#bioware PLEASE. i'm about to lose it for no reason.

[oopsallmabari]

me: oh i should write a flashback scene in ostwick circle that'd be a good thing to explore

me, 5 minutes later: i need to diagram the entirety of ostwick circle in my mind with floorplans

[janewayintersection]

the amount of people who are like "omg i ditched kaidan for garrus after he was mean to me on horizon!!" baffle me. shit on bioware's writing for making shep work with cerberus all you want, but kaidan calling shep out on this and not joining them is NOT the issue. in fact, him reacting like this is why i love him??

he specifically states he trusts shep, just not cerberus. which is the only rational response in that whole entire goddamn game!! like?? you spend all of me1 stopping cerberus operations. they kill several alliance soldiers and admiral kahoku, try to make a rachni army -- they are WELL known for cloning and ais... miranda even outright states she wanted to plant shep with a control chip. there is literally zero reason for kaidan to believe the shep in front of him isn't some cerberus sleeper agent. or an ai. or indoctrinated. or being manipulated (THIS ONE IS CANON BTW). even if he trusts shepard, he doesn't trust cerberus not to pull any of this. quite frankly, i'm baffled more companions don't have this exact, entirely justified concern.

loyalty is important, but blind loyalty is dangerous.

honestly, the crew in me2 is lucky that the illusive man was so weirdly and uncharacteristically insistent on shepard remaining untouched. things could have gotten very bad otherwise.

being best friends with someone, or more notably, being in love with someone, isn't the end all be all magic potion in this world. being in love with someone doesn't mean you should blindly trust their actions. if my significant other joined a terrorist group, you can bet my ass i wouldn't join them! sorry! if anything, it's healthy that kaidan has his own sense of morals and priorities he follows over shepard. he's his OWN person, love shouldn't be something that makes you suddenly give up who you are and what you believe in.

not to mention kaidan is entirely out of the loop for the whole game. his intel states that cerberus is behind the abductions (the horizon incident is partially a result of cerberus' fiddling btw), and that shep has been alive and never even reached out to anyone. he doesn't have the information we the players have. he doesn't know that the illusive man insisted on no control chip. he doesn't know about the lazarus project or its specifics.

and as for the "cheating" discourse if you romance someone new in me2, i do personally believe shep getting with one of the me2 love interests is cheating on their me1 love interest. to shep, they skipped those two years. they wake up as they did during the me2 prologue. no time has passed. and then they immediately get with someone else after one (1) argument with their love interest over them, may i remind you, joining a terrorist group. even if you don't think it's "technically" cheating, it's at the very least pretty trashy and flakey.

if anything, i'm gonna say it! kaidan is more forgiving than i'd be! the fact that he even sends an email saying he still cares and that they can see what happens after this is all resolved is WAY more than i would have done. the fact that kaidan will find out shep got with someone else, and STILL be willing to give shep a chance is like. man. it's saying a lot. i am just saying.

imagine losing someone. you see them literally die as your ship explodes and they burn up in the nearby planet's atmosphere. you grieve. you put yourself into your work. then suddenly, two years, later. they pop back up again. ALIVE. and with a terrorist group. and basically tell you the equivalent of "just trust me bro" despite the fact that while you trust them, you don't trust the terrorist group. so you're like hey, what the fuck. why are you with a terrorist group. and they're like i'm not with them, we just have common goals. and you're like. i'm gonna say it again. i trust you, not the terrorist group. okay?? i can't join you for this reason. please be careful out there, seriously.

and then they immediately jump into the pants of that one guy you knew back on a mission from two years ago.

what would you do?? would you not feel hurt? betrayed? upset? confused?? i'm sorry, i'm completely on kaidan's side. i'd go as far to say that he's far more understanding than he should be in me2.

me3 is all about regaining that complete and undying trust back, and that cerberus didn't fuck around w shep. or that being with cerberus didn't change them. his "loyalty" quest is just visiting him in the hospital and showing him shepard still cares. that they're still the same. that cerberus truly didn't alter them. that there was more going on. that shepard was forced to work with cerberus out of complete necessity and only did what they thought was right. and i think that's neat!!!!

[heart-forge]

If this feels too cans of wormsy please feel free to ignore, especially since you’ve talked about this before, but do you feel like your RPG critique applies to Cyberpunk 2077? In my mind that’s the game that failed pretty hard at being an RPG, not just from how it was marketed or its initial launch state, but also from a gameplay and narrative perspective.

