Discover Top Posts Tagged with #andrewknightley

Sera pinup for @andrewknightley <3

She was such a joy to draw, love her design!!

#dragon age #dragon age inquisition #sera #sera dragon age #the cutie from my gfs video games #fanart #myart #stakeart #andrewknightley

@andrewknightley replied to your post “WAIT FOR REAL THAT'S BELLARA'S COMMITMENT...”:

I have not seeing it how it is gidkdkdk

B A D

it is legitimately six lines long, and only one of those lines are from rook, and in terms of content it is functionally identical to the earlier softlock scene except again it's way shorter with way less substance & characterization. bellara (again) expresses anxiety about rook's commitment to her, but instead of that doubt being meaningfully about her (in the way that, for example, the harding romance introduces a new interesting element of the character with the lyrium poisoning arousal stuff) she ties it back to what's going on with cyrian. she asks if rook is sure they want to be with her, they affirm that they do, and the scene ends.

and i realize that this isnt the biggest problem because lucanis' commitment scene doesn't include a kiss and it at least reveals something interesting about the character & the budding relationship (that lucanis cares enough about rook to remember their favorite drink & make them a desert to complement it), but THEY DON'T EVEN KISS.

some of the follow-up scenes flesh out a bit more of bellara's interiority in the romance--i like the detail about her crushing on rook from the very beginning & her anxieties about other people wanting her to change but not wanting to wait around & help her figure out who she is feel extremely real--but... ultimately everything just seems to circle back around to bellara being really glad that rook is vaguely Here.

which is a shame because there's a lot more interesting room that's sketched out in the softlock scene! bellara's anxieties about her first/second real relationship, her desire for methodicalness/understanding/predictability vs rook's suggestion that they play it by ear/do what feels right/improvise, bellara even gives some lovely date ideas! why didn't i get to dance with her epler!!!!!!!!!!

i think neve's romance is a really good comparison point, because where her romance is similarly almost monotonously built around the one point that Rook Is Here For Her, that point is interwoven throughout the entire rest of her character & arc in such a way that the romance feels thematically rich and coherent. and there's more dimensionality in the fact that neve both does and doesn't want them there-- that it scares her to desire their proximity as much as she's come to rely on it because she's so, so, so certain that one day, they'll be gone.

with bellara... there's just no There there. if we had gotten to see more about how her ADHD/anxiety/grief had impacted her past relationships (as we see in the like One scene where she interacts with other veil jumpers at the very beginning of her arc, or as she alludes to but never really elaborates on with irelin), we would have a better understanding of why rook is Different and meaningful to her (in the same way that, say, cyrian was different), and it would be a really sweet romance that isn't about fixing a neurodivergent person but loving them as they grow & change (hell, i would've loved to see something like relating to/identifying with taash's autism for bellara too). but to the extent that that's in the game, it's sooooooo shallow.

as much as any vg romance feels tacked on to the story (with the soft & hardlock scenes not even getting their own separate cutscenes but being additions to existing ones you get no matter what), bellara's feels even more so, and it's really frustrating because the potential is clearly there!!!!

#andrewknightley #sorry if this is incoherent & also way too long i just woke up wfpiajdf #veilguard critical #the clarity of bellara's voice & character concept vs the way she often feels like an afterthought in her own arc #is a writing phenomenon that needs to be studied. not by me though i'll get mad about it

i wanna hear your thoughts about how dai fumbled the themes of religion 👀

okay i feel like i said that really definitively when actually i haven't played dai for a year so my thoughts are scattered and it's hard to point to specific lines 😭 but essentially it's the beginning of where the series stopped being grounded which made its politics pretty much dissipate imo. i have endless hate for settings that make gods real characters that we can interact with, and the way the game portrays dalish religion/gods is ofc extremely iffy given the way they borrowed from real irl religions

but for andrastrianism specifically i think it completely moves away from the rest of the series' criticisms of religion - in any game the absence of criticism would be kind of annoying as christianity's #1 hater, but when the previous games portrayed the chantry as a colonialist institution that enables every kind of abuse (with da2 frequently emphasising sexual abuse)? it feels extremely nasty. imo it comes mostly from the game's refusal to let the player feel like a bad person, eg; neutering the mage/templar conflict so the abuses of mages aren't bad enough to make a new player who chose to side with the templars will feel guilty etc. Basically most of my criticisms of dav apply but because dai keeps attempting to engage with religion it's both better AND worse

#andrewknightley #ask #just wait until i start my dai replay i'll be writing essays.....#see i have a lot to say on this but it's hard to condense into a single post yk?

Spinning this off into it's own post but context here.

I don't currently have posts about it from me or ones saved (not really surprising unfortunately... </3), but the thought mainly comes from her Hawke-dependent lines to Tallis. The “I see what they say about you is true.” one, for m!Hawke it's “Oh it most definitely is." and for f!Hawke it's "She likes rogues. Rivaini rogues, especially." Yes it's just a single line change but to me it's very telling that one it's an actual variant, and two what it means. For f!Hawke it implies she's more insecure, prompting a jealous reaction. And I do really love this as a Hawkebela shipper don't get me wrong, and for Isabela to be jealous for once? Oughhhh. It makes me ILL.

(Both genders get the ending line "Well. There's a lot of Hawke to go around. You just have to ask me nicely." too to note.)

As a Watsoian view, I also enjoy a lot it as a character beat, and it gives some much needed variety to the romances that Leliana and Zevran had. But if you look at it with a Doylist view, and kind of overall the romance, it's very much (to me and my read on it) just, the man is easier to keep because of sex, not a woman. There's no reason for her to be jealous because she can keep m!Hawke with sex, or m!Hawke having sex with some other woman wouldn't be an issue, or Isabela wouldn't have an issue, if it was another woman f!Hawke was sleeping with.

I would love if this was some intentional trait of Isabela, like yes she does feel more insecure with a woman because of her own issues with intimacy and how she views herself/how others view her. She knows how to be with a man but a woman is something she's not as used to, and doesn't want to lose that, but doesn't know how to keep her.

But I don't think it's this deep lol. I do think it's a very compelling bit to work into Hawkebela thru fanon (I sure do), but I think it's fully just "haha men only want sex" and thus circles back to the whole "male audience focused" elements plaguing all sapphic romances. :")