|| “The Maker Smiles Sadly On His Grey Wardens, So The Chantry Says, As No Sacrifice Is Greater Than

i see the flash of your eyes in my dreams and turn -

only to see a retreating shadow

I can be shaped by more than the things that hurt me

Regrets of the Dread Wolf

— Red Dead Redemption —

re: my last post but being a little nicer and less pissed off this time. i am really just a vibes girl at heart like truly when i take the myers-briggs i am 99% intuition and 1% thinking and my intuition is always right but thats a post for another time. and i obviously value objectivity and i have done a lot of very logical, grounded analysis of v*ilguard placed completely within the text but i also believe that some things are. just vibes.

sometimes, you can FEEL when something is off. when something is made out of love and when something is made out of... whatever else. with v*ilguard, what comes to mind is fear, anxiety, insecurity, scorn, derision, and hilariously, pride. i feel the fear and anxiety of backlash and being canceled on twitter in the sanitization of the lore and the lack of flaws in its major characters. i feel the insecurity in the way they marketed the game as something it was not and tried to hide the lack of worldstates and wiped out the south of thedas as if the franchise's established history was something to be ashamed of (i havent forgotten the interview where they made fun of zevran and didnt know who he was). i feel scorn in the way lore that people spent 10 years analyzing is retconned, ignored and simplified, or how characters like varric become cheap plot devices and grabs for nostalgia rather than the fully fledged characters they used to be. i feel derision in the ridiculous fucking dialogue that uses the vocabulary of a 4th grader and sounds like a bad middle-grade novel. i feel the pride in ahistoricism of the narrative, in its condescending overall theme that feels intended to punish players who drew the "wrong" conclusions from their past writing, or the way they thought they could divorce a game so completely from its beloved roots as if the past three games that got them their place in the industry was a gangrenous, rotting limb they could not wait to cut off. the only time i ever feel any love from that game is in a couple of solas's better moments when it feels like trick's love for him is banging on the walls and screaming from the basement and you can only hear the slightest echo from under the floorboards.

when i play inquisition and origins, in contrast, i feel how much the devs loved that world, those characters (most of them... and with viv and sera and you can FEEL how much the lack of love from their writers stands out in comparison to the others. also anders.) and perhaps most importantly to the whole experience, ME!!!!! the depth and complexity of the lore and characters feels like a bridge that creates a relationship between the developers and the player borne out of our shared love for the world of thedas. they littered clues and mysteries and puzzles around that game because they knew we'd be smart enough to figure them out and would have so much fun doing it. they gave us morally complex characters because they trusted us to evaluate and draw our own conclusions about them. they allowed us to make complicated and sometimes fucked up decisions because they had faith in their audience to act like adults playing a fucking video game. for adults. da2 is being left out of this because there is definitely some hatred in that game but they managed to spin it to be juicy and interesting so it gets a pass and for the most part you can tell the characters at least were loved and they had faith in the audience to handle a balls to the wall banger tragic rollercoaster of a story. v*ilguard is like if someone made cocomelon knockoff youtube videos for babies except they fucking hated babies and were just using these videos to put on their resume for their next job. and maybe there were a few people there who DO love babies and want this to be something more than cocomelon, but they're the minority, and you can feel how the end product is not just making fun of the audience but of them too.

the whole game feels like an insult to the players and half of its own developers, and is trying to make fun of you for being there and playing the game in the first place. "here is your nerdy gay fantasy RPG slop that you whined about for 10 years, fucking shut up already and leave us alone." and we literally know this is true. gaider has tweeted about this several times now, a new thread a few days ago about how much of bi*ware at large HATED dragon age. the jason schrier article from 2019 uses the term "black sheep". its why half of the developers fucking left over the past 10 years and the only people left to make this game were people WHO THINK YOU ARE A LOSER AND WANTED TO MOVE ON TO MASS EFFECT!!!!!! and even the people who didnt want to move on to mass effect think you're stupid and interpreted the last game wrong and need to be taught a lesson. god no fucking wonder i never want to play this game again. i said i was going to be nicer and less pissed off at the beginning but you can see how riled up i got just writing this. rancid vibes.

we need to slow down a little I'm so serious. all these quick short videos on tiktok, ig reels, and youtube, artists releasing quick little songs for the trend, tv shows releasing episodes at once, people using chat gpt and google ai overview because they get answers quickly but no validation done for the source, we need to sloww downn i really do not think our brains should be running this fast

The original Emerald Knight. Definitely went in an unexpected direction, but it was a good excuse to have more practice with gradient maps. Btw, this isn't done in color and then a grey scale layer added on top, it's done completely in grey scale AND THEN colored with about 1000 different gradient map layers, as well as a some extra blending layers AND and overpaint layer. Also, totally unintentional, but with his hair pulled up like this is kind of gives me Koga from Inuyasha vibes? I'm trying to figure out prints. I've tried INprint, but the quality just isn't where I want it. Any tips?

Found my old sketches of Arthur

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

(๑•ᴗ•๑) if your Dragon Age elf OCs were elves that had manifested from being spirits rather than elves that had been born, what kind of spirit would they each have been?