I CANT DO THIS IVE BEEN HOLDING THIS IN FOR SO LONG

Q!JAIDEN THINKS SHES A BURDEN ON ROIER BECAUSE HE WAS ALWAYS GIVING HER ARMOR HE SAVED UP FOR HIMSELF AND GETTING HER FOOD AND WEAPONS AND DIAMONDS AND A PLACE TO STAY AND TAKING CARE OF BOBBY MOST OF THE TIME AND SHES SO INSECURE AND FEELS SO ALONE AND UNWANTED AFTER BOBBY DIES SHE DOESNT KNOW WHAT HER PLACE ON THE SERVER IS IF SHE CANT BE BOBBYS MOTHER AND THAT ITD BE BETTER FOR HER TO BE ON HER OWN NOT BOTHERING ANYBODY AND TRYING TO PROTECT THE EGGS ON HER OWN BUT!!! HER ISOLATION IS MAKING HER VULNERABLE!!! AND DEPRESSED!!!!!

SHE NEEDS TO BE AROUND PEOPLE ESPECIALLY ROIER WHO SHE CAN SHARE HER GRIEF WITH OVER THEIR DEAD SON!!!!! AND SHE HAS A HOUSE ALL TO HERSELF NOW BECAUSE SHE FELT LIKE SHE WAS INTRUDING ON ROIERS SPACE AND HE WAS ONLY LETTING HER STAY THERE OUT OF NECESSITY BECAUSE THEY WERE RAISING BOBBY TOGETHER BUT

BUT IT WAS THEIR HOUSE THEIR HOUSE THEIR FUCKING HOUSE TOGETHER THEY WERE A FAMILY THEY LOVED EACH OTHER ROIER WAS LETTING HER STAY BECAUSE SHE MADE HIS DAYS BETTER AND SHE WAS FAMILY AND HE LOVED HER (PLATONICALLY) AND THEY WERE ONE OF THE HAPPIEST FUCKING FAMILIES ON THAT GODDAMN SERVER AND CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME HELLO CAN YOU HEAR ME

2023 reads

The Spider And Her Demons

YA Australian urban fantasy/horror

about a Malaysian-Chinese girl who’s half spider-demon, just trying to keep her head down and survive high school

when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl at school, they strike up a strange friendship and she starts to learn more about herself and the supernatural world

aroacespec/sapphic ish

Carina *can't stop touching my wife* DeLuca

and happy one year anniversary of making gifs of maya and carina to me.

finals are eating me alive but beiyuan

h2o so perfectly encapsulates teenage girlhood and all the good and bad that comes with it. like building the greatest friendships of your life but also losing friends you once thought were close. your parents divorcing but gaining a new parent. growing up to see the best in your parents and becoming closer to your family. getting boyfriends but knowing they come second to your girlfriends. drinking juices and shit talking and knowing you would swim to the ends of the earth for these people, because they get you in a way no one else ever will.

"Because I want to be one with you — you finally noticed the wish that I'd been praying for!"

Sirius’ outfit is a wedding dress / wedding themed! I made this her motif because of her obsession with Petelgeuse and because of the whole ‘becoming one’ thing reminding me of marriage / wedding vows, stuff like that. I didn’t know whether to incorporate her bandages or not, and in the end decided against it + opted to just cover as much of her bare skin as possible like with the veil, sleeves, and purple fabric above the shoulders. I gave her a spiked collar and spiky halo-like hairpiece + put her hair in a ponytail (maybe that’s a little hard to tell ahaha) to give her kinda punkish elements to her, twisting the ‘purity’ of the wedding theme a bit to subtly reflect her instability (and because it looks cool). I didn’t want her to just have a regular old wedding dress cause I thought it would look kind of bland compared to the other magi designs, so I added some fire elements to her dress that I think turned out really well :) . I also had the genius idea to make her hooks double as weaponized wedding rings to go with the outfit’s aesthetic. Her hooks are connected together to also symbolize ‘becoming one’ / the unity of marriage, that sort of thing.

The authority from a wish doc says that her wish was for love / believes love is to become one, so her wish would grant her ‘soul-washing’ powers. Her abilities make her extremely dangerous to other magi…

This week on "CJ needs to gush about DAO": Morrigan's dark ritual.

I adore Origins because depending on how serious you take roleplay, every decision you make is a thread that leads back to your origin, and in this case of the ritual, who you choose to romance can have a major impact on how you handle this choice.

For context, my canon run is with a female Tabris who romances Alistair and keeps him as a Grey Warden, and is close friends with Morrigan. It's more in character for my Tabris to reject Morrigan's ritual and not even bring it up to Alistair, which would result in her leaving him behind while she makes the ultimate sacrifice in killing the archdemon... however, agreeing to convince Alistair to do the ritual with Morrigan is the only choice in the entire game where I break roleplay because I'm selfish and weak and I want Tabris to live.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the ritual, like it hurts me. It makes me want to chew on furniture. I can talk about it until I can talk no more. I so badly want to be strong enough to remain in character and reject the ritual.

