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prime-pulse · 3 years

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how about 2, 14, 15, 32, 34, and 45?

WAAA thank you for the ask !!!! Let me answer all of these :]

2. How did they decorate and structure Skyhold?

Edric personally saw more value in building a mage tower and new medical center when upgrading Skyhold; everyone fought well and they had way more mage recruits than they did anyone else, so it only made sense, especially with the “medical center” at the time being just a few tents laid on dirt.

When it came to DECORATING Skyhold, though, he mainly let Josephine, Dorian, and Vivienne guide him (except when it came to choosing the throne), because he trusts them to make better choices when it comes to design WAY more than himself. His happy little contribution was choosing the most plain and simple throne he could— which is a bit of a sore thumb compared to the Free March styled windows, Orlaisean decor, and Inquisition banners.

14. Who is their favourite and most trusted advisor?

Josephine, 100%. He would not hesitate in telling you this. Though after realizing how quickly he answered, he would beg you not to tell Cullen or Leliana. Though he values all of his advisors an incredible amount, he couldn’t have accomplished all the Inquisition has without them, Josephine is the only one he can really sit back with and just /talk/ to— whether it be gossip, engaging stories from their pasts, or just discussing future banquet plans.

He personally feels like he almost has to parent Cullen and Leliana when it comes to their sometimes brash methodology— which, of course, he doesn’t mind doing, but he enjoys how Josephine almost always tries to find the peaceful solution to a problem and how she always humors his ideas, even if they aren’t necessarily… Good ideas.

15. Out of the followers/companions, who are they most comfortable around?

Edric is comfortable around almost all of his companions (save for Vivienne, who he is still relatively comfortable around, she just intimidates him more than anything), but for who he’s /most/ comfortable around I think would be a three-way tie between Dorian, The Iron Bull, and Solas— which is a REALLY weird tie now that I think about it?? Apologies if these next few parts don’t make sense I’m going to just pour out my feelings

With Dorian, Edric doesn’t feel pressured to hide really anything about himself. He feels confident around him, he doesn’t feel like he doesn’t know what to do with himself and he doesn’t feel compelled to hide his nervous ticks around him. He loves to joke with him, he loves to gossip, he loves the way they can just talk and none of it feels weird. He feels comfortable talking about things he’s never spoken about before with Dorian, he feels safe to share his (sometimes nonsensical) worries and doubts with him, and he also feels safe enough to express annoyances and grievances with other people to Dorian because he knows Dorian feels safe and comfortable enough to do the same with him!! Edric has never really felt that comfortable around someone before, comfortable enough to have his back turned to them and not expect anything to happen, and he loves being able to feel that comfortable around him. Dorian keeps him grounded when he needs it, and Edric keeps Dorian grounded when he needs it.

With Bull, Edric feels relatively the same way but in a more platonic sense. Bull is very jokey and lighthearted, but he can be blunt and serious when he has to be. Edric likes to bounce battle plans off of Bull, or just plans in general, because Bull has a very calculated mind. Edric likes to come to the tavern and share drinks with Bull on occasion because Bull is not only fun to be around, but because he trusts Bull enough to let his guard down and have fun with him. He loves listening to Bull ramble on and on about the Chargers; missions they’ve had, embarrassing stories, etc. and telling Bull his own stories from when he was still in the Carta. He feels like Bull and him have lead similar enough lives for them both to be able to just sort of understand one another. Also, Bull is a good person to go to when you need to see if a pun you want to start using makes sense.

And lastly, with Solas, Edric finds himself comfortable with him because they both have a similar nature— at least, he did find himself comfortable with him before he ran off. (I haven’t done Trespasser yet, so he doesn’t know about the whole… Dread Wolf thing yet.) They used to sit together for hours in Solas’ study, working through ancient scripts and piecing together puzzles and contraptions Edric found during his adventures. They enjoyed bouncing theories off of one another when it came to magic and the fade, despite Edric not being very experienced in either. Edric felt comfortable enough around him to, like Bull & Dorian, voice his nonsensical concerns and worries to Solas; who would almost always give a solution in a very blunt but kind way. He always appreciated Solas listening to him, and he always loved listening to Solas’ stories. But, now, in recent times, Edric’s starting to see a lot of those stories… Don’t all make sense. It makes him worry.

32. Who did they leave in the Fade, and why?

Edric left Stroud in the Fade. He didn’t have much time to think; he was angry, he was tired, he was afraid and everything around him felt like it was spinning the entire time. He could barely think clearly, but he tried his best to put himself in both Stroud and Kariyan (my Hawke)’s shoes. Both wanted to be left behind, to fix some mistake they both felt responsible for, but Edric decided to let Stroud stay behind. Though it sounds harsh, he figured Hawke had more stories to tell— He was needed in places already; Varric needed him, that Anders fellow he’d briefly heard of needed him, he had a brother in the Wardens who needed him, and Mages who still needed his support. He himself may have been ready to give his life to help, but the world wasn’t ready. Stroud couldn’t do what Hawke would be needed to do.

Edric isn’t happy about the outcome at all, but he can’t rationalize an outcome that would make him happy given the situation. He holds out hope Stroud is somehow still alive and surviving in the Fade, and maybe they’ll be able to save him one day.

34. How do they cope with the stress of being Inquisitor?

Edric doesn’t cope with it very well at all. He tends to overwork himself constantly, with him almost never able to say no to a person in need and being the head of the Inquisition he always has a lot to do. He used to, every other week or so, either lock himself up in his room for a straight two days or would suddenly disappear from Skyhold for a few hours just to be by himself and try to clear his head (doing the latter more often). This of course would cause more chaos and panic for him to return to, the inquisitor being gone without so much as a trace for hours on end, then he’d have to deal with being scolded by pretty much every one of his advisors and a few of his companions.

After those methods didn’t work, he’d try to stay up for as long as he could to complete as much work as possible so he could maybe have a few reasonable days off without feeling too bad about it. Usually, that'd end up with him falling asleep at his desk multiple times and being too tired to actually carry out his work, so he stopped doing that as well.

Recently, however, he’s taken to knitting, reading, or beating the absolute shit out of training dummies depending on how stressed he’s feeling. They’re all definitely way better than what he’d been doing, so it works out for everyone.

45. What is their most and least favourite place to explore? Why?

Edric hates the deep roads. Hates them. Absolutely despises them. Every time he has to go and explore them, he’s stressed and a bit peeved almost the entire time. He’s cranky, the whole place smells like death and mold, there’s darkspawn everywhere, and the fumes from the occasional lava pool make his head hurt. If he had the ability to, he would personally seal up every entrance to the Deep Roads himself. But he can’t, so he just tried to avoid them as much as possible.

His favorite place, though, definitely has to be either The Emerald Graves. He loves the plant life and the general atmosphere. Sometimes he likes to go there himself or with a few of his companions, not to do anything necessarily important, but just sit and maybe have a picnic. He would especially love to go there while it’s raining, just to hear the sound of the rain hitting all the leaves and the sound of the rivers overflowing. He finds the place peaceful (when there’s not a giant chasing him, anyway).

#Dai #Da:i #dragon age inquisition #OC: Edric Bonehunter #(Mentioned:)#Dorian Pavus #The Iron Bull #Solas #josephine montilyet #dragon age leliana #cullen rutherford #asks

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scarin-aaarin · 3 years

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Been thinking about Zelda 2: Adventure of Link so please allow me to elaborate.

So I heard someone talking about the antagonists in zelda games, and they mentioned how Zelda 2 never really had a clear villain. All there was is a threat. The THREAT of the prince of Hyrule and the THREAT of Ganon returning should Link’s blood get spread on his ashes. These are two separate forces that don’t seem to intersect at first glance. The prince of Hyrule wants the triforce of courage that the king, his father, hid with a series of trials to protect it and the only other person who knows where it is, is Zelda; that’s why the prince enlists the help of a mage to put her under a sleeping spell. Ganon’s minions don’t care about the triforce. They only care about Link’s blood so they can revive their master.

So these are two different forces, but they’re just threats and not real antagonists for Link, himself, to fight.

This would appear disconnected at first, but if I can’t find answers then I will make them so here’s my theory as to why that is.

My guess is that the prince of Hyrule and Ganon’s minions are working together without them knowing it. I also want to give my ideas about potential lore for the classic games while I’m at it. Long explanation under the cut-

The prince only wants the triforce of courage, right? Well, knowing that Link is probably the only one capable obtaining the relic a second time, lures him to go hunt it down for him by putting Zelda under that spell; possibly planning to kill Link after he defeats the final trial the king put in place. That’s probably as far as his plan went. That’s where Ganon’s and his minions play in the background.

Ganon’s followers only need Link’s blood to bring back their master, presumably unable to find him before this point. Well, word gets out that the hero they need is just wandering around, all they need to do is find him dead or alive. They simply need his blood. Even if he were to die in one of the king’s trials that would be fine or even preferable and they have the prince to thank for threatening Link and the princess enough to bring him out in the open so they can get him.

This leads to monsters relentlessly hunting Link, hoping to find him weak so they can get what they need from him.

I also have another theory that monsters are not only following Ganon, but being created from people. We’ve seen this happen before in The Minish Cap. In the house of a poet, the Link from that game can walk in and find a monster who’s hiding after being changed into a moblin. They offer money for Link to stay quiet about it and that’s that. This ties in to another anomaly from the first Legend of Zelda game- the moblin hidden in a cave with the simple dialogue “It’s a secret to everyone”. My theory is that Ganon/ his minions are adding to their numbers by not only recruiting monsters, but making them as well; the first successful case being in The Minish Cap but being done in mass by Legend of Zelda 1 and 2. Some are more human than others, begging Link to go away and not say anything instead of killing him, but it’s clear not all monsters and mobs are equal.

However, the growing number of missing people doesn’t stop at people being transformed into monsters.

Another great mystery of LOZ 2 is the literal ghost town hidden away in the forest.

In this town, the people have fled but there are still forces working against Link. Ghosts that actively attack Link if he doesn’t have the cross item are everywhere in this deserted town, and those who survived moved to another hidden village far away. This makes me wonder WHY these ghosts are so against Link and swoop in to hurt him.

Well, those people fled for a reason- most likely the influx of monsters storming the town and being ruthless as they hunt for their prize- and there are many people who didn’t survive. If those people lost their lives because of monsters hunting for one particular person, and that person wandered into town...it makes sense why they would attack him beyond the grave.

So anyway, this post started out with me going into the “why” for LOZ 2′s lack of a true villain for Link to fight against. He had nothing but trials set in place by the king in the dungeons and his final showdown is against himself before returning to Zelda- there is no single antagonist for him to fight and there are nothing but looming threats presented to him. After looking at odd bits and pieces, I think it makes sense why there is no single thing for him to fight when pretty much everything else is against him. The ruler of the kingdom, the minions of the defeated Ganon, the living and the dead. It’s the world against him.

#legend of zelda #loz #loz 2 #zelda theory #loz 1 & 2

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beautifulterriblequeen · 4 years

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King Runaan of the Moonshadow Elves, pt 5

Viren’s Plan and Runaan’s Shirt

Angst Rating: 9/10

You know the line from Hamlet: “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”? Meaning someone is trying too hard to seem innocent? That is the vibe I always got from this line of Viren’s.

I couldn’t really figure out how he could’ve invited them, and that’s not the full focus of this section of my King Runaan theory. But I do think Viren basically did just that. Here’s how I see it going:

Viren got into the Storm Spire and saw the egg and the magic mirror. We don’t see him pay it any mind, but you know a smart, enterprising, pragmatic guy like that noticed a not-dragon-sized mirror in their lair. The biggest power couple in all the land has something secretive and unique. He wants it, and he wants its power. He just helped his friend kill the King of the Dragons. This mirror, and this egg—as Tiadrin suggests—are powerful, and they’re now free real estate.

So he takes them, as we know. But he wants to know how to use the mirror, not just possess it. And the key to his master plan—which kinda got derailed but still isn’t entirely complete—is written on Lain and Tiadrin’s faces.

They’re Moonshadow assassins, bound to the Dragon Throne. I’m assuming Viren knows this because it’s ancient history and current events rolled into one, even in human lands. The Dragon King or Queen sends out Moonshadow assassins to do their bidding ever since the humans got kicked out of Xadia. Everyone with a stake in a human kingdom knows that.

Viren also likes his research, though. He wants to minimize threats to Harrow’s power, so he’s as familiar as possible with Moonshadow assassins. And in a bright aha moment there in the Spire, Viren hatches his master plan. If he kills the egg simply to protect Harrow and Katolis, he won’t get answers about the mirror. The elves might not avenge a grizzled and warlike king who committed terrible acts of his own. But they will absolutely avenge the death of an innocent egg, with the most powerful assassin they can send.

Just the elf Viren is looking for: the king of the Moonshadow elves will know all about Xadia’s magical history, its relics, its threats, and so on. And he knows just how to get this king to deliver himself to Viren’s doorstep, because that king is also an assassin.

He steals the egg, and he steals the Moonshadow elves to use as a threat against him. He may or may not have any idea that Lain and Tiadrin know Runaan as well as they do. But if they’re Moonshadow elves in the Storm Spire, they’re assassins, bound to service as their king is, and he’ll know them at least a little. It’s good enough.

Yadda yadda yadda, Runaan pops up in Katolis with his assassins.

Why was Marcos patrolling the woods the night before the full moon, anyway? Perhaps Viren ordered extra patrols. If you’re expecting trouble, a dead scout who doesn’t report in means the same thing as a live scout pounding on the door.

Viren was right there at the battle outside Harrow’s chamber door. The High Mage of Katolis, standing there and watching. He was looking for someone he knew would be there, because he’d all but sent him an engraved invitation. And he was studying all the assassins’ markings until he found the elf wearing the brightly glowing painted crownmarks on his shoulders.

Target acquired.

Once he located the king of the Moonshadows, he made sure that Runaan survived, and no one else. After the battle, Runaan lost his royal tunic and his hoodie, but he still had on his armored vest, green shirt, and gloves.

Yet the next time we see him in the dungeon, he’s lost all of those things.

Viren took off his shirt. He took it off to look for the mark of the Moon staff. And he took off his gloves too. Making very sure he’s got the right elf, while also making him colder and more vulnerable as a prisoner of war. We keep hearing mention that Runaan’s shirt mysteriously went missing. That’s because its removal was a plot point.

