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Dalish aravels

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I kind of love that we have no idea if Sebastian was actually a bad guy before the Chantry. He talks about himself like he was but all we actually know is that he liked to party and it pissed his parents off. In the short story he hates his past self in the kind of way where you could read it as feeling real guilt over things he did or just as being prone to a negative self image after a lifetime of being treated like a disappointment. And it doesn’t really matter and we won’t really know because both options hold the same weight when it comes to the chantry

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you are the hero of ferelden. no matter your origin you watch those you love most be ripped from you. death becomes an endless cycle which seems to follow you wherever you go. the fate of the world rests on your shoulders as you know you can never return home. home is gone now. home is buried with your family, jailed with your closest ally, cradled by the ancestors, forgotten like your beloved, lost to time in the murky glass of the eluvian- dead in your arms, killed at your hand. you are the hero of ferelden and it is your destiny to die. when next the world falls apart, you do not come. this world does not deserve your pity.

you are the champion of kirkwall. you are a refugee, cold and hungry and sold into labour. your mother hates you, though she will never say it. it's your fault the ogre killed your sibling, your fault the taint took the other. but you are happy. you have everything, friends and family and status and riches. you defeat the people plaguing your glorious city, you are the people's hero. you will always know even as she came back, isabela left you to die. you are happy but you are alone. you have everything and then you are rocking back and forth begging please please please do not take my mother as well. you have nothing, but you for a single second, you had everything. you are the champion of kirkwall, and your ally has blown up the chantry. where is your home now that everything is your fault?

you are the herald of andraste. and you are so, so scared. these people do not trust you, do not like you, would feed you to the fade if they could. they do not care if you follow another religion, you are their herald. you can never return home because heroes do not have homes. they say home is the people you choose, but you didn't choose these people, did you? every step you take aches. thousands reach out to touch you, for safety. for comfort. you are a black hole close to destruction, and you cannot do this. you are the herald of andraste and you have not been yourself for so long now.

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stone's silliest soldier

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(jerk hawke voice) samson is not that hard to escape poverty 🙄 if only you stopped drinking lyrium and used it to purchase a rune of fortune so your enemies drop more coin... Yeah they are fucking acumulative. 5% on your chest, 2% on your helmet, 3% on your boots and gloves, 3,75% on your shield , you'll get 13,75% more benefits with every dead. And 10% more with every buddy you have. Anyone can can get these in the black emporium under kirkwall. What do you mean "what am i talking about". The place with the talking skeleton. With Thaddeus Gigantus Crumbum the Third. Yeah, the golem. Where you can also change your face in a mirror, and everyone will act like you were always like that? You know the place. Honestly is like people here aren't even trying.

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Truly crazy that you only get this codex entry if you manage to loot the corpse of the templar lieutenant during the quest Tranquility, in the brief window you have before the second cutscene with Karl.

Why is this relevant information and foreshadowing so tricky to get?

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Hi!!!! I know you've said you're alright with the revelation that elves come from spirit. But how do you feel about the fact that them making bodies for themselves is more or less what triggered the event leading to the blight..? personally it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to shift the blame from tevinter to ancient elves and them wanting to exist in the material world...

thx for reading!

THAT I'm not a fan of, mostly for two reasons.

Why does everything have to always come back to elves? Like, keep in mind I am saying this as an avid elf fan, but even I find it a little annoying when literally every bit of world lore is somehow always linked to them.

