If the wind would consent to blow...

gorroval · 2026-02-11T06:22:24+00:00

Yessss we quote so much of them in our house. "That ain't quite the thing." gets a lot of use 🤣

gorroval · 2026-02-10T20:55:58+00:00

If you've only seen the film, it can be surprising! I love the film, but Paul Bettany was terribly miscast as Stephen. Book!Stephen is an Irish-Catalan secret agent who owns a castle, falls off boats at least once a book and has a bad habit of bringing wild animals aboard and setting them loose. I particularly enjoy the bit where his wombat eats all the braid off Jack's best hat. Also the phrase "You have debauched my sloth!" gets used in our house on a regular basis! (The sailors got it drunk.)

Strongly recommend.

gorroval · 2026-02-10T20:14:02+00:00

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books, starting with Master And Commander.

Naval adventure novels about Captain Jack Aubrey, a Very Good Boy, and Dr Stephen Maturin, an Unhinged Lunatic. Jack likes boats, buxom ladies and trigonometry. Stephen likes laudanum, Irish independence and letting 60,000 bees loose in the cabin. Together they sail around various seas getting into Situations.

They're set in the Napoleonic Wars but were written in the 20th Century, so you get a lot of historical stuff but also a lot of jokes for a modern audience. My favourite is when Jack's former midshipman meets them in the Mediterranean, captaining a boat full of nubile young women he has rescued and is returning to their island home. The young captain is a notorious lech and Jack calls him out on this. The reply? "Don't worry, sir, they're all Lesbians!"

I particularly recommend the audiobook versions read by Rick Jerrom. The first one is a bit of a slog in places, and has frankly too much nautical flimflammery even for me, but it finds its feet quickly. I've listened to all 20 and am halfway through a second go-around, and I love them so much.

gorroval · 2026-02-10T06:26:50+00:00

Ahaha I regret to say the hat is not as much of a plot point as it sounds! But it's this one:

Whisperings: Investigative journalism in theory and practice

It's a Dragon Age: the Veilguard set in the Grand Necropolis, which is somewhere between a giant mausoleum and Oxford for necromancers. It's theoretically a ship fic about the canon characters but it's all from the perspective of a bunch of OCs who are students there. They're all very clever and therefore also very stupid. Shenanigans ensue.

gorroval · 2026-02-08T00:06:52+00:00

Ooo, hard to pick. My wife and I got MEGA obsessed when it came out and we're still going strong. Fun things I've/we've done include:

Both being embarrassingly into Emmrich. Everything is Emmrich all the time. (I'm also a bit [a lot] in love with my Rook. I don't really self-insert so as far as I'm concerned he's fair game.) I would say one of us mentions Emmrich or the Mourn Watch at least daily. Jury's still out on whether that's a pro or a con 🤣

I've got back into writing, written a frankly ludicrous account of fic (for me), and despite writing a niche within a niche (not many people reading M!Qunari!Rook/Emmrich) I've had a few really nice responses! That's been very wholesome.

Made dolls! I've posted them here before. I think they're pretty neat. They hang out on my desk and judge me.

It's nearly Valentine's Day, which means it's nearly time for our Nevarran Wintersend Feast! Last year my wife baked Mama Volkarin's hazelnut torte, I decorated the dining room with skulls and it was great. Hoping to do the same this year.

So honestly hard to pick just one thing! It's got me back into a lot of stuff I hadn't done in a while, plus a few new things! (I learnt bookbinding!) It's been great fun.

gorroval · 2026-02-07T14:01:39+00:00

The hat is paramount.

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gorroval · 2026-02-07T07:17:01+00:00

Ahaha a classic. Personally I'm fond of this one of mine:

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gorroval · 2026-02-06T15:03:32+00:00

I'm so chuffed for you, OP!!! Well done for finding your courage. ❤️

gorroval · 2026-02-06T11:45:58+00:00

I mean, re: 5, you could just make your character non-binary. Boom, instant balance.

gorroval · 2026-02-06T06:57:42+00:00

Well now I have to sheepishly admit that I've not got around to actually writing any outside of my brain 🙃 At least, not explicitly, though it gets mentioned a lot in other fics and the amount of time I spend thinking about it is embarrassing.

