nature-based-being Asks:
flutiebear Said:
welcome down the rabbit hole, my friend
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
ONE OF US ONE OF US ONE OF US :)
Of course I remember you! And I’m glad you enjoyed the game! If you can stomach what goes down in the Deep Roads in Origins, then you’ll definitely be able to handle anything DA2 throws your way, IMO.
Keep in mind that DA2 is a much different type of game than Origins, though. The play styles are radically different (DA2’s much faster) and if you loved Origins’s expansive, labyrinthine dungeons… well, that’s not something they had a lot of time for in developing DA2.
Still, like I’ve already said, DA2 is my favorite game, and I do hope you like it too!
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
Thank you kindly, nonny. I’ve collected my first impressions of Season 8 on my SPN Meta archive. They’re highly reactionary, and maybe not as thoughtful or in-depth as the stuff I’ve written for previous seasons, but it’s likely all I’ll ever put together on the season, since it didn’t exactly set me on fire.
As for Dean’s obsession with Busty Asian Beauties, I thought I’d written a meta on the topic at some point, but I must have deleted it or never posted it or something, I can’t remember. (I kind of write a lot, lol.)
My opinion, however, is that I find the whole BAB thing to be really quite racist—not to mention it’s a bit of dumb, cheap humor that the writers never should’ve leaned on for as long as they have.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
*shrug* Your guess is as good as mine, nonny. Maybe he didn’t want to give Azazel the upper hand like that? That is, he was still hoping for the element of surprise?
magpiemurph Asks:
flutiebear Said:
Working on something about Samson at the moment for the 30 NPCs for 30 Days challenge:
What fascinated me then as now is the concept of the “Good Templar”: honest, righteous, sure of his cause. Someone who genuinely believes that mages are not weapons but people just like the rest of us, people in need of protecting and defending.
Good Templars seem in fairly short supply in Kirkwall, along with like “Mages Who Don’t Go Gooey or Glowy” or “Dwarves Who Are Not Criminal Masterminds”.
Good Templars are instead far outnumbered by the zealots (Ruvena, Meredith), the creepers (Karras, Alrik), the sadists (Varnell, Mettin) and the fearful (Hugh, Paxley). Even otherwise rational men and women in the Order seem to hold the party line that mages are subhuman and need to be corralled like cattle (Cullen, Wesley Vallen).
By my count, we meet the only three relatively sane Templars left in the Order: Thrask, Emeric, and Keran. Choice members of the very old guard, and the very, very new.
What happened to the rest? Samson might hold the answer.
Hmm. I don’t have any Supernatural meta that’s in a state ready to share, but here’s a bit from an Uncharted 3 meta on gender norms that’s kind of rambly and probably will never see the light of day:
In far more cases, however, the answer to “what does it mean to be a man?” is shallow and uninteresting. A man is whoever has the biggest guns and makes the loudest explosions. “Manly” men are the ones with big muscles and deep voices, the ones who sleep with many women and harbor no regrets over violence.
Their antagonists are either women or often men who appear physically weak, with soft voices and appearances—like Talbot. These antagonists allowed to express doubt, fear, devotion and other emotions to a degree the protagonist is not afforded.
Stories where hyper-machismo is romanticized, in which heroes are slavishly devoted to their own emotional repression, offer a representation of masculinity that is actively harmful. They suggest that the emotional lives of men are not just irrelevant, but destructive. That is to say, male protagonists fall in love only to give the villain something halfway believable to hold over their heads during the final battle—and true heroes know better than to fall in love in the first place.
This undermines real-life male emotionality in two ways. First, it codifies male emotional expression as rare and precious; second, it puts male emotion on a pedestal, in that when a man does express emotions, society should somehow consider it some sort of remarkable achievement.
And so it goes for Nathan Drake, who falls in love with Elena and thinks he deserves a gold star for opening himself up to that vulnerability, when the reality is falling in love really is nothing special—it only feels that way to the individuals experiencing it.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
Funny you mention that! Myjusticecake and I were just talking about this the other day.
We really enjoyed doing the podcasts, but for the moment, there’s not really much to talk about. We’ll probably resurrect Knickerweasels once DA3 gets closer to release.
Dragon Age 2 is more tactical than a lot of RPGs. The combat can be fast and frenzied, and to get by on a Hard or even Nightmare setting, or even just the later stages of the game, you can’t get lost in one-on-one combat. You have to think instead about how best to manage your entire party all at once, on a split-second timeframe. In particular, that means setting up attack combos amongst your party members (Anders and Fenris, for example, or Aveline and Isabela, etc.)
That’s why, of the three classes, I find that the mage class is probably the easiest to play as a beginner, because many of your spells are a) really freaking powerful, and b) target multiple enemies at once.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
I hate to disappoint, but probably not. Like drinking and sex, I prefer to meta out of love, not anger :)
Beside, I decided to step away from the SPN meta writing scene—I plan to finish up the GS7R and then move on for good.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
I hear that. Like you, I have a terribly weak stomach, and I can’t really handle body horror. I hate torture porn or gross-out horror too, not just because it’s lazy but because really? Gruesome is not the same thing as scary. Totally different bodily reaction.
