Ammonite Flesh

Sighrun

DA:Awakening

the dialogue between solas and a necromancer inquisitor is very telling too because the only way he approves of studying necromancy is saying that you want to use it to understand spirits more but disapproves of anything else, especially saying you want to use it for your own power

interesting also that he specifies “so long as no intelligent spirits are harmed”—what constitutes a spirit being intelligent? cole disapproves of necromancy as a whole, saying that even the littlest, barest wisp could become a spirit.

solas and cole’s differing philosophies speak to… well, solas and cole. solas who is wisdom, who can convince himself that the ends justify the means, and cole who is compassion, who feels for every living thing. and wisps are alive, as we see in veilguard, but they’re not considered intelligent; when they possess corpses, they can be controlled by a necromancer, and it’s seen like, i don’t know, having oxen plow a field rather than enslaving a person.

it’s that matter of intelligence that brings about the primary moral quandary of necromancy that makes use of wisps. the mourn watch would be on solas’s side here, saying that they’re not quite intelligent and useful in the way that a work horse would be. but they’re not animals. they can continue to grow and become full-fledged spirits. solas even says this in his companion quest.

the following is from the origins codex entry on wisps:

A wisp is a demon that has lost its power; either it has existed in our world for too long without finding a true host or it has been destroyed […].

this is what solas is describing. he approves of an inquisitor utilizing wisps in battle, so long as they care to learn about spirits. but… he also knows that wisps are spirits that were killed and can be reborn, spirits that are too. is this just a trap for the inquisitor? hoping that they’ll learn more about spirits through their practice and that will lead to them realizing that what they’re doing is wrong?

i don’t know. i’m not a solas scholar.

anyway i’m still hung up on the “intelligent spirits” thing. here’s that one dorian and solas banter

solas is on the money here about binding spirits. but the intelligence thing comes up again! if a spirit is intelligent, it shouldn’t be bound or harmed. but a wisp is fine…? granted, that particular line is from a dialogue where he slightly disapproves. and it’s solas. and i don’t know him that well. so. grain of salt. but.

veilguard completely ignores any of this nuance. they say “oh it’s fine because wisps don’t count” and then leave it there. but then when ingellvar talks to a wisp they say this

so… they know wisps are “dead” spirits. right? what solas and cole say is known to the mourn watch. emmrich refers to wisps with “who,” as if they’re people. manfred is right there as our… rather poorly implemented as per my earlier rb, but right there nonetheless, example of a wisp growing into a spirit, actively displaying the humanity of wisps.

but they’re not intelligent, right? so it’s fine, right?

i’m jumping back to inquisition necromancy briefly as a quick added tangent—specifically the spirit mark skill and its upgrade “wisps of the fallen”

the default skill employs a spirit, but the upgraded version employs multiple wisps instead, weaker but more plentiful. i just think that’s interesting. notably, other necromancy skills such as horror (the first skill you unlock lol), power of the dead, and simulacrum have flavor text that describes them as using spirits specifically, not wisps; wisps of the fallen is the only thing on the necromancer tree that specifies wisps

utilizing spirits in magic does not necessarily harm them; spirit healers have been around since origins, and the necromancer skills that utilize spirits don’t imply that they come to harm (save for walking bomb, which is… unclear. in origins it’s described as “magically injecting a target with a corrosive poison” and in 2 and inquisition it’s just “a curse” so i have no idea whether spirits are actually used to cast it?? i’m leaning towards no though).

as a sidenote, the knight-enchanter’s primary ability is called “spirit blade,” but the blade itself is described as being “of solid magic,” not of spirits. it does deal spirit damage though

IF I START ALSO GETTING INTO SPIRIT HEALING and and how spirit healing and origins/2 spirit magic compare with inquisition necromancy i will never shut up so i’m not going to do that right now. but. my POINT is. uh. i don’t really know where i was going with this. something about necromancy and wisps and spirits. wisps being dead/dormant/reborn spirits

the necromancer tree kind of only has 3 abilities that actually deal with the dead. which are

1. death siphon: Every time an enemy dies nearby, you regain both health and mana.

2. power of the dead: Killing enemies attracts spirits that increase the power of your spells for a short time.

