#toaster age

[beingatoaster]

given that Varric is narrating DA2, and we know he’s an unreliable narrator, I wonder how the interaction with the pickpocket when Hawke first meets him really went

doesn’t seem real likely that you’d go out of your way to hire someone who just got ripped off by a bad and obvious pickpocket. If they’d just helped you out with one, though? That’s a different matter.

[beingatoaster]

I will say, though, I really don't understand why the Joining isn't undertaken sitting down. How many people survive, but bang their heads falling like that? That's not a great start as a Gray Warden.

[beingatoaster]

I did literally every quest I got for reinforcing and upgrading Vigil’s Keep, and it still fell? Or at least it’s marked as such on the world map. D: IDK if there’s a glitch, or if I wasn’t given a quest somewhere, or what, but it’s SUPER frustrating.

[beingatoaster]

Welp, stayed up way too late, but I ran through the Blackmarsh and everything else leading up to the final run of the game. I think I did everything right to save both Amaranthine and Vigil’s Keep, and I brought along the characters I needed to for the character endings and DA2 import I want (both the girls, of course, just in case I missed something at the Keep; I would rather have Justice than Nathaniel, but google suggested that Nathaniel will flag as dead in DA2 if I leave him at the Keep, which I don’t want, and since I’m cheat-coding my way through combats it doesn’t matter in terms of party balance). We’ll see how it goes! Another day, because I really do have to go to bed now.

[beingatoaster]

Katerine Mulgrew does such a good job voicing Flemeth.

[beingatoaster]

Finished Witch Hunt! Larel is SUPER CONCERNED about Morrigan, but not so much so as to try and follow her when Morrigan clearly doesn’t want her to. She stated her desire to help; that will have to be enough.

And now that her tale has come to a close, when I play again I’ll pick up DA2, my favorite! But that I definitely cannot do tonight.

[beingatoaster]

Spent the last several hours playing DAO: Awakening, during which I cleared up a bunch of sidequests and recruited Velanna. I want to clear up one or two more sidequests, but then I have to go to bed... Awakening is normally a horrible slog, but I’ve been half-awake all day, so it’s working out. (With the ‘killallhostiles’ cheat code.)

I know Velanna’s a pretty unpopular character in the fandom, and I do kind of get why. She’s very aggressive and abrasive, and she’s pretty one-note (though, to be fair, all the Awakening characters are pretty one-note). But listen, if people attacked my friends and family, murdered a bunch, and kidnapped my little sister, I’d go a little unhinged about it too.

And it does feel like some of the blowback on her is the weird responses a lot of people have when female characters are allowed to be, as I said, aggressive and abrasive, and not immediately agreeable with the player character. She’s demonstrably very flawed! But I find that makes her more interesting.

Anyway, Larel’s basically going, “Finally, another elven woman, and it seems like she’s likely to understand my qualms about shem and doglords, thank Andraste.”

[beingatoaster]

Also, I did it before I entered Kal’Hirol, but I will note for posterity (because sometimes I check a game tag to remind myself what I did) that Larel ended up releasing Nathaniel Howe with his family’s things. She can’t forgive him for what his father did, and she doesn’t want ANOTHER surly, overtly threatening guy in her Wardens, but she won’t kill him for his father’s crimes either. It seemed the best balance she could find. She knows that technically adding him to the Wardens would be the best thing she could do as Commander, the “right” thing given her role, but... she already has to suffer Oghren, she doesn’t want this arrogant noble shem around too.