Dav - Blog Posts
It's even funnier when most of them are the same people who go screaming around that Solas and Mythal were startcrossed endgame soulmates because she called him love once lol.
I'm not mad with this new game, honestly. I may not like how rushed it seems sometimes, but the romances I've done so far left me very satisfied (Emmrich and Lucanis ofc).
People who are claiming the Lucanis romance is lacklustre because you don’t make out immediately are weak. Every piece of dialogue from this man has been so sweet and romantic and genuine and thoughtful especially since confirming the relationship. and people are saying it’s “like you’re just friends” because there’s no sex scene after you enter the relationship… not sure what they’re doing wrong but Lucanis’ gentleness and protectiveness toward Rook reads 100% romantic to me. the man was just tortured for a year he’s a slow burn let him COOK
had to get these out of my system...
Veiltober - day 26, Ghilan'nain
Our new mommy figure, AHHHHH!!! I don't know what else to say here except that I am READY TO MEET HER!!!
I've got Internet problems so I wasn't able to upload this one to Redbubble, but everything else is there right now!
Prompts for Veiltober by @lynnerdo as always!!
Veiltober - day 1, Veilguard
I'm back with a variation on Inktober, this time, Dragon Age the Veilguard themed. I'm sooo excited for this game to come out, I've been waiting almost a decade for this and I can't believe it's finally happening!
I'm going to be following the prompts from @harkonnin shown in this post.
Please follow along, as I'll be trying to make a piece for every single day! I decided to go with a personal tarot style (this is for Dragon Age, after all!!) and I do hope yall will enjoy!
Definitely don’t picture him standing there in shock for a few seconds. Don’t imagine that split second he needs to process Rook is gone. Really, don’t delve into the way Spite came to realize it, too. Given the demon originally has no sense of space/object permanence (banter with Emmerich) and has to very quickly come to terms with the sudden grief, and fear, and unbridled rage overcoming his host.
Probably the closest they’ve ever come (apart from Illario’s betrayal) to going full demon and almost everyone was on eggshells around him. Guaranteed, Harding and Belara were keeping those enchanted arrows close. Just in case he fell too far into himself to come back as the Lucanis that they know.
The Lucanis who was willing to kill any god Rook wanted in the name of safety he could no longer provide…
Reality so utterly out of their control, again…
But can you imagine. Lucanis on the high of finally landing his shot at ghilan'nain. That moment of anxious disbelief thinking "I did it, we did it, she's dead, Rook is safe" only to have Rook suddenly ripped away just gone into nothing, the Dread Wolf carving his way out in their place. Solas gives his "price of winning" speech to Rook but it's Lucanis who was left untethered in his fear and anguish.
Imagine how feral he probably went in those hours after. Spite howling at the forefront, wings thrashing, throat hoarse from yelling. This isn't something he can fight- it's not even a cloud face, it's just nothing. A void where Rook was meant to be. Taash is too lost in their own grief to bring Spite to heel and so it's left up to Davrin and Neve to keep Lucanis from mauling Emmrich as he rages with two voices at the mage to FIND THEM. FIND ROOK. BRING ROOK BACK (they were supposed to be safe)
Vellore is an elven Antivan Crow, who fought her way from the gutters of Antiva city to the ranks of house Valisti. Using her beauty and charm Vellore disguises her intelligence and blades beneath a flirtatious persona waiting for the right moment to strike. Secretly she is conficted between the power and security the Crows offer her and a life free from bloodshed.
Eurydice is a young Dalish Veil Jumper fascinated by the mysteries of ancient elven technology. Inspired by the Inquistor, she left her clan to travel to Arlathan forest where she could dedicate her life to exploring the fade and building a new future for the People. Deep down she is lonely person, and perhaps finds too much comfort in the oddities of the fade.
so pumped after seeing the new dragon age trailer. maker, the character designs, the setting, even the music makes me want to yell!
I mean in this trailer alone we saw half a dozen new factions, THREE whole new nations and settings to explore, seven new companions as well as uhhh red lyrium infectet darkspawn, the return of griffins in Thedas, and the freaking EVANURIS!
I'm honestly so excited
Rip to everyone on this site who didn't realise they were following sleeper dragon age fans. The fandom is awakening from its deep slumber.
So I just realized: Neve means "snow" in Italian, and we all know she specializes in ice magic. ¿Coincidence or intentional?🤔
I've come far enough in DaV to have all companions and I don't get why so many people are upset with Taash's writing.
Y'all rave about having queer characters in the game, but as soon as a queer character isn't kissing everyone's ass 24/7 they're suddenly badly written?
If anything, Taash is perfectly written for being a baby trans who's discovering themselves. I sure was 10 times more difficult when I had my own self-discovery period.
I've also seen people whinge about that "Nobody likes being a woman" line.
