#but the only time you will see me express an opinion on a bioware game on fucking tumblr again will be on my death bed so that everyone
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that post about the bioware mandated bestie but i can't rb it bc my hated bioware mandated bestie is a character most if not all of my mutuals love
#rena.txt#i wouldnt even say hated i'm just lukewarm. does nothing 2 me#but the only time you will see me express an opinion on a bioware game on fucking tumblr again will be on my death bed so that everyone#will be free to hate on me without me seeing it. peace and love on planet earth now and forever <3
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ME2 Overlord DLC, an autistic perspective
So, uh, this was a long time coming.
I must admit that I’ve never played the Overlord DLC until now, when I’ve gotten around to playing ME:LE, which included all DLCs-but I had heard about it both from casual players who commented certain moments, and other autistic ME fans who chimed in to give their thoughts. I’m autistic myself, and needless to say, I was very intrigued to see how Overlord dealt with autism, disability, and the horror inflicted upon the different. I will try and update this as I play the DLC, so I can put down my thoughts.
Obligatory disclaimer that this is just my own opinion and perspective, and I’m in no way, shape or form, a spokesperson for my whole community. I also want to make it very clear that this will not be a formal essay with citations and sources: this is a post on tumblr dot com written by a college student and that mainly draws from a) my experiences as an autistic person b) the stereotypes surrounding autism in media and c) the history of the treatment of autistic and neurodivergent people, including institutionalized torture.
CONTENT WARNING: mentions of ableism and torture inflicted upon disabled people. I will not include any graphic images. Also, Overlord DLC spoilers.
Overlord starts with the premise of a Cerberus research facility that had been researching experimental science going off-the-grid, which prompts Shepard/the player to go investigate. How shocking, the organization that also experimented on biotic children, rachni, husks and Thorian creepers is having problems with yet another of their questionable scientific projects. Who would have thought? (Clarifying that this is sarcasm).
Once you arrive at Aite, the planet where the base is set in, you meet Gavin Archer, the leader of Project Overlord, who vaguely explains you what happened, how everything went to hell, and how there's a rogue VI that has infiltrated the facilities' systems and now wants to take over the galaxy. Keep in mind that the VI situation is presented at first as the villain of the plot, which becomes relevant when you later learn what is behind it.
The first sections of the DLC aren't that bad. I really loved the gameplay, being able to use the Hammerhead for something other than picking minerals up, and LOVED the whole design of Prometheus station, which was like a crossover between Giger and Dead Space aaand now I want a full ME game in this style.
Then we get to Atlas station, and, in my opinion, that's where the trouble begins. The first log we encounter from Archer describes David's autism as a "handicap until now", evoking the stereotypes that autistic people are somehow impaired (because we don't behave like allistics do), and, at the same time, that we somehow have some sort of "superpower" thanks to our condition. What this log tells us is something I've unfortunately seen before: some people will demean us for being autistic until it's suddenly convenient for them. Autism is bad because we stim, can't make eye contact, or communicate verbally, and the only good thing from it is what society sees as "genius". We are not a burden just because we have different ways of expressing ourselves or needs that aren't often met by conventional society. We deserve to exist, even if we aren't geniuses or revolutionaries.
And that ties into my wider issues with David's characterization: he's another version of the only autistic characters we ever see in media, (mostly) white, cis men who aren't able to behave by neurotypical standards, and who are extremely good at memory, math, and numbers.
Is it the most harmful thing in regards to autism rep in media? No. But as someone who doesn’t fit most of those molds, and who knows many autistic people who also don’t, it’s frustrating. While probably unintentional on Bioware's part, it ends up repeating the same cliche and establishing one autistic experience as the universal one and erasing the rest that are across the spectrum. It's called that way for a reason, dammit.
You fight through the station, get into the weird virtual matrix VI-thingy, and finally learn what the hell happened. David is a mathematic savant and is able to learn how to communicate with geth; intrigued, Archer decides to take the project one step further and (forcibly) integrate his brother into a VI to control the geth. The result is horrifying in more than one way and looks like something straight out of Warhammer 40k, with a gratuitous dose of mechanical body horror. I won't put an image, but if you've played the DLC or google it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This is just a side note: while I'm not opposed to fictional depictions of violence, and ME is a universe with plenty of it, I can't help but think of the institutionalized torture autistic people are put through in real life under the name of therapy when I see what David went through. If you want an example, read about the Judge Rotenberg center.
Overlord's end has you deciding what to do with David: either rescue him from his brother and send him to Grissom Academy (where he makes a cameo in ME3) or allow him to stay with Archer (which leads to him continuing being part of the project and eventually, being euthanized by Gavin). Complaining about such a decision being available would be silly since this is also a game trilogy where you can commit genocide three times, but I still don't like how a) the agency of an adult autistic man is stripped away b) the narrative gives Gavin Archer room to cry a river about how he didn't mean for it to happen and oh poor him. Let me play you a song on the world's tiniest violin.
That's the point of the "essay" where you yell at me in the notes about how Gavin Archer is a character that you aren't meant to like, and with that, I agree. He's a POS who decided that experimenting on his brother would be a good idea, and one of the few ME characters I actually hate with a burning rage. And, as I said before, it would be hypocritical of me to complain about Archer doing and saying bad things in the game where you can befriend assassins and war criminals. But you, the player, Shepard, are the one who scorns Archer (as he should), and we never learn anything else about David or how he felt about the project other than he was in pain, or about the fact that, you know, his brother, who he trusted, tortured him in the name of science.
This is where my main issue lies: David has no agency in the entirety of the DLC or his characterization. His life and character arc are narrated through other characters, Archer and Shepard. Admittedly, when you actually meet David he really isn't in the position to make a speech, but we see him being able to communicate (in a neurotypical way) throughout flashbacks. One of, and probably the only, explicitly autistic characters in the history of the franchise is relegated to not being in charge of his own story and narrative. Again, this is not the first nor the last time this is done in media—autistic stories tend to be told both in and out of universe by allistic people, and we're constantly excluded from our own narratives, because we're infantilized and/or deemed as unreliable. When autism comes up in media it's to talk about how it affects those around us, but almost never about us. I'm not saying David needed to become a squadmate or romance interest, but getting to know and interact with him in a wider context that wasn't a full on torture scene, and getting to hear his story told by him would've been nice.
There's also the othering. Both the characters and narrative present David not as a human being, but as an other, with Archer explicitly calling him a human supercomputer. I'm a huge sci-fi fan and love my aliens and robots, but we're often seen as robotic, weird, or, well, alien. I would probably feel different if this had been written by an autistic person, and I'm not saying neurodivergence in non-human characters shouldn't be represented, but it's a nuanced topic and characterization with a lot of ways to execute it, and this wasn't one of them. The connection and similarities David might have with the geth only serve to hammer home what the narrative has been telling us this whole time: that autistic people are the others, and that because their brains are wired in a different way, they're akin to computers, not human beings. Hell, I even think that pulling a JKR (minus the bigotry) and saying that Mordin or Liara were autistic a decade after the game's release would have been better representation, even if that also has its fair share of issues. All of that combined with the fact that this is probably the only instance that we get an explicitly neurodivergent character in the trilogy—and it's a dehumanized caricature that relies on allistic conceptions and torture porn—just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
So, where do we go from here? Can we do something that is more productive than complaining about it on Tumblr? At least in my opinion, the harm is done. BW removing the Overlord DLC from ME:LE or the ME2 DLC or issuing a notes app apology via social media would just be performative and accomplish nothing. Overlord is one of many cases of bad autistic representation, and pretending like it never happened wouldn't be productive for anyone.
But Bioware isn't dead. They're currently working on new ME and DA titles, and personally, I think that this could be a great chance to put neurodivergent/autistic rep in their games and this time, do it well by hiring neurodivergent consultants or (better yet) writers. We're the ones who know the nuances and difficulties that our experiences carry, and even though the topic of good representation isn't black and white and has a lot of debate surrounding it, we should be able to tell our own stories and handle delicate topics in a way that doesn't feel outright careless or hateful.
As a final note, April is Autism Acceptance Month. If you’re interested on learning more about autism, autistic people, or helping our community, there are many resources out there, but I recommend starting with ASAN, an organization by and for autistic people based in the US. If you know of any local organizations based in your country that do good work and are led by autistic people, feel free to add them in the reblogs. The Twitter tags #Creatingwithautism and #CreatingwithASD are also good places to find artists and creators on the spectrum and support them.
I encourage any other autistic folks out there to add onto this post, or if disagreeing with something, tell me about it. This is a free social media platform and I can't control what people do, but I'll prioritize autistic voices in this conversation. I'm willing to answer any questions as long as they're in good faith.
And before anyone comes here asking: no, liking ME2/the Overlord DLC doesn't make you a bad person. But refusing to listen to marginalized groups in regards of their representation in mainstream media and belittling their concerns does.
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GETTING TO KNOW ME
i was tagged by @melodious-tear ♥
why did you choose your url?
i feel like that’s obvious to anyone who’s followed me for, like, two days. i know where my heart belongs. besides, the aesthetic of cql!qinghe fucks
any side-blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.
well, this. i also run @masseffectcaps although i haven’t posted in a few months; i probably will again once i get my hands on the legendary edition. i started it because original default female shepard didn’t get the respect she deserves from bioware especially. don’t get me started on this bc i will not shut up. i have a lot of feelings.
@celestecraft used to be popular on mineblr; i went on a lot of adventures while playing with a small group of friends and wanted to save them in some way + sharing a hobby is fun. in the past i also had a fairly well-known lgbtq+ blog and a terry pratchett-centric one but that was years ago and my energy to keep up with providing things for others (rather than just enjoying myself) waned.
how long have you been on tumblr?
t...twelve years by now... oh no
do you have a queue tag?
nah. i used to, on my personal, but i almost exclusively post things through the queue so it doesn’t feel like it matters.
why did you start your blog in the first place?
i was lured into this fandom because a good friend of mine played a character based on him in a d&d oneshot and i was immediately and helplessly charmed, saw this gifset a little while later and told her “this. this will make me watch your show” and, well.
it started consuming enough brain space, especially as i was reading the book, that it made sense to keep it contained rather than expose my original followers to this endlessly when they come for — actually i don’t know. pretentious aesthetic and me being gay over star trek women (well, janeway, mainly) and crying over mass effect?
why did you choose your icon/pfp?
that woman is wife city to me. it was nhs previously because... baby
why did you choose your header?
it matches my blog background on desktop. that’s it. it’s for the aesthetic.
what’s your post with the most notes?
on this blog it’s probably this one of me calling lwj a bitch (honorific). i believe this wangxian fic i wrote for vday is a close second. (a couple of my gifsets of nie mingjue looking beautiful are gaining though which is very pleasing to me)
i also have a few posts that have reached the thousands on my mass effect blog, but i don’t keep track of those anymore.
how many followers do you have?
five hundred... something. six hundred? who knows.
how many people do you follow?
a couple of hundred? many are lgbtq+ resource blogs that post very infrequently though, so my dash generally isn’t that cluttered
have you ever made a shitpost?
a couple! i’m not all that funny (perk of being my friend is that you’ll always be the funny one, it’s the main service i provide) but the bitch!lwj one and an outofcontextyaoi text post edit.
how often do you use tumblr each day?
ehh, depends. some days i’ll only check in at night and refresh the dash once in a while when doing other things, other days my brain requires constant input and i’ll open the app on my phone every hour. there is no average.
did you have a fight/argument with a blog once?
yeah, but not here. i pissed a lot of people off a few years ago when i expressed my opinion on sexist portrayals of women in video games in general and mass effect specifically. my opinion was sexism = bad and some people decided that i was wrong and it’s empowering to put career soldiers in styled hair and a full face of makeup for the sake of marketing, actually, while male characters get to have weathered faces and grey hair. it was a fun time. (it was not)
how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this post’?
my dashboard is carefully curated and i never see those posts. are they still common? because they suck. don’t guilt people into caring.
do you like tag games?
mostly, yeah! sometimes they require energy i simply don’t have but i also think they’re a nice way to interact without having a direct conversation
do you like ask games?
i’m a lot less fond of those, personally. the chain letter type in particular.
which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?
a lot of them are well known in the fandom actually! which makes me question why they follow me but i am always flattered
do you have a crush on a mutual?
oh absolutely @evakant since we decided we were willing to die for each other after one conversation. wenzhou levels of love happening here.
i’m gonna tag already-mentioned @evakant because reasons but also some people i see in my notes a lot but haven’t talked to — feel free to ignore but also let’s be friends ♥
@shippingsavesmylife @radishsizhui @ahatfullofwords @inappropriatewenning @whateverthemoonhasalwaysmeant
#tag games#your girl#celeste.txt#melodious-tear always thinks of me for these and it's so sweet ily#edit: forgot a readmore! sorry#long post
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Fanfiction tag game
Thanks for tagging me @dhwty-writes
Even tho, this will probably be pretty disappointing ...
How many works do you have on Ao3?
0. Zero. Nada. Nothing.
I enjoy reading on Ao3 A LOT. But i've never come around to actually publishing something there. I haven't published much of my writing in general.... The only ever fanfictions I've published are in german on the website fanfiction.de
So I'll be answering the following questions for that side instead.
What’s your total Ao3 word count?
66.588 of published stuff
... but there is probably another 500k of unpublished stuff somewhere in the dephs of my computer, notebooks and google docs :D (200k of them are partially @dhwty-writes ' fault)
what are your top 5 fics by kudos stars?