That said, body horror done right can be deliciously terrifying; the secret, imo, is in implying more than you show. Take Jaws. That movie is scary not because you see the shark eat people, but because you don’t see it eat people, except in little glimpses: An arm here. A splash of blood there. etc. Your imagination is so much more terrible than anything Speilberg and co. would have shown.
So it goes for Dragon Age. I’ve played a lot of survival horror games in my day, but Origins’s Deep Roads quest is by FAR one of the most terrifying sequences I’ve ever played—mostly because so much is implied but not shown. And while waiting at the end of your road is something fairly gruesome, it pales in comparison to what you never got to see.
(There’s a similarly-structured quest in DA2 that uses body horror to great effect, but as great as it was, IMO nothing tops that Deep Roads sequence *shudder*)
I don’t want to scare you off from playing the games, because they’re so, so, so good. (And I’m of the opinion that it’s okay to be scared once in awhile, as long as it’s worth it; and the Deep Roads sequence is just brilliant, really, some of the best games writing of all time.) Besides, you may not react as strongly as I did, either. Still, the body horror is there, and if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, I don’t think it hurts anything to have fair warning of its presence.
Oh jeez. Talk about Flutie catnip, lol.
Fair warning: This is going to be a long answer. Hopefully interesting and useful, too, rather than completely overwhelming. But yeah. Long. Sorry not sorry.
notmuchadoing Asks:
flutiebear Said:
As for meta, no, probably not. At the moment I have no plans to write any more Supernatural meta. I’ll finish out the Great Season 7 Rewatch, of course, because I don’t want to leave something like that undone. But that’s likely going to be the last of it, after which I’ll turn my attention elsewhere.
As for my thoughts on Charlie? Well, I don’t know. I like her just fine. But I’m not wild about her. Well, I’m not NOT wild about her. She’s just sort of… okay, I guess?
And I get that lots of other people love her, which is fine, go right ahead. And I get that it’s cool in a meta sense that she’s on the show, nice to see actual positive queer representation (though I could have lived without last night’s episode, wherein it turns out that the one canonical lesbian on the show has serious Mommy Issues). But to me, Charlie is just sort of… fine. Sometimes she’s hilarious, sometimes Thompson is trying WAY too hard with her, and I dunno, she’s like the Campbell family, or Samandriel — I get the idea, I’m just not set on fire by it.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
Oh, I hear that. But:
- “Nonny” is a softer, friendlier term than “anon”. I find “anon” very impersonal and cold, like I’m calling somebody a number rather than their name.
- “Nonny” is pretty standard parlance, at least in my old fandoms — I’m far from the only person who uses the term.
- A few people pointed out that “nonny” is slang for “ninny” or “n00b”. Okay. Fine. But then again, the context in which you use a word matters too. I should think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not calling the people who write me anonymously “n00bs”.
- As for the word being condescending because ALL pet names are condescending depending on the audience they’re spoken to — how am I supposed to know whether the anonymous askee is part of that audience? They’re anonymous.
Like, I get the fact that diminutives can have power, and I’ll be the first to call out an older man when he calls me “hon”. But that kind of relationship requires a keen awareness of the social status of both parties. For me to condescend you through a pet name, I have to be aware of what group you fall into, and how it relates to my own. When the party I’m talking to is anonymous, I can’t know that. So the intent is totally different, you know?
So anyway, this is a very long way of saying that I hear what the original askee was saying, but after some careful thought, I’ve decided to keep using the term “nonny”. Askers, if you’d like me to call you something different, then please come off anonymous before pushing “send”.
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
2. For those reasons, Megstiel, and the fact that the writers openly support it, really disturb me because it seems like they want us to forget that she is a rapist and a murderer (I don’t think her last vessel was an empty one like Ruby’s either) It seems wrong to me that Meg is the one to get a hero’s death when Bella and Ruby, who were with us for much longer and didn’t do as much damage to the winchesters, were never redeemed, just because they didn’t put all their faith in the winchesters.
3. Also, I find most of megstiel extremely dubcony at best considering that Cas was either comatose or in a very fragile and unstable mental state for most of their time together. It reminds me more of the Florence Nightebgale effect than true mutual respect and love. Yeah, so that is my barrel of Meg issues, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Meg’s end that you could share that would perhaps give me some clarity Thank you! Sorry for the long ask!!
Hmm. There’s a lot here. Let me take it point by point.
