I mostly ramble about Dragon Age these days. Two has my favourite cast of characters. Origins is my favourite in terms of gameplay, plot design, level design, and worldbuilding.
The characters I like best are Fenris, Merrill, Justice!Anders, Morrigan, Zevran, Sera, and Sigrun. Also I'm obsessed with the Tevinter class system.
I used to post a lot about Yu-Gi-Oh! which is also class conflict and thus good.
Other things I like include dated JRPGs and literature.
I take things too seriously. I like to pick things apart and complain about them and roast my faves sadistic haterism style.
Sometimes I commission or am gifted art. Please have a look.
i'm obnoxious and will moan and groan about how prose needs a thesis statement 'why are you writing this story if it doesn't have a point?!' etc but then sometimes i'll see a fic where the author outright tells me the thesis statement and what they're attempting to accomplish with their writing directly in the summary and then i'll be like 'okay, but you are writing prose, so can you maybe communicate it to me a little more sneakily and in-character?'
I understand it's because Malik has pushed the emotions and thoughts that he can't handle on his own onto his other self thus partially explaining the following, but there's this interesting contrast of how the base Malik so very deeply loathes the dark and yet he still harbors love for his father who was the one who trapped him there, and then Yami Malik of course embraces and oozes with all the hatred Malik has for his father that Malik can't handle or face yet but Yami Malik also has fondness for being in the dark and feels a sense of place there.
In some way, it's possible that Malik -hates- the part of himself who found some sense of meaning and comfort underground, instead espousing his rebellion with his all and everything, and so those feelings ended up buried and vested into Yami Malik. To admit to those in-some-form nuanced memories and emotions might feel like a betrayal and might be devastating in its own right for the base Malik and Malik's need to exist in the full world is so bright (he could exist in the full world with nuanced feelings but it's so rough - he killed it).
Someone else pointed this out to me, and this is probably a more subtle thing that would require more long-term passionate fans of Yami Malik to notice, but Base Malik is actually a lot more volatile and impulsively angry while Yami Malik does a much better job at staying calm even if he's being such an "edgy" character.
they're of course both experiencing both these things but base malik feels more ready to indulge the anger and fear of the world feeling out of control and yami malik feels more ready to indulge the calm of asserting control forcibly and violently
ULMCSD Round 2, Match 1 - "Live by the Sword Forever and It's Awesome, That's the Whole Phrase" - Dak-wai vs. Ngayu Brosca
Dak-wai (bg3 dak-wai tag on main, da dak-wai tag over here)
featured in: There Must Be Candles (aka wyllfic), autism be damned this qunari i found in the desert can blow up darkspawn, that comic i reblog every 4 month
my personal friend, and yours. dak-wai began life as my 10 charisma paladin durge, and then i became so fond of them i keep putting them in other games. morally conflicted agender lesbian with a flat affect who only really knows how to kill things, and is trying to work that into a justified, fulfilling purpose in life by pursuing vengeance or making themself into a shield for others.
more successful at this in bg3, where they do save the world, than in datv, where they become an abomination and let the veil fall because they wanted to kill solas really bad. but they have cool wings
Ngayu Brosca (tag link)
featured in: in elegy love me (well...), when it's busy at the blight and the grey wardens get mean (wip)
born doomed and angry. had resigned herself to that fate until duncan provided her with the only glimmer of hope she'd ever known, only to have that snatched away from her too, leaving her even more doomed and angry. 20 years old, reactive, self-sabotaging, continually reinforces her own belief that she ruins everything she touches. in love with leliana, intense friends with morrigan, but she's definitely not gay.
made harrowmont king equally out of resentment towards/concern for rica. defiled the ashes because the guardian called leliana a faker. showed up to the battle of denerim with an army of werewolves. conscripted loghain and sent her worstie alistair into exile before sacrificing herself to kill the archdemon
do we have any idea what his dynamic with fenris was that he was willing to ask around the best mercenaries he could find in order to con them into walking into an ambush (potentially ruining long-standing business relationships with meeran and athenril that he seems to have?) by doing an elaborate act of being a new to the surface terrified lyrium smuggler for basically no reason
WELL HEY EVERYONE I kinda disappeared for a while because the 30th of April was my birthday!! But now I’m getting back in to uploading stuff, so here’s a request from my last post.