Well... thats hard because I have published barrely more then 5 fics xD. But they would be:
You don't need eyes to see (Again: GERMAN!) its a SwanQueen (Once upon a time) Fanfiction where Regina Mills goes blind after an accident with old magic and Emma Swan helps her navigate her new life. I write that thing since 2015. It was my second fanfiction, and I am not sure if I'll ever finisht it xD
The Handmaiden .... another SwanQueen one. Smut... its just a huge excuse for flirtatious smut
Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf ... more flirtatious SwanQueen Smut. I like that okay?
Lost and Abandoned ... SwanQueen Angst. Just Angst ... But I added a second chapter later ,that one could argue makes it Hurt/Comfort.
The Cerberus Agent ... I actually think its funny that that one is on this list. This is the first ever fanfiction I wrote, so it probably wasnt to shabby after all xD Its about Mass Effect (Miranda Lawson/FemShep) Tho I never finished it...
do you respond to comments, why or why not?
Oh Yes! To every single one! I am way to happy about any little form of feedback, to not respond! I love comments! And people who leave comments!
what’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?
Oooof.... I don't think, I can answer that. None of my fics really have endings. I mostly write One Shots, where the ending is basically the beginning of a bigger story. And my bigger fanfictions never got finished.... so I'd say the smutty ones have the happiest endings? I mean GET THE GIRL, GIRL!
what’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?
Ohhh, Definitly "Lost and Abandoned!" The whole premise of that Two Shot was angst!
do you write crossovers?
Yes, sometimes.
But none of them are published and several of them are Hogwarts AUs.
have you ever received hate on a fic?
Not from all the lovely internet peeps that read my stuff, but IRL I've gotten weird looks. No explicit hate tho, and I am thankful for that. Let's hope it stays that way <3
do you write smut? if so, what kind?
....... yes.......
I love flirtatious banter and power dynamics. So The literal dagger to the throught kind mostly (tho the dagger is often of verbal form tho) ... hmm besides that, it's mostly romantic, fluff and pretty vanilla smut.
have you ever co-written a fic before?
Yes. I mostly write together with another author. I only write One Shots alone. 95% of them aren't published tho xD
The biggest and arguably my favourite one tho is with @dhwty-writes . its a 200k unfinished monstrum. .... UNFINISHED!
You hear that @dhwty-writes ??? UNFINISHED!!!
what’s your all-time favourite ship?
oooooooffff... I probably should say SwanQueen, as I've read and written the most about it... but my own Characters and DnD ships are growing on me far more by now.... for the purpose of this game tho, let's stick to SwanQueen
what’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?
Definitly You don't need eyes to see. I hate leaving it in that constant unfinished state with publishing aroung 2 chapters a year... but I had no real plan for the story aside from some some scenes I've already written... and at this point, it's just a huge bundle of lose strings I can't even grasp properly. Also my writing style has changed so much over the course of this story, that I can't even bring myself to reread the early chapters.... I hate myself for letting it come to that....
what are your writing strengths?
Thats a mean question to ask... I don't think I have a particular strength. I like writing in metaphors and I've been told I am very good in describing scenes and the emotional states and thoughts of characters... So I guess, describing is a strength of me?
what are your writing weaknesses?
TIMESKIPS! DIALOG (besides flirtations) HAVING A F*CKING PLAN FOR A STORY! I almost exclusively write one shots alone, because I just can't think of a cohesive longer plot. I am in awe of every author who knows in the beginning how many chapters the story is probably gonna have and what roughly happens in every chapter. I SUCK AT THAT. I just start writing and stop when I think it's a nice cliffhanger. And the next chapter is picking up at that cliffhanger and ..... looking where the story carries me... that's the main reason why "You don't need eyes to see" is taking so long
what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
Hmm... I've never written in another language than german. So I don't really have a thought on that. But I have some characters who speak fantasy made up languages, and it's really fun to write sentences and expressions that the other characters or the co author dont know. Especially if you teach them in character this made up language. So.... Its a pain in the ass to read, if you don't know the language but a lot of fun worldbuilding and dialog/character development wise in my opinion.
what was the first fandom you wrote for?
The game triology "Mass Effect" by BioWare. To this day, it's my favourite game. But I've only ever written and published one fic for that fandom, and it's not even finished.
what’s your favourite fic you’ve written?
Hands down The Handmaiden . I am thinking a lot about translating it into english, because I like it so much... but the Fandom for it is pretty dead I think....
That was fun I think... Thanks for tagging me!
I tag everyone who feels like it, Since the only mutuals I have here, eihter tagged me or did the game already xD
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My final thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda (a 3 years late review)
So I spent the past week and a half playing a game I paid 13€ for, one that I promised myself I wouldn't touch but that in the end I gave a solid try to anyway, because I was willing to give Andromeda the benefit of the doubt. Because I'm aware that sometimes I'm a bitch, and that the Mass Effect trilogy had its own problems too, but I still regard it as one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
It wasn't as bad as I had expected it would be, but that doesn't make it good. Above all else, Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game that could have been interesting, had the creators actually cared to make something out of it outside of just “Dragon Age Inquisition in the Mass Effect universe”.
I wanted to write a more coherent post about what I didn’t like about it, aside from just shitting all over it like I’ve been feeling like doing since the canonical bury your gays in the game slapped me in the face. So here it is, an overlong post about a 3 years old game.
Before getting into the main elements that I disliked, I wanna preface this post by saying that I enjoyed parts of the game. The main characters, while not as well characterized as they could have been (no Bioware character ever is), grew on me the more I played the game, and by the end were the main reason why I kept playing. Unlike DA:I, the writers did a really good job building up the found family trope in this game, and while it turns corny at times, it’s very heartwarming. I think many of the planetary settings in Heleus were stunning to look at, to the point that I didn’t even mind all that much having to drive from point A to point B.
I didn’t hate the game, and I’m speaking from the point of view of someone who enjoyed it, but not enough to simply accept its many flaws.
The problems with the gameplay itself
There are three main things that I don’t think work well and are up in your face since the first seconds of the game: the game interface, the fight mechanics, and the open world aspect of the game.
◦ The first impact I had on Andromeda, right from the first 2/3 hours of playing it, was that it was very cluttered and very, very confusing. I had just finished playing ME3 and I had issues understanding how to move without having a proper map onscreen, how to read throught the thousand tutorials for the 100 new, useless elements they added to the game that are either reused from ME1 or taken directly from DA:I. The game didn’t need a crafting system, especially not one DIVIDED IN TWO DIFFERENT SECTIONS, it didn’t need an inventory system, and especially it didn't need to have the sheer amount of sidequest it had.
◦ The fight mechanics + leveling up/classes system is a hot mess. I understand they wanted to try something new, and in part they did make the fighting feel more fluid, but not being able to rely on teammates for necessary stuff like overloads/specific powers that you need during fights severely impaired the strategic element of the game. Now it’s just a third person shooter with teammates dying left and right because you have 0 control on how they fight, aside from putting them in one place or another.
The fact that you can only use 3 powers at the time is a consequence of the confusing leveling up system. Because you can have an endless amount of powers you can give your character, they needed to find a way to make them not too overpowered. The problem is…. You had more powers to use in-game in ME1. It doesn’t work so well.
When the fighting mechanics in ME3, a game that came out in 2012, feel way fluider and more enjoyable than the ones from the game that came out in 2017, something is very wrong.
◦ Open world games are a challenge, because too many developers don’t understand that turning a game into an open world doesn’t make it good, it just makes it bigger and slower. It was a problem with Dragon Age Inquisition, and it’s a problem here with Andromeda - with the only good aspect being that at least Andromeda gives you a decent car to explore the planets.
ME1 had some level of open world-ness, and there was a valid reason why ME2 and ME3 got rid of the concept: the maps you’re given are a big, cluttered mess of nothing. You have several thousands sidequests, many of which incredibly similar to each other, and nothing fucking else. Sometimes you will accidentally stumble upon something interesting, and then return to a 6 hours drive into the nothingness that keeps repeating over and over again.
It got to the point I almost stumbled upon the endgame because I got exhausted of running around doing errands, and I tried continuing the main plot, only to realize I was almost done with it. That was it.
Empty self-referencing
This is the term I used to describe my girlfriend why the way the game made call backs to the previous games bothered me so much. Call backs aren’t new to the concept of the game (the Mass Effect trilogy literally lived on characters returning from previous games, referencing things that had previously happened, etc.), but because this game wanted to be a separate thing from the ME trilogy, it couldn’t use this sort of material. And that’s completely fine! The game wanted to be its own thing, I was happy about it at first, because the trilogy was over and done for. If Mass Effect was indeed gonna continue, it needed a fresh start.
The problem is, it also needed to remind players that it’s a Mass Effect game, the game from which Commander Shepard came.
So, how to solve this matter? Well, instead of referencing stuff that actually happened in the trilogy, it solves the referencing aspect by putting a bunch of relatives of characters from the trilogy in the game. You get Conrad Verner’s sister, Nyreen Kandros’s cousin, a lost illegitimate son of Zaeed Massani, a brief cameo of Garrus Vakarian’s dad, a krogan on New Tuchanka being from clan Urdnot, and so on. And it was funny the first time or so, maybe even the second, but at some point it just turned awkward, and I started asking myself, “is this it? Is this all that’s left of the trilogy, just a bunch of big name characters to remind the player you belong from the same universe?”. The brief way they referenced back to Shepard was also very awkward and felt... out of place, with the rest of the game.
A couple call backs I really liked were:
Liara being acknowledged for her work as a Prothean researcher and being in contant with Ryder Senior, without much reference being done to her time in Shepard’s crew. It was good, seeing her from an outsider perspective.
The fact that Avitus Rix, being a turian ex-Spectre, knew Saren and was in fact his disciple.
Both these elements are things that make sense and tie the game back to the trilogy beyond just going “hey, this x character is the relative of this other x character, isn’t it crazy!”
The plot, and the problem with binary choices
It’s easy to make fun or critique the game struggling to find its own plot after something as big as the ME trilogy was. But Bioware isn’t an indie developer, it’s a huge fucking company, and they could have done better.
While I liked the design of the Remnants architecture and enemies, putting a plot point revolving around an ancient, long lost alien civilization who was much more technologically advanced, sounds a lot like a bad repeat of the Protheans.
I liked the Angara conceptually, but I didn’t like their design all that much and I often found it hysterically funny that angara are supposed to be a deeply emotional race, when the animators left them stuck with those mono expressive faces and unemotional eyes.
And on top of all of this, the kett are boring villains. The exaltation progress is really just a bad repeat of how Reaper indoctrination worked, and the way they talk reminds me of the big bad templars from the Dragon Age universe. It’s literally nothing new, and because of it, it’s boring.
When I was playing the endgame, all I kept thinking was “this is it? this is all they came up with? for real?”. I liked the twins aspect of the endgame, but aside from that, it didn’t feel satisfying.
And now comes the reason why it didn’t feel satisfying: the game got rid of the Paragon/Renegade system from the trilogy, and because of that, they also got rid of the possibility of additional problem-solving solutions during big choices.
In Andromeda, almost every major quest has a binary choice attached to it: choose this or that. Burn the facility or save all the angara but leave the facility standing. Save the krogans or Raeka. Pick Sloane or Reyes. Keep Sarissa as the Pathfinder or not. Etc.
in the trilogy, complete, important binary choices were rare (choosing Ashley or Kaidan is probably the biggest one) and the consequences had long lasting effects. Not all of them did (saving or killing the rachni in ME1 and rewriting or destroying the geth in ME2 didn’t have so many long term consequences in ME3, for example), but a great deal meant big changes in the following games.
The issues with these choices in Andromeda? None of them matter. Characters will get angry at you for going against their will in a single dialogue line, and then never mention it again. The opinion on the Nexus won’t change if you expose Spender, Addison’s connections to the Exiles, or Nexus people targeting the angara. None of your companions will betray you or leave you for going against their will during their loyalty missions.
A Mass Effect game with choices that don’t influence the final result of the game feels like a joke, and while I know in many ways the trilogy also had a problem on this matter on some parts, dead characters stayed dead and betraying a friend’s trust meant losing them in the near future
The unavoidable part where I mention the issue with LGBT rep in this game because I’m a nonbinary lesbian and I can’t detach that aspect of myself from how I consume media
Endless gays and trans folks out there have already written this sort of matter so as my last point of critique, I’ll make it quick. Bioware has a long story with homophobia and transphobia in its character writing - this without mentioning the huge problems with racism in the character writing, too. Many gay/bi women in Bioware games are written by the same homophobic straight cis man with a lesbo fetish, AKA Lukas Kristjanson, and that alone gives a really good feeling on why such issues exist.
The original Mass Effect trilogy had very little gay romance options, out of the amount of romance options: as of ME3, there are two main gay romance options for fShepard (Liara and Traynor, without counting the mini-romances that were put in the previous games for pure fetish fuel) and two for mShepard (Kaidan and Cortez, both only added in the last game).
Andromeda wasn’t... the big breath of fresh air in the representation department they tried to pass it as. There are more romance options, but for once, there add to add another m/m romance option later on because the only gay romance available were with minor NPCs, and there’s an issue with the amount of content gay romances get compared to main het romances.
There’s a single trans NPC, and it's a random person you meet who tells you her deadname and the reason she transitioned right away. Ugh.