Let me explain: Tabris survives an origin that deals with sexual assault. She gets kidnapped on her wedding day, she watches the other kidnapped women and her husband get murdered, and then is too late to save Shianni from being assaulted... and Tabris carries that trauma with her throughout the entire game.

If the way to save her life is to ask the two most important people she cares about; one being her lover and the other being her best friend; who she knows hate each other, to have dubiously consensual sex in order to make a baby to absorb the old god soul... she's saying no. The last thing Tabris would ever do is put someone into a sexual situation where consent is at all dubious after what she saw happen to Shianni and nearly happened to herself. She'd rather die than force that upon Alistair and Morrigan.

That's what I mean when I say origin affects everything; I know some will side eye that with "Really? Your warden would rather die than let Alistair sleep with another woman? It's one time, and Alistair agrees to it, so no one needs to die?"

Let me be clear in saying this isn't a "Morrigan slept with my man" issue. Sure, that part's awkward and it sucks, but that's not even breaking water tension, let alone diving into the deep waters to the core of the issue.

For my Tabris, this is about betrayal, consent, and accepting fate.

The person offering Tabris this deal is someone she thought of as a trusted friend who has actually been lying to her the entire time. It doesn't matter what Morrigan's intentions are now or if she genuinely wants to save the wardens. She knew from the beginning why Flemeth sent her with them, she admits as much. She knew a warden would need to make the ultimate sacrifice and then leveraged that to get what she wants. Morrigan waited until the night before, when Alistair and the warden learn one of them has to die to defeat the archdemon, and took advantage of the high running emotions and possibly the fear of dying to make the warden agree to her ritual.

At least, that's how my Tabris interprets this confrontation. She feels betrayed by someone she came to love like a sister and went out of her way to help Morrigan with her mother upon learning what's in Flemeth's grimoire. And then that someone tells her no one needs to die, she just needs to convince Alistair to sleep with her... which is a huge fucking problem.

The Alistair and Tabris romance is slow; it took a long time for either of them to be comfortable with being emotionally vulnerable and trusting each other with basic intimacy, let alone sex. Tabris is mortified at the idea of putting Alistair in this situation. Not only would it feel like a betrayal on her part to ask that of him, but she knows the last thing Alistair ever wants to do is father a bastard who then goes on to grow up without him. How could she possibly ask him to do that?

Then you consider that ritual or no, there isn't a guarantee that they'll survive anyway. Say they do the ritual and Tabris dies anyway; she made Alistair sleep with Morrigan in order to save her and then she died anyway. Or if Alistair dies then Tabris gets to live with the fact that the last person Alistair was with was a woman he hates because she asked that of him… and either way, Morrigan gets to walk away with what she wanted.

Tabris led the group, and she's accepted that if Riordan dies [which he does] then she'll be the one to make the sacrifice, even if it means breaking both hers and Alistair's heart.... except she doesn't because I'm a coward who doesn't want to lose her because my worldstate isn't good without her in it but I also refuse to lose Alistair so I just pretend it plays out differently in my head it's fine-

But... that's how I play Tabris and view the situation. My friend @pi-creates and I have discussed the dark ritual at length. While I play a Tabris who romances Alistair, Pi plays a Mahariel who romances Morrigan, so we have vastly different interpretations of the ritual itself and Morrigan's intentions.

Which yeah, it makes total sense that someone who romanced Morrigan with a different origin, and has the option to do the ritual with her rather than asking someone else to do it, wouldn't see this the way I do.

To quote Pi: "Playing as a male warden in the Morrigan romance makes the whole situation feel different, and maybe it’s because she’s presenting it differently due to the emotional connection, but it feels more like she’s opening up about her initial instructions (that she had been given by Flemeth) and offering a solution to avoid the possibility of death. And for my Mahariel, the constant threat of sudden death has haunted him from the start – he caught the blight and was ripped away from his clan (something he did not want to do in the slightest), got forced into a Grey Warden ritual that could kill him, was forced into a battle that could kill him, going on this whole quest that he never wanted but has now become responsible for regardless of his thoughts on the matter… the dark ritual may be one of the few moments where he is presented with an option to decide if he wants to walk into certain death, or take actions of his own volition to stop it.

"The idea of the ritual still feels like a dodgy thing to do since the ultimate outcome is unknown at that point, he’s taking Morrigan at her word that it will save the warden and that this child would be unharmed, just with an old god soul that she isn’t exactly clear on why she wants that and is determined to runaway immediately after the battle to secure it properly. It could be interpreted that it’s purely a preservation thing, but I’m biased to wanting Morrigan's intentions to not be power based.

