evanhereonearth

[evanhereonearth]

URGENT NEED OF DONATIONS TO SAVE TRANS MAN'S LIFE

Ko-Fi (please note that ko-fi has fees) Current funds: 0/$2000 My partner ended up in a nightmare situation after leaving hotel he booked for 2 weeks at bc of a sexual harassment from a long-term guest. Hotel refuses to refund and we have no money left at all. He is currently staying at safer hotel, but we can't extend his stay past September 6. His phone's screen broke, and he can't access calls/finances and other important resources. All this while he is still dealing with fresh trauma and serious chronic illnesses. He can't communicate verbally rn, deals with flashbacks and other consequences of severe trauma. We are in contact with LGBT organization, but they are simple volunteers and don't have many funds themselves. Donations will cover phone repairs, transportation to a safer place, hotel stay, food and other survival needs. If anyone wants to help with extending his current hotel stay, please contact me via DM. More information in my blog (I update it more frequently than carrd). Carrd: https://helpcharlie.carrd.co PLEASE REBLOG HUMAN LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

[evanhereonearth]

WIP: All of You. Unrendered except a little.

There are a million things I want to say to you.

But mostly it's that you are safe with me.

Let your wolf howl. Let your soul shatter. Let your heart beat.

You would hold me with mine. I will not break under your waves, and you will not break either.

We will wake with the dawn, spirit self seeing self. Wisdom and Grace, forever intertwined.

[evanhereonearth]

she had one job - and she nailed it

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I still think there is magic. The author of the masterpiece is @celterium

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What's the old Dalish curse?

May the Dread Wolf take you?

And so he did💔

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Okay, so. Shit kicked off, and not in a fun way. We’re talking “my new man had a brush with death a fortnight into our relationship” levels of shit kicking off.

The last month has not been fun.

I won’t spill details, beyond hospitalisation, rest of life go boom too, and all of it coinciding with the anniversary of my best friend’s death, so I spent that grief anniversary terrified of losing someone else, so…yes. Not fun.

I spent a lot of time asking myself who I wanted to be and how I wanted to show up. Listening to my intuition, trusting my heart’s whispering, and also regulating my nervous system through a lot of silence and fear, because he withdrew into his walls.

That intuition told me a lot of things. I know a trauma response when I see one. And I also trust my instincts about people. Also my nose? He smells safe. Weirdly, my nose is bang on about recognising safe people (including when someone has become UNsafe, but that’s a different story). Humans are animals too, but I digress.

The point is, that was a crucible of a Mercury retrograde.

And it ended. Fucking finally.

And he and I reconnected in vulnerability and mutual compassion.

I asked myself a lot if I was self-abandoning by waiting and hoping for a month when we’d only dated a fortnight. I decided I would be self-abandoning if I ran; whether I owed it to him or not, I don’t know, but I do know I owed it to myself to trust my instincts. Running would have also meant abandoning him, and that also wasn’t something I was willing to do. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.

Reader, while this is not a “hold steady for that random guy you met on Hinge when he leaves you on read for days” post, this is a post about grace for the people who have shown you care and consistency and communication and just happened to have a crisis. Or, like, a flurry of them in quick succession. Jab, cross, jab, uppercut, hook.

I saw the punches land. I knew where they hit on existing wounds. And as much as I wanted to stop it, I couldn’t. And when I got hit on the backswing and pummelled by my own hits, I reeled as much as he did. We never hit each other, but he couldn’t be there for me when he was KO’d on the floor. I didn’t get hit to that degree, so I crawled toward him and stretched out a hand and waited.

(I don’t know when this became a boxing metaphor.)

I’m so, so glad I held space for him and for myself. Did I have woe-is-me moments where I thought the same bloody pattern of me getting abandoned was repeating? Lol, yeah. Did I breathe through it and find compassion for myself? Yup. Did the ghost of my best friend maybe knock a trinket off a shelf to tell me when to send a text and he replied immediately when I obeyed? Erm. Maybe. (Yes, if you are a woo woo bitch like me. If not, cool.)

When he finally woke from that beating and saw my hand and reached back, when we reconnected, we did so with the same care and communication we started with from the first day. Directness and mutual respect. Wholehearted apologies and curiosity and seeking each other’s truth. Commitment to repair what needs repair.

That’s a hell of a lot for the first two months of dating, but lads, I am still just as cooked as after date one. More. Officially have been plated and garnished.

I’m keeping this one as long as he’ll have me.

I don’t need perfection. I need someone who tries. Who gives me the same grace I give them and who lets me in. Who sees their own wounds clearly and says, “I won’t let my fears and pain hurt you again, and this is what I will do to make sure of that.”