Yeah, because Taash is forcing themselves into the woman mold and don't realize they're allwed not to. And they're assuming everyone feels the same because it's not like they've had discussions about it with anyone.
Misunderstand me not, there's been a lot of valid criticism of DaV, but Taash not being a trans character that is palatable to cis people is not it.
every time lucanis is flying around this is what i see
I just realized that emmrich is living the bilbo baggins experience, going on an adventure in his fifties.
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?
Had some rambling thoughts about Emmrich and his questline,
It's funny, aside from Solas with his exclusive "is he an asshole or is he a victim?" interpretations in the endgame, I think Emmrich is another example of where they jammed two conflicting characterizations of the story into each other and just let one win out depending on which decision the player made so that each option looks Valid and Good and relatively consequence-free.
like, Emmrich becoming a Lich should have just been a bad thing, right?
Not in the sense that I think the game itself should have pointed at the player and gone "you picked the wrong option", but as a logical extension of Emmrich's arc, was it not a bad thing?
I remember at one point writing that Emmrich becoming a lich didn't do anything to conquer his fear of death even though him letting go of Manfred is supposed to be him finally coming to terms with him parting from people, and how that was bad. But I think I missed the point
I think (especially when you look at the concept art around Emmrich,) the original point was supposed to be that becoming a Lich was Emmrich giving in to his fear of death, ironically dooming himself to an immortality where he is surrounded by death, starting with Manfred's death. That losing people to death, like his parents, is the real source of the fear that he was grappling with, but he does not understand this and grasps it only as a fear of his own end. That it is, actually, on the player to understand that and counsel him wisely. It's an ironic tragedy, a very classic story of someone meeting their fate on the road to avoid it. And that's why it makes sense that he's still not over Manfred, why he's afraid of losing a romanced Rook, why he apparently mourns Manfred still (something I missed.)
But the narrative wasn't really built around this? You understand what his fear of death is about immediately and then the choice to be a lich was presented in most of the dialogue as like, "neato! he conquered his fear of death because he won't ever die! yeah Manfred is dead now but at least we honored his sacrifice and let him rest :)" no one has a problem with what he did, no one calls him out on it, no one but Spite even really cares that Manfred is gone even though Emmrich could have saved him, it's just Cool that he's a lich now. The liches are heroic and so Emmrich's desire to join them is heroic, his fear of death is not what motivates him to make some eldritch monstrosity of himself, it is preventing him from achieving this noble goal to help the dead forever, and leaving Manfred behind is a noble sacrifice that will prevent him from becoming a tyrant lich who just resurrects people at will.
I think the idea of "don't resurrect someone who died just because you miss them, you have to let the dead rest" is a completely separate idea that, in this specific situation, doesn't mesh well with "you shouldn't screw over your loved ones just to preserve your own life, and you should treasure your time with people while you have it," but they interjected both morals and just let them respectively theme the lich and human routes, as if I'm not supposed to think about the bittersweet poignancy of the human ending, where Emmrich proudly watches Manfred grow and achieve, while everyone is high-fiving him over being a skelly man in the lich ending. Or for me to look at the human ending as heartwarming after they already said Emmrich was disturbing Manfred's well-deserved rest and giving up an opportunity to do a lot of good by doing this, and that no one really cared that he was "dead".
(Also, like, as a spirit, Manfred's "rest" was him being sent back into the Fade, which we can now understand to be a spirit prison that Manfred specifically possessed that body to escape, so u know.)
I do believe Emmrich becoming a Lich is at its core meant as a selfish/cowardly act to preserve himself at the cost of someone he treated like his own child, because that was the motivation they gave him from conception. Concept Emmrich was turning himself into a lich to become immortal. In the game, he specifically sought out the liches because he was afraid of death. This is the case even if they interject dialogue later making it seem like he's trying to do this for the sake of the "dead" and it's really important and him resurrecting Manfred would be selfish of him. I don't mind Emmrich saying these things, but I feel like they needed to be lies he was telling himself, something that is not backed up by other Mourn Watchers, or by Rook not being given the option to call him on it, or by the liches having a morally stringent screening process that he passes with flying colors and stuff like that, with the entire narrative just taking the things he says for granted. Maybe the liches should just not be heroic at all, actually. And like if we're going to have it be a plot point that there have been powerful, immortal liches. In Thedas. All this time. They needed to not give a shit about Thedas to at least help me with my suspension of disbelief.
Am I making any sense here, like there's two different reasons Emmrich wants to be a lich and how his fear of death is interacting with it and they don't feed into each other very well imo.
And like, the way he is now this character, who was written to deal with a fear of death, has nothing actually helpful to say about coping with a fear of death, imo. The routes' messaging is either "You don't need to fear death because you can just Not Die" or "You don't need to fear your loved ones dying because you can just Bring Them Back" instead of "Death of some kind is inevitable, so cherish the life you still have instead of spending it in fear."
