emcandon

[emcandon]

doodled @emcandon's response to me finding the pulley crossbow on mt gelmir and exclaiming "miquella why did you MAKE A MACHINE GUN buddy are you okay"

[emcandon]

[emcandon]

tumblr is, if anything, the Appalachia of social media...easy to get lost, sparsely populated, out of the loop with fast-moving modern trends. Attached to tradition. Close-knit communities. Believe in "talk shit, get hit." Everyone is doing their own thing in their own obscure little holler. Prone to pulling the most inventive turns of phrase you've ever heard out of nowhere. Somebody's always starting a racket. We sometimes repel outsiders with much aggression. Lots of talk about hell and damnation to be found. Everybody tends to forget about us for some reason

[emcandon]

it makes me so crazy that friends at the table isn’t more popular. oh hey do you want to check out this thing that literally changed my life? can i tell you about some of the best stories and characters i’ve ever encountered in any medium or genre? no? okay!

[emcandon]

Let's hear those sleigh bells hurgling, ring ding turgling too

[emcandon]

college aus are kinda crazy. they would not be doing all that. There's midterms

[emcandon]

I'm like a fujoshi but for divorced couples

[emcandon]

I'm actually extremely triggered by being asked to reflect on my behavior and unlearn deeply rooted sexist and racist tendencies. You see I've been coddled like a baby my entire adult life and if you're not niceys to me I'll be forced to join the proud boys. This is a YOU problem btw

[emcandon]

i was just thinking about how 90% of my obsession with Diogenes started with Tumblr memes. what if there were similar memes for other philosophers? like jean-paul Sartre or sun tzu?

There are in fact Tumblr memes about Sun Tzu, though you need to be part of fairly specific circles to get the really good ones. I'm not personally aware of any significant body of Tumblr memes about Sartre, but I won't swear on my life they don't exist.

[emcandon]

When violent characters are gentle and tender & when gentle characters are violent and unhinged

[emcandon]

oooooh I'd love to hear your thoughts about DAV if you do ever feeling like writing them out. I personally have been pretty disappointed with how disneyfied the morality of the game has been.

i'm hoping to finish my first run through of the game in the next week or so! and am going to reserve anything longer until then. but in a broad preliminary sense:

i do have positive thoughts and feelings about the game -- they may even be the majority of my thoughts and feelings! imo, structurally and quest-wise, veilguard is possibly the best dragon age has ever been. the overarching plot is legible and tangible, the sidequests are dramatically driven, and the game does a lot of work to make sure your companions are both visible and meaningfully involved

the big set-piece story missions have also by and large really worked for me--i've gasped out loud MULTIPLE times! vs. inquisition, when the only time i even really Felt anything about the plot was during the burning of Haven + finding of Skyhold. (i liked it! i had fun! but that was the only part of the game that had my FULL ATTENTION.) (also DA2 is the best game overall, followed by DAO and DAI duking it out in the parking lot bc they both have positive qualities that the other emphatically lacks)

also as i'm starting to hit the big pivots in every veilguard companion's culmination arc, i've really liked that they don't feel like Obvious Choices (in fact, DA's usual Oppressed vs. Oppressors choice has been basically absent! hoorah!). i'm looking forward to making different choices next play through! (a liiiiittle afraid the choices won't have much material effect but on the other hand, i'm okay with that bc DA's choices are usually set dressing anyway.)

HOWEVER

Disneyfied, MCU-brained, Whedonesque -- whatever the name, we're all reaching for a way to describe that pervasive sense of flattened positivity. it's not just in the tonally off attempt to integrate modern takes into a fantasy setting (tho i would argue DA has been guilty of this before in different ways, and it was silly then too, if less...tiring), but in the way we're constantly tripping over Codex entries or conversations where the game is trying to like, paper over its own lore? basically the writing keeps putting a hat on the Problematic Tropes it's accidentally walked itself into to try and reconcile with its own past, but it's usually not a very interesting hat.

for ex: any time the lore tries to address having determined that the elven gods are 1) real, 2) just assholes, actually, and that because the elves have been alternatively an analogue for indigeneity and jewishness, that makes the evanuris both a colonial trope and an anti-semitic one. uh oh! uh oh!! probably there would be a more elegant and interesting way to unpack this in text, but it's not the majority of what the game is doing.