And now we come to the bury your gays mission that made me almost uninstall the game: the mission to find the turian Pathfinder with the help of his partner, the previously mentioned Avitus Rix, who also happens to be the first gay male turian character in the game (the first gay female turian being Nyreen Kandros, who dies btw). You invest time to trace back to the turian arc, while listening to Avitus talk about how important the turian Pathfinder is to him, you realize pretty fast they’re lovers, and when you find out the turian arc, it’s all to discover that the Pathfinder is already dead. Not a choice in the game that could accidentally kill him, like with Raeka, or an active choice you make to keep him in his role, like Sarissa. He’s already dead, and you’re left with Avitus alone and mourning.
The game is from 2017. This sort of bullshit is unacceptable, and I will keep screaming it until Bioware manages to pretend like they care about their LGBT fans.
To end this mess of a post - Mass Effect: Andromeda lasted me a total of 50 hours of game, and in a way, I’m glad I got it out of my system. It was a delusion, but at least now I can cross it off my list and go back to playing other stuff. I understand that this is a game many ended up liking, and I’m sad I can’t say I’m among them, and that I couldn’t even fully enjoy the game at times. Also I promised myself I wouldn’t mention this but goddamn the facial animations of the game were so ugly.
DESPITE THIS, I really loved the characters, and I very much enjoyed Vetra’s romance, which was the main reason why I bought the game.
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Hello! I saw you've played dragon age inquisition and I'm at the part where I have to decide to keep cole a spirit or turn him human. I played years ago and kept him human but I want to do everything right in this run and I was wondering what you picked and if there's a good reason to keep him a spirit? I'll wait for your answer before I decide. Thanks!
Hey, thanks for asking for my opinion!
I think I'm in the minority when it comes to Cole, because I prefer to keep him a spirit. I've done playthroughs where I made him human, of course, but in the majority of my runs (and on my canon profile) I don't change him. I have a few reasons for doing this.
1. There's nothing inherently good about being human. There's nothing inherently bad either, but in Cole's case it feels like too much of a disservice. When he becomes human, the first thing he says is, "It hurts." For Cole, becoming a human is painful, and it's a pain I don't personally think he should be subjected to.
2. If Cole remains a spirit, he's happy. At no point throughout the game does he express a desire to change what he is, only who he is. He never asks to become human, and despite being a spirit his personality still evolves over time. He still learns right from wrong, and to stop mercy killing if you choose to take that route. He says spirits are incapable of learning, but clearly that's not true in his case. He never loses his uniqueness, no matter what you decide for him.
3. In my opinion there's only one con to Cole remaining a spirit, and that's that he forgets the original Cole. That scene hurts, but not as much as hearing Cole cry, "How will I put honey in Leliana's wine now?!" If you make him human, that is. In fact, when you check up on him after his personal mission, he tells you that "everything hurts", and he seems troubled over losing his powers. If he becomes more human, he loses a lot of his natural abilities.
4. I've heard people argue that his powers are negative and invasive, but they don't have to be. Like I said, you can teach him right from wrong, and in arguing that there's something wrong with his powers, you're indirectly arguing that there's something wrong with spirits. The fact of the matter is, when we first meet Cole he's 100% a spirit, and that's the Cole we all fall in love with. Why change him just because his way of helping others seems alien to us?
5. The whole scenario of him changing relied on his fear of being bound by Corypheus. Regardless of your choice, he's safe, but what really fascinates me is that even if you turn Cole human, as Solas points out, he can still be bound by blood magic. Humans are just as susceptible to binding as spirits, so really ... what's the point? If Varric hadn't overheard the conversation, the idea of Cole becoming human never would've been introduced.
6. If humanized, Cole admits he struggles with his emotions and wants to "hit people a lot". He doesn't just lose his pragmatism, he loses his purity, which is what spirits are-- pure creatures. The real Cole had a dark and depressing past. He didn't just die in the spire, his father also beat him, killed his mother, abused his sister, and then he was enslaved in the Circle until he became an apostate and got arrested. Spirit Cole found him and tried to give him a few moments of peace before he passed. With that in mind, I just feel like taking away these abilities could potentially deprive so many people of Cole's help. The world needs Cole-- spirit Cole-- and he's happy to help.
7. Cole fully admits it's harder for him to help people when he's human. So if he messes up, he can't start over. He never loses his desire to help others, which actually might make his life easier, but because he doesn't lose his compassion his life as a human will likely always be painful. I'm sure we all know what that feels like; caring for someone but not being able to help them. As a spirit, Cole can do both.
6. In the Trespasser DLC, if Cole becomes human he ends up in a relationship with the bard from Skyhold. It's not super important, but I just really hate it. To me, Cole is a teenager and has a very child-like nature. Imagining him in a romantic relationship is just ... ugh. Conversely, if he remains a spirit, Krem ends up with the bard instead, which in my opinion is a much better outcome. I really like Krem and I was much happier seeing him find love, especially since he's trans and I think that's the first time BioWare put a trans character in a loving relationship.
7. Considering how the game ends, if Cole becomes human ... you're essentially condemning him to death. If Solas' plans come to fruition, Cole will be in the line of fire, like everyone else. Potentially, he could die. If he remains a spirit, however, he returns to the Fade with a ton of insight, and vows to keep helping people. Spirits, I'm sure, would survive Solas' genocide, because it's only meant to destory the physical world and restore the old one. Cole would simply join that world after the veil is torn down.
8. If kept a spirit, Cole thanks you for not abandoning him like his first friends did. In the end, I think he just wants to be accepted for what he is, not changed into what others feel is acceptable.
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30 Day Mass Effect Challenge: Day 5
5. Favorite character?
Surprising (hopefully) not a soul: Garry Vakary himself
(Disclaimer: I’m going to be talking about him in the context of the first two games while disregarding the third. Also, while Femshep technically is my favorite character, I already made a post about her, so I’m making this section about Garrus.)
Strap in, folks, because this is going to be a long post.
When I first encountered Garrus, I immediately felt a connection to him since he seemed like one of the few people on the Citadel who actually gave a shit about stopping Saren. Despite being a C-Sec officer bound by red tape, he proved that he was a man of action by leaving all of the bureaucracy behind and getting some real work done with Shepard and the Normandy crew. Since turians and humans had a few remnants of tension between them as a result of the Relay 314 Incident/First Contact War, which was still somewhat recent, it was nice to see another turian, besides Nihlus, act civilly towards a human.
Garrus was so eager to step up and take action against Saren; of course I let him aboard the Normandy. His struggle and Shepard’s struggle with politics are very similar; they both don’t like being told what to do by clueless politicians/higher-ups who try to prevent them from solving problems. This comes into play when Garrus and Shepard begin conversing more and more on the Normandy. I’ve always felt that Garrus’s interactions were a bit more profound than those of any other crew member; they don’t just talk to each other, but exchange opinions and feedback and really try to understand each other. They eventually develop a sort of mentor-protégé relationship to the point where Shepard really has a deep effect on Garrus in terms of his way of viewing the world. I had Shepard lead Garrus down the Renegade path while enforcing a few Paragon ideas (such as being cautious of the thin moral line that any Spectre walks as someone with nearly unlimited power in Citadel space), and I still do to this day.
I’ve always found it funny that Garrus is always super respectful to Shepard despite being a bit of a jerk to pretty much everyone else. Seeing him thank the commander at the end of the game for letting him in on the action and teaching him some valuable lessons was heartwarming, too. It made me kind of sad to think that he would go back to C-Sec after the war with Saren and Soverign was over, especially since he seemed to be so miserable there, but it was nice to know that he would follow Shepard’s lead and train to be a Spectre later on.
Fast forward to Mass Effect 2, and I was so upset when The Illusive Man said that Garrus had disappeared a few months after the Normandy was destroyed. I kept wondering what had happened to him and if he would ever appear in the game again, but when I took a closer look at Archangel’s dossier and noticed the line “omni-tool expert and noted sniper” on it, I became very suspicious despite not wanting to get my hopes up.
Throughout Archangel’s recruitment mission, I kept worrying. Hearing the mercs talk about how Archangel had been cornered and put through hell for the past few days didn’t sit well with me. I think that was the one point at which I hoped that Archangel wasn’t Garrus, because I didn’t want to imagine Garrus going through all of that on his own. When I saw that Archangel had blue armor, I knew for sure it was him. Taking off his helmet and revealing his identity to Shepard made me so happy that I wasn’t at all bothered by how little I was surprised. I wasn’t entirely relieved, though, because Garrus was still in immediate danger. Seeing him so tired and damaged was rough; he was fairly different from the enthusiastic C-Sec officer that I had brought with me on every mission in the previous game. Even though he was exhausted and didn’t exactly have sufficient energy to physically display his emotion, you could tell just how happy he was to see Shepard alive and kicking. “Yeah I shot at you, Shepard. I wanted to get you moving so you could come get my ass out of here.”
When Shepard was forced to leave his side to close the shutters in the base’s lower level, I was in full panic mode. I didn’t trust Jacob or Miranda enough to leave them alone with him. Then when Garrus was nearly killed by the rocket that blew half of his face off, I literally had to pause the game and calm myself down because of how pissed I was. Of course I was distraught at the sight of his motionless body bleeding out on the ground, but I was also upset with the possibility that the game would give me a surprise reunion with my favorite character just to kill him off so quickly. I was, for the second time, overjoyed when I saw that he was alive a few moments later, but hearing him gasping for breath and choking on his own blood with Shepard, who is almost always composed and level-headed, freaking out while trying to help him was heart-wrenching.
Then, right after I see Shepard looking very nervous and upset as Jacob explains the extent of Garrus’s injuries to her back on the Normandy, the smug bastard himself walks out of surgery and just casually waltzes up to Shepard like, “It’s only a flesh wound, I’ve had worse” and I literally thanked BioWare out loud for not killing Garrus. Shepard’s look of absolute relief and joy when she saw that he was okay was very touching, as was the fact that Garrus expresses that he’s more worried about Shepard than himself even though he nearly died a few hours ago. Garrus was so eager to fight alongside Shepard again that he put himself right to work at the Main Battery, and that really demonstrated how much trust he had in Shepard and her motives though I wish there was an option to have Shepard tell Garrus to focus on relaxing and getting some rest. Poor guy just went through hell and already wants to bury himself in calibrations.
While Shepard and Garrus were catching up later on, Shepard was so gentle with Garrus while she asked him about his team and what he had been doing while she was gone, and I could see how broken he was by the death of his team and the betrayal of his former teammate. I felt bad for him. When he asked Shepard to help him find Sidonis a few hours of gameplay later, I knew it was because he wanted the moral support - he wanted Shepard to be there with him while he sought closure with Sidonis (regardless of how he gets it).
Seeing Shepard and Garrus so synchronized while they tracked down Harkin and obtained information about Sidonis was great. They seem more like partners than mentor and student, and that was exactly what the writers were going for.
When it came to allowing or preventing Sidonis’s death, I let Garrus shoot him, and I continue to do so during every playthrough. There are three main reasons for this, the first being that I felt that Shepard shouldn’t be involved in the situation as both a separate party and a non-turian. Turians have their own culture and deal with responsibility and leadership a bit differently than humans do; they pride themselves on taking ownership over their choices and putting the safety and interests of the whole before the individual. Sidonis broke both of these cardinal rules. Garrus, as both a turian and the leader of the group who Sidonis had betrayed, felt obligated to serve justice to Sidonis, another turian, and that is inherently something that Shepard cannot fully understand as a human. It wouldn’t feel right to let Shepard deny Garrus the right to deal with Sidonis in the way that he saw fit.
The second reason is that Sidonis was more than just a coward; he had the opportunity to warn Garrus of the trap set by the mercs for his squad, but he didn’t. Garrus says that he learned through some old contacts that Sidonis “booked transport off of Omega just before the attack” and disappeared. He didn’t even try to make things right with Garrus by confronting him afterwards and apologizing. This is why I’m not bothered by Garrus wanting to kill Sidonis. If I felt that Garrus was being too destructive or going too far, I would have had Shepard steer him back in the right direction. He kept himself in check well enough (like when he didn’t kill Harkin).
And finally, the third reason: If Shepard came back to the Normandy one day and found that everyone - Garrus, Joker, Mordin, Tali, etc - had been slowly and painfully killed by an enemy group because, say, Jacob had been captured and sold Shepard out (and didn’t even try to warn Shepard or stop the attack), you know damn well that most, if not all, players would bring the fury of hell onto him.
Now for the juicy part: Garrus’s romance. When I was innocently exploring Garrus’s dialogue options after his loyalty mission and stumbled across the “We could ease stress together” line, I lost my freaking mind. The game is going to let Shepard sleep with Garrus? Is this for real? I didn’t immediately realize that “easing tension” would turn into “making love and wordlessly declaring mutual feelings for each other”, so I was a little disappointed at first, but I was willing to take what I could get. Garrus was so flustered by Shepard’s proposition, to the point where he seems like he wasn’t expecting her to be interested in him at all, and seeing badass vigilante, merc leader, and hero of Omega turn into a shy softy around her was cute.
Through further dialogue, Garrus began to hint that he had feelings for Shepard, and ugh it was so endearing. He made subtle remarks about wanting more than just “blowing off steam” with her without making his feelings obvious, probably because he didn’t want to chase her away with his heart, and when I combined this with the fact that despite these feelings, which he has had for who knows how long now (maybe even the first game?), he isn’t the one to make the first move, I realized that Garrus was probably too afraid of approaching Shepard with any sort of interest that he had in her because he didn’t want to be rejected and/or feared ruining their relationship. That was the final straw for me: I was super attached to his character at this point. The little dork wanted to watch porn to learn how to properly satisfy a human woman and thought that playing shitty club music was a good idea. The nerd. The doofus. I love him.
