10369 réponses à ce sujet

[DreGregoire]

Reika wrote...

Sarah1281 wrote...

Though I think being a Warden would keep a woman from getting turned into a Broodmother. Would rather not find out the hard way though.

That was confirmed, yeah, but how in the world would the Warden know that? They're not even positive about the Warden-baby things we know about.

 

Because being a Warden protects them from other things the Taint can do to a non-warden.

The warden taint is a modified taint to start with, so regular taint no longer effects the warden so according to my own (sometimes warped) logic brood mother taint would also no longer cause changes in a warden

[Reika]

DreGregoire wrote...

The warden taint is a modified taint to start with, so regular taint no longer effects the warden so according to my own (sometimes warped) logic brood mother taint would also no longer cause changes in a warden

Thank you, that's pretty much what I was thinking.

Besides considering how violently darkspawn and wardens react around one another, I can't really see darkspawn trying to capture female wardens.

The Architecht being an exception, but he was doing things differently.

[Sarah1281]

Reika wrote...

Sarah1281 wrote...

Though I think being a Warden would keep a woman from getting turned into a Broodmother. Would rather not find out the hard way though.

That was confirmed, yeah, but how in the world would the Warden know that? They're not even positive about the Warden-baby things we know about.

 

Because being a Warden protects them from other things the Taint can do to a non-warden.

That's a guess that the Warden could make but at the end of the day I feel it's rather foolish for a female Warden to be so certain of this that she completely dismisses the possibility that if she were captured by darkspawn that she could become a Broodmother. WE know that she couldn't but until a female Warden is attempted to be turned into one and it doesn't work, they're just guessing.

[DreGregoire]

So much of Dragon Age is up for personal interpretation, but I think that's part of what keeps people playing it! Yay Dragon Age! LOL

[DreGregoire]

Sarah1281 wrote...

Reika wrote...

Sarah1281 wrote...

Though I think being a Warden would keep a woman from getting turned into a Broodmother. Would rather not find out the hard way though.

That was confirmed, yeah, but how in the world would the Warden know that? They're not even positive about the Warden-baby things we know about.

 

Because being a Warden protects them from other things the Taint can do to a non-warden.

That's a guess that the Warden could make but at the end of the day I feel it's rather foolish for a female Warden to be so certain of this that she completely dismisses the possibility that if she were captured by darkspawn that she could become a Broodmother. WE know that she couldn't but until a female Warden is attempted to be turned into one and it doesn't work, they're just guessing.

Heh scarier thought! Maybe exposure to the brood mother makes you turn into one when the taint finally takes you! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo! *winks*

[nefand]

That's a guess that the Warden could make but at the end of the day I feel it's rather foolish for a female Warden to be so certain of this that she completely dismisses the possibility that if she were captured by darkspawn that she could become a Broodmother. WE know that she couldn't but until a female Warden is attempted to be turned into one and it doesn't work, they're just guessing.

The only real example we have is the one provided by Utha, but even then there are extenuating circumstances.

Modifié par nefand, 03 octobre 2010 - 06:47 .

[DreGregoire]

It's been a while since I made it to the brood mother but I got the impression there was a lot more to becoming a brood mother than just being exposed. I can't remember the specifics of the tale at the moment but just walking by or defeating her isn't likely to make you become one Just my take based on my limited exposure on a playthrough of the brood mother section

[Sarah1281]

DreGregoire wrote...

It's been a while since I made it to the brood mother but I got the impression there was a lot more to becoming a brood mother than just being exposed. I can't remember the specifics of the tale at the moment but just walking by or defeating her isn't likely to make you become one Just my take based on my limited exposure on a playthrough of the brood mother section

Hespith says this:
"First day, they come and catch everyone.
Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat.
Third day, the men are all gnawed on again.
Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate.
Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn.
Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams.
Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew.
Eighth day, we hated as she is violated.
Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin.
Now she does feast, as she's become the beast."

So even if at some point the Architect had tried to turn Utha into a Broodmother and failed, the Warden still has no way of knowing this.

