would love to hear more of your thoughts on briala (and felassan)..... 🙏 she could be such a girlboss who's so problematic and unwilling to face her blind spots if only bioware weren't cowards with a blatantly black and white worldview
yeah!!!! oh man this ended up a very long ted talk haha, sorry, i had been thinking about this a bit for my fic.
i guess this is one of those things where it's largely unintentional from bioware's part, and ofc they have their trend of framing anyone who wants societal change as either Evil Radicalized Monster or Insincere Fraud, bc they love bread markets. so having briala be the Only option when written this way would be pretty bad.
but i think there are so many examples of anti-colonial/other revolutionary figures who either allied with the ruling class to an extent, or were willing to sell out another minority group to get what they wanted? and briala could work so well that way.
like she grew up around celene, and sees celene as A Sympathetic Person Who's Doing Her Best in the way your average disaffected city elf trying to afford bread at the market doesn't. i think there are even a few lines in the book where they both half-jokingly go "oh, the common people think all we do is go to galas and drink wine!". she's a favoured and beloved servant who's important to celene personally, in a way that the several thousand halamshiral elves getting killed by celene's army weren't.
and briala then has more empathy for celene than she does the dalish? she's orlesian - but crucially, she didn't even grow up around city elves as a whole that much. her parents were palace servants who made sure she grew up there instead of in an alienage. felassan never took her to see any dalish directly (which in itself says a lot about both of them haha - he had no interest in having her meet this branch of her people, nor did she make an attempt to directly find them herself.) she has an almost paternalistic attitude about them in tme, like "oh, i helped them SO much when i was at court, (in ways that will not be detailed or explained) and they don't want to help us now? :/" girl? they don't know who you are? lmao???
so i think her opinion on the dalish would be shaped by first hearing this semi-romanticized idea of "ohhh they're so proud and noble and wise and live in harmony with nature... they never gave up the dream of the dales..." that the city elves have. as well as the "they're extremely deadly and aggressive and have to driven off land by force before they get any foothold, you can't negotiate with these heathens" idea that the nobility have. and neither of these are actually true! but when push comes to shove, briala empathizes with the dalish less than celene bc they're not people to her, they're a Concept. so she can kind of accept celene's "ouuuh i just did it for politics :( i still love you :(" stuff. but she does not have that same sympathy if the dalish have excuses like "well we don't actually know you city elves in halamshiral" and "there's 50 of us total"
and this is especially obvious with mihris. bc briala recognizes that it's bad that celene betrayed her own staff and had briala's parents killed - but doesn't register that's. also bad when her group killed off mihris' entire family? and then she's not willing to even let the dalish share the eluvians - after first dunking on them nonstop about how useless and history-obsessed they are, smoothly pivots to "and no, it's MY history now that i took it from you, and you can only access it if you're niceys to me 😌 bc i care about ALL elves, unlike you 😌". which is so extremely spiteful, haha. sure, weekes probably meant this unironically, bc they're racist, but i will choose to take it a bit in depth.
i think overall briala is far more Orlesian and a creature of The Game than she is a genuine elf liberationist. it's also SO fascinating that she basically showed up in halamshiral during the uprising, took control of its goals to shift to killing one guy directly rather than fully rising up in the streets, and then.... all the other rebellion leaders got killed except her. bc celene only wanted her alive and was fine with massacring the rest. and briala, in turn, is willing to let celene and gaspard live while knowing about the eluvians - despite the fact that this removes all advantage of surprise, haha. so she is kind of controlled opposition, i think? she's not truly willing to abandon the game and the noble power plays and make a fully elven alliance that includes the dalish, and she has this emotional tie to celene that prevents her from actually overturning things too badly.
and felassan, i think is like... he was a deep cover agent/doing stuff that solas couldn't do in the rebellion. thus, he's completely fine with doing stuff like threatening random (city elven!) shopkeepers with torture, and using the fact that he has vallaslin to gain clan virnehn's trust, despite their (very correct!) fear of being betrayed by the orlesians, before coolly going "yeah they're weeds though, it's fine with me if they all get killed 👍" in service of his goals. unlike solas, who spent a year or so in thedas and immediately started going "uwu let's get food for the refugees <3", felassan has been awake for... anything between a decade to thousands of years? and still didn't have that level of sympathy for modern people.
my personal take is that he turned into the joker after a few thousand years of watching mortal lifespans go by + the dales get destroyed, so he's like... not anti or pro elf? he just doesn't really care anymore. sometimes they're nice, sometimes they're weeds he needs to pull, but either way he doesn't actually feel anything unless he befriends someone and has a specific attachment. fhdskfjdgf.
I just found out that youtube-dl's downloading capabilities have been throttled and there's a new game in town (new to me, at least) called yt-dlp. It's a fork of youtube-dl and works pretty much the same.
Here's a cheat sheet for yt-dlp.
And it downloads FAST.
These are the ones I use the most:
Download the best format (video + audio) that is equal to or greater than 720p width. Save this file as video_id.extension (1La4QzGeaaQ.mp4):
okay kids i’m doing it i’m having my first long writing day. goal today is 5k. no research allowed today just writing. feel free to message me inspirational steph/klay stuff and then yell at me for checking tumblr.
Feel free to ignore this :D, it's mostly for my own personal reference.
The Mostly Super Firm Rules
There are Main Characters and Side Characters
Each household can only have one main character at a time.
If the flag is passed, then the previous main character loses any main character protections. They are now the same as any other side character.
Main Characters can have Watcher intervention to save them from death. Everyone else deals with the roll of the dice. Anyone can be killed by act of Watcher to fit the story as needed, but only Main Characters can be saved from random chance.
Whatever happens with neighborhood stories must be rolled with. Even for main characters. The eye of the Watcher can't be everywhere at once.
A note on Time and Auto Aging
Auto Aging is turned off, sims age with 'real years'.
A season is 14 days, a year is 56 days and time is consistent. If a full year is spent on a single family, then that year still passes for everyone else within a world.
The only 'pausing' of time is when the focus switches to a different world to catch up the stories there.
An infant becomes a toddler at year one, a child at year 5, a teen at 14, a young adult at 18, an adult at 32 and an elder at 60.
They must age up in the same season they were born.