Viren put the King of the Moonshadows on his knees and kept him there for a week, hungry, injured, cold, and unable to escape his fun little magic-experiment games, in order to soften him up. He knew who Runaan was the whole time, but he was only interested in the information Runaan could provide him. He didn’t care about his name or his title, calling him only “elf.”

If you have a starving king in your dungeon and you want something from him, you go out of your way to acquire rare Xadian fruits, because that’s what Moonshadows eat, and Viren assumes kings eat well even in Xadia. There was a jelly tart on that tray, too, but it was persimmon, not the dark red that looks closer to moonberry. So close, Viren!

But one does not simply bribe the Moonshadow King, and one does not threaten him easily, either. Runaan has lived his life at war and in the shadows. Viren’s fake kindness isn’t even remotely scary, and Runaan is quietly contemptuous. Even the threat that Viren so carefully planned when he kidnapped Lain and Tiadrin only drives Runaan to broody silence, giving him no answers.

Viren says he’s heard of “I am already dead,” but he doesn’t truly understand it. He describes it to Runaan in unfeeling terms, as if he learned it from a book. So when he finally resorts to verbalizing death threats, it feels like his big dramatic finish. But that’s not what makes a dent in Runaan’s stoic exterior. It’s the mirror.

Runaan is probably directly descended from the Moonshadow elf or elves who collaborated on locking Aaravos away. Despite how long they may live naturally, assassin lives may burn through faster, so I won’t guess at how many generations separate him from that time in history. But he’s well schooled in the history and facts as his people see them. He knows quite a lot about the mirror. Enough to actually scare him. Runaan has been dancing with death his whole life. It’s his job and his calling. But this mirror and what it represents is so much worse than falling honorably in battle.

And now a dark mage wants to use it. Runaan’s had a hard week of privation and pain. But he is still at war, and Viren is still the enemy. His first instinct is to protect literally everyone in the world from this horrific event, so he flat refuses to cooperate. And Viren loses his patience entirely.

But he doesn’t kill Runaan. That would be a waste of a perfectly good elf king! He stashes him carefully in a coin for later. One never knows when one may need a very expensive bargaining chip, after all. The pragmatic never throw anything away if it might prove useful later.

So he’s been wandering Xadia with a Moonshadow king in his pocket all this time. Just in case.

part 6

#tdp theory #tdp meta #tdp speculation #tdp headcanons #tdp #runaan #viren #moonshadow elves #king runaan #moonshadow assassins #moon druids #viren's master plan #it's a good plan #tdp angst #angst

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rexcaliburechoes · 4 years

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bittersweet [part b: sweet] // fire emblem echoes: shadows of valentia

in which everything works out.

rating: t warnings: canon-typical violence, temporary character death, nightmares characters: luthier, delthea relationships: none

now on archive of our own

Delthea was not having fun at all. Honestly, maybe Lu was right. But she needed to get out and away from the expectations pushed onto her and maybe, just maybe, prove that she didn’t need to constantly train from sun-up to sun-down. Plus, she was responsible! Lu didn’t have to remind her about what tagging along meant. She could handle traveling and fighting thing.

The company slowly marched into the Rigelian border and the wind started to pick up, rattling her bones. She pulled her rough training cloak closer to her bare arms to try to preserve some warmth. Even though she and her brother had lived relatively close to the border, meaning that it was colder than say, southern Zofia (not that she’d minded- she was too busy playing around and chucking snowballs at her friends/brother), she wasn’t expecting the wind to be so… nippy.

She edged closer to Lu, hoping to use him as a windbreaker for the time being. He only gave her a glance before raising his arm and letting her hide under his cloak. It was blessedly warm and she gave a small sigh. She snuggled closer to his warmth, burrowing into his side. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him tilt his head away in a “I’m-going-to-lecture-you” motion.

“You know-” he started, giving her that look. She rolls her eyes so hard that they might fall to the back of her skull.

“I don’t know, Lu, and frankly, I don’t care. Plus, I didn’t really have a change of clothes on me when I was being mind-puppet-ed.”

“I was going to say that you could have just asked me for my spare cloak,” he started to retract his cloak from around her, a little miffed at her snarky comment. She makes a noise and grabs the edge, wrapping it around herself protectively and giving him a wide-eyed, pathetic stare. He only sighs again in response and pulls her closer to him.

“Mila, your hands are cold.” He grouses at her, to which she only sticks her tongue out in response.

A messenger runs towards the captain of their unit. They briefly discuss something before they run off again, to deliver whatever message they have to the unit behind them. Frankly, she wasn’t paying attention to that, or her brother, but she felt that something was wrong. She whips herself out of Lu’s cloak, throwing a fireball in the direction of where she felt the uneasy sensation.

She misses, of course. Luthier follows up with a spell of his own. He clicks his tongue at her, but doesn’t say anything else. She could feel him composing a lecture in his head and she scowls at him.

“Now’s not the time, you know,” she snaps, walking away from him. She hurls another fireball at an enemy archer, knocking him over.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” his voice was equally snappish, which only made her even more annoyed.

“Don’t lie, Lu. You’re not a good liar.”

“Then, fine. You need to practice your aim, Delthea. You can’t rely on the spell doing all the work.”

“Whatever,” she scoffs. She didn’t need his magical theory lecture. She was a good enough mage to not need to practice as much as him. She turns away from him, then, running towards the front of their unit to help out there, clearing out a path for the rest to follow.

Luthier calls her name and she yells back at him. “Go away, Lu! I can handle myself, you know!”

He only shouts her name even more insistently. She turns on her heel to face him, frustration welling in the pit of her stomach. “Mila, what do you-?!”

Delthea’s eyes widen as she watches Luthier stagger backwards, taking the full impact of an incoming spell. A spell that was meant for her. Everything was moving in slow motion. He falls to the ground, electricity sparking through his body. Her eyes snap to the Witch who floated nearby, lingering sparks of Thunder fading from her fingertips. Delthea’s fists wreathed themselves in purple smoke.

“You- you jerk!” She screeches, white-hot rage boiling through her veins. She pointed both of her hands at the Witch, suffocating her in a pillar of purple light. She turns to the next one, flames flickering in her hands. With a flick of her wrist, she sent the fireball spinning towards his face, where it caught on his robes. The flames flickered, hungrily devouring everything on his person. She didn’t even feel herself moving forward, casting spell after spell after spell, leaving a wake of destruction in her path.

Someone grabbed her arm and roughly pulled her to the side. A sharp retort fell from her mouth, but the man only huffed, dragging her further from the front lines. The rage in her veins cooled as the while light of Recover washed over her.

“Geez,” the mage grumbled. “Fight’s over. You’re gonna kill yourself.”

She let out a shaky breath and glanced at her hands. They were shaking badly, too. Exhaustion creeps up her spine, alleviated only slightly by the white magic. She pushed herself too hard, she knows, but she couldn’t just do nothing. Not when her brother’s out. They hurt him. She didn’t know where he was or if he would be okay, she just knew that he shielded her, and that scared her. She could have survived that. She would have been okay! He didn’t have to stupidly put himself in the way for her sake. The idiot! She could have handled that herself! She wasn’t a helpless child!

“What… happened?” she asks, tentatively. It’s not that she completely blacked out, but everything felt hazy and out of focus.

“You went on a rampage.” he says shortly. “Almost like you were possessed.”

Her mouth forms a soft ‘o’. The only other time that happened was at the Sluice Gate… and she didn’t like what that entailed. She pulled her cloak closer to herself, missing the reassuring presence of her brother behind her. “I’m sorry...”

He only eyes her critically and drags her back to the makeshift camp by her wrist. She’s too tired and doesn't protest. Finally, he releases her, looks her up and down, and says finally, “Go see your brother, or something. Help out with the healers.”

A pit of dread opens in her stomach. It didn’t sound like he was… so there wasn’t a reason to worry about that, right? He was fine. She was sure of it. “Where is he?”

“Probably in the healers’ tent,” his sarcasm is missed on her as she bolts in the opposite direction of the healers’ tent. She couldn’t face him right now. She was so stupid. She’d almost killed herself fighting those people, and she’d let herself slip back into that hazy realm of not quite realizing what she was doing with her magic. Was she in control? Could she distinguish friend from foe? Vaguely, she remembers from one of Lu’s lectures that it was… possible, and that she needed to practice more control. Maybe he was right. Maybe she wasn’t prepared for this at all.

She stumbled to a stop in front of a tree, panting in uneven, shuddering gasps. Collapsing to her knees, she tried to not let the tears fall. Mila, she was so stupid. She curled herself inward, pulling her cloak around her arms. She missed Luthier. She wanted him to tell her it would be okay, and that everything was fine, that everything would go back to normal, just like in their tiny village in the middle of nowhere, when she would get mad at her friends or at their parents’ insistence that she had to do everything they wanted her to do.

She hiccupped, sniffling as she scrubbed away her tears.

“What’s- Delthea?” She jumped, hearing her brother's voice come from behind her. She stubbornly stared at the ground, ignoring his footsteps crunching on the grass as he came to sit beside her. Pulling her knees to her chest, she looks away, trying to scrub away the remaining tear tracks that ran down her face.

“What do you want, Lu?” She grumbles, pulling away from the hand that rested on her shoulder.

“I just… wanted to make sure you were okay. The last thing I remember was you storming off, and…” he pauses, thinking for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

She whips her head back to him, incredulously. “What are you saying sorry for?”

“Well, I-” Now, it was his turn to sheepishly look away from her. “I held you to the same standard mother and father did. And that wasn’t fair of me.”

“Wow. That’s… random.”

“D-Don’t make fun of me for that!” She laughs at his expression and he only turns even redder. She laughs even harder.

“What brought that on?” She tries to suppress her grin. They were having two entirely different conversations and she really didn’t mind that. It was… nice to know that he was okay enough to be completely random like that. It was nice to know that he was okay. He could be a real big idiot of a brother, sometimes. But he was her idiot.

“... Just thinking, that’s all.” He answers vaguely. Of course, he can’t be too forward with what he actually thinks. Because this is her brother. And he’s a dummy. “I’m getting the feeling like we’re having two separate conversations. You were crying earlier.”

She doesn’t reply, at first, her smile fading a little from her face. Should she tell him what she did? He probably should know, but she didn’t want to have another lecture about control and working hard and the same things she’s heard over a zillion times, now. So, she does the thing she normally does, and tries to deflect his concern. She didn't need him more worried than he already was.

“I was just worried, that’s all,” she finally says, a little petulantly. He raises an eyebrow. She never was a good liar.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm. Well, if you want to join me in practicing, just let me know.” Of course, he’s also a lot more perceptive than she gives him credit for, too. He stares into her face before finally standing, mumbling something about being out more than five minutes. She stands up, too, grabbing his cloak. He sighs, rolls his eyes with a smile and opens his arms enough so that she can wrap herself in it.

Everything would work out in the end.

#delthea fire emblem #delthea #luthier #luthier fire emblem #fire emblem #fire emblem echoes #fire emblem echoes shadows of valentia #fe delthea #fe luthier #rex can't write

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shuttershocky · 5 years

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Maybe 90% of the reason why I made up a “Sakura is adopted by Touko” AU is because if you really think about it, Touko is the person best suited for teaching Sakura magic after her traumatic experience with mage families, but also the absolute worst person to teach her about how to live her daily life.

Like, I have this theory that Touko is almost entirely self-taught and her magic technique is unique and improvisational. She was kicked out of the Aozakis at a young age and was never adopted by anyone else, leaving her to survive on her own and thus was unlikely to have received formal education beyond the basics when she was little, and the Clocktower which doesn’t even accept students until they are already magi of good ability. When she’s shown doing magic, she traces a rune into the air with a cigarette, a common item among modern people, when any formally educated mage channels their power through jewels, a staff, a wand, magical creatures like bugs, etc etc. Her familiars also turn into things like briefcases and film projectors, and the items you can find in her office (that she presumably uses for supernatural work) are things like TVs, cellphones, fax machines and a gameboy, all pieces of technology that someone like Rin would never figure out.

She also doesn’t appear to be discriminate with students whatsoever. Magi are notoriously picky when it comes to selecting students from their own fucking families, but then you have Touko taking on Azaka, who has no magic circuits whatsoever. Azaka asked Touko to teach her magic, and instead of being told that it was biologically impossible, Touko just made her a glove with artificial magic circuits that Azaka puts on to cast spells. Azaka also only knows fire and explosion magic when Rin says that fixing glass is always one of the first things every magi learns, indicating that Touko has literally no idea what a magic education is supposed to look like and probably just asks her students what it is they want to be able to do.

So when Sakura has difficulty casting spells the same way Rin does because the crest worms altered her body and took away her ability to cast magic normally, Touko would be the only teacher in the world for which that is not a problem at all. Sakura would likely feel frustrated and inferior for just being unable to do simple ordinary magic like Rin can, but Touko would just ask Sakura what it is she can already do, what does she want to do, and start helping her grow from there. She would be the only mage who understands how to help someone learn magic their own way, rather than follow a strict and rigid curriculum that favors old blood with a mastery of traditional, outdated abilities.

___________________________

And then there’s the part where, due to the same upbringing that makes her Sakura’s perfect magic teacher, she’s also the single worst person to learn how to live a normal life from. Touko graduated at the top of the Clocktower and immediately went on the run as every magus family saw a single, orphaned prodigy as a threat to their family-based hierarchy and tried to kill or imprison her. She learned to murder and maim everyone who stood in her way since they were very likely meaning to kill her first, and soon started going around the world on her own quest for power killing, conning, and stealing as she went, her loyalties and morals extending only to herself and to her underlings.

This woman literally defeated and kidnapped dozens of top magi in order to steal their magic crests and implant them all into herself, turning her body into a frankenstein powerhouse of magecraft while also effectively destroying every family whose crests she had stolen (and she stole a fuck ton). She’s going to teach Sakura that everything she wants in life is something she needs and everything she needs can be taken by force so long as she’s always the smartest cookie on the playing field.

Sakura’s going to ask how people file their taxes and Touko will reply

“Taxes? I’ve been legally dead in Japan since 1988 sweetie I don’t pay any taxes.”

Sakura’s going to be talking about her first ever bullseye in Archery club and Touko will say

“That’s amazing kiddo. Wanna practice on moving targets next? The Harways are paying us 25 million yen to take out the Edelfelt matriarch during their vacation to Osaka and I’m thinking their wards don’t check for physical projectiles.”