[nefand]

DreGregoire wrote...

It's been a while since I made it to the brood mother but I got the impression there was a lot more to becoming a brood mother than just being exposed. I can't remember the specifics of the tale at the moment but just walking by or defeating her isn't likely to make you become one Just my take based on my limited exposure on a playthrough of the brood mother section

Based on what the dwarf waxes poetic about, the implication that I understood were that it involved ingestion of infected flesh and bile, and forced insemination.

I remember the entire thing striking me as odd because the inclusion of bile indicated that bodily fluids other than blood could be infection vectors, and (this is where the clinical background kicked in) my first through was "so the taint is an STD, too?"

But clearly it isn't, at least not as depicted in the books or game... at which point I chalked it up to the Male Fantasy Model of Superhero Design and went on my merry little way.

[DreGregoire]

*giggles and goes to restart awakenings on Aonghas just so he can have different armor and she can take pics.*

[LupusYondergirl]

You think that's bad? I put Anders' head on Alistair yesterday and found the one set of mage robes that were incorrectly coded so a non-mage could wear them so I could take screenshots of him with Maggie.

(I shouldn't even admit that in public. I'm such a goober.)

[DreGregoire]

*giggles* Welcome to the goober club!

Anders: Just cause you're the commander doesn't mean you get to... command... oh nevermind.

Modifié par DreGregoire, 03 octobre 2010 - 08:44 .

[Merilsell]

Reika wrote...
 Keep the main elements: Blight, treaties, landsmeet. But handle the timing and interactions your way. I can understand for gameplay why you're limited to your Warden and 3 party members, but in some cases it doesn't really work storywise.

That's the fun part of fanfic, you're keeping the main elements, but re-writing stuff to fit your head.

Completely agree. The first blight stories that were written were rather strict and followed the game more closely. Nothing against it if that is your thing, but after people have played the game so many times and know the plot by heart you simple have to be more original to keep reader interested. Surely there are basic things you should keep, as said above, but it's nice to take that and play in my own blight sandbox Oh and I noticed that my attention span runs low when people are simply using the game dialogue while writing, even better when seizing the standard answers for the Warden too.

I for myself mix it with a lot of original scenes and focus to extend those around in my blight story and the basic plot. It's fun to write it that way...and hopefully for the readers too. Don't know since I never get feedback, lol.

[Sarah1281]

Merilsell wrote...

Reika wrote...
 Keep the main elements: Blight, treaties, landsmeet. But handle the timing and interactions your way. I can understand for gameplay why you're limited to your Warden and 3 party members, but in some cases it doesn't really work storywise.

That's the fun part of fanfic, you're keeping the main elements, but re-writing stuff to fit your head.

Completely agree. The first blight stories that were written were rather strict and followed the game more closely. Nothing against it if that is your thing, but after people have played the game so many times and know the plot by heart you simple have to be more original to keep reader interested. Surely there are basic things you should keep, as said above, but it's nice to take that and play in my own blight sandbox Oh and I noticed that my attention span runs low when people are simply using the game dialogue while writing, even better when seizing the standard answers for the Warden too.

I for myself mix it with a lot of original scenes and focus to extend those around in my blight story and the basic plot. It's fun to write it that way...and hopefully for the readers too. Don't know since I never get feedback, lol.

I try not to get too repetitive but I've had a bad case of fic fatigue for quite some time so I'm mostly just interested in getting the damn thing done already. Fortunately, I'm nearly done with my last treaty...which has thus far taken, like, twice as long as anything else. But then, it's Orzammar so that's to be expected.

At this point, I'm insanely grateful for feedback as that's pretty much the only thing that will convince me to waste two days a week every week getting a new chapter done, particularly since I've started getting insanely busy.

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

On the subject of broodmother taint, Gaider implied that female Wardens could still be corrupted to the point of being broodmothers, but as they are infertile they cannot reproduce. So the question would be more, do the darkspawn know this and not bother? Do their senses scream "Female! Take it!" or "Warden! Kill it!" ? Does the drive to attempt reproduction overcome anything else?



