MIKE SCHUR: I had a list of six things on the wall that every episode had to do.
Number one: Is it funny? It’s a network comedy show. If it’s not funny, we are blowing it. My number one fear is that people watching the show would suddenly feel, “Why are you lecturing me on how to live my life?” That is not the point of the show. The point is to raise questions and we need to do that in a funny way. So if the episode idea wasn’t funny, if it didn’t have enough comedy in it, it would go away. It is a specific goal of the show to never seem like it’s homework.
Number two: Are the characters being developed? That was a huge deal for season one. Knowing what we were gonna reveal at the end of the year, by the time we got there, we’d had to have explained to the audience who these people were and essentially why they ended up in hell. That was the big thing. If you didn’t understand why all four of them were being tortured, then the twist would seem random. It had to be properly set up in the Usual Suspects way.
Number three: Does the episode ask and answer a question about ethics, about good or bad behavior? Obvious reasons for that.
Number four: Is it compelling? I had this real fear that we were gonna seem like we’re spinning our wheels. This is something Damon Lindelof talked to me about because I consulted him a lot before while I was working on the show in the early days. One of the things he said was that they ran into trouble with LOST when they felt like they were spinning their wheels. They were adding new characters and kinda running in place and you get out an episode where Jack gets a tattoo, and that’s not compelling. This show has to be endlessly compelling and full of momentum in order for it to feel vital and interesting.
Number five: Is it consistent with the long game? The long game being they are all in hell and are being tortured. We couldn’t ever do anything that would contradict the big picture, the big secret picture. It was at the level of “you can’t ever see Michael, Ted’s character, alone.” You can’t ever see him because if he were alone, he would not be in character. He’d be evilly chuckling and laughing hysterically at the foibles that the humans were undergoing. So we had all these really specific rules like “Is there any moment in the entire show where – if you went back and looked – you’d go ‘Oh that doesn’t make any sense’?” Which was hard but fun.
And the last one: Are we making use of the premise? We set this show in the afterlife. If we didn’t have one insane thing – a dog flying into the sun and exploding – or something magical, Janet popping in and out, something that couldn’t happen anywhere but in the afterlife, if we weren’t doing that at least once an episode, then again, we felt like we were blowing it.
These are the six things that every episode had to do.
MARC EVAN JACKSON: I think you have a bright future in television.
Oh no, how dare a female character say something mean to the protagonist?
That’s… not the impression I’ve gotten at all? Like, maybe Anon knows a person who’s explained it that way, or maybe they’re just strawmanning because they like Bianca and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t, but that’s not me nor anyone else I’ve seen with a dislike of Bianca.
Varric trusted Bianca with the knowledge of red lyrium and the thaig where it was found, and she decided her own curiosity took precedence over that trust. Not only did she study it herself, but she led Corypheus (in Larius’s body) straight to the red lyrium, and she gave him unfettered access without supervision. It’s unclear how long she waited between getting Varric’s letter about red lyrium at Haven and coming to Varric about Valammar, but given the time gap before “Well, Shit” pops (only after “Here Lies the Abyss”), she probably waited at least a while. She also didn’t come clean about what she’d done until confronted with the evidence.
“I was doing you a favor!” Bianca claimed about her reasons for messing with the red lyrium… Except she didn’t ask Varric before studying the red lyrium (let alone before involving a stranger), and she never told him she was doing it. She probably never would have told him if he hadn’t written her about Haven.
And then there’s their relationship:
Bianca: You’ll have to stop by before Bogdan comes back. You should see my new workshop. Varric: I’ll see what I can do. You know your family will kill me if I stop by, right? Bianca: They’re not going to kill you. Varric: You always say that, and they always send assassins.
Inquisitor: After all this, do you think you’ll see Bianca again? Varric: I always do.
Varric: We write letters. Now and then, we manage to meet up. I don’t know if that’s “together.” Shit, it’s been, what? Fifteen years?
Inquisitor: What makes the merchant’s guild such a danger to her? Varric: To be fair, it’s more of a danger to me. Technically, we’re not supposed to be within 300 leagues of one another. If it got back to the guild that we were seen together, they’d freeze my assets. And then have me killed.
Varric: I heard the wedding was lovely. The one Bianca actually showed up for, anyway.
Bianca’s arranged marriage may not have been a love match, but ultimately she decided Varric wasn’t worth giving up her family, and she went through with it. In Varric’s dream, Bianca said, "You look out for everyone—me, your family, your partners… But who looks out for you?“ To me, this suggests that her leaving him for Bogdan was not about protecting him, but about prioritizing her own interests. Bianca doesn’t have anything negative to say about her husband, and she clearly has a very successful career as an engineer pursuing her own ideas. Yet she has continued to string Varric along for more than a decade, never letting him actually move on, all the while having her cake with her husband and eating it too with Varric… despite the fact that it puts Varric in literal, mortal danger every time they meet as well as keeping him in a permanent holding pattern where he can’t move on even when they’re just corresponding. And yeah, Varric is a big boy who can make his own decisions… but she’s the one who keeps dangling the carrot in front of his eyes.
Bianca’s “Get him killed, and I’ll feed you your own eyeballs, Inquisitor” line isn’t bad in and of itself—but it comes immediately after the revelation that she was responsible for Corypheus getting his hands on red lyrium, and after it’s been explicitly stated that her relationship with Varric—and especially her physically being there—puts him at risk of being assassinated. Which makes the threat more than a little bit hypocritical.
So I guess you could TL;DR my personal dislike of Bianca as that she’s deeply selfish, and especially that she’s deeply selfish in a way that has harmed and will continue to harm a character I care about a lot. She continually puts her own desires above the needs, wants, and safety of Varric, someone she supposedly loves (and cheats on someone she made a commitment to, to boot).
Maybe Bianca truly loved Varric. Maybe she thinks she still does. But someone who genuinely loves another person doesn’t treat them the way Bianca treats Varric.
i'll apple your turnover 