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The real danger isn’t just that the West is enabling or even partaking in genocide by starvation, but that it is now chillingly comfortable being seen as complicit in it. It's a horrific type of comfort that tells the world, “we know what this looks like and we don’t care.” In this phase, western elites have moved beyond merely permitting genocide under might makes right into justifying it as necessary through might makes righteous, whereby mass starvation is framed as Israel’s right to self-defense. The continued use of this phrase, even by so-called progressives like AOC, ultimately serves as a justification for defensive genocide. This isn’t just cynical realpolitik, but a brazen subversion of all basic moral norms and of humanity itself.

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they’re kind of the best

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Poorly drawn Mareep line

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I’m all for making stuff up when putting mythology in your story but it’s also amazing how many people can’t tell the difference between a work of fiction and what people who practiced a religion or a folk tradition at the time actually believed.

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Very happy with the redraw of these two sketches! Fenris as a Ukrainian cossack and Merril the Bukovyna witch.

Now it's time to redraw Hawke and Isabela, and a new print bundle will be ready 👀

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Wyll motivation for the week <3

I think I saw Karlach version sometime and thought Wyll needed one too

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Wyll is so fucking funny and no amount of acknowledgement about this could ever be enough. He's literally walking around being so casually hilarious completely under-the-radar. He calls Halsin a "thick hunk of an elf". He once accidently implied that he was fucking an ogre instead of killing it and then proceeded to absolutely stumble his way through explaining. He gets excited by Lae'zel talking about carnal pleasures. He canonically tells his pessimistic thoughts to shut the hell up. He volunteers to babysit Shadowheart's hypothetical werewolf babies as long as she gets him gloves. He tries to give Gale a hero moniker like his own. He jokes that his father, the Grand Duke of Baldur's Gate, can't spell. He calls Astarion "Mister Fangs". He makes up storybook chapter names for his own fucking adventures. As a child he got chased by the Flaming Fist for stealing fruit, nearly drowned trying to find mermaids in the harbor, and almost successfully broke into the Counting House. He reads monster erotica, and is not ashamed to tell you about it. He ranks eating pudding among life's greatest moments. He will, without shame and completely unprompted, meow at you. He is 24 years old.

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some experiments with brushes

lasso is really fun to draw

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someone: do you think anders is a good person

the part of my brain that engages in genuine critical media analysis: i think it's disingenuous to label him through the lens of a binary good/evil paradigm because what makes him such an interesting and engaging character is his status inbetween a human with complex emotions and desires and flaws that will never fully align with each other, and the singleminded focus and purpose of a supernatural entity that is literally justice incarnate and has no capacity for nuance and whose very nature is fundamentally incompatible with humanity but the two of them are so deeply connected that they make up a single identity that's constantly at odds with itself and this struggle causes him to act in ways that aren't always clean and often land him and those around him in impossible positions. i think he was morally justified in doing what he did to the chantry but i also believe he understood the magnitude of what he was doing which is why i inherently disagree with the notion that characters like varric or sebastian were wrong in their reactions because that's the very nature of violent revolution—people get caught in the crossfire and are harmed despite their innocence and regardless of the righteousness of the action at large. if someone killed your mom to protect a hundred orphans you probably wouldn't come out of the experience full of love and admiration for the person who killed your mother because regardless of the outcome they still fucking killed your mother. anders destroyed people's homes and lives and there's a conversation to be had about how he gaslit and exploited hawke, his own potential lover, into being an unwitting accomplice even though we know through meta knowledge that he was perfectly capable of doing it on his own and very likely only wanted hawke's involvement because he needed a powerful figure to become the rallying symbol for his cause. the reality is his very nature would have never allowed him to choose hawke and his friends over his goal because to do so would have been fundamentally selfish and antithetical to his newfound identity as one who champions the needs of the many at the expense of the individual. it's a beautifully tragic story about the lengths a person would have to go to in order to enact any sort of meaningful change while constrained in a system that benefits from their powerlessness, and how that process cannot exist without suffering and pain on both the individual and collective level. i also feel like if anders was written by a person with a degree of compassion and awareness for not only the character they were writing but just what living as a vulnerable and targeted minority is like then the narrative and message would have been vastly different than what ended up on screen because, ultimately, the game wants you to look at the stark injustice of a child being ripped away from their family to spend a life locked away in cold isolation where they're at constant risk of exploitation, abuse, death, and even a complete removal of their personhood, and think that there's room for compromise. it's a narrative that perpetuates the myth that passivity and tolerance in the face of oppression is more virtuous than burdening the masses with the discomfort of seeing their own culpability in sustaining it. a better game would have challenged varric and sebastian while also affirming their anger instead of just the latter. a better game would have explored hawke's reaction in a deeper manner that examined their relationship with the system, their own internal biases, and how anders affected their worldview.

the part of my brain that was on tumblr in 2014 and is still extremely petty and spiteful: he should have blown up the conclave while he was at it

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Playing Origins again

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Oh!

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Imagine Hawke travelling with all their companions at once.

A team of four is a game mechanics thing. Why would Hawke pick up just some of their friends leaving the others behind? Imagine them sticking all together instead. A whole band of misfits, breaking into Hanged Man to stand up for Fenris, or running down a dark foundry in attempt to rescue Leandra. Imagine them all at once, venturing into caves, wiping out the Qunari, fighting dragons and demons, confronting mages and templars, protecting Kirkwall - and turning it upside down.

No, a team of four is only a game mechanics thing.

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i was talking about this with ppl, but fenris is actually the more open one about his past and trauma. anders just drops random horrifying statements that u can’t really comment on