personally i love when people find my ocs hot

I engage with fiction in a normal way. don’t look at my blog

ok just finished the final quest for Lucanis and like... this is what I mean about the Lucanis/Neve thing and how it should have been Neve/Bellara

Bioware makes no effort of convincing us of this relationship being legit beyond very easily missable cutscenes (i.e. the cutscene where Lucanis out of nowhere is making a dessert for Neve which you can easily miss if you have a flirtation with Lucanis active). They don't seem to have any interactions as friends. And in my playthrough, literally the first I'm hearing that Lucanis has any remote interest in a relationship with Neve is just now, after 100+ hours of gameplay, he is listing the people he cares about, and mentions Neve's name.

Before this, the literal only interaction beyond party banter is a scene where he confronts her about brewing coffee wrong where he's overreacting and she's dismissive. It doesn't read as flirtation unless you squint. And then you're confronted with the choice between Minrathous and Treviso and there's a tense understanding between them. And I'm someone who would go to the Lighthouse after every side quest to see what banter was happening, and maybe it's unlucky coincidence, but even then, I never found the two of them specifically having idle banter around the Lighthouse.

And this isn't a critique on either Neve or Lucanis bc I adore them both, but this really is the most heteronormative "because they were both there" ship I have seen. It's like if Mass Effect decided that, if you romance Liara, they're gonna put Ashley and Kaidan together.

And idk if someone actually enjoys their dynamic I won't take that away from you, but it's really just not a convincing relationship in my opinion.

(and before u say "oh you like Lucanis ofc you don't want him with Neve" like, there's actually other relationships for Lucanis which feel like they have a more natural build-up like Davrin or Harding, and ones with Neve which also have a more natural build-up like Bellara or also Harding--who I just ship with everyone actually)

*light bulb going off over my head* oh so THAT'S what the devs meant in the q&a when they said "not that skeleton"

no im not thinking constantly about the early game hilarity of when its just the ladies of da:v lounging around the dining room watching a freshly freed Lucanis bus about the stoves making food for his new strange flock of poorly fed women.

The Sacrifice of Souls, Part 1

welcome to my 2-part essay about the conclusion of emmrich's story line. this part will focus on the actual quest(s) involved and analyze the decisions we make. part two will be about the effects on the romance, particularly as i am approaching it with my rook, corentin.

spoilers ahead! beware that both essays are going to assume you have completed The Sacrifice of Souls and at least one of the follow up quests, Heir to the Dead or Will and Testament. if you have not, i suggest returning to this later and playing it out yourself.

so what are we even talking about?

for my purposes, about 90% of the sacrifice of souls is irrelevant. here are the important bits: hezenkoss puppets a giant skeleton monster powered by the gloaming lantern, manfred sacrifices himself to rip it out of the thing's chest, and emmrich risks his life to free the souls trapped inside, symbolically overcoming his fear of death (for the moment).

when manfred's beautiful skeleton body is brought before the lich lords in the necropolis to ask if his spirit can be recovered, the lich lords give an ultimatum: they will allow emmrich to bring manfred back, but it will remove his candidacy for lichdom.

"how many exceptions 'til tyranny?" they say. if emmrich is to become a lich, he must be able to accept that people he cares about will die as he lives on.

emmrich is obviously extremely conflicted. he's being forced to choose between his life's work or having his pseudo-child back; he is torn because he at once wishes to spare himself the pain of losing someone, while also wanting to "honour death and let him rest."

from there, the choice is given to the player: encourage emmrich to bring manfred back, or encourage him to pursue his life's work and become a lich.

I think the choice becomes less contradictory if you think of it less as asking Emmrich to decide whether his death or Manfred's should be accepted as natural and more as making Emmrich face what becoming a lich will actually mean. I mean, in that banter with Lucanis you linked Emmrich is... honestly really dismissive of the fact that becoming a lich will mean watching everyone he loves die and everything he loves wither; like he says himself, he hasn't really considered that aspect of it. He'll move forward and meet new people and see new things, and while he's probably aware that it'll be sad watching those people and things inevitably fade I really don't think he's considered the full weight of watching that happen over and over again forever. It's not so much about Manfred specifically, he's just the most obvious (and uh. expendable) character to use. It's about Emmrich really having to consider that being a lich means standing back and letting the people he loves die to uphold the cycle of life and death, knowing he can save them and making the active choice to do nothing, and he will be expected to do that with everyone he loves, forever. Is lichdom worth that pain to him? Is he even capable of doing it? It's easy to say he can, but when the choice is actually laid out before him it's more difficult. I think the problem really is that that only really comes up in banter; the choice would feel a lot stronger if Rook could raise that concern and discuss it with him in conversation, if only to make sure that that angle is established even for people who never take Emmrich and Lucanis out together.

Rook: [Fumbles and does something dumb] Spite: They're so stupid. We have to fuck them. Lucanis: What do you mean WE!?