How do I tumblr?

New to tumblr. Mostly following Guild Wars 2 stuff, one day I might summon the courage to write something. Nakht.5467 (EU Blacktide)

[thorns-and-brambles]

My characters

Lucius Skysplitter (Warrior - Bladesworn?) - Vigil/Pact chopper pilot and member of the Sky warband.

Aulia Ormsdottir Forgalsdottir (Guardian - Firebrand) - Vigil Warmaster, Forgal’s adopted daughter.

Ingevast Ormsson (Revenant - Herald/Renegade) - Son of Svanir, claims to be Havroun of the Dragon, Aulia’s brother.

Ruadhán (Ranger - Soulbeast/Druid) - Pact Commander, leader of Dragon’s Watch, Knight of the Thorn, Champion of Aurene.

Reza Afsali (Thief - Daredevil/Specter?) - Priory Magister of Orrian descent, Orr historian, Trahearne’s student.

Genn (Engineer - Holosmith) - Order of Whispers Lightbringer and Inquest Overseer. Triple agent.

Pippi (Necromancer - Scourge) - Priory Archon specialized in reconstructing historical necromancy.

Marianne Kelly (Mesmer - Mirage) - Noblewoman and member of the Shining Blade.

Ayda Blackmoon (Elementalist - Weaver) - Fully ordained female shaman from the Flame legion (haven't really thought about it, this can change). I'll remake this character... someday

[blumineck]

Can you hold your bow at full draw? And should you?

Either way it does look cool sometimes, I’ll give them that!

If you like my content please consider supporting me on Patreon (or at least give some of my videos a watch on YouTube!)

[lost-wayfinder]

also not really happy to say this but I... I think I've lost my drive for gw2?

Like when SotO was announced I was excited, when I saw Zojja on a promo poster I was hyped and then the story came out and it felt.. okay. Just okay. And then there was the update. And it felt... okay...ish. I don't want to go deep into detail because I want to go to sleep but like...

i feel let down.

and i dont like it.

[dogesterone]

Thoughts on zweihanders?

Zweihänders are SUPER fucking cool! If I had a spare $900 I would totally get one.

A lot of video games and other media actually get them wrong, though. Slamming a sword that big into the ground is gonna really damage the sword, but abruptly stopping something with that much momentum can severely damage your joints and muscles if you aren't careful. You want the sword to only come to a stop when it's either hitting something you want to hit or when stopping its movement won't injure you. The trick, then, is to let the momentum of the sword carry it into this very beautiful flowing cutting pattern where the sword and its wielder are working together.

So, in practice, zweihänder/doppelhänder/montante/spadone looked less like this:

And more like this:

Some fun zweihänder facts:

"Zweihänder" is specifically a German name for this kind of sword. "Montante" was the word for more or less the same kind of sword in Spain, and in Italy they were called "Spadone."

There are some particularly massive swords of this style called "Paradeschwert" that were purely ceremonial. I saw a few at the Chicago Art Institute last time I went that were absolutely enormous.

It wasn't too uncommon for these swords to have wavy "flamberge" blades.

The prongs on the blade are called "parrying hooks."

The Landsknecht mercenaries famously used zweihänders to push past enemy pikes and break front lines.

Aside from Landsknecht, they were also used by bodyguards.

Flamberge zweihänders are still used today by the Papal Swiss Guard for ceremonial purposes.

[darklynoon-deactivated20170407]

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

[m0r1bund]

Swerving on getting fridged by becoming a water spirit that haunts the shit out of Orr. I cannot figure out how to draw this man’s face for the life of me send help.

[icebrooding]

How much I wish we knew literally anything about these two... what are their names... why don't the other Firstborns even talk about them (as far as I know)

[icebrooding]

WIP... my hand feels destroyed just doing the sketches for this hahah

wanted to draw the whole flock Q_Q with their initial designs

[sylvaridreams]

Ultimately it's very funny to me the "character xyz did nothing wrong actually!" fans of every character that gets any degree of hate. OK. Sure. Have you considered though that it's vastly more entertaining and interesting if they *did* do something wrong though?

