Latest Posts by stinkylittletoad - Page 2

Reblog to make it die faster

thinking about blackwall leaving the inquisitor's ass naked in a barn to go get himself hanged. most insane post nut clarity ive ever seen

A rest day isn't enough. I need one billion years alone in a crystal.

[guy who hasnt drawn in a few weeks voice] yeah the world is horrible and life is agony

Computer. Iris by the goo goo dolls. Loud enough to kill.

in the mood for Mythal...

sketch

They should block chatgpt on uni WiFi the way they used to block coolmathgames

taking out the complexity

I have this hypothesis that at some point quite late in the writing process of Veilguard someone came in and pushed for the moral complexity to be taken out of the game. Because there are several plot lines which seem like they were potentially intended to be more complex than they ultimately were:

Isseya and the griffons. When I first played this I assumed that the punchline would be that she stole the griffons because she didn't trust the wardens with them after what happened - then deciding what to do about her would have raised interesting questions about war, sacrifice, the greater good etc. But instead there was this reveal that she was planning on blighting them, which makes no sense at all and feels shoe-horned in just to make it clear that she is Evil and Wrong.

Ivenci feels to me like they were originally intended to articulate the very reasonable point that it's not good for Antiva to be ruled by a group of unelected assassins - thus setting up an interesting chance to reflect on the nature of the Crows and the necessity of working with groups who do harmful things. But instead the Crows have to be the good guys so Ivenci is made into this weirdly cartoonish villain to make it clear that they are Evil and Wrong.

Relatedly, Lucanis' plot line feels like it was supposed to culminate with a reflection on his relationship with the Crows and the abuse he suffered, probably with the option to turn down being the First Talon and maybe even leave the Crows. But because the Crows have become the good guys this never happens and hence his whole arc feels quite inconclusive.

As this post points out, it feels like Emmrich's lich choice was intended to be darker and for the lich route to be genuinely a selfish option, but instead it's become this somewhat toothless 'dilemma' where both options are right and you never have to feel bad about your decision.

The initial ritual feels like it was a set-up for Rook to unintentionally do terrible harm while trying to stop the world from being destroyed, thus offering the opportunity to reflect on the dilemma that Solas faced in making the Veil and to understand the moral complexity of his situation. There is apparently even cut dialogue from the regret prison on this topic. But instead no one ever blames Rook and Rook is not allowed to blame themself at all, because they have to be The Hero in an uncomplicated way.

I don't know; it just seems to me that there are all these fossils of a more interesting game in there and they've been sort of clumsily written-over because some exec etc wanted the game to be less challenging or targeted at a younger audience or something.

Had some rambling thoughts about Emmrich and his questline,

It's funny, aside from Solas with his exclusive "is he an asshole or is he a victim?" interpretations in the endgame, I think Emmrich is another example of where they jammed two conflicting characterizations of the story into each other and just let one win out depending on which decision the player made so that each option looks Valid and Good and relatively consequence-free.

like, Emmrich becoming a Lich should have just been a bad thing, right?

Not in the sense that I think the game itself should have pointed at the player and gone "you picked the wrong option", but as a logical extension of Emmrich's arc, was it not a bad thing?

I remember at one point writing that Emmrich becoming a lich didn't do anything to conquer his fear of death even though him letting go of Manfred is supposed to be him finally coming to terms with him parting from people, and how that was bad. But I think I missed the point

I think (especially when you look at the concept art around Emmrich,) the original point was supposed to be that becoming a Lich was Emmrich giving in to his fear of death, ironically dooming himself to an immortality where he is surrounded by death, starting with Manfred's death. That losing people to death, like his parents, is the real source of the fear that he was grappling with, but he does not understand this and grasps it only as a fear of his own end. That it is, actually, on the player to understand that and counsel him wisely. It's an ironic tragedy, a very classic story of someone meeting their fate on the road to avoid it. And that's why it makes sense that he's still not over Manfred, why he's afraid of losing a romanced Rook, why he apparently mourns Manfred still (something I missed.)