"But also, taking part in the ritual isn’t as outlandish for my warden since he and Morrigan have already been involved in an intimate relationship. It’s the future of the ritual that is scarier – the idea of this old-god baby, and the idea of Morrigan insisting that she’s leaving afterwards when Mahariel and her have a loving relationship. He’s hurting, but he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want Alistair to die, he doesn’t want Morrigan to leave, he definitely doesn’t want pregnant Morrigan to leave on her own… it’s complicated, but for completely different reasons."

And I find that fascinating. I want to know how other players approach this part of DAO, what origins they play, and who they romanced. Seriously, this is an invitation to anyone reading to share their thoughts.

What about a warden who doesn't even have Alistair in their party because they made Loghain a warden? Is there anyone out there who has Loghain do the ritual with Morrigan and why? What about male wardens who don't romance her? Do you choose to do it with her anyway, or do you ask Alistair or Loghain to do it? Do you tell Morrigan to fuck off with the ritual? Why? Who makes the ultimate sacrifice in that case? And what about Morrigan herself? How do you interpret her intentions/motivations? I want to know.

I'm telling you, this is a discussion that gets me excited, as most discussions about DAO do.

s1 luz was at least a little bit gay for willow i will not be told otherwise

idk if it was a full on crush but it was at least one of those types of nebulous not-quite-romantic not-quite-platonic "hahaha, unless..." type friendships that a lot of queer teens have, u know the ones

madwheeler sibling dynamic with "i've always wanted a brother" and "i've always wanted a sister" but Max is the brother and Mike is the sister

do you ever think about how immediately after rachel's death cassie mentally memorializes her as a "happy warrior"...when you put it in the context of rachel's acknowledged ambivalence about that warrior role and the intensity of the self-alienation and pain it causes her and her unfulfilled longing to just be a normal human being, it just wrecks me

remembering how in first year of art school as a 20 year old i was running late to class one morning and i ran all the way down the street to catch my tram and missed it.. so im just at the tram stop catching my breath ready to wait on the next one. and this lady pulls up nearby in her car w a man in the passenger seat, rolls down her window, and calls out to me that she can give me a ride or something. im like.. not only do i look like a teen boy so this is suspicious behavior, but im also trans and im not gonna jump into the car of two unknown grown people right.. and so i say im good and go wait for the tram. but she wont fucking leave! she just stays there on the side of the road by the tram station calling out to me and whatnot while im just trying to get some distance away and ignore her.. at one point this guy across the station calls out to me like "hey shes trying to talk to you! shes asking you to come over!", clearly under the belief that the woman was some friend or relative or whatever, and i just yelled back "i dont know her!!" and the guy was like 😐😐😐.. eventually she gave up and left but what an absolutely bizarre interaction lol like i still cant quite figure it out today.. why would she stick around for like a whole minute trying to get me in her car 😭 and tbc this was not like a "people in a similar age group interacting" this was a grown woman old enough to be my mother..

for so long I was really against Will having powers because it felt sort of. unnecessary. to the story and to his character. because we’ve only ever seen “powers” displayed as something akin to a tool or a weapon. they’re something to wield

but that doesn’t make sense to me in the context of Will. like, he’s nonviolent by nature, more or less a total pacifist, to the point that even in that very first dnd session, he waffles between casting protection and casting fireball, only to cast fireball and… get “got” by the demogorgon. even in pretend, he doesn’t succeed at using a weapon

but when I began looking at it from the angle of “well maybe his powers aren’t the same as the ones we’ve been shown” it really opened it up a lot more for me. I talked about my winding incoherent thoughts on it in this post, but it’s just like

something about his character being so full of love despite everything he’s been through. continuously using his kindness even when cornered and scared. simply trying to face his fears and stand up for himself re: the Mind Flayer rather than trying to physically beat it back. and how the core of the solution to the conflict is not to fight violence with violence, but to see the violence as the pained, fearful lashing out that it is and meet it with only understanding and compassion…

and all of that just made me go “well wouldn't it be poetic if he didn’t have powers and simply beat vecna with the power of love?” but there is way too much evidence that points toward him having powers (looking at you @pinkeoni with this post)

so it’s like. okay. how do I contextualize all of these feelings inside the evidence that he does have powers? and it’s like. well of course! he doesn’t have powers, he is the power. it’s not something he wields, it’s something that is inherent to him and something he extends to others with open palms much like his love and kindness. i think it was even Robin again who said that his name is even Will, so he “wills” things into being and he “wills” love onto people. more like it's a desire, or a wish, than anything he directly points and controls

One of my friends took a photo of the Solar Eclipse!

no one told me julianna raids were so fun to do. hot tip, take "i know moves you haven't even thought of" as a mantra. move that turret onto the roof. put an unavoidable tripwire in that tunnel. put on a julianna and the juliannas concert. kill egor with your bare hands.

area woman FUCKING BLINDSIDED by running into high school art teacher in public