I feel like if you put a top ten list of RPG critiques on a big wheel and then for flavour you added common film critiques and like a grocery list, no matter what you hit it would apply to some way to Cyberpunk. I cannot emphasize enough how wholly CB2077 failed. I have written fanfiction, I have thought about it at length, I'm deeply obsessed with the character arc of Johnny Silverhand, and I'm infuriated at the historical revisionism of something that happened in goddamn 2020. It failed. It is not a good game, it is not a complete game, and while you're playing it you know that it is not a complete game. If you happen to have worked in some level of gaming, you can observe the places in which it is incomplete. I can vividly taste the parts of Cyberpunk where something was cut or a concept was oversimplified to integrate it at all. I can see features that were haphazardly integrated and never removed. They never fixed the driving.

I'm gunna throw this under a read more. I don't think those are necessary anymore but I talk a lot.

They fail in very predictable ways. As I said, their biggest prior hit was with the Witcher, where they had Geralt and they had predetermined major milestone events. From there, they could get creative: they could add silly quests, they could add story moments, they could improvise dialogue, but all with a preexisting stone framework.

Playing an improv game within your favourite setting, writing functional playable fanfiction, is different than working from within a TTRPG system. Improvisation where anything could happen is hard, and with TTRPG systems that's the point. When you're playing a game with your friends, you need the structure to allow your buddies to be silly or serious, to engage with a well thought plot and to take that plot off the rails in a way that's still fun and enriching. The concept was just too foreign and their scope too enormous, especially for a first attempt (comparable to Bioware's Anthem, where I said very confidently at launch...why is Bioware doing this? I played DAI multiplayer, and it wasn't transcending the genre for me).

V isn't a player character. V is not the main character. The story could care less what happens to V: the V might as well stand for Victoria, from Cats (2019). No one cares what happens to V. V's connections are all superficial, even their dead best friend's mother might as well stop existing after he's been laid to rest. People think V is a cool tough guy badass, but because they pretty much have to: if they know V, then V has to be good at something or have some serious connection to someone that isn't "I heard you're the guy to call if we want the world state progressed". V is your cardboard cut out in every scene to experience the life and times of the actual protagonist, Johnny Silverhand.

See, Johnny has a reason to be pushing to the end against all odds (you're told very, very early in the game that V is going to die no matter what you do: one ignores it, because one assumes that there must be some reward to putting up with all this nonsensical bullshit, but no). Johnny has a reason to burn out and a driving force behind him. Johnny is the one with ties to the city, real ties: people that love him, people that hate him, people who just don't want to see him burn out or blow up. Johnny has grudges, Johnny has a history. Johnny is the one that ends the game becoming a better person. Johnny is the one who has something to lose, and something to learn.

V is just the audience proxy. V cannot be truly loved by anyone, because nobody knows V, least of all the game. River's entire romance happens before you tell him that you have a dead rock star in your brain that's killing you. Judy and Panam I have repeatedly described as the only romances, as they're the only ones that show up in the main plot literally at all which is a big glaring testament to who this game is for (and hint, it's not wlw despite Judy). Kerry might not even know that you're dying. Johnny isn't romanceable despite being the only person in the world who offers you any sympathy and encourages you to live against overwhelming odds. Keanu Reeves whispering "tell him it was your guardian angel" when your good buddy and doctor who repeatedly tries to goad you into suicide for some reason asks you how you even made it to the clinic in the first place, as sick as you are (the answer is that Keanu Reeves piloted the EVA) lives rent free in my brain.

V doesn't have opinions. Johnny as a million opinions, which range from Twitter levels of simplistic violence that assumes that the world hasn't been fixed because everyone on earth is too stupid to see there's a problem, and like, basic empathy for other people, but V almost antagonistically disagrees with him on literally every point he tries to make, sometimes playing devil's advocate like a total asshole just for the pleasure of fighting with Johnny. It makes their relationship early on annoying, because I don't always disagree when V disagrees. V isn't disagreeing because they hold morals to the contrary, they just agree with the popular narrative about Johnny Silverhand because agreeing with the news is the safest option and doesn't suggest that V is a right-wing loom nor a frothing anarchist.

Johnny is also constantly being, loosely speaking, racially insensitive. It's edgy garbage put in by the game developer and doesn't serve Johnny's character, especially as it's never acknowledged that Johnny himself, through virtue of being played by Keanu Reeves, is asian. I'm not asian so I can't speak to it, but he calls the Japanese Hanako Arasaka a lot of shit that I'm sure somebody would beat his ass for even if it isn't an outright slur. It's the same with the Nomads, who are a group of indigenous stand ins that specifically include white people in prominent roles so that the game developer feels safe from criticism about the way that they treat the stand in for indigenous populations in their game which is an issue spanning many, many game developers who want a cool nomadic population that faces the same prejudice that real nomadic peoples face with at least similar slurs but also don't want to be held responsible for making them zone enemies, mindlessly evil, and insulting barbaric. Anyway, the point of this section is that even though Johnny is one of the more principled characters in game, it's pushed to the point of absurdity: Johnny has to be a blue haired social justice warrior (but also a borderline racist insensitive conservative type, as to never express a political opinion in the political opinion TTRPG system) so that V's centrism never seems glaringly malicious.

