#worst of jade

[cannibalings]

overheard someone say that lesbians don’t have male icons the way gay men have female icons…. baby you have not logged onto tumblr dot com. the lesbians are dedicating blogs to men who look like the default mii

[ryllen]

somehow along the way, we collectively agree jade would own a borzoi,

and that's beautiful

[jadequarze]

It is. The bird

[noisyghost]

i've never drawn a complete ref sheet for alex and he's been swirling around in my brain a bunch lately so i committed way too much time to actually making one for him lol.

Alexander is Cheslov's older brother and resident anti-social nightmare man. He is devastatingly quiet and forcefully stunts his own emotions, so he usually comes off as pretty deadpan and uninterested. But the dragon he's basically merged bodies with once burned an entire city to the ground so. It's no surprise that he's kind of agoraphobic :')

[crowleycorvid]

Thinking about Hutchins and Harumi I'm so ill. Garmadon Rulez did something to me. He sang her to sleep every night. He took her to libraries so she could research despite her parents disapproving. He gave her that journal to help her cope with her trauma.

He didn't have to do any of this. None of these things were because of his obligation to the royal family really and in fact he sort of went behind their backs taking her to the library of domu (even if it took some convincing). He was the first to suspect her of her plans but didn't tell anyone, not even the ninja when he definitely had a proper chance to. I think he genuinely just cared about her. And that's making me so

[heartscrypt]

azul stronger than me bc if the tweels trapped me on a boat with my crush and started blasting the soppiest song known to man id seriously jump off

[lesovyart]

((shows up to Willow 2 yrs late)) I LOVE THEM

[mikansei]

we know jade's cornerstone can read people's desires, and there's no visual indicator on her person that gives away when she's using it. it only makes sense she'd use it to interrogate the suspect in the egyhazo case, especially since she was asking into his motive. her cornerstone would give her a way to either verify he was truthful or catch him in a lie.

(she ended this interaction by telling him "may your schemes be forever concealed," by the way.)

point being, she had the means to know - really know - his deepest desires.

egyhazo was an elaborate scheme to land himself in front of someone powerful, to wager his life in exchange for a chance. he said as much. he even said why: to ask for a measly 30 tanbas, and use that symbolic pittance to rise to even greater heights. what he didn't say is that he didn't want wealth and power and status for its own sake - even if it wasn't a full-fledged plan at the time, everything he wagered, everything he gained, he wanted to use to help the avgins. to repay their faith in him. to lead them to prosperity like he was supposed to.

and jade had to have known what he wanted - what he desired - too.

jade gave him the chance. she took him under her wing, guiding him through the corporate ranks all the way to missions like iymanika, the test for obtaining his own cornerstone. it had to have been some time between the interrogation and iymanika - between being a prisoner in rags with nothing to his name, not even personhood, and sending a warlord into financial ruin and subsequently pulling off the double indemnity gambit with jade - all the while aiming for the status being a stoneheart would grant him to save his people.

but he found out from jade that the avgins were gone only after he'd been given the aventurine stone.

all that time, jade knew they were gone - and deliberately hadn't told him so.

after all, if he'd known beforehand that his goal was unachievable, he might not have wanted to become a stoneheart anymore - and then her investment in him would never pay off.

is it any wonder his voiceline about jade is "be careful, her kindness always comes with a price"?

[missescalientee]

jd and jade have a small wedding either in the wilds or when everyone is together in vacay island

I can’t speak for the fic as I want that to be ambiguous for now, but I can say for the explorer au they did have a big wedding! The guests were friends they’d met on their travels, Lief was a big part of it too cuz they couldn’t leave their little angel out!

Their outfits were made by hand, Jade is wearing white rose petals as a dress, JD a leaf cloak with a feather collar, and Lief is wearing the smaller petals from the rose his mom used!

This is where the httyd inspo for this au comes in because I always imagine their wedding song to be For the Dancing and the Dreaming

[cannibalings]

we need to take classic literature away from hollywood film directors.. u can have this back when u have learned how to use it responsibly

[ryllen]

too tired to doodle properly, but have a florid

[sleepypandazzz09]

Imagine if silver learned how to use his fairy powers and pulled something like yuno did from black clover. He would be so powerful and so badass 🤩

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

perhaps my most #cancelable videogame take i can post on this website is i think that the kind of people who say that anyone who picks the "morally wrong" or "mean" options in video game dialogue should, as a player, feel bad about their own choices/morals in real life. is that those people are just another flavor of the kind of dudes who play Disco Elysium and get mad for not being rewarded for picking the facist options. both of these groups are reducing games to "a thing I want to agree with me and everyone else who doesn't either suffers or does not have the option to play a character who behaves otherwise" rather than "a medium where you get to (or even Have to) explore different kinds of characters in order to experience the full depth of the story and characters in it."

