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#And it's tangentially relevant
rabbitr · 1 year
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make sure you keep your warrior of light in an area with dungeons and treasure vaults so they're enriched by their environment. if you can't make small areas to hide treasure for your wol to find, you should reconsider getting a wol. do NOT let them into the universe! wols are natural predators of gods and in several areas they've already hunted the god population to extinction
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faejilly · 8 months
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i always liked the thought that outside of the persona that he presents, magnus is terribly domestic bc he seems that he would curl up on a couch with his lover and just be yk? like i bet that he has had relationships that were just sex and partying but i bet if he was given a choice he would choose to spend the evening in and watching a movie
Quite possibly.
I do think that Magnus, (much like Alec in fact, if in a slightly different way), is very good at giving anyone he is with the experience that they most want.
He enjoys performing, whether he is highlighting or subverting expectations, I believe he loves putting on a show and he is perfectly capable of tailoring that show to his audience. Part of this is survival, part of this is avoiding conflict, part of this is politics, but it seems clear he does actually also like it or he wouldn't have chosen such an extravagant persona (or bothered with all the necessary closet space to hold his wardrobe 😅).
He likes planning parties which is a different skill-set than just attending them after all. He wants to create an environment, set the stage, organize the comforts and attractions and entertainment and etc.
Magnus does in fact also enjoy people. He likes parties and dancing and afternoon tea and anything else that gives him that jolt of interaction and appreciation. He does seem to legitimately be an extrovert who feels recharged after social interaction; especially if he knows he's the one who made it a good experience for everyone involved. (Or a bad one, if he's intimidating people. There's some pride involved, I think, in knowing he can have whatever effect he wants, regardless of what anyone else is expecting.)
He is much better at grand gestures of devotion and friendship (and money and power) because that ties back into him being in control of his interactions and his vulnerabilities and other people's expectations.
So I don't think he dislikes being a party person, or his extravagant High Warlock persona, or that he was at all unsatisfied with whirlwind dramatic relationships full of parties and dancing and shows and travel. Those are all things he can do, and do well, and gets a kick out of.
However satisfying it is to do the things you're good at, and know that you're sweeping someone else along with something they enjoy, I do think sometimes he hid himself within those extravagances; avoided smaller intimacies of domestic chores and quietly reading on opposite sides of the couch, etc. because then he'd have to share control, which is terrifying when you're as aware as he is of all the ways an intimate friend or partner can (purposefully or not) betray or hurt you.
He offers the high life because he can, and once upon he couldn't, and most people enjoy it and are impressed by it. HOWEVER, I do agree that that's not really the point for him, and sometimes it was definitely another layer of armor between his bruised heart and the world.
All he needs from a partner is their attention. (I know the love languages book is nonsense, but, it will be a useful framework for my rambling, so! Let's imagine it's not.) I think his personal love language is simply quality time. Someone who wants to be with him, regardless of time or place or consequences or conveniences, who doesn't just want his money or magic, but will not flinch from those parts of him either. Who may not need him to take care of them, but won't push him away when he does anyway.
Which is of course exactly what Alec offers with his single-minded focus and devotion to the partner he's chosen, and which most of us cannot do to at all the same extent. (Which is why Alec feels vaguely useless to Magnus most of the time, because everyone else he's ever known or loved has required his actions not just his presence, and is also why Magnus cannot understand that insecurity at all, because no one else has ever just looked at Magnus without all the trappings and been enraptured.)
But! Back to the original premise.
Alec is not an extrovert and hates putting on a show and does not trust large crowds of people to avoid being stupid, so in fact once they are together I do believe they are usually very quietly domestic at home, because the setting, for Magnus, is incidental to the fact that they're spending time together, so he is perfectly content making sure Alec is comfortable wherever they are, and that they have that quiet time together reasonably often.
(I do think Magnus and Alec spend a lot of time in physical contact, cuddling or hand-holding or working on similar projects in shared space, because Alec's love language is very clearly physical touch. He is more than capable of showing his love and care to people in their own languages, time or gifts or words or service, but all he really needs is for the people he's worried about to be close enough to hold onto.)
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ziskandra · 1 year
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listen, listen
I know this is gonna be a controversial take, but the more I think about it, the more obsessed I am with the idea of Varric voluntarily helping The Crimson Knight (especially in a worldstate where Hawke was left in the Fade).
I’ve talked before about how I view Meredith as the type of person who is motivated by her desire to protect her own at all costs, and how this leads her down the path of Well-Intentioned Extremism, and culminating in becoming the embodiment of the uh, Knight Templar trope.
