elissbell

[elissbell]

Doing a Jowan and Surana of 'Dragon Age Origins circle mage'-fame retrospective in 2025, yep.

[elissbell]

they're so normal about each other, so fucking normal right now

[elissbell]

disco elysium portraits for the house guys WHOOPEEEE

[elissbell]

Library books art hack by @danarune on Twitter

[elissbell]

Big preparations for horror halloween one shot! Meet Rosalin and Erwin! Hes a worn out detective that lost all will to live and shes a charming aristocrat with drinking problem after her latest husband died in the most horrible way.

[elissbell]

Harlan said it's HIS turn to be sopping wet okay and Arthur is literally I guess

[elissbell]

I think it’s weird that people try and point the finger at Solas for being racist and bigoted when I don’t think I could name a single character in DAI who isn’t?

Except maybe Cole and he’s the exception as he’s a spirit who’s newly crossed over and therefore can’t possibly have been shaped by the world’s prejudice.

But as for the rest, has no one listened to their dialogue? Even at their most well meaning, each character has had their actions and world view shaped by a certain form of prejudice. Casual racism is kind of everywhere in Dragon Age.

Just look at Dorian. He says some genuinely racist things to Solas over the course of their banter. And remember that Dorian is an incredibly privileged man who was born to and benefited from the culture that built itself on the ashes of another civilization and enslaved/abused/dismantled the personhood of the survivors for generations. Tevinter is actively a slave state, and at no point does Dorian really give the impression that he’s all too bothered by it. He outright denies the personhood of Spirits, an assessment we definitively know to be not just inaccurate but deeply immoral.

Then there’s Bull. His banter with Solas reveals so much about them both. In particular, it reveals that Bull looks down on pretty every other culture. He holds up the Qun, an ultra authoritarian nightmare state, as the pinnacle of civil order and admits that he thinks the world would be better if they simply conquered and subjugated everyone.

Even Cassandra, Blackwall, and Varric, as much as I love them all and consider them genuinely good people, have their prejudices.

As for Solas, I’m honestly not sure you can call him a racist? It’s just a gross misreading and oversimplification of his character. People point to his plans for the Veil as being genocidal. But they aren’t. Solas hasn’t set out to wipe all Non-Elves from the face of Thedas. He’s not trying to purge the world of all other races. He’s trying to fix a mistake that he made long ago, one which has left the world in a state he can only perceive as nightmarish and doomed.

I feel like people forget that Solas was only back in the world for about a year prior to Inquisition, and in that year he likely experienced nothing but violence and cruelty. The few redeeming things the world had left before he put up the Veil are all but gone. His people have been scattered, subjugated, and enslaved. They’ve had everything taken from them by this new world he helped create, and that clearly horrifies him.

Solas is absolutely misguided, and he’s absolutely stubborn. But racist? I don’t really think you can call him any more prejudiced than the rest of the characters, except in his case we’re talking about someone who is quite literally from another world. He is as alien to the world and its people as they are to him. And still he shows care and respect to others, despite how awful they’ve been to him.

He respects Cassandra and comes to enjoy her company despite how hostile she was towards him at first. He genuinely befriends Varric, reads his books, jokes with him. He never attempts to fight with Sera, despite her being an outright bully towards him. He shows compassion for Blackwall. He even comes to show respect for Bull and Dorian, despite their various ideological differences.

So, bigoted? No I wouldn’t say he is. Bigoted implies that Solas is incapable of tolerating a worldview outside his own, which is demonstrably not the case. Solas can and does accept the arguments and opinions of others. More than once he concedes to Varric. If you’ve played a Dalish Inquisitior who either befriends or romanced him, he changes his opinion about the Dalish, too.

The only subjects he won’t budge on are the ones that a person really shouldn’t?? He sure won’t entertain the idea of slavery being anything but a horrible atrocity, and that’s a bad thing? He’s a hardliner when it comes to Spirits being recognized as people, because they are and it’s the morally correct stance to have. Again, why is that a bad thing?

What is it with people taking characters who have been made victims by either society or circumstance and are vehemently anti-slavery and trying to cast them as monsters who go too far? I keep seeing it in different franchises cough gameofthrones and it’s starting to make me genuinely uncomfortable.

[elissbell]

This is your judgment, Inquisitor

Allaros' third tarot card.

In an effort to get his sister back, the Inquisitor has resorted to blood magic on more than one occasion, whether it is good or bad is for everyone to decide. Did he have a choice? To choose you, your death or the death of your loved one. I'm sure it was the former, and here he is. He brought her back to life, twisted her, stripped her of her magic, but now her son can embrace his mother again.

This will remain the Inquisitor's personal sin, his secret sin, known only to those dear to him.

[elissbell]

Its that time of the year again, making my cultists eat shit and draw stuff uwu

[elissbell]

anyway the reality is that bellyaching about how "likes do nothing" and how people aren't reblogging your posts enough does not actually make people reblog posts more, it just makes them less likely to interact with posts at all.

[elissbell]

To go alongside my John thoughts, I also can't stop thinking about Arthur.

You love him, you lose him, you get him back, but not before mistreating a version of him that you don't recognize, one that isn't perfect, one that isn't right. You nearly die in front of him. Again. You escape. You leave. And at the crossroads, he asks you to trust him.

You know he is lying to you, but you trust him.

You gain friends, more people than you've spoken to in, what? Weeks? Months? Entire years? He pushes you away from them all, some more violently than others. He tries to kill one and doesn't even realize it. You give him another chance. You give him what he asks for. You let him feel seen.

And he is still lying to you. You realize later, it's with good reason. He's told you the horrors of that place, you cannot judge him for wanting to escape at any cost, and it would be hypocritical to judge him for dealing with the devil when you were the first to shake his hand.

You would have forgiven him that. Easily. You trust him.

But he doesn't trust you.

He asks for your memory to be taken. For revelations to be obscured, for you, who has spent this entire journey driven by the insatiable urge to seek, to find, to know, to forget. Because he does not trust that you can find him redeemable.

[elissbell]

drawing At 5am

[elissbell]

Happy 4th birthday, baby girls ❤️

[elissbell]

Fought with the composition of this for 4 hours and lost ‼️🗣

[elissbell]

I love how supportive Vanessa is of his dad's relationship with Perry. She even gave Doof the card, meaning she and Perry had to "talk" about it before

[elissbell]

they should interact

please imagine reigen as another ofa vestige but none of the other’s are really sure how he got there

[elissbell]

I love the Malevolent fandom because it's practically impossible to get spoiled. I see a piece of fanart and it's either Arthur having a bad time or John and Arthur being tragic gays. Which has happened 63972 times already and will happen again