BALDUR'S GATE 3 (2020) dev. Larian Studios

Phantom Anders💙

The Invitation

Zevran is out there living it up sexy style, aging like the finest Antivan wine!!!! YOU DESERVE IT KING!! i miss him tho 😔 at least I can have my Rook wear this outfit + Arainai's Talon in homage to him.

my man

“People are looking for a path- they’re looking for a path and I’ll tell you- and this is true- I did my best in every town I left, no matter how they treated me. And a lot of them treated me with deep disrespect. I left every town better than I found it.” ✨

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

why is buying tickets for a concert so stressful

ticketmaster fucking LIED to me it did NOT refresh automatically to join the queue I had to refresh the page myself after a minute and now I'm #21,000 in line. great 😔

i view just enough horror and have poor enough visual processing that i legit thought this was a gore-drenched bedroom that i would nope the fuck out of

that's cool. personally i'm getting him pregnant

I got a party banter between Bellara and Taash about how the Lords of Fortune steal elven artifacts. And then Taash clarifies later that they have a Dalish expert on the team so they can check to make sure the Lords don't sell something culturally important and instead return it to the elves.

Like. I get it. You want the Lords to be fun swashbuckler Disney pirates and Robin Hoods instead of actual pirates who steal and plunder. Because we're only now in Western society realizing that stealing from indigenous groups is, uh, bad. But like. Writing really uninteresting factions for your "dark" fantasy (tho lbr Dragon Age hasn't been dark fantasy since DA2) isn't gonna solve real-world neo-colonialism, ya know? The Lords not stealing priceless elven artifacts and returning them to the elves doesn't signal to me that the Lords are total rascally good guys, it signals to me that BioWare itself is trying really hard to seem morally conscious. "See? We know stealing from other cultures is bad!!!"

And man. Not to be a "political correctness has poisoned media" grifter on main (tbh it's less political correctness itself and more the commodification of real-world activism) but I couldn't help but imagine how this convo would've played out in earlier games, potentially even Inquisition.

You could've so EASILY made this interesting while giving the Lords and Taash and Bellara a lot more depth, while also making it clear that stealing from indigenous groups is wrong.

Just have the Lords, yeah, actually sell those artifacts. But also establish that the Lords take in and help elves from all walks of life. That they free slaves, or collaborate with alienages. Then you could have Taash defend the practice by saying to Bellara that little orphaned elf kids being sold as slaves probably don't give a flying fuck about some artifacts they're never gonna see, but the money from selling those artifacts goes to buying them food. And have Bellara fire back that preserving elven culture is also part of its survival, and that there are Dalish clans that would be willing to pay for them or offer something in return. Or have her say that the Lords are doing charity for the sake of recruitment rather than actual altruism. And then Taash responds that those high and mighty Dalish elves don't do shit to help abandoned city elves, just because those aren't part of their correct elven subculture, and they care more about reclaiming old glory than helping the people that exist here and now.

Then you could have side missions or at least codex entries that describe maybe some Lord recruit being conflicted about what they're doing. Maybe a few of them are collaborating to hijack a deal or steal back an artifact. Have implications that some high-ranking Lords are, in fact, using those artifacts for their own gain, despite claiming otherwise. Have some Lords genuinely trying to help, and believing that gold and trinkets don't matter as much as people's lives, so they sell them in exchange for safety for refugees or slaves or some other helpless group.

But no. Instead it's "hey do you steal from my people?" "nah lmao we have a cultural advisor don't even worry about it" "oh wow so cool and woke of you!" And then that's it. No need for any further discussion. No conflict and no complexity. No bad actors and moral quandaries.

Weh.

people are wrong about chosen family. chosen family can become just as involuntary and inescapable as regular family if you use your fucking imagination

the most delicious thing about justice-anders is that anders has been running for so long. he’s never put down roots anywhere. “anders” isn’t even his name. he is convinced that letting himself care for anyone or anything is a death sentence, that it only stands to be ripped from him and that pain isn’t worth it.

enter justice, a friend, who is in love with the world anders has been locked in a mutual hatred of since he was a child. who asks for nothing but anders’s body (something he has always been willing to give), to borrow anders’s tenuous place in the world, and in return, anders has someone he can count on to stay, who cannot be separated from him no matter how hard anyone tries. no matter what either of them may want.

who are either of them to refuse, really

the tour announcement has me back on my emo bullshit

sometimes you’ll enjoy a band casually and other times that band will have you saying shit like i need to go to east rutherford new jersey

My fave DA fanarts i've made :D

ALSO i am back on instagram so please feel free to follow me there as well :3

Insta: thee_steppenwolf