ALT!CALLIE: *says anything*

EDEN internally: shut up shut up Shut Up Shut Up SHUT UP

the kismesissitude ever

jacques's, nancy's, and mrs. villareal's parents circa 1960-something + baby jacques and nancy bc they were there in cas anyway why not

this feud's been going on for approximately this long

Sky’s Secret

rich, complex, caffeinated. something fiddly, something red.

muddle 2 roasted (then chilled) grapes

2 oz. triple crème brie and aged white cheddar fat washed vodka (mostly brie, cheddar aged 1 year — get cheese with some crystals)

1/2 oz. cold brew (tangerine, light berry, sweet almond tasting notes, medium roast)

1/2 oz. — sweet red vermouth. the good local stuff.

stir over ice and double strain

serve in your most audacious martini glass garnish with gold flakes

my thanks to the muses @worldsbeyondpod @quiddie and @onsereverra for reminding me that obviously i should start with coffee when building a drink for suvi 😘😘😘

I managed to have some free time because a professor was absent

So, @skaelds threw this AU idea at me about Eol never having left Doriath, hence Maeglin growing up as a prince of the Sindar under Thingol. Which, YES, delicious implications for Noldor-Sindar politics and how subsequent events may have been affected and all that, but also --

please consider the fact that Maeglin and Dior are incredibly close in age (in comparison to everyone else around them, at least) and with some mild timeline tweaking could have conceivably attended lessons together and been fast friends. Both Skaelds and I think that Eol and Luthien would have Intensely Disliked each other, leading to awkward kindergarten pickups XD

ALSO, we both agree that Maeglin would most likely pick up a condescending Sindar attitude regarding the Noldor, since he doesn't really have a reason to seek out his mother's side of the family and power in Gondolin in such an AU, while Aredhel would be somewhat more in contact with her family... and what better way to try and improve relations between the kingdoms than having your child and your brother's child get along?? yes yes, Idril's age would have to be very adjusted for this, but it's a silly AU, just go with it XD

And then I got this idea in my head and couldn't get it out and had to draw it.

SO ......... what's the overlap between non-mainstream 90s animated movies and the Silmarillion? 👀 🤣

(Skaelds, I tried to go with your versions of Eol and Maeglin... hope they're somewhat accurate!)

xadian field guide

On Dragon Age II's Ending

The ending of Dragon Age 2 has always felt to me like the least morally ambiguous of any of the games' mage-templar decisions and frankly one of the least ambiguous "big" decisions in the series.

DA2 makes it extremely obvious that the Circle mages are about to be executed for something that absolutely none of them had any part in and no one, not even the Knight-Commander, is arguing that that isn't the case. You can feel whatever kind of way about what Anders did, and still recognize the staggering injustice of killing all the Circle mages for something that everyone, including the Knight-Commander calling for their deaths, is fully aware they did not do.

And just in case that wasn't clear, someone made a point of dropping in that bit of ambient dialogue telling us that Meredith is already trying to get clearance for the Right of Annulment before the explosion; she's just looking for an excuse. The game is pretty clear about the injustice of this situation, regardless of how many demons and blood mages there may or may not be in Kirkwall.

I'm a chronic replayer who enjoys making up new characters every time to see things I haven't seen before and I didn't have a particularly difficult time coming up with in-character, circumstantial reasons why a character might annul the Circle in DAO or recruit the templars in DAI and believe they're doing the right thing. For the former: dwarven noble who knows little about magic and believes what the Knight-Commander tells her, and chooses the wrong dialogue option with Morrigan in the party so Wynne attacks and therefore is not present in the party as an emotional anchor and a voice for the mages, and listens to Cullen when he says it's too dangerous to let any of the mages live. For the latter: non-mage human noble from a Chantry-connected family who just implicitly trusts templars, as he was raised to. Or Dalish elf who walks into Redcliffe, sees a magister stinking up the place and says "Well, the Dread Wolf take the lot of you then" and turns around and marches straight to Therinfal, conscripts the templars, disbanding the Order in the process. Just a couple of easy examples I've actually played.