I'm editing this section for detail. I got off the rails here, I'm talking about the narrative push and pull between Johnny and V. Johnny is the protag, you're V and you just ferry Johnny to and fro between events. You have no real life, no real friends, no real ties to the city. You want to be famous but it's never really explained why besides like, California malaise I guess. You have barely any options for origin: if you're a street kid, it tells you what street you lived on and eliminates the possibility of any wiggle room between there because other people will recognise you as a resident of the city (destroying one of my favourite V concept, an outcast Pacifican V who goes to work for a corp and returns in disgrace). A street kid V will also be told where they've been and why everybody is reintroducing themselves (you were in Atlanta for two years). A corpo V works the same position in the same company, and their motives are never discussed. The morality of it is barely addressed and they behave exactly the same as a street kid V. Nomad V operates exactly the same as a V who's always lived in the city with no real ties to their old clan and no real questions about city living.

V is a born killer, a mercenary and edgerunner who's good with a gun no matter what weapon you actually choose to use. V can run off to live with the nomads again (prompting kerry and river to leave you), stay in the city and become an asshole (Panam and Judy will leave but you still destroy your relationship with Kerry or River). V can die and let Johnny take over (in which case Johnny steals your life and runs but is a better person this time because he was nice to an abused kid which we literally have no reason to believe he wouldn't be anyway), or V can just die (in which case your friends all hate you for dying).

Also there's a thin veneer of transness over the character creator, but it's so bad. it's so transphobic that it wraps back around and suddenly it's just misogyny again. your voice pitch controls your gender, your voice gender is repeated over and over and over and over and over again, girl V small boy V big.

THEY NAME V. BASED ON YOUR GENDER. YOU GET A CANON NAME FOR YOUR OC FOR NO REASON AT ALL.

I have a lot more complaints about CB2077 not being good. It's a game of interesting concepts dotting a corporate frankenstein with Keanu Reeves' face on it, but it's now 1:30am and I've lost steam. This has been highly paired down because I got heated and lost the point, but yes, cb2077 failed because it didn't want to be an RPG, it didn't want to be a shooter, it didn't want to play strategy or politics...all it wanted was for a firmer structure, a clearer guiding hand, a more controlled scope, and a pre-built protagonist.

[thetrashbagswasteland]

For the ask game 2, 23, and 25 :0

2. a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom? oh ho ho starting strong here with this - now, this is a hard one bc most of my faves are quite contented switches depending on their partners/the point in time/mood (even if they tend to have their preferences), but the one I'm gonna have to go with is Macen, who's the least likely to bottom. It's not about being in control, per se, but he dislikes losing control and always feels like he's not proactive enough bottoming; he wants to take care of his lover, not be taken care of - which suits Avitus' preferences just fine too. 23. ship you've unwillingly come around to? I won't exactly say unwillingly bc like, that's not really how I work but believe it or not until a fair way into sunseeker + meeting the right people I wasn't a massive kryterius fan - primarily because I encountered a lot of tropes that were really not my thing and... it's hard to vibe with a ship when your first introduction to it isn't something you like. I'm feral for it now tho 25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing? Oh man so so so many things but first and foremost almost every "X alien character isn't romanceable". Like, yeah, we're deffo lacking a romanceable krogan (or ace-but-romantically xenophilic salarian, bioware, please, can we rectify this with the next game maybe?) and I will not deny that, but especially in Andromeda, there's a reason a great number of the alien minor characters aren't romance options and it's not just bc Ryder is a hell of a lot younger than them.

[ishaslife]

Dragon Age: Dreadwolf Doubts

(possible spoilers)

This is a random post but mostly out of fear and anxiety for dreadwolf. They have been hyping the game way too much and we haven't even gotten a proper trailer yet. For a game that's supposed to come out probably by the end of next year, we have only a couple teasers, a behind the scenes and an in-game cinematic. Having seen analysis on the game cinematic, I feel a bit more hopeful that Bioware won't fuck up as they've added lots of symbolism. But I am afraid of where they'll take Solas' arc, whether the companions and the hero will be handled well and so and so forth. I love dragon age 2 but I think we can all agree that it is black sheep of the series and most of its charm comes from the characters rather than the story and the location it is set in (let's be real, Kirkwall looks like the garbage disposal of Thedas). I don't want another dragon age 2 but nonetheless I'm trying to keep my expectations low for DA:D.

