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Having a uterus is so confusing. Like *watching the murder scene in an art film* Why am I crying? *looks at calendar* Oh.

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Once again I want to push my vampire Vetinari theory. That mf knows no one else could do the job like he can, and he patiently maneuvered the pieces of Ankh Morpork society to get Black Ribboners a toe in the door. His... friend, Lady Margolotta, is a vampire. He's well set up to quietly become immortal. Most people probably wouldn't even realize until someone asked, "How old is he now?"

Listening to Night watch for the millionth time. Only just realised that the event that sent Sam back 30 years was Jeremy and Igor starting the crystal clock.

Once again I am struck by how brilliant Terry Pratchett was at plotting. I wish he had lived long enough to tell us who followed Veninari as Patrician. My money is on Carrot. I can't see Sam every accepting it. But then who heads the Watch? There is so much else that he might have told us. Not just what happens to Princess (Alice) after she grows up.

This means that Lu-Tze was living twice in that time period. He was having one life in Ankh Morpork sweeping and waiting for Sam to turn up (ten years), and other in the Monastery of Oi-Dong waiting for Lobsang Ludd.

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Honduran White Bat!

Fuck it what's your favorite bat specie mine is Woolly painted bat. (Maybe long eared bats as well i dunno)

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First round’s on me

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blushing is so stupid you're literally my blood wtf. obey me

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Fuck it, I'm going home.

Back to my original obsession.

Pallet Town, here I come.

I feel the calling of Pokémon again.

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I think Mighty Nein and Bell's Hells will be sort of extended family forever after this episode, if for no other reason than that Jester and Fearne have bonded.

But more than that, the way that "Nein Hellz" sounds so good and the ways in which some of their stuff is so closely tied (Caleb and Essek studying dunamancy and Ashton's brain being a dunamantic artifact, Jester and Veth being responsible for Braius' huge life changes, FCG being awakened by Davexion after M9 awakened him, Ludinus, I could go on but I think that's enough to illustrate my point) and the way that at least one member of each group was exactly the person that at least one member of the other group needed to talk to/meet

*DEEP BREATH*

Just feels like Fate. Like these two groups were always meant to be together some day. It's SO satisfying.

And that goes double for the few things that came out of left field and really surprised and delighted me, like Chetney hitting on Veth and Caleb's heart-to-heart with Imogen and Laudna and Dorian and Yasha's jam session (these weren't surprising because they were out of character, I just didn't think to expect them).

All absolutely perfect. Nein Hellz forever.

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The perfect character wiki doesn't exi--

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So Johann and Bach are brothers...

Where's Sebastian?

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If I've learned anything from Dimension20 it's that the most powerful abjurative spell in the world is "I don't know you!"

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I loved this so much that I sent it to myself to read again later

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

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As a third culture kid this actually hit me hard

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THIS.

This is Reception Studies. I like to joke that I unofficially majored in Reception Studies, because of how closely entwined it is with Classical Studies.

Honestly, "high art" of any kind isn't really any more or less incomprehensible or unapproachable than Tumblr meme culture. It's basically the same kind of thing, really, but with a longer time span and more reading to catch up to - things making references to things that were a thing earlier, and everyone kind of supposes that everyone who sees the work also has some background knowledge of the previous work being referred. Just imagine an art history teacher breaking down a tumblr post like

"...And here we see the next poster replying with this image. Here, this image of a statue has a very exact symbolic meaning. The figure of the statue is the Greek god Apollo, here in his role as a prophetic deity, which you may have concluded from the original post referring to future events that may or may not come to pass. In his hand, he is holding a dodgeball, raised on the level of his head, as if ready to throw it. The threatening aura of the image is multiplied by the way the statue's eyes have been edited to gleam omniously - the poster replying to the Original Post is expressing a symbolic, indirect threat, that the future that the Original Post's author described might come to pass, as if the patron deity of oracles had personally cursed the Original Poster to a fleeting gift of prophecy, as swift and brutal as being slammed with a dodgeball."

[scrolling down powerpoint presentation]

"...The second reply, here, has an image of a smiling woman wearing a helmet, standing in a row of people in similar uniforms. This reply requires some slightly deeper konwledge of Tumblr meme lore to understand - the image is a fragmet of a larger whole: a single frame of a gif, of a clip from the movie Starship Troopers. What is important here is the omitted context, which is the line that this nameless character famously says in the scene: 'I'm doing my part!' By posting this image, instead of the entire captioned gif, the replier highlights the implied obvious meaning behind it: They are not merely announcing their intention to actively work to see that the future that the Original Poster foresaw will come to pass, but wordlessly taunt them by implying 'you already know what I mean to do.' It is - in joking - a threat."

"And as you see here, the Original Poster has replied to these comments with a gif, which depicts an encounter between two robotic arms. The swift and dynamic action of the gif serves to express the OP's emotions, as the first robot represents the author themselves, and the second one is a stand-in for the two previous repliers. The way the first robot arm grabs the second one and starts beating it against the floor represents the author's anger. As surrogates for the two parties engaged in the conversation, the author is expressing their personal desire to grab the two previous posters and violently beat them against the floor."

