I must not look at spoilers. Spoilers are the mind killer. The temporary anxiety relief that longterm have the effect of making me increasingly more uncomfortable with storytelling-induced discomfort and uncertainty. Instead of respecting the storytelling craft and process, I look for temporary relief to 'is it too bad?', 'is it good enough?', 'how close is it to how I imagined it?' and that's not the way to go.
Stories don't pop in from the ether or as messages from God, they're made by people, and they inevitably contain something of those people. The same bullet point list of events can be read and experienced quite differently depending on storytelling factors. etc etc
Tbh I'm still omw to making peace with the fact this game will inevitably do some things different to how I imagined or wished and that's OKAY. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and lots of complicated feelings tied to how intwined this series has been with my life since highschool. I feel like the only antidote for spoileritis is trying to take it slow and to have fun, see what the makers came up with, treat it as a conversation rather than a proclamation. To have above all grace for the process, the key to my enjoying of every Dragon Age game so far, one I practiced naturally up to Inquisition, where it needed to be deliberate cause I changed and became more cynical about stories in general then. This time it also needs to be deliberate, because it's so so easy to slip into cynicism or let nostalgia distort perception of how things used to be vs how they are now.
And to any spoilers I marginally glanced on the corner of my eye, I need to remind myself it's unlikely many or any people managed to reach the end of the game already while being very very thorough with exploration, codexes etc. I just need to chill tf out cause people can misinterpret online, and make definitive statements lacking information online, and really just straight up lie online.