The tonal shift to "actually the ancient elves were the real source of all evil" feels so awkward after spending 15+ years worth of lore saying, in great detail, how elves are victims of colonization and oppression. If this was the secret plan all along, why the fuck did BioWare put so much effort into making the elves an obvious allegory for marginalized racial/ethnic communities? I think it is irresponsible to push such a right-wing narrative (yeah, not even centrist let's be real here,) of a world in which the oppressed were the real bad guys all along, in today's political climate especially. Because even though the revelations about the evanuris do not actually change the fact that all the elves to come after them have suffered greatly under human colonial brutality, there are far too many people who genuinely miss that. I know, because it's impossible to talk about real colonization in real life without someone trying to justify it with "well your people were already #problematic before white people arrived," as if that makes suffering genocide okay. (And as if Europeans have any moral high ground to stand on when it comes to history between each other either.) So yeah. It leaves a terrible, terrible taste in my mouth every time a similar argument comes up in fandom and in game universe about elves. And honestly, I'm struggling to even put it to further words right now, but I feel like I haven't quite even gotten to the whole depth of it in this response... sorry for that. I just... yeah. It's bad. I don't like it.

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i really wish that there was a way to spare the arishok without having to hand isabela over...

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still thinking about blackwall's gendered dialogue differences. the chivalry towards and idealization of f!inquisitor. the frankness about sex with m!inquisitor. sheryl chee can we talk...

^ this is sooooo crazy . when f!inquisitor asks, blackwall's mind goes to the ideal of family life, which of course he doesn't believe he deserves. but in response to m!inquisitor he's firmly oriented in reality where he could've fathered a bastard at some point, who knows, but no child would deserve a father like this. (a father who's killed children.) the romanticized ideal of a happy family as a kind of just reward, as opposed to reality where a child can be born of an unknown, disgraced father and the fact they deserve better doesn't change the facts. all they can do is try and avoid the truth. and of course the focus in both cases on being 'deserving' in either a positive or negative sense. (people only get rewards they deserve in fantasy!)

and like it is. so andrastian. blackwall isn't overtly faithful in the way of leliana or cassandra, but it is clear that the idea of the inquisitor as andraste's herald means something to him, and plays heavily into his idealization of f!inquisitor/an inquisitor romancing him especially. he is invested in the idea of women as purer and closer to divinity while men (like him) (especially him) are forever marked by betrayal and violence, because it's a familiar and comfortable framework to contextualize his own guilt. we've GOT to get a war table operation going for diy feminizing hrt

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? varric we're at the fucking beach

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in an awesome world we would have gotten a version of corypheus where his existential terror of inhabiting a godless universe being his primary motivation for trying to ascend to godhood was actually played up and utilized to draw a thematic link between him, the inquisitor, solas, and andraste. we could have had a game where faith and fear being two sides of the same coin was a major motif and not just vaguely relegated to that one quest with the spiders. we could have had a protagonist who just might have to grapple with their role in a religion that has historically been used as a tool for oppression and genocide and whether that can be reconciled with their own moral convictions. we could have had bisexual blackwall. it could have been awesome.

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dialogue that might as well be full penetrative sex to me

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these two make me fucking insane.

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I painted Sten for @dragonageannual ‘s zine SAGAS!

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I wish there was a narratively satisfying way to justify picking Sten to fight Loghain over the Warden and Alistair because the way he responds to getting chosen for the duel by actually smiling a little, saying "Finally" like his sole goal in life has been to beat Loghain to death in front of a live studio audience and then heading off for that standoff/quickdraw cutscene is very cool

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i think. blackwall and vivienne should have kissed about it

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kind of surprised at how much people romance alistair when i feel like every warden (but especially cousland) has very good reason to resent him

that conversation when the party first arrive in lothering always bothered me. "i don't know where we should go. i dont want to lead" you are the SENIOR WARDEN, alistair, even after being recruited, the warden was kept in the dark about so many things. they weren't with the wardens long enough to learn about the dreams, or the shortened lifespan, or the loss of fertility, or anything. I know even alistair didn't know everything (a fundamental failure of the grey wardens, imo, how much they insist everything should be a secret) but he had six months at least. the warden had. a day.

secondly, its having all that responsibility thrust upon them, then having to comfort alistair through his grief when they have likely recently exoerienced their own loss (and, in the case of cousland, leave their parents to be murdered)

i kept seeing takes of how nobody cares about rook, they have to help everyone with their problems when no one will help with theirs, but that has always been the lot of the da protagonist, and i feel it most keenly with the hero of fereldan