Sakura’s going to be riding with her in the car on the way to the office and she’ll be all

“Mom, can we buy a beginner’s cookbook on our way home? Senpai’s cooking is really good and I want to learn from him!”

and Touko will go

“Honey, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at something and we could be using that time to make some yen. Here, put on this ski mask. We’re gonna go kidnap that Gordolf Ramesses guy and xerox his brain and we can’t have our faces on the evening news.”

______________________

Bonus, since Touko’s worked for and against all the biggest names in the Clocktower, only she knows that the Tohsaka’s reputation for being an ancient, famous, and prestigious family is a bunch of bullshit and the Tohsaka are actually obscure country bumpkins.

Rin, lecturing Sakura on their family history: “Remember Sakura, as the last living members of the Tohsaka clan, we are responsible for upholding the family name’s reputation. A Tohsaka is always calm and collected no matter what, solving all their problems with skill and grace.” Touko: AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA- Oh wait you were serious.

#Aozaki Adoption #Kinda #Shutters rants about their own AU like a tool #Basically I feel like if Touko's heart ever really opened up to being a parent she would become an extremist Gruncle Stan #The single worst parent magus kind has ever produced

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commentaryvorg · 5 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.12

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time in chapter 5’s investigation, Shuichi spent all of it constantly telling himself Kaito might not be dead in a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that he subconsciously believes he is, Monokuma was eager to watch the investigation so he could figure things out himself, the antidote bottles in Shuichi’s lab delightfully told the story of Maki’s utter panic last night, Shuichi stubbornly kept looking for missed evidence of Kaito’s survival rather than accept the alternative and found some which really didn’t prove it nearly as much as he told himself it did, Maki was steeling herself to get all her friends killed, and Shuichi was determined to prove his best friend is still alive.

Now, the trial! This one’s going to take several more posts than any trial before it, even trial 4. I hope you’re ready, because I sure am.

Keebo: “We don’t need your rules anymore! We’ll find our own reasons to live!”

We never needed his rules in the first place, Keebo. You are still just spouting the vaguely heroic-sounding bullshit your inner voice wants you to.

Monokuma: “Wow! An actual talking robot! I’ve never seen one of those before!”

I like how Monokuma is basically lampshading the fact that Keebo has only just started becoming properly relevant to the narrative.

Maki: “What happened to Kokichi? Why isn’t he here?”

Monokuma: “Aw, don’t make that face, killer.”

It has to hurt that Monokuma calls her that, given what she thinks she did. And Monokuma knows it, too; even if he didn’t see the antidote situation, he did see who shot who with the crossbows.

Monokuma: “Given these circumstances… I decided to start off this class trial while the victim is still anonymous! After all, it’d be a shame if I let such a rare opportunity go to waste!”

Aaaaand Kokichi’s plan is still just playing into Monokuma’s hands and giving him more of an excuse to make things as uniquely entertaining as possible, which is exactly what he wants and exactly what Kokichi knew he wants. What an idiot.

Everyone is quick to assert that obviously Kokichi did it, but not Shuichi.

Shuichi: “It’s too soon to decide anything for certain. We don’t even know if Kaito was the victim…”

Not because he has a problem with thinking Kokichi might be the killer, of course, but because that comes with the automatic assumption that Kaito is dead. He’s still hoping he can somehow use his logic in this trial to determine that Kaito is alive after all. Which he’s not wrong about, but… this is going to take a lot longer and be a lot more painful than he’s hoping it will.

Shuichi: “If we don’t positively identify the victim… the other person will never show themselves, right?”

Haha, no, that’s not at all how this is going to work. Poor naïve Shuichi, thinking that he’s going to be sure one way or another before long. I remember when first-time-me thought that too.

Shuichi: (Everyone thinks that Kaito is the victim, but I have my doubts… There’s a chance Kaito is still alive…)

There is, but what you think is proof of that really isn’t proof at all, Shuichi.

Himiko: “The victim has to be Kaito.”

“It has to be Kaito.”

Definitely Maki’s white noise there. She is certain he is dead and wants everyone else to stop acting like he might not be.

Himiko: “We lost a really good guy today… Kazing! …if only mages could cast revive spells.”

I like that Himiko also seems reasonably upset about Kaito’s apparent death! They weren’t close friends or anything, but I bet she appreciated his optimism a lot and misses having that to help her out.

Shuichi: “I have evidence that points to Kokichi being the victim!”

No, it doesn’t, Shuichi. It only points to him having been injured.

Shuichi: “The fact that these were flushed down the toilet implies they were evidence of a crime.”

Yes, but not necessarily that the crime was the murder of Kokichi! If Kokichi was under the press then his killer wouldn’t have needed to get rid of his clothes like this!

It’s honestly kind of surprising that Maki doesn’t use this rebuttal, since she’s all about arguing that Shuichi is wrong here. She just jumps to insisting that Kaito’s clothes being in the press proves he’s under there, which is also not an airtight argument.

Shuichi: (Ever since she found the body in the hangar, Maki’s insisted that it’s Kaito’s… But why is that? I thought we had an understanding… I thought… she’d want to believe Kaito is still alive.)

Shuichi flashes back here to the “training” where the three of them just chatted all night long! Aww. He is thinking of the fact that they are FRIENDS and wondering how Maki could possibly so easily accept that her friend is gone.

Shuichi: (Either way, it seems Maki is hung up on Kaito’s clothes. In that case, I need to demonstrate the flaw in relying on that evidence.)

He’s able to see the flaw in relying on Kaito’s clothes as evidence of his death, but not able to see a very similar kind of flaw in his own reasoning that relies on Kokichi’s clothes as evidence of his death. You’re not quite being objective here, Shuichi.

Shuichi: (If I do that… I think she’ll realize. There’s a chance that Kaito is alive.)

No, she won’t, just like Shuichi wouldn’t change his mind if someone pointed out the flaw in his theory about Kokichi’s clothes. Neither of them are being objective about this.

(But Shuichi really wants to try and get her to hope for Kaito’s survival again, and that’s adorable.)

Maki’s words in this Rebuttal Showdown (hi, Rebuttal Showdown typography anon!) are in fairly simple, straight arrangements. They’re moving fairly fast, but they’re still doing so in a straight line. This probably represents how Maki’s not exactly trying to get in Shuichi’s way here – she’s just trying to get him to see and accept the obvious truth that Kaito is definitely dead already, and the speed simply represents her impatience.

Maki: “If you can’t see that… then you weren’t looking hard enough.”

It’s ironic how she’s accusing him of this when they’re both guilty of it – Shuichi for not looking hard enough for evidence Kaito is really dead, and Maki for not looking hard enough for evidence he might be alive. Shuichi doesn’t want to properly consider the possibility that he’s dead because it hurts too much, but in exactly the same way, Maki doesn’t want to consider the possibility that he’s alive, because it hurts too much for her to think about that hope when she’s convinced there is none.

Maki: “He never put his arms through his coat sleeves.”

If you happen to swing the wrong Truth Blade at Maki’s statement here (not that Shuichi would get it wrong, but)…

Maki: “What did you say? After all that time you spent together, you still don’t know anything about him.”

Maki is again accusing him of something she’s even more guilty of, if she has apparently forgotten that it’s only one sleeve and not both that Kaito doesn’t wear. Or alternatively, she’s fully aware of that and is just hoping Shuichi doesn’t remember so that he’ll concede her point.

I really like how Kaito wearing his coat asymmetrically like the ridiculous doofus he is is very briefly a plot point, by the way. Interestingly, if you look at Kaito’s various beta designs, most of them have him wearing either both sleeves or neither sleeve of his jacket, and only the last one is asymmetrical. Apparently this plot point was only decided upon late-ish into development of the story.

Maki: “Then maybe neither of his arms were through the sleeves.”

No, that’s not possible. The fact that there is an arrow hole and a bloodstain on the sleeve proves that he was wearing it at some point prior to being in the press regardless of which sleeve it is. It is kind of frustrating that Shuichi apparently doesn’t realise this, especially given how desperate he is to find any kind of proof that Kaito isn’t dead – this is a genuinely strange point here that actually does indicate he might not be dead! Why would his killer take his jacket off his arm but still keep it under him while he’s in the press unless there’s something more elaborate going on?

Shuichi: (Maki… what’s really going on? Seems you’ve made up your mind that Kaito is definitely dead. But why would you do that?)

Shuichi is somehow only now noticing that this is clearly the state of mind Maki is in. Probably because the idea that she would do that when he doesn’t see a reason why is so bewildering to him.

Tsumugi: “Kaito’s gotta be the victim. Cuz if Kokichi, the mastermind, was dead, the killing game would be over.”

Good job helping everyone jump to a wrong conclusion by reminding them all of the premise that you know full well is false, Tsumugi.

Maki: “Monokuma, hurry up and bring Kokichi here. We already know who the victim is.”

Monokuma: “Huh? Already? You sure it’s not too soon?”

Monokuma knows that it is way too soon and they have not remotely properly figured out who the victim is at all. This argument about Kaito’s sleeve just now went nowhere.

Monokuma: “Hey, Mister Suspect! That’s your cue!”

And then Monokuma calls him this, partly for drama but mostly because he genuinely doesn’t have a goddamn clue who it is.

Heeeeere’s the Exisal! Hooray! I have been looking forward to this part of the commentary for so damn long you don’t even know. (Well, maybe you do.)

Before he actually says anything, let me get one general point about the Exisal out of the way. I’m playing on the Vita version, which is a downgrade in technical quality with regards to the Exisal model’s polygon count… but this happens to be a slight upgrade in story immersion.

See, the thing is, with the HD versions’ higher-res Exisal model… you can see inside the cockpit. Which you obviously emphatically should not be able to do. And it appears to be empty, which obviously it should not be either. Every time I watch this trial in HD, which is what I usually do (this is actually only the second time I’ve played this trial on my Vita), I can’t help but notice this and it is incredibly frustrating. The screen and cable are admittedly a lot harder to make out without the contrast-adjustment I did here, but the white edge of the seat is always quite noticeable from several angles. You’d think that when the 3D modeller made the Exisal, they’d have been told that it’s a vital plot point that the cockpit is completely sealed off when closed and can’t be seen into from the outside. But at least the simpler Vita model doesn’t have this issue!

(If you’ve managed not to notice this fact until now… you’re welcome, now you’ll never be able to unsee it like I can’t either.)

The other general thing I should introduce right now about Kaito in the Exisal is my favourite trial minigame! We’re going to be playing a game of “Script Or Ad-Lib?” throughout this entire trial. Kaito mentions at the end that he had to ad-lib some parts even despite all of the possible lines for various outcomes that Kokichi wrote for him in the script. One of the most fun things to do on a rewatch of this trial is to try and figure out which bits were Kaito following the script and which bits were him making his own choices.

One general rule of thumb to keep in mind while doing this is to remember how much of this case’s events Kokichi was even able to write the script for in the first place. He’d have been able to work on the script ever since finding the hydraulic press in the hangar and finalising the main details of his plan, so anything related to any of those parts: the press, the Exisal, and the fabricated video, should be assumed to be scripted unless there’s a specific reason to think that Kaito might have changed something about his words. But, everything regarding the events Maki kicked off – breaking into the hangar, the crossbows, the poison and the antidotes – could not have been predicted in enough detail by Kokichi beforehand for him to include in the script. He didn’t have enough time to add any of it afterwards either, since he was dying from the poison. So literally all of the discussion surrounding those parts of the case should be ad-libbed by Kaito. That’s like half the trial - way more than he makes it sound like he had to do! Serious props, dude.

It’s possible that Kaito helped himself by spending part of last night writing some of those Maki-related parts of the script himself. He’d be able to use Kokichi’s existing lines as a template to write more lines that sound appropriately Kokichi-ish, which would be better done in advance when he has more time to think about them and get them sounding right, so that he doesn’t have to come up with it all completely on the spot. I doubt he got all of his ad-libs down that way, but maybe he did at least for the most prominent topics that were almost certainly going to be brought up.

Also, remember that Kaito is trilingual despite not having a multicultural background and is therefore evidently very good with languages. Learning how to emulate Kokichi’s speech pattern is essentially a much simpler version of learning a new language. He’d have spent last night basically teaching himself to speak “Kokichese” using the script as an example, sometimes by writing lines down like he’s preparing for a spoken exam where he knows what some of the questions are going to be, but also enough that he’ll be able to ad-lib answers to questions that he’s not going to be expecting. Kaito’s talent as an astronaut – or at least a skill he has that’s related to that – is genuinely coming in extremely useful for him here. He is and has always been best with words.

(For that matter, Kaito’s astronaut talent is also coming in very handy at piloting the Exisal, being stuck in a tiny cramped cockpit with only a bunch of controls and a screen to let him actually see and interact with the world outside it. That’d be really difficult and disorienting for most people, but Kaito has trained for precisely this kind of thing.)

So, to start us off: I always like to think that Kaito starting out in-character as himself was not specifically in the script and just something he chose to do on his own. It would have made a lot of sense for Kokichi to not script this and to want Kaito to pretend to be him the whole time if at all possible, because then nobody would know the Exisal had a voice changer and that it could potentially not be Kokichi in there despite having his voice.

But, Monokuma would already know the Exisal has a voice changer and that it sounding like Kokichi doesn’t necessarily prove anything. So Kaito might well have figured that fooling his classmates into thinking he must definitely be Kokichi isn’t actually that important when Monokuma isn’t going to buy that argument anyway, since fooling Monokuma is the whole point of the plan. (See also: Kokichi’s ridiculous lengths to convince everyone he’s the mastermind when Monokuma already knows he’s not, what an idiot.) Therefore, Kaito wouldn’t really care about making things seem unambiguous and might have chosen to be himself first to let his friends see that it’s possible he could still be alive, just so that this won’t hurt for them quite as much. If Monokuma knows that it’s possible he could be alive, then his friends deserve to know that, too.

Exisal Kaito: “Haha, whoops, my bad. Seems like I gave you guys a scare, huh?”

Haha, of course you know that you gave them all a scare, Kaito. Too bad you’re going to have to keep doing that and making it even worse for them.

(Look at him still managing to apologise for it. Even though this is a very deliberate part of the plan that he’s choosing to do, he still feels bad about the fact that he’s choosing to hurt them as part of that.)

Shuichi: (…What is this?)

Shuichi is so surprised! …He wasn’t truly expecting it to be Kaito at all, was he.

Maki: “…Kaito?”