But the ending of DA2 is a choice between "Yes, I will help to execute these people for something everyone knows they didn't do" or "No, I will not do that and I will help them defend themselves and escape." Of course it's possible to come up with in-character reasons to make the former choice, and I have! But it's much less of a choice a character could just stumble into, and you have to do a lot more ideological contortions for a character to do that and believe they're doing the right thing.

Yes, there are a lot of blood mages and demons in Kirkwall. While we don't get a lot of opportunities to treat blood mage NPCs with much nuance apart from Merrill as most blood mages are programmed to attack on sight (and this is likely a product of the game's tight development deadline), the game itself offers an explanation for this in the writings of the Band of Three, the Enigma of Kirkwall codex entry that you can collect throughout the story. While you have to look to find it, this history does make it clear that Kirkwall is meant to be an outlier, for reasons both political and historical (which is another post for another day). And Merrill herself, whether you agree with her viewpoints or not, does offer an important counterpoint: a character designed to be sympathetic while giving a more nuanced perspective to the player on why a mage might choose to use blood magic.

And yeah, even with the fact that the game makes you fight Orsino in the mage ending, I still think this. It's clumsily executed, yes, but Orsino going all blood magic harvester abomination is just one more example of what the game has been showing us all along: that mages (like most people) turn to extreme measures when they're backed into corners with no sense of hope, and the templars then use those extreme actions to justify further abuses of mages. I don't think it was strictly necessary (and for what it's worth, Mark Darrah agrees with that; it's a decision that was made out of concern for gameplay balance more than narrative and in hindsight he's said that he thinks it was a mistake), and I definitely think it could have been executed better, but as it stands it does fit an ongoing theme, and Orsino's actions still do not justify the murder of every other mage in the Circle.

And then there's that thing where Hawke can only receive the support of the nobility and become Viscount if they side with the templars, thereby agreeing to uphold the existing power structures in Kirkwall. It's easy to miss if you've never played through the templar ending (and also because Hawke doesn't hold the position for long and Inquisition doesn't really acknowledge that they ever did Correction: It is actually mentioned in the Champion of Kirkwall codex entry, and possibly other places as well, my memory just failed me), but to me that outcomes is absolutely inspired. It serves to highlight how deeply intertwined the nobility are with the Chantry. The nobles of Kirkwall want Meredith deposed because they feel she's overstepped her bounds by denying them a proper viscount, but they are not anti-Chantry or anti-Circle; they still want mages locked up, and they probably also remember what happened the last time Kirkwall's nobility decided to try and contest the Chantry's power in their city (see: Perrin Threnhold).

I find the templar ending genuinely interesting to play through in terms of seeing the story from that angle, and in terms of what it has to say about power structures and politics in Thedas generally and in Kirkwall in specific, which I also wrote about recently. (To say nothing of how differently it frames Varric in Inquisition when the Hawke he idolizes is the Hawke who slaughtered Kirkwall's mages to a one.) I would honestly recommend playing it at least once for lore reasons if you're into that sort of thing. But I would hardly say that you as a player come out of that ending feeling like you're playing the good guy.

And I'm not even arguing that all choices in the games should be this in-your-face. On the contrary, I don't think they all should. I like it when it's possible for a character to make a choice with unintended outcomes, or get accidentally locked into a worse choice because of previous decisions (like annulling the Circle and then being forced to kill Connor or Isolde). Those are some of my favorite kind of choices in these games. In this particular case, I do think the extreme nature of the choice is important to the story, both as the catalyst for the mage rebellion and to underscore why Anders did what he did.

So when people tell me that DA2 "both sideses" the mage-templar conflict... I respect that it's possible to feel that way about it, but I just don't see it. The game allows the player to role-play a character who might make various choices within its narrative; that is not the same thing as presenting all choices as morally equivalent in-universe, and it has never been the same thing, in any of these games.