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I have... wow, such a different take on this.

Not on Anders being a terrorist, I agree about that.

But Sebastian's reaction... I mean, imagine you're Hawke.

You tried to help your friend. You could tell he was doing BAD. You did everything you could to bring him back from the brink but he used your desire to help to commit an atrocity. He is Not Well, and yet he Did That, and whether you execute him or not, That cannot be undone. It was Vengeance, not Justice, and no matter what you do or do not do it will not be enough to fix That, so the only worthwhile consideration at this point is do you have mercy on the terrorist abomination and kill him, or do you make him live with doing That, which is actually the harsher choice because Justice/Vengeance demands that he also be punished.

And if you hesitate for one second to kill your friend (terrorist yes, but also, for the last six years, a big part of your life, and maybe the only reason you have one living family member left), Sebastian Vael, the exiled prince of Starkhaven, regardless of which of his loyalties he has been pursuing, gives you this spine-chilling ultimatum: execute Anders or he WILL take Starkhaven's throne and return to burn what is left of Kirkwall to the ground.

And here we see Sebastian's WRATH on full display. His fatal flaw. His true motivation throughout the game. For all that he waffles between his duties to the Chantry and to his family, every decision that he actually makes for himself (that Hawke doesn't basically push him towards) is motivated by the same thing that possesses Anders: Vengeance. Sure, in this case his Wrath is completely understandable, even righteous, but Wrath is what it is, because it won't actually make anything right.

And you stand there with the place you have come to call home burning down around you, your betrayer begging for death, and your friend threatening to make it all so much worse if you don't give it to him, and your hands are shaking and your heart is pounding and HOW DARE THAT HYPOCRITE THREATEN YOUR CITY? HOW DARE HE CALL FOR YET ANOTHER DEATH UNDER THREAT OF MORE DEATH? YOU ARE THE CHAMPION OF KIRKWALL. IF HE IS GOING TO COME FOR KIRKWALL HE HAD BETTER BE PREPARED TO COME THROUGH YOU.

I honestly can't decide if it's worse if you romance him, because how much worse can it get? But I do think you should be able to dump his ass for that. Feel like it would be mutual. Like, no I will NOT execute Anders and not because he was right but because how fucking DARE you threaten my whole city.

So... yeah. Not defending Anders, just... Sebastian isn't the only one with cause for an extreme emotional reaction in that scene.

Anders is a terrorist (like, *textbook* terrorist) who blew up Sebastian's adoptive family and the home Sebastian literally lived in.

Sebastian is not betraying Hawke if Hawke refuses to kill Anders. He's reacting reasonably to being shown that his life doesn't matter to his supposed partner.

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Why does this not have more notes by now

like

Not that they're necessarily analogies or even foils of each other (I mean, they are, but) but understanding Varric's attitude toward Sebastian is SO key to understanding him.

Varric says he thinks Sebastian is boring.

Varric lies.

Varric knows Sebastian isn't boring. He's an exiled prince. He's torn between his ambition and familial duties and his vows and duties to the chantry. He's possibly in love with Varric's chosen protagonist. Varric is too good a writer to not see what a compelling character he is.

No, Varric hates Sebastian for personal reasons. Varric does everything for personal reasons.

If you don't bother to know Sebastian, you don't really know Varric either.

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Mostly het? Let's see:

Leliana: canonically bi/pansexual

Josephine: canonically bi/pansexual

Cullen: canonically straight

Cassandra: canonically straight

Solas: canonically straight

Varric: sexuality never made explicit, once in love with Bianca

Sera: canonically gay

Vivienne: sexuality never made explicit, in a straight relationship

Blackwall: canonically straight

The Iron Bull: canonically pansexual

Dorian: canonically gay

Cole: sexuality never made explicit, possibly asexual as a spirit, in a straight relationship as a human

Okay, if you decide that being in a heterosexual relationship makes someone strictly heterosexual, then you have a bare majority of the inner circle who are heterosexual. But by that reasoning, you might as well say that not being in a sexual relationship makes someone asexual, which is of course nonsense.

By my count, one third of the inner circle are confirmed straight. That's not most.

I think it's funny that when Cassandra gathers ppl to save the world you get the (mostly) het Inquisition. But when Varric gathers people it's always a wild pack of deranged fruits, AKA the DA2 crew minus Sebastian (the dlc straight) and the Veilguard minus Solas (status pending)

Idk what to put as a ending post image so here's Varric with his cleavage out

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OR what if Ira and Artagan both do this because they know each other. Like, they're siblings or some shit. Been pulling this lame-ass joke for so long they can't not do it, don't even realize it's a giveaway to anyone who's met both of them.

either artagan wasnt bullshitting or both he & ira are: licking a finger really is a fae compass rose

Artagan in Critical Role Campaign 1, Episode 61, "Denizens of the Moonbrush" // Ira in Critical Role Campaign 3, Episode 108, "Looming"