contessaxchaos
contessaxchaos
feral fen'harel fanfic writer
248 posts
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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I'm chewing so hard on the 'guilt is a distraction' comment Solas makes when asking Blackwall about his romance with the Inquisitor
It gives some potential insight into how he was feeling when he finally made his decision to abandon his plans and commit to a relationship with Lavellan. When did he switch from viewing it as an entanglement which could lead to trouble, to viewing his original plans as a distraction to their love and happiness together?
I think it would've been around the time he realised that, not only was he in love, but what falling in love actually meant. This is a man who has never experienced romantic love before. Who has never felt love be elevated to such a level, who has never felt so elevated himself. Who has never felt so encompassed by love in this way, who has felt, ever since he manifested as an elf, that he was not good enough, that he was an outsider among even the People he loved and gave everything he had trying to save and protect. Who, for the first time, is being loved for exactly who he is, with no expectations of leading a rebellion, or demands to twist himself from his purpose, as payment. All the relationships he has had with people up this point are essentially transactional.
Based on the in-game scenes, I think it's after his personal quest, when his spirit friend died. He tries to walk away from Lavellan on the balcony, but he can't. In his own words, he can't bear the thought of losing them. It's then that he knows he's too far gone, and what that means. It means that this world he hated was worth something. It means that he's in love, totally gone for this person, and that means he has to consider them as equally, if not more, important than his plans. That being with this person is closer to his heart than restoring Elvhenan is, than restoring immortality to the elves is, than avenging Mythal is. (I think the acceptance that they were more important than his plans came later, but this scene was the beginning of that.)
Then he drops 'ar lath ma, vhanan' on them and walks away. He says it in his own tongue, so they know he means it from the heart. He calls no one else vhenan, because this person is his heart, they are sharing the core of him. It's at this point that he knows he is being deeply selfish, that he has chosen his own heart over his duty, which is why he is so angst-ridden as he walks away. It's painfully bittersweet, like everything in this romance.
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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intimate solavellan
bathing together underneath a cascade waterfall. washing away the days weariness. shoulder bites. lavellan in solas' arms in a hotbath. solas writes sweet nothings in elven on lavellans back. what did you write? the things i want to do to you. back hugs always whenever wherever they can afford. booping snoots in those saccharine moments. sugar cube in solas' tea. adoration in their eyes for each other for themselves not what they represent. legs entwined in bed while reading. solas big spoon. lavellan backpack. ar lath ma. ar lath ma. ar lath ma. in heavy sighs all atangle. conversations in the dark. lavellan whispers. what do you dream of? you. a future with you. solas allows himself this. kisses on eyes closed. lavellan believes.
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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It goes like this, the fourth the fifth
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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yeah im super busy but i'll be here forever <3
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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Jason Schreier for Bloomberg reports: 'Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio'
The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil. The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in October, led EA to gut BioWare
[note: article is below cut after these tweets]
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Jason Schreier: "NEW: What went wrong with Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Why was the writing so tonally inconsistent? Why did it feel so shallow? Why were there so few choices? Really, after ten years of turbulence, it was a miracle that anything came out at all. This is the story [link]:" [source]
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Jason Schreier: "The fatal flaw for Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't just that it pivoted from single-player to multiplayer and back again. It was that after the second pivot, the team was forced to keep going rather than hit the reset button and take the time to create a new plan." [source]
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Jason Schreier re: this old tweet from Casey Hudson: "Fun fact: when I first reported at Kotaku in 2018 that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted to become a live-service game, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson wrote this on Twitter. But it was not entirely truthful. In reality, the game was being designed around cooperative multiplayer, replayable missions, etc" [source] Casey Hudson's old tweet from 2018: "Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you'll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about "live" it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story."
Rest of post/article under cut due to length.
(bold in the text below is mine for emphasis)
"In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem."
"As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment."
"The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years."
"Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. “I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’” Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series."
"In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.” Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer."
"“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.” In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games."
"But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously. As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings."
"“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.” Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game. When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered."
"“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.” Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. “That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”"
Article by Jason Schreier. [source]
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contessaxchaos · 7 days ago
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what is he staring a... oh of course
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contessaxchaos · 8 days ago
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on being yourself
@ brainsoupp_ on twitter// @stmichaelthearchangel// @ cybermrcury on twitter// @throughmy-eyez // @ shellerina on twitter// @caesarsaladinn// @ nelsoncj4 on twitter // @ heimberg_a on twitter// make your own kind of music by cass elliot// @ soledadfrancis on twitter// ? // @ sourcenectar on twitter// @superorganism
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contessaxchaos · 8 days ago
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WIP
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contessaxchaos · 9 days ago
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haven’t even started on the background yet and it’s already driving me insane
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contessaxchaos · 10 days ago
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a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.
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contessaxchaos · 10 days ago
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get haunted, fool!!!
from the fic on ao3 🪻
(uncensored version is on bsky)
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contessaxchaos · 11 days ago
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WIP Wednesday (Friday Edition)
Tagged by @alice-dead and @liberaquantobasta-catossa 😘
Here’s a sneak peak of a collab with @postboxrose that I’m painting feat. Solas and her Inky, Luella.
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Tagging: Anyone (I’m late lol)
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contessaxchaos · 12 days ago
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“YOU KNOW WHAT SOLAS DICK LOOKS LIKE?”
Solas is, in fact, packing heat. 
He must have painful erections as his pants are, as geeky-jez put it, “one step away from cutting off his circulation”. 
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contessaxchaos · 14 days ago
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0.02 seconds apart at the winter palace.jpg
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contessaxchaos · 15 days ago
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im back in the fucking building
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contessaxchaos · 18 days ago
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I saw this meme with the Zaundads and a follower on ig suggested this constellation and I had to make it with Myrra. I HAD TO!
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contessaxchaos · 18 days ago
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Day 60
It was a different kind of prison, this body. Mythal had called it handsome when he first stepped into the light on two feet and stumbled into her arms. 
Bodily instincts will kick in, she said. Brace yourself. 
She bathed and clothed him. She was there for his first sip and bite. He soiled himself; she cleaned him up. These are all a normal part of the process, my friend! she said, laughing. 
He shivered and his entire prison shivered with him.
Highlights of Solas's entire year imprisoned in Redcliffe: Like embers to ashes
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