Maki Roll! She actually looks like she believes this, just for a brief, shining moment! God, that’s only going to make it hurt her even more when that hope gets crushed, because as soon as it becomes ambiguous, she’s going to be right back to being convinced Kaito is dead. I’m… not sure Kaito realised that when he decided to be himself first. Even if he was thinking about trying to give her hope, it probably didn’t occur to him that she’d go right back to being utterly certain he’s dead afterwards, because he’s used to a more optimistic outlook on things. Surely Maki Roll would want to believe he’s still alive if she could?

Exisal Kaito: “There was a lot going on, so I just hid in an Exisal and kinda dozed off. Haha, and that’s why I’m so late! Anyway, what’s goin’ on, guys?”

See, now, this… does not sound like Kaito. It is way too vague and flaky and unreliable to be him – and while, yes, Kaito sometimes comes across as flaky and unreliable, he never ever wants to, and most certainly would do his best not to in a situation as serious as this. Even if he genuinely did fall asleep and miss the investigation and really was clueless as to what had happened, he would then sound a lot more urgent about learning what’s going on so that he can understand the situation and help.

Which made first-time-me already a lot less sure that Kaito was in there at all. But that’s exactly the point, because, hopeful possibility aside, Kaito does not actually want them to think he is in there. He is pretending to be Kokichi pretending to be him, and Kokichi would not completely accurately emulate Kaito’s behaviour, so he’s not doing it, either.

(I’m not sure whether or not Kokichi would have had the gall to script Kaito’s lines here, assuming he even scripted the notion of Kaito temporarily being himself in the first place. But I also feel like even if he did script Kaito’s lines, Kaito would have stubbornly ignored them and decided to do his own lines, even though he knew that had to involve coming across as not-quite-himself.)

Also, let’s appreciate the Exisal’s Kaito-like body language. It is pretty great. He does not do this while being Kokichi, so we don’t see much of it.

Tsumugi: “H-Hold on. Then the one that died wasn’t Kaito—”

Exisal Kokichi: “Stuuupid! That was just a lie!”

Please imagine Kaito sighing and taking a deep breath to steel himself for this before switching characters. Another reason I think he might have chosen to be himself first is because he was not remotely looking forward to having to put on this mask and lie to everyone in this way and wanted an excuse to put it off for just a tiny bit longer.

Exisal Kokichi: “Ah-haha, you guys thought I died!? I would never! Noooo way!”

This is something I really wish I could let you hear, because the way this line is voiced sounds just a tiny bit too over-the-top to be Kokichi. Admittedly Kokichi is quite over-the-top in general, but there’s still something very subtle and nuanced here that just doesn’t quite sound right for him. It’s not just this line: there’s quite a lot of them throughout that sound just ever so slightly off, which I’m probably going to be feeling compelled to point out even though I can’t let you hear the voice acting.

Again, I’m doing this in English. The Japanese may also give a similar effect, but I’m not sure I would be able to pick up on something this subtle when it’s not in a language I’m fluent in, even if I’d been listening to and familiar with Kokichi’s Japanese voice the whole game. This is one reason I’m really glad I chose to watch this game in English on my first time through – because first-time-me picked up on this too, and it gave me just a tiny bit more hope that Kaito really was alive.

It’s also absolutely fantastic that Kokichi’s voice actor can pull this off. He’s pretty damn good at his job in general, and I see a lot of people praising his performance in trial 4 specifically, but I personally don’t see what’s the huge deal about that – sure, it’s a lot of angry yelling and it is well-done, but any voice actor is expected to be able to do that kind of thing. This, though? He’s sounding like his character while also not sounding like his character, just subtly enough that it’s there and you can hear it if you’re listening for it, without it being obvious enough to definitively prove anything. That takes some serious skill. Kokichi’s voice actor is at his very best right here, when he’s voicing Kaito.

Exisal Kokichi: “‘I’m gonna live till I die! I’m gonna laugh ‘stead of cry!’”

Himiko: “Wow, that’s old! How old are you!?”

This song he just sang is by Frank Sinatra and is from the ‘50s. Obviously this wasn’t in the original Japanese. In that, he says something like, “I won’t die! Because I love you guys!”, except that he says it in some kind of unusual dialect/accent, and Himiko still comments on how old it is, so I can only assume that it’s some old Japanese cultural reference that would be lost on an English audience. This is good localisation, changing things to something that the new audience will get while keeping the original nuance: it’s a dated cultural reference with the literal content being about not dying.

Whether Kaito just sang a Frank Sinatra song or made a reference to probably some old Japanese TV show or something, I’ve seen a lot of people argue that this is a strong hint towards his identity, since Kaito was raised by his grandparents and would potentially be into more old-fashioned media like that. But I don’t personally think this means anything, because it shouldn’t be Kaito who chose to do this. There is absolutely no reason to assume that this moment – “Kokichi” commenting on the suggestion that he might have died and asserting that he definitely didn’t – wouldn’t have been in Kokichi’s script. And especially right at the beginning, Kaito would want to make sure he gives a first impression as Kokichi that really convinces them it’s definitely him, so I doubt he would have wanted to put his own flair on the script already and risk messing it all up so soon. Plus, if this was a reference that Kaito was personally fond of and chose to make just to be himself, I feel like he’d have wanted to make it while in character as himself, because doing it as Kokichi just cheapens the point of him having chosen to do so to express himself.

It is worth noting, though, that even though Kokichi chose the song, Kaito apparently is somewhat familiar with it himself, since he knew the melody. As it turns out, the full song in question has lyrics that happen to fit both Kokichi and Kaito quite well – I can definitely see why Kaito would like it, but if Kokichi happens to have old-fashioned tastes then he might like it too. There’s one bit about aiming for the sky which is more specifically Kaito, but then there’s another bit about being a devil which is more specifically Kokichi (although that fits Kaito quite well right now). Everything else pretty much works for them both, especially in this situation where they’re both literally about to die. I wonder if the localisers deliberately went for something that’d potentially fit both of them in order to keep things ambiguous when they were deciding what to change this to.

(Picture Kaito in the Exisal last night as he read that line of the script for the first time, going “huh, I know that song”, and then realising that the lyrics were very appropriate for his current situation and singing it to himself to boost his spirits. Damn right he’s not going to let the fact that he’s going to die tomorrow get him down!)

Maki: “I thought as much.”

You did not think as much, Maki. You thought for a brief fleeting second that Kaito really was invincible and had pulled off a heroic miracle, just like he promised you he would.

Maki: “Your appearance right now is fit for a lowly asshole like you.”

By “appearance”, she can presumably only mean the fact that he’s hiding in an Exisal, and just pretended to be Kaito apparently simply to be a dick, which sure does sound fit for Kokichi. Cowardly and hiding behind something so he doesn’t get hurt? Check. Being a dick just to mess with people who are already emotionally vulnerable? Check.

Shuichi: “… Is that really you, Kokichi?”

While it could be that Shuichi is genuinely sceptical because he picked up on the slight discrepancy in “Kokichi”’s intonation, I somewhat doubt that and think it’s more likely he just doesn’t want to believe this because that’d mean Kaito really is dead.

(None of the characters ever comment on his voice sounding ever-so-slightly different, which is fair enough because that would make it an explicit thing which is definitely happening and therefore practically confirm on an out-universe level that it isn’t Kokichi. But consider: if any character would have been able to pick up on something like that… it’d be Kaito, if he weren’t the one in the Exisal himself. His intuition would come in incredibly useful in a situation like this. If Kokichi had actually done the sensible thing and chosen Shuichi to be his accomplice, Kaito wouldn’t have had the first clue how to conclusively prove Shuichi was alive, but he would have been able to sense, to have a hunch, that the person in the Exisal doesn’t quite seem like Kokichi and hold on to hope that way.)

Exisal Kokichi: “Oh, this is more for self-defense. Little Miss Crankypants would kill me if I showed myself.”

Maki: “…”

This is quite a believable excuse as to why he’s in there. Maki absolutely would kill him the moment she could, so that she doesn’t have to sacrifice everyone else. Even just opening the lid a little bit to wave at them and prove it was him would be too much of a risk, because Maki can almost certainly throw that knife of hers very quickly and accurately. And fun fact about the trialgrounds which hasn’t really been relevant until this trial: Maki and Kokichi’s podiums happen to be directly opposite each other. She’d have a very clear shot.

But while this line is obviously scripted, I’m certain Kaito edited it a little. Kokichi probably wanted him to call Maki something much worse and more geared towards the fact that she’s supposedly a heartless killer, and Kaito is not having any of that, especially not after what Maki thinks she did. So he changed it to something that’s still mean-spirited and therefore still believably Kokichi if you don’t think about it too hard, but which is much more light-hearted and silly and not harmful.

Imagine Kaito reading through the script last night and emphatically crossing out every line in which he was supposed to call Maki a murderer because NOPE fuck that, and then amusing himself by thinking of sillier things to call her that still technically sound like something Kokichi might say. It may have a negative meaning and therefore a more mocking tone, but “Little Miss Crankypants” kind of has the same brand of cute silliness behind it as “Maki Roll”. Kaito is adorable, even when he’s a murderer who’s pretending to be an asshole.

(In the Japanese, he did not call Maki anything nearly as creative here and just said “a certain someone”, so we have the localisers to thank for this. Which begs a question. This game had I believe four different people localising all the dialogue because there was so much of it to do, and apparently each character was given to a single localiser so they could keep their voice consistent. So… who localised “Exisal Kokichi”’s lines? Because those lines are mainly Kokichi’s but still often influenced by Kaito to some extent, which is never more clear than it is here. It’s this that makes me speculate that Kaito and Kokichi might have been deliberately assigned to the same localiser, so that this trial did not have to involve massive amounts of inter-localiser communication, which is something they are evidently not great at based on inconsistencies elsewhere. I don’t actually know if this is the case, though – if anyone knows of a list of which characters had the same localiser, I’d be really interested to see it.)

Exisal Kokichi: “I understand how you guys must feel. You can’t believe it because I’m like this, right?”

This is another line (and in fact, so is this entire ensuing speech about the video camera, which there’s no point me quoting all of when I can’t make you hear it) which sounds slightly over-the-top in its delivery. It’s like Kaito’s trying just a tiny bit too hard to sound like Kokichi.

Exisal Kokichi: “The moment the victim died…”

Himiko: “Nyeh!? Wh-What did you say!?”

Exisal Kokichi: “Alrighty then! Let’s watch this shocking moment!”

Kaito definitely does not enjoy having to sound so callously excited about this when he knows exactly what seeing this video is going to do to his friends.

For that matter, the video does, in fact, show the moment the victim died, despite the initial apparent fact that the press must have been crushing an already-dead body because of the safety function, and despite the fact that the victim is not actually Kaito like the video makes it seem. So I can’t imagine Kaito enjoys sounding so callously excited about watching this himself, either. He’s probably watched it all of one time, just to make sure the fabrication was convincing, and then didn’t want to think about it again until the trial came along and he had to.

Speaking of the fabrication being convincing… let’s talk about Kaito’s left arm in this video. It should not be angled outwards like it is. The Closing Argument shows him with his arms tucked in such that it’d have been out of sight at the moment the press stopped, which is definitely supposed to be the way things canonically happened. If it’d happened like this, with his arm still visible, then there’d have been a split-second of it suddenly turning into Kokichi’s arm before the press descended. Even if Kokichi had worn Kaito’s shirt to help it match – which he did not do – there would still be differences in skin tone and the size of their hands that would look off, and that’s assuming they could even manage to co-ordinate to get their arms in exactly the same position, which would be difficult with a camera this basic and only the two of them doing this.

So basically, this arm was the biggest reason first-time-me stopped questioning the video almost immediately even though I really wanted to think it could have been faked somehow and Kaito could still be alive. Which I’m maybe glad about, because if I had figured it out sooner then I wouldn’t have had the terrifying baselessness of my hope last nearly as long as it did and I wouldn’t have fallen into despair at any point either, but it’s still frustrating that my judgement of this was influenced by a detail that simply isn’t what canonically happened.

Fun fact a lot of people apparently know: Kaito’s arm was actually not like this in the Japanese game’s version of the video! It was at his side, like it should be. But before you start yelling – trust me, I know the feeling – there’s more to it than that.

Because not in the video itself, but in the thumbnail of this video that you see when looking at your Truth Bullets in the Japanese game… his arm’s incorrectly sticking outwards like in the localisation.

So what I’m assuming happened is this: the Japanese game designers originally drew the art for the video with Kaito’s arms spread out, not getting the memo that they really needed not to be. Then at some point during quality testing, someone noticed that contradiction, and they fixed it by redrawing it, but they didn’t actually remove the original file from the game’s coding and forgot to change the Truth Bullet thumbnail. Fast-forward to the English localisation: as it happens, the Japanese version, while more correct, is missing the bloodstains on Kaito’s arm and jacket. Someone obviously noticed this and figured that’d be easy enough to edit in… except that apparently when they did so, they took the wrong file from the game’s coding to edit, the original incorrect one with his arms spread out, and this time nobody noticed the mistake before the game was released. So it is a mistake on the localisers’ part, but it’s a mistake caused by meaning well but being careless and short on time, rather than one caused by them having somehow deliberately decided to add a massive non-canon contradiction into this vital piece of evidence.

…Okay, hang on, hold the fucking phone. I wrote all this having not checked actual Japanese footage of the game in ages, because Spike Chunsoft had done a big crackdown on Japanese footage past chapter 1 and I could literally no longer find any. Instead I just referred to an image that the wiki has for the supposed Japanese version of the video. But I checked again for Japanese footage just before putting this post up in the hope of finding a shot of the thumbnail (and as you can see I found some), except, also… this is the actual video in the Japanese game:

It has the bloodstains! And you might also notice that, unlike in every other version of this image, they moved Kaito slightly closer to the edge of the press to allow more of his sleeve to hang down and added the buttons that shouldn’t actually be visible, to better match what the sleeve looks like in the investigation. (Despite being moved, Kaito’s arm is still just barely out of sight when the press stops in this version.) I have no idea where the wiki even got its image from, then – probably by digging through the game files to find an earlier version without these extra fixes, but apparently not from actual finished game footage.

In which case, I am SO CONFUSED. I have no idea any more why the localisers felt they needed to change anything about the Japanese video. I still maintain that it must have been some kind of careless oversight rather than deliberate idiocy, though, since an image of Kaito with his arms spread out does already exist in the original game.