1 How do you feel about the resolution of Meg’s charachter?
While I really love what Thompson did with Meg and Megstiel in “Goodbye, Stranger”, I’m not particularly overjoyed that Meg is dead. Like, I get it, I get what Carver wanted to accomplish, and I think Thompson did as good a job as he could with her death, but ultimately it was a) yet another case of Supernatural bringing back a female character just to kill her, and b) kind of the cheap way out for the narrative. By that I mean, sometimes it’s easier to kill off your characters than have them face the consequences of their decisions. What kinds of new choices would Meg have had to make if she’d survived, now that she’d admitted she thought of Cas as her “unicorn” and made her last stand for two men who’d never thank her? I would have liked to know.
I’m upset that her autonomy was taken away and that was the way to make her “good.”
I don’t know what you mean by her autonomy being taken away, unless you mean that she was taken captive by Crowley? Because until that point, Meg had had 100% agency over her own life, from what I could see.
Now, yeah, she had sort of switched sides – SORT OF, Meg makes it very clear that she’s only ever working with the Winchesters for her own gain – but that’s the thing about life; the stances we hold and the causes we order our lives by shift throughout our lives. As Meg says, “we learn, we grow”.
I also associate Meg with sexualized violence and lack of consent, and think it made her a truly horrifying villain, so it seems wrong to me that she became good and suddenly in love with her “unicorn.”
Yes, I hear that. But I guess it just comes back to “we learn, we grow”. I’ve written before about how Meg tries to use her same old M.O. on Cas, but it doesn’t work – which is part of the reason I think she’s becomes so fascinated with him. I won’t repeat the argument here.
2. For those reasons, Megstiel, and the fact that the writers openly support it, really disturb me because it seems like they want us to forget that she is a rapist and a murderer (I don’t think her last vessel was an empty one like Ruby’s either)
Do they want us to forget it? I don’t think that’s the case – else, Thompson wouldn’t have brought up in Meg’s final scenes the fact that she mind-raped Sam all those years ago. I think he (and all the writers) have really loved exploring the complicated relationship that developed between Meg and Cas, and maybe it’s not something that their friends (or we as audience) always support, but it’s something that does, at least to me, feel organic to the characters. Personally, I have terribly conflicting emotions over Meg and Cas’s relationship, and I like that, because I think that’s one of the signs of good writing, that I can’t easily label my feelings on something, that there are layers to what I feel.
Meg’s an awful person. She’s done terrible things, and to the characters we love. There’s no excusing that – but at the same time, Cas murdered thousands of his own brothers in cold blood; Sam chose drugs and a mission of revenge over his last remaining blood relation; Dean tortured souls in Hell and liked it; Bobby killed his wife (twice!) and possessed a maid – and it’s like I said last night, characters do shitty things. I’m not bringing this up to say, well, your favorite characters did crap too, but, like everybody in this universe is awful sometimes – but sometimes, they’re also kinda awesome too. The fact that they’re both is what makes these characters feel so real to me, because that’s what real people are: a mixture of heroic and horrible and hot mess.
It seems wrong to me that Meg is the one to get a hero’s death when Bella and Ruby, who were with us for much longer and didn’t do as much damage to the winchesters, were never redeemed, just because they didn’t put all their faith in the winchesters.
You won’t get any complaint from me about the unfairness of Bela and Ruby’s deaths. But take it up with Kripke. He was the one in charge back then.
3. Also, I find most of megstiel extremely dubcony at best considering that Cas was either comatose or in a very fragile and unstable mental state for most of their time together.
I don’t what you’re saying here.
- Are you saying that the mentally ill can’t offer sexual consent? I don’t know that I buy that as an across-the-board statement. In many cases, perhaps, but I don’t know if it applies here. I mean, it’s not like Cas is in the mental hospital because he’s getting treatment for mental illness; he’s there as a sort of witness protection program, a safe spot for him to undergo his metamorphosis into Hospital!Cas. And nor is Meg his nurse, either – she only took the job there so that she could keep an eye on him. If anything, she’s more like (HAH) his guardian angel.
- Where do you get that Cas was “fragile”? Cas is many things in 7x21 – distractable, passive-aggressive, completely out of fucks to give – but I never felt that fragile was one of them. And for that matter, nobody makes Cas do anything he doesn’t want to. I mean, that’s sort of the point of 7x21, that Cas refuses to face what he’s done, and nobody, not Meg, not Sam, not even Dean, can make him.
- I don’t know that shipping Megstiel necessarily means you believe Meg must have raped Cas while he was in his coma. Plus, Cas was only “Hospital!Cas” for two episodes. Before that, Meg and Cas had had other interactions, in an equal number of episodes (“Abandon All Hope”, “Caged Heat”).
Hope that answers your questions, nonny?
Anonymous Asks:
flutiebear Said:
Nah, though obvs. I appreciate the name. Flutie’s the name of my dog. He had it when we adopted him from the rescue.
TBH, I wanted to rename him (my first pick was Anders, because he wouldn’t stop pacing about our kitchen, but Mr. F didn’t quite see the humor in that). But he already responded to Flutie, so why confuse the poor guy? He had enough problems as is.
I did give him a nice little honorific, though. So now his official title is King Flutie-Bear, Admiral of the U.S.S. Dogboat. :)
