So True - Blog Posts
hey remember that one time tasuku saw two queer people in love and then proceeded to want to scream at the sky
ANY TIME SOMEONE SHAMES YOU FOR WRITING FANFICTION
REMEMBER THAT THIS
IS FANFICTION OF THIS
THIS
IS FANFICTION OF THIS
THIS
IS FANFICTION OF THIS and Plato’s Ring of Gyges
AND THIS
A MODERN AU OC-CENTRIC VERSION OF THIS
EVERYTHING IS FANFICTION OF SOMETHING, WE ONLY CARE THAT IT’S GOOD AND MAKES US HAPPY
Remus: I feel like I can be myself around you.
Sirius: You’re usually weird and quiet around me.
Remus: Yes.
remus lupin variants:
mop
wet rag
left sock
dusty blanket
throw pillow
carpet
shoebox
eco friendly confetti
old laptop
best thing about Ianthe is that the bone arm is so fucking stupid. it doesn’t make any sense. it sounds cool in theory but in reality having her entire right arm reduced to only skinny little bones probably just make her look off-balance and weird. the joint that connects to the shoulder is either surrounded by open exposed meat or has had skin manually grown over it so that her upper arm looks like a corn dog. I assume lyctorhood + bone magic means that her body can do whatever it wants but also how is an arm without muscle going to have any strength behind it. she’s one unlucky landing away from snapping clean through the gold plating and exploding her rapier arm into a dozen useless shards. Yes she can just regenerate it but why go through the effort. Why is she only making herself a Fat Glove on an as-needed basis she is a flesh magician just put the meat back on it. except she never will because it’s her daily reminder of the closest she ever got to having sex with harrow
harrowhark nonagesimus is the character of all time. she's 3'6 and made of soggy pipe cleaners and will hiss at anyone who gets too close to her and yet she is almost universally beloved. palamedes sextus is like this is my best friend and my special guy. ianthe tridentarius is like i WILL marry this nasty smelly woman. gideon nav devoted her soul and body to her after hating her for 17 slutty, slutty years. god himself was like you are the wildest and saddest bitch i've ever met and you are a daughter to me. and harrowhark is just sitting there with 3/4 of a brain and vomit on her robe
So, full disclosure, I haven't been a Solas fan before.
I am now.
And that's because of Veilguard and the many, many ways in which I felt let down by this game.
The aspect that bothers me most is the reduction of nuance and complexity.
Rook's hero's cakewalk (because “journey” really isn't the right word) is a ready-made path that offers no deviation at all and never challenges the player in any meaningful way.
Sure, you can spend some time pondering the pros and cons of saving Treviso or Minrathous. Ultimately, it makes no difference. Rook does their best, they just can’t be in two places at once.
Same with the companion character arcs. What does it mean if you decide to you turn Emmrich into a lich? For the most part, it's idle musing. Indulgence. He’ll be happy either way, there are no real stakes. Yeah, your actions do have consequences, just not the sort of consequences that make a substantial difference. It’s the illusion of choice – reduced to cosmetics.
The problems with decisions that cost nothing is that they don’t feel like an accomplishment. They also don’t allow for character growth. Rook doesn’t change, they remain static. Even the section in the Fade where Rooks faces their regrets is easy and comparatively lightweight. Varric was killed by Solas, Harding resp. Davrin died in combat and either Bellara or Neve was abducted by Elgar’nan. It’s not like Rook’s decisions actually caused these events, it’s not like Rook actually failed through a choice they had to make that turned out to be the wrong one. Everyone was there willingly and volunteered to fight the good fight. Rook’s regrets are not about real guilt, they are about feeling sad and guilty. And that – it needs to be said – is not the same thing. At all.
At the same time, the story carefully avoids any kind of true ethical dilemma.
