vanilkaplays

[vanilkaplays]

Propaganda for Roach (The Witcher): Roach is actually more of a group of horses, because Geralt names every horse he owns the same - but it's sure that wherever the witcher wanders, so does his horse.

Roach does a tough job accompanying her rider throughout the dangerous terrain infested with monsters, and no less dangerous encounters on the road. Her most iconic depiction are the lovable chestnut from the 1st season of the Netflix series (played by a male horse named Zeusz) and the bay from Witcher 3, altough the Roaches from the earlier TV series and movie also deserve a mention. Her name in Polish (Płotka) has a double meaning - it's a diminuitive of płoć, a feminine noun and a name of a small fish species, but it's also a stand-in for a small catch, or an irrelevant person.

In the game she is truly the impressive jack-of-all trades, carrying heavy trophies, acting as Geralt's warhorse and taking a pretty fair amount of time in the presence of actual monsters before she spooks. She's potentially the fastest racehorse in the Northern Kingdoms and she faithfully finds her rider when she's called (not without the iconic shenanigans, of course). Her ability to spawn in the weirdest places and positions has become a meme that added an unintended comic relief to the game, and it's referenced in her Gwent card. She's the reliable, silent companion throughout the game. Well, mostly silent, because in one DLC quest she speaks. Or rather, Geralt can hear her speak. I thoroughly recommend watching the scene in Polish dubbing, it's hilarious - her voice actor is a radio presenter, who definitely has a lot of fun. (if you don't mind occasional commentary, I was able to find the scene with polish dubbing and english subtitles: https://youtu.be/lGnVZ-Vt7Lo?si=R-Tq7TqakegAxNTO&t=746)

Roach's presence in various Witcher media has always underlined the humanity of her owner - Geralt, who's perceived in-world as a cold-blooded mutant and sometimes expected to be deprived of human emotions cares about his horses, despite the utilitarian nature of the relation. The horses also treat him like an ordinary human. The fact that he names all of his horses the same is also one of his humanising quirks that his friends make fun of. The fact Roach is always a mare also is a subversion of expectation - in a grim, medieval high fantasy world one would expect a hypermasculine hero to ride into battle on a back of a stallion - but Geralt is a deconstruction of a classic high fantasy hero, and he prefers to ride mares because he considers them more reliable.

So to sum up, Roach is a horse with many faces, a faithful companion, a mischievous comic relief, an important narrative tool, a feminist icon and a very good girl!

Pics:

#The Witcher #not gonna watch the video because I haven't played TW2 and TW3 yet #but the post is good

[vanilkaplays]

#I've finished two balanced playthroughs and still have two going #but all the other characters I have going are on tactician now #finished one playthrough on tactician so far

[vanilkaplays]

During the MP playthrough, I had my barbarian in medium armour for a good while, and I know that might not be ideal for her optimal functioning, but I'm unfortunately not immune to shapes.

#Baldur's Gate 3 #BG3

[vanilkaplays]

This machine kills AI

[vanilkaplays]

the birth of bhaal's chosen

#whoa #love how the waves of the blood sea transition into her loose hair #Baldur's Gate 3

[vanilkaplays]

such rage in such a little body

[vanilkaplays]

Part of me

#Dragon Age

[vanilkaplays]

Im curious.

#I've never watched the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise because I know Trip dies an extremely dumb death #I didn't see it so it didn't happen 😜 #that's how it works right?

[vanilkaplays]

#Baldur's Gate 3

[vanilkaplays]

It was always funny to me how other companions would just stand there while Gale delivered this rizz lol

#Baldur's Gate 3

[vanilkaplays]

Thoughts on the delightful Baldur’s Gate 3 frog?

My excitement about it was quickly assuaged when it very nearly resulted in a TPK for my party because of the Madness.

Anatomically it is weird, but only because the arms are hella long. Not that such proportions don't occur—Leptobrachium definitely has similarly weird limbs. But the rest of the body doesn't fit.

As for the madness… well, amphibian toxins can do weird things. Just, not usually when you hit them with a sword.

#Baldur's Gate 3

[vanilkaplays]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[vanilkaplays]

Dragon Age: Inquisition | The Exalted Plains

#Dragon Age

[vanilkaplays]

#cute

[vanilkaplays]

I had this bug where the game flagged looting Nere's corpse as theft. This sort of led to a funny moment when my durge cut off his head and looted his body...

There was this Duergar rebel who caught her "stealing", confronted her about it, and the game gave me this dialogue option to talk out of it. So perfectly fitting, considering what she'd been caught taking, that I just had to use it.

Now I have to imagine her standing there, still covered in blood, Nere's head hanging from one hand by the hair, bloodied knife in another, giving the dwarf this response, and so making the threat a real thing that could very much happen. An excellent durge moment and I didn't even have to come up with it.

#Baldur's Gate 3 #BG3

[vanilkaplays]

some of my favourite sign fails <3

[vanilkaplays]

#Baldur's Gate 3