still working plotting for my main fic and yknow. i see a lot of posts laughing at cassandra/the inq/justinia/whoever for wanting to recruit hawke as the inquisitor but like there's actually a lot of really disturbing tones to it, when i thought it through.
cassandra recruits cullen into the inquisition. and yeah, he comes in as a military commander, despite the fact that he has no military experience, but i think that's more related to like. the roots of the first inquisition. they later became the templars and the seekers -- cullen is military commander not because they expected to have to fight anyone but because justinia was going to use the writ to build the chantry's military strength if the bloody conclave didn't work out. cullen was hired because he's the fucking knight-commander of kirkwall, and justinia wants him to rebuild the templars. i know people like to laugh about it because it makes "no sense" but the military commander was never meant to do the kind of fighting they ended up having to do in the game -- it was intended to remake the templars. cullen trained hundreds of templar recruits in kirkwall and he's one of the only few that hasn't broken away from the chantry despite the dissolution of the nevarran accord. he's the most obvious pick for commander, when you consider what the inquisition wants.
bw canon hawke is a mage hawke who sided w the mages in kirkwall. they recruited a templar that knows him personally, that has had an antagonistic relationship with him in the later years, that knows how he works and thinks. if they had gotten their hands on hawke, do you actually think they wouldve politely asked him to lead the inquisition?
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Candela Obscura has me in its clutches, especially Sean Finnerty and the Circle of Needle and Thread. I really enjoyed that installment and the brain rot it caused. For some reason I need horror podcasts again. Fortunately for me there are new episodes of the White Vault while I wait for the next episode of Candela.
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Second Act Problems and Izzy's Death
I thought I was out of things to say about That Ending, but now that I'm thinking about the rest of the show, here's what I'm figuring out: to me Izzy's death seems to set the season's flaws in stone, in a way that makes them a lot harder to overlook.
Like, second acts of trilogies are hard--you have to move pieces into place for part 3, while telling enough of a self-contained story to keep the audience invested, but not resolve so much that there's no tension left for part 3. It's difficult, and it's pretty typical for the middle installment of even very good trilogies to be considered the weakest of the three. (I had trouble getting through The Two Towers, and I know I'm not alone in that.)
What we got, with OFMD, was a part II that has a lot of really fun moments, but doesn't hang together very well. There are lots of loose ends, things that don't quite make sense if you think it through, bits that never pay off, but it's fun to watch--and gives the invested viewer a lot to speculate about in terms of how things are going to resolve.
If you have to pick a direction to err in, that's a good one to pick--especially for a sitcom! We've still got part 3 to weave in the loose ends: some of the things that don't make sense now, will make sense once we see where it was going, and the rest will seem less important once we're looking at a complete story.
But, to those of us invested in Izzy's character, his death brings all of that to a screeching halt. The loose ends involving him can never* be woven in. His relationship with Ed can't be resolved, and his relationships with the crew can't develop any further--even if Ed and the other characters come to understand things about him and his death (perhaps through flashbacks, guilt hallucinations or other devices which will give us Con on our screens), that will only develop their arcs, not his.
(*Unless, of course, we get real, autonomous ghosts, a resurrection, or a complete retconning of the death into something else. I'd personally take any of those, over a complete lack of Izzy, but I'm not able to fool myself about it being good writing.)
It also sucks a lot of of the fun out of the earlier parts of the season. For a lot of people who are already upset about how it ended, rewatching the good parts just makes them feel worse. Ditto for speculating about where it's all going. I have some ideas about what the narrative payoff for Izzy's death is going to be, but thinking about them isn't fun.
Izzy's death seems pointless, because one of the challenges of writing a second act is that the audience doesn't yet know the payoff. I'm sure Djenks and the writing team have a plan, and it might even be a good one! But at this point, trying to figure out what the point of it all was, just throws a spotlight on the loose ends, the hurried pacing, the muddled messaging around the themes of love, violence, and revenge, of what exactly piracy represents.
"Doesn't hang together very well, but has a lot of fun moments" is a good direction to err in on a Part 2, as long as you don't plan to suck all the fun out of the room in the last few minutes.
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