one of the most annoying things about being both a sera and vivienne enjoyer isn’t even the fandom. it’s the game itself that is like. primed to try and make you dislike both of them. or at the very least it operates under the assumption that you already don’t like them.
the player is rarely allowed to give sera actually positive and understanding responses but is given every opportunity to kick her out of the inquisiton (she is the only companion this is a constant option for) and to insult her/her beliefs. so many of the player dialogue choices have the inquisitor calling sera unreasonable or nonsensical but so few letting you fully agree with her in a way that doesn’t sound condescending in some way. this even extends to some of the companions and how they interact with her.
and then for vivienne, she is constantly referred to as being untrustworthy, manipulative, and “only in it for her own goals” when. surprise. everyone here is here for their own goals. solas and blackwall actively lie to and manipulate the player while iron bull has the potential to turn on them completely and cassandra repeatedly presses the inquisitor into being a religious icon to fit her own beliefs, even when they protest. not even mentioning the “but what’s her real agenda 🤔” line in her character trailer, the snow white reference in her personal quest, and how her epilogue slides have this Edge to them that no one else seems to get.
ok… so I have finally finished veilguard after about 90 painful hours (two playthroughs). im not gonna write an actual review about all of my detailed thoughts bc it’ll actually take days, this is just to at least get my general thoughts out and see if anyone else feels the same or if ive actually lost it.
overall it is the weakest dragon age game story-wise, and I’d give it a nice lukewarm 4/10.
(i wrote this post right after I finished the game on the weekend so maybe I sound a bit harsh, I tried to edit it to be more reasonable lol but I didn’t really want to delete this since I do still stand by a lot of this)
it’s fun to look through datamined stuff but I need some of you to stop getting mad at larian for scrapping ideas you thought were cool. cool doesn’t mean it’ll make sense in the overarching story, and maybe larian likes this version better, or sometimes ideas just didn’t work well with what they had in mind. I know this first hand from writing stories, I’ll have cool ideas but realize later it doesn’t fit the original tone of the story. it’s okay to scrap stuff, but you can always use it for something else.
also, like it or not, it’s larians game first, their story, their characters (I know.), it doesn’t matter if we think something is cool, the reality is that not everything works in the end. and that’s fine. that’s how all art is, it’s alive and ever-shifting, it’ll go through many, many, versions, to the point where you might get sick of chewing on the same plot, and in the end the final version might not be as good as you thought when you look back in a few months or years. and that’s ok. art isn’t supposed to be perfect.
everything is subjective and I think fandoms would be a more intellectual place if people learned to critique art for what it is not what it isn’t.