Another reason I'm not too sure about Dreadwolf is because of the old Bioware staff that has left during its making, I wonder if it was because of disagreements on the project or if major changes were being made to the story that they didn't agree with. Also, Dragon Age is grim, gruesome and forces you to make choices for the good of your friends or the people you are trying to help along the way. I don't want it to lose that. It was so hard to be able to leave Ruck in the deep roads and tell his mum he's dead when we knew he wasn't or deciding whether to kill our good friend Anders, who we know has been through so much, or even feeling torn when it comes to Solas, these are difficult choices. I don't want dragon age Dreadwolf to become a simple story, I want it to be complicated, to make us see things from solas' eyes, to make us realise how we are two sides of the same coin. We are trying to save our world from him and he's trying to save his world from us. A very FFXIV story line.

Overall, I just don't want the story and characters to be ruined. Please please Bioware, do not mess this up. (disclaimer: these are all just my opinions)

[hanalghilans]

WE CALL HER HANAL'GHILAN, THE PATHFINDER. IN TIMES OF GREAT NEED, SHE COMES TO SHOW US THE WAY.

#HANALGHILANS. private, low activity & selective writing blog for inquisitor maella lavellan of bioware's dragon age saga. headcanon based & canon divergent.    memes never expire on this blog and are always welcome   &   accepted! (nan, 22, she/her)

ABOUT. PLAYLIST. AES SIDEBLOG. PINBOARD.

✶ NAN, 22, SHE/HER.ㅤㅤi currently work a full time job, so activity is slow. please be patient with me! while i ask that you don't pester me for replies repeatedly, if it's been a couple of days and i haven't replied yet, feel free to send me a reminder! i tend to get distracted by other things and lose replies under other notifications.

✶ this blog is selectiveㅤ&ㅤmutuals - only. meaning i will only interact with people i follow back. for my own sanity, i'm being very selective with who i follow back, meaning i will only follow back if i see us writing in the future. if i don't see much chance of our muses interacting, i won't follow back. please don't take it personally! that being said, repeatedly following meㅤ&ㅤunfollowing me to get my attention will only get you blocked.

✶ standard rp etiquette applies: no godmodding, no force shipping / assuming ships, hard block if you're breaking a mutual following with me, no pestering for replies, no stealing content. DNI if you or your muse is a bigot, if you write gross contentㅤ ( ie. rape, ship incest, pedophilia, etc. )

✶ this blog will deal with genre-typical violence, bigotry, racism, sexism, religious imagery. triggering themes will be tagged appropriately when they appear, however if any of these themes are especially distressing to you, for your comfort i suggest that you don't follow me!

✶ this blog is dynamic - oriented and focuses on all kinds of ships, be they platonic or romantic. having pre - established dynamics between our characters makes writing startersㅤ&ㅤanswering ask memes easier for me, so i prioritize interactions with blogs i already have established dynamics with. so if you want to, hop into my ims or ask for my discord, and we can plot out a dynamic between our muses! that being said, i will not write romantic or sexual ships with muns or muses under 18.

✶ when breaking a mutual, just hardblock me! i won't bother you to ask for a reason, as i fully support curating your own dash. however, if you softblock me and tumblr recommends your blog to me, i'll generally assume that you moved blogs or something. i don't want to make you uncomfortable by re - following you!

✶ i support callouts of actively harmfulㅤ&ㅤdangerous behavior, not personal beef or drama. i do understand that a lot of people are here for escapism and don't want to interact with negativity sometimes, so i will reblog these posts with the tag "callout /" and situation specific trigger warnings for anyone who wishes to avoid them

✶ maella is fc-less simply because theres no one who looks like her in our real world, so i will either be going iconless or using icons of her animated character model. she won't have any modern real world verse and likely won't have any verses outside of dragon age.

[ofparagade]

RULES

DISCLAIMER. Long story short, I own neither Commander Shepard nor Mass Effect. They both belong to bioware. I make zero profit off of this blog and am only here to have fun. nothing more, nothing less. I do, however, own all of my icons / gfx / promos / headcanons / etc. unless stated otherwise. In fact, for the time being I’ve been getting my screencaps from @masseffectcaps. So I'd greatly appreciate it if you neither stole them nor claimed them as your own considering I worked very hard on making all of them.

