#binary oppositions

[lynnetendo]

TRIED DRAWING SIFFRIN FOR THE FIRST TIME!!! FINDING MY STYLE FOR FUTURE ISAT FANART BLAH BLAH!!! NEED TO PRACTISE DRAWING SIF. SIF IS INEVITABLE

[mollysunder]

My wildest theory for now is that Mel will make a pact with a demon in the Noxus show.

The eye on this sword tells me that it's either possessed by a Darkin or a demon, and either can bind with a host.

Why do think this? Well in Blood Sweat and Tears it's apparent Mel is connected with the Kindred, but the Kindred is strange here. I don't mean something like, "Oh the Lamb is black and gold and red all over". I mean the Lamb's arm seems to be permanently red here.

The only person with an arm like that , completely and fully red, is Swain, who was included in the Wolf's afterlife. Swain's arm is only like that because the demon Raum replaced it using his power.

There's also many similarities to the Lamb and Mel which I discussed in another post. If we treat the Lamb as a stand in for Mel, the reason Ambessa rejects a relatively peaceful death, for a life of ruthless ambition to protect her children (as referenced in Ambessa's bio), the connection becomes clearer and the implications become further reaching.

[rated-r-for-grantaire]

potentially hot take but there is literally no such thing as an “opposite gender/sex” and literally no one has a gender that is the ~opposite~ of theirs.

[foenixed]

The "robot/alien learns how to love" trope is just aphobia btw.

[rachedurst]

anyways i love you people that are both gay and straight, in whatever way that presents. being nonbinary often can mean a complicated relationship to sexuality and how one perceives it within the societal restrictions of homo and heterosexual, and i think bridging those definitions and having "contradictory" labels like lesboy or whatever is really cool. i support and stan he/him lesbians or butch lesbians or she/her gay men or femme gays or she/he pronoun users and whatever else, be it cis or trans or both. if you feel like youre both cis and trans that also rocks. dont let people force you back into a binary within the queer community, stay strong!

[gabrielisdead]

definitely not a girl, too pumped up on transitioning to a hairy man like creature to be considered enby, too soft to be a binary man, too purple to be human. this mortal coil is only a vessel for my sick pleasures in life

[bunnybonesstudio]

Sametri for the soul

Demetri: ‘You disgust me on every fundamental level.’

Sam: ‘Bagels and loxs are one of the most beloved ways to eat a bagel! Stop being so dramatic!’

Demetri: ‘I’ll concede when you stop brutalizing the best way to eat breakfast.’

Sam: ‘Spare me. You’re so basic. Bacon, egg, and cheese? Really re-inventing the wheel over there!’

Eli: ‘Remind me to never get breakfast with you two ever again.’

[trlvsn]

they need to put me into cryogenic sleep and wake me up when society reaches an era beyond post-gender. they need to wake me up when being non-binary is no longer understood by defining the binary first; they need to put me into a world where male and female are as extinct as dinosaurs, where people try to construct an image of them with bits and pieces of history but can't reach a sure conclusion because of how unfitting they are to the modern world. like damn i'm tired

[hoboblaidd]

This is not related to anything sexual but I did find it interesting while we were talking about Mythal and Elgar'nan as parents figures to the elvhen. I find it interesting that when Solas could have had a chance between picking a more female body (mirroring Mythal) or a more male one (mirror Elgar'nan) that he chose to go with Elgar'nan given how close Solas was to Mythal. It is more to do with how Solas felt in a body (and how he eventually came to regret it) but I do find the choice an interesting one

unprompted but always accepting | existential edition

honest to god i've been thinking about this too. i think he probably chose to go male because he saw it as a complement to Mythal. I don't think it was in a 'im usurping Elgar'nan' kind of way, because as much as he grows to hate Elgar'nan he never wanted to be 'the Father' of the People or Mythal's lover/husband/toxic counterpart lol. I also don't think he hated Elgar'nan enough and was proud enough to be so petty as to be like 'well I'm taking a better male body so fuck him.' At most, he thought Elgar'nan lacked wisdom, but that was supposed to be Solas' job anyway. He didn't begrudge him that (at that point). The hatred festered the longer they were in bodies. If he'd taken a body after he became Pride, that would be a very different story lol.