{Later addendum edit: OKAY SO, sometime way after posting this commentary post, I happened to see relatively-recently-uploaded footage of the English game in which the video is the entirely correct version as seen in the last of my screenshots here. Apparently, the game got patched or updated or something to fix this, and this footage was from a newer release of the game! I am very happy that the game devs cared to do this. And what this presumably means is that the Japanese footage I checked for this commentary in which I saw the version with everything correct was also a more recent version of the game, while the original Japanese version of the video was indeed like the one labelled “wiki” here. There. Mystery solved.}

I really like this shot panning out from behind Shuichi as it focuses on the screen, to really give you a sense of how Shuichi in particular must have felt having to see that video – especially since the screen is almost directly opposite him.

Maki is also wincing. She claims to not be bothered at all by what apparently happened to Kaito, but it seems like seeing this got through her defences slightly.

Exisal Kokichi: “By the way, I’d like to add that this footage has not been doctored in any way!”

And Kaito very quickly continues on with following the script, quite probably because he doesn’t really want to linger for too long on anyone’s reactions to seeing this (not even his own).

Shuichi: (Was that…? Was that really him? …Why? Why was… Kaito… killed?)

Even though Shuichi has no idea how to prove that the video could have been faked right now, he still doesn’t want to accept it at all. He’s so hesitant to even directly “voice” that thought in his mind.

Shuichi: (Kokichi had no reason to kill Kaito… He had just told us all that he was the mastermind, and that the killing game was over. So what would he gain by killing Kaito?)

And as soon as he does voice that thought, he then immediately starts questioning why this would even happen, as if the fact that there’s no conceivable reason behind it right now means it still can’t be true and so he doesn’t have to think that it’s true.

Exisal Kokichi: “Nee-heehee… It looks like you finally believe that I’m the one in this Exisal.”

Congratulations, Kaito, you’ve successfully convinced your best friend that you’re dead! He has to be so painfully torn by all this – on the one hand, the plan is succeeding for now and that’s a good thing because then he didn’t murder Kokichi for nothing, but on the other hand, he’s hurting Shuichi and Maki so much to do this and he must hate that.

I don’t think he quite has convinced Shuichi of that yet, though, not fully. Shuichi’s train of thought stopped at the “he’d have no reason to kill Kaito” and didn’t re-settle on “but I guess Kaito really must be dead regardless”. He’s still running away from it, even after the video.

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[Next post]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 5 #class trial #commentary

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too-much-tdp · 5 years

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Analysis of Elarion’s poem - City Perspective

@siderealsentinel has written up a really cool theory about Elarion being a city and I really really like it. And the reason for that is because finally the poem makes sense to me.

When I read it for the first time, it sounded so weird. None of the phrases really made sense to me. I interpreted it as being about a human and thought “Well, I guess it’s supposed to mean something like she grows up (seedling, pulling roots, her open flower -> adulthood etc.) and that she’s in need of help and that she spreads dark magic (spreads her roots).” But nevertheless it didn’t feel satisfying. The metaphors didn’t feel like very goid descriptions of human experiences to me. Kind of, as if someone was trying just a bit too hard to sound different, mysterious and poetic.

But now, when I read it from the perspective of a city suddenly everything makes sense to me. Everything falls into place automatically. The metaphors suddenly seem fitting and don’t feel like forceful attempts at colourful speech.

And since I’m confusing Tumblr with English class right now, I will quickly go over every verse. : D

Also, I will sound exactly as pretentious as you would expect if from a poem analysis!

In general I think the growing tree metaphor is a very good parallel for a little settlement or small town (seedling) growing over time, streching its roots --> growing and occupying more land, stretching its branches --> amongst others: buildings growing higher towards the sky, open flower --> a city being at its peak, economically, politically culturally and socially. It sounds like the city is thriving, perhaps very rich and possibly quite influental in Xadia.

Elarion, trembling seedling Lying on the ground on an icy night. And in the cold She pulled her roots Defying the deadly winter bite.

This sounds, obviously, like the beginning. A small settlement, weak and with little rescources whose people have a hard time surviving the winter because they lack so much. But somehow it manages to grow into a blooming city:

Elarion, and her open flower, Afraid of wilt, darkness and death, She searched the darkness For a Spark And caught the eyes of a hungry dragon.

However, the city fears the loss of their fortunate situation, their peak, their wealth, their influence. This could either be due to greed or because they fear that they could never withstand magic forces as mere non-magical beings. Or both. So, in order to avoid a possible downfall and the wilting of their city, they search for means to prevent such a case. The spark could mean that they look for a source of magic. Maybe they’re trying to amass magical jewels, primal stones and other natural carriers of energy that they can use.

It is possible that they don’t really go about it in a measured way. Maybe they’re desperate and are too intense in their actions, maybe they’re greedy and try to take too much, maybe they’re too aggressive and it leads to conlficts with surrounding settlements and magical beings. No matter what, their work surely doesn’t go unnoticed and they attract a dragon. (Perhaps they wronged him in their pursuit and it wants revenge. Perhaps it’s just evil and they were unfortunat enough to wake its interest.) Elarion, the fearful fool, Reached her white branches toward the night, Asking the stars To receive their light And stop the fire of the raging dragon.

Now, that they’re faced with an enemy, that seems to be too powerful for them to defeat, their fear starts to make them foolish. Perhaps this is a hint, that they’re so desperate that they’d welcome any solution. Even if it is harmful and risky to themselves and others...like dark magic.

Before that happens though, they turn to the help of the stars which - as most assume - are the startouch elves (and maybe other starbound intelligent creatures) to save them from the dragon.

Receive their light could either just mean that they ask for their “blessing” and their mercy and hope the elves will stop the dragon for the humans. Or it could indicate that the humans asked to receive power - perhaps a star primal stone (which would be a literal physical embodiment of the stars’ light) - in order to fight the dragon themselves.

Personally I think it is the latter for a couple of reasons: It fits well with the theme of humans seeking out magic for their own gains and protection. Even without an arcanum humans could thrive a lot more if they owned more magical utensils like primal stones or arcane gems (they’d still be disadvantaged because those things are rare but if every city or so had their primal-stone equipped mage then they’s already be a much bigger force to be reckoned with). Also, unlike dark magic, it’s save. However the Danish text implies that humans aren’t considered equal. So perhaps the mere idea of humans using magic is considered an affront and their question for a primal stone could be seen as a big offense, making the elves even less willing to help.

Elarion, a heavy body, Cried as the stars of the sky turned to black, They turned their backs They concealed their light, They left Elarion to die.

A heavy body could mean that they’re already under attack and have taken substantial damage, making it hard for them to recover. For some reason - justified or not - the startouch elves abandoned the city. Maybe they didn’t see it as worthy because of their disdain for humans, maybe humans had done something arguably wrong in their attempts to keep their city strong and healthy and the elves thought its destruction was justified. As a consequence the city is facing its demise.

Elarion, her shell struggled death, She withered and suffered in darkness, Until the last star Linked from afar: a fire, a gift, a spark.

However in the last moment, right before their death, Elf Jesus - or Elf Satan - appears and gives them the power that they have so desperately searched for. A spark, magic.

Elarion, with her pure whiteness, Embraced the great black night flame. When she bent down, She declared her faith, She whispered, "Aaravos," his name.

The pure whiteness could have a double meaning, referring to the still innocent city on the one hand but perhaps also to the stone the city is primarily built with (not as important, but who knows). Maybe Elarion, being an important city, was famous for its white, bright cityscape.

Going back to the fearful fool, the city readily accepts a dark powerful force that is given to them.

Now here it becomes really interesting because the more obvious way to read it, is that Aaravos gave them dark magic directly. Either because he thought human empowerment justifies a possibly dangerous force since they have nothing else left. Or because he’s a bastard who wanted to cause a human-elf conflict deliberately.

No matter what, the city considers Aaravos their saviour and the humans pledge their loyalty to him (oh...). They become his disciples - maybe more in a scholarly way or maybe with much more religous undertones - but either way, they declare their faith to him and follow him.

The other interpretation, that siderealsentinel suggested, is that Aaravos merely tried to give them arcane magic but along the way humans discovered dark magic. Maybe they wrongfully associated his name with the practise by vocally following him/worshipping him and spreading the belief in Xadia that he is actually the source, when that was never his intention.

Another possibility is a middle-ground between these two, namle that he thought dark magic was a necessery tool for humans to connect to an arcanum (see Callum). So he introduced them to the dark flame, in an attempt to lead them to their arcanum but sadly humans didn’t really share his vision and thought dark magic was much more convinient. And that sweet moment of revenge, when you kill a dragon and actually use its body to conjure more magic that you can turn against other dragons.

I think this also opens up the possibility that Aaravos’ very bitter words to Viren are not in fact about the elves that imprisoned him (if he was imprisoned at all - that seems debatable, too), but about the humans to whom he extended loyalty and friendship but who...yes...ignored him. They failed his test of love. (Sorry, I’m really going overboard here. And eventually it could still very well relate to the elves and dragons. From interviews it sounds like he still has a special interest in humans? Or maybe he’s pissed at everyone. Everyone betrayed him. And on top of that he has to wear pants now.)

Elarion, black-eyed child, Her twisted roots spread deep and far, The humans’ might Sparked by the light Of Aaravos, her midnight star.

Elarion, being the capital of dark magic, spreads out. This could either mean that they literally expand and forcefully subjugate their surroundings, bringing dark magic to the humans living in the land they take in. Or it’s a metaphor for the citizens of Elarion merely spreading the word/the gospel and the practise of dark magic amongst humans.

They do all of this in the name of Aaravos - who may or may not like this depending on his intentions and the level of aggression the Elarion citizens employ.

However, one way or another, as their spiritual leader of some sorts he has become the guiding star of the city. The light in the dark midnight they had to face before. Either because he supported the spread of dark magic until it reached a desastrous tipping point (that he may or may not have wanted to happen) or because he accidently pushed them into the wrong direction and now they’re taking it everywhere and crediting him as their saviour (if only they’d be more like instagram art reposters in this regard...)

#Aaravos #The Dragon Prince #TDP #TDP Theory #TDP Speculation #Elarion #Aaravos theory #Elarion theory #The Dragon Prince Theory

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geek-patient-zero · 5 years

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Prologue (Part 2)

Or: Your Clan Sucks

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Dead Trilogy Volume 1

Father Naples claims that the Methuselahs were the ones who instituted the Masquerade. Not really true in canon, but let’s go with it for now. The Kindred realized that if humanity continued knowing that they existed, they’ll overwhelm them with sheer numbers and wipe them out. Under the Masquerade, Kindred had to hide their true natures and the existence of vampires in general from humans, on penalty of death. And it worked. Despite being fed on by them for over two thousand years, humanity forgot the existence of vampires after a few centuries, remembering them only as myths and legends. Now relatively safe, the Methuselahs sired more vampires, who sired more and so on, and in secret, apparently gained control of the world from the shadows.

Since one vampire could in theory create infinite more vampires, Reuben asks why, if all this is true, the earth isn’t overrun with vampires. Father Naples tells him about the Six Traditions, which the Masquerade is one of. He doesn’t go into detail, so here’s a link if you’re curious. The relevant Tradition is the third one, which says a vampire can’t sire another vampire unless daddy an elder vampire gives permission. If you played Bloodlines, this may sound familiar. Father Naples claims that the elder vampires keep the number of vampires low. Apparently the rule is one vampire for “tens of thousands of humans.” Given the different vampire factions this probably isn’t followed exactly worldwide. The point is vampires control their populations so they don’t overpopulate and wipe out their main food source. Keeping populations low also means that newer kindred generations can’t grow more numerous than the older ones and, well, you know. That’s left unsaid by the third Tradition.

Reuben’s next question is how kindred maintain their influence over the world when they can’t do anything when the sun’s up. Father Naples explains ghouls to him, and here there might be some divergence from modern canon.

You know Renfield from Dracula? A ghoul’s basically that. They’re humans that a vampire regularly feeds their own blood to, but whose blood isn’t drained out first so they don’t turn into vampires themselves. They stop aging and gets some enhanced strength, survivability, and other goodies as long as they get their fix. In exchange for their free will, that is. A ghoul becomes utterly devoted to their master, doing anything for them even if the ghoul hates their master, like an unholy combination of a stalker, junkie, and slave. It’s a really shitty thing to do to someone.

Father Naples doesn’t mention that bit about losing their free will. He just thinks they’re traitors and devil worshipers. Thing is, I don’t think it’s just Naples being an unreliable narrator. Throughout the book, except for maybe one instance, it isn’t brought up, and ghouls come across more like regular people who just knowingly work for vampires in exchange for their blood. There’s some mention of possession, like his ghoul or her ghoul, but if they’re still stalker-junkie-slaves in this story it doesn’t come across. The writing is very expository even after the prologue, so believe me, you’d notice if that was how ghouls were supposed to work here.

Reuben then asks about the Camarilla and the Sabbat. Now we get to talk about everyone’s favorite V:TM subject: factions and clans. First he discusses the Camarilla, and the seven clans (at the time) that makes up the bulk of it. Father Naples seems to define the sects more by their opinion on the Antediluvians as a threat than their structure or how they operate.

“The Camarilla believe that the Antediluvians met the Final Death when the Second City was destroyed. They feel that the basic threat to the Kindred comes from the possibility that mankind someday might learn that vampires are real. The Masquerade governs their actions. They are the traditionalists among Caine’s decendants.”

He goes on to define the clans in the Camarilla.

“The Ventrue are power mongers, the unofficial leaders of the sect.”

Eat the rich before the rich eat you. Naples summed it up well enough: they’re old money aristocratic fucks who believe they’re meant to be leaders of vampirekind, and thus are most likely to be Princes, the guys in charge of a city. They’re famous for the Dominate discipline, a group of powers that allow them to force others to obey their commands.

One interesting thing about the Ventrue that doesn’t get covered in this book is their clan curse. They can only drink the blood of certain kinds of people. In Bloodlines, this translated to a Ventrue character being unable to feed from hobos and prostitutes without barfing it back up half the time. Think of some snooty rich New Englander turning his nose up at a Happy Meal. In the tabletop, this preference tends to be more specific. Sometimes very specific, like that same snooty rich New Englander absolutely loving Burger King but not being able to eat anything else. Sometimes, a little too specific.

There’s this Ventrue guy in the lore, Jan Pieterzoon... I’m probably gonna get shit for this since he’s a character in the popular Clan Wars novels. Janny Boy here can only drink the blood of rape victims.

Uh huh. Wasn’t kidding when I said that this franchise can get try-hard edgy.