this has overall bummed me out bc i think dragon age was always at its best, lore-wise, when it was being creepy. and now it's kind of afraid to be creepy!

also i was tempted into playing the first one bc a friend described the mage situation to me bc they knew i'd love it! that i'd be so happy with a setting where all the magic users were walking time-bombs, and the crapsack world's crapsack strategy for dealing with that was to stick all the time-bombs in a box and SHAKE IT REPEATEDLY AND AT LENGTH. that's a bad solution! with some potent human emotional stupidity driving it! how fun!

anyway this is a lot more words than i intended but i just finished emmrich's last big quest (my man...i'm romancing him next run through i can't wait...i love grandpa...) and had to EXPEL THOUGHTS

more on the way at some point possibly? or more deets on specific elements once i've actually seen the ending.

[emcandon]

[emcandon]

I got a party banter between Bellara and Taash about how the Lords of Fortune steal elven artifacts. And then Taash clarifies later that they have a Dalish expert on the team so they can check to make sure the Lords don't sell something culturally important and instead return it to the elves.

Like. I get it. You want the Lords to be fun swashbuckler Disney pirates and Robin Hoods instead of actual pirates who steal and plunder. Because we're only now in Western society realizing that stealing from indigenous groups is, uh, bad. But like. Writing really uninteresting factions for your "dark" fantasy (tho lbr Dragon Age hasn't been dark fantasy since DA2) isn't gonna solve real-world neo-colonialism, ya know? The Lords not stealing priceless elven artifacts and returning them to the elves doesn't signal to me that the Lords are total rascally good guys, it signals to me that BioWare itself is trying really hard to seem morally conscious. "See? We know stealing from other cultures is bad!!!"

And man. Not to be a "political correctness has poisoned media" grifter on main (tbh it's less political correctness itself and more the commodification of real-world activism) but I couldn't help but imagine how this convo would've played out in earlier games, potentially even Inquisition.

You could've so EASILY made this interesting while giving the Lords and Taash and Bellara a lot more depth, while also making it clear that stealing from indigenous groups is wrong.

Just have the Lords, yeah, actually sell those artifacts. But also establish that the Lords take in and help elves from all walks of life. That they free slaves, or collaborate with alienages. Then you could have Taash defend the practice by saying to Bellara that little orphaned elf kids being sold as slaves probably don't give a flying fuck about some artifacts they're never gonna see, but the money from selling those artifacts goes to buying them food. And have Bellara fire back that preserving elven culture is also part of its survival, and that there are Dalish clans that would be willing to pay for them or offer something in return. Or have her say that the Lords are doing charity for the sake of recruitment rather than actual altruism. And then Taash responds that those high and mighty Dalish elves don't do shit to help abandoned city elves, just because those aren't part of their correct elven subculture, and they care more about reclaiming old glory than helping the people that exist here and now.

Then you could have side missions or at least codex entries that describe maybe some Lord recruit being conflicted about what they're doing. Maybe a few of them are collaborating to hijack a deal or steal back an artifact. Have implications that some high-ranking Lords are, in fact, using those artifacts for their own gain, despite claiming otherwise. Have some Lords genuinely trying to help, and believing that gold and trinkets don't matter as much as people's lives, so they sell them in exchange for safety for refugees or slaves or some other helpless group.

But no. Instead it's "hey do you steal from my people?" "nah lmao we have a cultural advisor don't even worry about it" "oh wow so cool and woke of you!" And then that's it. No need for any further discussion. No conflict and no complexity. No bad actors and moral quandaries.

Weh.

[emcandon]

THE SHOULDER GRAB ??? THE BICEP GRAB ??? THE PAINTING ON THE WALL ??? POWDER WITH HER 2 DADS ??? THE WAY THEY'RE ALL SO HAPPY ???

[emcandon]

My favorite moment in the PALISADE finale is when Janine halts the action to clarify the extremely critical point that even though they’re a gross frankenstein bug monster the Chimeric Cadent is still beautiful in like a bloodborne way. Very important

[emcandon]

A better future is possible if we have the courage to pave the roads to it. Also libraries are punk as fuck, pass it on.

[emcandon]

*covered in blood* I'm literally fine guys. im still funny. Would you like to hear a joke Im going to tell you a joke