I’m just going to admit it: the first time I saw his romance scene with Shepard right before the Omega 4 Relay, I went from laughing as he awkwardly played techno music and tried to woo Shep with his bad flirting skills to tearing up as he confessed to her that he wanted their time together to be special and that he wanted to do things right. Notice how this is different from something he said previously about how if their romantic rendezvous goes south due to species incompatibility, fighting the Collectors would be “a welcome distraction” and wouldn’t be a big deal. Oh, no. It would be a big deal. Garrus wants to give Shepard the best final moment of peace he can before they take on the Collector base, and when Shepard shut him up and they touched foreheads (which I suppose is like the turian equivalent of a kiss given that turians don’t have lips to kiss with) I just lost my mind. I cried and I’m not ashamed to say it. It takes a lot to make me cry, since I’m not easily moved, but seeing Garrus and Shepard so happy in such a tender moment was too much for me. My two favorite characters enjoying peace and joy that they deserve. Beautiful.
The suicide mission - I have all my upgrades, all loyalty missions complete, and I’m still freaking out about who is going to die and who is going to survive. I made the right choices in terms of who I assigned to what, but even with Garrus at Shepard’s side the whole time, I was again in full panic mode. I had like three separate heart attacks thinking that Garrus was about to be killed. I was literally shouting in horror as this happened:
Everything worked out in the end, though. The whole crew survived, the base was destroyed, and Shepard got to snuggle with Garrus in her cabin afterwards. I was very, very happy.
So yeah, Garrus having such a profound character and being not just a likable badass but also Shepard’s most loyal companion is why I love him so much. Evidently, this is also why he’s one of the most, if not the most, popular characters from Mass Effect. Archangel owns all of our asses.
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Quill’s Swill - The Worst Of 2019
Congratulations! You’ve made it through another year! You’ve faced many obstacles and overcome many adversaries to arrive here, at the dawn of a new decade. So as we prepare to leave the 2010s and make our way into the 2020s, lets take a look back at the challenges and hardships of 2019. And by challenges and hardships, I of course mean shitty fiction and media.
Yes, it’s time for yet another edition of Quill’s Swill, where we mark the absolute worst stories that the industry had to offer over the past year and proceed to tear them to shreds. Think of it as like voiding your bowels before the New Year.
As always remember that this is my personal, subjective opinion. If you happen to like any of the things on this list, that’s fine. More power to you. Go make your own list. Also bear in mind I haven’t seen everything 2019 has to offer due to various other commitments. So as much as I really, really want to, I can’t put Avengers Endgame on here. I know what happens. It sounds fucking terrible, but I haven’t seen the film, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to put it on the list, even though it would most definitely deserve it.
...
Seriously, read the synopsis of Endgame on Wikipedia some time. It’s like fanfic written by a nine year old. It’s truly shocking. And now it’s the highest grossing movie of all time? Give me strength.
All In A Row
Don’t you just hate it when you’re expected to parent your autistic child? Like actually show love and care and consideration to your offspring. Look at him, expecting you to treat him like a human being. Selfish bastard! If only there was a play that explored the horrors of having to be a decent person to your own flesh and blood and how objectively awful it is. If you’re one of those people, then the play All In A Row will be right up your street.
Premiering on the 14th February at Southwark Playhouse in London, All In A Row was a total shitshow to say the least. The playwright, Alex Oates, claimed to have ten years of experience working with autistic children, which you wouldn’t have believed if you saw the play as the autistic child at the centre of the play, Lawrence, seemed more like a wild animal than a person. In fact two of the main characters compare him to a dog. And if you thought this wasn’t dehumanising enough, Lawrence isn’t even a child. He’s a puppet. Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.
All In A Row seems to place all of the blame for the family’s predicament on the autistic child, who’s presented as barely functional, bordering on bestial. There’s no effort to really make an emotional connection with Lawrence (how can you? He’s a puppet!) as the play instead focuses on how this kid has effectively ruined this family’s life because of his autism and aggressive behaviour. Speaking as someone on the autism spectrum, I can say quite confidently that this play is fucking despicable. Badly written, badly conceived, insulting and downright mean spirited. I wouldn’t want Oates looking after my autistic children, that’s for damn sure.
Anthem
EA is back and this time they’re dragging the critical darling that is BioWare down with them.
Anthem was a desperate attempt to jump aboard the ‘live service’ bandwagon, trying to replicate the success of other video games like Overwatch, Destiny and Warframe. They failed spectacularly. The game itself had more bugs than A Bug’s Life, loot drops were often stingy and unrewarding, loading times were farcically long, and the story and worldbuilding was fucking pitiful. Oh yeah, and if you played it on PS4, there was a good chance it could permanently damage it. Thankfully I have a uni friend with an Xbox One and they allowed me to play the game on that. It was a crushing disappointment, especially coming fresh off the heels of Mass Effect Andromeda, which didn’t exactly set the world on fire back in 2017.
It didn’t help that EA’s reputation was in tatters thanks to the lootbox controversy of Star Wars Battlefront II and having to try and win back the trust of fans, but worse still reports began to service of what went on behind the scenes at BioWare during the game’s development. Apparently the game’s story and mechanics kept changing every other day as the creative directors and writers didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of game they wanted to make, and the developers were often forced to work obscenely long work hours in abusive crunch periods to get the game finished for launch. It got so bad that, according to an article on Kotaku, some members of the team had to leave for weeks or even months at a time to recover from ‘stress casualties.’
To think this was the same company that gave us Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Knights Of The Old Republic. Thank God that Obsidian Entertainment is there to pick up the slack on the RPG front because I think it’s safe to assume that BioWare won’t be around for much longer at this rate.
The Lion King (2019 remake)
Here we go. Yet another live action remake of a Disney classic. Excpet it’s not live action, is it? Well... it’s live action in the sense that Dinosaur was live action (remember that film? Don’t worry if you don’t. No one does). Real locations but CGI characters. Millions of dollars spent on cutting edge tech to create photo realistic animals... and the film ends up duller than a bowl of porridge that really likes trainspotting.
It’s not just the fact that The Lion King remake is yet another soulless cash grab from the House of Mouse, it’s also the fact that it’s done really badly that upsets me. The Lion King works as an animated film. Bright colourful images, over the top song and dance sequences and vibrant character designs. As a ‘live action’ film, it just looks awkward and stilted. None of the animals are very expressive, leaving it up to the poor voice actors to carry the film, and to cap it all off the CGI isn’t even all that convincing in my opinion. At no point did I look at Simba and go ‘oh yeah, he looks like a real lion.’ It’s so obviously fake. In fact it reminds me of those early 00s movies like Cats & Dogs or Stuart Little where you see the jaws of the talking animals moving up and down like some messed up ventriloquist act or something. And here’s me thinking cinema has evolved past this.
BBC’s The War Of The Worlds
Remember Peter Harness? That guy who wrote that Doctor Who episode about the moon being an egg? Yeah, he’s back and he’s doing an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds. And guess what! It’s fucking ghastly! :D
The three part BBC mini-series was without a doubt some of the worst telly I think I’ve ever seen. It’s staggering how clueless Harness is as a writer. For starters he managed to achieve the impossible and somehow made a Martian invasion of Earth boring. I didn’t even think it was possible, but somehow he pulled it off. Then he sucks all tension out of the story by revealing the ultimate fate of the Martians at the beginning of the second episode, so now any threat or danger has been chucked out of the window because we know that the main female protagonist Amy at least would survive. And then finally he takes a massive dump over the source material by having humanity weaponise typhoid to kill the red weed rather than just having the Martians die of the common cold like in the book. Because God forbid us Brits should be presented as anything other than heroic and dignified.
So what we’re left with is a poorly realised allegory with ineffectual horror tropes full of OTT progressive posturing in a pathetic attempt to make Harness and the BBC look more liberal than they actually are. There’s no effort to really explore the themes of imperialism and colonialism outside of casual lip service, and we barely get a glimpse of the dark side of humanity. Everyone is presented as flawed, but basically awesome or, in the case of Rafe Spall’s character, utterly gormless. Our TV license fees help fund this shit, you know?!
And if you think this was bad, just wait till New Year’s Day where we’ll get to see Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ butcher Dracula. Can we stop giving these beloved literary icons to these hacks please?
Glass
I liked Split. It wasn’t an amazing movie, but it was entertaining with some good ideas, a great performance from James McAvoy and was a true return to form for M Night Shyamalan. That being said, I wasn’t keen on the idea of it taking place in the same universe as Unbreakable. I feared it would be a step too far and we’d end up having something like... well, something like Glass.
On paper, Glass isn’t a bad idea. The idea of superpowers being a delusion is legitimately intriguing and could have been a great post-modern deconstruction of the superhero genre. Except Shyamalan never actually does anything with it. The first act drags on and on with absolutely nothing happening, none of the characters really grow or change over the course of the film, Bruce Willis in particular is basically only here for an extended cameo as his character does pretty much nothing for the majority of the film, and then the entire film is undermined by that stupid Shyamalan twist. Turns out superhumans are real and there’s a big cover up. Oh great! So not only does it render the entire film pointless, it also undoes what made Unbreakable and Split so good. They’re no longer people capable of extraordinary feats via rational means. They’re just superhuman. They can do anything. Sigh.
Shyamalan... maybe it’s time to give up the director’s chair, yeah?
Cats
Oh come on! Don’t act surprised! Did you honestly think I wouldn’t put Cats on this list?!
Cats, without a doubt, is the worst film of the decade and, yes, the CGI is terrible. Not only are there these sub-human cat mutants running around, we also have mice and cockroaches with child faces, James Corden coughing up furballs, Taylor Swift trying to give the furries in the audience boners, Idris Elba looking disturbingly underdressed and Rebel Wilson being... well... Rebel Wilson. It’s a disaster of a film. And really, should we even be surprised? We all knew this was going to suck. And no it’s not because of the CGI. I thought the CGI in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu was creepy as well, but at least it had a decent script and good performances to back it up. No the reason why Cats sucked is because... it’s Cats. It’s always been that bad. No amount of ‘advanced fur technology’ was going to change that. It was still going to be a confused, plotless mess with one dimensional characters and bad songs.
The only consolation I had was that I didn’t waste money buying a ticket. A friend of mine snuck me into the premiere and we watched it in the projector room. The plan was to make fun of it and have a laugh, but we didn’t even do that because honestly there’s nothing to really make fun. There’s only so many times you can take the piss out of the CGI and honestly the film was just boring more than anything else. It doesn’t even have the distinction of being so bad it’s good like Sharknado or Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. It’s just bad, period.
I just hope we don’t see something similar happen to Starlight Express. Just think. Anthropomorphic, singing trains on roller skates. Shudder.
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker
Finally we have yet another cynical cash grab from Disney.
I confess I didn’t exactly go into The Rise Of Skywalker with an open mind. I was never all that keen on a sequel trilogy in the first place, and neither The Force Awakens nor The Last Jedi ever convinced me otherwise. Admittedly they weren’t bad movies. Just derivative and painfully uninspired, and I was expecting more of the same for Episode IX. What I got instead was quite possibly the worst Star Wars film since Attack Of The Clones. Yes, it’s that bad.
This film is very poorly made, filled with plot contrivances and logic holes galore. I lost count of the number of times the protagonists got into a dangerous situation because of Rey constantly wandering off like a confused toddler lost in a shopping mall. Oh and we finally find out who her parents were and it was quite a twist, but only because it was really stupid. Of course we didn’t see it coming because nobody would have guessed it would be something that moronic. I feel JJ Abrams’ stupid ‘mystery box’ philosophy is to blame for this. It’s derailed countless franchises before such as Lost and Cloverfield, and now Abrams has fucked up Star Wars because he’s obsessed with mystery for the sake of mystery and Disney are so lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to plan an actual trilogy out properly beforehand. Instead they just wing it, making it up as they go along, which led to Rian Johnson ‘subverting our expectations’ and left Abrams desperately trying to pick up the pieces.
In fact a lot of The Rise Of Skywalker seemed designed specifically to appease people of both sides of the wide chasm The Last Jedi had created. The roles of characters of colour like Finn and Rose were significantly reduced, Poe and Finn don’t end up together because of homophobia, but we do see two women kiss in the background of one two second shot that could easily be cut out when they release the film in China, Kylo Ren gets his stupid redemption even though he hasn’t fucking earned it, Lando Calrissian shows up for no fucking reason, Rey is given ‘flaws’ relating to her parentage in order to combat those accusing her of being a Mary Sue, but they’re the boring kind of flaws that don’t have any real impact on her character, and that ghastly ship Reylo is made canon even though it makes no sodding sense in the context of this movie, let alone the whole trilogy. They even go to the trouble of baiting us with a FinnRey romance before pulling the rug out from under us. Then, just to add insult to injury, the film retroactively ends up making the entire original trilogy completely pointless. All because Disney wanted more dollars to put in their Scrooge McDuck money bin.
