#anyway i love characterisation in this game and how it manages to deliver a cool rp experience. yeah

[kaltacore]

i know many people are afraid of being rude and roleplaying as someone besides people pleaser (which is not not-understandable tho. especially for the first time players) but i think bg3 is the game that tries to motivate you not to be agreeable and obedient all the time. usually in rpg games with approval systems there are one or two characters who will approve of you being an asshole mostly for the sake of it but that's it. also actively challenging character's beliefs in most cases will just gain you a whole lot of disapproval and no actual change. meanwhile in bg3 there are many characters who will approve of you losing it in some situations and disapprove if you act too gullible and let everyone use you.

also following someone else's orders and desires every time won't get you far. if you'll blindly support your companions' initial goals (and they're very insistent and defensive about it and questioning their ideas may also naturally result in disapproval) it won't automatically get you their best ending and in the most cases it is literally the opposite. shadowheart wants to become dark justiciar real bad but if you support her on that path she'll be claimed by the evil goddess she unconsciously resisted her whole life. astarion wants to get ascended but helping him do it won't drive away his fears and just will lock him in the same cycle his master was trapped in. lae'zel worships vlaakith and is really hesitant to give up her faith and everything she was taught no matter what she's witnessed and not challenging her beliefs will make her just another sacrifice for a tyrant. if you play durge and decide to accept their father (which is also actively encouraged by durge's sidekick and, well, the other present option is an inevitable death) they'll forever lose their freedom and will become their father's dreadful instrument with no will of its own. if you decide to give gortash the netherstones as a goody two shoes you are when he asks he'll fuck you over on principle. this game lacks a truly unique completely evil run for sure. but it does reward your character for questioning other people and standing up for themself and does punish them for being too lenient when they shouldn't be

#also this gave an idea for a totally disastrous goody two shoes playthrough which would be. absolutely disastrous and FUN because of it #the road to hell is paved with hood intentions or so they say #anyway. i think it's really encouraging in terms of roleplay. it's more fun when you play more evil-leaning character #and it doesn't automatically make the whole main cast hate them #and also if you want a good ending for you faves you have to actually listen to them but not only that #you have to analyze them! draw conclusions! decide whether they really need that thing or if they make themselves believe they want it! #that's really cool thing to do i think. knowing how easy it is to get approval in rpgs simply by being agreeable but now it has layers yk #anyway i love characterisation in this game and how it manages to deliver a cool rp experience. yeah #bg3

[elizabethrobertajones]

@destielonfire replied to your post “You've been around for a while in the SPN fandom, right? I was...”

i'm sorry about the chronic pain, I can understand how that doesn't leave much room for enthusiasm or writing or anything else..... I was wondering though, you say you got what you wanted from the characters, but is that also true about destiel? Or does that no longer matter to you in the sense that you'll just be happy to see it play out however the writers want? (not a wanky question, I am honestly curious)

Thanks :) And, yeah... Destiel too, but in a weird way where obviously I still want it to pay out MORE and BETTER and more easy to read as canon, but literally since I got invested I have been pretty much non-stop since season 9 convinced that I knew exactly what the last shot we'd ever see of those two together was:

- that was how it was gonna happen. Cas said he loved them, and then bam before Dean knew it, he's dead at his feet and that's a wrap, folks!

As you can see, with more canon to come and Cas returning along with it, I'm at a bit of a loss to process past my point of "welp that's going to happen one day" in my bitter grumpy "oh they'll make it canon alright" feeling here. I mean I'm not even THAT bitter about stuff in general on the show, but I sort of nurtured in my heart of hearts the grim acceptance this was my worst case but also 70-90% likely endgame scenario for making it canon, to keep my expectations sensible. And this model is not how Cas dies in general - this is the very specific "this is how canon happens" thought. If the show ended on this shot, we'd have had that to work off to yell forever about if it was canon or not, and maybe got a Korrasami-style explanation later but without the happy ending.

Breezing past the endgame before it was meant to happen is a bit confusing :P

And other stuff like the Sam and Dean development, or their personal growth - again, this season tidied things up in such a way the spoilers for next season about character development are like, "and then Sam carries on being chill and in charge" and I'm like, one, cool love it all aboard, two, who is this guy. Because the whole long painful Carver era grind through all the meta and spec was a grim hope that ONE DAY MAYBE the show would even get to MAKING its point instead of waffling around hinting while putting almost the opposite picture in the main text with only subtextual clues that it was all fucked up and meant to change. 

By the time it started getting to the point it was all going too fast - like, I should have braced myself to speculate beyond this point after Sam was like "it's called sublimation Dean" and Dean snarked about that's him alright. Like, seriously. Miscalculation on my part, and then we barrel into season 12 in full force and systematically work through entire checklists that have just been sitting around gathering dust on everyone. And even if we're not at the END of the checklist, it's like, Carver just wrote all the points on the checklist up for us and made us aware of everything that had to change. And even when little bits of character change came, they were still quite quiet, and not really addressed as solid changes that paid off, and then the end of season 11 was all crowded and messy trying to wipe the slate clean, and only with the last conversation with Amara and Chuck, and then the promise of Mary coming back, do we get an idea change is coming...

I mean I have been browsing old meta tags on and off this hiatus and we all made the required checklists for what we hoped Mary was going to do in the narrative, but something about Carver era just really wore me out like we could say all this needs to happen but would we just get more and more nonsense showing the problem without delivering the answer? And with no clue how it was supposed to look or could play out or, again, that anything could continue after it. Most spec was hedging bets on, well, we'll get some resolution with Mary but then they'll kill her off... and they're like hey we removed Mary from the board but she is SO not dead, she's kicking more ass than ever! Like... okay. Cool. Cool cool cool. What?

