Unless You're Diabetic

Rejection Sensitivity

Neurodiverse Journeys

i haven’t been able to finish my current me3 playthrough yet due to my brother hogging the xbox so he can play ARC: Evolved but here’s a list of things i remembered i hate in the OT in no particular order

the elevators

the asari

mark meer’s voice acting in ME1

liara’s writing if you don’t romance her (wtf bioware)…especially considering that the reason i generally DON’T romance her is because in ME1 at least, it feels like an adult dating a teenage girl.

femshep’s romance options and how most of them get fucking shafted to shit in ME3

how heteronormative ME2 was

jacob taylor’s loyalty mission and how racist it was

how racist and lazy the writing for jacob taylor was in general (ofc there are many reasons i dislike jacob in and of itself, but some it can be chalked up to bad writing)

jack’s chuppy ass default outfit in me2 (really bioware??? a woman could have the smallest titties in existence and she still wouldn’t be able to strap ‘em down with just a fucking belt. even if this game was written by mostly men, that’s still dumb as hell)

miranda’s largely unnecessary ass-shots

thane’s death

kai leng

that fact that you can’t call out kaidan for his bullshit cheating accusations in ME3 if you DO choose to romance someone else in ME2 as femshep if you romanced him in ME1, but mshep can do that to ashley (????? BIOWARE!)

the fact that an aro ace shepard it practically impossible to play after a certain point in the series without being a complete dick (and if you play the citadel dlc, impossible as femshep! because if you don’t romance anyone you wake up next to javik! lmao)

the fact that the dlc for the ME2 and 3 literally never goes on sale on pc like it does for the console versions, forcing me to pirate shit i already fucking paid for because i am unwilling to shell out £200+ on this shit again because EA and bioware are lazy money-grubbing fucks thanks ea thanks very much for your business practices

related to the above, but why did they never sell me2 or 3 with all the dlc included? that shit would sell like no one’s business…oh wait, EA…again.

the elevators

Me after clicking on Halsin: WHAT THE-oh right. Patch 6. Hoo, that was unexpected.

Me 6 minutes later, selecting Halsin: YOU CAN TAL-Right. Right. He can now talk.

Me: ........

Me: *click* *click* *click* *click*

Yes. And it's a modded versions of all the Shepards I've made. I've had painful longings since the release of ME3 for mods to "fix" Shepard but it took years, help from friends and money to finally afford the tools needed to mod and I've kept the results on my phone since.

Is your phone wallpaper a fictional character?

a non-selective plan for the resurgence of fic commissions

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Larian doesn't abandon BG3 and continue making new patches and adding new content. Hovewer, I find it very exhausting: I played the game when it came out. I saw how unfinished it was. I played the prologue when they released it. But I still have either the same or similar issues with the game since the day they released it?

Halsin's trauma (and his personality somehow) is still being taken as a joke. He still isn't an origin companion and doesn't really have much lore behind him.

Astarion, as great as his story is written, still has the most interactions with the character you're playing as, the most quests. They poured a lot of resources into him at the cost of forgetting everyone else (especially Halsin and Wyll).

Lastly, what about people that can't bring themselves to replay the entire game for the second, third, fourth, fifth (etc) time? Why do I get to experience the "finished" game at the release and then a year, two years later I learn that there's tons of new content I'm missing on because it became clear that the devs actually didn't finish the game when it came out of Early Access?

Technically, I can replay the game. But I find it way too boring, exhausting, and overwhelming to do all the quests for the second, third time. I can't even push myself thought the main quests, knowing I'm missing on so many missions, and interactions, and leveling up, and romance. So I just... don't?

I just want to experience the game the way it's supposed to be. Like wiyh red Dead Redemption 2—what a masterpiece. Rockstar took their time and created exactly what they wanted people to experience. How is it too much to ask for BG3, too?

Yeah, patch 7 is live. That's great. They couldn't made it into the finished game, though? Upon release? The game should've been in early access for another year or two. And have much more closed beta testers of every kind. They wouldn't get such a huge feedback as they got after "full" releasing the game, but they could've still improved it tremendously.

I don't know, man. I'm sad and exhausted. I want to experience all those new interactions, but I don't have the energy and motivation to do so. It's way too repetitive and, as I already said, overwhelming.