The Rise Of Skywalker, and indeed the entire sequel trilogy, should serve as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hype and nostalgia. The reason The Force Awakens was successful wasn’t because it was a good movie (because lets be brutally honest here, it really fucking wasn’t). It was because it gave gullible Star Wars fans warm fuzzies because it reminded them of A New Hope whilst tempting them with the vague promise that things might get more interesting later on. And when that didn’t materialise, quelle surprise, the fanbase didn’t take it very well. I would love to think that this will serve as an important lesson for the future when people go and see Disney movies, but who am I kidding? I guarantee at some point we’re going to get Episodes X, XI and XII and we’ll have to go through this sorry process all over again.
So there we have it. The worst of 2019. May they rot forever in Satan’s rectum or wherever it is stories go to die. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the other end of the spectrum. Yes it’s the Quill Seal Of Approval Awards! The best of the best! Who shall win? The suspense is killing me! Ooooh, I can’t wait! You’ll be there tomorrow, won’t you? Of course you will. How could you not?
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*writes up a half page ranting response*
*closes window*
No. I’m not going to get anywhere by doing that. But... GAH...
So, yeah, I’m gonna rant on my own instead of responding to a confession.
So, I’m not making value judgments on other people. I’m not telling them they can or can not like certain characters, certain stories, whatever. I’m not attempting to police people’s way of thinking. All I do with my various rants and ravings, which I try to tag appropriately, is express my views and opinions and at the least try to explain why it is that I am approaching things the way that I do.
So, my opinion: Dorian Pavus is a lousy, reductive character that brought nothing to the table that hadn’t been provided by no less than a dozen, and I’m underselling that point, characters in other media. To say nothing of my dislike of him on a personal level, finding him arrogant and obnoxious. And if this is the quality that BioWare approaches their gay characters, which, based on what happened with both Steve Cortez and Gil Brodie, seems like the case, I DON’T. want them to be writing more gay characters, because they SUCK at it.
My reasoning for this is based on the fact that all these characters have yet to be a character who the player seems expected to walk away from the game, if they must remember one fact about them, is the fact that they’re gay. It’s all that they’re there to be. The gay character. At most, you might be able to argue Steve, that he’s “the widower,” and not necessarily “the gay widower,” but still. What EXISTS about these characters beyond their sexuality? What do they provide, on a character, on a story level, that is not directly tied to their sexuality, to who they are banging and the fact that it happens to be another man?
Dorian? His entire personal quest revolves around his father not accepting him for being gay. Gil? Reduced to his straight best friend accessory and turkey baster. Steve? Exists to be in mourning for his husband, and possibly for Shepard to catch on the rebound. THIS is the caliber of BioWare’s writing for gay men.
I mean, take a look through my “another angry queer rant” tag. This is something I have LONG gone in on, because that’s their portrayal of gay characters. That’s the approach they take - make these characters have their character and characterization depend on them being gay. Write them in a way that makes it such a big deal that it’s the driving force of their portrayal in the game.
This is, I’ll be fair, something that I see as being born of generation gap - the writers at BioWare, the people who wrote these stories, came of age in a different era that queer people my age and younger. They grow up with the looming specter of the AIDS crisis. Being gay was something to hide, because it quickly led to a death sentence, either from the disease itself or because the straight people would decide to kill you before you had a chance to “infect” them. While the world today is still a massive work in progress on this front, it is still better than that.
So to a writer who lived through that, even while in the closet, when they do what I tend to think writers do and write to the child they were, the child in need of a role model, they are writing characters who are open and upfront about being gay. Who are making it a core part of their identity to reach back to that child and say “it’s okay.
BUT - there’s always a but - but, to MY generation, to the generations who are coming after that period, instead of coming across as trying to be revolutionary, of having gay characters who exist openly as gay... To these younger generations, it instead just comes off as reducing these characters to no more than their gayness, that ‘being gay’ is all the identity and story and existence they need. Because when you take away the time spent on highlighting their gayness, what story are you left with? What character are you left with? Does this character EXIST in the narrative as a person, or as a walking demand to be seen as a gay character?
And, y’know, to some, that demand is ignored anyway - witness the bi!Dorian mods. Witness the fact that there are mods that make Gil romanceable by Sis!Ryder - like, what are you getting out of that? I say this as someone who romances Gil, but... Really, WHAT do you get out of a mod like that? And the only answer I can come to on that question is that it is this group of straight women who are upset about ANY content they are locked out of on the basis of gender.
But that’s a separate issue for a separate rant. Just bringing it up because it points out that trying to use characters to demand that they are viewed as a gay person... It doesn’t have any effect on someone who is being homophobic. They will disregard that if they so choose. So using these characters as an anvil on the issues of gay people? Not exactly doing much. Meanwhile, as I said, to a new generation, this is reductive.
Like, I see a character like Dorian, I think about what would have happened if he’d been in the media for my teenage “struggling with my sexuality” self. And the answer I reach, the conclusion I come up to, is that, at most, he wouldn’t be a help. At worst, he’d be a dagger - THIS is the example he would have of what it is to be gay... And that’s not him. So does that mean he’s not actually gay? Well, he’s attracted to other guys, so he doesn’t think so. But then... who does he get to look up to? Who is his role model? Because it’s not Dorian.
That’s what gets to me with BioWare’s portrayal of gay men. In Dragon Age, gay men consist of Dorian, who I just went over, Wade and Herren (by way only of word of god...), who... That’s worse, in my opinion, considering the abuse they hurl at each other on the job, on top of being side characters we are meant to laugh at, and... That’s really about it. In Mass Effect, we have Steve Cortez and Gil Brodie, who, okay, in terms of personality might be better examples, but... Their portrayal in the game basically reduces them to a single element - “my dead husband” or “my best friend wants me to be her turkey baster” - and doesn’t explore them AS INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE, just as “messages” to be delivered.
That’s my representation as a gay person. Joke, reductive, or The Message™. That’s not a good track record.
So this leads me to advocate for the romances to be all bisexual. Because at least then, the characters are not defined by their sexuality. Because at least then, BioWare can’t restrict their Prince Charming style romance to women. Like, stop and consider for a moment. In the last seven BioWare games, not counting Anthem, the four Mass Effects and the three Dragon Ages, how many characters would you say really repeat a single, primary archetype? Like, if you were to reduce a character to a single trope on their TVTropes character bio, which would you pull out to describe a character to someone else so they got the core idea of who this character is? What it is like going through their character arc? Through their romance arc?
Because at least for me, “Knight in Shining Armor” could be applied to AT LEAST three characters, based on their portrayal in their respective games: Alistair, Cullen, and Cassandra. All three are straight romances. Two are from the same game. Two are the same gender.
I cannot think of a SINGLE gay - or bi - character who I would use that term with. This is a PROBLEM.
Because, again, as I’ve said repeatedly, BioWare TAPS. THE SAME. WELLS. with their same-sex options. Gay/bi men are sketchy, suspicious, someone on the outside of the dominant society of the places we are playing in. And I’m not saying that this is intentionally done on BioWare’s part, but it’s a pattern of behavior that they are perpetuating. The gay/bi options they offer are variations of the bad boy, and just about ONLY the bad boy - the exceptions are Kaidan and Jaal, who it took fan demand to get them as bi options, and then Cortez and Gil, who, as I’ve already said, don’t get enough characterization to qualify either way - sure, Gil’s probably not a bad boy in the traditional sense, particularly in comparison to Reyes, but... We come back to the issue of “what else IS there to him in the first place?”
BioWare’s portrayal of gay men is flawed at best. I don’t have FAITH in their ability to provide solid queer representation when they are giving us characters of a single set sexuality, because they fall back into these patterns that are painful, are reductive, are... just not reaching the audience that needs more to their representation.
And, as I’ve gone into elsewhere, the romances are ALWAYS playersexual, so that’s really no excuse either, because why would Alistair romance someone who sacrifices Isolde and Connor, his adoptive family? Would Morrigan REALLY come to love a goodie-two shoes who stops to pull kittens out of a tree? No, really, WHY is Liara devoting herself to a racist, xenophobic bastard? The romance options are playersexual by definition, so stop deluding yourself that it only comes into play when the romances are all bisexual.
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A few days ago, I was perusing the Dragon Age wiki (as one does) looking for info on Shale when I came across this archived thread from the now taken down Bioware forums. Dragon Age fans were posting their “random Dragon Age question(s)”, and for the first few pages of the thread, David Gaider would respond to some of them. Then I came across this question and answer:
[Image: David Gaider quotes a post by poster Alistairlover94:
“@Mr. Gaider: Was the Tome of Koslun based on the Qu'ran, the Qun on Islam, and Koslun on the prophet Muhammad?”
David Gaider responds:
“Not really, no. The Qun has nothing functionally in common with Islam, and the existence of a prophet or a book is hardly unique. The Qunari play a role in Thedas similar to Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe (combined with the Golden Horde, for good measure), which is where their Middle Eastern "flavor" comes from... but beyond that any similarities are unintentional.”]
Being a Middle Eastern Muslim person myself (specifically, I’m Palestinian diaspora currently living in Canada), this post caught my eye. And... not really in a positive way.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the Qunari connected to Arabs. That was back on some Reddit thread or another, where someone suggested that the Qunari are comparable to Arabs/the Moors/the Turks because they are a “foreign race” with a “strange religion” who’d once enforced that religion across a wide stretch of land before being forcibly pushed back.
My reaction at the time was “nah”. Maybe not a totally certain or comfortable “nah,” as I understood it’s possible that was what Bioware was going for, but more of a “nah, I don’t want to think about that, and I’m not gonna take that into consideration in my understanding of Thedas.” Fair enough, I thought, but having seen what Gaider said on the matter, I can’t really just write it off at my own leisure anymore.
I’m not the first person to talk about this. A quick search got me results like this in which people have expressed anger at this parallel before, as well as several threads questioning if the Qunari are meant to represent Muslims that make no reference to Gaider’s response in the thread I quoted at the start of this post. That said, though, I’d like to offer my own take on it here.
I think the first and most obvious thing to point out here is that Qunari are grey, horned giants. While their obvious coding as POC in relation to their designs and the fact they are non-human characters have been criticized before, I think it’s an important thing to mention here as well. Gaider clearly states that the Qunari possess a “Middle Eastern flavour”, i.e. they’re not meant to be a direct representation of Middle Eastern people but rather have cherry-picked parts of Middle Eastern history to use as an allegory. Regardless of their intentions, clearly many people have picked up on the connection, and when you’re a person of colour desperate for representation, the knowledge that something that’s loosely meant to represent you or “play a similar role” to you comes in the form of-- well, grey, horned giants, isn’t particularly fun knowledge to have.
Now let’s unpack what Gaider actually said.
First, he states that any similarities between the Qun as a philosophy and Islam are unintentional. I’m going to take him at his word for it; I don’t have any interest in trying to draw parallels between the Qun and Islam, except perhaps to mention that “Qunari” is only one letter and two rearrangements away from being the word “Quran,” which, yeah, real subtle. Reading too much into it? Maybe. I wasn’t originally going to bring it up here at all, but I find it kind of funny, so there it is anyway.
However, I do want to look at what the implications of that are. While there’s differing opinions on the actual subject of “Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe” (I think he’s referring to what’s popularly known as the “Islamic Golden Age”) that I’m not interested in getting into here (because while I do have some knowledge of the time period I think there are still things that I’m ignorant about due to only having heard the story from particular perspectives, and because during that time and in those regions Arabs/Arab Muslims were in the most positions of power, I don’t think it’s for me to try to assess the period with my limited knowledge), I think it’s safe to say that the actual religion of Islam was a major factor in it. And by that I mean Islam, specifically, for what it is. It played a particular role, and to look at it as simply a placeholder where any philosophy, no matter how disconnected, can be readily and thoughtlessly filled in is reductive of the religion itself. No, the Qun isn’t meant as an allegory for Islam, but it is meant to be an allegory of the role Islam played as being a central factor to the people who the Qunari are meant to be allegorical to, and I find the careless substitution here questionable. I get that this issue isn’t a unique one even within Dragon Age let alone outside of it, but it’s worth mentioning.
Now I think it’s worth it to look at the Qunari themselves and the role that they play in Thedas as it pertains to this allegory. One of the central tenets of the Qunari is that they are, as the Dragon Age wiki phrases it, “fanatical in [...] devotion, [and] prepared to wage war throughout their entire lives as part of their attempts to "enlighten" all other races in regards to their philosophy.” The Qun may have “nothing functionally in common with Islam” according to Gaider, but if the Qunari truly play a “similar role” to that of historical Arabs/Muslims, then we can’t overlook this element. (Particularly because this isn’t the first time Thedosian history has overlapped with Middle Eastern and Islamic history: the term “templar” references the Knights Templar, which was the name of the Catholic military order that fought the Crusades, of whom Middle Eastern Jewish and Muslim people were the primary victims, particularly in Jerusalem. Another example is in the name “Inquisition” itself, a reference to a group of Catholic institutions whose goal was to combat “heresy”. One of the most famous examples of the inquisiton was the Spanish Inquisition, that was formed around the decline of the Islamic Golden Age and specifically targeted Muslim and Jewish people. Several of the other inquisitions targeted Muslims as well).
The way the Islamic Golden Age has largely been depicted in the West involves the Orientalist idea of Muslims as barbarians who’d taken control of large regions with their “heretical” religion before their rightful defeat. The Qunari aren’t portrayed that much differently: they took control of sweeping regions of Thedas for a long period of time, forcibly converting masses of people to their philosophy, before being defeated by the Tevinter Imperium. The important difference here is that in real life, the details of the Islamic Golden Age were far more nuanced than that, and the labelling of Muslims as “barbaric” and Islam as “heretical” was a deliberate tactic to justify waging a war against them on the basis of their religion. In the Dragon Age universe, with respect to the Qunari, things are what they seem. While the notion of the Qunari being “barbaric” is specifically challenged, the Qunari really did convert people forcibly to their philosophy, and this is an undebated fact.
