dreadfutures

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Idk how to caption this, I think he says it all.

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sword in the right hand of the divine

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Tshirt idea I had

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This Dragon Age comics and art book Bundle is currently available on Fanatical with tiers of £1.80 and £9.15 available. [link, via, Mass Effect bundle]

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This Dragon Age comics and art book Bundle is currently available on Fanatical with tiers of £1.80 and £9.15 available. [link, via, Mass Effect bundle]

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i am very obviously a vivienne enjoyer and i do really like the idea of vivienne becoming divine and being able to enact wide-spread change for mages but like. walk with me for a second. imagine a world where vivienne becomes divine and then, shortly after, is forcibly removed from the position and forced on the run. walk with me.

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coldplay was right. nobody said it was easy but no one ever said it would be this hard…..

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Dishonored landscape

Little landscape I drew inspired by my fav game Dishonored. Love these old brick houses and rusty roofs, and spent a lot of time on searching color scheme, cuz I wanted to convey that game gloomy/misty green atmosphere.

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the conclave fandom really out here making the most insane art and it is just so weird to me like

I am happy to be heretical and all but I don't know if everyone knows how heretical the cardinal yaoi is. the load bearing cosmic wrongness it has in the real life religion and why. like have we become so detached from IRL culture to just think that "ooooo taboo" as a sweeping general spice without realizing where it falls on the scoville scale

I love all of it it just gives me a sense of awe

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umm fucking sniffsniffsniffsniffsniff ??? ? (x)

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the reason healthcare is free in the Pokemon world is because every time some corporation starts hoarding all the wealth some 13 year old comes in with a team of literal gods to stop them

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This is what the Elgar'Nation had me draw on stream.

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30 second clip of Devotion - watch me struggle with getting their faces right and refuse to put in flowers (before putting in flowers).

(❀❛ ֊ ❛„)♡

the full video is 28 minutes. If anyone wants it, I'll put it up on youtube. Here's just some tweaking missing because when I looked at it on my desktop screen I noticed that I somehow managed to egg-ify the circle, plus I wanted a different background colour.

I rotated Merlin’s head bit by bit ➔ I wanted there to be skulls at the bottom ➔ I didn't like how it looked ➔ I did not want to add flowers ➔ I added them anyway ➔ didn't want to add purple to the painting ➔ I added purple ➔ lavender (devotion, love, loyalty) plus ivy (dependance, endurance) and some wildflowers plus deadly nightshade (death (to Arthur's enemies)) ➔ I ended up adding both skulls and flowers

I did not want this painting to get out of hand like this and yet it did but I loved every minute of the 43 hours it took.

brushpack:

and to end this post, here's a print of this:

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Incoherent rambling about Antiva and organised crime

Hello, you read it a bunch of times in my disclaimers: I'm Italian. I love lore. Again, I'm not claiming Antiva as Italian, I am just analysing the lore through that lens because it's my culture. I fully recognise that Antiva is a mélange of Spanish and Italian culture, but I don't feel comfortable speaking on behalf of something that doesn't belong to me, so I only stick to what I know.

I've been hesitant to write this up because I find it really hard to express myself coherently. I have very ambiguous but also very visceral thoughts about the way Antivan lore shifted in Veilguard.

On the one hand, I think a refresh of the lore was needed. To me, the idea that one of the most popular fantasy renditions of my culture revolves around the concept that the entire nation is governed by organised crime is... unpleasant. There are so many more interesting things in Italian history, like trade guilds, maritime republics, etc. that like, did we really need that level of stereotypisation? I don't know, I think we could have done with something more tasteful or interesting.

As someone who people in real life have asked if my country was really governed by the mafia, seeing it in my fantasy game is just another reminder that that's how we're perceived abroad. Not a fan of it.

Despite this, I really enjoyed Eight Little Crows and The Wigmaker Job because of the focus on family politics, which is something that is very culturally relevant. At the same time, I was afraid it would lean more and more into the epic narrative of the mafia that has been promoted by American movies that couldn't be further from the reality of organised crime.

But I frankly don't even know what to make of what they did with Antivan lore in Veilguard.

As I said, I recognise that a revision of the lore was needed, and it's hinted at in previous installations. It doesn't come from nothing. Zevran has been cleaning up the Crows via murder for decades now. It must have had some effect. The new guard of Talons is also presented in a more idealistic and politic/trade oriented way in Eight Little Talons, but nothing of that or almost nothing makes it in the actual game. It's handwaved away.

And that doesn't sit right with me.

The previous rendition of Antivan lore was painfully stereotypical, but sadly, it was at least a merciless and raw mirror to look at. It didn't shy away from the fact that it sucked.

What we have in Veilguard is... much more painfully surface level. I don't really know what to make of it.

Nowhere it mentions reform, or a revolution. I think that's the direction they were going but there is no text about this, only subtext.

I can't really come to terms with how the topic was banalised and emptied out until it turned with something so shallow that is more an aesthetic than anything. Like as if we're cosplaying the mafia. And that is unacceptable.

Let me tell you in no unclear terms. The mafia sucks. It's not an aesthetic to be worn. It destroys my country from inside out and I have a stomach ache every time I see it glorified.

It exploits and kills innocents continuously and it poisons my country.

Some real life examples of what the mafia did:

Heading reads: strangled and thrown in the acid. It's about an 11 years old whose only "crime" was to be the child of someone who was in the mafia and testified against it to the authorities.

In 1992 the mafia blew up a highway to make sure they killed a magistrate who was fighting against it. Four people died and 23 were injured.

To this day the mafia is an accomplice of real world slavery and exploitation on top of the plague of drug and weapon trafficking and its businesses are not even a local issue anymore, but worldwide.

As you can imagine it really hurts in a visceral way to see something that still causes a lot of harm to real people being trivialised and made into an aesthetic.

And this is where my semi-coherent thoughts end.

I don't know where to go with this. I enjoyed parts of the crows arc and the more intimate family drama aspect. My rook is unapologetically a crow. I write Antivan lore tidbits because I find it fun.

I just wish we could have had that in a more sensitive or meaningful way. Something that was thematically satisfying.

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afternoon tea 🍯🍵🌸 | prints