Said it before I think to sun and sage, and this isn't to pick specifically on Caithe fans, but-- blah blah, never ask a man his salary a woman her age or a Caithe-did-nothing-wrong fan what happened to the centaur settlement in the Silverwastes in 1304 AE! She did help do a massacre there. That's pretty bad overall.

And yet I really like Caithe! I think she's fun and interesting and she's nice to get to know throughout the game. I think these two ideas of "Caithe Did Something Pretty Bad" and "I Like Her" can coexist. Like it's great that she doesn't massacre villages anymore overall but also I think it lends more to her character that she actively participated in this brutal act than if we pretend that she's got mega girl power but only when it's convenient to some morally upstanding end, and otherwise she was just completely at Faolain's dastardly whims. Somehow!

Something about how every character needs to be morally upright and can-do-no-wrong for us to like them, and if they're not they must repent and atone and seek the ultimate forgiveness-- overall it's all very christian in nature and boring and it sucks. You reinvented catholicism is what you did. You made Rytlock confess his sins eat a cracker and atone. You shouldn't do that, he's more interesting without doing that. Personally I think Rytlock should get another divorce and kill another son. And Eir should have also had more secrets she kept, and Caithe should steal a full baker's dozen of dragon eggs from me, and Braham should actually be even worse at handling grief and take it all out on the Commander. These are all what's known as conflict in a story. And they make it sooooo fun. It's almost 2 am, are you rocking with me⁉️

[meeeeeeese]

So I want to talk about the altar of Glaust, because it's incredibly important to the story and yet it almost never gets brought up.

What I think most people know about the altar is that its a forgotten artifact that was responsible for Glint, and by extension, Aurene being freed from the yoke of Kralkatorrik. While you can visit it in Arah, it kind of exits the story from there with no character ever thinking to use the sole artifact with the power to grant corrupted creatures free will again. However there's a few details that I think a lot of people miss that I find kind of interesting at least.

The first thing is that the altar itself is only a part of the process, it's just a component of a spell or ritual that does the actual work of cleansing the corruption.

Secondly, the spell needs to be performed at Arah. Though I don't know whether that's simply because the forgotten built the required altar there or because Arah is special somehow.

Personally, I think that there's something special about Arah that's required for the spells function beyond the mere presence of the altar. Zhaitan's presence indicates that it's almost definitely a ley-line nexus, and something about the land there was special enough to call the gods to tyria. So I think it'd make sense that they'd have to do it in Orr (which also suggests, given the forgotten attempted to purify Kralkatorrik, that ol'Kralky used to be active in Orr during the last dragonrise before flying up to the blood lands for his nap)

I think that would go some way as to explain why we're not using this incredible power, as the only way to do so is to venture through an unchained-infested city all the while lugging about whatever corrupted creature you want to cleanse.

And while I'm on the subject of why the altar isn't in the story more, there's also the fact that making corruption being curable more of a thing really changes the nature of dragon minions. Where before they're poor victims who can only be put down for everone's safety, the altar's presence makes them victims who, if you put in enough effort, you could save. Which would probably change the focus of the story quite dramatically as we have to weigh protecting still uncorrupted people against trying to save the corrupted from their fate.

(though imagine if we used purified branded to create living dragonsblood weapons, warriors uniquely suited to fighting branded who are immune to corruption because I don't think Kralkatorrik can brand them twice)

(as a sidenote, if you haven't done the forgotten path of the ruined city of arah you might not know that the altar is blimmin huge, check out the pic below with risen giants for scale)

Finally, just an interesting/annoying note is that we never got any explanation as to how the forgotten purification works, does it block the elder dragon from issuing commands to said minion? Does it work to nullify the dragonvoid lurking at the heart of the creatures magic? Replace the corrupted dragon magic with more benign ley energy? Who knows! Not us, and we likely never will now that we're moving away from the dragon storyline. And I promise I'm not salty about that.

