#ever since i found out the common interpretation of that song was about being transgender it’s be OVERR

[porcelainvino]

i forget that my headcanons aren’t real.. i was like “wdym blaine isn’t a trans icon”

[witchdoodle]

random dalish headcanons

halla are not raised for slaughter like goats or sheep, but when they die of illness or age or accident, every part of their body is used, to honour their life. usually a funeral is performed first. things like halla leather and halla horns are very expensive because of this; it’s rare the dalish will sell either to non-dalish, but the high price those goods fetch when sold to shems is a pretty good source of income if they get really desperate.

halla milk is definitely a staple of their diet though. halla milk isn’t as sweet as cow or goat milk but it is HUGELY superiour in terms of fat and protein content and makes really tart, tasty cheeses. you milk a halla for the same reason you milk a cow, it’s good for them.

all dalish can understand halla, who do not talk but make themselves understood to elves. it’s not just reading their body language like you would a mabari or a cat, but neither is it verbal words nor telepathic thought. the process is impossible to explain to shems. “you just /know/ what they mean,” lavellan says to cullen after trying to explain it to him for like an hour.

dalish spirits are strong as fuck, but their wines are typically shit, and mostly used ceremonially. that varies by clan, location, year, and luck, though. sometimes you forage some good shit.

lavellan was BLOWN AWAY by the ABUNDANCE of readily available sugar in haven and skyhold. sugar would have been an expensive luxury to his clan. that and the idea that shem are used to food just being like… delivered to them is like ????????? to him. most shem have never even butchered a chicken in their lives????????

like city elves, dalish marriages (they dont call it marriage, but lbr it’s marriage) are mostly arranged. dalish clans that we’ve seen are mostly small, and after a while everyone in it would be related to everyone else in some way, and i hc that they’re you know, intelligent enough to recognise incest = bad. there’s no stigma against a love match, it’s just kinda rare bc most of the people in your clan who you spend 99.99% of your time with are like, your first cousin. so chances are once you’re an adult your keeper eventually arranges a match, and it’s not like YOU MUST MARRY THIS PERSON OR BE CAST OUT FOREVER it’s like hey i found this girl from another clan who i think would be perfect for you, you should spend some time together and see if you’re into it. 

for them, it’s about tracking bloodlines for the purpose of knowing who everyone’s parents are; “pedigree” is a non-issue, unlike human nobility. you’re not matchmaking for pedigree kids, you’re matchmaking to create healthy, long-lasting, loving relationships that produce happy, healthy, supported children. 

family lines are tracked through the mother. they have no word for “bastard”

the attitude about homosexuality varies wildly both by clan and individual, but nowhere is it forbidden, no one sees it as inherently wrong or sinful, it would be refusing to reproduce that would be the problem.  at WORST, the attitude would be that it’s a selfish individual choice.

like the qunari, the dalish see transgender individuals as just being the gender they say they are, because surely they’d know best, right? nonbinary individuals are not unknown to them, and elvish has always had gender-neutral singular pronouns, and gender-neutral forms of gendered words, like lethallin (masculine), lethallan (feminine), lethallen (gender-neutral).

trans and nonbinary individuals are widely viewed as special and important. shem don’t understand but fuck ‘em.

kicking out mage children to die in the woods is stupid. if i HAVE to acknowledge it as canon because apparently it is now, i hc that was that an extreme minority view. one or two specific clans’ stupid decision is NOT a common, widespread practice. if a clan already has a lot of mages and is worried about templars, they make contact with another clan to harbour the mage child until a more permanent placement can be found. elves do not fear magic like humans do. magic is a precious commodity, and a USEFUL and RARE skill. it is a gift to them, not a curse.

dalish religious ceremonies involve a lot of song and dance, especially call-and-response type of songs. a lot of their song uses sounds that aren’t explicitly words, necessarily, but which are loaded with meaning anyway; this is a result of them substituting what they’ve lost of elvish.

