspawn dreams had by wardens 2. freaky fade fuckery 3. that one time mythal’s hosts grandson mentioned the old god soul he carried gave him dreams
^the rant pictured above
THE FACT THAT YOU CAN FIND HIS DIARY IN THE SHATTERED LIBRARY. BY A DEAD QUNARI. WHAT THE FUCK, SANDAL
One thing I can’t stand in Inquisition is that you don’t get a Dalish elf supporter. Like You alone, if you play as a Dalish elf, are the only person there to defend the Dalish and that ... really... irks me?!?!? Like in Origins, you have Zevran who has a Dalish mother , who misses and respects the culture he was never allowed to partake in, who immediately puts on the Dalish gloves you give him and even pleads on behalf of the Dalish if you choose to slaughter them using his own Dalish heritage to Appel to you. In DA2 you have Merrill, an actual representative of the Dalish who is unapologetically proud of her Dalish roots.
But in Inquisition you have absolutely no one. And what makes it worst is that the two biggest detractors against the Dalish are THE TWO ELVES IN YOUR PARTY. So like if you don’t play a Dalish inquisitior, your elf perspective on the Dalish is ‘fuck em’ and if you do play a Dalish Inquisitior you get to see the only other elves in your inner circle badmouth your culture.
Like that’s so fucked up. You are stuck as an unwilling symbol, surrounded by humans and an establishment that actively condemns your entire way of life and you have no support.
You have people telling you,
‘Can’t you make room for the Maker’
‘You never see a Dalish elf wanting to help people’
‘Ha ha ha your Gods are lies and you’re stupid’
‘You’re not my people’
And you have no one on your side.No one who understands.
But DAI is soooo pro-Dalish.
And of course let’s not forget that we spend a fair bit of time wandering through lands with great meaning to the Dalish (Emerald Graves, Exalted Plains) and ... Ghilan’nain’s Grove, for example, is this awful swamp full of unpleasant gases and wyverns. Exalted Plains is a largely burned-out ruin. Emerald Graves is largely forgotten. And Halamshiral is a palace full of assholes playing shitty political games and eating food that tastes of despair. And no one ever expresses sympathy for a Lavellan (particularly a mage!Lavellan, who would have learned the meanings of these places at least in part) when s/he has to tromp through all that.
if bioware gave a shit about realism the game would immediately end if you gave fenris back to denarius because all the companions collectively kill you.
Coding Does Not Inherently Equate to Representation
So I’m mostly going to be talking about Dragon Age’s elves and Indigenous coding, because that’s my lane to drive in, but that is just a single example of what my point is: The unfortunate truth is that media–namely media almost solely built by white men–can be sleazy as hell in taking things from minorities without giving back in return.
The elves in Dragon Age are canonically inspired by Indigenous, Jewish and Roma peoples. This is something that has been stated by the developers, namely Gaider, on multiple occasions. But the elves of Dragon Age are not real representation. I, a native person, have taken them and made them into that myself, because there is so so so little Indigenous rep in the fantasy genre, but any remaining imaginative notions that BioWare intended that, or even gives a single shit about me, left after the events of Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Trespasser DLC.
For those of you who don’t know, “coding” ranges from subliminal to obvious ways readers are tipped off things about a character, commonly used in reference to background and ethnicity. This can be used for good, and this can be used for bad. And sometimes it can be used simply because creators think it will give their story a cool/uncanny/unique/etc vibe, without any thought or consideration for what they’re actually taking and who they are taking from for their coding.
If I were to sit down and actually make an expansive list of all the bits and pieces of Indigenous coding put into the Dragon Age elves, it would make for a long post. BioWare quite literally picks and chooses things I can only assume based on how cool they thing it would be, because if any actual consideration was put into it, you would have to assume someone would say for example, “does it really make sense to place this ripoff tiki torch and ripoff inukshuk next to each other, though?” Of course, I resolve things in my mind with the assertion that Dalish elves are not in fact a single culture but differ from clan to clan, and ignore things like the above–something that is not even a stretch, considering we are told about how they differ in other ways. But that doesn’t erase the fact that BioWare chose to pull things from this culture and that culture, as if we’re the monolith we’re so often ignorantly believed to be, without any thought or care in the world beyond wanting to give their fantasy race an “ethnic flavour.”
To call Dragon Age elves proper native representation would be like calling Jared Leto wearing a headdress because he thinks it looks cool representation, because what BioWare is doing is walking a very, very fine line between coding and straight-up appropriation. Could they turn this around? Could they make it better? Yes, I think they still could. They could start by having some explicitly native-equivalent protagonists. They could stop using the elven religion to prop up the Chantry, going as far as tearing it apart while promising to never do the same to Andrastianism. They could stop beating us to death with victim-blaming and the most whitest takes on colonialism. They could retcon the bullshit about multiracial elves not existing. But I don’t think they will.
The bottom line is this: Dragon Age elves may be coded Indigenous, but it’s not intended for Indigenous audiences. (Nor are the elves even the only example of BioWare doing this.) It’s for white audiences to play pretend in before going back to calling us greedy for wanting things like clean water and to stop being murdered without repercussions.