If you're looking for one mage-templar choice that puts the injustice squarely in your face, I think the ending of DA2 is very much that.

i'm about to finish rotk on friday (am working 24 hours tomorrow 😔) which means i'll have read the entire trilogy in like. 10 days. i can't remember when i breathed through something this quickly and joyfully, and I don't want it to end, and the real question now is if i can read the entire silm in one week before I'll be on vacation or if i should take a lil break because man. man

Hey! I found you though your superhero AU, which i love, by the way! I really enjoy your writing style, so I was wondering what your writing process is, in particular, do you have a plan/outline you follow, or do you have a list of little snippets of writing you want to include, etc. Just really curious!

oh my god the question i've been dreading. so funny thing, for the longest time, i actually didn't have an outline or like. a plan. at all

this wasn't even originally going to be a series, it was just supposed to be the first part 😭 but then people started liking it so much (and i live off of attention and comments) so i decided to make a part two and it kind of skyrocketed from there. did not expect we'd be getting past 20k words this is my longest series ever LMAO

but it's not like i have nothing planned out — like i know what's going to be happen with etho and the agency (to an extent) and i've pretty much got the whole ranchers and gempearl storyline down. but desertduo and boat boys..... i've kinda been taking it part by part.

that however does lead to things being repetitive and getting a little stale. so i've been planning things out more lately, and i'm very pleased to say that now i do have (kind of) an idea on the ending. which i have no idea when is going to happen

peter x neal; in which i break my record for level of schmoop

Their first kiss is something epic, Hollywood worthy, rain pouring down and air ringing with angry, desperate words said before the inevitable crashing of lips. When Neal remembers it, he remembers it in wide, swooping camera shots and blue-toned filters.

They were epic, Neal thinks, in a subtle, quiet way that is so perfect and constant and understated that it really isn’t epic at all. 

So maybe they aren’t always epic, then, but they’re right , in the easy and simple way that Neal feels every time Peter brushes his fingers against his as they walk, or that he sees every time Peter smiles at him from across a room, unabashed and bright. It’s calmer, softer than anything Neal has ever known, and he loves it more than all of the fine wines and grand heists in the world.

2 panels done, about 78 more to go ;-; only the speech bubbles & lettering left!

This is a WIP of a dp x dc silver age based on a prompt from my twin @stealingyourbones !

I’ve been storyboarding this comic for months but have procrastinated actually digitalizing it until now as I’m Very new to digital art and much more used to traditional art but it’s slowly getting easier!

I’m just on the intro section currently! I’m trying to keep it as cartoon accurate in both art and script as I possibly can as I want it to feel like something that could be pulled straight from the original show.

Here’s the complete storyboard for the first page:

The intro is meant to be based off a classic early season dp plot of “Skulker has a device to trap Danny but Danny outsmarts Skulker and uses that device against him.” But you’ll have to wait to see the rest >:)

Here’s a sneak peak of a rough draft of a page during the Skulker fight that I had to scrap the paneling from because I couldn’t get the flow of it to work:

I’m still debating whether I update it on a page by page basis or release it all at once so I’ll keep y’all posted for updates!

I still need a name for the comic so feel free to give me suggestions!

it's really upsetting me so to get it off my chest i'm gonna confess that the positivity posts i saw yesterday really hurt. i didn't realise that was a thing in this fandom, and i wish it wasn't because those things inevitably leave people feeling left out and like their presence isn't worth anything to the fandom (plus readers, rebloggers and commenters are integral to fandom community but don't usually get a shoutout). i'm already struggling because of this horrible trend towards using threads in discord which renders most of the servers inaccessible to me, i feel extremely isolated and alone and unwanted, but i was doing okay muddling along churning out fic and a few silly polls and posts now and then until yesterday. the fic i posted today just made me feel so sad after i posted it. it was a lovely fic :( but like what is the point. if i'm worth so little i might as well not be here. why put the effort into making things if no one notices. i already feel so lonely it's like i'm being torn in two, posting things now and then brought me comfort but idk what i have now

trying to remember that good friends enjoy doing occasional favors for the people they love and it's not weird to ask them for help when you need it..............

some oc sketches from the boat… my beautiful lameass former child star and his failgirl cousin

Just a heads up for friends who read When Catastrophy Strikes…

A new chapter will be arriving tomorrow. And I’m working on being able to commit to weekly (or weekly-ish) updates.

Also I’m working on finishing Until I Find You.

Ya know, in case you were curious.