Blackwall And Inquisitor

re: my last post but being a little nicer and less pissed off this time. i am really just a vibes girl at heart like truly when i take the myers-briggs i am 99% intuition and 1% thinking and my intuition is always right but thats a post for another time. and i obviously value objectivity and i have done a lot of very logical, grounded analysis of v*ilguard placed completely within the text but i also believe that some things are. just vibes.

sometimes, you can FEEL when something is off. when something is made out of love and when something is made out of... whatever else. with v*ilguard, what comes to mind is fear, anxiety, insecurity, scorn, derision, and hilariously, pride. i feel the fear and anxiety of backlash and being canceled on twitter in the sanitization of the lore and the lack of flaws in its major characters. i feel the insecurity in the way they marketed the game as something it was not and tried to hide the lack of worldstates and wiped out the south of thedas as if the franchise's established history was something to be ashamed of (i havent forgotten the interview where they made fun of zevran and didnt know who he was). i feel scorn in the way lore that people spent 10 years analyzing is retconned, ignored and simplified, or how characters like varric become cheap plot devices and grabs for nostalgia rather than the fully fledged characters they used to be. i feel derision in the ridiculous fucking dialogue that uses the vocabulary of a 4th grader and sounds like a bad middle-grade novel. i feel the pride in ahistoricism of the narrative, in its condescending overall theme that feels intended to punish players who drew the "wrong" conclusions from their past writing, or the way they thought they could divorce a game so completely from its beloved roots as if the past three games that got them their place in the industry was a gangrenous, rotting limb they could not wait to cut off. the only time i ever feel any love from that game is in a couple of solas's better moments when it feels like trick's love for him is banging on the walls and screaming from the basement and you can only hear the slightest echo from under the floorboards.

when i play inquisition and origins, in contrast, i feel how much the devs loved that world, those characters (most of them... and with viv and sera and you can FEEL how much the lack of love from their writers stands out in comparison to the others. also anders.) and perhaps most importantly to the whole experience, ME!!!!! the depth and complexity of the lore and characters feels like a bridge that creates a relationship between the developers and the player borne out of our shared love for the world of thedas. they littered clues and mysteries and puzzles around that game because they knew we'd be smart enough to figure them out and would have so much fun doing it. they gave us morally complex characters because they trusted us to evaluate and draw our own conclusions about them. they allowed us to make complicated and sometimes fucked up decisions because they had faith in their audience to act like adults playing a fucking video game. for adults. da2 is being left out of this because there is definitely some hatred in that game but they managed to spin it to be juicy and interesting so it gets a pass and for the most part you can tell the characters at least were loved and they had faith in the audience to handle a balls to the wall banger tragic rollercoaster of a story. v*ilguard is like if someone made cocomelon knockoff youtube videos for babies except they fucking hated babies and were just using these videos to put on their resume for their next job. and maybe there were a few people there who DO love babies and want this to be something more than cocomelon, but they're the minority, and you can feel how the end product is not just making fun of the audience but of them too.

the whole game feels like an insult to the players and half of its own developers, and is trying to make fun of you for being there and playing the game in the first place. "here is your nerdy gay fantasy RPG slop that you whined about for 10 years, fucking shut up already and leave us alone." and we literally know this is true. gaider has tweeted about this several times now, a new thread a few days ago about how much of bi*ware at large HATED dragon age. the jason schrier article from 2019 uses the term "black sheep". its why half of the developers fucking left over the past 10 years and the only people left to make this game were people WHO THINK YOU ARE A LOSER AND WANTED TO MOVE ON TO MASS EFFECT!!!!!! and even the people who didnt want to move on to mass effect think you're stupid and interpreted the last game wrong and need to be taught a lesson. god no fucking wonder i never want to play this game again. i said i was going to be nicer and less pissed off at the beginning but you can see how riled up i got just writing this. rancid vibes.

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

Chord.

my fav part of origins is the fact that it's a love letter to "the end does not justify the means". the entire game, in almost every quest, this is the constant question that's thrown at us. everyone in the story tells us that they did what they did because it would achieve the best outcome. from uldred's uprising in the circle tower, to zathrian's cursing of the werewolves, to bhelen's coup. loghain himself uses this as justification for the retreat at ostagar - that it was the morally correct decision to abandon the field, because it guaranteed some of the army would survive and could regroup for a new assault on the darkspawn in ostagar. and it's so specific that loghain, as the primary antagonist, loghain is the one arguing that the ends justifies the means because he is either your parallel, or your mirror.

to be more specific, my favourite thing about origins is that you, as the player character, are faced with the exact same choice. you will always resolve the circle tower uprising. you will always resolve the issue between the dalish and the werewolves. you will always settle the secession crisis in orzammar. you will always fight the archdemon and win over it. but how? what are your means? will you murder a child to spare redcliffe? will you slaughter cornered circle mages trapped in a tower with no escape? will you kill innocent werewolves who had nothing to do with a tragedy that happened hundreds of years ago? will you support a king that has his own family's blood on his hands because he wants change or a king that's more committed to culture & tradition over justice?

does it matter? to you? to anyone? why does it matter, if you're going to get to the same place in the story at the end?

and the story tells you. again and again. it matters. it matters because the ends do not justify the means. to roughly quote ursula k le guin, it matters because there is no end - you start the awakening dlc as your own warden if you survived, or as an orlesian warden if not. so, all you have left is the means.

it's very clumsy in a lot of places, and there's obvious issues if you look at each case in closer detail (e.g. the ideas around social justice re: dalish elves & mages), but overall, this is the kind of story that makes origins so special to me tbh. it really holds up a mirror to this kind of cold, utilitarian morality that's so often rewarded in "dark" fantasy genres. like idk it's very good to me.

My paladin again!

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads

|| “The Maker smiles sadly on his Grey Wardens, so the Chantry says, as no sacrifice is greater than theirs.” ||

my secret to art happiness is it's not about how many notes what you draw is likely to get. t's about how many times you're going to go back to it, to your own art, and think "this FUCKS actually and caters to me entirely, specifically, fully. i love this artist (me) (me who i drew this) (myself)"