Idk how psychiatrically sound it would have been. There were apparently people who struggle with Thanatophobia who were helped by Emmrich's character, but like, just talking narratives.
I'm going to put a video here where a published author and content creator is talking about the way readers frequently interact with the book world, and specifically Sarah J Maas readers and their ilk. The video isn't hating on readers, or Maas or the types of books Maas & clones write. I am not posting it in relation to the topic of plagiarism. The reason I'm posting it is because of the way people have responded to Veilguard. It's not very long, and I'm sharing it because he summarizes and briefly discusses the following points:
anchoring bias
schema theory
cultural myopia/commenting on things when you have limited cultural exposure
other people dealing with the consequences of a critical poster getting 15 minutes of attention
I thought the video was a good poke into problems coinciding with people criticizing (not critiquing, there's a difference) Veilguard, where anything from themes, plot points, characterization or even costume elements in the game are being torn apart...and the people doing the tearing are approaching the topics with often *self-admitted* lack of experience on what they're criticizing, and zero curiosity.
A concrete example: there was a discussion swirling recently in which there was an attempt to criticize Veilguard for the funerary practices Rook and Bellara go through. This in spite of the fact that a Dalish Rook and Bellara can have an in-the-moment discussion about the differences between their clan practices, and in DA:I Solas can mention how clans are different from each other, and there have been many, many posts on this site discussing from a lore perspective how the elves are not a monolith. I don't have to tell you that the posters criticizing the scene were myopic on both a cultural and personal preference level in their criticisms of the scene.
Critical posters have also frequently spoken over users who attempt to explain the diverse cultural, political, or queer experiences and influences which align with Veilguard's portrayals.
I thought it was great that this creator brought up how authors are affected for a considerable amount of time by shitty online takes. Recently there were screenshots where Trick mentioned that making Veilguard was traumatic, and folks passed them around with bioware/EA/Veilguard critical tags, but didn't include that maybe the fans themselves continue to bear some of the blame for this experience.
I don't think Bioware/EA are blameless as companies, or that Veilguard is a perfect game, but there's been a distinct trend where 'fans' claim to be critiquing things and are really only whining (and sometimes harassing creators) that they didn't get what they personally wanted. And if pressed about what they wanted, the examples they give aren't coherent narratives meant for published or produced media - if they were, those fans would already be working in those fields making art. Social media has made it very easy to 1) get access to and attention from creators, and 2) get validation (and very little pushback) from other fans for pithy remarks. In other words, it's easy to feel undeservedly "right" for shitposting.
how many times can one guy draw the same two losers tangled up with the same red string damn
Dragon Age: The Veilguard art book pages, under a cut due to spoilers:
This sequential series was another way to explore the story structure that was solidifying. It relates the story of Rook, who returns to her ship to find the Inquisitor waiting and expecting a report. Rook tells of the Necropolis mission being interrupted by Solas. Making uneasy alliances. Going undercover with the Qunari, rising in the ranks, and then betraying them to Tevinter. Finally heading to Weisshaupt, stopping the Wardens from making a huge mistake, and ultimately joining them and slaying an Archdemon.
The Dumat The ship idea was coalescing. The name Dumat was pulling ahead (named for the first Archdemon). We were on Frostbite, so we knew we could probably borrow some of that awesome ocean tech from Battlefield! One problem was that thematically, boats didn't quite line up with the spy theme. They're too easy to spot and attack. But you know what's not easy to spot? Submarines. The idea was completely insane... so we had to try it. This brought up the challenge of anachronism. Submarines don't fit in fantasy games. Obviously. But what if we found a way? The first attempts were to make a submersible boat. Something that looked mostly like a boat but could plausibly dive under the surface.
The more we researched and referenced submarine mechanics, the more nautical they became. Subs are incredibly sophisticated marvels of engineering, but the more we referenced them, the more we strained the believably of our fantasy world.
Top: Submarines provide the element of surprise. It was fun to explore how to exit and enter the ship for each mission. Bottom: Sneaking past Qunari dreadnought fleets and giving fishermen nightmares.
We thought it would be fascinating to have a mysterious prisoner in your brig. Do you let him out?
Dragon Sub To make a submarine that fit into our world, we tried to make it look more like a sea monster. We had already named it after the dragon Dumat, so it felt like a natural fit.
We tried to disguise the sub as a natural creature, making it look more like a dragon or a sea monster.
Dumat cutaway. We wanted the interior of the Dumat, built in Tevinter, to feel luxurious and mysterious.
