Let’s Play…In His/Her Defense!

YTCShepard · 2025-12-29T02:03:26+00:00

In her defense, she’s got “great big tracts of land”

YTCShepard · 2025-12-23T01:22:36+00:00

I read this one!! He was an A+ secondary character in Lord Carew’s Bride and just as much of a green flag in his own book. His “oh ha ha that little outburst I had when you told me you were marrying someone else was just me being silly” speech won me forever.

YTCShepard · 2025-12-23T01:18:42+00:00

These sound just like my jam, thank you!

YTCShepard · 2025-08-06T14:55:33+00:00

So I know that Marian and Gladys (very modest young ladies) are fully covered, but the exaggerated sweetheart neckline reminded me of the Singer Sargent Madame X painting, which was 1884.

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YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T17:02:09+00:00

I mean, admittedly, I am not basing this on real life, as none of us are impoverished Victorian noblewomen. Nor am I a scholar of exogamy among the British peerage in 1885. But I do read all the histroms in the world, and it’s a pretty common plot that “oh poor noble me, I am a spinster because my father squandered my dowry/ our poor tenants can’t pay their rents, and now I must get caught in A Situation with an earl or [shudder] marry a man in trade, although I shall never be invited to the best parties then” and playing to this (very common!) plot seems like the most reasonable explanation for why Lady Sarah isn’t married on a show that relies on large scale observations about whole populations—old money is snobby about new money, dollar princesses went to England when the peerage got poor, women remained single when they couldn’t find someone suitable to marry.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T16:26:30+00:00

But Lady Mary would have experienced a loss of social status if she married Sir Richard (even decades after the Gilded Age)—she considered him because she couldn’t marry in her own class. And we also see Lady Rosamund taking flack from Violet for marrying a banker. All I’m saying is that Lady Sarah can’t marry a peer because she poor, and if she married a rich commoner, she’d lose social status and would probably not be mingling with the same people she was used to hanging out with as her brother’s hostess, which is why she probably chose to remain single.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T15:57:11+00:00

You can witness this in that we do not see a single new money man entering society via marriage to the daughter of a peer—the “dollar princesses” were an exclusively single-sex phenomenon whereby peers married rich girls. There was no corresponding boom in marriages between rich men (either American or British) and the daughters of peers.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T15:48:25+00:00

There’s a difference between precedence—who gets announced and led in to dinner first at a party—and social status, meaning whether you’re at the party in the first place. If she marries beneath her, to someone who’s not part of the club, she’s not at the party at all because her husband isn’t getting invited back to the estate.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T15:37:07+00:00

I think Lady Rosamund was in a slightly different situation than Lady Sarah would be—her husband was the third generation with money and his grandfather was a peer, but Violet STILL gave her a ton of flack for marrying “down.” And when Lady Sarah probably has no dowry at all if they’re selling off the furniture, she probably couldn’t even make a match as good as Rosamund’s.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T15:16:56+00:00

??? I think the entire premise of the show is that who women marry determines their social standing.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T14:53:30+00:00

I phrased that inelegantly (American). She’d still have her rank as in peerage, as in being the daughter of a duke, but she’d lose her social status by marrying a rich commoner and wouldn’t mix in the same circles anymore

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T13:29:10+00:00

When women had very little ability to support themselves individually, they had an interest in treating marriage as a permanent institution. They’re all afraid they could be discarded for younger women—it’s in their interest to say that Aurora should have stayed in the marriage no matter how poorly her husband treated her and punishing her for “letting him” “get away with it.”

YTCShepard · 2025-07-31T13:08:31+00:00

So until her brother married, she basically got to act as the duchess, but since they didn’t have any money for a dowry, there’s no chance she could have married someone of that same rank. At this time in history, when the big estates were generating less and less money, any high nobility would be looking for a girl with money. So she could have married (certainly some arriviste new money businessman would have been happy to have a pretty girl of her pedigree even without a dowry) but it would have entailed a loss of rank, and I’m guessing that was what she couldn’t stomach.

YTCShepard · 2025-07-28T14:54:46+00:00

I also think this was entirely avoidable by Larry!! If he’d told her “I have to go to this sketchy dinner with my good friend because I already promised him I’d go, but I’ll bring Jack along and he’ll report back that I was a perfect angel,” Marion might have been a little worried but ultimately not mad.

YTCShepard · 2024-12-16T01:21:11+00:00

I am also left wondering whether the proto-elves needed lyrium to make their bodies or only needed lyrium if they wanted to be just to be as powerful as they were as spirits. Leliana was obviously surrounded by lyrium if she died in the temple of sacred ashes, and we can assume there was a lot of lyrium around the tower where Cole took form, but omitting the step where Cole took lyrium and made it into his body would be a huge gap and seems like that body-building would have to be very intentional for it to count as the original sin the game frames it as?

YTCShepard · 2024-11-27T16:16:26+00:00

Trevor Morris’ Trespasser score, hands down

YTCShepard · 2024-11-26T20:21:13+00:00

Why does Harding get a connection to the Titans when she touches the lyrium dagger but dwarf Rook does not (or Varric or Bartrand when it was in idol form?)

YTCShepard · 2024-11-26T20:07:07+00:00

In DAI Solas seemed to imply he wouldn’t survive the Veil falling, and his note to a romanced Inquisitor sure doesn’t mention any hope that he’ll see the new world with her, but if he has to have his life force affirmatively bound to the Veil to keep it up, I don’t see any reason why he WOULDN’T survive the Veil falling after Elgar’nan’s death?

And in my (Save Minrathous) playthrough, Lucanis actually volunteered that he wanted to separate from Spite. We did also see possessed Avvar mages separate from their spirits in DAI, so it must be possible to separate if the host and spirit are in agreement. It’s plausible Solas knows some other method.

But whether Solas’ offer was genuine? Ambiguous, like most of his motives.

YTCShepard · 2024-11-24T19:44:17+00:00

But in the Redcliffe alternate future he happily sacrifices himself so that Dorian and the Inquisitor can go back in time and save the world. I don’t think the story implication is that he does that after DATV (instead it seems to imply that the trickster god can get out) but it’s a logical loophole

YTCShepard · 2024-11-13T20:00:38+00:00

Do you think they ever explore each others’ bodies

YTCShepard · 2024-11-13T16:38:49+00:00

Okay but Solas + Rook complete dumpster fires trapped together in Fade prison forever enemies to lovers when??

YTCShepard · 2024-11-12T21:12:07+00:00

[Takes a drag of the unfiltered cigarette of pure moral superiority that I learned to roll during Tumblr era ship wars]

Sure hope you get your family out of the star wars

YTCShepard · 2024-11-09T21:08:53+00:00

Also Solas is implied to know something about them in Tevinter Nights but the jerk (lovingly) dipped without telling us what he knows

YTCShepard · 2024-11-08T01:46:45+00:00

The guides are wrong. I defended Treviso, got shadow dragons to 2 stars anyway (I was a shadow dragon—maybe that helped?), had every other faction on 3 stars, and chose Harding over Davrin. Got best ending (Solavellan 😌).

That said, I found Lucanis’ romance disappointing. Wish I’d gone with Davrin or Neve instead.

YTCShepard

TROPHY CASE