But the narrative wasn't really built around this? You understand what his fear of death is about immediately and then the choice to be a lich was presented in most of the dialogue as like, "neato! he conquered his fear of death because he won't ever die! yeah Manfred is dead now but at least we honored his sacrifice and let him rest :)" no one has a problem with what he did, no one calls him out on it, no one but Spite even really cares that Manfred is gone even though Emmrich could have saved him, it's just Cool that he's a lich now. The liches are heroic and so Emmrich's desire to join them is heroic, his fear of death is not what motivates him to make some eldritch monstrosity of himself, it is preventing him from achieving this noble goal to help the dead forever, and leaving Manfred behind is a noble sacrifice that will prevent him from becoming a tyrant lich who just resurrects people at will.

I think the idea of "don't resurrect someone who died just because you miss them, you have to let the dead rest" is a completely separate idea that, in this specific situation, doesn't mesh well with "you shouldn't screw over your loved ones just to preserve your own life, and you should treasure your time with people while you have it," but they interjected both morals and just let them respectively theme the lich and human routes, as if I'm not supposed to think about the bittersweet poignancy of the human ending, where Emmrich proudly watches Manfred grow and achieve, while everyone is high-fiving him over being a skelly man in the lich ending. Or for me to look at the human ending as heartwarming after they already said Emmrich was disturbing Manfred's well-deserved rest and giving up an opportunity to do a lot of good by doing this, and that no one really cared that he was "dead".

(Also, like, as a spirit, Manfred's "rest" was him being sent back into the Fade, which we can now understand to be a spirit prison that Manfred specifically possessed that body to escape, so u know.)

I do believe Emmrich becoming a Lich is at its core meant as a selfish/cowardly act to preserve himself at the cost of someone he treated like his own child, because that was the motivation they gave him from conception. Concept Emmrich was turning himself into a lich to become immortal. In the game, he specifically sought out the liches because he was afraid of death. This is the case even if they interject dialogue later making it seem like he's trying to do this for the sake of the "dead" and it's really important and him resurrecting Manfred would be selfish of him. I don't mind Emmrich saying these things, but I feel like they needed to be lies he was telling himself, something that is not backed up by other Mourn Watchers, or by Rook not being given the option to call him on it, or by the liches having a morally stringent screening process that he passes with flying colors and stuff like that, with the entire narrative just taking the things he says for granted. Maybe the liches should just not be heroic at all, actually. And like if we're going to have it be a plot point that there have been powerful, immortal liches. In Thedas. All this time. They needed to not give a shit about Thedas to at least help me with my suspension of disbelief.

Am I making any sense here, like there's two different reasons Emmrich wants to be a lich and how his fear of death is interacting with it and they don't feed into each other very well imo.

And like, the way he is now this character, who was written to deal with a fear of death, has nothing actually helpful to say about coping with a fear of death, imo. The routes' messaging is either "You don't need to fear death because you can just Not Die" or "You don't need to fear your loved ones dying because you can just Bring Them Back" instead of "Death of some kind is inevitable, so cherish the life you still have instead of spending it in fear."

Idk how psychiatrically sound it would have been. There were apparently people who struggle with Thanatophobia who were helped by Emmrich's character, but like, just talking narratives.

My name is sayde... her name is Sadie... we could be both be Mrs Adler.....

that pistachio completely sealed in its shell is scared and alone, like a miner trapped by rubble. you need to free it by any means necessary. get the gun from your dad's cabinet

I copy pasted parts of this but I do hand letter everything, because while I'm trying to work easier as I'm chronically ill, I am still chronically stupid

too much monogamy in fandom in general

Adobe is going to spy on your projects. This is insane.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3457130/chapters/7585658

You know those cheesy romance novels you see in store nowadays? Well, this is my take on a Solavellan version for my all time favorite modern AU Solavellan fic, "Message Sent" by Aicosu The fic is a bit of a y/n when it comes to Lavellan, and since my personal Lavellan is also named Ellana, I just cast her as the role of love interest.

it was not on wheat...