…But that’s just all the more reason my bitter and starved for any potential rep ass is taking them.
So, an ending tip for all the aspiring content creators out there: If you want to use coding, a) do your proper research to be respectful, and b) do it with consciously good intentions.
@nerdlingwrites I hope it’s okay to highlight your tags because yeah I couldn’t agree more, and also because for sure it’s not just the mentioned people above who can easily relate to the elves but any peoples who have had to go through the things they’ve gone through, and the resilience
i had planned to do more of these but i lost the ambition, so here’s what i had finished
There are very few things one can say in fandom that seems to give people more permission to pounce upon you like a league of hissing snakes than saying “I unironically love Anora Mac Tir.”
And I do. She’s amazing. She’s ruthless and brilliant and completely unashamed to say so. I love her.
Love her as a character, hate her as a person
I said this kind of thing once, too, when I was younger and didn’t realize what it was like to be a woman in a position of authority. It’s hard to do your job when people don’t take you seriously, so you adapt. Maybe that makes you not very likable, but it also makes you good at what you do.
I never get upset when people don’t like her as a character or as a person — there are some very valid reasons for that after all. What my post is about, and what this addition to it proves, is that posting about loving her is just as good as soliciting unwanted criticism.
We love and respect Anora Mac Tir in this house!
Like, what exactly makes her unlikable?
She’s cold. Okay, she’s the fucking QUEEN, and no one has taken her seriously. She was born for this and everyone knew it. And, come on! Cailan has been a man-child for years, and even though she loved him, she knew he’s not exactly great at being king. She’s good at what she does and knows it. If she’s had to throw likability under the bus to earn respect, however grudging it may be, that’s what women do in the real world. It’s true to life.
She sells out the Warden? Bullshit! She tells the Warden exactly what she’s doing - trying to escape safely without being recognized. The Warden fucks up the plan! Of *course* she salvages the situation by implicating the Warden in a kidnapping plot. She doesnt have a ton of tools or leverage beyond the fact that her father wants to keep her alive and accessible, even if it means Howe gets to wrongfully imprison her to accomplish it. She tells the Warden to be sneaky and not to betray her confidence, and if they do she uses the one card up her sleeve! She’s resourceful, not a snake!
She gets Alistair killed/exiled! Okay, yeah, that’s fucked. But it’s not her fault. The system is broken, and the Landsmeet recognizes the right to rule in weird ways. I still argue this isn’t her *fault* but is more a consequence of how Ferelden operates. Ali makes us all sad, fam, but that’s what the game wants.
Anora is a woman distrusted by her own court, only grudgingly respected, and is shown to be caught between all sorts of rocks and hard places. Her power and right to rule is threatened by a child coming out of the woodworks, propped up by an ambitious arl. (Of anyone, I don’t trust Eamon!) Alistair isn’t really interested in ruling, and everyone knows it - that’s why he needs convincing on all sides! Anora loves her people and is a good Queen. She knows what she’s doing. So yeah, maybe she’s cold and bitter. But she’s also been reminded that her position is tenuous at best. She has to be unflappable. Why give anyone any sort of power over her by admitting insecurity or being afraid?
I’m not sure how she could have done much better with what she had, given the writing and the plot.
There has to be a special kind of cognitive dissonance at play here, when you add unsolicited criticism/opinion of Anora to a post pointing out how people add always their unsolicited criticism/opinion of Anora to character positive posts of her.
DA4 is gonna be all about Tevinter. Right? And I’m not saying Jeff Goldblum should voice the Black Divine but I’m not NOT saying that.
Black Divine Goldblum, atop his throne: So, if I’m hearing you correctly, uh…uh, this guy, right, this guy is a wolf? A *dread* wolf?! Well, that’s…that’s just fantastic. I love the name.
Well there’s a thing I didn’t know I needed and now can’t live without
da2 is what happens when you get a bunch of dnd characters and then don’t really give them a campaign you just toss them into a city to live there and have Shenanigans.
“I’m playing a elven blood mage.” “yeah, okay, what’s she doing in a human city?” “research.”
“I’m playing a dwarven bard.” “….and?” “just a dwarven bard.” “is he, like, a spy, a wandering adventure, what? why’s he away from the mountain?” “fuck if i know.”
“My character is a cleric to the god of justice who’s become disillusioned with the established orders of priests and wants to destroy them and start again. His name is Anders.” “Is he from the anderfels?” “No, of course not. He’s Ferelden.”
“My character is an elf. His name is Fenris.” “Okay… is he a mage? Does he like… transform into a wolf?” “No, he’s a warrior! He USED to be a slave to a mage, and as a result hates all magic.” “Fine. Roll for strength.” “He can use magic to rip people’s hearts out.” “What.” “His owner put magic ore in his veins and now he can use a magic punch.” “…” “…” “Why would he-” “Also he’s in love with a mage.”
“Is hawke hot?”
“Oh, Hawke is super hot.”
