occasionally, you will discover an artist who drew roughly 300 beautiful pictures of your favorite characters over the course of a month and then never touched them again. you must accept this as a gift.
Because I wanted a prompt list specifically for Dragon Age. I've tried to keep these prompts open enough that they could be done for more than just one specific protagonist/character, while still keeping within the setting.
content aggregator blogs that just comment with three flower emojis and somehow rack up thousands more notes than OP. 16-22 year old fandom artists putting COMMENTERS DNI in their bio and COMMENT IN TAGS at the bottom of their posts. hapless i-check-tumblr-once-a-week users commenting on a reblog and getting their inboxes full of scolding. people making multiple single-posts instead of reblogging their own posts to continue a thought.
the culture of this place is gonna get so fucked. PVP enabled website.
(screenshot for illustrative purposes) i didn't know the update was live already and seeing TWO different actions bars on the SAME post is frying me. They don't have a fucking UX designer in office, not a single one. Yeah, let's multiply the post interactions by double. triple. hell, how many times people comment. more actions per action. a bottom bar in the middle of the post. yeah, that'll be awesome. that's look so cool with our neat figma auto layout fill container action group
so as long as tumblr keeps this, here's the tumblr version of etiquette that was maintained when twitter's quote-retweets affected artist visibility/notes:
for art that someone has added reblog commentary to (or removed the caption from), reblog from the source
otherwise, avoid adding reblog comments to art (as this will affect the artist's notes/visibility)—utilize tags and replies to provide commentary (which artists will absolutely appreciate)
reblog comments are comments added to the body of a post, not the tags and not replies.
tagged by @50sjello (ty <3) for WIP Wednesday - i have a bunch of ulysses stuff in my drafts that i keep ping ponging between yoooooooo this shit sucks megacockolis and no wait we can still salvage this. plus an andy i've had for weeks.
i’m from maine. i’ve lived here my whole life. i am also native american, and in community with other native people here (wabanaki people— passamaquoddy, penobscot, mi’kmaq and maliseet). i have been to mount desert island and bar harbor (you may know as far harbor) countless times throughout my life. i am also a native studies minor in a wabanaki-led program.
mount desert island, or pesamkuk (passamaquoddy name) has been a gathering place for wabanaki people since time immemorial. indigenous presence on the island has shaped what it is today. tourism and white settlement (summer homes, a coast guard base, a national park, and myriad other tourist businesses in places such as bar harbor) during the “rusticator period” (1840s-1920s) all but pushed major seasonal camps off the island. in fact, today most average-income people will have a difficult time living on MDI now. the crisis of affordable housing on the island was at one point so bad that teachers and firemen were traveling upwards of an hour to get to work. not great!
but that does not mean that indigenous people are simply gone from the island (or maine in general!)
in maine, the major wabanaki communities are: penobscot nation on indian island, motahkomikuk (passamaquoddy), qonasqamkuk (passamaquoddy), and sipayik (passamaquoddy). the houlton band of maliseets and mi’kmaq nation are both in aroostook county and do not have formal reservations in the same way. indigenous lands in maine are subject to some very interesting and frustrating legislation. for more info, look into the maine indian claims settlement act (MICSA).
image: wabanaki alliance
today, the abbe museum is in the middle of the tourist district in bar harbor— it is dedicated to wabanaki history and is largely wabanaki-run. efforts into restoring traditional harvesting are ongoing (such as picking sweetgrass)!
indigenous people are still very much here and deserve much, much better than complete erasure for the kitsch aesthetic of the game. wabanaki presence COULD HAVE BEEN integrated into the game. bethesda could have made an effort to reach out to wabanaki peoples to work on representation in some way or another. the history of the place could have been mentioned. it was not.
why is this?
i think a lot of it boils down to laziness. companies do not want to pay for cultural consultation. they don’t want to take a risk at either seeming “too woke” or, on the other side, not socially aware enough.
so indigenous people continue to be written out. because it is easier to pretend we are all dead.
for more information about wabanaki presence on pesamkuk:
https://abbemuseum.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/4b8da-namingthedawnlandgeorgeneptune_web.pdf (written by a passamaquoddy knowledge keeper— i have met them, very cool person!)
indians in eden by bunny mcbride and harald prins: https://ppld.overdrive.com/media/1239742
some discussion of suzanne greenlaw (maliseet) and her work around sweetgrass harvest: https://www.abbemuseum.org/blog/2018/6/21/a8ox8s8wxde6nenklfm77gayl60h87
the abbe museum website: https://www.abbemuseum.org/
New Vegas is not any better, I’m afraid to say. I’ve been meaning to do a write up on the issues associated with Indigenous representation in NV, but suffice to say, it’s really, really bad.