It’s still early days, even if we lowkey covered the whole in sickness and in health and for better or for worse on a speed run from hell.

Neither of us navigated this tangle without stumbling, but that’s kind of what I’m here for too. It’s not avoiding mess and life and conflict; it’s handling it on the same team.

Even as we both got hit with what felt like our own personally tailored cosmic shitstorms the same week in some godawful galactic joke, we treated each other with kindness and gave each other what we were able. That wasn’t always enough to meet a need fully. That’s okay. We each gave a hundred percent of what we could.

And that, my friends, is a triumph—whatever happens next, I’m excited to find out. Because if this man can come back from this mess, if I can be safe to have my feelings and needs and express boundaries, if we can meet each other with such care and kindness and tenderness?

We might just be unstoppable.

🥹

When you’ve got a date you’re painfully excited for and he sends you a voice note about his own excitement and chuckles halfway through and you almost pass out because it hits the Solas chuckle activation node:

[evanhereonearth]

Update: best first date I’ve ever had.

I’m cooked, pals. Cooked.

When you’ve got a date you’re painfully excited for and he sends you a voice note about his own excitement and chuckles halfway through and you almost pass out because it hits the Solas chuckle activation node:

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Hard agree. I’ve suspected all this time that the live service killed the spirit of Thedas because they had to flatten it out to make it MMO-able. You simply cannot incorporate the depth of choice from previous games in something like that. Hard enough to do that well in single player.

It’s deeply depressing and why I cannot blame the devs for what we got. They were forced to make a shit sandwich and then told fine, you don’t have to have shit in it anymore, but you still have to use the same bread.

The biggest criticism of Veilguard is it doesn't engage with moral dilemmas in any way. Slavery in Minrathous just isn't discussed. The nuances of Solas's cause are never brought to light.

For me, it helps to remember that the devs weren't allowed to make the game they wanted.

Joplin was looking to be the DA4 that we wanted. But EA canceled the project in 2017, told the team the next DA had to be a live service, and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director at the time, resigned. That's it. The DA4 we wanted and that the devs wanted to make died.

The crew was told to start over. And the direction they were given was that live service games were more campy. Traditional DA was too dark and too gritty for live service. They were forced to make a tonal shift. They couldn't touch slavery in Minrathous! That was "too dark for a live service."

And then Anthem flopped, and they were told to make the game single player again. This should have been a moment to rejoice. The team should have been able to go back to the drawing board and start rebuilding the game the way that they wanted it.

But they weren't allowed. Too much money had already been "wasted." They had to piece a game together with what they already had.

To me, looking at how much the devs were dicked around, that makes Veilguard an absolute triumph. Is it a fitting sequel to Inquisition? No. Is it a satisfying entry to the series? No. Does it explore the past of The Dread Wolf and his current fight to restore the old world in any meaningful or interesting way? No.

But I enjoyed playing it. I got a brand new cast of companions, and I love every single one of them. I got a new protagonist to build up and canonize. I got my Solavellan Heaven ending that I never in a million years could have predicted and was scared to hope for.

Veilguard is a terrible DA game. It's shallow and unsatisfying. But I also never rolled my eyes at the slog of combat. I enjoyed every moment I got to spend with our companions. I revelled in all the new locations we got to visit (even if they weren't explored in the depth that I would have liked). I got to spend time with a project that the devs undoubtedly put their blood, sweat, and tears into.

It was a labor of love to give us something out of the meager tools they were given. It is heartbreaking and devastating, and the franchise didn't deserve that kind of treatment. But the devs pulled something out of that mess. And the fact that it works as well as it does is incredible.

We could have had nothing. I could have been in Solavellan Hell for the rest of my life. But instead, I got to laugh and cry one more time with characters I love and cherish. I'll forever wonder about what the game should have been, about what that pre-2017 build could have turned into. But I was given a gift - a very imperfect, broken, yet beautiful gift. And I can't help but be thankful for it.

[evanhereonearth]

When you’ve got a date you’re painfully excited for and he sends you a voice note about his own excitement and chuckles halfway through and you almost pass out because it hits the Solas chuckle activation node:

[evanhereonearth]

[evanhereonearth]

Okay, I have been absent for a long while but it’s because I was busy working out a decade of Solavellan angst in an original book to kick off a new (spicy, kinky) trilogy that is not full-on Dragon Age inspired but is definitely me A: having Unresolved Veilguard Feelings, B: needing to write some fantasy with Gaelic in it in a way that honours our culture and doesn’t fetishise it, and C: soulmate romance plus dragon bonds.

Anyway, if you like the idea of a tortured wolf chained to a power-hungry tyrant to hunt down forbidden magic but pining for his target, you might like Wilder.

