#He's OG. He's my homeboy. My rotten soldier. My sweet cheese. My good time boy.

[thirium-800]

you've been a bit quiet lately, everything good? (feel free to ignore if you don't wanna talk)

🥹🥹🥹 Messages like these make me want to cry happy tears. How kind of you to message. Everything is good thank you!

I caught covid a little while ago which wiped me out and I took time away for (fully recovered now woop). I've been busier than normal with work too, taking back my old job role and managing the team again. As well as being a mum and looking after my little one 🩵 So in between I've had very little free time 🥴

In the moments that I do get, I've just been vibing to Sleep Token. Their sexy music makes my brain happy. Apologies to those who also follow my side blog and have had to bear witness to me being unhinged about them for weeks now 🤡

BUT I've got a nice ten day break from work 😌 and like 5848536 posts sat in my drafts so let's resume the DBH posting! 🎉

And Nonnie, whoever you are, thank you. I hope you're having a wonderful day 🩵

[sic-sempervirens]

Taio, a timeline

Okay, receipts:

Taio 1.0. OG Taio. Cutie Dummy. Wide-eyed soldier of fortune. More or less beyond reproach. First playthrough of that weird open-world dating sim my friends had been talking about a couple years ago. Over the course of the game as we encountered weird cutscene angles or janky texture shadows or whatever, we did little refinements which ultimately resulted in:

Taio 2.0. Husky adult sword man. The hero of most of the screencaps you’ve seen me throw around like sweaty pictures torn out of Tiger Beat. He’s our most complete game. Little more grown-up, leaning a little more into typical qunari features (not all visible head-on tbf) with the broader nose bridge, less turned-up nose, rectangular jaw. My roommate and I split this playthrough pretty much 50/50 so she got to give him the poofy lips. Dorian is grateful. We got busy and never got to TP, and after I was playing Niamh and Cato a bit in the interim, we got curious about...

Taio 2.5. ~MAGE BABY TAIO~. PRECIOUS SQUASHED BEAN. NICE AND GOOD LAMB. We consider this an AU where he’s about 10 years younger than usual and it SHOWS. Big gooby cartoon eyes. Smooth face smooth brain. Gave up on the endeavor once we got to Skyhold because honestly, it just didn’t feel right to have a Taio who couldn’t go smashy smashy. But STILL. LOOK AT HIM. HOLD AND CUDDLE HIM AND GIVE HIM YOUR PROTECTION.

Reminder at this point that we played the entire franchise widdershins: Inquisition first, then jumping back to Origins (oh, so THAT’S Morrigan...) and finally DA2.

By this point I’ve got a shitload more playthroughs. Reed, Niamh, Ari, Cato. A couple deleted dwarves. Reed’s twin sister Lark who’s more manly than he is. Sarielle who’s going to be our dirtbag solasmancing assquisitor who I just can’t bring myself to work on.

But honestly, we keep coming back to Taio. We can’t stay away. He’s our pal, our homeboy, our rotten soldier. He's our sweet cheese, our good-time boy

So we fill out the DA Keep with all our best choices, figuring we’ll start a fresh game on my roommate’s PSN, no golden nug, no shortcuts, no skipped characters, and do it all and take our time.

So we get into the generator to whip up Taio from memory for the fourth time. And this happened.

Taio 3.0. Ultimate Taio. Platonic Ideal of Taio. We’re back to the chestnut hair. We've got 1.0′s wider-set eyes and lower-set ears. We’ve got 2.0′s heavy nose and jaw. We’ve got Mage Taio’s more vivid eyes and ridiculous cheekbones. We’ve got a heavy brow situation because we forgot to go in for those sliders and wound up with deep-set eyes that stare into your very SOUL.

I know there’s at least one of you who’s gotten to this point and I’m going to cut you off right now -- NO, these are NOT al the same picture, YES, I CAN tell the difference, and Why Do You Hate Nice THINGS? Why can’t you just love him?