Hi @mustardpeach - Tumblr Blog

Whoever wrote this, slayed so hard with all these statements, truer words have never been spoken

look, it's easy, okay? High Fantasy has An Hero whose Destiny is Sword, and Low Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Job is Sword.

littlepinkbeast

expanding it to a full matrix: Sword And Sorcery has An Hero whose Job is Sword, and YA Fantasy has Some Schmoe whose Destiny is Sword.

the-real-seebs

wow, this is an exceptionally effective taxonomy.

noctuamagna

victusinveritas

There's more:

brosef-von-dudehomie

Why are the dial hands underneath the metal pin?

"I'm a security guard and I am tasked with doing rounds of mechanical rooms. I've been asked to look at these specific water pressure dials and examine whether the hands are stable and to inform the administration of the building if they are not. I noticed that two of the hands are underneath the metal pin on which they should rest if they were at zero. I'm very ignorant in plumbing, but is it supposed to be like this? Why is it like that? Doesn't it make the hand impossible to rise above 0 since it's blocked by that pin?"

hawkeyedflame

brazenautomaton

dear guys who make gatorade frost:

the purpose of having a name for the flavor of your product is to tell me what flavor your product is

apparently, nobody ever told you this, and so you think the purpose of naming flavors is to sound like Death Knight talents

I don’t know what Icy Charge tastes like but I’m pretty sure it’s going to move me into melee with my target and slow their movement speed by 75% for 3 seconds

shibepetter

Zevran nation how we doing

perilegs

I'm thinking about the Dalish conversation with Zevran and how he tells of the circumstance of his birth in the most matter of fact way and calls it the oldest tale in the book. If the Warden says it was horrible, Zevran plays it off with a nonchalant "Is it?" and says it's normal, especially for the boys he grew up with. But! He approves of you acknowledging that his past has been horrible to him. He keeps diminishing his own problems and trauma, and it's interesting because there are so many little aspects of him that show themselves in that tiny bit of dialogue.

Zevran, as a crow, is trained in the art of seduction and it has been one of the reasons he's still alive to this day. He knows it's typically unsexy to lament on how terribly your past has been affecting you. If you tell Zevran you're sorry for him, he immediately turns the conversation into complimenting the Warden.

It can be read as a test of character if one so chooses. Obviously Zevran isn't going to show a weak point to a person he just met, but, he is telling about himself, on a deeper level, and it's up to the Warden on how they react. Also, It's a good way to scope intentions and such. Zevran is still sharing information on himself, but on his terms. He chooses to tell the Warden about his childhood when all they asked was a question about the Dalish. And he sets a neutral tone to it.

Zevran's childhood is not a pleasant subject and he distances himself from it. It's far easier for him to talk about it that way, and it doesn't force him to process what he experienced and how it was horrible.

But he does enjoy someone, an outsider, reaffirming that what he went through was horrible, and it wasn't okay just because others have gone through the same and worse. Was there a moment in his past, where he even mildly suggested his childhood might have been less than ideal, and gotten back the reaction that it's no different from his peers? Or that he is lucky to have been bought by the crows?

"My first victim, as it were." Is that what the crows said to him? How they reassured Zevran time and time again how he was meant to be an assassin, it has been so since his birth.

theheartmold

This might be a controversial post but I’m going to say it anyways.

One thing that absolutely turns me off from reading Dragon Age fanfiction where Zevran is the romance is the way that people write Zevran. I think that a lot of people see him flirting with the Warden right off the bat and fail to recognize that, no, actually, he isn’t falling in love with them at first sight. It’s a defense mechanism and a hope that you’ll find him endearing enough to keep him alive.

Zevran is rarely disapproving of the Warden, but that doesn’t mean he’s easy to get to know. He’s not easy at all, in fact. Once the Warden spends a considerable amount of time talking to and discovering more about Zevran’s past, a lot of the behaviors aren’t as simple as they appear on the surface. He talks about being sold to the Crows and the things he was expected to do in service to them, and suddenly his “flirtatious” attitude very quickly appears more like a hypersexual trauma response that he used in an attempt to convince the Warden that he was worthy of not killing. Good enough at something to keep him around.