HEY. HEY. why is the ghoul!!!!. sewing on lucy’s fucking finger!!!! while claiming that HE busted the organ dealers!!!! presumably!!!!! to take heat!!!! off of HER!!!!!!!!! IS ANYBODY ELSE. SEEING THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i think perhaps the most annoying/exhausting phenomenon in existence is when something kind of genuinely sucks but it has, like, a female lead or whatever so half the people that are saying it sucks are nightmare people that unironically call things "woke garbage" and the other half are people that just like. have a basic sense of story structure and knowledge of character arcs as a concept that quite reasonable think this thing sucks. BUT it gets assumed that 100% of people who think it sucks are in that first half and then there's a backlash TO the backlash and all along it's still not a good fucking story. I call this "The twilight phenomena" because it got a lot of hate because of a mockery of teenage girls when it had well deserved hate for the like racism and misogyny and the throwaway detail that a grown ass man is somehow romantic soulmates with a quite literal baby.

Norm previu o futuro:)

There are a couple more Garrus-Vakarian-related hills I'm willing to die on.

Maybe this particular bit of fanon has faded over the years, but there used to be a lot of insistence that Garrus is young and somehow inexperienced when he meets Shepard. Canon doesn't really support this. Turians start their mandatory service at 15. Garrus has at least a decade of experience. Even if he's 2-4 of years younger than Shepard (according to Patrick Weekes), he's got at least as much field experience as she does by dint of the difference in turian and human "enlistment" ages.

Garrus is really damn good at his job at C-Sec. You don't give the Case of Investigating the Rogue Spectre to a greenhorn. You give it to your best, most tenacious agent. Pallin may not always approve of Garrus's actions, but that doesn't actually stop him from putting Garrus on the tough case. Also, we don't know much about how C-Sec works but we do know a bit about how the turian hierarchy works, and we know C-Sec was essentially a turian initiative. That means it's a meritocracy where failure reflects on the superior, not the one who failed. So, in roughly a decade (Shepard's 29 in ME1; I always think of Garrus as about 27), Garrus has not only done shipboard military service, but he's also risen to be one of C-Sec's top investigators; Pallin wouldn't risk having Garrus's "failure" reflect poorly on HIM otherwise. I'd say that actually makes Garrus as remarkable in civilian law enforcement terms as Shepard is considered to be within the ranks of the Alliance military.

Of course Garrus was scouted by the Spectre program. And honestly, if his dad hadn't stepped in, I think Garrus would have become a Spectre, no problem. Especially for a turian, he's cut from precisely the cloth the Spectres would be looking for: extremely skilled, extremely capable, and--most importantly--he's a turian not just able but willing to work outside the chains of command that turians are taught from birth to revere and be loyal to above all else. This is the reason Pallin is leery about Spectres: he's a good turian. Good turians follow straight lines; they don't carve out their own paths.

Garrus's dad's not dumb, and he's not cruel, and he, too, rose to the top of the C-Sec hierarchy. He took one look at his kid, I think, and said, "I love my child, but I'd say it's a 50-50 chance he ends up a shooting-first-asking-questions-later Spectre like Saren Arterius, and I don't want to see that happen." Yeah, he uses his parental influence to try and jam square-peg-Garrus into round-hole-C-Sec and Garrus resents him for it, but there's no way he did it just to stop his son from getting his way or because he doesn't like Spectres. I expect Vakarian Sr. had to clean up more post-Spectre-interference messes than we can possibly imagine. But we also know he and Alec Ryder were pals later.

So the importance of what Garrus learns from a Paragon Spectre Shepard is this: You can't just do what you want and claim the ends always justify the means. That's what Saren does. Over and over again. Garrus's code and his idealism and his sense of justice and his ability to work alone should make him a great Spectre, actually, but he needs Paragon Spectre Shepard's actions to show him the lesson he tells her he's learned during ME1: "If the people I'm sworn to protect can't trust me... well, then I don't deserve to be the one protecting them." (And the seed of Archangel was planted.) I think for the first time he realizes that even though he believes his sense of justice to be correct, it doesn't matter for shit if he can't show others why that's so. And that's where the trust comes in. (Also, ow, the extra level of importance this gives their exchange where she tells him she trusts him and he tells her she's about the only friend he has left is... a lot. Cool, cool. I'm totally fine. Nothing to see here.)

When Shepard asks him what happened on Omega, he replies, "My feelings got in the way of my better judgement." Something tells me that this never happens to "good" turians, which just makes the line so much more devastating. And although the lesson some might take away from this is "feelings bad; no feelings ever," the "grey" that Garrus has to learn to deal with is precisely the grey of recognizing feelings, validating them even, but not acting on them until they've been examined. (Which is why my Shepard stands between him and Sidonis; she doesn't give a shit about Sidonis. But Garrus has refused to process his own feelings of failure and self-loathing, so they have to take the therapy session to the Citadel and deal with it there.)

Ahh yes. The mountain range of character analysis.