And Varric is obviously motivated by his motivation to protect Hawke: he shielded them from the Inquisition, and when push came to shove and he was forced to expose Hawke to the Inquisition anyway, it can result in Hawke’s death. The Inquisition fails Hawke, who is basically Varric’s moral compass — without Hawke’s influence, he defaults to siding with the templars at the end of DA2.
Most of the Inquisitor’s inner circle scatters over Thedas and Varric returns to Kirkwall. Varric loves Kirkwall; he’s a Kirkwaller through and through: even though he’s never envisioned nor wanted a life of politics, he becomes the fucking viscount, because there’s nobody else left who wants one drop of the poisoned chalice of that role.
And Kirkwall is a city that has always been dependent on its templars for protection. They are the city’s military force, and the city is noticeably weaker once the templars abandon it — depending on world state, it can lose a significant portion of its territory to one of Varric’s former companions. If someone he knew and trusted can do that to Kirkwall, who else might take advantage of Kirkwall in its weakened state?
Varric is isolated and alone, away from anyone who might be able to help him see the situation in a different light: his main support network is Aveline and Seneschal Bran, neither of whom are known for their ardent support of mage rights. They’re doing their best to clear Kirkwall of the impacts of the war, of the red lyrium, and even though they’re doing their best to avoid exposure, being around that much red lyrium cannot be healthy. Slowly, the paranoia and increased penchant for violence settle in. It becomes impossible to resist spending more time around the substance — and sometimes, it talks! And it sounds like Meredith Stannard.
Varric is desperate and scared and has lost everyone he has ever loved. The Inquisition has been downsized or disbanded, and his only purpose is to serve his city: the same intention with which Meredith started, the same intention and fears that the red lyrium feeds upon in them both.
Varric fears becoming his parents: people who failed to protect him because they were too caught up in their past mistakes.
But sometimes, as people, in our attempts to avoid our fears, we end up barreling into them headfirst instead.
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easyaesthetics · 1 year
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Thinking again about how Metatron, the Ultimate Persona of the Justice Arcana which you only gain access to after the Engine Room scene, has an inherent trait called Martyr’s Gift…
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anna-scribbles · 10 months
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ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL US WITH THAT PLAYLIST?!?!
i don’t know what you’re talking about i’m just providing relevant vibes for upcoming chapters…just some easy listening.. don’t worry about it
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anendoandfriendo · 1 month
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3 - 4 in the morning thoughts right now but we wonder how many plural systems out there are saying they're asexual aromantic or similar when they're actually just...collectively sysian*.
Mainly the thought process here is: a lot of the struggles are the same on a surface level, but following the actual reasoning is completely different honestly.
Also, if you're like us and you start out as a much smaller system, it's entirely possible you won't even notice and it ends up functionally the same until your system population basically explodes (assuming it even does) and then someone goes "oh wow, that person is gorgeous actually can I kiss/fuck them??? How does that work in my own head??? Does it even have to be the same physically as an external-world relationship or are there certain processes I can straight up ignore????" and that's when at least a few people figure it out.
And then, like, there is the fact sysian and plurillean are umbrella terms the way achillean, sapphic, and delphinean are umbrella terms, so if you use the split attraction model the way it is supposed to, you could technically also have different sexualities for the inner world and outer world + whatever other orientations you have and be something like sysian lesbian/plurillean heterosexual, sysian gay man/external world ONLY you are demisexual instead (still gay but the modifier is that demi part), and other weird shit that even queers being queer, because we will be honest, plurality makes everything fucking WEIRD even by normie queer standards.
*obligatory disclaimer you can be both, asexuality is a valid sexuality, aromantic is a valid romanticism/romantic attraction and because headmates are separate people you can have, for example, three headmates and all are sysian but one is pansexual demiromamtic and one is asexual alloromantic and one is bisexual heteroromantic. Or smth like that. At minimum our very very last paragraph above should have made this very clear, but, at the same time — this IS the "piss on the poor" website.
