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also since ive seen that point being brought up a couple of times here's my gay lil input no one asked for. wrt "if the issue with anders and straight women is his bisexuality/non-traditional masculinity why is astarion so popular"

da2 came out in 2012 at the height of the homophobic gamergate wave and bg3 came out over 10 years later. most of the fans of bg3 who were also da2 fans have largely moved on from dragon age and/or grown up in a rapidly accelerating queer rights movement era which almost definitely altered many people's worldviews

there were 3 romanceable men in bg3 and one is the guy whose biggest character trait was how Not Over His Ex he was and the other one that is arguably the picture perfect example of a straight woman's preferred love interest is also a black man .

look me in the eye and tell me straight girl astarion stans retain his fruitiness in their content of him .

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though tbf with discussions about m/m being overrepresented i do think it's unfair to act like this is the fault of queer men when we usually make up a very small amount of fandom communities. a huge chunk of m/m shipping is just a commodification of our sexuality that often veers into fetishisation

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blaming queer men for the overabundance of m/m in fandom is incredibly funny to me those are literally gods greatest soldiers

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Dorian Pavus, you will always be an icon to me... ❤️🐍

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They're drunk and mean.

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Bellara Lutare the woman that you are

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the da writers attempting to write thedas with total gender equality would have been such a mess. they would have just let women sometimes do "man things" and had jokes about men being degraded while taking zero effort to actually unravel any other societal gender dynamics

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Obligatory Halamshiral dancing scene redraw

the inquisitor is ours with @starrythroat

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Crying in the chantry (see under cut)

Paris Paloma's Notre Dame

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Sera in between Inquisition and Veilguard

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i can't find that one really good post about the differences in fenris' hatred for anders (dismissive) vs merrill (pure vitriol) and how it relates to his idolization of family ties, but once you see it it's hard to ignore

forget slavers, blue wraith should have had him hunting down deadbeat dads or something

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the prince of starkhaven

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Anders and Hawke having dinner, Anders holds up a pastry.

Anders: Aura used to love these.

Hawke: Who’s Aura?

Anders: My wife.

Hawke: Your…? You were married?

Anders: No. Justice. Well, not Justice. Kristoff. Aura was Kristoff’s wife.

Hawke: Who is Kristoff?

Anders: *takes a slow, deep breath as he remembers his Justice’s their brief time as a reanimated corpse* Actually, let’s just stop talking.

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Matt Rhodes posted the final concept art of the Black Codex. But the most interesting thing is the notes that go with it.

The false gods decide to release the full power of the titan souls, which have become twisted with madness in their captivity. Solas tries to stop them.

Unable to stop them, Solas instead creates a Veil between the physical world and the magical. He binds the Veil to the blood of the false gods, turning them into the locks on their own prison.

Early humans discover the ruins of the elven empire. Using knowledge scavenged from the ruins, Tevinter spreads across Thedas as a crude copy of the elven empire.

From their prison in the Veil, the spirits of the titans lure power-hungry Tevinter magisters into the Fade to release them. Instead of a city of gold, they find a Black City. The first Blight is released.

So the magisters were originally lured to the Black City not by the evanuris, but by the spirits of titans?

Because this version is different from what Solas told Rook.

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Idk if you've posted about it before and I missed it, but I saw ur tag mentioning you have a critique on datv's treatment of transness and I'd genuinely be interested in hearing about it :)

hi, yes i have but it's been a while since i last talked about it! i've been meaning to write a long essay on my issues for a while but it would require actually playing the game and i don't want to do that. here's a long rant that got away from me though:

i've complained sometimes about various stereotypes or missteps in the way specific trans characters are represented, but i'd be able to ignore that if it weren't for my main issue, which is that trans characters just aren't properly woven into the world, leaving them feeling alienated in a way queer characters in previous games never were.

it's very clear that the writers haven't broken down their own perceptions of gender and the various cultures surrounding it enough to say something insightful, which is fine because most people haven't, but when people defend the game on the sole basis that its depiction of transness is revolutionary i do have to take some issue. there are books from the 60s that take a more interesting approach to deconstructing gender lol. veilguard may feel progressive in the landscape of aaa video games but i don't think that means it should pass without critique and i don't think that we should have to settle for this when it's possible to do so much better.

the easiest and most frequently discussed example of not properly incorporating transness into thedas is the use of language in the game. you've probably seen the endless arguments about whether taash calling themself nonbinary is an anachronism, and though i'm sure some of the arguments are in bad faith i think people overestimate how many people (on here specifically) are arguing from that perspective. it's been extremely frustrating to be called transphobic by cis people over this when i'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who has actually studied shit like this.

this is a problem throughout the game but it's easier to examine codex entries for this post than go through entire scenes. i've talked about hating the language in this codex entry before, but it really annoys me so let me complain about it again lol.

acknowleding that trans as a prefix means "change" is actually a good start here and if wasn't for how this codex entry continues i'd just shrug and move on, but i really hate the absolutist way it uses the very modern "affirming" and "was always" narrative and language as though it's universally agreed upon. you can argue that this is subjective and what taash was told (though which shadow dragon is talking to them like a GIC psychologist lol?), but when the entire codex entry feels like an educational pamphlet for clueless cis people it just comes across as very odd.

