#because it makes for some fascinating implications

[ladykyrin]

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025)

↳ Tonatiuh as Molina; Diego Luna as Valentín Arregui

"A kiss can destroy a philosophy." —Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 4: 1927–1931.

[bricky-brikson]

Every now and then I think about how Egyptian mythology is literally inherently cyclical (like the sun (Ra) being threatened with destruction every night but every morning arising victorious), due to the cycles of the Nile that supported the whole civilization. And how Hindu mythology constantly has its figures die and return in new forms, the soul living on even as the physical body dies, essentially immortal and yet still able to be killed.

And I look at Golden Cheese and Burning Spice.

And I curse the writers for fumbling such an interesting thematic parallel.

[daily-ukyo-screenshots]

Bike Teams

[spark-circuit]

so one of the remaining bugs for the Sunlit Trail regions (and perhaps anything using the M4rbelous Entity Pack) is - the Iterators are all just gone. the lights are off and nobody's home. they all left. they all found the Solution. the Triple Affirmative is real. praise be to the Void Sea i guess??????????

[androidtrashfire]

Just unpacking some DATV lore implications, like a year and a half late:

So we know that Solas did something to disconnect the titans from their dreams, and their dreams became the blight. This is... weird. Like I've always thought that was sort of a weird, existential concept that didn't quite make sense to me, but I just accepted what I could and rolled with it.

But if you go back and actually watch the mural scene play out, Solas originally says that he is going to sunder the titans spirits from them, and then those disembodied dreams will become the blight. He uses that exact language, in that exact order.

Basically, Solas seems to be implying here that in the Dragon Age universe, dreams and spirits are the same thing.

This is... big, if true.

Harding goes on to say in the post-scene discussion that the titans became "mindless" after this.

There's a lot to unpack in all of this, but there's a couple of things:

Again, dreams and spirits being the same thing. Not separate experiences or concepts or entities, but the same.

Mindlessness being associated with having one's spirit/dream disconnected from them. Which, that seems to mean...

So the implications of this are pretty fascinating, I think, when applied to present-day Thedas. This would imply that for mages made tranquil... when they cut off their ability to dream, they're also cutting off their connection to their spirit. Which may not be a sort of existential concept like you and I think of irl, but a... very literal spirit that resides somewhere in the Fade???

Does this mean that potentially... all the spirits in the Fade, connected or disconnected, are just the literal spirits of corporeal people wandering around in Thedas???????

It's hard to picture exactly how that could be, and yet... now the evidence is kind of compelling.

There's also a real question of, if this is the case - and this is what happened to the dwarves - how they are handling it so well having never been connected to spirits at all.

Which makes sense, because of how curious and even weirded out Solas is by dwarves. He's not just feeling guilty, he's also like... how the fuck are you guys even functional??? Do you feel your inherent brokenness??? Why don't you feel your inherent brokenness????

Then I guess the other question is, do Seekers dream? Since they've accidentally-on-purpose tranquiled themselves. I don't remember if their dreams actually even come up at all. If they are still able to dream, that would put this theory, that spirits and dreams are the same thing, to rest as wrong. Or at least there's something more complicated going on. But if they don't dream, and they're Tranquil, what is it about certain people (or certain methods) of tranquility that make some people okay and some people not. Is it agency? Is it having enough time to warm up to the new state of being, versus having it thrust upon you all at once?

Again, though, if the dreams = spirits thing is correct, then that would still beg the question of what spirits really are, and what they were in the time before the Veil fell. Even in the time before elves became elves.

Since we now know humans predated elves... could spirits be the literal spirits of humans, originally? At least the very first spirits? If spirits linger after an individual is dead, could that be the definitive answer about what happens after death for corporeal beings in Dragon Age? They die, but their spirits live on in the Fade? If that's true, does that make it make sense why so many spirits want to possess people and/or create their own new corporeal bodies... they are seeking the body they used to have?

If this is all true, do the spirits themselves have any knowledge of this? Do the elves who were once spirits, like Solas or Mythal, know?

Or is it even more specific, when it comes to demons. We know demons are spirits whose purposes have been warped, at least according to Solas. Could at least some of the demons have been the spirits of people who have been violently cut off from the Fade?

[muninnhuginn]

yasaka (miss psychological warfare) being entirely bamboozled by mitsumi working at face value is pretty amusing ngl

[ladytereir]

The class darlings

[sound-the-horn]

I cannot recommend bringing your heritage and culture into how you view media enough.

It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.

As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.

I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.

So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.

The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.

I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.

The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.

You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.

When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".

"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?

However, when I repeated my viewing to a college class, they were fascinated. The implications of what I had seen and felt made the film all the more terrifying and solemn. It encouraged a lot of people to try to ask themselves what media meant from a cultural perspective, where they hadn't done that before.