Solas was always Mythal's "companion spirit", and he loved it. Together, they formed an effective and loving whole. They both brought different gifts and expertise to the table that worked so well together. In his mind, at least, they were two sides of the same coin. So to him, since Mythal took an unequivocally female body, he would take an unequivocally male body as a good counterpoint to her. That way, he can bring a different perspective that fits into how he viewed their relationship. In sum, to him they form a more complete picture if he's a complement rather than a 'copy', if that makes sense.

adding to this what @loredrinker articulated so beautifully: Without it having to be gender or binary, there is the spiritual aspects of masculine and feminine. They are companion spirits and would reflect opposites in order to be complementary as a whole. Ying and yang.

[amaryllis-sagitta]

I've always disliked the spirit origin theory and I finally know why

To put it briefly: it's the cornerstone of the Thedosian brand of gnostic pessimism ingrained in the worldbuilding around both Fade spirits and elves, that subtly condemns their existence among the living no matter how hard the writing tries to compensate in the other direction (and to be fair, it hardly ever does).

I have already mentioned in several analyses that the worldbuilding in Dragon Age is trying to impose some objective moral order through the system of virtues embodied by Fade spirits and the speculated position of the Maker, illustrated through the visual allegory of The Gaze. Every place where the Gaze does not fall is identified as the Void - the realm of the Blight, demonic whisperings, evil in mortals' souls, oblivion and erasure.

This moral compass ingrained in Thedosian worldbuilding is outlined in the Canticle of Threnodies. I have always posited that we can read the Canticle's "Maker" as a purely formal locus meant to hook up some form of prisca theologia that would be partially true regardless of whom we put in the Maker's seat.

For example: the Canticle claims that when "The Maker" created the physical world from a portion of the Fade itself, then Their firstborn, Fade spirits, turned away from their perfect resonance with the Maker. They envied what they were not, and for this poisoning of the heavenly "song" with discordant (so, evil) intentions, the Maker castigated them, declared them the first demons, and made humans Their "chosen" race -- presumably, this time building them of both Earth and Spirit so that they would not envy partaking in either.

After multiple hints left in DAI Trespasser, that sparked speculation about the spirit origin theory as the dominating fan theory years ago, DATV confirmed that the "firstborn elvhen" were Fade spirits that manifested physically. They used lyrium, the blood of the Earth's Titans, to build themselves physical bodies. The Stone retaliated, and the first elvhen waged a war with it, eventually devising a way to sunder the spirit essence/ dreams from all Titans. It is heavily implied that this choice to carry out their existence on Earth as war and conquest has twisted whatever the "virtuous" spiritual nature was left in the Evanuris, and that after the end of that war, Elgar'nan simply could not stop.

Why would they do it though? While some concept art from the artbook shows spirits observing primordial dwarves dwarfing, in the end, the Regret mural that shows Mythal inviting Solas into the world explicitly tells us he had no desire to live "as HUMANS" (and the story fails to bridge that lore drop with the known lore about humans allegedly arriving to Thedas from across the seas, and only being able to thrive after the Veil).

So, despite disproving the story about the Chantry's Maker creating the Veil, the writing confirms the Chant's initial overtly anthropocentric orientation. Humans were always special and spirits were always meant to backup and store their ethically charged concepts. But the important accomplishment here is that spirits/ elvhen are doomed with an inherent moral error that snowballs into inevitable strife, destruction and error!

But wait, there's more! Because now that we have the anthropocentrism as our implied position towards the Thedosian races, the history of the elvhen race looks even more like some bizzare form of "karmic" reckoning that completely misses the point of a reckoning, to replace it with unwarranted generational punishment. First, as a result of the Great Betrayal, the elvhen are sundered from their connection to the spirit essence, and thus subjected to the Quickening, which I guess is supposed to be a way of the world giving the elvhen a taste of their own medicine and saying "Be careful what you wish for". Then, once they are finally effectively like humans in every metaphysical respect (unbeknownst to everyone except the remaining ancient elvhen), the moral corruption of the Evanuris gets passed on as the Tevinters learn to glorify blood sacrifice at the behest of their Old Gods (who are really Evanuris speaking through their Archdemons, at any capacity they still have left). This gets used to further humiliate the remainders of ancient Arlathan. What happened to the elvhen now gives Solas reason to hate the mortal physical existence of elves twofold.

The fact that elves keep being punished by the narrative is a direct result of BioWare implementing the spirit origin theory the way they did, because it was devised as a scenario of original sin that necessitates conflict and moral downfall, and ends up snowballing into dooming elves through and through.

But more than that, as I have mentioned in another post, on the metaphysical level, "pure" spirits should be occupied solely with their respective defining abstracts. Spirits should know no desire. Desire is the "unquenchable flame" that defines humans. As far as DAO, we would read that the more benevolent spirits prefer to sit back in the Fade and not interfere with the mortals, and the ones with the greatest drive to join the living are predatory demons.

