may the dread wolf never hear your steps
cherry valley forever

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
NASA
No title available
todays bird
Not today Justin
we're not kids anymore.
noise dept.
DEAR READER

Andulka
Mike Driver
styofa doing anything
One Nice Bug Per Day
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Monterey Bay Aquarium

shark vs the universe
almost home

ellievsbear

izzy's playlists!
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@viagosbitch
may the dread wolf never hear your steps
i am always thinking about that one quote from the wigmaker job which is like “lucanis was the kind of man you couldn’t look away from- until he looked at you” and then when rook says “nothing i’m seeing makes me want to look away” oughhhghghhh
“Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken.”
The thing is, it's not about the Therapy Speak. It's not that everyone who disliked DAV hates healthy communication as a dynamic in fiction. It's not even about only being allowed to be a good guy, really, because most of us did do that anyways (though the option not being there is a loss I grieve even if I never chose it myself, but that's another rant for another day).
It's that DAV does all that stuff at the expense of being believable. At the expense of characters being permitted to have personalities. At the expense of emotions behaving the way emotions actually work for people. At the expense of letting the plot build tension through the stakes we're forced to grapple with.
Half the fics out there take the conflicts between the characters in the previous games and resolve them. I do it myself ALL THE TIME because I like to find a path to resolution through just about any conflict, that's what fascinates me about telling these stories. But the higher the stakes, the harder a conflict is to resolve. You CAN resolve any conflict, you CAN communicate healthily through any emotion, but you can't skip the time it takes to process it all to even be able to communicate it. As someone whose got CPTSD and recovered from many Traumas, I can tell you that the TIME it takes to work through it is not something you can fast track, and the ups and downs of your emotions on that journey can't be skipped. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to do it, exactly how it's going to feel, or exactly what the end state will be, you CAN'T speedrun it.
DAV has stakes that are astronomical, but nobody treats them that way. Nobody experiences denial - a common psychological reaction to being presented with information that shatters your worldview. Nobody expresses any distrust in the establishments handing out this information - something common among cultures that have at times been at war, even if those wars are "resolved" in the present. Nobody really ever breaks down - something that any person is capable of under extreme circumstances, especially when facing multiple crises of faith that challenge everything they thought they knew about themselves. Nobody blows their lid because they've been repressing the hell out of everything. Nobody grieves for southern Thedas, the entire thing dying off screen and giving you, the player, NO way to engage with it in any way.
Not to mention there are barely any inter-party conflicts, when there should be a lot more. Why is everyone (except Spite) fine with it if Emmrich sacrifices Manfred to become a lich? Why is everyone fine with Illario potentially being set free if he was working with the venatori and Elgar'nan, two sources that have actively attacked everyone in the party? Why doesn't Neve resent Lucanis if Treviso is picked? Why doesn't Harding get pissed off at Nevarra for having a secret society of liches that never helped during the Inquisition's war against the breach and corypheus? Why doesn't Harding feel ANYTHING about Ferelden and the rest of the south? Shouldn't Harding resent the fact that she's stuck in the north while her home dies?
All of these conflicts ARE resolvable, but not easily. And it's not believable that they're never brought up. It's not believable that these characters skip through everything that happens with like, barely a frowny face most of the time. In DAO, Alistair leaves if you don't treat his conflicts with respect. In DA2, your party members try to kill each other if you don't pay attention to their conflicts/emotional needs. In DAI, people can leave or betray you, Cassandra throws a chair at Varric and tries to body him out a window. ALL of these can be resolved but it takes effort, and the characters get to SHOW that they're bothered by them and struggling the way a person would when faced with those emotions.
The problem isn't the therapy speak, or that everyone is loyal and won't leave, or that they aren't mean to each other enough. It's that it's toxic positivity. It's toxic as fuck to imply that anger or grief should be smiled over or else you're giving up, and it's damaging to people to avoid engaging with their own negative emotional responses to extremely negative stimuli. It's pasting optimism over very real, very weighty issues, sweeping it all under the rug, and you keep waiting for the lid to blow off the pressure cooker that creates, but it never does. It never becomes anything that emulates real emotions, which is why the whole damn thing feels hollow. Everything's dying and nobody cares, not even about themselves, and that's NOT healthy communication.