Regrets of the Dread Wolf

Me, sewing without my glasses on: why can’t I fucking see anything

<Ir abelas,vhenan>

You ever hear that old chestnut about how most people neglect the part of the story of Icarus where he also had to avoid flying too low, lest the spray of the sea soak his feathers and cause him to fall and drown? You ever think about how different the world would be if Icarus died that way instead? If the idiom was to Fly To Close To The Sea? A warning against playing it far too safe, about not stretching your wings and soaring properly? You ever think about how Icarus died because he was happy?

I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why Veilguard feels so hollow is because it makes an attempt to reckon with Solas’s fatal flaw, but completely fails at actually doing so.

This may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think pride is Solas’s fatal flaw. It's a symptom, not the origin point. Solas’s fatal flaw is his inability to trust others. It's a threadline all the way through Inquisition, from the things he says to you (I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory) to the very structure of his personal quest (which does not trigger if you're on low approval with him). He's tragic (in the literary sense) because even in the case of a high approval Inquisitor, the person most likely to listen to him and capable of acting upon it, he doesn't ask them for help. Hell, we know he was planning to tell a romancing Inquisitor, but chickened out at literally the last possible second, that's how deep it runs. That's why it's Tragic.

And I think Veilguard tries to contrast this with the Team™. Which is fine, I guess, until you realise that Solas’s original Team was the Evanuris. None of Rook’s Team™ can betray them. If they don't do the companions personal quests they die, rather than become disloyal in some way. They're all 100% in accord about their politics and what is Right, without real argument. Which is nice, but if your advice to someone with severe trust issues is 'skill issue' that's...unhelpful.

And yeah, Solas did have his rebellion, but he had the rebellion in the sense that the Inquisitor had the Inquisition, not in the sense that Rook has the Team™. And as he says, any powerful organisation inevitably falls to betrayal and corruption.

And he had Felassan, but Felassan also betrayed him (with good reason, but he did actively undermine an operation he was on on behalf of Solas. That is a betrayal), which can only have cemented the inherent trust issues.

But, thinking about it, there is actually a paralell with some of the companions having experienced some kind of betrayal. Lucanis and Illario, Bellara and Cyrion, Davrin and Isseya/the Wardens, Taash and Shathann. And pretty much all of these experience a last minute change of heart, or otherwise come to the companion's POV if allowed to. Is this what they were going for with Mythal in the Atonement ending? I can kind of see the logic.

The problem is, I don't really see why this suddenly turns Solas around. He doesn't overcome his fatal flaw in order to avoid his tragedy. It always comes down to the fact that Solas’s actual reasons for bringing down the Veil are never truly addressed, and likely changed at some point in production between Trespasser and Veilguard. The political and systemic issues of the setting are pushed aside by Veilguard's narrative for individual and personal issues, even well established issues like systemic racism and slavery. It's incoherent to say 'Solas was destroying the Veil because he couldn't trust people, so fixing the trust means he doesn't want the veil to come down', when the issue was 'Solas can't trust anyone else to help solve the harm caused by the Veil because of the betrayal'. The harm doesn't go away because the betrayal did, you know what I mean? And Rook, and by extention the entire narrative, never displays willingness to even acknowledge those issues as existing in the first place, let alone needing addressing in some way. Rook interrupts Solas when he tries to talk about the suffering of the Spirits. So why does he suddenly hand over the dagger, symbolically handing the matter over to Rook?

“Cole is a spirit of compassion, and this world is too bleak to spurn compassion offered freely.”

And so he spurned him, because if anyone could help, it was Cole 😭

The words are from Gareth David Lloyd on Cameo ❤️

Solas, charcoal on paper 🎨

i love how he talks to his horses its so cute

commissions are open!!