This is a problem because this view of Muslims and Middle Eastern people still affects us today. One of the major justifications that white supremacists use for their islamophobia is the conspiracy theory of “Islamization”-- that Muslims have a master plan to convert the entire world to Islam and conquer. For the Qunari, this is literally true-- they actually do plan to conquer and convert the entire world to the Qun. The islamophobic caricature of a Muslim screaming “infidel!” to anyone who isn’t Muslim is still very much relevant today-- and the idea that Qunari view anyone who doesn’t follow their way derogatorily is a fact. The characterization of the Qunari, as far as it is allegorical to Middle Eastern people and specifically Muslims, could be more accurately described as an allegory to islamophobic and racist portrayals of Middle Eastern and Muslim people.The existence of Qunari as a fictional entity does not challenge stereotypes, or offer a new perspective. It instead reinforces those harmful sentiments, the same ones that are echoed by those who commit hate crimes against us, and those who target us in politics and legislation.
Like any other marginalized group, Muslim and Middle Eastern people don’t get a lot of representation. The Dragon Age series is one of my all-time favourites, and being able to see myself reflected in the Dragon Age series would be thrilling. But “representation” like this does more harm than good. While it wasn’t the intention of the developers to represent Muslims or Middle Eastern people by the Qunari except to give them a Middle Eastern “flavour,” that “flavour” is deeply embedded with a history of racism and islamophobia. It hurts twice: first, because it’s reductive of Muslims and Middle Eastern people, turning our history into something that can be cherrypicked from at the writers’ leisure without making any respectful effort to actually represent a marginalized group, and second, because that cherrypicking is imbued with stereotypes that have been and still are used to hurt us.
I hope that these concerns are considered in future work done with the game. While I’m not sure how this problem with the Qunari could be specifically addressed in the future, I think one suggestion that could help would be to make a better effort to represent Middle Eastern people in other areas of the game. @dalishious pointed out that we still don’t know much about a lot of the human cultures, such as the people of the Anderfels, and a sincere effort to write more positive and nuanced representations of marginalized people that the series has previously snubbed with human characters could help even things out more and potentially even do a lot of good.
Note: Thank you so much to @dalishious for letting me ramble about this and for looking the post over for me before publishing it! I really appreciate it :)
#ramblings#Qunari#analysis#my writing#Bioware critical#islamophobia#racism#if there's anything I should've warned for feel free to lmk and I'll add a tag for it#Thank you for reading !!#long post#I probably should put a cut somewhere but I can't think of where & also I'm obnoxious
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DRAGON AGE LINKAGE.
Flemeth knows.
The fragment of Mythal within her spans all time. Even the future.
When you bring her amulet to Sundermount in DA:2 she gives you a bit of prophecy.
If you have Bethany (and maybe Carver too, but that is unknown to me) in your party she expresses regret and sympathy for your Champions loss. You might have thought this was about the death of the other twin. However along the story your Hawke has to deal with the loss of the surviving twin, as well as your mother, and perhaps the person you romance depending on situation.
But this is not the only thing she prophesied at Sundermount. She prophesied both 'Here Lies the Abyss', as well as the Breach.
All in very quick succession.
She speaks that the world fears change, but will inevitably fall into the abyss. To watch for that moment, and when it comes do not hesitate to leap. 'It is only when you fall, that you learn you can fly'. She could also speak of Hawkes fall from being Champion after the events of DA:2, and being on the run. But I think she's lumping several events into a single Prophecy.
You literally fall, into the fade. When you fall off the collapsing bridge.
I think Flemeth means you're supposed to leave Hawke in the Fade. Why? I can't really other think of a reason except that the answer was supposed to occur in DA:4, or is in Mike Laidlaws notes for future content. (that is if we ever get it, after so many members of Bioware have left ina very short timeframe, most of which worked on the Dragon Age games. I'm really convinced that EA is trying to force them to take the games in a route is was never meant to be taken. Much like they forced the Montreal team to make a rush job of ME:Andromeda. Meaning it will be a VERY long time until we see either another DA or ME title, if ever.)
She also alludes to Merrils Eluvian. She tells Merril to be careful, that 'no path is darker, than with your eyes shut'. Is Flemeth telling her complete the Eluvian or not here?
I personally think she wants Merril to fix the Eluvian. I'm still of the opinion that it's her that wakes up Solas from his Uthenera. Meaning Merril fixing the Eluvian would be canonical. Was Flemeth warning her about the darkspawn on the other side, or something else?
In the Dalish Warden origin you are a member of Merrils clan, and discover this Eluvian, at the loss of Tamlen. Who comes to you later in the beginning stages of becoming a darkspawn.
He says he sees something in the dark of the mirror. Is it darkspawn? Forgotten ones? Forbidden ones? Are the forgotten or forbidden the originators of the creation of broodmothers, thus creating the darkspawn?
In 'Paragon of her kind' you come across a dwarvette named Hespith. She is a member of house Branka that went with Paragon Branka on an expedition to find The Anvil of the Void. She was the captain of the expedition, as well as became Brankas lover, as Branka is married to Oghren, a member of your party, as well as Hespiths cousin. She says she is the member of the expedition that is 'alive', but I wouldn't call being a ghoul such that she is now alive. She is the only member of the family you see, but she speaks of another, Laryn. She also says she is heartbroken from being betrayed by her lover, Branka. And that she was forced to watch the last of the expedition be made into darkspawn, the women became Broodmothers, and the men presumably becoming Genlocks. (This begs the explanation for Genlock Emissaries, considering that dwarves are unable to use magic of any kind, but I digress.) Or being eaten.
You encounter the broodmother that is most likely Laryn, right after dialog from Hespith explaining how all the women were violated and forced to consume darkspawn bile and blight, and as they turned came back to consume more members of the expedition. Hespith says she watched as Laryn tore her own husband's face off and drank his blood (Before or after becoming a Genlock I wonder?), grew and turned gray, becoming a broodmother.
Now all of this meaning that there has to be Eluvians is the deep roads. Now this we know (spoiler) since in DA:I- Tresspasser we end up in a long forgotten part of the deep roads. In which there is elvhen influence. Seen in the absolutely gigantic statue we see of Mythal in the distance, as well as the very old statues of Mythal and Fen'Harel.
How many Eluvians are in the deep roads? Is Merrils Eluvian connected to one of these? I think so. I also think it is most likely linked to the place Solas slept through the ages in Uthenera. But perhaps Flemeth was warning her that when she goes through the Eluvian be prepared. For it is dark and many things lurk, and you will get turned around and lost if not careful. This explains why Solas only wakes a year before Inquisition, in the year 9:40 Dragon. Andres blows up the Chantry in Kirkwall in 9:37 Dragon. This allows time for Merril to be lost in the deep roads for three years before waking Solas, Fen'Harel.
I like this theory. While getting to know Solas you find that he only ever lies once. He says he missed court intrigue, if you ask him he stammers and says he has seen it in the fade. This is the only time he lies. At the end of Tresspaser he tells you he woke but a year before the Breach. This is truth. Meaning the theory that Solas was just a spirit wandering looking for a host, much like Mythal and Flemeth, until he came across the dying Zatharian. Keeper of the the elves you find in the Bracelian Forest. In this quest you must side with the werewolves or the clan. If side with the wolves he dies, if you side with the clan he lives but at the end of the game it is made clear that he disappeared. Many players have assumed that he was found by the spirit of Fen'Harel, his vallaslin removed, and became a vessel for the spirit. The argument is that both characters look alike and are bald, as well as the staff the Solas is seen with, no matter what staff you had equipped with him, is the same model as Zathrians from Origins. However the time lines just don't match up well enough for me.
Either could be true, but I think Merrils path makes mores sense, especially when you take what Flemeth says seriously into account.
But I personally think that every single tiny detail is connected.
I think that Sandal is an older version of what we see in Valta (your Shaper guide in the Descent who becomes MORE after the Titan zaps her) connected to another Titan. Specifically a Titan in Orlais, like... under Kal-Sharok? This would explain why he only says the word Enchantment. He nor his Titan cant possibly know Common, but he could pick up some from his time on the surface. As well as why he is so extremely good at enchanting, why Feddick found him in the deep roads, and why you find his equipment and journal in the Ruined Library in Tresspasser. His Titan wanted to explore, and sees through his lyrium blue eyes. This would also explain why Sandal also graces you with a prophecy of his own in DA:2, if you are lucky enough to catch it.
'One day the magic will come back. All of it. Everyone will be just like they were. The shadows will part, and the skies will open wide. When he rises, everyone will see.'
This is about one of three things, or all of them at the same time.
Solas, achieving what he says out to do in Tresspaser, and successfully tearing down the Veil.
Corypheus, taking over the world. The breach expanding and the fade merging with reality, like you see in 'In Hushed Whispers' if you side with the mages.
Or your Inquisitor, rising to power, failing to stop Solas from tearing down the Veil, and saying 'I fucking told you so' and everyone seeing as it was a bad idea that they demand the Inquisition disband or downsize when it's needed most.
Sandal also talks about the old lady with a scary laugh telling him things in his head. Flemeth perhaps? Or maybe the prophecy is Flemeth or his Titan speaking through him.
He is also badass. You find him near the end of both Origions and 2 in a room full of dead enemies, ready to sell you wares or enchant stuff for you.
Everything is connected.
Long but relevant post I think.
Dareth Shiral.
#dragon age inquisition#dragon age 2#dragon age#dragon age origins#dao#da2#da:i#da: inquisition#da: origins#da:2#da: 2#da:o#inquisitor#dragon age theory#dragon age thoughts#sandal feddic#Sandal#Flemeth#mythal#fen'harel#prophecy#trespasser#the descent#lyrium#titans#dwarf#dwarves#elvhen#elves#Hawke
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Time to stroke my ego and elevate my opinions to untouchable facts with the fourth annual Whatever Awards! Now, don’t let me being a veteran AAA game developer trick you into thinking this list has any merit. My pointless, subjective list carries the same weight as The Oscars, that is to say, none.
Now read my absolutely important, objective list of Best Games.
Intentionally Hardcore or Accidentally Impossible? - ELEX
One of my gaming guilty pleasures involves wonky sandbox adventures from Europe. Colorful worlds with unconventional RPG systems make for...unique game experiences. Which means unpredictability; something AAA games sorely lack.
This year’s prime example was ELEX, from the makers of Risen. Adding a dose of sci-fi seemed like an interesting twist on this already bizarre sub-genre, but it may (or may not) have gone horribly wrong. Because I genuinely can't tell if this game is monstrously difficult by design, or by accident.
The leveling system is heavily balanced towards quest completion, yet most quests involve traveling to areas swarming with tough monsters (who reward almost no experience for being killed). The combat is extremely stiff, so fighting them is an uphill battle to begin with, but presumably easier with better weapons. Yet you can't upgrade weapons (or even hold fancy weapons, like a blaster pistol) until you level up your character...which is almost impossible, since you finish so few quests. There's no good way to break in to this loop.
So my brief time with ELEX devolved into cautiously exploring the world and running away from all combat. And reloading often from the never ending stream of one-shot kills.
The Tale of Two Takes Award(s) - Nioh and The Surge
Both games offered a take on the Soulsborne formula this year, with varying degrees of success. Without naming names, one was fast, fun, and interesting, whereas the other was slow, awkward, and frustrating. I liked the settings of each, and the core systems, but ultimately one I finished and the other I dropped after getting lost for hours in the second level. And for me to get lost is an almost unheard of feat. Remember, I make virtual mazes for a living!
Phrases to Retire Award, part 1 - Love Letter
Every indie game on Steam is a love letter to some game from the past. Just once, I'd like to see a reply from one of the games that’s been called out.
Dear Face Xploders Xcelsior,
Thanks for the kind thoughts. I tried your demo, and it kinda sucked. Please, don't write me again.
Ciao, Castlevania.
P.S. Stop mentioning my name!
Too Much of a Good Thing Award - Prey
Prey is a smart, rewarding game with confident, emergent design. Except for the last four hours of backtracking and more backtracking through monsters that repopulate at mach speed. Because of this, there is little motivation to fight them, only to flee, leading to a marathon of speed-run style tactics to get from point A to B, and back again. That said, the ending IS great, and makes everything come together as a whole, but it could have arrived much sooner. AAA games are so afraid to cut any finished content, (hey, that cost time and money!), but sometimes its necessary.
Way Too Much of a Good Thing Award - Miitopia
Miitopia is a quirky, cute game with fairly standard JRPG design. And there's a good dose of humor in the unexpected interactions between Mii characters. Nothing close to the likes of Tomodachi Life, the insane, brilliant Mad-Lib generator, but still amusing.
This is a slow paced game, one that I burned through over the course of many nights, falling asleep in bed. But the thing is, this game is HUGE. It keeps going and going, world after world. Long after it has run out of new things to show you, there is just MORE. Even beating the game unlocks two worlds and an infinite side-quest system. As a kid, I never imagined that a game could be too long. Sorry, Little Me, but you were wrong!
