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@monocytogenes / monocytogenes.tumblr.com

Ammy, she/her. Swtor, DA:I, memes, character nonsense. I write fic on occasion.
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mauls-fair-in-love-and-war

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Annihilation: A Terrible Summary

  • Hi my name is Theron Shan and I have brown hair and brown eyes and pale skin and cybernetic implants around my left eye and right ear-
  • Theron Shan is not a Jedi. You will be reminded of this twenty times
  • Theron gets jumped by another SIS agent and proceeds to ruin an entire operation
  • Theron attempts to jump about 30 feet horizontally. He doesn’t make it and climbs up a building like Spider-Man
  • Theron steals a swoop bike and gets in a high-speed chase with a gang. Everyone claps.
  • Drug smugglers use an engine as a shield. It explodes.
  • The Dark Council is racist
  • Darth Marr possesses the only brain cell in the Sith Empire
  • Cabinet Man battelship?
  • Two Sith put more energy into fighting each other than the Republic. It’s amazing the Sith Empire lasted even this long
  • Office work is a circle of Hell
  • Theron Shan is good at what he does. It’s not usually his job though
  • “I think I’m your father” “what the fuck.”
  • Theron follows a drunk man into the bathroom and subsequently gets his teeth knocked out
  • Theron scales the side of a building to break into Jedi Grandmaster Satele Shan’s apartment, even though the door was unlocked and he was invited. He leaves the same way
  • I’m no Jedi. Like my father before me
  • Jace Malcom violates the Geneva Convention
  • Theron pretends to be shitfaced to get out of trouble. This plan works a few times actually
  • Teff’ith says acab?
  • “Why are you in your underwear?” “Why are you in your underwear?”
  • Theron Shan and Master Gnost-Dural emerge from an escape pod to cheers. They are both still (basically) naked
#god i love him#also an accurate description of marr#theron shan#swtor#star wars the old republic
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An Embellishment of Lore (tag game)

I think as Fanfic writers, we often add lore to our stories. It is natural for us to build upon the pillars set for us. But what about the foundations, gravel and grit? What was a piece of Lore you added to Dragon Age that wasn’t pre-existing?

Tagged by @theluckywizard!

I tend to have a lot of lore sitting in documents (like, seriously, I have a whole thing just on Orlesian theater culture), but honestly, most of it is side stuff that enters fics in bits and pieces. Apart from events that I tweak due to character choices that aren't available in canon or the need to maintain practical plausibility, I usually don't invent that much for DA because the foundational worldbuilding is so damn good.

That said, here's a few fun details:

There are newspapers in Orlais. (Makes sense, since we know they can mass-produce books.)

Pravin glanced up from his cup of tea, regarding the older man, who was reading the week’s copy of Le Royan through a pair of pince-nez. “What?” “Inquisition,” Gaubert repeated expectantly, sliding the paper across the table to him. “You heard about this?”

Opiates exist. (There's implication of this in canon, but not fully substantiated.)

“And…” Fidencio’s gaze slid thoughtfully upward, debating his last choice, before leveling on Varric again. “One case laudanum.” “Ooh,” Varric said with a sharp inhale. “That’s a toughie. Been having some sourcing issues, for all the obvious reasons.” “Well, I can’t make this too easy for you,” Fidencio said with a smirk.

Josephine's a theater nerd who had season tickets to the Grande Royeaux. (I mean, she can take the PC to the opera; of course she is.)

“Which plays have you seen?” he asked in friendly Antivan. Josephine switched to her native tongue with a delighted laugh. “So many. I had season tickets for a quite a while. You were very memorable as Godoy in Fontenot—you brought such sharp intellect to a role that’s normally just a caricature of the scheming foreigner. And Sévigny—I’ve seen that probably three times with different casts, and your take on the man was fascinatingly raw and real. Like the prayer scene, how that’s normally this somber, elegant expression of grief, and you were just stalking about, furious, weeping—”

Cullen was taught to "speak properly" in a Chantry school and has an accent that implies he didn't receive a high-end education.

A commoner, Pravin figured. Interesting pick for a military appointment. Cullen sounded vaguely Ferelden, with one of those Chantry-taught accents that came across as deliberately stripped of regional color. Maybe he’d been connected to the institution, someone one of the Hands had grown accustomed to working with—a templar, perhaps.

I think probably one of my biggest additions to canon is the amount of multilingual interactions/linguistic code-switching I write--it's not something that's easy to portray in a game with voice acting, but so normative among real people who speak several languages that I can't not see it happening. Josephine and Pravin swap between Orlesian, Antivan and Common through the course of their first meeting in The Girl He Remembered, depending on their comfort level with each other, what they're talking about and who else is in the room, and I just love what it adds to the scene.

