vyllraen

[vyllraen]

the contrast between how gandalf and saruman spend the beginning to fellowship is so funny

[vyllraen]

Genies can only grant wishes that are things that an ordinary person could do, just better and faster. The jinn are the creations of a divine being, and so they are part of the divine plan and cannot defy the natural order of things; a wish granted by a jinni can’t turn the day into night or the sea into yogurt, but if you wish for a temple to be built, a jinni will build it by hand, the way men do, and have it done in a day.

If you need a wish granted that defies the natural order you gotta catch a leprechaun, because no god was involved in their creation whatsoever. They just kinda showed up one day in the nineteenth century. The Aos Sí have no idea what their deal is

[vyllraen]

idk i think what is interesting about astarion to me is the fact that you have a guy who started out an asshole (normal type) and then spent two hundred years in a very carefully and specifically crafted (by the writers of the game) Become A Terrible Person Or Die nexus. like it wasn’t just a Torment Nexus, he wasn’t just in hell, i feel like this is very important not to forget, he was in hell but it was specifically a hell designed to, over time, kill the empathy of anyone trapped in it, kill their brain’s ability to prioritize other peoples’ survival, to numb one’s conscience.

and then he gets yanked directly out of that nexus and despite that the fact that he spent, again, two hundred years in a situation that was sort of a rock tumbler for the human soul, there’s still a pebble left in there. and it’s a pebble that can be grown if placed in the right environment and provided with a support network.

so i think it becomes interesting because it really does i think force you to start thinking about the limits of free will even on as basic a level as the human personality. i think the fact that he becomes such a different character based on player choice, that his end morality is so hugely dependent on player choice, is uhhh. a big part of what the devs were going for probably.

it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable to acknowledge some bad people would be good people if literally nothing changed except they had a good support network and different circumstances. especially because it means the opposite is also true. which is even more uncomfortable.

you know that part in the beginning of fellowship of the ring where gandalf is talking about how gollum is ultimately only like that because of the ring and gandalf thinks his story is sad? astarion is kinda like if they sexualized gollum.

[vyllraen]

sorry i was researching the author of a victorian book about raising children and now i'm fascinated by her. clear my schedule we're talking about lydia maria child.

[vyllraen]

No wait, random worldbuilding idea:

A people who have an age-old tradition, that when warriors left home to go to war, their family that remains home prepare funeral goods for them while they wait, sewing them the clothes and preparing the tools and all that they will be buried with - to emotionally prepare them to the hard possibility that the one who left will not return home alive. If the warrior returns, their burial goods are all burned in a bonfire that is lit for the celebration of their return.

And to this modern day, mothers of the culture will tell their children "fine, but let me take your measures for burial clothes before you go" as a way of telling them that something they're about to do is lethally stupid. Sharing stories about just how dramatic their mothers are, someone tells their group of friends that his mother once actually took out a measuring tape to start taking his measures when he said he's leaving home for a work trip.

And another one goes "pfft, yeah. This one time I went to a rock concert and came back home to mom sitting on her sewing machine, fucking making me a funeral coat."

[vyllraen]

odysseus tying himself to the mast but he's doing some proto shibari type shit to make his tits look really good and his crew isn't saying anything but it's kind of hard not to notice

[vyllraen]

“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

[vyllraen]

thanks miraak

[vyllraen]

Second proper attempt at Muriel… I love his big nose and the hair came out better this time. Still a bit chiseled and I don’t know how I feel about the cleft chin but we are getting somewhere

[vyllraen]

Trying to draw Muriel. Getting back into using loomis heads and everything but the hair came out all right

[vyllraen]

sex is very thematically rich on a conceptual level but could use some work as a real thing that happens like go back to the drawing board on that one

[vyllraen]

The air is hot and still in a distant place

And orange poppies

More orange than rich fresh egg yolks

So orange I can taste the sight of them

Grow under a brilliant and silent sun.

You’d like it here.

[vyllraen]

i go to bars and coffee shops and breweries and libraries and thrift stores all the time by myself and i have a chill banger time i love my own company. so why is the grocery store a warzone. im fighting for my life. barely make it out alive. if someone even looks at me i want to blow them up with my mind

[vyllraen]

the student said, "i'm reading a zen buddhist cookbook. with no recipes." and the teacher replied, "ah, dogen's instructions for the cook, written in 1237?" "yeah," said the student, "it's saying not to let rats fall into the rice pot"

[vyllraen]

I like to imagine Marcille deals with her grief of outliving Falin (her wife) and Laois (her platonic soulmate) by looking for new friends that are just as weird/obsessive as the Touden siblings. Through this process of finding generations of weirdos she starts to notice genetic patterns and similarities to the point that she "discovers" autism. She names it Touden syndrome though.

[vyllraen]

Child of the stars, head in the clouds

There will be others I love

In the rest of my life:

On nights that I am tired

A little buzzed, maybe

I will try to lovingly call out their name

And will utter yours by mistake.

Do you hear it where you are?

[vyllraen]

people on here give yoda a lot of shit and say that he was a bad mentor but i’d like to contest that Yoda is and has always been cool as hell and the real problem was that in the days of the Republic he was forced into a shitty managerial position, where he had to worry about paperwork and massive unauthorized clone orders and vetting chosen ones and shit like that when really all he wanted all along was to be a delightfully shitty impish little grandpa living in a hut giving cryptic advice to teenagers 

Like remember that episode of the Clone Wars where the jedi council finally tries to put yoda in a retirement home because he starts talking to Qui Gon’s ghost and yoda calls anakin over like “hmmm…. friends, we are, young skywalker. help me escape this silly place, you must. in it for you, a handful of Werther’s Originals is” like that’s who Yoda is, at his core, and the stifling weight of Force monk bureaucracy took that away from him