And the reason for all of this is "the Maker" being bored of perfection in the Golden City, and wanting some change. That the world requires change and opposition to let its best aspects shine is not an controversial idea. However, in the Dragon Age worldbuilding, this necessity for change is not introduced under a milder Hermetic assumption that, even after being cast down into a darker realm of the incarnate, one can successfully control their mundane passions and heal their soul from corrupting influences whilst existing physically... Not on the grand scale, at least.

Once spirits decided to enter the physical world, they started acting like they were trapped and forced to fight for their lives (despite them being the trespassers). The vast majority of them got spiritually corrupted (if they didn't represent vices like Tyranny from the get-go), they dragged their hesitant kin down with them through manipulation. The elvhen race fell into tyranny as their "First" were actually the worst, yet people looked up to them for survival. One particularly inventive specimen devised two catastrophic tools -- one, to deflect onto the Titans whatever should have happened to the first elvhen in order to sunder what has been wrongly joined; the other, to sunder the tyrannical Evanuris from the rest of the elvhen and spirits and stop their corrupting influence. Yet, because the world changes, the collateral of one such tool introduced a wholly new type of rampant evil, and the collateral of the other made the whole elvhen race spiral down... even further into their entrapment in physicality!

The way they built up the spirit origin theory, it draws a full circle: first, the Southern Chantry and the Dalish demonize Fade spirits - one for dogmatic reasons, because it sees the marriage of spirit and flesh as something that is evil even in humans, the other because they can't be denied that healthy cackle of metaphysical irony even if they try their hardest. Then, with DAI Solas and Cole, we're acquainted with a more sympathetic understanding of Fade spirits as being that are fundamentally different but operate on a logic that doesn't automatically lead to a shitshow of a moral downfall. But then, we learn that a group of spirits doomed the entire world to millennia of strife because they felt curiosity for the Other and because the choice to cross the great threshold almost automatically made them forget the virtues they supposedly embodied and spiral down into the "lower" survival instincts.

Personally, I believe that spirits & elvhen could be built on a fundamental existential difference in a way that would have made their excursions into each other's realm temporary. I believe that the spirit origin theory, even if upheld, could have been taken in a direction that didn't imply instant rampant and thoughtless colonialism on the elvhen part. I believe that such choices would have enforced worldbuilding that didn't need to condemn the spirits/ elvhen with that weird version the original sin that receives completely unsympathetic treatment as the time goes by.

[pitotube]

it's weird how many trans people seem to genuinely forget that transition is a thing that happens, is possible, and more common than anyone knows. like it's crazy how much people forget this is a thing & attempt to define transness by the state of not transitioning

[fully-embracing-my-autopsy]

The next person who uses "opposite sex" is getting stabbed like Caesar

(/nsrs bec I'm not literally going to stab someone but SHEESH why are people like this)

STOP. PROMOTING. A SEX. BINARY. IT. DOESN'T. EXIST!

[doomed-era]

the weird thing about botw sheikah is that I really do think they have some knowledge of magic, they're just subtler about it use. magic is sacred, magic is holy, magic should only be used in these specific ways so it remains unseen. magic should only be used for little things that couldn't harm. magic is steeped in tradition. magic is closed off, and only for the people who can use it appropriately

and while the yiga clan are the opposite of that-- they are much flashier and more open about their magic usage-- they still ultimately use the same framework, while openly loathing and rebelling against it. magic is something ripped from the mouths of gods (but in this world, magic is still sacred.) magic should be used openly (because they wanted to keep it hidden.) magic is used to distort (because they rejected its true power.) magic must be expanded on from its tradition (because they tried to stop us.) magic is less closed off, but only those who can handle its power should use it, and that means us, because we have that power.

[fox-guardian]

something that I've realized recently is that you can, in fact, assume the specifics of nonbinary peoples' genders, and that it is, in fact, really weird to do so

[mystrangebones]

The left-hand path and Lucifer symbolism speak to the ultimate rebellion against authority. About embracing the beauty in darkness, death, the taboo. This completes the wholeness of being. The worldview in Satanism, specifically, is not a binary one. It is not dark versus light. It is the recognition that all things contain both. The above reflects the below, the dark exists because of and balances the light, and between the two are infinite shades and hues.

[spitblaze]

I'm not at all an expert on gender studies but if you're interested in it at all I HIGHLY recommend you look into oppositional sexism as an issue because I feel like I can see into the fourth dimension of queer discourse now