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I miss them :')

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so the grey wardens' reputation has to be a witcher kind of deal, right? you want them around when the darkspawn show up, but they make you uneasy. you can tell they're different somehow, that something's wrong with them even if you can't quite put your finger on what. and they're not exactly the cheeriest folks around either, are they? haunted eyes and grim smiles. why are they here? is it the darkspawn whose trail they're on or is it the other way around? the two are never far apart.

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The way the Warden *had* to do the Joining and then walk it off like it was nothing because of the nearing battle. With Duncan and Alistair looming over them like "Oh good you're awake. Well you passed out but at least you're alive. Now up on your feet you must go climb that tower. There shouldn't be any darkspawns there but who knows." Didn't even have time to adjust, no, the Warden had to fight while feeling sick as a reanimated corpse.

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I love how the game tries to convince you that the First Warden is so unreasonable and annoying and a pisser when Rook talks to everyone like a flat earther. Like going up to your county sheriff and saying "hold all your calls. We need to focus on the real problem: Zeus and Aphrodite from Greek Mythology are in the White House and they have the nuclear missile codes" it's a wonder he didn't just kill them on the spot

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There's going to be a conclave to elect a new Pope.

I hope it doesn't-- OH MY GOD

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do you ever think about how learning to fight in a family of three mages must have affected carver’s fighting style?

if he joins the templars, he gets yelled at for charging onto the battlefield without waiting for his squad to catch up. they call him dangerously reckless and it’s not like he can say that he’s used to having three healing spells ready for him and at least one barrier already cast.

on the other hand, he’s very popular with the mages in the wardens. he’s the only person on the entire continent for whom run into battle and absorb as much damage as possible is an intuitive strategy. tanking was always his job! he knows to pull the battle away from the mages as much as possible.

he also knows how to be buffed. most warriors need practice to be able to use haste without tripping over their own feet. carver? carver was the guinea pig for hawke and bethany’s support spell training. it takes at least three haste spells stacked on top of each other to faze him. he’s not thrown when the heroic aura wears off and suddenly his hands are slower and his sword is heavier. he’s got a sixth sense for when a mage is about to cast an aoe spell right on top of him and he needs to move. 

you ever think about how no one outside of the dalish elves grew up fighting with mages?

the warden commander probably puts him in charge of training new warriors, is what i’m saying. 

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This is my first DA2 playthrough romancing Anders and he has a lethal amount of insane pussy. Zero rizz and zero chill. Rebel without a cat. Incurably a dork. You show the slightest bit of interest and he's ophelia swooning into your arms waxing poetic about the end of the world. He's blonde. He's deranged. He is 100percent right about the mage revolution. His ability tree has skills like VENGEANCE and MARTYR and he has big brown eyes that belong on a baby cow. The DA dev team created a man so wonderfully broken and fumbled him so badly. If you hate Anders I'm going to assume you're fascist. No there is no nuance.

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See, while I do wish Avelines storyline brought us into more close quarters with the darker aspects of her job/her personality, I do kinda like the implications of her personal missions.

At the very beginning of act 1 Aveline says there is plenty of opportunities in Kirkwall if you're the type of person that the locals want. You can ask her if she is that type of person, and she tells you basically that she's trying to force herself to be. She then gets herself into a position of power incredibly quickly and remains in that position for the rest of the game, making herself into that person that the locals want. Her personal quests are mostly surrounding her infatuation with one of her subordinates. I've always found her act 2 quest completely jarring, compared to Merrill, Fenris, Sebastian, Anders, Varric and Isabelas act 2 quests.

And yet...I think that's kinda the point?

Like Aveline is in this position of power and working within the system and that affords her SO many liberties! While her closest friends and other refugees are dealing with things as serious as trying not to be re-captured by slavers or almost killing innocent girls because their possessed Aveline is...worrying about whether or not a boy likes her. When the companions call on Hawke throughout the game it's usually life or death; yet Aveline wastes hawkes time getting them to give her crush flowers. It's absolutely ridiculous but it highlights the privilege that is afforded to those who just fit in and do what the system wants them to do regardless of if it's hurting others in Kirkwall. The city guard ignoring elvish citizens actively leads to the Qunari attack in act 2 yet Aveline never suffers any blame for that because she's conforming. Aveline refuses to let Carver into the city guard in part because if he fucks up it will reflect badly on her.