Top: To help give a voice to the Dumat, we explored having a captain and an engineer. They had been shelved, along with their experimental vessel, for decades. We even explored them having an unrequited love story. Bottom: We designed a mystery engine that the engineer had to feed seemingly random objects into in order to keep it running. Ten dried lavender flowers, five quail's eggs, three brass belt buckels, etc... It would have served as a way to offer up some light fetch quests: "While you're out, could you pick up ten giant spider fangs?"
Underwater Mansion The direction that started to feel the most correct was the underwater mansion on the back of a creature. It was much more mysterious and appropriate to the fantasy genre. It still gave us the awesome underwater vistas, but we weren't limited to the claustrophobic restrictions inherent to submarines.
We explored having a giant golem or a colossal sea creature carry the Dumat mansion.
The mansion on the back of a giant... something that you would only catch small glimpses of. Is it a giant sea monster? A colossal construct?
Covert Commandos "Covert commandos" was our answer to the "fantasy spy" theme. Rather than slipping into the rogue mindset that that implies, it left room for warriors to smash things and mages to light things up with fireballs. We tried to imagine what the high adventure of covert commandos might look like. It was a lot of fun to explore different team-ups between classes and factions. How do they solve problems differently? Bottom left: Going undercover with a trading caravan to make a map. Bottom right: Escaping a dragon on griffon back.
Top: A heist becomes a rescue. Center left: Evading guards in the Undercity. Center right: Three brave warriors hold the gap while civilians escape. Bottom: Everyone is on edge when an Antivan Crow enters the room.
The palanquin heist.
Top: Switcheroo at the prisoner exchange. Bottom: The party holds a chokepoint.
Top: Complicated ecosystems. Center: Sneaking through the streets of Minrathous. Bottom: Scoundrels flee when the Crows come to town.
Top: Steal some uniforms and bluff your way past a guard. Bottom left: A high-speed aravel chase. Bottom right: The team using its skills to outwith some bandits.
Bottom left: Clearing a roadblock. Bottom right: Sabotage down at the docks.
Killing time until the monsters show up.
Top right: Discovering the griffon sanctuary. Left: Just five more seconds! Bottom right: End of the line.
Early NPCs The early stages of character design are exciting. Writers and artists will develop simple sketches or descriptions to start filling up the blank canvas. We start simple. If a character works as a thumbnail sketch, they'll work when blown up to full size. It's a great way to keep an eye on shape and color, to make sure they all stand out from one another (an important element on the battlefield). We explore NPCs throughout the duration of a project. They change constantly as we discover more about the project and have new problems to solve. Top left: An early idea for Cole to act as a compassionate voice for Solas. Bottom left: Some characters are strong right out of the gate and change very little, like Emmrich here. We won't know until the project nears completion. Bottom right: It's always fun to bring old characters into newer games. In this case, explored Sten from Origins as a dreadnought captain.
From where we left off in Inquisition and Trespasser, we knew Solas would be a central figure. We wanted to show Solas having cast off his hermit disguise. He was never flashy, but he was calculating and intentional, so we gave him the ancient elven god equivalent of a business suit. --- In the early stages it helps to explore simple expressions of each character. It forces us to exaggerate, focus on fewer details, and really emphasise what matters most. Eventually we can start getting more specific, but this is a valuable stage not to skip over.
Top: Early sketches of Ghilan'nain and her experiments emerging from the sea. Center: A dwarf and her construct friend. Bottom: In earlier drafts, Solas had a partner who could play bad cop to Solas's good cop.
Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain were the two remaining elven gods. From the beginning of the project we were excited about a double Blight. --- Bottom left: Ghilan'nain is the mother of the halla, goddess of monsters. Bottom right: Elgar'nan is the god of vengeance and the sun, fire and shadow. The eclipse motif made sense very early on.
An early version of the party meets up in a private booth at the Blue Blood club.
some other pages -
Some opening pages
Foreword
Google Books preview pages Part One
Google Books preview pages Part Two
Amazon preview pages
Book art credits:
BioWare art: Matt Rhodes, Ramil Sunga, Albert Urmanov, Christopher Scoles, Nick Thornborrow, Steve Klit
Volta art: Gui Guimaraes, Stéphanie Bouchard, Akim Kaliberda, Alejandro Olmedo, Alexey Zaryuta, Julien Carrasco, Maksim Marenkov, Marianne Martin, Mariia Istomina, Marion Kivits, Matti Marttinen, Mélanie Bourgeois, Pablo Hurtado De Mendoza, Rael Lyra, Rodrigo Ramos, Thomas Schaffer, Tiago Sousa, Tristan Kang, Vladimir Mokry, Yintion J, Joseph Meehan, Stefan Atanasov, Julien Carrasco
Additional art: Marc Holmes, Thomas Scholes
It is admittedly quite funny that Solas in Veilguard is significantly less complex and interesting than in Inquisition. And yet. Widely agreed to be the most complex and interesting thing in Veilguard.
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.