Bad Habit Award - Hyperbole Headlines
Everything is either the Best Thing Ever or the Worst Thing Ever. This reaches much further than the game industry, but some (not all) of our news sites have jumped fully onto this trend, which is the Worst Thing Ever, by the way.
I Forgot This Came Out Award - For Honor
One of my only repeat awards, the "I Forgot This Came Out" Award is not meant to downplay the award's recipient, its meant to humbly remind us that hype and excitement mean nothing when it comes to standing the test of time. For Honor was a big E3 reveal for Ubisoft, a new IP set to redefine online combat. It had the world's attention. I tried the beta and it never clicked for me, but I know some of my co-workers adored it.
And then...it was gone. Like so many of the games we pour years of our lives into creating, they get their 15 seconds of fame, and nothing more. No end of the year praise, no all-time best lists. Just another momentary fragment of joy.
Best MMO - Destiny 2
No matter what Bungie claims, Destiny 2 is an MMO...and it's pretty fun this time! There's a deep-seated momentum to the gameplay. You never sit still as you dance through a progression of ever more colorful worlds. And strong art direction bleeds through everything. Compare that to my only memories of Destiny 1: sitting around, waiting for a FitBit to decode computers in dull, empty rooms.
Phrases To Retire Award, Part Two - Blowing Up
My phone is blowing up! This game is blowing up! These awards are blowing up! They got two whole retweets!!
Remasterpiece Award - Final Fantasy XII
Sometimes its sacrilege to mess with a masterpiece. Even the phrase "Who shot first?" evokes memories of defending Han's trigger finger. Yet, in videogames we buy remakes and remasters with the express hope that our masterpieces HAVE been messed with. They better have spruced up them graphics and tripled the FPS, re-recorded the voice-overs, let me fast travel, save anywhere, and given me a new epilogue for good measure.
Such is the case with Final Fantasy XII, a masterpiece to begin with, and much more so now with the addition of one clever feature: the fast-forward button. One click and the entire game runs at either 2x or 4x normal speed. I was certain using it would cheapen the experience, but to my surprise, it greatly enhanced it. By speeding up the tedious parts, players have more time to enjoy the tasty bits. It encourages deeper exploration of the world and its content.
One could argue, of course, that there should be no tedious parts, but I can think of few narrative-heavy games without some tedium built-in. Every second of the story can't be exciting, we need peaks and valleys. A sprinkle of tedium helps virtual worlds feel more lived-in and authentic. Pure games like Ikaruga can dispense with tedium because the story of Ikaruga is "shoot or die!"
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Shadow of the Colossus next (this) year. A ground-up remake of yet another masterpiece, but by a completely different creative team. Every line of code is new. If I told you I had the exact blueprint to replicate the Mona Lisa, I doubt you'd be excited to see my "remake."
Trend That Needs To Die - Loot Boxes
They've been lame since day one and everyone finally seems to agree. Companies, just let us directly buy the dumb consumer junk we want!
Game that Most Impressed my Parents Award - Horizon: Zero Dawn
My Dad is a classical landscape painter, so I like to show him vast game environments. While he was impressed by Assassin's Creed's Egypt, and Zelda's rolling fields, he was blown away by the sheer beauty of nature on display in Horizon. And my Mom also remarked that it was "very pretty." I made a brief attempt to explain robot dinosaurs to them, but ultimately concluded with, "look, its a videogame, ok?"
The Inverse Xenogears Award - Mass Effect Andromeda
Xenogears, if you'll recall, started strong and remained strong...until disk 2 where, frankly, the game kinda fell apart. Many games fall into this mold, most famously Mass Effect 3 which ended on a particularly underwhelming note.
So what happens when I game STARTS on a particularly underwhelming note, but gains momentum and finishes strong? Such is the case with ME:A. The game sets up a simple, awe inspiring premise: humanity goes to Andromeda. We've finally reached a new galaxy. Things beyond our imagination await here, just you wait!
Oh, never mind. Turns out its just the standard bipedal dudes-with-guns waiting for us, behind cover no less. Also, some animations were weird. Buzz killed. Understandably, most people bailed out around this point.
But, given about ten hours, the game opens up. For one, you start visiting proper alien-looking planets, and the scope of the story broadens vastly. Around the same time you've gotten enough abilities to zip around the battlefield, never needing to hide for cover again. This is where the game should have started.
By the end, the fate of Andromeda convincingly rests in your hands in a truly bombastic finale that hits on every level. And your character is a bona fide joy to control by this point. This is easily the strongest ending in Bioware's history, overcompensating for the ME3 ending fiasco. Shame that most will never see it, and the stage that it sets will never continue. Mass Effect is likely dead now.
What's the Fuss Award - Player Unknown's Battlegrounds
This game has been around for years, more or less, in various forms. So why do people suddenly care? Why this one? Nothing about it is particularly new. If anything, it seems like a slower, clumsier version of almost any other shooter that comes to mind. The Zeitgeist is weird.
Might have been game of the year, if I had more time to play it - Persona 5
Even though I've played ten hours already, I know I'm basically nowhere in this game. Which is more than I can say for Divinity 2, another supposed GOTY candidate that I've yet to even start. There were just too many good games this year. Who has the time to play them all, especially these 100+ hour behemoths?
Movie and music critics can easily keep up with new releases, but game reviewers are obligated to complete these massive games before rendering judgement. Most professional game outlets divide reviews across numerous individuals and even then these outlets only review a fraction of new releases. Is there a single soul on Earth that played EVERY Steam game released in 2017? Doubtful. Given this, is any "game of the year" pronouncement valid? At best, GOTY is more like "Best game I played this year, of the 5% of total releases that I actually played"
Phrases to Retire Award, Part 3 - Is a thing.
Apparently, Microsoft Windows 3.1 is still a thing. Listen, it might have been cute if it was said once, by one human, and then retired for a decade. But instead it's said by every human, every second, about every THING. How is this a thing?
The Long-Lost Everything Award - Xenoblade 2
This game reminds me of all the best bits of ye olde games of yore: A huge, sweeping story that keeps evolving and unfurling with none of the cut corners I associate with the PS3 era (where every game got really short, and every environment got reused 200 times). A huge, sweeping soundtrack with countless memorable songs and none of the generic movie-orchestration I associate with games made in the west. A huge, sweeping overworld that's intricately hand crafted to match the story (living on the shoulders of Titans is escapism at its best), with none of the generic cities/fields I associate with, well, most open world games.
Mostly, this felt like a great, overlooked space-opera Anime that we've all somehow rediscovered 15 years later. That said, the fan service also feels fifteen years out of date, and is the only questionable bit from ye olde games of yore.
“Hey, I Have a Fun Idea” Award - Super Mario Odyssey
The award is named after how the game was designed. Just a bunch of people sitting around saying, “hey, I have fun idea,” and then making that into a tight, micro-slice of gameplay bliss. This game is loaded with brief, memorable moments that are novel, and never overstay their welcome. As the last drop of fun has been reached with one activity, the game is already moving you along to the next...hundreds of times in a row. Now that's impressive.
Everyone's a Speedrunner Award - Ys VIII: The Lacrimosa of Dana
Most games try to mimic real-world physics when it comes to character movement. A character's jump, for instance, looks wrong if it doesn't match what we'd expect to see in reality. Speedrunners know how to exploit these pseudo-physics to great effect, and use this knowledge to "break the game" by moving and jumping in ways unintended by the game's developers. Usually this type of movement is difficult to perform, and requires hours of practice to master single-frame animation windows and pixel-perfect jump arcs.
But not in Ys VIII! Just mash on the jump and dodge buttons and you'll soon become a whirling dervish of energy, constantly increasing in speed. It requires no practice, and feels exhilarating. The music's tempo matches the speed, and nothing ever slows you down, making it clear that this freedom of movement was by design. Brilliant!
The Armchair Architect's Wet Dream Award - Gravity Rush 2
Gravity Rush 2 is a beautiful game. Maybe too beautiful, as I spent most of my time slowly walking the streets, taking in the colorful architecture. And while this world is obviously an impossible place, most of the buildings still seem like they could work. In particular, I liked that the bottom of every island was explorable as well. I guess there are literally no places to hide when your main character is a badass, flying-cat superwoman.
Game of the Year Award (or Best game I played this year, of the 1% of total releases that I actually played) - Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Hardly surprising given that Zelda has won this award from...well, everybody I think, but there is no denying this game is just sublime. A profound sense of freedom and old-school Adventure permeates every inch of this vast world. And the game is greatly unpredictable, thanks to all the emergent physics systems built-in to the core gameplay. No two encounters play the same because of it, keeping this behemoth utterly engaging from start to finish.
Art of the Year Award - Nier Automata
Videogames are an Artform, which we all (finally) know by now, but of course they're only one of many Artforms that fight for our hearts and minds: Movies, music, literature, painting, sculpture, and sandwiches made at Subway (hey, they're made by "sandwich artists," right?). And with this in mind, I offer up my first ever "Art of the Year Award" to the best damn Art I've seen in many years: Nier Automata.
It's hard to explain why this game packs so much of a punch, especially given that, at first glance, it seems like an easily dismissable fan service game. Do not be fooled! What starts as a standard sci-fi premise, becomes more and more involved both in terms of plot and philosophy. This buildup leads you exclusively in one direction, thematically. This theme is remarkably consistent, from the music to the side quests, even to the enemies you encounter. That is, until the credits of ending five roll (there are 26 endings, but you'll only need to see five to fully understand what I mean). Then everything gets flipped, so to speak, in what is EASILY the best ending in video game history. This turnabout is not only well earned, but it makes every second preceding it feel more important and absolutely necessary. In terms of vision, this is a Complete Thought, delivered in video game format.
Most importantly, Nier showed me that "art games" don't have to be boring. It's so fun to play! With my game, ULTRAWORLD EXODUS, I kept many exciting elements of movement out because I was worried players wouldn't pay attention to the message, which was the game's reason to exist. But instead, they paid attention to the lack of movement options, and missed the message anyway because they were too frustrated. Nobody wants a symposium, they want to smash giant robots. And hey, if someone is talking that philosophy stuff in the background, that's cool I guess, as long as I can keep smashing. This one will stay with me for years.
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And that’s all; what an embarrassment of riches this year was! Feel free to disagree with me, because honestly, that’s the point. Your opinions will always hold the most weight, far more than mine, which suck. So, yeah, whatever :P
#video games#criticism#art criticism#art critique#critique#videogames#videogame#video game#Video Game Criticism#gamedev#game developer#game development#indie game#indie dev#nier automata#legend of zelda#art#fine art#game of the year#goty#goty2017#nintendo#super mario#xenoblade#persona#ys#review#game review
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The content you make has power.
Tumblr is not your home—it is a public space, where a lot of people come to share work. It is more like a park or a public square, an art gallery or a library. Act accordingly. People are watching. If that’s no good for you, there are other platforms (ie Discord) where you can make and share content in an environment where the audience is curated.
White people, it is not the job of POC to comb through your content and tell you what you are doing wrong. I say this as a white person. I see a lot of posts saying Tumblr is the space you go to escape from the world, and I get that—it is that for me, too. The world is really ugly and frightening right now. But it is also that for BIPOC, and (speaking from the US) it was ugly and scary loooong before 2020. Again, this is a public space. And when the content that gets boosted in the tags is harmful, Tumblr can’t be that safe space for them. I am 99.9% certain you are not doing this on purpose or with bad intentions. But when you make content that exposes your subconscious biases (we all have them, and need to constantly be checking ourselves and unlearning them; I am just as guilty of this as anyone) and brings racism into fandom space, that fandom can no longer be the escape for BIPOC that you say it is.
The content you make has power! Art has power! Isn’t that incredible? Isn’t that why we do it? To share our stories, to share a part of ourselves, to make connections with others and inspire each other and uplift each other. But that power works both ways. Your content can also harm people—not only by hurting the people whose lived experiences the Bioware writers have cherry-picked to create their ‘grey morality’ BS, but by perpetuating and reinforcing the harmful stereotypes and prejudices that exist in the real world. Yes, the characters are fictional. The people on the other side of the computer screen are not.
Which is also to say, OF COURSE, the same person can be responsible for content that is wonderful and heartwarming, AND content that perpetuates harmful stereotypes. The former does not excuse the latter.
I am of the opinion that everyone can learn from their mistakes, and that no one should be chased out of fandom for them. But I think we all bear a responsibility to commit to do better, and I don’t see a whole lot of that beyond people asking the BIPOC in the fandom to do the work for them.
I get it. It’s not easy work. It’s hard, and it’s painful. I’ve done ignorant shit in the past that I am so ashamed of; I still have to catch myself all the time. But that’s the point: we have to be better at catching ourselves, not just to create better fandom content, but to be better people—because, again, it works both ways. Fandom does not exist in a vacuum.
I see certain meta blogs on here regularly attacked and demonized but I cannot stress how much these users have made me a better person IRL with their criticisms. I am thankful all the time that they persevere through all the BS they receive. Their criticisms of Dragon Age (I game I still absolutely love) have affected me IRL. The content you make has power.
If those blogs aren’t going to work for you, that’s fine too. The best way I have found (personally) to educate myself is to make a deliberate effort to read more BIPOC authors. Listen to their stories. It’s not a magic fix-all, but it might help you calibrate that voice in your head that should chime in and say, ‘Is this content I should think twice about before putting out in the world?’
