sigrun really is. she really. how is she a grey warden, a member of the legion of the dead, a dwarf, every single banger concept from dragon age lore rolled into one character and over a decade later she has YET to reach fandom sexyman status maybe the joker was right about society
I kind of want a Zevran zine. Dragon Age fan people who know how to make this happen pls make this happen and let me peddle my favourite sexyman art to you and then let me buy it with like 20 other pictures of sexyman Zevran
on a surface level, wyll's romance reminds me a lot of cullen's romance in dragon age inquisition, so it always amazes me how many people (especially on tiktok) talk about how boring he is and how they never interact with him, bc cullen was literally the posterchild for inquisition from what i understand about the fandom in 2014 lmao. like they both have that lawful good, prince charming, shy boy aesthetic going for them in both of their romances/their interactions in general, but only one of them gets the fandom sexyman treatment... like wow... i wonder why that is..........
On a similar note, I always felt very on the outside of the Dragon Age fandom because I never understood the appeal of Anders. It wasn’t until I dug my hands into the fertile ground of the Tumblr Dragon Age community that I finally pieced it together:
Thoughts on new Dragon Age "teaser"? You have the best takes.
I'll be deadly honest, I didn't even realise it was out, that's how checked out I am, but I will always fall hook line and sinker for a delicious bait made of things I can chew on, so let's seeeeeee. I'll do first impressions for now. I'll warn you, I haven't done 'takes' in ages, I've seriously lost my edge and resemble someone yelling at a cloud more than someone with intelligent or at least entertaining takes. Proceed on your own volition. Note, I have not been keeping up with DA4 updates. At all. I am literally grasping at straws and screaming out of my arse.
I'll say this. I believe Mark Darrah who had retired from BioWare was brought back on to save this tattered ship that had failed to launch how many times now? If you were with DAI and Anthem especially, you know that when a vet of that calibre is being brought on board towards the end of production, you're fucked.
The sheer scope of the regions visited in the trailer... I wouldn't blink an eye if it was a turn-based strategy game, but it is not.
I'm surprised how shit the game visually looks, but it's been my criticism with the thus far released art, and now, environment assets. And again, I'm coming off of Anthem, and Anthem was truly, truly gorgeous. Now someone might argue that every DA has had its distinctive visual style. Well I thought DA2, for what it was, sure did look inspired. I didn't enjoy the game or the characters, but I enjoyed looking at it. Dragon Age Inquisition kind of lost me aesthetically, but I see what they did there. It was more generic, certainly not attempting to be photorealistic, but I saw the idea and accepted it.
Now this though? What is this? The panning over what I presume is Treviso literally looks like a mobile game ad.
Ok, fine, I'll not go in on the visuals, I'm too fresh out of art college and I'm so anal-retentive that my o-ring's more pinched than a pinprick about this stuff. Moving on.
I believe the new PC is an Antivan Crow? Since when are they fighting for all of Antiva? Everyone??? Since when?! Zevran's canonically not returning, and even he was compassionately practical on his best days. The Crows are not good people. They buy kids to train for miserable jobs meeting miserable ends. Oh, so we had a whole character who gave the Crows a finger for being the shitshow they were, but now they're this resistance task force? What, why, because the 'Islamic Borg' invaded?
Then. I feel like I'm missing a fuckton of contest because I haven't read the preceding comics and stories, I have one comic book from the DAI-DA4 interim and it ended so disappointingly, I never bothered after that.
We're really retconning all the complex and complicated factions into freedom fighters, aren't we. I guess such is the state of our real world. Always a plucky band of people belonging to formerly shitty fucking organisations suddenly saving the day like heroes, possibly somewhere along the way ruminating for 2 seconds on whether they deserve to pat themselves on the back, landing on 'but we will change how we operate, and we will save the world, always!'
I'm into the Rivaini squid though. I've never been fond of Rivain, not just because parts of the fandom like to present this place that has barely been talked about in canon like some haven for... idk. I just didn't expect squids. And you people know I love marine invertebrates. You know what, fuck it, here's my 'best take': have squid, will travel!
But that port city ravaged recently by the dragons in ruins looks like it's been in ruins for the past 2000 years, only recently excavated. It's so clean. And here I go again with the aesthetics.
Anyway, Falon'din and/or dirthamen is fuckin' around in Rivain, aren't they. Because I believe that head shape, multi-hands etc were presented in many of the statues we saw in DAII, and given that Falon'din's proverbial crows, envy and nightmare were so prominently featured, and sexyman Solas' outright resentment for former master Dirthamen and the vain Falon'din, welll... risen gods. Dirthamen at the very least was associated with watery depths, but they're twins (or are they? Perhaps the facets of one person altogether)...