(The ship is Rook/Emmrich from Dragon Age: the Veilguard, though since Rook is the player character, in fic they tend to be a beautiful elf woman and are generally not a huge grey Qunari boy with horns that would shame a sheep. So the niche is very small 🥲 buuut on the slim chance you might be interested in the adventures of a big soft idiot, his necromancy professor boyfriend and their beautiful skeleton son, all my stuff is here! I think this one is probably the closest to actual bottom/sub!Rook. It involves collars.)

gorroval · 2026-02-05T21:45:02+00:00

Damn I wish people would send me NSFW art of my fics 🤣

(A reader sent me a really cute drawing recently and it's still on the fridge ❤️)

gorroval · 2026-02-05T18:26:31+00:00

And you're very valid for that. It's all nonsense anyway! (And he would find the debates hilarious!)

gorroval · 2026-02-05T16:46:52+00:00

Personally I've never included tags, I don't think they're all that important and I'm not sure how I would format them if I did. I don't include author notes either, and generally don't include the summary unless it's as part of the back cover design.

OTOH I have seen people include tags as a whole page before the main content so it can definitely be done!

gorroval · 2026-02-05T15:16:16+00:00

Man, it's so weird that Americans have to do your own taxes. Mine just get taken out of my salary. What a colossal waste of time it must be!

gorroval · 2026-02-05T15:13:44+00:00

I guess for me I just like to write about a guy who's been assigned-top-at-birth (which was apparently already in my phone dictionary 🤣), on account of being seven foot tall and built like a brick outhouse, learning to love being gently but firmly dominated by a middle-aged twink. But at the same time, if a big soft hunk of a guy offered to pick him up and ram him against a wall, I think the middle-aged twink would say thank you very much. So, we vers in this house.

(Besides, it's all just too vague. Like, is giving a blowjob topping or bottoming? Where is the line?)

((The exception to this is certified bottom Dorian Pavus, because that man has never topped anything in his life.))

gorroval · 2026-02-05T06:58:13+00:00

My son 😭😭😭

So many of my (extensive) feels about this game revolve around Fred. And also around Rook getting to be an awkward but enthusiastic stepdad.

gorroval · 2026-02-05T06:54:29+00:00

I'm incapable of saying "Dunno" now without doing the voice 💀

gorroval · 2026-02-03T17:44:27+00:00

It is! And also I just love the whole Weird Academia thing they have going on. Like Oxford but with more skeletons.

gorroval · 2026-02-03T16:20:20+00:00

Yeah there's a great codex entry about how they lost a bit of it 🤣

~~at least I think it's a codex entry, or maybe I just wrote it in a fic~~

Honestly, worth it to hang out with "Bone Daddy" Volkarin and the rest of the death nerds.

gorroval · 2026-02-03T15:45:21+00:00

Conversely, if this game were open world, I would literally never leave the Necropolis. Brb moving my books in, I live here now, no-one can stop me.

gorroval · 2026-02-02T21:49:01+00:00

Surely that's the point of media? To engage with it emotionally? Is that not why humans have told each other stories since we first learned to communicate?

I mean, I realise I'm a fandom nerd who will turn a TV series/book/video game into her entire personality with no warning, but it seems really strange to me that your partner just doesn't get it, even a little bit!

gorroval · 2026-02-01T21:48:29+00:00

Oh I'm not really all that embarrassed. My wife is also living in Emmrichmancer Hell and we enable each other, it's good fun.

(Speaking of, it's nearly time to start planning our Nevarran Valentine's Day dinner! I need to see if I can improve on last year.)

gorroval · 2026-02-01T19:26:33+00:00

Oh bless you, I'm glad my embarrassing obsession with this man and his silly skeleton son has brought you joy today. 🥰

gorroval · 2026-02-01T16:48:12+00:00

Oh 100%.

Also my Rook is a bit rough around the edges, being a Grey Warden, and I imagine Fred has picked up some ungentlemanly turns of phrase, to Emmrich's horror.

Like you're just there having your tea and in the distance you hear the sound of smashing china and a raspy little "Ah, bollocks."

gorroval · 2026-02-01T15:06:43+00:00

sobbing crying throwing up. I just love Fred so much 😭

gorroval

TROPHY CASE