It’s sad, really! I struggle to enjoy a lot of peoples’ interpretations of Zevran as this flirtatious, sexual fantasy where he’s actually one of the healthiest and respectful (if not the MOST) romances in the game. Zevran is understanding, nonjudgmental, and respects the boundaries of the Warden in a way one doesn’t often see represented. Just my thoughts.

I’ll also add that there is a level of fetishization that comes with his character being racialized (as he is not white!) but that would be better be discussed by someone with more expertise than I. It just didn’t deserve to go without mention or in the tags.

theheartmold

(via @apostate-chic)

This is exactly what I was getting at… it’s all part of a survivalist transaction so that you don’t kill him. (Or maybe you’ll get annoyed enough and you will!)

Non-sexual intimacy with Zevran is what I live for (and I know that a lot of my asexual friends or sex-repulsed friends were grateful for the opportunity of a romance where that wasn’t necessary)! I just think that the way a lot of people characterize him in their heads or write him in their headcanons, fanfic, depict him in art etc. is indicative of a broader issue.

theheartmold

#yes yes all of this#and i'm telling y'all right now that race plays a big part in this#I have come across various fics and depictions of him that whittle him down into 'oh look at this sex-crazed brown man'#and people find it endearing#the way some people perceive him would be SO different if he was white coded#would be nice if people stopped flattening his character and being racist#but you know#zevran#he deserves better (via @elvhendreamer) YOU. You get it. You have broken down my issues with Zevran's depiction into some delightful little sentences. It is a phenomenon that seems to plague Zevran depictions everywhere where people buy into the racialized sex-fiend (and lets not yet get into the dynamics of how that might come across in a queer relationship, too).

And people find it endearing! And they don't read into the context at all! Even if they're diehard Zev fans who romance him every single time 10/10 stars baby boy. Like... tell me you don't critically think about your fave without telling me that you don't critically think about your fave.

(Because lets be real if he was white-coded, the girlies would be devouring every little bit of dialogue to uncover the secrets of his very traumatic arc. Instead of like... taking him at face value and aggressively sexualizing him).

buckykingofmemes

i’d follow him to hell and back but i wish he’d just stop going there

fatsoupy

i found out yesterday while my grandpa was helping me move that he consistently carries four knives on him at all times. it’s as natural as carrying around his phone and wallet for him. he says if anyone ever attacks him and takes his first knife, they’re in for a surprise. if they take his second knife? another surprise. his third knife? buddy, you’re in for a treat: another knife

the-tree-line

the problem with having a decade old tumblr blog is that there are posts on it from a decade ago

the-tree-line

i’ve become a completely different person like 5 separate times since making those posts and there are STILL people finding them somehow

wingedtwilight

another thing about morrowind i love that is basically immediately removed from the series afterwards is that morrowind like. puts some actual thought into its animal life. like i’ve said, tes and a lot of other fantasy has really weird ideas about nature, and morrowind isn’t exempt from the gameplay flaw of literally every single animal in the game being on a single-minded mission to kill you for no goddamn reason.

but morrowind also like, does show you that people do have other relationships with the native fauna. it’s not all saint jiub the ecological terrorist out there. the kwama egg miners live in harmony with their kwama and we know exactly how the egg miners get around the kwama’s instinct to defend the nest. there’s a man in the game who is on an expedition to record kagouti mating behaviors. we know exactly how silt striders work as transport and how the dunmer live with them. there’s a distinction between wild and domestic strains of guar. the animals feel more like part of a landscape and a society and culture than they do later in the series and i miss that.

l0stvegas

I wasn’t crazy about this piece so I wasn’t intending on publicly posting it again, but it keeps getting stolen every five minutes so I figured I’d put it here so people at least know who to attribute the original thing to lmao

[Digital illustration, Procreate App, 2020]

randomslayerphoenix

ITS NOT A PHOTO????????

bauliya

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

darkshrimpemotions

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.