─── Asylum ───

precious

some people, apparently: consider the messages in your writing, and try to be ethical in the morals you might intentionally or unintentionally present to your audience!

this post all over my dash, about six miles long and full of pro-ship dogwhistles: PURITANISM. CHRISTIANITY. BLACK AND WHITE MORALS. IM GONNA SHIT RIGHT HERE ALL OVER THE FLOOR. WATCH ME

no, writing does not have to conform to a set moral standard, ever. no, writing should not exist purely to present a message or call to action. yes, it sucks when people use media to encourage dubious behaviour or beliefs. 

no, posts on writeblr encouraging you to examine how you discuss marginalised identities, how you present relationship dynamics and the messages you’re presenting to your (potentially very young) audience are not trying to take us back to the 1800s. no, your writing is NOT immune to criticism for spreading harmful rhetoric, even if that wasn’t your intention. 

nothing is black and white. hell, exactly zero of the relationships in everything I write are pure and unproblematic. but when they are unhealthy, it’s addressed and discussed, and i am very, very, very careful not to present these dynamics as palatable or attractive or desirable, because when you’re an author that publishes novels like i am, hey, you have to consider who might read them, and for all i know, a kid is going to pick up my books and get the wrong idea and it’ll hurt them. 

take on an ounce of responsibility for your own impact on those around you and realise that just because you don’t want to talk about problematic issues in a responsible manner, it doesn’t make you immune to critique, especially when discussing issues like marginalisation and abuse and trauma. grow up.

feel like OP’s tags are important too

additionally, i, a jewish person, have been called a “puritanical christian” for being anti-bad shit (ex. art sexualizing underage characters). i shouldn’t have to explain why it’s antisemitic to call a jewish person christian. i have seen this happen to many people.

I’m not about to kinkshame a whole aquarium but

carry me into the sunset, my cephalopod prince

friends, you don’t understand. This ad campaign was goddamn HUGE. They bought out the entirety of multiple train stations in Boston with these. There are so many more, and they’re all this same beautiful combination of questionable/amazing.

@lynne-monstr

This is the best thing in my life

@seananmcguire

I love that this makes you think of me.

@starcrossed-sky

@janiedean

…. so now I get tagged in tentacle porn, YEY EXCELLENT

Varric’s attitude toward Anders, and especially Anders’s death toll in DA:I is so weird.

“I once met a Grey Warden who got possessed by a spirit and then blew up a Chantry and killed a hundred people.”

As opposed to who, your friend Isabela who threw slaves overboard to drown? Or who got at least that many people killed when she brought the Qunari to Kirkwall? Fenris, who slaughtered the people sheltering him on Seheron and who knows how many other people? Your best friend Hawke, who limited their wholesale murder to smuggers and mercenaries and gang members in Lowtown just like them? You, who did the same thing? The Inquisitor who don’t even get me started?

“Innocent people killed” is such a meaningless metric for this series, I’m not sure why they keep bringing it up. Especially in Inquisition, where Dorian will actively give you shit for your enormous body count. 

I had a whole long post written elsewhere on this topic, but here’s the excerpt of the relevant bits:

“We Kill A Lot Of People In This Game, Like, Seriously A Lot, Guys

“Origins had a statistics counter which, among other things, listed the number of kills by your character. By the end of my game, my Warden’s kill count was somewhere above 1800, which honestly was on the low end of what it could be considering that I skipped much of the optional content. DA2 doesn’t have a similar counter, that I know of, but I would imagine that Hawke’s death toll by the end of the game was somewhat similar. Heck, there’s that banter between Varric and Anders in Act III where Varric pegs Anders’ death count to date as “two-hundred and fifty-four by my last count. Plus about five hundred men, a few dozen giant spiders, and at least two demons.” That’s at least 750 dead human beings that neither we nor the other characters are even asked to consider giving two shits about, and considering that Anders is 1) in a healing/supporting role for much of the game and 2) not always in the party, it’s almost a certainty that all of the other companions’ death tolls would outstrip his, let alone Hawke’s.