I...tend to lean towards the former, as it gives an interesting explanation as to why the Grey Wardens don't have many female members. Maybe they shy away from recruiting women because the Calling will lead them to the Deep Roads and, compared to men, a possibly horrific end.



As with lots of DA:O stuff though, it's open to interpretation at the moment.

[Aroihkin]

LupusYondergirl wrote...

DreGregoire wrote...

DreGregoire wrote...

@ LupusYondergirl

This is somebody interupting right? I always use "And I'm going to keep talk..."

I've
never used (--, converted to one line) to indicate a person interupting
another. l always used it when a person is talking and then interupts
themselves with another thought, but maybe I've been doing it wrong for
over 20 years hahahah

Technically an ellipsis (three periods) would be used to indicate a pause in conversation or a trailing off, not an abrupt break. (which some people still don't even accept as proper, but I think a century of established usage trumps my creative writing professor last semester.)

Or it's used, more traditionally, for an omission of text from a quoted passage, but that wouldn't really apply to fiction.

It's fiddly stuff that almost no one does right, including quite a few published authors.  I just know it because I have no choice.  The same reason I know where one would apply a comma, semicolon, or colon.  To think, I used to know things like the best places to get cool boots and the BPM of almost every Ministry song. 

I honestly wouldn't worry about it, though.  I'm one of those OCD academia types.

I just think the two dash to single dash conversion is the reasoning behind their change, since the most common word processing program supports it when the second most common does not.

I dunno, it looked just like a single short - that they converted everything to, and copypasted into a text file as a single dash. I think you give the site that periodically deletes whole formatting tricks too much credit. Like this:

Sarah1281 wrote...

Aroihkin wrote...

Writers who post on FFnet may be interested to know that, at some point in the recent past, every single -- got converted to a single -.

I assume it's part of their crusade of stupid against text-based linebreaks, and am kind of surprised they didn't just delete every - in fics.

...Well, again. Anyway. I think they did that once in 2002, but I could be remembering when they slaughtered every single asterisk and tilde and all of their extended families.

Oh, wonderful. I used to use '- -' as a line-break but a few months ago it deleted all of them so now I keep having people reviewing my stories and oh-so-helpfully suggesting that I seperate different scenes so it's less confusing.

Yep! That's when I went on my last FFnet rant, and then spent a full day going through a novel's worth of combined fanfics and inserting their ugly, never-works-right-for-me hr breaks because I was done with it. So they turn around and bork something else a few months later, of course, leaving me with the choice to spend several days making an even more complicated fix on a novel's worth of combined fanfic, or just leaving it as-is.

Since the "--" into "-" thing doesn't render my writing into total chaos (it just makes me look kind of awkward, especially in sudden thought/dialogue interruptions) I'm leaving it as-is this time. Most of my stories have a note at the top now stating that FFnet likes to **** my formatting, anyway.

I spent all day yesterday copying IO and all four TAFs over to AO3 though. I have another large other-fandom story to copy over as well. In IO's case I had to go through and manually fix each instance, since I don't have any of my DA stuff up on my personal site yet as a backup. Good to have a backup/another backup on the web, though.

Modifié par Aroihkin, 04 octobre 2010 - 04:57 .

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

I used to use *** as linebreaks...I still haven't gone back to my old old novel-length stories to fix THAT up.



Fortunately the hr breaks have been working ok...I think they're too big and immersion-breaking (like suddenly seeing BOLDED FULL CAPS), but it's better than having the next text linebreak idea crumble I guess...

[soignee]

I like the lines <.<



To me when I do them it's a very clear THIS PART OF THE STORY IS OVER NOW AND THERE'S A CHANGE OF PACE/SCENERY. I didn't realise they were so hated D:

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

Well, I don't *hate* them, I just prefer something subtler I guess.

[Maria13]

Sarah1281 wrote...

DreGregoire wrote...