@disturbed-katten wanted some happy Fenris, and I can never refuse the chance to draw him actually smiling 8′)
this is getting a bit awkward i fear. i never considered thematic consistency between my icons before but 'you will never escape guilt' and 'you will never escape desire' are combining into 'you will never escape the shame and arousal feedback loop' which is basically 'you will never escape catholicism'
do you think zevran worries about how his identity and personality have been affected by his upbringing with the crows? do you think any core aspects his identity and personality have been affected adversely or otherwise by his upbringing with the crows? is there a side of zev that's like the grew up in a brothel side of his personality with its own relationship to the grew up training to be a crow side of his personality? do these questions themselves reveal an unpleasantly fatalistic relationship with how upbringing affects future identity that zevran would reject wholeheartedly (and how justified would he be in doing so)? idk, talk about zevran and the facades for a while if you'd like :')
yayyyy i love these questions. this is going to be so long (':
i think that the biggest point of tension between rinna and zevran is that she makes him think consciously abt his identity and personality and how those things have been affected by the crows. origins is the first time he maybe ever tries to think abt it on purpose, and even then, a lot of the time i think he's being dragged kicking and screaming into it — and this is assuming the warden in this instance is curious enough to give him the space to do that.
i rly like his embarrassing comment directly to caridin's face when his answer to 'should we deny ppl their agency en masse if we can make use of them?' is lmao come on, isn't that just how the world works? isn't that just the way things are? sort of! but not rly!
rinna, to me, was a v lonely outlier in the crows, a woman w enough self-possession to be utterly saturated in a lack of autonomy and still able to decide she would act to change the system regardless. in origins, zevran is the v lonely outlier — a barely-ex-crow in a group of ppl who had their own specific upbringings, to be sure, but not his. he gets to learn in real time when a belief he thought was objective turns out to be v much not.
still, there's a part of him that's clearly been struggling to reconcile itself for a while. that part takes over if you decide to annul the circle or wipe out the dalish clan. there is a part of him that can take a stand. is it abt things taking what he feels to be their natural course vs interfering? i think so. he can reflect on his own agency in those moments. he can decide it's worth it to say 'this is wrong.'
it's difficult to piece out how much of his personality comes from age 7 and younger vs over a decade of indoctrination, and that's prob up to individuals to decide, but for me, he did have some agency in the brothel. he had ppl there who cared enough abt him to tell him abt his parents and particularly his mother, ppl to give him the gloves to remember her by. ppl to locate him within a community and history that were his. he was not a blank slate when the crows bought him.
i am currently thinking abt how much he would not want the ppl who knew him as a child then to see what the crows have made him. i'm playing around w the anxiety that comes from not knowing what the actual core of yourself is but being terrified that someone else knows who you are, and will be able to take one look at you and see the damage in a way that even you yourself can't bc you're swimming in it.
like i think ultimately, is he afraid that he's a bad person? no; that seems like a moot point. is he afraid he will never be a good person? debatable. he has no idea who he is. he's afraid he'll pluck out all his feathers and find nothing beneath.
it's what's v juicy abt his role as 'black shadow', actually. taking on an identity of smth that only exists bc of smth else. a redundancy, a shadow that's black. the imprint, the silhouette, the sign & signifier of presence but not the presence itself. at once entirely legible and completely ambiguous.
at some point you have to stop going 'well i'm doomed!' sure, okay, but what are you having for dinner, you know? he has so many shifting identities and is so painfully aware at all times of the power of perception and how he can use the way ppl adjust him to fit their expectations or needs to accomplish things — which, to be clear, we all do. we are all always managing shit all the time, but when you're aware of it, it can make you feel like the loneliest outlier of all at best, an utter monster at worst.
a facade is so much less complicated than an identity, right? he has to start choosing how he wants to identify. letting go of the myth of a normal, stable identity, that thing everyone surely has, that thing he would have if he hadn't been broken so early on and then over and over again. gotta just start choosing, gotta just figure out what feels most doable.
