dragonagedreaming

[dragonagedreaming]

Naenia and Zevran

A story told by an elderly healer from the Brecilian forest who once tended to the Wardens.

“They weren’t speaking, that was the first thing I noticed. He had a wound, shallow, just beneath the ribs... too much talking that one, not enough dodging. She was the one stitching him. He watched her hands, the way her hair furrowed out of the braid, didn’t make a sound. Her hands shook the entire time and his jaw was clenched like he was holding something back with his teeth. I offered to finish for her but she just shook her head 'he's my burden' to which he smiled at. When it was done, she left without a word, fingers still shaking, two steps in place of one and only then, did he exhale. Just one breath. ‘She should have let me die. But she never does.’ I didn’t ask what he meant. Some things are meant to be sewn in silence.”.

Famous verse sung in tearful taverns across the Waking Sea:

They say she almost died in Denerim. That he kissed her blood and begged the sky. “Just let her stay. Just one more day.” And the sky did.

art by @/crowwowo

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Love Growing in secret.

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how ruthless is Solas?

We know that Solas woke 'weak from his slumber' and could not come up with an immediate way to recover his power, hence the Corypheus plan.

Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain also wake weak from their slumber/imprisonment; but they do immediately recover their power, using a blood magic ritual in D'Meta's Crossing and destroying the village. This is interesting to me because it stands to reason that Solas, having similar origins, could probably have recovered his power in a similar way. But strikingly, he does not.

This is an interesting reminder I think: if Solas were as ruthless as he's pretending (trying!) to be, there are almost certainly ways he could have recovered his power much more quickly and thus opened the orb without using Corypheus. Although the Corypheus plan was clearly not a good idea, it was nonetheless an attempt to find a compromise which would get the orb open without resorting to blood sacrifices of innocents etc. Despite Solas' claim that he originally saw the modern people of Thedas as 'like Tranquils' it's clear that even then he wasn't able to bring himself to treat them as disposable in the way that Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain immediately did. 

(Of course, in the end the Corypheus plan resulted in a lot of deaths anyway due to the Conclave explosion, but Solas presumably didn't know that Corypheus would open the orb in a location with so many people around - there's a tragic irony here that if he had just done some kind of blood magic ritual it might very well have cost fewer lives.)

This is an interesting throughline in his character - because there's no doubt that Solas is willing to take extreme measures in pursuit of his cause, but he consistently fails at being truly ruthless. He really should have killed the Inquisitor at the end of Trespasser, or at least not divulged so much to them. He really should have killed Varric as soon as he appeared at the ritual in Veilguard, rather than risking Varric disrupting something so important. He could have used blood magic in a much more coercive way on Rook and then he probably could have got out of the prison faster. He could have been much more manipulative in the Inquisition and turned some of the Inquisition's resources to serve his cause. Interestingly, the only instances where he really seems 'ruthless' to me are when he kills his old friends, but since both of them have betrayed him you have to suspect that he's not actually being ruthless here but rather acting out of hurt.

Though he tells the romanced Lavellan that he doesn't want her to see what he becomes, he never actually succeeds in becoming the hard-hearted antagonist that he set out to be, because fundamentally that is not who he is nor who he wants to be.

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Solas, Lavellan and trust

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[gently but with passion] The Characters In A Piece Of Fiction Are Not Supposed To Act Like They're Fans Of The Fiction,

also i am BAFFLED that weekes genuinely wrote that "lol were they doing it?" bit on purpose. after the masked empire, where ostensibly the whole thesis is "it's fucked up for a very powerful empress to be sleeping with her servant/agent and getting the agent to compromise their morals for her". like truly. forget the manosphere jokes and comedic tone. if you genderswap solas/mythal, it would come off as inappropriate and concerning at best, and genuinely abusive at worst? these bioware gender politics are truly something.

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Once again thinking about Veilguard and pealing back some of the layers, and I can't help but think about the way both Morrigan and Solas' interactions with Mythal are heavily retconned, but how this is used to emphase Solas' pain and angst, and yet its used to minimise and refute Morrigans pain and angst.

Because the few conversations we have with Morrigan in DAtV basically boil down to 'haha I was so stupid for thinking Flemeth was abusive or wanted to possess me - now I know the truth, I was being silly before, and she loved me all along'. This is a sharp turn away from even Inquisition, where Flemeth/Mythal was actively holding her child hostage and giving her ultimatums about Morrigans own safety vs. her sons. There's basically no depth or nuance brought to that conversation, Morrigan was just wrong, and now she's happy to have her worst fear happen to her.

Meanwhile, Solas, who was characterised in DAI, Tresspasser, The Masked Empire and Dalish lore as a trickster God, playing every side, a principled man with his own goals...he is reduced in DAtV to be basically Mythals puppet, with everything bad or morally complex he ever did (sundering the Titans/releasing the blight/sealing away the fade) being something he was 'tricked' or forced into by Mythal. This is truly hammered home when Solas only stops his plan because Mythal tells him that he can do so, and that he doesn't have to do what they wanted etc.

And this is infurating! I mean, I think its more interesting if Solas wasn't pressured into doing these things, but if that was really the route they wanted to go down...there are serious discussions/lore implications that Mythal actively forced Solas to get a body, ignoring his autonomy and wishes, something which should slot well into Morrigans storyline...but it just doesn't! It just doesn't because Flemeth is framed as always right about this whole thing!

It just screams Misogny to me. A real preference for this man and absolving him of all his blame, while actively ignoring and minimising the very real abusive behaviour Flemeth/Mythal showed to Morrigan.