It's been a while since I made it to the brood mother but I got the impression there was a lot more to becoming a brood mother than just being exposed. I can't remember the specifics of the tale at the moment but just walking by or defeating her isn't likely to make you become one Just my take based on my limited exposure on a playthrough of the brood mother section

Hespith says this:
"First day, they come and catch everyone.
Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat.
Third day, the men are all gnawed on again.
Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate.
Fifth day, they return and it's another girl's turn.
Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams.
Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew.
Eighth day, we hated as she is violated.
Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin.
Now she does feast, as she's become the beast."

So even if at some point the Architect had tried to turn Utha into a Broodmother and failed, the Warden still has no way of knowing this.

Nothing like going back to the game.  I think frankly, female wardens would not be concerned whether they would ultimately become broodmothers or not, just being subject to the process outlined above is truly the stuff of nightmares, anyone's nightmare.... 

Is not going into the Deep Roads a very, very faillible way of ending one's life? I mean it's fine for warriors if they perish in the course of battle, but even that can never be guaranteed...  Look what happened to Bergen... 

But for a GW healer mage for example, what are they going to do against the darkspawn masses, heal themselves again and again...  Makes no sense.  One of the GW commanders has to bite the bullet and say "Deep Roads: Traditional but strictly optional... You want a way out... We can assist..."

[Reika]

Maria13 wrote...

Nothing like going back to the game.  I think frankly, female wardens would not be concerned whether they would ultimately become broodmothers or not, just being subject to the process outlined above is truly the stuff of nightmares, anyone's nightmare.... 

Is not going into the Deep Roads a very, very faillible way of ending one's life? I mean it's fine for warriors if they perish in the course of battle, but even that can never be guaranteed...  Look what happened to Bergen... 

But for a GW healer mage for example, what are they going to do against the darkspawn masses, heal themselves again and again...  Makes no sense.  One of the GW commanders has to bite the bullet and say "Deep Roads: Traditional but strictly optional... You want a way out... We can assist..."

Agreed on all points. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't some GW who quietly committ suicide rather than face the Deep Roads, healers or not, females or not.

Of course, I wonder what the general suicide rate is amongst GW to begin with, I'm sure the nightmares alone take their toll after awhile.

[Maria13]

Reika wrote...

Maria13 wrote...

Nothing like going back to the game.  I think frankly, female wardens would not be concerned whether they would ultimately become broodmothers or not, just being subject to the process outlined above is truly the stuff of nightmares, anyone's nightmare.... 

Is not going into the Deep Roads a very, very faillible way of ending one's life? I mean it's fine for warriors if they perish in the course of battle, but even that can never be guaranteed...  Look what happened to Bergen... 

But for a GW healer mage for example, what are they going to do against the darkspawn masses, heal themselves again and again...  Makes no sense.  One of the GW commanders has to bite the bullet and say "Deep Roads: Traditional but strictly optional... You want a way out... We can assist..."

Agreed on all points. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't some GW who quietly committ suicide rather than face the Deep Roads, healers or not, females or not.

Of course, I wonder what the general suicide rate is amongst GW to begin with, I'm sure the nightmares alone take their toll after awhile.

It's always quite possible that their brothers and sisters might help them on the way too...

[Corker]

LupusYondergirl wrote...

It's fiddly stuff that almost no one does right, including quite a few published authors.  I just know it because I have no choice.  The same reason I know where one would apply a comma, semicolon, or colon.  To think, I used to know things like the best places to get cool boots and the BPM of almost every Ministry song. 

I honestly wouldn't worry about it, though.  I'm one of those OCD academia types.

*votes for worrying about it* 

Obviously I can't speak for all humanity, but I definitely parse an ellpsis and a long dash differently when I'm reading, according to exactly the rules LupusYondergirl has said.  It get really confusing when an author is using a different personal convention - I don't understand why all these characters who are obviously drifting off, lost in thought, get mad when someone else starts talking and "interrupts" them.