#ask meme#writing#dragon age inquisition#dragon age
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No context WIP tag game

tagged by @theluckywizard and @nirikeehan! Here's a few:

“Don’t,” he scolded softly. “We’ve both seen tonight what happens to heroes.”

There were copious stories, of course, beyond patriotic action holos and the well-known comedy Cipher Fifty-Five (which Intelligence had to find funny, really, or the Outreach Bureau would’ve censored it ages ago)—tales of disappearances, assassinations, forays deep into enemy territory beneath disguises worn like a second skin.

“I refuse to consider it because it’s ridiculous. And last time I lowered myself to relying on Lana Fucking Beniko I ended up getting sucked into a maelstrom of incompetence so potent that I had to cut a deal with some cad who, if we’re going to be all parsimonious in our reasoning, probably works for the SIS!”
#writing#tag game
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ya-boi-alesi

does tumblr know about tim misny??? like has the level of tim misny awareness that exists in northeast ohio broken containment and become known online yet???

ok so tim misny is a personal injury lawyer here in ohio.

that’s him. you do not have to remember his face from this image because you’re gonna see it a lot in this post. so mainly i think we all kinda honed in on tim misny because of his slogan

he’s gonna make them pay. he’s gonna get you that money but also it’s a little threatening like he’s gonna fully fuck his legal opponent’s shit up. this sprung tons of local memes. then there were the billboards which were normal at first.

but here’s the thing; we already know what misny does. he makes them pay. so it turns into just saying “you know what i do” which is funny enough if you don’t at all have the context.

but this is not where the absurdity caps out, my friends. no. this is what it has evolved to and they. are. everywhere.

that’s right. no text. just the judging eyes of tim misny, glaring through our skin and into our souls. there is no god. there is no devil. there is just tim misny and he’s gonna make them pay.

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monocytogenes
#the eyes of t j eckleburg#humor
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sullustangin

Writing Advice: How to Create Conflict when Your Characters are Competent.

Featuring Leverage, the ultimate in Competency Porn.

  • Make them so good it gets them in trouble. So you've got a hacker and he's the best, definitively. Okay, well, one of his fake IDs just got called for jury duty. You pretended to be a psychic so well, someone kidnapped you to talk to a dead crime lord.
  • Make them targets. You're so good, enemies you didn't even know about are trying to kill you just so they won't have to take you on in your element. You're being blackmailed into doing a thing because you're the only one that can.
  • Limit the scope of competency. Sure, you're competent as a fighter, but your hacker is in jail and now you have to do his job and you are not competent in that. Yeah, you can climb a building, but do you know what you need to do to not end up in a crevasse while climbing a mountain?
  • Raise the stakes. Can you handle extracting a orphan being used by a washed up actress to fund her extravagant lifestyle? Yes. But can you handle extracting 30 orphans being used by the Slovenian mob to fund gunrunning? Maybe all you wanted was to get enough money to buy back a house, but instead you have to ruin the company so that all houses they illegally obtained are returned to their rightful owners.
  • Make others competent, too. Your characters are the best, but are they the best of the best? If you take you enemy down, do you go, too? If you win, does it make them win? Does it get out of hand and make other people start noticing when you're trying to keep your head down? Do they know every trick in the book and know the next move before you make it?
  • Make others painfully incompetent. Your characters are the best, but are they woefully unprepared for people who are not even good? Can your hologram hacker roll with it when the vital information is on a casset tape? Is the old mentor up to date on the recent technology, or is he going to screw you because he assumes the cops are just as corrupt/incompetent as when he was young?
  • Have some standards. Specifically, morals that make it impossible for your characters to back out or gets them in trouble for doing things "off-script." You can't leave on the train someone just stole for you because you've got to go back and stop the bad guys from bombing the IRS (even if we don't like them). You wish you could just say no to that assassin contract and leave, but someone's getting assassinated and you have to stop it because you're a good guy.
  • Bring up the past. Do you think that bad guy you brutally scarred a decade ago is going to carry a grudge? Do you have to save your ex-wife from the bad guy, who may also be her boyfriend, and if you suggest that she'll shut you out and you won't be able to save her or get paid? It's Draaamaaaa, babee.
#this is the good shit#characters#writing
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theluckywizard asked:

△ Has Pravin (DA and SW) ever killed someone who didn't deserve it or kill someone on accident? How did he feel about it?