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neosatsuma · 7 months
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I finally made a Durge and I stuck with the white dragonborn, and when I couldn't decide between blue eyes and red I said "why not both? :)" which. is very Symbolic of her struggle I must say, but it also means she kinda. looks like this
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birlwrites · 7 months
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the thing about the cruciatus is that it's just PAIN. we have this general idea from canon that if you're under for too long, you lose your mind, but we don't know how long 'too long' is, or whether it's cumulative or if you can recover and have a blank slate, or if there are ANY long-term effects from going under once. it doesn't leave scars. it won't kill you. it's just pain for the sake of pain. i think it's much more impactful, both for a story and for a character, to use torture methods that the character can never, ever forget experiencing
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layeredwanderings · 10 months
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big fan of this quote:
"The plain and raw Truth of the matter is that all of us are background characters in someone else's story. Is that, then, a cause for despair? I think not. Equally are we all of us protagonists. Your Relevance is given wholly by you and the people you care for. And that is all there is to say on the matter."
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toastybugguy · 9 months
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Watched Red, White, and Royal Blue. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Full body had to hold back a yelp each time (which is quite a few times) a plot point directly mirrored one from Drastically Redefining Protocol. Overall 8.7/10, showing this shit to my family promptly.
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duskkodesh · 9 months
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Sometimes I feel like us Morbius fans have the hardest fight just trying to keep our damn tag actually about the character.
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mr-e-nigma · 1 year
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“Computer enhance” and “He’s just doodling question marks” are two of the funniest file names I’ve given to screenshots and I’m still very mystified that I don’t have any other screenshots with names in between c and h so that they display next to each other in my 60s Batman folder as they’re intended to be viewed
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irradiatedsnakes · 2 years
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The only reason I don't draw Ingo bald is like.
I somehow just can't draw bald people??
my man if thats the only thing holding you back i think Reference and Practice is your answer. getting a hang of how hairlines work and the different ways they can be shaped is certainly tricky but itll help in drawing people with any hairstyle where the hairline isnt obscured by bangs or somesuch. perhaps looking up pictures of folks with buzzcuts so you can see how their hairline is shaped would help!
that is to say in a more general sense.. there's no such thing as Can't Draw [X]. some things are harder than others and that can vary a lot by person, but i think that restricting yourself to not drawing certain things/looks on people/etc is a lot less fun than rising to the challenge of learning how! also references are your friend now and forever
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enneamage · 2 years
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Why Tommy being bisexual would(n’t) matter.
Main gets hype when Tommy has a gay moment™️. While this is largely in-group teasing, ‘It’s a joke’ ranks up there with ‘it’s platonic’ and ‘I’m not sexualising’ in terms of Main-typical repression—most people might truly be noncommittal, but others might be showing their hand a bit. I’m making a gut call and saying that the topic comes up with enough frequency and eagerness that there’s an interesting dynamic going on.
People have been nosing into each other’s love lives from the beginning of time. Romance and attachment are big human interest stories and most people have an ear for them in some form or another. The question of human sexuality is interesting because it carries a lot with it that doesn’t have much to do with the immediate act itself—a lot of people rightfully wonder why it would matter who wants to get with what gender and why, and the answer is less the immediate impulse as much as the domino effect it has on the rest of their lives, and the lives of the people around them. This post isn’t actually about if Tommy is a boyliker or not, it’s about why there’s so much urgency around divining if he is a boyliker, and what that means.
Ships
The first and simplest answer is that people want to believe that their ‘ships of choice’ are possible—that the dynamics that they love the most between the people that they like could get romantically sanctified. This motivation is common and low-stakes, people want to believe that the thing they see (or think they see) exists in the world. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a transformative fandom (attachment through fic and art) investment, people often look at celebrities and speculate who is and isn’t good for who behind closed doors regardless.
People like having reminders around them that love is real, particularly the versions of love that appeal to them. (We’re going to loop back around to this in a slightly deeper capacity later.)
Identity
If I were to pick a contemporary figure that was a perfect example of being tormented by the crossroads between personal identity, romantic attraction, social scripts and gender identity, I would choose Tommy. That was actually a big part of my first impression of him, he had the demons of an online gamer upbringing with the piss and vinegar of a small dog.  
Straight young men are asked to do several things at once, most non-explicitly. They’re put in situations where they’re pressured to rid themselves of femininity to the best of their ability to reduce vulnerability (both emotional and to criticism by others who target those traits.) This naturally puts them in an adversarial, fearful and devaluing relationship towards femininity, and sometimes women themselves. At the same time, all of this is done with the approximate goal of gaining female attention, using the romantic/sexual approval of women as the ultimate measurement of achievement. Not only is this confusing, it’s a paradox, and I could see it drive Tommy a bit crazy. He was not just a straight boy but a straightened boy, literally performing straightness, and it made him sound like he might commit some sort of crime. There’s not much uncommon about his story when you boil it down save for the scale of it, so in a way it’s not even personal, he just happens to have been a perfect caricature of it. 