And Aveline...isn't an awful person exactly. She clearly cares about companions like Fenris, Varric, Bethany and even Isabela and Merrill. She's happy to run around and kill bandits with Hawke. Yet in her own job, she will look the other way if it's required. She's miss queen of compartmentalizing. And that reflects a lot of people in the real world who are willing to take jobs within the system because it allows them a much easier life compared to others who won't/can't.

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And here's the thing; Anders is antagonistic. He antagonizes people. But listening to his banter back to back is heartbreaking because everyone is SO dismissive of his very real, very lived oppression. He's screaming to the wind and the people he cares about the most get mad every time he refuses to joke about with them. Idk man I'd be antagonistic too.

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Zevran: So, err….is it Lord Loghain? Loghain: I am no longer a teyrn, nor even a knight. Address me without a title, as you would any other Grey Warden. Zevran: So just Loghain, then? Loghain: Correct. What's on your mind? Zevran: You know who I am, yes? I was one of the Crows you hired to kill the Grey Wardens. Loghain: I thought you looked familiar. Zevran: Well, I just wanted to report that I failed my mission, Loghain. Loghain: You don't say. Zevran: I'm terribly broken up over it. Loghain: Hmm. Well thank you kindly for informing me.

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I think it would be really funny if it turned out that the real reason Alistair didn't need lyrium to use "templar" powers in DAO was bc he was a weak mage. Everyone secretly just assumes it's bc of his freaky Theirin dragon blood until he meets Surana, which goes something like this:

Alistair, oblivious: It's really hard, but you can totally use templar powers without lyrium! You just have to pull from the reserve inside of you :3

Surana: ...okay, do you know what a mana pool is

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my fav part of origins is the fact that it's a love letter to "the end does not justify the means". the entire game, in almost every quest, this is the constant question that's thrown at us. everyone in the story tells us that they did what they did because it would achieve the best outcome. from uldred's uprising in the circle tower, to zathrian's cursing of the werewolves, to bhelen's coup. loghain himself uses this as justification for the retreat at ostagar - that it was the morally correct decision to abandon the field, because it guaranteed some of the army would survive and could regroup for a new assault on the darkspawn in ostagar. and it's so specific that loghain, as the primary antagonist, loghain is the one arguing that the ends justifies the means because he is either your parallel, or your mirror.

to be more specific, my favourite thing about origins is that you, as the player character, are faced with the exact same choice. you will always resolve the circle tower uprising. you will always resolve the issue between the dalish and the werewolves. you will always settle the secession crisis in orzammar. you will always fight the archdemon and win over it. but how? what are your means? will you murder a child to spare redcliffe? will you slaughter cornered circle mages trapped in a tower with no escape? will you kill innocent werewolves who had nothing to do with a tragedy that happened hundreds of years ago? will you support a king that has his own family's blood on his hands because he wants change or a king that's more committed to culture & tradition over justice?

does it matter? to you? to anyone? why does it matter, if you're going to get to the same place in the story at the end?

and the story tells you. again and again. it matters. it matters because the ends do not justify the means. to roughly quote ursula k le guin, it matters because there is no end - you start the awakening dlc as your own warden if you survived, or as an orlesian warden if not. so, all you have left is the means.

it's very clumsy in a lot of places, and there's obvious issues if you look at each case in closer detail (e.g. the ideas around social justice re: dalish elves & mages), but overall, this is the kind of story that makes origins so special to me tbh. it really holds up a mirror to this kind of cold, utilitarian morality that's so often rewarded in "dark" fantasy genres. like idk it's very good to me.

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Saw someone call Anders a "fandom darling." You sure about that? Are you really sure about that???

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random assortment of shitpost

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i don't remember if i ever made that post but like. constantly thinking about the trifecta of templar/mage sex jokes that really aren't jokes at all

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as a writer my relationship with dragon age can be summed up by that one interview where it’s gaider, jhep and someone else talking about the exalted march dlc, and at one point someone brings up, “yeah we were gonna have you meet justice still inside of kristoff and he’d be like, ‘kirkwall? i never went to kirkwall.’”

and in the five seconds before i read the next line my brain went, holy shit that’s genius— so anders was never possessed? he was just radicalized the way anyone who had his experiences would be? and the possession was an invention of varric’s— maybe he mentioned justice to varric over drinks once— an exoneration, an insanity plea, and, subconsciously, a personal way of coping with the fact that his friend did something that ripped his home apart. holy shit, that is actually such an incredible way of using the frame story of da2, what the fuck—

and then the next line someone else says, “yep, because the demon that possessed anders was just a random demon that tricked him into thinking it was justice.”

and im just like oh. right. this is dragon age. ok.

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the hero of ferelden