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SWTOR Pravin: 7/10 on this (I think he'd be willing to tell this to certain people, circumstantially, but...)

"Well, the thing with espionage is that it's generally not that violent, despite what the holos imply. Most of it is just networking. Building and leveraging relationships to gain access to people, places and information. And when you're undercover and casualties happen, that usually means something's gone terribly awry.

...There was this one instance. Had my cover blown on Narsh whilst infiltrating a terrorist cell. It was this kid--had to be twenty years old at most, gang-banger mixed up in something well over his head.

I had him on the ground, disarmed. I remember he started begging. Crying. I... [a pause] ...I couldn't risk it. Not there, not then. He'd seen my face.

I must've been upset because they made me do counseling in the debrief. I don't know if that helped; I just tried to put it out of mind. I still dream of him, sometimes. Less so than Hunter and Kothe and the hell they put me through, but every now and again."

DA Pravin: 8/10 hi

"I don't style myself as a killer, and that's on purpose. Intellectually, it's beneath me; practically, it's much too dangerous. I work to account for many possibilities, to avoid situations where I'm likely to encounter a fight, but it...hasn't always been possible.

What gets me is the futility of it. You can't be willing to lay your life down for petty power-plays; there's no glory in that, no great purpose. And yet, when it's me and one of those young, stupid bards in a room, they panic and--and what can I do? I do what I have to do.

They don't deserve it, but it's self-defense. Maker forgive me, it's self-defense.

...Forgive me."

#oh i forgot this in my drafts#have some angst#ask meme#pravin winscliff ii#pravinquisition
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writing patterns

From @theluckywizard--first line of last ten posted fics:

  1. “Thank you,” the former minister said, gesturing to the conference table across from his desk. (for what it's worth, swtor)
  2. The message arrived while Vector was seated for breakfast at a Kaas City café, skimming through recent correspondence with Falner Oeth. (a calculated risk, swtor)
  3. “Can I ask you something?” (making the call, swtor)
  4. Pravin had attended a few promotion ceremonies during his time in the navy, all necessarily formal—if a ceremony was to be done at all, it had to involve marching, singing, highly scripted speeches and rehearsed gestures. (you no longer have a name, swtor)
  5. The trek to Haven had been, as anticipated, an exercise in discomfort. (the girl he remembered, DAI)
  6. “Remind me again,” Pravin said, gazing out the coach window at the shadowed treeline, “which one you were shagging.” (the triumph of old and new friends, DAI)
  7. It took a few hours for Lana to finally get a lead on the man—Raider’s Cove was, after all, a city of transients, one of those gang-run trading posts in the middle of galactic nowhere. (all the times we've said goodbye, swtor)
  8. Fidencio Frye is an actor well-known in the realm of Orlesian musical theater, as well as an uncommonly effective bard. (seems like a real gentleman, DAI)
  9. “Have you heard about this Inquisition?” (as with any shitshow, DAI)
  10. Quinn had grown accustomed to contemplating his own death. (better to be wrecked, swtor)

I have two (2) settings and it's "in medias res dialogue opening" and "worldbuilding", haha. I think #5 is probably my favorite in terms of being a pretty classic hook sentence, though #6 is also up there for making me smirk every time I read it. (#10 is a little off pattern because it's stylistically pretty different; it's kind of a poetic, meditative one-shot, whereas my more recent works have been largely plot or dialogue-driven.)

#ask meme#writing
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@theluckywizard tumblr is straight up throwing an error when I try to post an answer to your ask, so here you go:

  1. To pick a DA one--this whole codex, particularly this:
Once donned, the mask is understood to be absolutely them. …It is my guess that Orlesians, surrounded as they are by masks in their daily lives, both require and fully respect a place where the objects boldly display their wearers' intentions for a change.

It's such a cool idea, and speaks to one of the fundamental purposes of art--creating a space where social mores can be challenged and upended, where one can safely explore unacceptable notions. I think that's important to remember in general, especially in our own consumerist society where our consumption of art is all too often taken to be acts of direct self-definition and ethical posturing, rather than that sort of explorative activity.

2. Hurt/comfort is an all-time fave. I generally love moral/ethical quandaries, especially those related to politics, bureaucracy and structures of power. Here's some other weirdly specific tropes that I have a soft spot for: what you are in the dark, he who fights monsters, the chains of commanding, curious qualms of conscience, idealist vs. pragmatist

3. I read a weird amount of agent/Theron SWTOR fic for someone who doesn't ship anybody with Theron, lol. He's a fun character to play others off of in general, and I love reading a good, sexy adventure story with him!

#ask meme
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