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my sweet girls!

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the inglorious mask

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i miss her like a mf...🚬

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what do you know of loss?

no words for how much I adore these two characters and the ways their journeys parallel one another's... take this as part character study (what if they helped each other heal!) and part ship content (they were made for each other...) anyways. the shadowzel illness never stops

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Has Lae’zel ever hit on you in front of a traumatized Mayrina?

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yeah , don't know if anyone notice it but I used the face from the spongebob meme xD

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i want to live (all origins)

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The strength economy is in shambles.

100% Karlach just thinks a deathmatch is a fun friendly time

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Delicious in Baldur’s Gate

Nyachooh

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I heard this audio and immediately had to redraw it 🫠

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The Main six Baldur's Gate Companions

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some domestic shadowlachs <33

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im cooking

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Veilguard did not ‘ruin’ Mythal insofar as it made her seem abusive. She always was, as both the goddess and part of Flemeth. If anything, Veilguard glossed over it.

The Mythal of DAO, DA2, and DAI is not benevolent. She is justice turned vengeance. She seeks a reckoning that will shake the very heavens in vengeance for the injustices she suffered. She uses people, especially the people closest to her, to set that board in her favor.

All of Flemythal’s ‘help’ in the first three games is as transactional as the greatest of spirits we meet. Everything she says is to give fate a little nudge in the ‘right’ direction - her direction. Everything she does demands a price in return - In Origins, it’s to send Morrigan with the Wardens in order to better shape her as Flemeth’s new host and get the old god soul. In DA2, it’s to preserve her immortality. In Inquisition, it’s the Well and thus Morrigan/the Inquisitor’s servitude, Kieran, and the fact that her only aid against Corypheus is binding yet another free-willed creature in the dragon. 

All of the advice she gives each protagonist is double-edged. She sows the seeds of the old god soul in Origins. She plants the idea of ‘here lies the abyss’ in Hawke. She makes the Inquisitor an unknowing pawn in Inquisition. The throughline for all of these is Mythal’s reckoning, her vengeance, and her doom upon all the world.

Nowhere is this more blatantly obvious than with Morrigan. Morrigan’s entire story with Flemeth is one abuse piled on another. Physical, mental, verbal, emotional - you name it, Morrigan received it. Flemeth created an environment so toxic that Morrigan can’t even fully see just how terrible it was. It is cruelty without purpose, save for Flemeth’s own ends.

That ‘a soul is not forced on the unwilling’ is not the measure of benevolence she makes it seem. There are endless ways to break someone’s will, as demonstrated by Flemythal in both Origins and Inquisition: Flemeth fashioned for Morrigan a ‘welcome home present’, ‘designed to sap Morrigan’s will and ease the ancient sorceress’ possession of her daughter.’ Mythal created the Well of Sorrows, a ‘reward’ for her most faithful servants that saps their will, replacing it with a compulsion that lets Mythal control their actions. Those who drank are not noble warriors who swore an oath - they are ‘bound,’ to quote Abelas. 

Mythal’s abusive and manipulative nature is not unique to Veilguard. Veilguard waters her down. The bones of Flemythal’s true character are still present if we read into datv’s overbroad and shallow lines. Even Morrigan’s ‘the regret of a mother’ could follow Flemythal’s characterization if it was presented as insidious and terrible as it truly is. It’s pure emotional manipulation - which the first three games established as Flemythal’s MO. Morrigan wears Mythal’s crown, she bears the staff Mythal does in her judgment fresco, she plays Mythal’s game. The Morrigan who spent a decade hiding and protecting Kieran from Flemeth’s machinations, and who spent a lifetime suffering her abuse. Where is her ‘self’ in Veilguard? Subsumed and corrupted by Mythal. Just like the sentinels, the geased, and to a lesser extent, Solas.

You can’t blame it all on Flemeth’s influence, either. There’s a reason Mythal chose Flemeth, and why they remained symbiotic for all these years. Dalish legends paint Mythal in much the same way as Flemeth, and since their legends grew from Evanuris propaganda, they’re not talking about anything Mythal did since her murder, and they’re certainly not talking about Flemeth -

Morrigan: In most stories, Mythal rights wrongs while exercising motherly kindness: let fly your voice to Mythal, deliverer of justice, protector of sun and earth alike. Other paint her as dark, vengeful: pray to Mythal, and she would smite your enemies, leaving them in agony. Solas: The oldest accounts say Mythal was both of these, and neither. She was the Mother, protective and fierce.

This gross emotional manipulation is simply expanded in Veilguard to include everyone closest to her. It’s how Mythal coaxed Solas from the Fade and manhandled him into doing her bidding. It’s how she directed her servants to worship her in the Trials of the Gods, and how she deals with Rook asking for her help to save the world. There is nothing benevolent in requesting her aid - it is a hardline of justice and arrogance, and every answer Rook gives to appeal to her emotions or that the world deserves her atonement is met with a harsh dismissal.

It’s not so different from the Petitioner’s Path in the Temple of Mythal - using that logic is an easy way to win her favor in Veilguard. Instead of speaking truth, Rook has to bend over backwards to make her feel good about herself to the point that she’ll deign to help save the world - from Solas, who ‘betrayed’ her by refusing to submit, and not the crimes of the Evanuris or the blight.

There is nothing ‘good’ about Mythal’s role in the atonement ending. It is a tragedy, and one Mythal escapes entirely. She superficially admits her culpability, she doesn’t apologize, and she doesn’t love. All she did was ‘release Solas from her service.’ And as always, that ‘kindness’ is transactional - he receives that catharsis if he binds himself to the thing that broke the world, and the very thing that ensures his people, both elves and spirits, are never truly free. She suffers nothing from this ending. Her culpability isn’t punished by words or any other consequence. It’s Solas who’s condemned to suffer the weight of both of their crimes. It would almost have been kinder if she hadn’t made her admission at all, because now he knows and accepts her equal role, and still he alone is punished for it all, forever, in eternal servitude.

At the end of all of these stories and manipulations, it’s not the world that suffers most from Mythal’s abuse. It’s the people closest to her. If ‘everyone is a pawn’ to Solas, what does that make Mythal’s worshippers, her daughters, and whatever Solas was to her? Her love was never free and without terrible price. Mythal took that which Solas and Morrigan value above all else - their freedom. The ‘best of them’ demanded everything from Solas, her daughters, and her people. Their wills, their freedom, and their very selves. All for the promise of a benevolence and unconditional love that she is incapable of giving.

Veilguard did not invent her abuse. It softened it. 

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Dorian: Neve says you can communicate with Solas through some kind of mental link.

Rook: Yep.

Dorian: How extraordinary! Would you be willing to pass on a message for me?

Rook: I guess so.

Dorian: Marvelous. Then kindly tell him that I said the following: “Go fuck yourself with that splintery, moldy stick you call a staff until it breaks off in your arse, you ancient bald twat.” Did you get all that?

Rook: I got the gist.

Dorian: No, no, that won’t do. Here, let me write it down for you. Tarquin! Do you have a quill handy? It’s very important.

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Don’t you know your Sam? :(