3. spirit mark: as above

we know that spirits are drawn to corpses because they can possess them easily and thus leave the fade; this is why the chantry burns their dead and why the nevarrans don’t. that’s really what ties the inherent spirit magic of necromancy to the dead in the first place.

death syphon (as it’s spelled in origins and 2) is particularly interesting because… okay. it’s in the spirit school (death tree) in origins and the spirit tree in da2. it’s described in both as functioning by “consuming entropic energy” from nearby dead. and entropy is its own different thing that comes from “the chaotic nature of the fade” per da2, and god i started getting into it i said i wouldn’t do that. i’ll get back to this sometime

OKAY. THE POINT IS. WISPS. INTELLIGENCE. AUTONOMY. it’s well-established that wisps are spirits in a weaker form, by solas, cole, and (vaguely) the mourn watch (i can’t physically check veilguard so all i have to go off of is a couple clips i saved from emmrich’s recruitment in my ingellvar playthrough and there’s not much in there). so are they not intelligent by nature? does that not imply that controlling wisps is enslaving them just as binding spirits is? that everything the mourn watch does is like, pretty wrong?

and veilguard is just like nah they’re silly little guys who chirp at you and follow you around so it’s okay. we are going to infantilize manfred and make him essentially emmrich’s servant so you don’t think about it too hard. as this one post i’ve had in my drafts for months and will never properly finish says:

tags via @asharaks

yes!! extremely this. i was looking into veilguard codex entries as well because i forgot to do that and there’s this:

emmrich posits that being able to name their own interests and self-reflect is when a wisp is granted personhood. now here’s a snippet from the wiki page for spirits:

as solas says to describe his friend wisdom in his personal quest, “a spirit’s natural state is peaceful semi-existence. […] something similar may reform someday.” and there’s something stuck in my teeth here about weakened spirits and wisps. i don’t… quite have the words to articulate what i’m getting at here, but i think what you said about dolphins and apes vs slime molds is in the same vein. a weakened spirit is still granted personhood because it once had a virtue to embody, even if that virtue has long since been forgotten by those outside the fade, thus leaving the spirit essentially purposeless.

here’s a snippet from world of thedas as well:

wisps are “simple” and only “driven into action by a master with a purpose to give them” (…hate that). but in my reading of veilguard, it’s clear that wisps are capable of thought and feeling. the wisps in the necropolis can be “placated” by emmrich’s abilities. they respond happily to rook. exhibiting emotion is not equivalent to “intelligence,” per solas’s reading, and it’s not equivalent to “self-reflection,” per emmrich’s. wisp wraiths are described as having “more consciousness than an average wisp.”

emmrich: “i dare not call them beings at this juncture”

cole: “a fraction of a fragment of a figment, not enough to be, but the bits that could be”

wisps are not yet fully-formed spirits. but notably cole still disapproves of their use, saying a necromancer inquisitor “breaks” them. prevents them from becoming what they could be, what they already have been, because spirits never die, they exist in a cycle of reincarnation, and that should be central to all of this, too. because based on the above interpretations:

- a spirit does not retain its personhood when it is physically destroyed and reformed as a wisp

- a spirit does retain its personhood when it is weakened to a state of impotence by irrelevance

but the power level of the weakest spirit and a wisp is… probably comparable? the only difference really is in ability to express itself with words, isn’t it? because wisps are described as “impressionable,” but aren’t all spirits? isn’t that how they work? they’re shaped by the world around them?

Veiltober - day 9, Harding

HARDING!! Our fav flirt. Fav rogue. Fav everything!! I can't freaking wait to see where her ark goes with all the dwarf stuff.... I'm foaming at the mouth to find out vuzrehbohbortbhtpuyfuduhkjhfj

Enjoy her looking fierce!

Prompts come from sweet sweet @lynnerdo

WHY, specifically, is it black peoples' facial expressions that are seen as just so comical or exaggerated? analyze the history of this nation's comedy and tell me why you might be predisposed to thinking of black peoples' faces as just, "more emotive" or exaggeratedly funny than a white or nonblack person's

and throughout those years, 00s-10s, many black bloggers -- victims of the mass staff-led purge (under the cover of them being 'russian' while reichblr still exists) -- they DID tell us it was a problem, DID try to educate people who freak out at the insinuation of 'being racist,' DID argue, DID point out the duplicity and the appropriation and the gross equivalence of african american slang with unintelligence, goofiness, etc. and they were ignored, abused, cancelled, chased off, until being eventually mass deleted by our racist transmisogynistic staff.

we didn't do enough, and the generation after us gen z "kids" didn't stop the trend. using the '-ahh' suffix. rizz. no cap. ate. delulu. it's giving. it's serving. crash out. lock in. aura. tea. main character. bruh. slay. real. keep it 100.

all of the following images are or were popular reaction images! what do they all have in common?