I'm convinced most unsolicited concrit boils down to "please make this more to my individual tastes" while pretending not to. This kind of comment just cuts right to the heart of it without pretending otherwise. 

Not that I know of, but it's vaguely guessable that very little of it is close to the surface. If you've played The Descent DLC for Inquisition, you'll remember a long lift ride down just to get to the dwarven inhabited sections of The Deep Roads. And from there it just keeps going. 

Not to mention that magic is part of the Thedas ecosystem so... who knows how much of the vast open spaces that seem impossible by real world standards are actually shored up by the magical properties and quirks of lyrium that still might not be fully fleshed out in the lore. 

I think the basic, real answer you are going to keep hitting against is that the writers don't want an easy solution for sealing up all the Deep Roads in one fell swoop. 

Gut feeling: I don't think it would work that way. Those tunnels are likely very deep and protected, and even if you collapse a few upper layers the surface tunnels are going to keep being opened up... But again, not a structural engineer, so I'm totally speculating based on weird stuff I like to read about mines and caves.

Though, this whole premise could make a great fanfic short story. I'm now imagining something that kicks off a Centralia mine fire type event in Thedas

Well... that would resolve the conflict too easily.   

But I mean in practice, I'm thinking that sounds like a logistical nightmare. You are fighting a vicious hoard of sorta undead guys who are good at tunneling and also have mages... that can presumably lift away sections or rock and debris just like a mage Inquisitor can...  

Also, I'd worry about the structural instability issue for the surface and for other, dwarven-used tunnels and cities when collapsing large sections of an interconnected, underground system of caves, mines, and passageways. I'm not a mining structural engineer, though, so maybe you gotta cross-post this one for the true experts!

It's not unusual for people to feel guilt about all kinds of benign things, but that doesn't mean it's a well-suited response. I always recommend that people who struggle with excess guilt try to work out ways to lessen their guilt response in general. Feeling guilt over things that aren't wrong and don't matter much is not an easy way to go through life and can make a lot of relationships really difficult.

:)

Forcing it tends to lead to greater difficulties, at least that's what I've found. It's also okay to go for a year or two, or more, without updating. Or never updating. 

There is a fic I love, been subscribed to it for years now, and the writer keeps promising to finish soon and apologizes for the slow pace of updates everytime they post a new chapter, which happens with gaps of several months to over a year sometimes...

And honestly, I love their story and enjoy every new chapter, but I never feel upset with them in anyway for the gaps between their updates. It's amazing writing that I get to read for free and I'm just happy about that, even if the story never finishes.

Okay, so one specific thing that helped me get past the excess guilt issue in my life was this: when i notice the guilt about something, imagine it's happening to my friend instead and the only thing they need from me is gentle, understanding feedback. 

So I have to come up with three things to tell them about why they are allowed to ease up on some of the guilt. It might be things like:

• You are doing your best. It's okay to let go of guilt about small mistakes or things you think you could be doing better

• A lot of the people in your life are more understanding than you are probably giving them credit for. Letting go of the guilt allows you to see other people ad they are: generous and understanding towards you

• You owe yourself time to rest, recharge, and take it easy. If you don't build that time in, your brain is going to do it for you by being unable to keep powering through your to do list. You don't have to feel guilty about putting things on hold to take care of yourself

Stuff like that, idk. For me, I always thought this stuff was so much bullshit and a waste of time. But then it worked and my brain stopped hassling me. It's a lot easier to be me now than what it was.

You won't just stop feeling guilty immediately, but you can practice little habits to start changing those pathways in your brain. And over time it can make hard things feel easier.

I had to work out a lot of issues in couples therapy a bunch of years ago, and one of the things that I had to unravel was guilt and people-pleasing as bad emotional habits that weren't serving me or the relationship. I learned tactics to break the habit of feeling like I had to apologize for every little thing.  

Not saying everyone needs therapy for writing related guilt. Just that sometimes it has nothing to do with writing and the guilt is a whole bigger thing that takes work and time to adjust in yourself.