So yeah, that's pretty much it, the altar's a pretty cool object and, for how little it comes up, a really important part of Aurene's ascension to non-mad elder dragon. Hopefully it'll one day get more attention, if only so we can have the commander go "Wait why haven't we been using this the entire time"

[eviltransnecoarc-deactivated202]

We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it

[androgynuisance-deactivated2024]

My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.

He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.

He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".

I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.

Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.

Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.

And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.

And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.

Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.

[discoursedrome]

I was really surprised at how many bald people there were when I got my first white-collar job. It was an aging, nerdy workforce in a large uncool company, and the of majority guys who worked there were bald or balding, and right at the beginning I was trying to figure out, like, is baldness associated with being interested in that kind of work or something? Because it was by far the highest concentration of bald guys I'd ever seen in one place.

Eventually I figured out that no, this is basically just the prevalence of baldness in general. It's like 50% of the population by middle age, with visible thinning or hairline recession topping out above 80% IIRC. The reason I was seeing a lot of it is just because the workforce there skewed older than I'd been used to, and because these weren't the kind of guys who would go to great lengths to prevent or conceal it. Add to that the fact that the rate at which it's depicted is vastly lower than the rate at which it actually exists, so you end up with a very distorted idea of prevalence when your acculturation relies heavily on media and celebrities.

[miss-oranje]

would u guys leave if i started talking about copaganda in gw2 or

[miss-oranje]

okay. i think when i say “logan’s writing is copaganda” a lot of ppl assume i just mean that he’s a cop and he’s likeable. but it’s a lot more than that. so let’s talk about logan.

he’s a captain of the seraph—seemingly the highest-ranking, but it’s possible he just has de facto outsized influence bc he’s closest to the queen. he’s a powerful guy!

we don’t get a ton of insight into what his job looks like day-to-day, or what his officers and krytan civilians think about him, besides that they like his hair. (who doesn’t?) but what we do see of his behavior on duty is… hm. well.

in level 10 personal story, logan brings a noble human PC with him on a raid on minister zamon’s house, suspecting zamon of collaborating with bandits. he doesn’t have a warrant or strong argument of probable cause.

Interacting with the door:

Maid: Is someone out there? What do you want?

your options:

let’s review. logan gets you, also a civilian, to help him force an illegal entry into a suspect’s house, letting you do the talking so that the consequences of lawbreaking, if any, will not fall on him. following his lead, you can:

➡️ threaten to kill the suspect’s house staff

➡️ lie

➡️ threaten to arrest the staff for “obstruction”

➡️ use the vaguest possible wording to manipulate the maid into opening the door for you

once you get inside, logan encourages you to destroy zamon’s property out of spite even though zamon hasn’t been convicted of a crime and you’re both there on a “routine investigation.”

Logan Thackeray: If you find anything breakable, break it. This dandy needs a few more setbacks in his life.

when zamon is brought to court and initiates a trial by combat, logan begs you to choose him as your second so he can personally kill the accused:

Logan Thackeray: As a Seraph captain, I can’t really jump around saying, “Pick me! Pick me!” But I can certainly think it.

he also says outright that he plans to murder zamon if he’s found innocent:

Logan Thackeray: I’m a loyal servant of the crown, but if Zamon gets off, I’m going to take matters into my own hands.

in another level 10 PS route, the human street rat can say they want to become a vigilante and kill “a lot of vicious punks” (gang members) on the streets of divinity’s reach. logan’s reply:

Logan Thackeray: If you’re serious, I’d like to take you up on that. Unofficially, of course. I need more friends like you, who know how to get a job done. What do you say?

this is obviously illegal, and manipulative; it’s clear that his status awes the PC and makes them eager to please him, since your response is:

➡️ Are you kidding? Me, friends with the Captain of the Seraph? I’d be honored.

he is absolutely abusing his power here.

earlier in the same instance, logan delivered a line that has stuck in my head for fully a decade:

Logan Thackeray: Prison’s full, Pete. Let’s skip the trial and go straight to the execution.