CALLOUTS. The whole purpose of callouts have more or less gotten waaaaay out of hand and I'm not even sure how I feel about them anymore tbqh. The reason I bring this up is because the whole purpose of a callout is have those who are, in fact, problematic make public apologies and learn from their mistakes. Nothing more, nothing less.

DNI. Please don't interact with me if you, yourself, are a genuinely problematic person. This includes being racist, ableist, sexist, LGBT-phobic, and a Nazi bootlicker. I also don't want to interact with people who think it's okay to ship minors with adults.

DNI. PEOPLE. Please don't interact with me if you support any of the following people: Ziro. I’m a pretty forgiving person but if problematic people tend to play the victim, refuse to acknowledge they’ve messed up, refuse to apologize, and refuse to learn from their mistakes then I want nothing to do with them. If you do, however, make a public apology and explain yourself then that's a whole other story.

DUPLICATES. Because of how complex Commander Shepard is as a character I’m 100% fine with interacting with other variations of them. Not only that but it’s pretty stinking easy to throw the mutliverse theory into Mass Effect with ease so there’s that!

FORMATTING. I’m strictly using BETA TEXT EDITOR + XKIT REWRITTEN. My original blog was created back in January 2022 but I remade this blog specifically on April 26, 2023. What this means is that I’m stuck using BTE + Xkit Rewritten. So if you’re not using BTE with me then I’m more than likely not going to be interacting with you. Sorry.

FOLLOWING. I only interact and follow mundanes who are 18+. Though I'm perfectly fine with non-mutuals sending headcanon asks, anonymous asks, and chatting with me OOC. Otherwise, I’m only going to interact with mutuals IC. It just makes my dash cleaner and easier to deal with.

INTERACTIONS. Memes, unprompted asks, open starters, and dash commentaries are the best way to interact with me. I’ve come to learn that I get bored / lose motivation quite easily and rather quickly when doing starter calls. So I prefer sending / receiving unprompted asks, memes, and making open starters as well as replying to them. Now if we plan on doing a specific thread or something then that’s one thing. So I will very seldom if ever be making starter calls and / or like my mutuals’ starter calls because of how easily bored and uninterested I get with them early on.

MAINS & EXCLUSIVES. I do practice mains & exclusives. Though I am extremely picky with whom I become mains or exclusives with. The number of dupes I will have of one character is up in the air right now so I'll stick with two to three mains per character for the time being. Exclusives, on the other hand, will be one per character. That is non-negotiable.

MUNDANE. Call me Shin! My pronouns are she / they. I’m 21+ years of age — 29 to be exact — and am demi-bi.  I suffer from severe GAD, with frequent paranoia episodes, and mild MDD so please be patient with me and my random mood swings and bouts of negativity.

MUN =/= MUSE. Mass Effect has a lot of shitty and problematic characters in the series and most of us don’t agree with their viewports. Kai Leng is canonically xenophobic, racist, and sexist. The Quarians created the Geth strictly for cheap labor only to then try and commit mass genocide when the Geth asked if they have a soul. TIM has a God Complex and is a manipulative bastard. With that being said, I’m fine with roleplaying with problematic characters just as long as you, the mun, are against their viewpoints. That’s all I ask.

MUSE. Do not take Commander Shepard lightly. Despite being “just human”, Shepard is the reason the entirety of the Alliance Military and everyone on the Citadel were able to fight off the Reapers. And while Damien is very much a Paragade he won’t hesitate in killing a bastard because of their problematic views. Case in point? Killing Gavin Archer for brutally torturing his brother physically, verbally, and emotionally. He also killed Udina and Kai Leng without hesitation for being … well … yeah. Long story short, don’t piss him off for he can and will go Renegade on your ass without second thought.

REBLOG KARMA. I don't practice reblog karma in the slightest. I’m perfectly fine with you reblogging musings, fanart, gifs, memes, music, PSAs, promos, and callouts from me. In fact, I encourage it. Just don’t reblog my ooc posts, headcanons, and threads without permission. You can like them all you want, just don’t reblog them.

SHIPPING. This blog is currently not open to shipping as of right now. The reason for this is because, in my take on things, Damien’s actually already in a relationship and is happily taken. I’ll be going into more detail with that on the blog in due time and actually plan on making several references to my fanfics throughout the entirety of my blog

VERSES. I don't really have any verses up and running yet minus my Mass Effect verses. But that's not gonna stop me from interacting with people. In fact, I encourage crossover threads and whatnot tbh! It doesn't help that Mass Effect has a relatively small RPC so there's that to also consider.

ADDITIONAL INFO. I can and will be updating these rules from time to time. But rest assured that I'll always be letting my followers know when I update them. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns then feel free to message me for I’ll 100% answer them to the best of my ability!