#Dragon Fact File

[flowersforthemachines]

Remembered I talked about it under one post but never actually posted this here.

Here's a (rough) visualisation of how many times Rook's faction is referenced in conversations. Based on the pics, from most to least referenced it goes like this:

Grey Wardens > Mourn Watch > Antivan Crows > Shadow Dragons > Veil Jumpers > Lords of Fortune

[leopardmuffinxo]

is this all just for show? gif i made for this set, but didn't end up choosing.

[darkdragon768]

Looking up the different routes on the deltarune wiki and... yeeaa I would have never discovered the snowgrave route on my own.

[vaguely-concerned]

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this here btw but rye's name is just pronounced like y'know. the cereal. or the whiskey and rye them good old boys were drinking lol. in his full name it's 'ri' (Ellaryen as something like EL-ah-ri-en I think), but when he started to transition and dropped the childhood nickname he'd gone by until then (which was 'Ella'! rather unimaginatively lol renn was better at constructing arches than creative thinking) he shopped around for new ones and with some squashing and stretching to help things along he ended up with 'rye'. I don't know that many people would have called him by it -- he'd be 'watcher ingellvar' in most mourn watcher contexts and probably be referred to respectfully like that outside of the necropolis as well considering the standing of watchers in nevarran society -- but it's what his two closer childhood friends, max the terrible ex, and professor-mentor name pending would use, probably.

he embraces 'rook' pretty much immediately though. so it's like. me, and two childhood friends of him who'll ever call him rye dfhaj (max and professor-mentor are both dead. which, under the circumstances, may not stop them from talking to him but would make it a rarer occurrence probably)

[spittingspite]

Update still losing it

[commodoresigma]

[original drawing date: 11th Oct '24]

Did some slight tweaks to my two characters currently named The Empress and The Dragon. Probably gonna make a fancy proper digital version at some point before the new year, hopefully, cuz I like this too much to not try that (that, and i wanna do a couple more tweaks to their designs)

[spicyliumang]

[oc x canon]

looking out for him 🥺

[pomellon]

What’s the koolish height difference like in the dragon au? :3

I want to imagine that they were originally the same height but after Karl’s crystallization he can use Foolish’s toe beans as a mattress or something XD

They were really close to the same height originally, foolish just being a teeny bit taller :D

But yeah if we count Foolish's leviathan size it's closer to this XD

I should mentioned that Foolish don't look the same when he takes his true size btw! He would definitely look older and more worn out if that makes sense, big and longer scales, spins, fins and horn!

[flowersforthemachines]

Useless Veilguard fact of the day: Day 33

There are plot conditionals for each of the 4 available lineages (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Qunari) that are used to determine if lineage-specific content should be used in a certain scene.

In addition to that, there's also a "Rook_lineage_HumanOrElf" conditional that's apparently used in twice in the game: in Harding's final romance scene and after the final battle with Elgar'nan.

Check out the tag for more useless facts: #useless davg fact of the day!

[thebookworm0001]

The person who figures out how to mod in the ability to alter the inquisitor’s appearance after the initial cc will be my hero for forever and ever

[certifiedbundleofsticks]

guys help how do i play anything other than dragon age

like i open games and play for an hour before going ":/// this isn't fun" and then I open one of the dragon age games and play that for the rest of the day

[spacetrashpile]

i need to be able to be in my home and playing dragon age inqusition. right now. brigid trevelyan i need to make you real.

[squirrelno2]

When you don't know if you have a job and the job in question starts in a week and you can't write your novel or your fanfictions because your files are inexplicably corrupted and you live alone over an hour from everyone in your life (if not significantly more) and your brain doesn't even have the decency to hang on to your most recent hyperfixation

If you have ever wondered anything about anything I've made please please tell me I'm losing my mind and can no longer distract myself without help

[notebooks-and-laptops]

Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard

In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.

About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.

How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.

So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.

But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.

We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.

None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.

The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.

Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.

Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.

Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.

And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.

Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.

This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.

Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.

And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.

I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.

[kitsunabi]

It just occurred to me that the CN voice actor for Wriothesly also voices for Azdaha

[sweetestflow3rs]

someone needs to stop me with the au rewrites i think of when getting into media

i thought i was gonna draw some dumb linden purposefully pissing noel off type of comic today but….. rune factory just came out with a new game guys….