It's bullshit, half-assed storytelling that didn't tell us the actual story, just the vague idea of what it could have been.
Reblogging this again specifically because it made someone so big mad that they had to reply to it to say that I lacked media literacy before they blocked me, which is. Extremely funny behavior. lmfao I've had MANY discussions about my quibbles with DAV, with people that have a broad read on what worked/didn't work about it, including people that have found a fair bit to like underneath the Problems, but I stg nobody is more annoying than the people who have made it their entire personality to Love It.
By all means, enjoy the game. There's definitely a few glimmers of fun stuff in there, and the combat is pretty solid, so I can get why, if that's the most important part of a game to you, you wouldn't be bothered by the rest. But you're not an oppressed class because other people didn't like it. You're not being victimized because we want to talk about what we did/didn't like with each other. And Bioware isn't going to fuck you for running around the internet waggling your finger at people you disagree with.
Curate your experience online and touch some damn grass, ffs. <3
The Warden, The King
also the best boi
hello dragon age fandom i am not dead even though im 99% a pitt account now
This was my piece for Tension, a fanfic by @galedikarios for the Emmcanis Minibang! It was a joy to read the fic even if the moment that caught my eye to draw was VASTLY tonally different from the rest of the fic. I'm excited for everyone to get to read the fic and excited to participate in more group events in the future!
Demon of Vyrantium
Justice: I do not know what makes demons as they are. Such evil angers me, but I do not understand it. Anders: Well, I hope you never come to understand.
a conversation before the end of act 3.
version with rambles!
the justice/anders relationship is one of my favourite parts of all the dragon age games, any permutation of it is so intensely tragic. Their old selves died and created a new one and they don't even know that they should be mourning what they lost? tragic. They exist in an uneasy fusion until all that is Anders is gone and Justice is back to possessing little more than a corpse? tragic.
BUT. my favourite dynamic is that Anders is not as controlled by Justice as he says. Because imagine. you're a mage and all you want is agency, the freedom to live your life your way. you say mages should be free, and at best you get a half-hearted 'eh sure'. but then, when a literal embodiment of justice starts saying it, people listen. surely a spirit whose entire point is Justice knows whats objectively right? and the result is intoxicating -- you can start voicing things you've been saying for years and for the first time people take you seriously.
but then maybe you start to rely on it a bit too much. you make an overly cruel remark and get odd looks. you can't have that, you've learned that the only way to survive is to be charming, to make people like you. you blame it on Justice -- any outburst, any unpopular opinion, any selfish action, its the spirit's fault. maybe you believe it too -- after all, you're the suffering idiot who made the mistake of trusting a demon. and now you're getting sympathy as well as recognition.
and then all of a sudden it turns bitter. you vent to your friends, and they beg to not lose yourself to the demon. that's weird, that was you speaking. and now any opinion you have is Morally Right. you aren't allowed to be wrong. You make a mistake, someone gets hurt, and people still celebrate you as the arbiter of right and wrong. you just want to run away from it all, but that means justice has abandoned all mages. you have to stay. you know how it must end.
and you realise that the freedom you so desperately wanted is gone. that you are in a prison of your own making. not free to make your own choices, not free to speak your own mind. you are but a Symbol, that some revere and some revile. because a possessed voice is a dispossessed voice.
and alongside all this, you've trapped, betrayed, and besmirched a friend who trusted their soul to you.
tragic :)
as a Josiemancer anytime i go anywhere it's just this
couple wips for a thing
with your mermaid hair and your teeth so sharp.
Useless Veilguard fact of the day: Day 429
When Cyrian appears during the Demon's Bargain quest his eyes are red, likely signifying his bond with Anaris.
However, you can spot them momentarily turning brown when the two of them start arguing.
Then, when Anaris responds, his own eyes light up and red sparkles appear around Cyrian's face as his eyes turn back red.
Check out the tag for more useless facts: #useless davg fact of the day!
DA banner commissions for @thehangedmancreatives!
(links // tip jar!)
Anders by Lorandesore
Relent.
No mistakes, I know the stakes 🫴 🤌 🫴 🤌 🫴 inside you there are two clowns a wolf and a crow 🐺🐦⬛ based on this iconic video