It's not even about the lack of mean or edgy dialogue options; that’s just a symptom. The cause is the writers’ unwillingness to let realism intrude in Rook’s fairytale – the lack of anything that would require Rook to compromise on morals, or fight temptation. Rook is never faced with any sort of moral conundrum, or allowed to act out any kind of vice that realistic characters have. In its straight-path simplicity, Rook's story is apparently written for children and people who remain child-like in their yearning for simple, uncontested truths.
Of all the sorts of conflicts that a story can offer, Veilguard carefully avoids the most realistic and (in my opinion) interesting ones: Character vs. self and character vs. society, aka, politics. The game firmly refuses to go there. To the point where it creates a completely unrealistic consensus on all sides that eliminates yet another sort of conflict: character vs. character.
If Rook and their companions would talk politics, they’d all be on the exact same side. In a two party state, they’d all cast the same vote.
I am sure that there are many players who feel comforted and reassured by that fact, who sincerely believe that this is how stories should be written. That stories should reflect the world not as it is but as they think it should be. But for everyone who likes their stories a little more realistic, that lack of meaningful interpersonal conflict, that lack of real diversity which comes not from appearance but from different cultures and opposing viewpoints amounts to a frankly cringe-worthy, artificial and juvenile surface-level interaction between characters. Or, to phrase it differently: the diversity remains skin-deep and doesn’t extend to the philosophical, and even in the few instances where it does, it shies away from the political.
Which means that the only conflicts that remain are the most boring and stereotypical ones: character vs. monsters resp. the supernatural, where all foes are evil in the blandest way (Supremacist Venatori! Fascist renegade qunari! Power-hungry necromancers!). These conflicts are resolved through exploring maps and endless, repetitive combat.
The only thing that brings a bit of nuance to the game is Solas’s story. And there is an element of character vs. character in Rook’s and Solas’s relationship, but the sad truth is that what could have been a fascinating mirrored character journey falls flat for all the reasons already explained – because where Solas is a character as layered and controversial as it gets, Rook is anything but.
Solas’s story shows how even people with the best intentions and the greatest integrity are ultimately broken by what life throws at them, both by the decisions that are forced upon them and the choices they make on their own. It shows how a prolonged war is always a sunk cost fallacy: I’ve gone this far, if I stop now, it was all for nothing.
Rook’s victories, on the other hand, come without a cost – both in terms of moral corruption and in accountability. The guilt Solas bears is real. The fight against the titans, followed by his war against the Evanuris, requires compromising his own morals, one day at a time, one century after another, he’s trying to save the world yet doomed to fail. Sacrificing the spirits to win a battle after the war has gone this far? Every single war leader around the globe would make the same decision. In fact, all of them do: They do sacrifice the lives of others if it will help them win, they do send soldies into the trenches to die, whether these soldiers want to or not, and they are rarely, if ever, truthful about the reasons why.
In a certain way, the story of the spirit of wisdom turned flesh is reminiscent of the biblical Fall of Man: the original sin. Solas has fallen, and he’s broken. In trying to heal the world, he’s trying to heal himself. The burden is too heavy, the responsibility to great, the knowledge that he is responsible for all of it too devastating. Solas’s greatest conflict is character vs. self. It has the potential to be great. In a way, it is. It’s the single redeeming quality that, depending on your interpretation of what went on behind the scenes, the writers managed to salvage from the original concept of Dreadwolf or the lone pillar that withstood all their attempts to bring it down.
Only sadly, infuriatingly, in the end, that fallen hero’s ending is put into the hands of a protagonist who judges him from the perspective of someone who has never even stumbled – not because they are wiser, braver, or kinder. No, just because the writers were gracious – or cowardly? – enough to never let them fail.
The game gives Rook a moral high ground which isn’t earned in the slightest because Rook never had to walk even a quarter of a mile in Solas’s shoes. They don’t know what they would have done in his stead, they have no idea what it actually means to see the sorry shape the world is in and know that it was your hands that shaped it. And even where Rook might actually be culpable – the interruption of Solas’s ritual that freed the remaining Evanuris – anyone is quick to assure Rook that it wasn’t their fault.