The rep in NV plays into a lot of the worst stereotypes— noble savages, white saviors, and positioning of ‘native adoption’ in the worst and most stereotypical way. I really deeply recommend reading Tuck & Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ for a more in-depth analysis of some of those problems (as part of a broader and systemic conversation around Anti-Native racism)
New Vegas nearly starts to have an interesting conversation about Indigenous positionally, but fails miserably. Mormons and Anthropologists both (who are represented by Joshua Graham and Caesar) have extremely loaded histories with Indigenous people. From an essay I wrote last year (About Twilight, but still relevant):
Mormons and Indigenous people have a long, bloody, and contemptuous history. From the start, The Book of Mormon states that both Jewish and Indigenous Americans are “scattered Israelites,” descendants of an ancient family of Jews who came across the sea from Israel and settled in America. Indigenous people are believed by Mormons to be “Lamanites,” sons and daughters of the wicked “Laman,” and at the top of a hierarchy of cursed lineages, “cursed with redness” or “marked skin” for turning away from God.
[…]
Mormons believe that ancient Lamanites slaughtered Nephites (pale-skinned, righteous God warriors and descendants of Nephi), despite the fact that there is no archaeological evidence or oral tradition from any Indigenous group to suggest this ever happened, and there is no genetic link between ancient Jewish populations and ancient Indigenous populations.
As a result, Mormons (like many other Christian organizations in America) took part in the brutal and paternalistic residential school system, believing that Natives needed to be “saved.” Of all the residential schools in the U.S., one third were run by Mormon missionaries. Beyond residential schools, Mormons also operated the “Indian Placement Program” from 1954 to 2000, responsible for sending up to fifty thousand Native children to live with Mormon foster families. Both residential schools and the Indian Placement Program were rife with every kind of abuse imaginable. The last student within the program graduated in the year 2000, five years before Twilight was published. Mormons also took part in colonial expansion, believing their cause of slaughtering and converting “Lamanites” to be righteous retribution. Along with the U.S. government, Mormons were responsible for the Bear River Massacre of 1863, in which Shoshone women and children were raped, and more than four hundred and fifty Shoshone were slaughtered.
For context around the issues with Anthropologists and Native people, refer to Vine Deloria Jr.’s collection of essays: https://archive.org/details/indiansanthropol0000unse
x, 226 p. ; 24 cm
New Vegas falls short. It does not do a successful political critique of Indigenous treatment by simply acknowledging our existence (in the most offensive, stereotypical light). Even for a piece created in the 2000s, it is beyond egregious.
Indigenous fans of Fallout have been talking about the problems of New Vegas for years. This is not a Bethesda problem, it is a systemic problem. I can think of very few game studios who have ever done any better.
Just wanted to add if you appreciate my writeups and such, a great way to support me is through my ko-fi tip jar. Things are tight for a lot of people right now, including myself, so don’t trouble yourself if you don’t have anything to spare.
I’m definitely heartened by the response this has had 💖
premise: talk about the origins of the names and personalities (and maybe even the design?) of a couple of your OCs!
tagged by @winecupwars, thank you!! Because I've been replaying New Vegas and because, according to steam, Andy completed his 10 years (!!!) last week, I'm going to go in depth about him. Ten years sure is a lot of character development!
Before I continue, I'm tagging @cassiaorsellio @roberthouse69 @outeremissary and @ampleappleamble
Ok, origin of the name is easy. Andy comes from The Killers' song Andy You're a Star, which I'd just found out at the time and was listening to a bunch, and the surname Steel comes from Lucy Steel from Steel Ball Run, which I'd read earlier in the year and felt the cowboy inspiration totally fit with the game (and her looks also informed Andy's earlier design). I remember being oddly invested in the fact that Andy was a gender neutral name, and this is a surprise that will help us later.
Now, to understand Andy 1.0, I have to talk about my Fallout 3 character, Eva. Fallout 3 was my first fallout game, and I loved it and my character a lot. Eva was kind, young, curious, a wasteland doctor, dedicated to improving the world and always leaving it a little better than what she had found. Because I had spent so much time with this game and this character, when I moved on to New Vegas I wanted to play something different, so I went with the direct opposite. My courier would be selfish, rude, cocky and uncaring. Instead of a young, naive vault dweller, she would be an old wasteland rat (original andy was 28 years old. Yes, I considered that OLD when I made the character 😭), probably irradiated too. She was meant to be ugly, so I made her pale and blonde, and here's the first drawing I ever posted. I remember painting the skin with a green tint because again, irradiated and sickly.