Heterofatalism
Heterofatalism and the dynamics of modern relationships are some of my favorite topics, by which I mean they’re my ol’ faithful when I need to get into a despair spiral. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a relationship statistic that made me go ‘yeah that seems okay’, and the profound failures of something so basic to produce a non-depressing result are kind of hypnotic. Being worried about ~human nature~ is kind of pretentious but it does make you wonder if these things are nature or nurture problems, and if anything can be done to counteract them.
There’s a lot of unspoken dread and fear surrounding the archetype of the straight boy. He’s selfishly horny, he’s manipulative in a stupid way, he isn’t sure how to love. He’s incapable of taking your perspective or interests into consideration because gendered socialisation has left an unbridgeable gap in his intuition that you either need to fill in yourself time and time again or suffer in silence. While there are plenty of people who exist outside of this mold, finding someone completely free of these traits is an ambition, and the source of a lot of angst.
Male-dominated online video spaces take all these things and pour acid on them. It’s not a mystery why viewers are notoriously paranoid and obsessive with safety-testing CC’s, the stories that come out of the space are nightmarish. While gaming still carries some unwarranted stigma, it is a sphere that collects an identifiable subsection of people that lean a bit stilted and shut-down, which doesn’t compound well with the above problem.
I think people are pessimistic about Tommy’s ability to connect with women. People don’t talk about this directly because they may not even realise they think it, It’s too brutal of an accusation to admit that they don’t think he would be able to treat a woman well in spite of how much they like him. Still, their instincts are based off hours of exposure to his content where being a Clueless Straight was his primary shtick, as well as the loud undercurrent of truth in comedy. While it’s true that casual viewers wouldn’t have many insights into his personal life by his own design, most people will be left with the ghost of the impression thatTommy is a, if not the, Clueless Straight. They’ve been given nothing but forms of evidence to suggest it, even if it was cartoony and (hopefully) larger than life.
When it comes to his early career, the words “homicidally misogynistic” would not have been out of place. Badly out of context, but not unwarranted. I don’t really hold that era against him, because it’s obvious that he was acting out in ignorance that was quickly pressed out of him by Wilbur, but the archetypal disappointing straight boy is ignorant; someone complacent, set in their own agenda, and unwilling to learn beyond immediate self-serving motivations. Tommy has greatly improved, but people seem to throw up a silent prayer for him to be into men so that he can be fully delivered from this dynamic, bypassing it altogether instead of being tasked with learning his way out of it. This is both because the idea of a woman having to tutor him out of it themselves is depressing and too-real, damaging the escapist element of his vibe, as well as people being quietly doubtful that it’s even fully possible. Exclusively same-gender attracted teens didn’t have to resolve straight dynamics, their journey was declaring independence from them, so it makes sense that some see them as things best left behind. 
Again, nobody wants to think of him this way, so they find ways to think and hope around it. They try to see the best in him and separate him from the toxicity in Straight Culture, simultaneously dragging him out of a burning building and diffusing him like an active bomb.
Online dynamics and LGBTQ+ identity
The teens are gay online, and it matters to them. People may be isolated and seeking out people who are like them, trying to cultivate spaces and distinct cultural identity. Because the internet runs on keywords and personal data, online spaces directly and indirectly turn peoples attention inwards and ask them ‘who are you and what is it about you that qualifies you to show up/speak in this space.’  Among the simpler answers (I’m a fan, I’m a cooking enthusiast, I have a deep knowledge of stamps) you have people who have/go on to cultivate a queer identity and stand proudly by it alongside their peers.
When standing outside of a mainstream norm, having an in-group is valuable. You also get to define what you’re not, giving you the opportunity to formally disown the parts of society that never gelled with you to begin with; there has to be a reason why you don’t click with these NPC acting ass people. Why are there so many of them, and so few of you, but the distinction can be felt so strongly? Maybe it is LGBT+ identity, maybe it’s something else, but there’s got to be some trait that can be pointed to that’s making the difference. 
Because LGBT+ identity isn’t a cultural default, there’s a much greater cultural association of self-actualisation and self-discovery with it. There’s a narrative of working through things, resolving things, and coming to peace with things associated with integrating it into one’s sense of self. Someone’s concept of their self-interest changes when the concept of their self changes, which means that they might not even have to become more empathic to change their thoughts and behavior, they just need to be re-directed.  