if i start throwing stones from inside this glass house i will get in trouble but i must say sometimes i read a dragon age fic that i think treats the subject of slavery in incredibly poor taste
the first date merrill and amice go on a date, pls
For the First Times meme if anyone else would like to send me one.
ngl i think this date has to collapse under its own weight. from amice's perspective it's a date that has to justify the full weight of upsetting anders for her own self-gratification. and from merrill's perspective it's a date that has to justify maybe a third of the weight of deciding that marrying anders might not be the worst decision ever (the part where she's rationalising that doing so will give her the opportunity to get closer to amice among others). i think given the anders pov of this part of "the fic", amice and merrill have to be a bit of a unified front about how the date went ✨perfect✨ just so he doesn't try to capitalise on the vulnerability of it being any less than that, but from their perspective it's probably a mess.
the place they were planning to pick up food from is closed in the general instability after the riots. amice suggests that lirene's bakeshop is the next best option and merrill is having trouble asserting that she fucking hates that idea and wants a break from thinking about the mess between the alienage and the fereldans, not to walk directly into it. she also hates the idea of the hanged man because (a) it's not special they go there every other day, and (b) they might run into varric or isabela or fenris. while they're dawdling they run into isabela anyhow who is not really respecting that this is a date. then they run into several people amice knows from her time running with meeran who are not really respecting that this is a date. then they run into arianni who is not really respecting that this is a date, and who is full of opinions about everything and also some complicated feelings about how amice managed to convince marethari to take feynriel in even after she made it pretty clear arianni wasn't welcome after what happened with vincento. by the time they extricate themselves from all that, it's too dark to skip stones at the docks.
merrill is like 'wow, i didn't realise it was fucking impossible to get a private moment here in this shithole shemlen city unless you bar yourself in your room. this never happens with the dalish (lying)'. amice goes 'well, you know, maybe people would actually realise this was a date and stop interrupting if you actually let me hold your hand or kiss you in public'. and merrill who has been living the consequences of the entire alienage sticking their nose up her love life snaps at amice, then immediately feels guilty and starts apologising. at which point amice is like 'no, don't apologise, i like when you show me how angry you are'. at which point merrill immediately gets snappy again, 'right, how could i forget that your type is actually angry yell-y shitheads who think they know better than everyone else' and then starts crying because, frankly, she isn't over how she spent the last two months telling herself she was more boring and more unloveable than anders before finding out that amice liked her for a lot of the same damn reasons she liked him.
at this point they're probably sitting somewhere around the docks and have to have a real conversation about how they hoped this date was going to go better than this, and merrill says that this was supposed to prove something about how this whole scary arranged marriage situation would be okay because she'd at least get to spend time with amice. and why couldn't their first date go as well as that time a month ago when she was pointing out to amice which qunari she thought were most attractive or which clouds were the most interesting shapes? or that time they went to the wounded coast to go swimming with isabela and fenris and the others and found a bunch of old rusty nails in the shallows and hypothesised about where they came from? and amice is like 'well, maybe one of those can be our first date instead?' and merrill 'well, but we weren't trying to be ~romantic~ with each other then'. and amice goes 'well, it was romantic for me anyhow. i've been head over heels since at least two years ago when you saved me from that raider' and merrill is like 'yeah, actually, i'm not sure when i fell for you, but watching you collect all those rusty nails at the beach was romantic for me too, vhenan.'
and i don't think they have another official date until after the marriage then, and that one probably goes better. but it does them both good to chill a little and remember they like each other when they're not hinging all of their hopes and fears on being able to perform romance to standards everyone else will simultaneously recognise and revere and magnanimously not notice and not cause further drama over.
since i like fake deadlines and the last time i made sufficient writing progress i was rushing to miss the deadline for fucked up ships week maybe i should attempt to finish some kind of gay thing for pride month...
since i like fake deadlines and the last time i made sufficient writing progress i was rushing to miss the deadline for fucked up ships week maybe i should attempt to finish some kind of gay thing for pride month...
i forget the context but one time someone said something to me about fenris/isabela/merrill like it was a brand new revolutionary idea and i told a friend about this and they were like 'that ship is easy mode' and i gotta concur. like half the ship is already canon and the other half is whatever the fuck is already happening in merrill and isabela's canon banters.
