#misc: personal text

[vonclosen]

i hate to make a post where i’m asking for money, but as some of my followers know, i’ve been sick with pneumonia now for about 3 months. i’m supposed to be graduating in about a week, but being sick has put me behind on a lot of coursework. my home is full of mold that is not helping at all. they don’t know for certain the source of my pneumonia, and after four rounds of antibiotics, it’s still not budged. i haven’t be able to go to work in weeks.

while i have a little money now, i know its not going to last—especially since my partner is having a dry spell in clients. we’re in a really, really rough spot. we need to move, pay our bills, and get groceries.

if anyone has anything at all to spare and if you like my meta posts on indigenous issues, i’d be beyond grateful. this year has been insanely hard.

philamayaye, you are all the best. 💖

kofi venmo

also! if you are an author or writer, please consider checking out my partner’s services. they are a professional editor with over ten years of experience.

[vivalravn]

frame the halves, and call them brothers 🎭🔧

[estormo]

[ericdravens]

hi jack and i gave michael and jason both kids and now they’re kissing and they gotta be careful or else their respective dads will have to fight to the death

their moms are pals, tho. Big Scary Husbands club

[fenryth]

i like really wanna develop ephrius more because his design is so fucking?? solid?? like i know he’s just a stupid self insert that literally just looks like a hotter version of me but i love the idea of his sort of almost nilfgaardian aesthetic and him being a hero of will, and ruling this little hamlet of a country that’s been sealed off for hundreds of years and has a lot of elements of the old kingdom? honestly i could probably make a lot of crossovers with him too but at the same time i feel so guilty for having such a blatant self insert that’s clearly just me but Better and Hotter lmao

and i feel like posting all my art of him so here suffer with me

[vonclosen]

me wandering the streets like cassandra talking about how the whole fallout series has a lot of fundamentally anti-indigenous sentiments baked into the world building and how i wish people would think about it more

and also with all of this critiquing you’d think i fucking hate fallout but truly i do not. one of my favorite game series. which means that naturally i have to rip it apart viciously and thoroughly. nothing is free from my wrath.

[vonclosen]

i gotta say i obviously liked the north water quite a bit but i have my thoughts you know. why are we as native people always saviors but never given full agency? i think obviously patrick aligns himself far more with the inuit that he encounters in the arctic but in some ways it really feels like that same old white-man-becomes-indigenous sort of plot there at the end

within the context of the story it obviously endears me to patrick that he views indigenous people as fellow people and is always respectful and not patronizing (which is kind of huge in 1859), he doesn’t ascribe to the “we need to teach ~the savages~ our ways, they’re so primitive and childlike” that the priest pushes onto him—he’s more like “that’s not my business what others believe and i’ve lost all faith in a christian god so power to them for having their own belief system, i think it makes more sense tbh”

speaking in terms of the indigenized white man trope i do think i appreciate that he learns and highly values what he learns, he carries it with him, but then also goes back home instead of becoming this stupid mystical white savior figure (though i do think it’s a bit corny that they’re like “oh they think you have powers” but that’s neither here nor there, i’ve got mixed feeling on it). i think that speaks a bit to his positionality as a colonized person himself (we see it so literally with the fact that he is irish but speaks with an english accent because he was raised/adopted by an english surgeon) who has already participated in colonial violence and has lived to regret it. i think there’s some really interesting stuff there that could have been built out more intentionally and intelligently if it had been told by someone who understood the topic better

and at the same time, it’s a show that came out in 2021, and i wish the inuit he encountered had been given more agency and more context. translate what they’re saying. give them names.

generally i liked it, but there’s of course room for improvement. 7/10

[vonclosen]

remember when each type of dragon age race corresponded with different types of darkspawn from different kinds of broodmothers. remember when the lore wasn’t a twisted up contradictory mess. i miss origins :(