When I want to pick options in a game that are mean, negative, arrogant, or ignorant, it's because I want to explore what would push a character into becoming that kind of person. Sometimes I want to see how the NPC characters who I-The-Player like/agree with react to someone who is fundamentally different from them. I think it's GOOD actually when the narrative allows you to push limits and especially when it has the option to then punish you for it in some way, such as losing options/routes later on, or companions straight up abandoning you for your choices. It DOES often make me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable to make choices in a game that are so counter to my own, but it means I get to experience that discomfort in an isolated environment and also think about what it means, what would push the character or even yes a real person into actually feeling those things. And I get to play with what ways the narrative could challenge them/make them grow over the course of the game--or on the other side, it can let me make a character who does start off more open/accepting but let the events of the narrative push them into being more reactively closed-minded instead.

I like that we have invented a medium where you can play a game multiple times and experience it differently depending on the character you play as. Books and TV and movies are all static--the greatest draw of games to me is the ones that are responsive, that can tell a slightly different story every time--when other characters in the game respond differently to you because of it, or some paths open up and others don't. And so yes it did disappointment me when a franchise that previously had these elements, Dragon Age, did not include them in the most recent installment. I don't think games should have options where you get to just hit a button to say something racist with no consequences or exploration into why a character would do that. but like, if i can only ever play a game as an upstanding person who is morally right all the time in basically the same flavor for every dialogue. I only get to truly play that game Once, you know? And I only get to see the way the companions react to someone they like and trust. And never really go deeper than that.

So like... I just sit and think about the scenes you can get in Inquisition. with Cassandra breaking down, because she fears she placed a would-be tyrant at the head of a powerful organization--that she searched and searched and chose wrong. Of Varric who is desperate to convince you not to become a monster, like the last person he feels betrayed him. Vivienne intentionally pissing you off because she wants to see how far you'll go when angered, how much she has to worry about your reactions. They say so much about the companions, what they fear most, and where they will draw the line. And especially in Inquisition, at these crisis points--you don't have to double down. Your character can have a come-to-Andraste moment where they go "woah... is that really how people see me? is this what i want?" and I think that kind of option can do way more for encouraging actual players to examine the choices they make in stories, more than locking the player into supportive, non-aggressive options does.

now. do i think all games execute these flavors well? no. writers and devs will have their own biases and blind spots, even if they are otherwise well-intentioned. and I don't think the ends of the scale need to extend from "absolute angel" to "horrible bigot", because the real complexity of course lies in the middle. I am not asking for games to let me be bigoted at every turn, what I want is games that let me make the protagonist deeply flawed in one or more ways--fearfully closed-minded to things outside their upbringing, or afraid of change to the status quo, or who want to advance their own aims regardless of consequences to others. I actually agree that the game was correct not to include any options for disrespecting Taash and their personal journey for example, but I do wish... idk maybe that we could have had a scene where if for instance the player character avoided outside-world missions relating to clearing away blight, they could confront us on how this might devastate the natural world and its creatures like dragons, and push us into trying to resolve it. Or in the other direction, if you spend the (currently meaningless) time giving money to background NPCs begging in the cities, Neve could could have a special cutscene thanking you for your attention to people otherwise beneath notice. You know?

And of course not every game can do this, I can write those sentences up there that represent hundreds of hours of dev time, of course they can't do it all. But the prior games usually did have at least a little of this, and that was enough to make me really fall in love. I KNOW the tumultuous development cycle, restarts from scratch, interference from higher-ups all contributed to why Veilguard was unable to hit those same marks this time. And we probably won't ever know how much of the loss of options/reactivity was intention vs a side effect of these things. But I wish people wouldn't frame players who miss these aspects as insane/morally corrupt. When for most of us it's because we genuinely enjoy challenging and exploring these aspects of reality in fiction in a way entirely unlike what we actually support in real life. i fully acknowledge not everyone desires to play this way. and that's fine!!! i am glad people can enjoy doing a "good" run each time that brings them joy. but for me it really limits the potential bounds of my enjoyment i guess. I like media that is complicated and messy and makes me think, and extra so when I get to see how playing that way impacts the greater story around it.

[chessb0r3d]

i cracked the code.

[rottenapplefae]

making out?? in my kymerian cuirass???

[lavellaned]

Always thinking about how Solas’s personal mission in inquisition is a direct mirror to how he came to be (wisdom spirit pulled from fade, made to kill, twisted into a demon) and his approval/disapproval option during it. He wants to straight up murder the mages who did that to his friend so badly you get a big ol Solas Approves if you let him, and vice versa if you don’t. Like, yes, it is for his friend, but it’s also for himself. If he were still not bound to a summoning circle of his own like his friend was. If he weren’t so deep in the trenches of a bajillion year long trauma bond, I think that’s what Solas wishes he could do that to avenge himself as well.