Whatever regrets Rook carries, they’re born from self-doubt and trauma response. Survivor’s guilt, mostly. When compared to Solas’s immense guilt, Rook’s regrets are, for lack of a better term, insignificant. That Rook manages to face them doesn’t mean that they are more truthful or emotionally mature, it just means that Rook’s story is a tale for children and Solas’s is not.
It’s not that I’m necessarily opposed to the idea that the player decides Solas’s fate through their actions. It’s the injustice of it all that bothers me: The player is led through a game that provides a safe space for their character, one that is devoid of any interpersonal conflict and any ethical quandary. Rooks succeeds through kindness and heroism and taking their companions on team bonding exercises.
As if Solas could have won the war against the Evanuris if he’d taken the time to take his companions on coffee dates.
The juxtaposition – Rook vs. Solas – fails, simply because of this deep divide. Rook’s story is detached from reality and yet Rook gets to be Solas’s judge, jury, and executioner. On what grounds?
As I said, right in the beginning, I haven’t been a Solas fan before. But by the end of Veilguard, I was firmly, irrevocably, Team Solas, just because I was so annoyed that the narrative put Rook in a position of moral superiority. I detested my own character. Jesus, what a goody two-shoes! I was rooting for Solas simply because his story was so much more: a genuine tragedy, a study in complexity. Rook, on the other hand, remains bland, snotty, unchanged. Untried.
The thing is, I don’t believe that my reaction was one the writers had intended. I strongly feel that they didn’t mean for me to pick up on their double standard, that they expected me to walk away fully satisfied, convinced that Rook and The Team were the Good Guys because they went on picnics and petted the griffon, their final victory well-earned and just. If only Solas had had a Team and taken care of their emotional needs – he could have taken down the Evanuris with nary a scratch!
It’s all so very disingenuous.
Rook and, by extension, the player exist in a bubble of sanitized content. That is clearly deliberate. The player is meant to like it there. (In that sense, it’s only logical that they changed the title from Dreadwolf to Veilguard.) And clearly, it does resonate with a certain kind of their player base: mostly with people, I think, who would like their real life to be a bubble too and whose only experience with moral corruption is when they find it in others.
i’m gay but i’m always gonna choose the well developed straight ship over the 2 bland and incompatible white dudes that have 500,000 fanfics written about them. you guys just hate women.
if you want me to consume a new media you MUST catch me at the exact moment when the stars are aligned and the air pressure is equal to the current degree of the sun’s peak against the horizon and all the cosmic energies are perfectly unified (aka my old interest is fading out) or i will nod and say “im adding that to my list!” Knowing theres no chance i will check it out
i call him jesse james bc he AINT a saint
God I love the osc. I know there's some bad parts, but the strides it has done for indie animation are actually insane. most well done object show pilots end up getting quite a bit of attention and it's all because of this community if people who like talking objects. I'm pretty sure cheesyhfj was in college when he made hfjone and he made it mainly on his own, thats actually incredible to me. one of the best object shows (in my opinion) made by some guy in college. and he was able to do that! beacuse the community is so vast and supportive! inanimate insanity started as a fan project for bfdi by some kid with barely any animation knowledge! the nightly Manor was a remake/rewrite of his childhood object shoe that was cancelled! none of these would have grown to the size they are without extreme support from the community and I love that so much. idk I'm just gushing but it makes me feel happy man.
-🖋⚫️
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the amount of times i went to someones blog (who posts about ii) and looked up 'lightbulb ii' to see their content of her is embarrassing 😭
If true we HAVE to make this the biggest flop in gaming history, as in 'destroys the company' levels of gaming flop as in a 'lesson must be taught' gaming flop, as in 'E.T. destroyed atari' gaming flop
Tyr and Týr are in the same room and have to convince Freya that the other one is Odin and HE'S the real Týr.
Odin got got.