TVtropes’ V:TM character page lists Jan as a Nice Guy, but also mentions under Kick the Dog that he once had to arrange for someone to get raped in order to survive. This might be more on TVtropes being full of fucked up contributors, but still. In the recent V5 of the tabletop, a change was made that Ventrue can feed from people other than their preference, though they won’t get as much “nourishment” from it. Sounds like it helps avoid situations like Jan. Who’s dead now, by the way. Final Death dead. That helps.

“The Toreador are involved in the arts.”

Father Naples doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the Toreador as that’s all he says about them. Commonly rich socialite types, if the Prince of a city isn’t a Ventrue, chances are they’re a Toreador. They’re big into art, yeah, but they’re also the clan that works the closest with humans and are obsessed with beauty. So obsessed that they can be distracted by something they find beautiful, ignoring anything else until they can either muster the willpower to tear their eyes away or, more likely, one of their friends drags their pretty ass away from the shiny thing.

Their art, by the way? Fucking sucks. Toreador are terrible artists. There’s a neat reason for this; when they’re Embraced, become vampires, they’re said to lose much of their passion and creative spark. That, and they’re emotionally and artistically stunted to the era they were Embraced in no matter how long they live; something that’s apparently inspired by Anne Rice vampires. Their love and obsession with what they find beautiful is a way for them to hold on to their humanity, and art is in service to that. It’s beautifully tragic.

Not that your character is going to care when they have to deal with Vampire Squidward showing off Bold and Brash Belongs in the Trash. You can’t say anything about it either, because that Toreador is probably powerful enough that they can have either you or someone you love killed. You’re not even safe if you’re playing a Toreador because even Toreador don’t like other Toreador art. As with humans, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what’s considered beautiful varies from one Toreador to another. So they shit on each other’s work and call each other poseurs.

There’s maybe three Toreador in the book, and they’re all background characters. Only one of them gets a line or two of dialogue. I get the feeling Robert Weinberg wasn’t a big Toreador fan.

“The Tremere are a line of vampire wizards...”

Insert What We Do In the Shadows quote here.

“...who rose to prominence in the Middle Ages.”

Unlike the most of the other clans, the Tremere didn’t originate from an Antediluvian. The original ones were mages, members of the now technically extinct House Tremere led by Lord Tremere, who turned themselves into vampires with magic in order to obtain immortality. They lost all their cool powers in the change, so they had to invent blood magic, which they call Thaumatergy. It’s both a specific Discipline (vampire power) and a general term for blood magic.

You might be wondering, if they became vampires via magic and didn’t come from an Antediluvian, wouldn’t that mean there are fourteen clans, not thirteen? Well, one of he original thirteen clans were the Salubri. They were the healer class among vampires and were dedicated to finding a certain kind of enlightenment. Y’know, to make the Tremere look like extra big pricks for what they’re about to do to them. Lord Tremere, now a vampire, finds and diablerizes (more on that another time) the Salubri Antediluvian, and then Clan Tremere wiped out most of the Salubri. So now they’re one of the thirteen clans.

While they never wiped out another clan, this screwing over of the Salubri was part of a trend with the Tremere. The magic potion, spell, or whatever they used that turned them into vampires in the first place? Made by experimenting on vampires. They also created Gargoyles by performing blood magic rituals on unwilling vampires from other clans. So, despite a propaganda campaign advertising that no, really, the Salubri had it coming, and the fact that they gained legitimacy as a clan and became a part of the Camarilla, other vampires generally hate the shit out of the Tremere and don’t trust them even remotely.

We’ll be seeing the Tremere in more depth later in the story, including this book’s interpetation of the ritual that turned them into vampires.

“The Nosferatu are monstrously ugly because their leader was cursed by Caine. A few of their fourth-generation progeny are rumored to be grotesque monsters, known as the Nictuku.”

Ah, the Nosferatu. Everyone loves the Nosferatu. Like Father Naples says, they’re all horribly deformed; so ugly that even being seen by humans risks breaking the Masquerade since they’re obviously not human. That curse Naples mentioned? The Nosferatu Antediluvian was a vain pretty boy to rival a Toreador, so for his part in killing the Second Generation and destroying Enoch, Caine cursed him and all future Nosferatu generations with ugliness.

(He actually cursed all thirteen Antediluvians for what they did, hence the clan curses.)

Why does everyone love the Nosferatu? Couple of reasons from what I’ve seen. They’re ugly as hell and generally have to live in the sewers, and while they’ve learned to live with that they’re not really happy about it. On top of that other clans find them repulsive and don’t like being around them. Loneliness, pathos, angst; this is crack to fandom.

I imagine they’re also fun to design. The standard look for them is Orlok-like, but lore says that each Nosferatu’s deformity is unique. I haven’t tried designing one, but as a wannabe artist I can see the appeal. Just don’t wuss out and make “hot” Nosferatu.

Speaking of, there’s the monster fuckers in fandom. In this post-Shape of Water world, it’ll take more than looking like Count Orlok and a few lumps to make someone unfuckably ugly. And even if they are, I’ve seen people lust over werewolves, the deathclaws from the Fallout games, all kinds of weird crap. There’s surely someone out there for your lonely Nosferatu.

Oh, and they’re the smart guy of the vampire clans. You know how when people talk about playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Ghostbusters on the playground as kids, and which characters they’d play as? And how there’s always those people who’d say they always picked Donatello or Egon because they were the smart gadget guys who made all their toyetic gear, unlike their dumber friends who stuck with boring old Leonardo and Venkman? That’s the Nosferatu. They don’t really invent anything, but some of them are hackers. They’re also spymasters, using their hacker skills and Obfuscate discipline (turning invisible, mostly) to obtain information others can’t, making them an indispensible part of the Camarilla, or whatever group a Nosferatu is part of.

Finally, as a culture, Nosferatu are the most likely to stick together and look out for each other, united by their shared experiences of having to hide in the shadows and pisswater in order to not break the masquerade and being direspected by the other clans. Nosferatu can scheme and plot like every other vampire in the setting, but at least for survival’s sake, if you’re playing a Nosferatu, you don’t have to worry about your fellow uglies stabbing you in the back (most of the time). Outside the clan, I imagine this trait can easily transfer over to a coterie (V:TM’s word for party) or an OC’s friends.

Yeah, Nosferatu are these angsty, fun to draw, unconventional looking but bangable hackermen that know the Meaning of Friendship and who you can feel sorry for. But there’s another side to the Nosferatu. Fandom looks at these appealing traits, maybe a bit too shallowly, and risk over-glorifying them and missing out on their darker side.

Like I’ve said several times, Nosferatu are ugly, deformed. A lot of them develop a complex over this, along with a strong hatred and jealousy of beautiful people. One thing Nosferatu like to do is find mortals who are stuck up and egotistical about their looks, turn them into Nosferatu, and let their newly grotesque appearance serve as an eternal karmic life lesson. Whether the formerly pretty person was actually a stuck up jerk guilty of vanity or if their sire imagined it is a matter of opinion. Hell, some don’t care about teaching a lesson, embracing beautiful people purely out of jealousy and spite. They have a word for these victims: Cleopatras, named after the villain from Freaks, not the Egyptian queen. It’s like their version of “Chad”, except as the name implies, these poor newly deformed people are usually women.

Am I implying what I think I’m implying? Yep! Your favorite clan is made up partly of proto-incels!

On a lighter note, their differing opinions on beauty make the Nosferatu and Toreador natural enemies... if they’re NPCs. Player characters will be BFFs.

“The Malkavians are tricksters, seemingly mad, but probably more cunning than most imagine.”

The V:TM fandom’s other favorite clan. I don’t have to explain Malkavians to you, do I? Even if you’ve never played Bloodlines I bet you’ve heard people talking about the Malkavian playthrough of the game. At least the part where you can yell at a stop sign?

Malkavians are the “crazy” clan. Said in a more respectful way, they’re the clan whose embrace gives them a form of mental illness, either a real one or a more supernatural one, if they didn’t have one already. These guys are probably the hardest to roleplay well, because there’s a thin line between a respectful portrayal of a mentally ill person living their unlife the best they can and a character Jhonen Vasquez would create if he was phoning it in. You’d better do your homework if you want to roleplay a Malkavian or else you’re gonna annoy your friends and look like an insensitive dick.

There’s a term for a Malkavian character who acts in an early 2000′s monkey cheese lol random humor way, but c’mon, you already know what it is. That’s it for Malkavians for now. There’s only one Malkavian side character in this book so I don’t feel like going too in depth with them. Besides, I already wasted too many words on the incels. Just keep the “more cunning than most imagine” bit in mind. Oh, and they have a power that can make people around them go mad, usually in the Malkavian’s favor. That’s pretty rad.

Now that the fan favorites are out of the way, let’s get to the boring clans.

“The Brujah are rebellious in nature...”

That’s all Naples says about the Brujah. Even the writer can’t think of anything interesting to say about them.

Alright, seriously, Brujah tend to be rebels and activists, very passionate about their beliefs and strive for social change. I’m not sure whether becoming vampires makes them that way. The White Wolf wiki says that they’re compelled to go against the status quo, but I’ve heard people argue that’s just the kind of person a Brujah tends to embrace. Either way, they do develop very short tempers. Gameplay-wise in both the tabletop and Bloodlines, they tend to “frenzy” more easily than other clans, meaning they lose control of their vampiric urges and try to kill/drain the closest person available, masquerade and consequences be damned.

I feel a little bad about calling the Brujah boring. Especially nowadays with fascism on the rise and climate change about to kill us all, it’s easy to empathize with rebellious activist characters and find them relatable, even if they aren’t as flashy as the pretty people, the ugly people, and the crazy people. It’s their powers that’re a little dull. Ventrue have Dominate. Nosferatu have Obfuscate. Tremere have blood fucking magic. But despite their clan name, Brujah aren’t magic. Their powers just enhance their physical abilities, allowing them to boost their strength and move faster. You know that RPG joke about how wizards get more god-like power when they level up but warriors just hit harder? That’s the Brujah. Okay, they also have Presence, which makes them more charismatic, scarier, more convincing, and other things that helps with roleplaying a street justice dispensing rebel. And one other power I can mention, but we’ll leave that for later...

In a way, the Brujah are the closest V:TM has to a default clan. If you’re playing a game where you have no choice of which clan your character belonged to, you’d likely be a Brujah. Luckily, unlike the Ultramarines over in Warhammer 40K, the Brujah don’t really steal any of the spotlight from the other clans, so they’re not intolerable.

“...while the Gangrel, master shapechangers, maintain close ties with the gypsies and werewolves,”

Wolverine from X-Men, you know him? Give him shapeshifting powers and that’s a Gangrel. This Clan is for those who want to roleplay a werewolf but aren’t playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse for some reason. Their biggest claim to fame is that Beckett, one of the most popular recurring characters in the franchise, is one. Problem is, he’s supposed to be a subversion of how one of them typically acts, a wandering scholar instead of some guy who hangs with his pack in the woods, so he’s not doing them much favors. There's only one minor Gangrel character in Blood War, so I apologize for glossing over them.

You probably want me to talk about a certain word Naples just said here. I could say that it’s characterization, that since Naples is some old European prick he’s prejudiced against Roma and calls them whatever he wants. More of that unrelialbe narratorness. He also said Gangrel are close with werewolves when werewolves will attack them on sight like any other vampire, which helps with that interpretation. But this is the early 90′s, and V:TM had an entire clan that was based on negative Roma stereotypes. So...

Reuben sipped his Coke and said nothing. He had come to listen, not to comment.

I’m pointing this quote out because he comments two paragraphs later. Father Naples moves onto the Sabbat.

“The Sabbat are the rebels of the Kindred. My Order considers them the more dangerous of the two sects. Two major clans, the Lasombra and the Tzimisce rule the order. Most other clans are represented by small groups of rebels known as Antitribu.”

The franchise likes to point out that the Camarilla aren’t the “vampire good guys”, but the Sabbat are undoubtedly vampire bad guys. They believe that vampires shouldn’t have to hide behind a masquerade, that they should be the masters of the world with humans as their cattle and slaves. They usually ignore the Masquerade, and use big obvious Masquerade breaking as a tactic against the Camarilla, who have to clean up after their mess. Since the Masquerade exists because humans will curb stomp them if they ever found out they existed, this also makes the Sabbat the stupid sect in this case.

The Lasombra are like eviler Ventrue, but with cool shadow powers, a fetish for Catholic symbolism, and being the only clan to do the “having no reflections” thing. Oh, and they’re social darwinists. One of their methods for picking out potential new Lasombras is to utterly ruin a prospect’s life. Make their business fail, kill their family, frame them for something terrible, cancel their favorite shows. If they don’t break down after all that, congratulations, you’re now a vampire! If they’re not an utter sociopath and do, then the Lasombra just leave them in the ruins of their life without them ever knowing why the hell any of that happened. So yeah, they’re jerks.

And the Tzimisce? Quick, whose your favorite comic book villain? If you said “mid-2000′s Black Mask”, then congratulations! You’re a teenage boy, and also a potential Tzimisce player.

There is one “redeeming” thing about the Sabbat. While the Camarilla deny the existence and threat of the Antidiluvians...

“Leaders of the Sabbat firmly maintain that the third generation lives and that they are secretly manipulating their descendants for reasons of their own.” The priest’s voice sank very low. “They fear an approaching Armageddon that they call Gehenna. A time when the Antediluvians will rise to take control of the Kindred. The Sabbot suspect that the third generation plan to devour their descendants.”

Gehenna is an important part of the setting. It’s another thing I’ll explain more about later, but the Sabbat are right to worry about it. It almost makes up for their dumbass social policies and the whole “chaotic evil” thing.

Reuben comments (told you) about how the longer a vampire lives, the more potent the blood they drink has to be. Third and fourth generation Kindred would only be able to feed on other Kindred. This backs up the “third generation’s gonna wake up and eat everyone” theory. After Naples’ confirmation about this, Reuben immediately changes the subject and asks about the four remaining independent clans.

“There are the Ravnos, a society of outcasts and drifters,”

These guys are the Roma stereotypes I mentioned earlier. Their clan weakness is that they’re addicted to crime! Or at least some personal vice. Someone at White Wolf must have figured out how this looked, so they fixed it by, um, having their Antediluvian wake up and kill all but about a hundred of them... I mean, it worked for the Squats over in Warhammer 40K, but...

“Then the Assamites, an Order of Assassins, much feared even among their own kind, [sic] The Followers of Set worship a long-dormant third-generation Egyptian horror, the embodiment of that land’s ancient evil.”