And no one's *fixed* and some of these things aren't exactly OVER, like, performing!Dean symbolically died and we had a whole rebirth followed by breaking down Mary's walls too thing, but I still expect Dean not to act magically cured, and he was wearing short shorts in 11x04 anyway so it's a fluid development that's been going on for ages, but tiny nods like the shorts that he might be feeling better and more comfortable were great but not playing a role in the narrative, while now it has BEEN the narrative and his entire conclusion to season 12 in his personal arc was this great coming together of his personal arc Carver set up and the new angle to attack his childhood trauma Mary brought to the table, and it's DEEP and actually getting to the heart of things and unpacking the characters and exploring how they feel and putting it all out there.

And I can't even explain Sam - just know that until this season I only had one thing I ever really cried about in this show, which was Bobby's death, and then somehow out of nowhere, Berens hit me so hard I SOBBED when Sam uncovered the Colt and looked at it in tears with his eyes, so clearly SOMETHING epic happened there in his characterisation and his own personal growth. (Sam's personal growth tends to hit me in hindsight about what it was all about... It's almost like I need to be 3 seasons clear to understand it properly >.>) And then 12x22 managed to completely beat me up on both Sam and Dean AND Mary's behalf and I cried a bunch more times, very confused about when the show changed to something I cried about the emotional stuff in... I cry very easily at OTHER things. I spent the last couple of days WEEPING about [static noises] in The Adventure Zone, and the Orphan Black finale, and I've got a low investment in OB, I just like watching it. I cried at its previous season finale as well. SPN just isn't a tear jerker for me, and it's not tuned that way in general? And this season the writing has changed to doing SOMETHING with the characters that puts it into the territory where they're wringing our investment in the characters in a GOOD way and I think it's to do with the changes and the sense of finally overcoming and growing and being free of the weights piled on them over the years. Even just the PROMISE that that might happen is shocking enough, really :P

Like long term 12x22 is probably going to lose some of its punch once we see where this development goes and HOPEFULLY we work our way to the real resolutions. But just in terms of emotional attrition from Carver era, it's just a massive RELIEF to have some things spoken out loud, and other things like the grenade launcher game they put in the subtext, to be acknowledged and played with in a way which really really WORKED to convey that they WANT to positively develop their characters and maybe it's a waiting game but they seem to want to actually DO it.

And I'm basically just in shock :P

And with the Destiel stuff, then, to go back to how it all makes me feel, I feel like there's maybe a very real possibility they're going to do some pretty amazing things with it, canonical ending or not, for a subtext gremlin like myself I can't even BEGIN to grapple what they might throw at us, because I can barely process what they already have given us, because it's almost completely unbelievable to me because I've lurked in fandom so long waiting for them to actually make a move? Practically, the meta I read at the end of season 9 still broadly applied at the start of season 12, but immediately and mercilessly got resolved or changed up or turned on its head and shaken all about, and I'm too tired to keep up :P

So I don't know, there's a large part of me that's now content to watch it play out, but mostly because I feel like the way it's pandered it's crossed a lot of lines with the stuff they have given us like mixtapes and an "i love you" and angel/human romance episodes and Dean being singled out to kneel at Cas's lifeless body... I mean 12x10's actual concept was like a ridiculous dream back when, reading meta about all these season 8 human/monster relationship episodes, and the interspecies romance in Bloodlines using 6x20's dialogue and so on. They explored it all obliquely, and some parallels like the one in the LARP episode or the Prometheus episode were pretty blatant Crypt Scene foreshadowing to the point people were speculating it before it happened in good detail, AND romantic AND interspecies romances at that. But an actual episode unpacking not just angels and humans and how they mix, but to tie it to Cas, and to tie Cas to Dean directly? If you dropped 12x10 in the middle of season 8, the meta writers would have literally exploded. No survivors :P

And that's the positive remains of the season 8 meta bubble I still read when I was there in season 9 and it was getting bitter, and then I weathered season 10 and with the plot accordion and the beginnings of putting Cas somewhere else to delay everything with Dean, getting back to it with 3 personal episodes and loads of other moments which explored how Cas REALLY felt and related to humanity and "humanity"? I mean... wow.

And there's a part of me desperately trying to keep everything in context, to remember this journey as it unfolded from right back in the days where it was all snide and borderline cruel gay jokes and now it's a narrative goliath... And even to remember how sparse and painful and scavenging for Destiel subtext scraps season 10 was or something... But that part of me that's trying to keep it all in context literally can't handle season 12's context because it defies all the previous ways you're supposed to handle it. It's too hot to hold onto and you have to drop it. Which I appear to have done, because in the sense of waiting and expectations and wondering wtf canon would look like or what the writers would dare to do... All the things like that, they've actually just ALREADY crossed all the lines my careful expectations were set to? Because I always tried to listen to the bitter, careful, don't get your hopes up side of things because it sounded much more healthy to take it all as a pleasant surprise... 

I don't know where it's all going and I can't take it as a promise of canon or even dare to raise and sort of hope that it's going to get more canon from here. But's going to get more INTERESTING from here, for sure :P And I feel like in season 13 I will be in business to write a LOT of meta. I just can't even begin to grapple with what they're going to throw at us before we see it...

#replies #destiel #season 13 speculation #ish #season 12 kicked my butt and it was Bobo's fault #12x22 #12x23 #riverboat gambling