I remember not knowing for the longest time if I wanted to side with House or the Legion, but ultimately House's charisma won me over. René Auberjonois was the goat, after all. Siding with House was the glue that brought my character together. Andy's selfishness came from a life of work on the wasteland. She was an orphan, a born nomad, forced to work on the caravan business since she was a child. She eventually became a single mother at 16, which complicated her life further and pushed her into debt. Siding with House wasn't ideology, it was survival. It was "who cares about the others, I'll never go hungry ever again!!!!". This aspect also informed her weapon of choice, a power fist. For me, as a player, it was because I used guns a lot in FO3 and barely did any melee, so, again, I wanted to try something completely different. For Andy, the power fist was a choice she made because she couldn't afford bullets. This backstory still remains unchanged!
Andy had a brief redesign when I became extremely inspired by the californian band Deap Valley and their album Femejism (2016) (banger rock album btw, you should listen to it) and their MV for the lead single Royal Jelly.
You can really tell LOL I was looking for that Vegas sleazy chic look to better match the House choice, but in doing so, I betrayed my wasteland rat aesthetic.. You can see her skin developed a healthier complexion!
But there were other things I wanted for her appearance, namely, the half face paralysis because of the gun shot. You can see in some of these old drawings that her left eye is droopier, something I've kept since that time. For comparison, here's a recent drawing.
I like having the bigger visual impact of the gun shot besides just the wound, plus, the assymetry is fun! Another unique physical trait that Andy developed was losing the right arm to a deathclaw attack. You can see in those earlier drawings the shoulder claw scars, but at some point I decided, "hey, what if the deathclaw removed the entire arm?". And because I have an archivist's soul, I can tell you exactly when that was.
Seven years ago, wow. Here's a sketch of the mechanical arm I totally meant to finish for this but I didn't.
Ok, so by now you've probably noticed something. When I replayed New Vegas in 2021 I decided to make Andy trans (and also 35, but then this year I jumped him to 47). I never actually finished that 2021 playthrough, but Andy took to being a man really well. And, oh, hey, I told you the gender neutral name would be important. Cash those chips in now. "Couldn't you just have changed the name?" yeah but Andy is a practical guy for a practical world. Everyone already knows him by that name. Changing names is bad for business, it messes with your branding. So Andy's a man now, which works out great for me, because it adds another layer of The Struggle. Not a single good day in the wasteland for this man. Orphan, single parent, amputee, medical debt and now even more medical debt. As said by past me:
Thank God for Mister House money! Which was his canon route until this year (well, last). The reason for switching him to the NCR route was because of my FO2 replay and Noah Caldwell's Gervais Fallout Retrospective Masterpiece, which I've watched countless times. In this video, Noah says:
"The NCR is one of the most important factions of both Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. But if the player doesn't display a shred of curiosity and compassion for the tiny rural settlement of Shady Sands in Fallout 1, and doesn't come back to check on them, then that future never happens. (...) Making the NCR canon in future games is clever and rewarding (...) because the fact that the NCR exists at all is a reference to the player's initial investment and involvement in these foundational stories."
And later in the video:
"What's more interesting about the New California Republic is the sensation of following in your own footsteps, in a place that's both familiar and unfamiliar. (...) Without you, the player, none of this would've been possible. What makes that so fun and complicated is that not all of it is good or agreeable."
And hearing those words right after playing Fallout 2 got to me, I admit. I did this. The NCR is mine, I brought her into this world and it's my job to take care of it ;_; She's ugly and messy but she's mine and I can't abandon her, I have to try to fix her!
House!Andy was a very fatalistic character. It was about being so obsessed with yourself and closed off from the rest of the world to your own doom. I liked that about him, I like tragic characters, I like when characters sign themselves off to a miserable fate. But for this playthrough, and for who I am now, I liked the idea of Andy losing that selfishness he was born with and going "you know, what we have now isn't great, but we can try to fix it". It's kind of a bold shift in his character, but the more I played it, the more I liked the idea of him changing his mind, being changed by the wasteland and the people he met. It's never too late to fix things! Andy doesn't like the NCR and it would be easier to give up, but he can't! And he says as much to Ulysses at the end of lonesome road
So that's the person Andy is now. Life sucks, but he cares. Enough to try anyway. He's a far more hopeful character, and a union man, spiritually at least. And it feels good to explore that in writing!
Moving forward, one key aspect that I'd like to explore more is the topic of chronic illness. Andy has a stimpak addiction since the time he got jumped by that deathclaw. The entire right side of his body aches frequently. The head shot left him with short term memory loss, brain fog, light sensitivy and mood swings. As he ages, all of his physical issues will continue growing, and I'd like to explore what that looks like. So much of fantasy and sci fi is about characters with cool scars but no complications, so I'd like to use this opportunity to learn more about these issues and explore them in writing and drawing!
As cheesy as it sounds, this character grew up with me :) So here's to 10 more years of Andy! And if you read all of this I LOVE YOOOUUUU MWAH 💋
Bonus 62 year old Andy that I drew and posted here
And if you want to read more about Andy you can do so here
2087
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tangentwithtanner
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