Technique matters, and that includes grammar, punctuation and spelling.  A funny book like "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" can make the topic (well, at least punctuation) less painful.  And while the rules can get Byzantine, the most common ones that you'll need for genre fiction writing really aren't that bad.

/rant

[Aroihkin]

Shadow of Light Dragon wrote...

Well, I don't *hate* them, I just prefer something subtler I guess.

This. And I do kind of hate them because FFnet insists that hr tags will eat any empty lines above or below, so I end up with:

Paragraph of stuff, la de da--
HR SCENEBREAK THAT SPANS THE WHOLE WIDTH OF THE PAGE, HELLO!                     
Paragraph of new stuff crammed right on top. Hi guys! Our site doesn't allow paragraph indenting, so we all space between paragraphs, but not this time!

...Drives me a little nuts. And it would be one thing if they required their hr breaks and stated as much, but no. They just like to periodically retroactively delete formatting across the entire database. Super-duper.



Edit:

Corker wrote...

LupusYondergirl wrote...

It's fiddly stuff that almost no one does right, including quite a few published authors.  I just know it because I have no choice.  The same reason I know where one would apply a comma, semicolon, or colon.  To think, I used to know things like the best places to get cool boots and the BPM of almost every Ministry song.

I honestly wouldn't worry about it, though.  I'm one of those OCD academia types. {smilie}

*votes for worrying about it*

Obviously I can't speak for all humanity, but I definitely parse an ellpsis and a long dash differently when I'm reading, according to exactly the rules LupusYondergirl has said.  It get really confusing when an author is using a different personal convention - I don't understand why all these characters who are obviously drifting off, lost in thought, get mad when someone else starts talking and "interrupts" them.

Technique matters, and that includes grammar, punctuation and spelling.  A funny book like "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" can make the topic (well, at least punctuation) less painful.  And while the rules can get Byzantine, the most common ones that you'll need for genre fiction writing really aren't that bad.

/rant

Agreeing with Corker here. I read "--" and "..." (especially at the end of dialogue) very differently.

When I write, depending on the characters involved, I sometimes abuse both. My Raistlin tends to trail off a lot... cue thoughtful/sly look here, but Akara in the same conversation wants to know "What the f*ck was that fo--! Hey!" as she gets yanked through a doorway, or something thrown at her, etc.

One character all-out interrupting the other, though, I always use "--" because it's abrubt. It has punch to it, like someone cutting the other one off. I do that for thought process too, if a character is contemplating the meaning of socks and then suddenly a nearby car blows up, it might end in "--" and cut to a new paragraph with the car suddenly blowing up.

Though I've never actually had an english class, so for all I know I butcher the living hell out of them myself. XD

Modifié par Aroihkin, 04 octobre 2010 - 12:27 .

[FutileSine]

Hey guys, just a quick observation that could help some of you out:

First off:  I totally borrowed this idea from nefand - so thank her for coming up with it - but its the idea of writing and posting chapter summaries.  I placed my chapter summary page as the first chapter in my story, so its the first page a new reader sees.  Seeing as how my story is almost to 100,000 words (yay?) I thought readers would find it nice in order to catch up on what I had written so far...and especially to give them the chance to avoid my earlier chapters where I was still getting into the groove of writing (and still am trying to do, frankly....Alas I am no SoLD or Addai or Surely, or Lupus...or [insert your name here]!)

But people are actually reading my earlier chapters!  I don't really know why because no one has told me anything specific yet, but I *think* the readers like that they can see what my plot is through the chapter summaries, and liking where I am going, they decide to actually read the chapters, or start on the chapters that they think look most interesting, instead of having to sludge through the beginning where they may not like it because unfortunately I clung too close to canon or whatever other reason...

Basically, I got my highest views ever for one day for my paltry little story yesterday, and I place it fully on the fact that I did a chapter summary page...as while this was one of my longest chapters, I don't consider it one of my most shock-worthy ones.   

So, maybe some of you might want to consider it too.  

Modifié par FutileSine, 04 octobre 2010 - 12:31 .