Enemies to lovers in forced proximity with a bonus spicy fake relationship, anti colonialism, Gaelic in a second world fantasy that feels like living Gaelic culture in our world (by someone who knows cos it is my world), and kinky smut (the relationship is a D/s relationship that includes negotiation, active consent, and limits) for all your fantasy romance needs.

Ebook is here and in Kindle Unlimited!

Paperbacks are also there but you can get them directly from me too!

I’m absolutely unhinged about Eala and Conn, and I hope you will be too.

Dragooooooons too! Bull would be so bloody jealous.

Maybe if there’s interest, I’ll post a wee snippet. 😇

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you know what? fuck you (marries your leitmotifs together so that you might be redeemed by love)

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ISNT IT? PERHAPS WE SHOULD ASK YOUR FRIEND, THE IRON BULL. TELL ME, WHERE IS HE?

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I’ve never understood this love more than I do right now.

It’s a strange thing to both see myself in Lavellan and in Solas at the same time, echoes in my relationships.

There’s something about the kind of relentless love it takes to be in relationship with others when you feel like you don’t deserve the care, faithfulness, nurturing, or consistency you try embody. I think about my best friend Rekka, who came along when I needed them most…but also when I was at my most avoidant. I’d been shattered in love, romantic and platonic alike.

I wasn’t ready to be loved. I certainly wasn’t ready to allow love into my heart.

Rekka loved me anyway.

They loved me with a relentlessness that terrified me. They let me be avoidant and push them away. They let me be skittish. Scared. Prickly.

Rekka loved me anyway.

I only got to be Rekka’s best friend for three short years before cancer took them. In those three years, Rekka taught me more about love than I learned in two marriages. I spent most of that time fucking scared shitless. The cancer was the third party the whole time; somehow, somefuckinghow, I didn’t run.

I let Rekka past my walls and I loved them as hard as I could.

Now I am…maybe in Rekka’s place. Maybe in Lavellan’s place. Was Rekka a fool for loving me? Is Lavellan a fool for loving Solas?

Most people might say yes.

But I also know what that love can do. Rekka taught me how it can find you where you sit, scared and certain you are and will be alone forever, and surprise you when it pours in through the cracks, fills the space with a new thought, that maybe, just maybe, this person can’t be a fool. Because you know they’re not actually a fool. They’re brilliant and smart and clever and wise, and they’re here. What are you going to do, tell them they’ve got the wrong guy?

Probably, if we’re honest, but this brilliant, smart, clever, wise person is also stubborn as fuck.

Lavellan didn’t know there would be a resolution that could reunite her with her love. Pretty much everyone around her thought the entire idea was more insane than an ancient elven god throwing a temper tantrum and moving the moon.

Maybe she loved him because she knows too well how unworthy he feels of her love…because she feels that way too. She’s simply decided, unilaterally, that she no longer cares to live beneath a mask only he can see beyond.

Maybe all love is unhinged, a reckless gambit.

Maybe we’re all just casting out a hand and hoping when one catches ours, neither will let go.

“Where do I start when I open my heart?

It’s never easy falling in love again

Cover my scars when I open my arms

It’s never easy falling in love again”

(Open Hearts, The Weeknd)

[evanhereonearth]

Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to Gareth David-Lloyd (Solas' voice actor) during a Swedish convention. Here's some of the things he said about his work on Dragon Age (that I remember!)

He's not entirely happy with the writing of The Veilguard. "But that's what happens when there's too many cooks" (paraphrasing) and when all the original people disappear from the project (like the layoffs). He said something about how when passing on the project to other people (writers) there's sure to be some lost information or different interpretations.

He didn't know more about Solas than the player did during Inquisition. He just thought Solas was a mysterious companion that disappeared. He only learned more when he got the script for Trespasser (and his reaction to getting all the info from Trespasser was "this is awesome")

I asked how he prepared for the role of Solas the first time he got the role, compared to when he came back for The Veilguard, and one thing he did for The Veilguard was just to play Inquisition several times (which ofc he "had the time for since it took years for The Veilguard to come out" (paraphrasing)). The third time he played Inquisition he romanced Solas, which was "a fun experience".

He hasn't finished playing The Veilguard because he's playing on his son's ps5 and doesn't always have the opportunity to play. He received a free code for the game, but for pc, and he doesn't have a gaming pc (if I recall correctly).

Solas' performance was first done with motion capture, which David-Lloyd said he would've loved to have done himself. Mainly because he originally had to match his voice acting to that of the mo-cap actor's performance (like dubbing), which of course limited his own performance. But in the end he performed the lines in his own way, which he felt was best for the final product, and was more happy with the result. The animations then had to be altered to fit David-Lloyd's performance instead.

[evanhereonearth]

Making a sketch page for them RIGHT NOW