I’ve been thinking about this tweet a lot lately. I know the way we create fandom content can be serial in nature, so, y’know, you may be 80,000 into your story (or in my case, when I hit my hiatus, 230k lol) before you realize you’re steering that ship in a direction that maybe you shouldn’t go. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still course-correct.
If anyone is interested, here are some of the books I’ve read lately that I can recommend. I’d welcome any additions to this post with more recs.
Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir, by Ernestine Hayes
Using the story of Raven and the Box of Daylight (and relating it to Sun Tzu's equally timeless Art of War) to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.
The City We Became by N.K. Jeminsin
Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in this dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore.
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the Northreturns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan.
Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina
Zuleikha, the 'pitiful hen', is living in the home of her brutal husband and despotic mother-in-law in a small Tatar village. When her husband is executed by communist soldiers for hiding grain, she is arrested and sent into exile in Siberia.
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Virmire versus Odessen
Why Virmire Works
by the point in time of the Virmire mission in ME1, Ash and Kaidan have been with Shepherd for almost the entire game - Kaidan starts on your crew, and you pick Ash up during your first mission. They are fellow soldiers - they are possibly friends. Yall have been through hell together.
They are both soldiers - iirc Kaidan outranks Ash, but they are both damn good at their jobs. They are both incredibly brave, capable people. They are both allowed to die as incredibly brave, capable people.
There is a high probability that there is some level of emotional investment both on the part of Shepherd and the player. The Bioware formula was set by this point - talk to your party members after each mission to unlock more backstory. Be nice to them and you might get to smooch. As potential love interests, there is a high probability of further emotional investment from both Shepherd and the player (especially since Bioware seem incapable of grasping that people might talk to each other without wanting to bang)
Even if there is not a positive relationship/association, there is still something by virtue of the fact that it’s a small crew and ME1 actually has interactions within that crew. Kaidan’s overeagerness to investigate the Beacon, Ash’s potential clash with Wrex on the beach. The player has some level of opinion on and emotional investment in these characters.
The player is allowed to react, not just in ME1, but all the way down the line. That decision sticks with you. Other people react, too - again, all the way down the line. Their name is one of the first, if not the first, one ME3′s memorial wall. A constant reminder that carries emotional weight, without going overboard.
Why the End TImes choice does not work
There is a 7/8 chance that any given Outlander will not, on their recruitment, know Vette or Torian from a hole in the ground. The emotional attachments are entirely meta-textual, requiring player familiarity with and investment in the characters, but unless the Outlander is a romanced partner of a returning NPC, there will be no reinforcement of this attachment by the game/the interactions of Vette/Torian with the Outlander.
There is little to no interaction with recruited former comps outside of their recruitment missions - not so much as shitty Alliance-alert style sidequests. This means that new Outlanders (and players) meeting them have no chance to build a relationship with the NPC, and returning ones do not have that relationship acknowledged and/or reinforced.
Only romanced NPCs have any sort of recognition of previous relationships (again, only in their recruitment missions) - an SW who was bffs with Vette gets a greeting barely warmer than those who abused her, and... well, I’ve not run any BHs through kotfetet, but experience tells me that it’s unlikely Torian is treated much better.
Torian and Vette are not treated by the narrative itself as equals. All the way through kotfetet, the narrative pushes Torian as a hardened Mando soldier oorah, and Vette as a delicate little girl who needs protecting. Even the dialogue leading up to The Choice rubs this in, painting Torian as someone who can defend himself but Vette as someone who needs a hero to swoop in and save the day. Not only is this incredibly sexist, it also pushes the player and player character both to save the damsel in distress, and chides them for not doing so if they opt instead to protect Torian.
The post-choice narrative does not recognise in the slightest any relationship that the Outlander may have had with either the deceased or the survivor - there is nothing in the cutscenes where the PC is allowed to express grief (or relief), and the mails that the Outlander recieves are a) no substitute for voice acting, get thy shit together bwa and b) extremely generic (again, see an SW who was bffs with Vette recieve a mail saying that Vette doesn’t understand why they saved her - bwuh?) (or, as defira noted, that a romanced BH who loses their husband gets only a generic letter from Shae - salt in the wound, to say the least!)
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no it's the whole game grumps group. they are transmisogynistic have talked about raping a little girl and have been anti asian and racist towards black people. they produced the game did voices and are getting paid. the people who made it are friends with them. but you love to exonerate people of bigotry that doesn't affect you so it's not surprising you'd pull the idea that buying their game is the same as buying one from bioware
I literally know next to nothing about these people besides what I’ve finally got to read just this morning. Late last night I received messages from people saying they are good and bad, without any explanation as to why one way or the other, and while I definitely am going to take those saying they’re bad’s word for it until getting to look into it myself, because that’s just my default, I will still hold some reservationsbecause I have seen false accusations before on this website and all it does is subtract from true things. The fact is when people say they’re bad, phobic and racist, I assumed bad as in making some shitty decisions, a-la the BioWare comparison.People are suggesting I watch their videos to see for myself, but I can’t, because as I said just yesterday night, I have a data hub for internet, and I’m not about to waste my data or make a trip to the library just to watch a group of racist people.It has not been until just checking this morning that I’ve received two messages off anon, from people I know I can trust, with a reliable source of info on the shit they’ve done, far beyond what I imagined. And things about the game that I’m now hearing from actual mlm who most definitely have the right to critique it, and know what they’re talking about. But for me to talk about it, would be like me coming in and talking about the pros and cons of a baseball team, when I know nothing about baseball, have never been to a baseball game, and haven’t even had the time to look into baseball.
I’m just really not sure how I have managed to fall into a discussion for a game I have not played, will not be playing in the foreseeable future but only expressed the question of doing so at some point, have not seen a single video of, have extremely little knowledge of, and am expected to have a fully formed opinion on. In fact, I am not a gay/bi man, so I really don’t think it’s even in my place to make comments along those lines about the game, even if I did play it. But I will look into it so hopefully not to repeat this mess.
I do value your information/feedback, so thank you for that. Please don’t think I’m angry at you for sharing this because on the contrary, I appreciate you going out of your way to do so. I’m sorry for my confusion, ill-worded messages, distrust of people and looking at it now, a bit of hypocriticalness in there, too.
In the future, I think it’s best I try not to get overwhelmed by many fast incoming messages, and take the time to look into what people are saying before responding.
( For those who missed all this and are confused, here is everything:(x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) )
PS: While I’m not asking you to have to talk about this, I am interested in where I can improve on exonerating bigotry, as I admit I was sidelined from that and clearly need to put some special attention into my awareness. If anyone is comfortable/willing to talk about this/maybe give some more thoughts/concerns, please feel free to pm me or send an ask.
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What is or isn’t a ‘Microtransaction’
Full disclosure, yes this is 100% in response to Gearbox CEO, Randy Pitchford’s tirade against Game Informer for their article on Borderlands 3 having microtransactions.
If you google the word “Microtransaction”, that is the definition you will see come up first-hand: “A very small financial transaction conducted online.” Now, it’s reasonable to say that this is the technical definition of what a microtransaction is. It is what, at the end of the day, is the definition of a microtransaction.
I know some people might take issue with using Urban Dictionary as a source of information, but since it is essentially crowd-sourced information and with most every day people not being in control of how updated our dictionaries gets, it’s as close to a daily-updated lexicon that we have; it’s essentially a dictionary for modern words, which the word microtransaction sort of is (Google marks it’s first appearance in 1961, however it is only after 1985 that it began to increase dramatically in usage, reaching it’s peak in 2003, and by ‘peak’ I mean 0.0000000814% of people used the word).
If you go on Urban Dictionary and look up microtransaction, you get these definitions:
“The cancer of modern gaming.”
“A pay-to-win or pay-to-play method that game companies use to make the consumer’s wallets burn.”
“Pay-to-win in gaming.”
The central themes throughout these three definitions are that microtransactions are “pay-to-win”, an aspect that is not included in the technical definition of what microtransactions are, and the general reaction to them is clearly a negative one.
It’s no surprise that the inherent reaction to microtransactions is a negative one because, and I fear that it’s almost not hyperbole for me to say this, we’ve been trained to view microtransactions as a negative. They have brought nothing good to the video games industry.
There’s the nefarious lootbox pseudo-gambling mechanics, sometimes including gameplay-enhancing benefits, sometimes including only cosmetic items but all with the same randomized concept of not knowing what you’re going to get on each attempt.
Or the in-game currency that comes in packages deliberately designed to make you have to pay for the more expensive packages in order to get enough of it to buy the items that you want, of which may include items that are only obtainable via purchase.
Or the direct-purchase items with outrageous price tags for what you’re getting in return, like for example, the red-dot sight in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 that cost a whole $1, which in itself is designed to look like not that much money but when you consider what you’re getting in return it’s outrageously overpriced.
And even outside of the games themselves, they’ve done absolutely nothing to benefit the public image of a company, and have in general brought down the perception of many long-since praised companies like Bioware and Bethesda. Companies who used to have the respect, faith, and trust of many of us and who have now since lost all of it.
All of these different issues that microtransactions have brought up, along with the sensationalist gaming media, it’s no wonder the overall perception of microtransactions would be a negative one.
But I’m not here trying to convince you that microtransactions are bad, you already know that, I already know that, we all already know that. What this post is meant to be about is utilizing the technical definition, alongside the Urban Dictionary definitions or what I will refer to as the colloquial definitions, to ascertain what exactly we consider a microtransaction to be.
At face value, using the technical definition alone, it seems like an obvious question with an obvious answer: microtransactions are any purchases made through an online store, specifically an in-game store in this case.
I argue that this definition is far too broad and includes many different kinds of purchases that we don’t typically think of when we hear the word microtransaction used in relations to a video game. From the colloquial definitions, we can clearly get the idea that most people tend to consider microtransactions to be “pay-to-win” items and/or mechanics.
However, I also argue that that definition is far too narrow and doesn’t mention or include things like loot boxes, something that (by word-of-mouth) is the centerpiece of any discussion revolving around microtransactions, as they tend to be the most prominent and the most nefarious forms of microtransactions.
All of that being said, I bring in now the topic of Game Informer’s article on the microtransactions in Borderlands 3, and Randy Pitchford’s colorful response:
“Despite Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford’s comment about ‘no microtransactions’ in Borderlands 3 during today’s livestream, we’ve been told cosmetic items are still purchasable.” - Game Informer
Now, to be clear, at face value, nothing said here is wrong; this tweet is technically speaking true. However, going by the earlier definitions of microtransactions that I laid out above, it’s disingenuous, and that’s what makes it wrong.
I’ve spoken on numerous occasions about my opinions on Overwatch’s cosmetic-only loot boxes, of which I will not be getting into with this post, but an aspect of that I’d like to reiterate here: having purchasable cosmetics in a video game is not a bad thing.
It’s not what is immediately thought of when you hear the word “microtransaction”. Microtransaction, as the dirty and/or taboo word we view it as, brings up the idea of pay-to-win mechanics, lootboxes, and purchased in-game currency, not directly purchasable cosmetic-only items.
It’s important to keep in mind that, yes by technical definition alone, even directly purchasable cosmetic-only items are microtransactions, but so too are any purchasable content, including DLC. However, no one looks at DLC, especially not the kind typical for a Borderlands game, and considers it to be on the same level as Battlefront 2′s pay-to-win lootboxes, because that would be absurd.
This tweet and related article are essentially the equivalent to someone writing “My neighbor does a LOT of drugs” when their neighbor is a frail old woman who needs to take twenty different pills to stay alive. By technical definition, nothing said there is wrong, but it should be obvious why saying something like that would be wrong in that circumstance.
Yes, technically speaking, taking some Tylenol for my headache means I’m “doing drugs” but if someone came and told you that I was doing drugs, would your instinctual assumption be: “Oh, he’s probably just taking something harmless like Tylenol or DayQuil or whatever”? No, probably not. You would immediately assume ‘drugs’ means something akin to cocaine, meth, heroine, or the like.
The gist of what I am saying here is: context is important, and Randy Pitchford seems to agree with that sentiment, as was expressed by his reaction to Game Informer’s tweet and article. A lot of people criticize Pitchford for his reaction, saying he lied when said there would be no microtransactions, but it’s important to note two very important details here:
A) When Pitchford initially said that there would be no microtransactions, he clarified immediately after that there would be directly purchasable cosmetic items, as there were in Borderlands 2.
B) As expressed in earlier parts of this post, directly purchasable cosmetic items are not what is colloquially considered to be microtransactions.
Assuming they stick to their promises, something which I know seems unlikely in today’s video games industry but assuming they do and that there will be no microtransactions in Borderlands 3, we need to praise them for it. We need to praise the companies, big or small, that do not add in $1 red-dot sights, or lucrative gambling mechanics, or purchasable gameplay-enhancing benefits.
We need to emphasize to the video games industry that that is what we want from our video games. We can complain and complain and complain all we want to on our various internet forums, social medias, and articles, but clearly that isn’t working. So we need to show appreciation to the depressingly few companies who put out games that don’t give in to these disgusting “live-services” money-making schemes.
What I’m saying is, the next time you’re buying a video game, consider buying games like Borderlands 3 instead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, or Fallout 76, or Anthem, etc.
#random rant#video games#borderlands 3#microtransactions#live services#gearbox#activision#blizzard#call of duty#black ops 4#randy pitchford#fallout 76#bethesda#anthem#bioware#ea#electronic arts#game journalism#game informer#lootboxes#downloadable content#dlc#borderlands 2#urban dictionary#twitter#battlefront 2#cosmetics#long post
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