I don’t know much about these two clans. There’s a couple of Assamite characters in this book, but no one from the Followers of Set.

“And last, we must not forget the Giovanni, another fairly new clan, who are preoccupied with two subjects - death and money.”

The Giovanni have a big part in this story so we’ll get to them when they show up. Also, wow, they sure made these last four the ethnic stereotype clans.

Satisfied with this new info on the Clans, though “unsure about their interactions”, Reuben moves on.

The young man’s bright blue eyes burned with an intense inner fire. “What is the Jyhad?” he asked.

Father Naples was feeling very strange. Yet he felt that he had to answer. It was extremely important to himself and the Society of Leopold that he answer Reuben’s every question. Extremely important.

Reuben may not be a vampire, but it looks like he pulled some sort of mind whammy on Father Naples. Not sure why he had to, though. I can’t think of a reason why Naples’ would explain all the other stuff of his own free will but not this subject.

The Jyhad’s a legend among Kindred, that the fourth generation is manipulating their descendants as pawns in a game where they play against each other for complete control of the world. Some say that the fourth generation is actually being manipulated by the Antediluvians, the true players of the game. The nature of Kindred society and politics makes finding the truth difficult.

“The world of the Kindred is filled with treachery and deceit. Remember, Lucifer (here he goes with the devil stuff again), their patron, is the Father of Lies. Wheels spin within wheels within wheels. None other than the Antediluvians, if they actually survive, know the truth.”

“On that subject,” said Reuben, “you might be mistaken.”

Signaling for the check, Reuben asks if there’s anything else he should know about the Kindred, such as “the Inconnu” and “the recent disturbances in Russia and Peru.” Father Naples doesn’t know about any of that, and when asked why he asks, Reuben says he was “Just confirming a few of [his] own suspicions.” Father Naples has told him everything he wanted to know, so Reuben pays the waiter and prepares to leave. Time for the prologue’s big finish.

“The young man rose to his feet. ‘No need to get up. I can see myself to the door. Thank you, for your time, Father Naples. I appreciate the information you have given me, though I think your views concerning the devil tint your narration slightly. That’s always been a problem with the Inquisition. You worry too much about demons and too little about evil. I’m sorry, but you can’t be permitted to describe our conversation to anyone. Especially to your superiors in the Society of Leopold. May God grant you peace.’

None of the five Society of Leopold agents stationed in the restaurant noticed Reuben leave. Nor could they remember anything at all about his appearance. When rewound, the audiotape from the directional microphone was found to be completely blank. And none of the technicians working the post could recall a word of the conversation they supposedly recorded.

Father Naples remained unmoving at the table until fifteen minutes passed and a curious waiter came over to see if anything was wrong. To his horror, he discovered that the priest was dead.

According to a secret report prepared by a team of investigators, Father Naples had died from a massive heart attack. One suffered by the priest a few minutes after sitting down at noon. No one could explain, nor even attempt to answer, how a dead man managed to drink two bottles of wine. The black attache case found beneath the table was empty.”

I hope Reuben at least didn’t take back the money he payed his bill with. Reality warping or no, he still ate there and should pay them.

Seriously though, this was a great prologue. It explains enough about the setting to help you follow along with the rest of the story, but doesn’t explain everything and ends on a great mystery. Rereading this helped me remember why I liked the setting so much as a kid, even if I poke fun at it now. Vampire societies might not seem like the most original idea, but back then when I thought of vampire stories, I thought of a single vampire with a cape and widow’s peak sneaking into peoples homes to drink their blood, and the closest thing to mystery, court intrigue, and games of thrones were the humans trying to figure out how to stop that one vampire. V:TM introduced me to a type of story and concepts I’d never read before, and not just about fictional monsters. That’s more a credit to the original tabletop than just Bloodwar, but this book was still my gateway to the setting. Sometimes even schlock can have meaning to someone, I guess.

#vampire the masquerade #vtm #world of darkness #vtmb #vampire: the masquerade #blood war

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unproduciblesmackdown · 5 years

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so being abused the entire first 2 decades of your life: what’s up with that? Night Posts Edition

- classic when finding some “uh oh relatable!” content abt various Disorderres and there’s some thing like “many symptoms overlap with ptsd” and it’s like ooh which one is applying to me?? i mean spoilers the idea that The Grouping Of Non Nt Traits And Experiences Into Distinct Classifications is not actually...an exact science and for all intents and purposes it makes no difference if i am going “oh god #me” at an informative post about adhd if actually its ptsd acting exactly the same anyways so. but yknow it’s wild n zany being like “am i overstepping my bounds b/c this was caused by coping with trauma possibly? what audacity” and etc when it really....that doesnt matter....

- also ugh @ retaining things that downplay abusers’ responsibility for their actions (in specific things you’re personally dealing with, not like, as a general stance) and shift blame onto yourself like........you have to get so used to treating someone’s Abusive Behavior as something inevitable that you can’t ever expect them to stop doing, and thus pretty much considering someone abusive like a force of nature because they’re just gonna do what they’re gonna do whenever they next get Set Off rather than like.......a person who is responsible for their own behavior and in control of their own choices and like. especially zany when you’re a kid and they’re your parent so there’s the Power Imbalance of them being an adult and the other power imbalance of them being in control of your whole existence. but so like even just the other year i was taking the blame for calmly speaking back to a grownass man close to thrice my age raging at me and saying like, not verbatim but the idea of like “ugh i know it was partly my fault for even saying anything back to him because i knew he’d just continue to yell but unfortunately i just refuse to weather that kind of behavior without standing up for myself at all anymore” but like no!!!! that’s shifting all the responsibility for this other person’s behavior onto myself, like i Made him choose to shout at me at like 4am because he sucks and has some kind of superiority power trip issues. cuz i am well within rights to respond to anyone addressing me and it’s Not my fault at all that he chooses to react the way he reacts.

- also that i was ready to excuse my being blamed for this by others because they were closer to that person than they were to me and i was gonna be like “okay i Get wanting to defend someone who’s closer to you” but no!!!! actually!!!! i may get it but i don’t condone excusing anyone’s horrible behavior in the least just cuz you know them or they’re friends or family or something. in fact that’s terrible. i’m just primed to be Used To It because of the weird situation of parental abuse where there’s other people also trapped in this location and daily life with an abuser and if someone “causes” the abuser to start being shitty then they’ll get blamed / resented for that. me and my siblings seem more like friendly acquaintances b/c we had to be pitted against each other in these kinds of ways for eons until we were all in our teens and got some more Space and kind of realized that we weren’t each others enemies and got closer and my dumb little brother was old enough to stop being a whiny binch and Owed me for helping him with math hw over the phone from 2 hrs drive away lol.....jk, sort of.....we did get along great eventually but then i left thanks to said abuse and us talking via twitter isn’t at all the same as us being able to talk in person :/

- also one thing that sometimes Strikes me is that when i’m like blandly recalling incidents of abuse like “oh yeah, that time” it bothers me less to think about stuff that happened to me specifically than to think about times it was Other people who were being treated that way. the latter was always equally or probably more upsetting and it always felt just as bad in the moment anyways, there was no major distinction in the Abuse In Progress experience if it was directed mostly on you than on other people

- all my life i’ve also been super stubborn which never helped and even Abuse MaGee would have to try to get creative with Disciplinary Systems and there was this golden “punishment” which was eat dinner in your room by yourself and i was like oh my god can i really. the horror of Family Dinner was like, this dark comedic farce playing out in that house for all our lives. christ. speaking of being stubborn this one time my sister cut my toe with a knife (half accidentally) because i refused to stop swinging my legs despite her holding the knife under the table lol and i also refused to tell on her b/c we were All In This Together (that is, Us vs The Abuser, which always took precedence over any internal conflict in our faction lol)

- always remembering how my “’”””””””defining”””””””””” trait was always getting good grades except the only reason i ever felt this pressure was the time my sister caught shit for getting a C, and i wasn’t even getting A - F letter grades yet and was already like jfc guess i can’t like....get a single C ever.....the joke is i’ve always been a godawful student who hates school, i just also managed to get great grades fairly easily, b/c of the devil probably. i’m sorry

- love to wonder what interests i might have been able to explore if i didn’t want to hide anything i was genuinely interested in and other True Thoughts And Feelings from my ‘rents. who knows!!! even now i’m not sure what i like and my vague ideas about it are all mostly In Theory and i don’t have any hopes and dreams b/c of never being able to really consider my own interests and desires and also because when every day of your life is basically spent in survival mode about everything else, that’s not really conducive to having dreams and ambitions. see also: like, being really poor

- The Weird Experience when only one of your parents is abusive and the other parent is also experiencing spousal abuse and so like, even though they’re your parent, you know that they don’t really have equal power as the abusive one because they too are being abused? it’s a complicated thing b/c that’s how every individual experience with abuse is (complicated). and so you’ve got this bizarre situation where maybe someone cares about you but they can’t really protect you from this other person. and like, my dad is crap and in some areas even a crappier person than my abusive mom and also i hate him, but i only hate him for certain things lmao not for being abused or some ways he tried to deal with it. i know what’s trash and what’s not

- the zany experience of No One Will Help You Ever.....lucky for me i eventually figured out on my own that what i’d been living with all the time had actually been abuse for real all along! and yet still i knew that like, there wasn’t much i could immediately do with that information because..........yknow, what do you actually do. i was basically already 18, so. and even if i hadnt been. there’s nothing to do for it!! just sucks to be you, basically. but an exception is that when one day i texted my friend to ask if i might be able to leave my house overnight and crash at their family’s place for a little bit, their parents immediately were like Yes Of Course and they let me stay there for a week and were very nice about all of it. between them and the nice trans lady who gave me some more Housing Assistance by letting me stay in her spare room for like, most of december.....my Allies. plus someone who talked to me via online once i bailed on my ‘rents! if they read this they know who they are and they have continued to be so kind and generous ugh love and appreciate you

- god just individual occasions of “THIS bullshit that i went through this one time” of especially ridiculous incidents.....i could go on for eons

- sort of tangentially related and related to the first point but ugh specific memories of Moments In Which It Continued To Be Revealed To Me That I, Individually, Was Prone To Being Kind Of Socially Ostracized.....like my ass started noticing that shit as soon as i was around other kids aka preschool aka 4 yrs old.......like i’m usually somewhat withdrawn and cautious and quiet in social situations especially what with the association that “misbehaving” = trauma exposure so, yknow, that might be a way that you’re pressured into just keeping to yourself and keeping your head down. but talk about “i don’t really relate to other people my age” lmao like i always preferred interacting with adults really while by and large dealing with the other kids felt like a challenge that i was never gonna actually come out on top of and i still remember individual Efforts i’d make to ~fit in~ and Participate that just fell flat or got me actively excluded....Ugh City........and it’s like, i could make a list of Social Traits i think i have that help make it difficult for people to be interested in interacting with me, or “contribute” to those joyous occasions when you get to sit back and take in the thinly veiled contempt directed at you by various shitheads, but like, even that’s not really the right way to explain it. its kind of more a Greater Than The Sum Of Its Weird Parts sorta combined experience where i guess i just have this kind of Negative Je Ne Sais Quoi that gets ya the social brushoff / rejection. c’est ce que c’est. the joke is i actually like people and socializing In Theory, i just usually don’t get to do it. shoutout to the advanced relatability of alana calling everyone Acquaintances b/c i literally did/do that lmao......like are we friends if we don’t talk all that often? it’s part on me cuz i’m crap at being the person to initiate conversation cuz too often i assume i’d be an annoyance and also b/c conversation with me is like, not great lmao but still......ce’st l’a v’ie

anyways (clip from that fuckin song where it’s like WHO CAN RELATE lmao.mp3)

#long post //////#the entire first quarter (at least lol) of my life being Devastated By Abuse means i get to complain about it whenever i feel like it

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little-purple-thundercloud · 6 years

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LFRP: L’yhta Mahre (Balmung)

Character Name: L’yhta Mahre

The Basics ––– –

Age: Somewhere in her early to mid-20s (thanks, time bubble)

Birthday: 12th Sun of the 3rd Astral Moon (May 12th)

Race: Seeker of the Sun Miqo’te

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual. Prefers women romantically, prefers men sexually.

Marital Status: In a poly pod. By mutual agreement, the pod has certain open characteristics.

Alignment: Chaotic Good.

Elemental Affinity: Astral, Wind over Fire

What I’m Looking For ––– –

Adventure, including IC dungeons

Friends

Fellow mages to talk shop with

People with problems that need Magic! to solve

An apprentice

Possibly, romance?

What I’m Not Looking For ––– –

Unpleasant or abusive rivalries

Villains (got enough of those already...)

Mean, demanding, or uncommunicative RP partners

Other OOC Notes ––– –

Hi! I’ve decided to put this out there to see about expanding my RP circle. L’yhta’s a fairly easy to get along with character, as long as you don’t mind (or if you’re especially interested in) adventuring and magic theory. She has other interests, but being somewhat of an awkward sort at heart, she tends to fall back on what she knows -- and gets quite excited about it, to boot.

I’m usually in XIV during the evenings US Central Time (after 8pm or so), but I’m also available on Tumblr and Discord much more. Please don’t hesitate to message me if you’d like to interact! I swear I’m not scary.

More under the cut!

Physical Appearance ––– –

Hair: Highly variable, but naturally purple.

Eyes: Bright heliotrope.

Height: 5 fulms, 5 ilms

Build: Lanky, rangy, bony, and muscular, without many curves. She looks rather like a runner who eats far less than she should.

Distinguishing Marks: One thin white scar across her throat. What’s most distinguishing is her utter lack of distinguishing marks; outside of that scar, her skin looks eerily perfect and almost painted on, as if it were magicked to be such by some obsessed with flawlessness.

Common Accessories: L’yhta typically carries a pouch of candied fruits with her, along with a small ritual kit. She wears a linkpearl stud in her right ear that looks like a rainbow-colored flower. Her constant companion is Astrea, one of the Stardust Rods from the age of Mhach that she’s carefully restored over the years. When she can’t carry that artifact with her, she keeps a small mythrite scepter with a ruby focusing gem in a garter on her upper thigh.

Usual Attire: In public, L’yhta is often found wearing the robes of a mage with a taste for the historical (leaning towards Mhachi or late Allagan styles), along with short skirts or tights, ring guards, and ankle boots. In more casual situations, she prefers light skirts and sleeveless tops or Doman-style attire.