Anyway, I'm more interested in what the fuck is happening in Weisshaupt. That part genuinely interests me. Circling back to Dirthamen, Razikale is the dragon of Mystery. Associated with Dirthamen, at least according to my theory, while Urthemiel was the Dragon of Beauty, and we keep getting indications that Falon'din was pretty, aggressive, and exceedingly vain. So Big Dirty's up next. Falon'din had the crows, right? Both defeated in DAI. He's out, more or less. And again, Solas most likely was Dirthamen's student before he decided that he himself didn't want to be but totally wanted to be revered. So my take is that Razikale, who got mentions in DAI is waking up as well.
The villain gods of this mess, the classic Dragon Age false gods we fight in every single game as end bosses, will be connected to Dirt. Eh. Same eagle, different liver.
Anyway I have a doubt that this kind of scope will end anywhere nice. The production's been fraught as fuck to the point where the panic button has been pressed many times. The art looks like a significant downgrade, the production has been filled with veterans just clocking the fuck out.
It doesn't sound interesting. I'm tired of saving the world as an Eastern European in late 2023. This kind of story does not speak to me at all anymore. Not after 2019, not after 2021. It looks dated and mediocre, the story is so old that if it goes where I think it will, it has no relevance or message for anybody but perhaps some American audiences (some). I'm just... I'm not.
The rah-rah I got from that clip leaves me ice cold. There is no rah-rah in such widespread misery. There are only curse words and the sound of grinding teeth, and everybody's a dick, and everybody's dick past is dredged up hard. No retcons.
I don't want it. It better receive insanely high marks for me to play it. And I loved this franchise, two of the PCs have gone on to be archetypal in my private works now.
The mystery is gone. The power creep... I don't want to hang out with gods. They should have never been brought into the story as characters you can extensively hang out with.
Edit: basically the entire thing sounds about as exciting as a somewhat well-produced mobile game. Which is fun to fuck with while taking the metro, but...
I've been playing through the Live A Live remake lately, and I just realized something.
Lucrece is the Gravity Falls of Medieval Europe.
The first seven chapters pretty clearly established that none of this is taking place in a fantasy setting, it's real-world actual Earth from real life. A heavily fictionalized version of Earth, to be sure, but Earth nonetheless (unless I missed the part about the Bakumatsu when Sakamoto Ryoma teamed up with a purple-haired ninja to fight a frogsnake demon, a clockwork cyborg, and a giant koi fish, and yet somehow he couldn't fight off some basic assassins a few years later. :V)
Then you get to the Middle Ages and all of a sudden you're in a medieval fantasy kingdom straight out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The characters all speak in iambic pentameter, even the peasants. They worship Gods, plural, in a time and place where admitting you do so anywhere else would probably get you skewered. Two of your party members are straight-up flinging fireballs and summoning angels, a certain kind of grass that doesn't appear in any other chapter is a workable substitute for modern medicine (granted, so are soup dumplings, castella cake and beef jerky, apparently, but still) and the land is infested with little knights riding squirrels, killer plants, dog-people and Actual Dragons, none of which is remarked upon or treated as anything other than business as usual. The big threat on everyone's mind is a demon living in a mountain, while most other countries are more concerned with warring with each other - not that we'd know who Lucrece's neighbours are because other countries are never even mentioned. And that's before Odio completely screws everything up and the land gets overrun by baddies from all across time.
In short, it's very disconnected from Earth in a way that none of the other chapters are, even when taking all the fantasy elements in those chapters into account. You'd be forgiven for assuming it wasn't Earth at all but some kind of alternate dimension. This is where I compare it to the town of Gravity Falls, because:
They're disconnected from the outside world - what happens in Lucrece stays in Lucrece. No-one outside of it has ever heard of it, and no-one inside of it has any care what goes on beyond the borders.
They're a magnet for weird beasties and weird people - people who still worship pantheons in notoriously ultra-Christian medieval Europe, for example. Or someone who'll just take his shirt off in public and give it to the local hero for protection. :V
At some point, they get struck by an apocalyptic event that leaves the entire place infested with monsters even more weird than usual, and yet that event is strictly contained within its borders, unable to spread. This might actually explain why no-one's ever heard of Lucrece, because Odio killed everyone who lived there, wiped away all trace of its existence, and was then in turn killed by seven time travelers.
The big bad responsible for said event has powers of reality-warping, time-transcending scale, have a misanthropic streak, and have tried multiple times across time to screw up history. They're ultimately defeated by a team of ordinary humans (and some non-humans) pulling together with the power of trust and friendship.
And this really has nothing to do with anything, but Oersted does look kinda like classic Tumblr Sexyman Bill Cipher. He has the same hair, at least. :V