they don’t really have the space to be hauling books around. they have an oral tradition, and most dalish are functionally illiterate in terms of the common tongue. they don’t really need to read. that said, some choose specifically to learn, and keepers/firsts usually make the effort to learn, since they’re usually the ones preserving and studying ancient elven artifacts which does include some books and scrolls.

their history being mostly oral, they also use song as a teaching tool. it’s much easier to teach a bunch of six-year-olds history lessons if it’s presented as catchy songs.

dalish dancing is way more expressive and interpretive than ballroom dancing. it’s meant to tell a story, not follow a set of rules, and how good you are at it is determined not by how well you follow predetermined steps but how good you are at getting your point across and how creative you are. your dance should make your audience *feel* something.

it’s also how the Youths flirt with each other, you gotta really practice ya moves for the next arlathvhen cuz what if neria from clan whatever thinks ur a scrub... ya gotta Bust A Move...

they craft elaborate costumes for their dances. everything on those costumes is symbolic in some way, meant to express something.

generally speaking storytelling is SUPER important to their culture. much of their values are taught by fables. elvish is an inherently metaphorical language, this has always been the case.

all dalish are taught to track and hunt with bow and arrow. obviously some are better at it than others, but everyone learns the basics just in case. everyone learns to provide for themselves just as everyone learns to defend themselves. children, men, women, elderly, everyone learns.

dalish courting involves a LOT of gift-giving on both sides. usually one party initiates it with a gift, and if the other party is interested, they return with a gift, and so on and so forth, the purpose being to show mutual commitment to providing for each other. it’s not regulated by gender roles.

the vallaslin ritual involves taking just enough lyrium and felandaris to trip balls and go into the woods and have a spiritual experience. used to be elves would take lyrium and meditate and receive a message from their chosen god, and that’s how you picked your patron, but the gods aren’t listening anymore, so you just kind of have to have your own epiphany about life and culture and yourself and stuff. it’s meant to purify your mind and clear any lingering fears or doubts away. then you purify your body and the keeper mixes your blood, their blood, and the keeper’s magic into an ink they embed under your skin.

vallaslin is applied when you are ready, not at a certain age. some get it as young as fourteen or fifteen, others have to wait until well into their twenties. it’s about maturity and being ready for adulthood. 

nobody has ever failed the ritual. that is, sometimes people can’t do it on the first or second etc attempt, but nobody has ever PERMANENTLY failed to complete it. a keeper who senses that a young adult is sensitive and might not do well at it is likely to encourage them to get a small design. it’s a keeper’s job to see their whole clan safely through the ritual. if someone fails, it’s as much the keeper’s failure as theirs.

everyone in the clan has a “job,” but if you’re not up to speed or where you should be, the keeper intervenes, finds out why, and fixes it – whether that’s through counseling, or assigning extra training, or figuring the individual just isn’t suited to the task and finding them something else that brings them pride to do instead.

they bathe a LOT, cleanliness is super important to them. shem stereotype them as being stinky wood savages but nah, once or twice daily bathing is widespread practise, and they’re super careful about keeping their water sources clean. 

nomadic life is hard as shit. most clans lose a couple members every year from age, illness, accident, starvation, or shem interference. some years are harder than others. babies and the elderly are especially at risk.

there’s a dalish saying of “two keepers, three opinions.” the arlathvhen can get… heated… with debate, but nobody takes being argued with personally, because if you can’t defend your position then it’s a bad position. debate is a bonding activity. it’s the keeper’s job, also, to make sure everyone’s opinion is heard.

you will pry shoeless elves from my cold dead fucking hands

[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #85: Self Serving.