Personal ––– –

Profession: ~ Adventuring mage: L’yhta is a member of the Adventurers’ Guild of Eorzea and holds an honorary commission in the Maelstrom’s Foreign Levy for magical services rendered. She is known to actively practice all four Eorzean Disciplines of Magic and then some, with her primary adventuring praxis being thaumaturgy augmented with arcanima. ~ Researcher of esoterica: She’s also relatively well-known at the four magic guilds (though their opinions of her vary) as a researcher and once student. She has a reputation for devising new spells and trying to explore areas of magic that don’t neatly fit into the Eorzean Disciplines of Magic.

Hobbies: Reading, exploring dark places, listening to ribald music, writing questionable poetry, drinking to excess, musing about grand schemes to improve the world, swimming

Languages: Eorzean Common. She can read Belah’dian, Mhachi, and Nymian, and has a passing familiarity with Allagan script. Beyond that, she knows a few phrases in Doman. She does not know huntspeak.

Residence: An apartment in the Ivory Tower in Shirogane. She also has a small apartment in Fisherman’s Bottom in Limsa Lominsa.

Birthplace: A small coastal village in Vylbrand, about 100 malms north of Limsa Lominsa.

Religion: Worship of the Mothercrystal

Patron Deity: She would say the Mothercrystal, for all that matters.

Fears: Losing friends and family; the disintegration of her poly pod; an ignoble and irrelevant death; being unable to help someone she finds in need; the Empire steamrolling over Eorzea, Doma, or Hingaishi; being hated for no reason. Oddly, she doesn’t really fear death, and a part of her wants to die as a martyr.

Nicknames: Lyta, Y-hta, Lady Sorceress, Mistress Lyta

Relationships ––– -

Spouse: Divorced. She is part of (and quite committed) to a poly pod, but none of them would describe it as a “spouse-type” relationship.

Children: None

Parents: Deceased

Siblings: Six sisters and one brother, all of whom reside in the tribe where she grew up.

Other Relatives: She has about ten nephews and nieces at this point, as well as several cousins. One of her nephews followed her back to Limsa Lominsa and is a newly minted Yellowjacket.

Pets: None

Traits ––– -

* Bold your character’s answer.

Extroverted / In Between / Introverted

Disorganized / In Between / Organized

Close Minded / In Between / Open Minded

Calm / In Between / Anxious

Disagreeable / In Between / Agreeable

Cautious / In Between / Reckless

Patient / In Between / Impatient

Outspoken / In Between / Reserved

Leader / In Between / Follower

Empathetic / In Between / Apathetic

Optimistic / In Between / Pessimistic

Traditional / In Between / Modern

Hard-working / In Between / Lazy

Cultured / In Between / Uncultured

Loyal / In Between / Disloyal

Faithful / In Between / Unfaithful

Additional information ––– –

Personality: L’yhta is impulsive, but largely good-natured, as long as she doesn’t view someone as Evil (which usually requires they demonstrate a desire or intent to harm others for their own benefit). She has an unfortunate tendency to speak her mind and to accidentally flirt with people, and while she’s often quiet at first when in a large social situation, she’ll quickly engage with anyone who interacts with her. Those who get to know her will discover that she can sometimes be dryly snarky, cares for others quickly, is often impatient, loves and trusts her friends deeply, and can have a very nasty temper.

Recreational Substances: L’yhta has a very high alcohol tolerance and tends to drink to excess. She also partakes in recreational herbs, but only ones she considers “mind-opening,” such as hallucinogens and empathogens. She very assiduously avoids drugs like somnus.

Favorite Foods: Sweets, fish, miqa’bobs, and most Doman fare.

Likes: Adventurers, people who don’t take themselves too seriously, open-minded mages, battle, surviving nearly getting killed, helping others, the sense of a spell well-executed

Dislikes: Religious zealots, most nobility (knights she can be okay with, depending on their behavior), boredom, abusive individuals, being alone

Virtues: Loyal, trusting, defends others without hesitation, playful

Vices: Drinks to excess, lustful, holds grudges, temper

RP Hooks ––– –

Mistress of Magic: Whether you’ve got a magical problem that needs fixing, a desire to learn new magicks, a drive to talk shop about magic, or just an interest in the Art, L’yhta can range from anything from sounding board to plot device dispenser, drinking buddy to teacher, research friend to spellcrafter. She knows a lot about magic and I enjoy sharing the lore.

Adventuring Buddies: Need someone to blow things up for you? Maybe some combat healing magic? As a member of the Adventurers’ Guild, L’yhta can pick up leves that can put her just about anywhere in the world. Maybe she gets assigned to your adventuring party, maybe you end up investigating the same ruins, or maybe you’re looking for adventurers for a job.

Anything else! We can come up with lots of reasons, I suspect, for our characters to interact!

#ooc #character bio #ffxiv roleplay #balmung roleplay #character profile #lfrp

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mahalzevran · 6 years

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DA 20+ Questions

Tagged by @antivan-surana thanks! Tagging @situationnormal @the-dread-doggo @acepavus @aroundofgwent @lakambaeni @kxnways @fuckbioware (no pressure ofc) and anyone who wants to?

The rest is under a read more because it’s long

01) Favourite game of the series?

Origins, only because you got less and less op as a mage as the games went on. I love all the games tbh.

02) How did you discover Dragon Age?

My friend got my sister into it. They kept talking and talking about it so finally I was like “ok lets see what the big deal is” and here I am now

03) How many times you’ve played the games?

I’ve done Origins twice fully, DA2 four times fully (omg I didn’t realize this until now lol) and DA:I just once fully. I have one unfinished playthrough of Origins with a Cousland, and I’m in the middle of maybe two of DA:I. I think I’ve gone back and replayed certain parts of both Origins and DA:I plenty of times.

04) Favourite race to play as?

Elf I guess? Though I’ve only fully played as a human and elf. I’m in the middle of a dwarf playthrough and I’m thinking of doing a qunari one in the future. It might change idk.

I just really liked playing as an elf in Origins so that’s why I got into elves. But the funny thing is, I wasn’t even thinking of playing as an elf when I played for the first time. I wanted to play as a human. I just did it on a whim.

05) Favourite class?

Mage, hands down. Realistically, they’re the most versatile class. They can do range and melee since anyone can learn how to fight with weapons. But the last two games won’t let you so :)

Also, this stems from the fact that I’ve been a harry potter fan since I could remember.

06) Do you play through the games differently or do you make the same decisions each time?

In my full, proper playthroughs that I’ve finished, it’s slightly different but still the same basic ideas. Sided with mages, agreed with Anders, etc.

But I am planning to try an evil playthrough in the future so

07) Go-to adventuring group?

DA:O (I have two)

Leliana, Wynne, Shale - the OG crew; they were my main crew in my first playthrough and it was a pretty even party

Zevran, Leliana, Alistair - the elf crew; esp. with Rhian they’re all elves because I saw a theory that Leliana is half elf and I’m down

DA2

It’s a mixed bag. If I’m not playing as a mage, I usually take Anders a lot because we need a healer and Merrill can’t heal. I tend not to take Sebastian as much after I max his friendship. After Sebastian, I take Aveline the least. Other than that I just mix it up. Unless I’m romancing someone, then I take them every time.

I’d love to take Anders, Fenris, and Merrill out more often but I hate how mean they all are to each other (looking @ u bioware 👀)

DA:I

My first playthrough, I mixed it up a lot in the beginning but then I ended up bringing Solas, Cole, and Blackwall a lot near the end for some reason?

I love taking Vivienne, Dorian, and Solas out, especially if I’m playing a mage, because it’s such a pretty fireworks show

In general though, if I’m romancing someone I take them with me almost always.

08) Which of your characters did you put the most thought into?

I think it’s a tie between Rhian and Lu.

09) Favourite romance?

To no one’s surprise, it’s Zevran :3

Solas is second because I just really like that angst.

10) Have you read any of the comics/books?

I’ve read The Silent Grove, Those Who Speak, and Until We Speak (because someone gifted me the Omnibus) and The Calling.

I also have Hard in Hightown, which I should probably read lol, and the art book of inquisition.

11) If you read them, which was your favourite book?

The Calling solely because of my mom Fiona and my dad Duncan.

12) Favourite DLCs?

Awakening because I love everyone and its also really funny that Rhian, who is 19 at that point, had to basically babysit people older than her and also run a whole arling.

I love both Legacy and Mark of the Assassin. Mark of the Assassin was really funny (though I hated the stealth part). I love Legacy specifically because when I was fighting Corypheus, both Varric and Anders K.O.’d and it was just me and Carver. It was a special family moment bringing down a whole entire magister together. I also hc that that was canon and it brought Kaia and Carver closer together.

13) Things that annoy you.

I’m gonna talk about the game bc if this is about the fandom, then that’s a whole other thing.

Anders’ writing for one. It doesn’t make sense that he’d approve of giving Fenris back to Danarius. And also that he wouldn’t tell f!Hawke that he’s bi? Then there’s the fact that Anders, Fenris, and Merrill all don’t get along when they have a lot in common.

Anything that was written by Lukas Krisdkjsdhkdk. Aveline, Sera, etc. he did a really bad job.

Also didn’t like that mages got less OP in the last two games.

There’s also the tone-deafness? Dorian, a brown man, saying slavery is ok. And also there’s the dialogue between Solas and Vivienne where Solas supposedly “owns” Vivienne. I think he says something like “may you learn”? Solas, a white person, saying this to Vivienne, a black woman, when there’s obvious colorism in Thedas? I think not.

There’s probably other but I can’t think of them right now.

14) Orlais or Ferelden?

Orlais is too snooty and Ferelden doesn’t season their food. I pick Seheron and Laysh because that’s where the Asians are at.

15) Templars or mages?

Mages

16) If you have multiple characters, are they in different/parallel universes or in the same one?

Originally, my canonverse was Rhian, Kaia, and Luwalhati. Alden and Bolin were part of an AU. Then Alden finagled his way in there, then I decided to have Bolin in there too. So now i have twin Hawkes and Bolin is part of the Inquisition (if he’s a companion or not, I haven’t thought about)

I have plenty of other OCs that I’m planning on, but they’re currently sorted into a different universe.

17) What did you name your pets? (mabari, summoned animals, mounts, etc)

Pikamon for the Origins mabari. It’s a mix between the names of my two dogs, Pikachu and Cinnamon

Cinnachu for the DA2 mabari, also a mix of Pikachu and Cinnamon.

Lu’s mount is the royal sixteen (hart), which is given to you by Clan Lavellan if you manage to keep them alive iirc, and its name is Luntian, the tagalog word for green which is her favorite color. (In a teen!Lu AU, her mount is the bog unicorn bc she’s an edgelord)

18) Have you installed any mods?

It would be more surprising if I didn’t. How else would I manage to have my characters look like the’re poc?? And also get rid of whitewashing and have some continuity. I usually just do cosmetic mods if it’s my first playthrough. Then I do like “cheats” after I finish the game fully.

Fun fact, I once spent like 2+ hrs modding Origins to have the Zev romance the way I want. I also stayed up until like 5am trying to make Solas look like his concept art lol (it didn’t really work)

19) Did your Warden want to become a Grey Warden?

Rhian didn’t not want to become a warden. She read about them and thought they were an honorable order, but she didn’t expect to ever have a chance to become one. Her goal was to just go up in the Circle hierarchy, maybe even become First Enchanter. Then when the time came, she didn’t really have much of a choice.

20) Hawke’s personality?

Kaia is blue and Alden is purple

21) Did you make matching armor for your companions in Inquisition?

At first, I didn’t get what the big deal was with crafting. It didn’t seem fun at all lol. Then I tried it and was hooked. I don’t have them matching, but I do tend to try to match my Inquisitor with their LI in some way.

My usual procedure for armor in Inquisition is like this. I make everyone wear heavy armor and pick the materials that have the highest attributes, not caring how ridiculous the colors are. Then I go to tint them using a guide for each companion’s color scheme. This is the same for helmet but I usually have them turned off or have no one wearing one.

The only exception is Varric, Cole, and Blackwall. I have Varric wear the rogue armor that looks like his DA2 outfit, and Cole and Blackwall wear the Grey Warden heavy armor. I tint the grey warden armor using a guide for its color scheme.

I have Bull, Vivienne, and Cole wear their unique helmets.

22) If your character(s) could go back in time to change one thing, what would they change?

Rhian - She’d probably want to re-do how she told Zevran that she wasn’t exactly dead.

Kaia - Taken Quentin’s threat more seriously and killed him before he got to Leandra

Alden - He has no regrets

Luwalhati - wouldn’t have taken Sam and Wis with her so they wouldn’t have had to have died in the conclave explosion

Bolin - None, all of his decisions led him to Dorian and he’s happy with that.

23) Do you have any headcanons about your character(s) that go against canon?

They’re all at least part Seheron?

I also hc that neither Carver nor Bethany die because Kaia was able to cast a barrier on both of them before the ogre got them. Then they both became Grey Wardens because Carver contracted the taint in the expedition and wouldn’t join the Wardens unless Bethany came with him too.

Another hc I have is that Sebastian didn’t leave when Anders was spared and stayed to help out. But he went his separate way after because he still didn’t approve of sparing him.

Oh shoot, I almost forgot. The most against canon thing I’ve done probably? Rhian didn’t do the Ritual but she did slay the archdemon without dying. Rhian’s an arcane warrior, so when she slayed it, she was partway in the fade. Being partway into the fade was enough for her essence, I guess, to survive it. But she’s not mortal anymore and kind of a spirit now? So she periodically has to chill in the fade because being in the real world takes a toll on her.

25) Who did you leave in the Fade?

In the game, it was Stroud. I killed Loghain and no way is Alistair gonna be trapped in there. Fiona will be sad. So I made Alistair king in the game only, so Stroud was the one that was left.

This is another off canon thing I did. In my actual canon, Alistair is the warden contact. The Hawke that comes to the Inquisition is both Kaia and Alden. Alden brings Fenris with him because he doesn’t go anywhere without his Boo-Boo. Bethany and Carver also come because Weisshaupt was being weird and it seemed like they would be safer in the Inquisition. Lu + her party, Alistair, Kaia, Alden, Fenris, Bethany, and Carver all come to Adamant. Because there’s so many people, everyone was able to escape the Fade. No one is left behind.

26) Favourite mount? The nugs! All of them :)

Though I don’t really use the mounts lol

#tag meme #whew this was really long omg #thanks for tagging though!#about me

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