[rolls a charisma saving throw against the hot mage and fails] “SHIT”
Meanwhile Aveline’s just over here gritting her teeth because she spent three hours on her backstory carefully crafted to intertwine with the recent game lore (Ostagar) and her tragic dead husband (Wesley) and nobody else even seems interested
“My character is a dual-wielding rogue and also a sexy pirate.” “Okay, that’s just fine. Well, the party is going into the Qunari compound and-” “Oh, she’s not going in there.” “Why not?” “She has… something else to do.” “Like what.” “something, bye.”
if you’ve been around long enough you might have seen at some point that i, too, in my younger years was a cullen stan so this is @ all current cullenites: let’s all admit that the only reason we romanced cullen in the first place is because bioware wrote him as a blushy little innocent clean cut man who has a dominant side in the bedroom (talkin about that desk scene) and it’s theoretically Hot.
and then you make a mage inquisitor because it’s like, some weird forbidden thing that he’s a TEMPLAR and she’s a MAGE and if she’s a Lavellan? even better. my old Lavellan was a necromancer on TOP of all of that, because why not? why not put together someone who, as all cullen stans claim, has PTSD around mages with the one person who could trigger his PTSD in the most innocent ways possible? their very existence is a trigger to this man’s PTSD! (DON’T get me started on people who use their circle mages from DAO as the inquisitor because “isn’t it cute? it’s his first love meeting him again!” no!! it’s not!!! it’s heavily implied that he would have r*ped her! and if you think a mage inquisitor is a trigger, IMAGINE that circle mage as inquisitor. Yikes!)
and the thing is, all of THAT aside (if you can even PUT that aside), cullen believes in the chantry and in the templar order, to the point that he’s willing to CONSTANTLY defend the templars and pushes their help, even to a ROMANCED MAGE inquisitor.
my best friend (and a solasmancer) tried to talk about cullen because she had played all the way through DA2 at that point and i hadn’t, and i’m pretty sure we actually had an argument about it once on twitter because i was one of these assholes comparing cullen to solas. and it wasn’t until i played DA2 and then read some really nuanced posts on here about it, that i realized I was the shitbird who, because i’d only played the first game, half of the second (before you really get Into the drama), and the last, wasn’t understanding that cullen was a terrible fucking character. like full stop an AWFUL character. for several reasons.
if you’re still reading this post and you’re a cullen fan, i want you to know this: bioware did that on PURPOSE to make this man who wants to eradicate minorities palatable because bioware is chockablock of other white men. they offered you up mr Knight In Shining Armour that they hand tailored for newer fans of the series (it’s been packaged as a game you don’t have to have played the series to understand)/fans who loved “noodle haired innocent chantry boi” cullen (guarantee there’s a portion of his fans who haven’t even PLAYED origins OR DA2) and rushed the production of his romance to the point where they didn’t even make him bi and they race-gated him, all because they knew it would be a good marketing strategy to have a blonde white boy as the romanceable character they push at you the most.
it’s ok to admit you’re not immune to propaganda, and i’m not saying that you have to shout “fuck cullen” from the rooftops of skyhold, but at the very least listen to what people are telling you, especially if they’ve played the other games and you haven’t.
also, try out a different LI. most of them hit different than cullen and that’s bc they’re really good fleshed out characters.
idk how some of y’all are genuinely like “you should hate blackwall instead of cullen!!” when they’re not even close to comparable
blackwall:
accepted a mission where the details were left intentionally vague, which led to the slaughter of an innocent civilian and his family
abandoned his men, who were then taken into custody and sentenced to death
assumed the identity of warden blackwall to hide from his crime
heard about the execution of mornay, one of his men, in val royeux and left the inquisition to confess and take mornay’s place in the execution
was jailed for his crimes (where he will be executed)
if pardoned by the inquisition, he spends his time between the base game and trespasser seeking out his old team and helping them rebuild their lives
also if pardoned by the inquisition, post-trespasser he “traveled across Thedas to give hope to the condemned and the forgotten”
cullen:
begged the warden twice to eradicate all the mages of kinloch hold
was kicked out of kinloch hold after the broken circle quest because greagoir considered him a danger to the mages
“mages are not people like you and me”
advocated for the tranquil solution
was complicit in all of meredith’s actions (abusing/killing mages and/or making them tranquil for “trivial” things)
let meredith run rampant when he had the power to stop her at any time
only swapped sides at the very end when he realized meredith was possessed by the idol and that hawke was going to beat her (and himself by association if he didn’t ally with them)
argues with the inquisitor at least twice for helping the redcliffe mages
has one throwaway line vaguely mentioning his past of “”distrusting”” mages and is never shown to be doing anything to atone for it
he literally calls for an avvar mage (if recruited) to be locked in a room with a templar
he calls himself an “ex-templar” but still wears their sigil?? like c’mon.
and honestly i know there’s stuff i left out but the point is that cullen is not like blackwall. it’s laughable to compare someone with an actual, in-game redemption arc to someone who only got off with a slap on the wrist because fandom/bioware made him their golden boy
i luv being cooler and better than people who have wronged me