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also i think the fact that solas kind of... covers for his sudden change of heart in the crestwood catastrophe with a last minute, "uhhh the truth is that... i can take your vallaslin(?)" is so interesting.

like that was CLEARLY not what he intended to say at the beginning of the conversation. and if it actually was something that was weighing on him a lot, he should tell any high-approval lavellan and make the offer. on low-approval, he wouldn't trust them enough or expect that they'd believe him - but presumably, on a high-approval run, he's reconciled to the fact that while it may bother him personally, it does not have any real negative effect on the dalish, and it's important to them in a different way.

but then, if his way to resolve the ethical conundrum of: "this person is magically bound to me. i can't take it off yet, and it's killing them slowly. they've fallen in love with me while i'm in this cover identity, and if i reveal the truth, and they hate me afterwards, they still can't actually tell me to leave until the anchor is gone. bc then they'll die. which is a terrible situation, and nearly blackmail to put them in. and if they agree with me, it would be at a terrible price of losing their conscience and morals, and i would have gained their trust on a false pretense, before asking them to be complicit in huge bloodshed and the destruction of their world."

is to go: "ah, instead of actually correcting the power differential between us or removing the anchor (bc i can't yet), how about i... offer to change an integral part of you and alter your physical appearance? which you would not have even considered before, if it wasn't for the trust we'd already built. and objectively speaking, this has zero material effect on you, since no one else sees these as slave markings but me. so it only serves to suit my perception of what they mean, and cover for my lie of omission a bit."

that is SO wild. like no wonder he feels guilty and breaks it off 2 seconds later - whether lavellan accepts or not, the fact that his impulse was SUCH a bizarre tactic to pivot the conversation away... wack.

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the world of thedas vol 3 project looked VERY neat, but i fear i have too much... inherent salt in my physiology. and if i contributed anything it would be like: "this is how the events of veilguard would logically lead to a full on exalted march against every elf in thedas" or "look at how fucked the entirety of southern thedas is with blight and famines" or "if mythal survived 5000 years after all her peers tried to kill her, no way did elgarn'nan and ghilan'nain die from a few boss fights. rumours are spreading of their return" or "hey remember how the veil tears on its own with any bloodshed? how IS southern thedas looking with that?" fdkjhfjdg. which is probably not the vibe people would want in a zine ;-;

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How I’d been feeling for the last year knowing EA sabotaged DATV so they could kill the franchise but I couldn’t prove it until that article came out

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I think this is the funniest onion headline bar none

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Reblog to tuck your Dragon Age protagonists into bed and gently kiss them on the forehead

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My post-veilguard rookanis

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#he tells corypheus he isn't groovy and that kills him instantly at haven#no avalanche required#he just turns into dust and has to reform somewhere else#harold of andraste goes “huh” and then walks away to receive his adoring musical sequence from his followers

dont u dare leave this gold in the tags

can you believe this dai concept art. can you believe this. can you believe this inquisitor concept art. this guy looks like someone’s dad accidentally got sucked into the DAI box art and has to go on a wacky adventure to save his son. when i look at this i hear the tavern version of Stayin Alive. This guy arrived to the conclave in rusty ass van with a 20 year old Van Halen paint job. This guy wears Canadian Tuxedos on his fancy dates to dive bars. I feel like if I shone a blacklight on this guy 20 years of spunk and lyrium juice would be on his palms. This guy snorts lyrium dust off qunari ass with rolled up pieces of the chant of light. this guy told corypheus he wasnt groovy and it was somehow the most injurious insult anyone has ever given him in his 94858392 years of living. This guy looks like how Elvis Presley’s corpse smells.

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tbh for a while now I've thought that Anaris is what Epler thinks Solas is.

maybe... honestly it's so hard to tell what the intention even was, bc he's such a flop of a villain to begin with. if epler wanted to make a parody of solas, just... give this guy some syllable cadence and make him say dramatically cryptic things, and it would be actually funny? idk, have him possess cyrian and do the world's worst "Hello Fellow Mortals" impression and i would do a small grudging laugh.

but the whole "ooough i'm a ancient elven entity who wants to end the world and turn elves into demons... but for SOME REASON people want to romance solas? how funny!" is. very pointed hjfhdhsh. also with his repeated anecdotes of wanting to punch solas in meetings, to the point where other people commented on it... 😔

anyway it was very sad bc i was SO curious about the forgotten ones and the void, and why they clashed with the evanuris, and how it seemed like solas was playing both sides with schemes, and surviving bc both sides had called dibs on killing him first... instead it's epler's inexplicable solas hater agenda, or badly done manosphere podcasting agenda 😭

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Have you ever been sent hate on tumblr? Can be anything from nasty replies to smear campaigns (im curious because I had to delete a post because people were being vile in the comments)

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remember when they were divorced?

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i was pondering the fen'harel and the tree story, and my opinion is:

while it is plausible that the evanuris would do stuff like this, i feel like. it's actually very bizarre on felassan's part, if he thought:

"hm. i need to impart the idea to briala that 'if you have two enemies that are more powerful than you, make them fight each other for your own benefit'. to convey this, let me use my boss/rebellion comrade/millennia old bestie's Extremely Personally Traumatic And Harrowing Experience as an example 👍"

like that's SO unnecessarily oversharing on his part, at that point i would have to assume solas killed him purely bc of the unnecessary breach of privacy? it makes sense for the dalish to have that myth, but wild if felassan would talk about it to someone, knowing that it was literally true and about someone he knew personally, hjfjdh 😭

anyway i think whatever the actual motive of andruil doing that was, it was something else that was lost to history and reinterpreted by the dalish into a more understandable premise. i think to them "creepy noble who tries to kidnap someone into servitude" is a commonly understandable concept, but whatever was actually happening had something else going on.