“Unlike the Warden, Hawke doesn’t even have the excuse of mostly fighting and killing darkspawn. Most of those ~2000 kills were other human beings, many of whom were no better or worse people than Hawke himself. There’s those townsmen in the Chantry in Act II that Petrice tricks into attacking you, who were guilty of nothing more than listening to their priest. There’s Merrill’s whole entire clan, if you choose the wrong dialogue options. There’s a whole horde of smugglers and mercenaries who are doing the exact same thing that Hawke did at the game’s prologue for the exact same reason: because theirs is a harsh society where they must struggle to survive, and survival often means killing.

“One hundred people died when the Chantry went up. We can be fairly secure in that number, since it’s reported independently by Varric and by Sebastian in DAI, both of whom were eyewitnesses, neither of whom have any reason to protect Anders nor to lie. I’m pretty sure that my Warden chopped her way through at least that many dwarven citizens in the ‘A Paragon Of Her Kind’ questline alone, most of whom had done nothing more wrong than to support a different political faction from me. The Warden can choose to firebomb Amaranthine, killing all the surviving civilians inside, in the aim of protecting vigil’s keep. My point is, we the player have killed a lot of people through the 60+ hours of game time by the time we reached this point; the game expects and requires us to accept that killing is an appropriate, often unavoidable method of solving conflicts and advancing your goals. Why, in the eleventh hour, are we suddenly supposed to stop accepting that? Why do we now,  after all the people we’ve killed, regard death as a senseless horror? What makes what Anders did any different than what Hawke did, or the Warden did? Why is only his crime, alone, considered unforgivable?”

Here’s my take on this. Do y'all actually ever consider what would have happened if Anders HADN’T blown up the chantry?

The mages would have died anyway! That’s right, Meredick had already called for the Rite of Annulment, remember? If Anders hadn’t acted, every single mage in the Kirkwall circle would have been killed. Instead of turning Kirkwall into the powerful political statement it became, the undeserved death of every single one of those mages would have gone down in history as ‘9:37 Dragon. Rite of Annulment performed’. The Kirkwall circle, like a bleeding and empty cyst, would have filled up again with another generation of mages for an organisation corrupt at its core to abuse, silence, and magically mutilate on a whim. The Chantry would have cried a single, holy tear, and continued along its merry way, accumulating power that they only used to help themselves.

I get hating that Anders’ actions were necessary. I get being upset that he lied to you, especially in the way that he did, or that he did end up killing innocents in the chantry. But to be honest, if you ever go into the chantry, there’s literally like 4 NPCs there. Whinging about imaginary children taking shelter there or whatever doesn’t help your case because it’s highly unlikely that the Chantry in Kirkwall ever did aid the poor and disenfranchised. When in the game has the Chantry ever been shown to help, I don’t know, the refugees in Lowtown? Uh, never. That was all Anders. Plus, there was a reason why he blew it up at night- he didn’t want to do it during Fantasy Sunday Mass™.

TLDR: Anders killed a hundred people to stop what would have been a silent massacre of five hundred. And anyone who misses that point is just being deliberately obtuse.

you know what it is though? it’s not only terrible writing, to try and force emotions and opinions on the player that make no sense....... but it’s also because for some reason or other, bioware really really wants everyone to hate anders.

bioware really really hates anders.

and they will do whatever they can to try and paint him as a monster when his actions haven’t been anywhere near as horrible or radical as they’ve been trying to treat them.

80s voltron is a gem

*screams in pillow* Lmao @jazzzasaruss

guess who my favourite character is 

This is the funniest thing in my life right now

did you ever look at a character and you were like

my son

but at the same time you’re like

my boyfriend

and ????????????

I can’t wait for Yaoi on Fire, the anime about two lesbians who perform Hawaiian fire dancing.