It was a new and active fandom. Someone else, a very skilled and very very popular fic writer, added my fic to one of their rec lists. It got an overwhelming amount of attention and still gets a ton of kudos. It's at more than 1,600 now and nothing else I've written even compares.  

My newer stuff in an older, more favorite fandom of mine is lucky to get 30 kudos or so. And I'm still much happier with other things I've written. That one just got a boost and took off at a time when the fandom was new, large, and active.

One thing to think about when you're tempted to compare yourself to other writers: you probably won't know how old they are or what kind of life experiences have contributed to their ability to dive into the emotions of a character. 

Sometimes very young writers think they suck at understanding emotions, but they're actually just comparing themselves to a 40-year-old who's been in several relationships, lost a parent or other close loved one, and who can think back on how it felt to be 18 but also knows how it feels to be middle-aged. 

It's not fair to yourself to be harshly self-critical when you're comparing yourself to people who have done more life stuff by virtue of having been here longer.  

That said, everyone has a different set of strengths and weaknesses in their writing. Maybe characterization and emotions is something that isn't easy, but other things are. Reading fandom meta conversations about a character's mindset and emotions (I've found this on tumblr especially) can help inform your writing, too.

I'm queer and fully admit I don't play Dragon Age primarily for the combat. And my prinary driving interest in being a fan is talking about characters and reading/writing fanfic.

I do play other games for the combat experience though, like Elden Ring as the current example, so I always have the sense about myself that "yes, even by the most wrongheaded asshole measure of being a 'legit gamer,' I could probably beat them using their own super exclusionary definitions." Which feels good even though I wish it wasn't needed.

He says, "Women are fine creatures... Just, not for me." I did a couple minutes of searching and found someone's video on YouTube that includes it

Yeah, I was too lazy to dig up my old disc from whatever storage box it's buried in, so I just repurchased it digitally and it launches fine as an Xbox360 game within Series X. I still had the Stone Prisoner DLC installed in my system somehow. Not sure about the others... I figured I'd just repurchase those too if needed. But maybe I should take thr time to find my old disc 😅

Oh, I'm thinking of later games or others then. Bad memory for specific games

I have resource links, created by others already!

• Formatting content on AO3 with HTML 

• A Complete Guide to 'Limited HTML' on AO3 by CodenameCarrot

<hr>

The horizontal rule tag

Preowned discs used to be tricky in that if you didn't have the original download codes, unused by previous owner, you were out of luck and had to buy the DLC separately. Could it be an issue like that? Or did BioWare change that policy and make it so all downloads were supposed to go through?

Oh, yeah, I think I know why. 

I think it's that your comment is adjacent to a lot of ongoing conversations about fandom etiquette, unsolicited concrit, and whether or not the purpose of writing fanfic ever needs to include improving as a writer. 

(Full disclosure: I'm of the opinion that no one needs to improve if that's not what they care about or write for. And I think it's a hundred percent okay for people to post error-riddled fanfic regardless of the context.) But I'm also not mad a high school kids for having an opinion that isn't informed by 10+ years of context. Good luck with your writing and reading!

Hah, okay, well, that's heartening to hear, at least for your school. Incidentally also answers my "why be mad" question. Youth! 😅

Agreed. Why be mad about this? 

Where I live it's not like schools even teach grammar anymore. As I understand it, reading and language education has been a nightmare ever since the U.S. ditched phonics education in favor of whole language. 

I'm just glad some younger people are getting into writing more thanks to fanfic. My take on it? They need encouragement to keep going, not people calling them out for educational oversights that aren't even their fault

The tonal whiplash is something special. 

I'm pretty sure it's also the only way to get a flirt option during that scene, which is pretty useful if you're aiming to start the romance. Inquisitor's gotta be like, "men? wtf are you on about Dori— ohhhhhhh, right, right. same, my favorite"

Lmao

I have never looked at this feature as a reader or writer, so it hasn't had any effect on my behavior related to leaving comments

True. I really appreciated body hair being there for my half-drow Tav in BG3, so I feel hopeful that other games might be starting to add it too

Regarding his character growth, you might enjoy his role in the short story Luck in the Gardens by Sylvia Feketekuty, which is part of Tevinter Nights