People want to feel like they have common ground with Tommy, to claim him as one of their own while also finding him to be safe for them. It wouldn’t be enough to be an ally because it still carries a feeling of otherness, and being ‘an ally’ would require a level of perspective-taking that people are very sceptical of right now—if someone doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of something their ability to understand it, let alone interact with it, is under moral question. (This is a problematic line of thinking, but we’re not tackling that one today.) Even people within the LGBTQ+ umbrella get chastised for being out of bounds or spreading irresponsible PR, the allies can stay all the way out of it.
There’s an article that I love and I hand it out like candy because 1) my pseudoacademic ass thinks its hilarious and 2) it outlines the difference, real or perceived, between mainstream straight relationship culture and queer culture. Is it really a utopia free of all polarity? No, a lot of similar problems show up in different forms and are even compounded by unique factors, but there’s a feeling of hope among the youth in the idea that you can get away from this miserable hamster wheel by turning to people you feel less estranged from.
The unspoken strategy
People don’t want to not like Tommy. There are a few mind-tricks that people do to avoid not liking Tommy—they put emphasis on his youth to take the heat off him being a dumbass, they handle him with a feminine sensibility despite him being a cis boy, and so on. This fits that pattern: People cross their fingers and hope he’ll get over this ‘girls’ phase to settle down with someone that he’s capable of being his better self with.
It’s unspoken—some people do not expect Tommy to be ‘one of the good ones.’ Technically it was never his responsibility to manage his image in this way, but the reaction among a vocal minority is the same, and people pretty uniformly tense up when he talks about Women. He knows he’s playing with cringe humor, but I don’t think he knows the depth of the button he’s pushing, or why sexuality ‘truthing’ is egged on by his play-ineptitude. He is someone who called to mind a kind of cultural scar that people might not have even gotten from him, but he does aggravate, which is why they want him to be provably different.
While I’m using Tommy as an example here, this is actually a pattern that I’ve noticed among a surprising number of CC’s in one form or another. A lot of hope is put behind the idea that a kind of spiritual knot will be untangled once they figure out that they’re bisexual (Read: ‘recognise’ that they connect better with men than they ever will with women) and implicitly never interact romantically with a woman again. It’s an easy thought experiment to take the people commonly speculated to be bisexual and see how the feel of them changes if one tries to think of them as exclusively straight. If it feels uncomfortable, like some sort of appeal has died off or even seems like a dealbreaker, there are probably stakes behind it beyond incidental sexuality. This isn’t necessarily bad on the part of the observer, but it’s an interesting chance to pick apart where the repulsion is coming from.
This pattern shows up with a number of other CCs-- People hope that whatever strain of Male Manipulator Wilbur has will be less toxic to another man, and people like to re-frame George as a Trophy Wife to distract from the very real possibility of a Lazy Gamer Husband. On the other end of the spectrum, Phil is a good example of someone who pulls an audience in the same sphere but gets different results. Since people will always speculate there’s no saying that no-one suspects anything of him, but there’s less hopeful urgency surrounding him since he’s got a place as the positive wifeguy representation.
This dynamic is a bit elaborate, and isn’t the only reason people speculate on the sexuality of CCs. Most people are following the tried and true “I saw gay, I said gay” model, which still sits at the core of most speculation. This is just one of the more obscure possible answers to the question “what does it matter to you if he’s gay/bi or not?”
Bringing the topic back around to Tommy, he has already changed for the better over the years, and with any luck he’ll keep moving in a positive direction. Will he ever abandon his Clueless Straight shtick altogether? It feels more likely that we’re going to get an evolved version of it over time, but you never know. As for the topic of sexuality, it’s a wildcard, I genuinely have no guesses as to what label he’ll prefer to go by years from now, but I do tend to be satisfied with what he says about himself in public when he says it.
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evercelle · 1 year
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ever your oumasai art is giving me so much life, i swear when I saw you're playing the game AND like the ship I got so so happy!!! i adore all of your art so much so hearing that made me v excited and AAAAAA 💕💕💕
apologies for responding so so late but i'm glad you're enjoying my v3 draws! i am not habitually a VN player so i wasn't sure i'd like it so much going in, though apparently enjoying the ship was a foregone conclusion from the start... literally everyone i know just did a 😏 @ me whenever i talked about saihara or ouma during my playthrough. i am unfortunately extremely predictable lmao
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dreadark · 1 year
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I always knew the ak gamepress “lore” articles were full of shit 
but I didn’t realize they   literally plagiarize wikipedia
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