PRISON’S FULL? PRISON’S FULL?

anyway. it’s easy to see why the human PC, and a lot of players, like logan. he’s a cheerful, encouraging mentor. he likes you. he’s easy to get along with, full of compliments, eager to help, and motivated by a strong sense of personal justice and love for queen jennah and the spirit of peace & generosity towards the common folk of kryta that she’s supposed to represent. the civilians he’s brutalizing are cartoonishly bad guys. he’s funny, and his outlaw streak, a holdover from his past as a young mercenary/hero, can seem rogueish & fun, making him “less” of a cop, because he rebels against the institution he works for.

except. it’s actually the opposite.

when not angsting about jennah or rytlock, logan spends most of his screentime in GW2 complaining that the seraph are spread too thin and that he, personally, is not given enough power to go above and outside the law and just kill anyone he suspects of criminal affiliations or plotting against jennah. he uses the human PC, especially the highly vulnerable street rat & impressionable commoner, to get around that “unfair” limitation.

this is despite the fact that he DOES fight and kill criminals (and untried suspects) on the reg and never suffers legal consequences. but it’s not a universal license to kill. he & his seraph are not getting enough resources and leeway from the crown. and that’s why violence and injustice persist in kryta. if only logan, the Good Cop, was freed from all oversight, he could eliminate crime and misery.

this is copaganda.

what copaganda tries to say is that, sure, the justice system is flawed. terribly flawed! but the terrible flaw is that the system prevents individual heroic cops from going to the fullest extent of their abilities to root out corruption, protect the helpless (white, cisheteronormative, nuclear) family unit, and champion the fragile, not-perfect-but-all-we-can-hope-for status quo.

not that the system creates, protects, and rewards abuse of power against the systemically vulnerable. we don’t need to defund the bad lawmen, we have to give more resources and liberties to the good lawman.

yeah.

to be clear, i know that most of this was written in 2012! there wasn’t a lot of popular awareness then, at least among mainstream white audiences, of what copaganda is and why it’s dangerous. he was written to be likeable, is a good friend to the commander (unless, like me, you consider his criminal misuse of the human PC a betrayal) and has an engaging backstory. it’s not wrong to find him interesting & endearing! but i hope we can all admit there’s a clear reason why he might’ve been written out of the main storyline, and why the game’s attempts to re-center him by involving him with the pact and the charr civil war conspicously stopped in 2020.

this post is long enough without getting deeply into minsec’s role in EoD, but i do think it’s worth noting & initiating a conversation about how EoD’s main cop ally, rama, quits the force after finding out it works to oppress outsiders and ethnic minorities in cantha (👍!) but that minsec in general remains an allied faction, and the fact that it’s riddled with purists and fascist sympathizers is framed as a shocking perversion of its intended function (protecting & serving cantha’s people) and something that can be fixed from the inside by a good cop like captain min, instead of something that follows naturally from the culture of an imperial police state.

[icebrooding]

Got distracted doing my story wanting to take pics of his glow...

[icebrooding]

boyfrens. or, you know what.

boyferns.

[icebrooding]

t-they boyfriens,,,, 🥺👉👈

[nocte-argentea]

Heyyyy I've been getting sad way too easily for the last few days so I'd like to call in a favor from my one of my favorite communities

Can yall show me pics of your commanders (or other prominent GW2 OCs) with their romantic partners? I want cute stuff to lift my mood 🥺

I'll start: here's Commander Vesper and her husband, Altair. Show me yours!

[thorns-and-brambles]

I don't know if OC x canon counts, but here's a cute screenshot of my commander Ruadhán with his beloved Ridhais. They had a long history together and went from rivals to friends to lovers.

[the-tired-commander]

Oh hey, 250 followers! Hello hello, thank you for hanging out with me while i yell about characters <3

So I will say thank you back! I'm running a little giveaway to say thanks! It's not out yet BUT once it releases, I'll be throwing the Brawlers Silk Jacket skin at one of you lovely people <3

Just reblog this to enter and i'll pick a random person either once the skin comes out! (which could be in a couple of days oops, i meant to do this post sooner)

If you use a sideblog let me know what you follow from!! New followers are perfectly fine! just don't unfollow immediately after, thats kinda rude ;-;

Good luck and here's to more of me yelling about characters <3