and then the rest of the codex entry just abandons any attempt at making the words "work" etymologically and gives extremely bare-bones descriptions of them. some of these words are younger than me, i saw them being coined on various forums and corners of the internet. is it representation if you say the word and put absolutely no effort into representing or even discussing the agender/bigender/demigender/others experience? in another post i compared this to being like if they did a lord of the rings remake and confirmed legolas as being bisexual by making him wear a bi flag pin with no extra context - of course people TODAY use that flag to signal their experience with bisexuality and there's nothing wrong with that, but to link modern language/signals with an experience that has clearly existed since before either of those things were invented comes right back around to being oddly invalidating, as though these experiences wouldn't exist without modern english speaking understanding of them.

as for the argument about whether or not it's anachronistic: i don't personally think you need to adhere to a binary of modern / historically accurate language and culture to make queerness work in a medieval-ish fantasy setting. the previous games (for all their faults) managed a pretty established status quo where they didn't aim to portray a utopia with a widespread queer culture while also not being gratuitous with their homophobia. and as much as queer x-topias can be interesting when done well, i think this is a good thing for a big budget fantasy game - unless you're EXTREMELY in the know about gender roles and queer theory etc, how can you hope to portray a queer utopia? some people write books whose sole point is to portray a world without gender roles or homophobia and they still misstep, i don't think it's the casual inclusive background thing a lot of fantasy authors believe it to be. it would have gone the same way as origins' claim that men and women are treated the same; maybe you make queer people hold hands in the street without being questioned and nobody makes negative comments about your romance option, but do you subconsciously assign gender roles to jobs? do you portray the majority of npcs adhering to western cishet gender norms? what is the ratio of monogamous f/m relationships portrayed compared to other relationships? these are all things people just straight up don't think about when designing a world and they will accidentally create a society that is welcoming of queerness in THEORY while actually replicating our own cishet patriarchal values.

i don't think veilguard is attempting to be a utopia, i don't think it's attempting to be anything but a finished game, but i see people defending it on the BASIS of it being a utopia fairly often.

taash's arc is another pretty big example of this struggle to examine gender in real life beyond the writers' experiences, namely white canadian. it's a deeply racist attempt at a multucultural narrative where one culture (which has already been demonised throughout the series, including in veilguard) is portrayed as less welcoming of queer people while the other culture, which is still a society with binary gender roles despite being a matriarchy, is portrayed as being instantly and unquestionably accepting.

there's a LOT of potential in an arc for a character like taash if they'd been written by someone with actual interest (and probably experience) writing about the queer experience of existing within two very different cultures. the qunari ARE a culture who are fairly big on binaries but they have an established acceptance of transition that would make their understanding of gender fairly fluid, meanwhile the lords of fortune seem ideal on the surface but human/(our) culture has so many hidden binaries that you don't notice in everyday life unless you're the one being alienated by them.

this could have been a chance to slightly turn the racist Othering of the qunari on its head by showing our own society from the perspective of perhaps some aqun-athlok characters taash befriends, a codex entry about an aqun-athlok character from the past that taash finds and takes inspiration from (maybe they start out aqun-athlok then reject the gender binary entirely?), or even from shathann, perhaps as a character who has explored her gender in the past or decides to explore it as a result of taash. (imagine if shathann was actually aqun-athlok herself, having adopted taash, and some of her complicated feelings about the qun involved the fact that her identity was more accepted there. just SOMETHING to balance the scales a little.)

then again, not even rivain gets to be the fully "progressive" society and taash has to go to the shadow dragons for their gender education. i think it's funny that someone seemed to be projecting an ultra-progressive modern activist group image onto the shadow dragons, i think i've said before that they remind me of all the modern au fanfiction about les amis from les mis that i used to read as a teenager, when they're supposed to be a ruthless abolitionist group. i think this choice was largely to facilitate interaction between the factions but it does feel a little odd given the other racist elements in taash's arc.

there's also the issue of the actual topic of medical transition being avoided. we have tarquin and mae, two characters who have seemingly undergone some kind of medical transition. we have top surgery scars in cc. but there's no discussion of how this transition happens - is hrt magical as krem suggests and is that the only option? is surgery affordable? do different countries and cultures have different levels of advancement in medical transition? these are things i'd want to see written about in codex entries, not lists of various identities that anyone can find by googling a list of genders.

i'm a little disquieted by the avoidance of medical transition given everything happening irl, but it's maybe the issue i understand the thought process behind the most. it feels like a very safe attempt at not veering too far into what happened with krem / the decades of weird fascination with trans bodies. my feelings on this entirely hinge on whether or not the dragon king does actually have top surgery scars lol, for my sanity i'll say he doesn't.

anyway, this all sucks because i've seen SO many fans do better for casual oc posting or fanfic. i've seen so many amazing ways trans culture and hrt and surgery could work in thedas and it's depressing that the writers couldn't even attempt to do something interesting with it. i know there was a lot of crunch that impacted the quality of the writing but i do also think some of these issues would have persisted if they'd had all the time in the world.

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A kiss in greeting from the kiss prompt meme! ✨

@goobigoombi: 27 because it sounds so domestic and cute 🥺

Thank you lovely goombi for the lovely lovely prompt!! I had so much fun <3 I have one, maybe two more left and I WILL fill those too, so if you sent me an ask it's coming! Soluella is getting all of the smooches they can get.

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And the sex is… Well. Athletic is the word she had used to describe it to Neve and Bellara. —a pit of snakes, chapter one (ao3) art commission by omwtsd