Written: 4/3/2017                                                                            Music Week Song Listened to Before Writing: Pop Group - Don’t Call Me Pain

Beatrice had worn, proudly, the label of being a political activist, but, unknown to people outside of her scene, she was generally disliked, since her motivations were anything but political, which could be interpreted from the button she always wore on her black denim jacket, which said: “Right Side of History”. If anyone had asked her for an explanation, she would use it to get on her soapbox about how the left was always on the right side of history, and that nobody could deny that what she was following was a truly just cause, but in reality it just meant that she had sided with what she had felt to be the winning team, just because it seemed to be the winning team, which was something known to plenty of the activist she had talked to, especially an organizer who only went by the name “the Mistress”, mainly due to worry that if anyone had seen news stories about her, they would start leaking all sorts of her personal information, send her threats of rape and/or murder, crudely drawn pictures of her either naked or in the middle of sexual acts, sometimes with animals, or even would, as had happened to a close friend of hers, begin to call the workplaces of her family members, making up all sorts of fabricated claims with the intent of getting the family member fired.

The Mistress was one of the few members of the group who actually interfaced with Beatrice on a regular basis, even if she did, like many others, have to hold back an instinct to slap the frustrating girl, she felt that there was a chance for the self centered activist to actually have their mind in the right place, instead of wanting glory or the opportunity to break things, which many protesters despised. “You can tell that they are not dedicated to the cause,” Beatrice had once explained, as she made sure her garish, platinum blond wig wasn’t askew, “because they decide to stick with bullshit peaceful resistance, which doesn’t work. Think about it: actions speak louder than words. Ever hear that? Of course you have, its a common phrase, its a cliche, and people repeat these kind of things for a reason, you know. They’re common truths. Facts about the way the world is.”

“I think you’re only seeing things the way that you want to see them,” the mistress had tried to explain, looking down at the short girl through her circular, rose-tinted glasses, “I don’t deny that actions speak louder than words, but isn’t that the whole point of a peaceful protest?” Slowly and calmly, hoping that would help get her point across, “Isn’t the crowd that gathers an action within itself? A large crowd voicing their discontent and their desire for change is more than just idle words, and I feel that you are minimizing what the rest of us are trying to accomplish.”

“I think you are minimizing the situation by doing nothing about it! If you are really so upset, why don’t you take real action, instead of the action of inaction? Why don’t you start doing shit that gets people to really pay attention, instead of just inconveniencing some people? Why aren’t you angry?”

“We are angry, we just don’t let our emotions get the best of us. Hate and anger only creates more anger and hate, and it is just a terrible cycle. There is nothing to be gained from fighting and destruction, when there is so much more that can work. We can’t jump to one extreme, just because we are prisoners to our emotions. Don’t you always talk about how hateful the other side is, why stoop to their level? What is there to-”

“Look, doll,” this was a pet name that Beatrice had for the older woman, who became annoyed every time she heard it, “They are hateful, so we have to be hateful too? Don’t you see?” The Mistress sighed. “Look, when the Nazi’s were taking over Germany, did passive resistance do shit to stop them? No! Anyone who thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just sit around and ask nicely for the problem to go away’, was gassed or eaten alive. There is nothing to be gained by sitting on our asses, by-”

“Okay, I have to stop you there, you really have to stop comparing everyone you don’t like to Nazis. We are not in Nazi Germany, it isn’t as bad as you keep making it out to be. Sure, there is a lot of bullshit going on, but it is nowhere near genocide, or even having the bulk of our rights taken away, and there are still checks and balances in place to make sure that the government can’t become that. I agree that things have gotten a little out of hand, but-”

“Here you go again with that, ‘I understand you but I really don’t’, bullshit. Look, these are the end times, doll, and if you can’t see that its because you’ve got your head in the sand. You’ve chosen to play by the rules that they set up for you to stay away from power, they let you do what you do because its all harmless, its a load of horse shit, and you can’t realize it because they-”

“You keep saying ‘they’ like I’m supposed to know who you’re talking about, who the hell is this group that you’re trying to pin everything on?”

“Are you slow or something, the fuckin’ Republicans! They’ve had this countries balls in a vice grip since it was founded, and they’re the ones that call the shots. They wont stop until all the gays have been shot, until-”

“You’re just saying nonsense now,” She was beginning to get red in the face, which didn’t happen very often, “you’re just letting your emotions get the best of you, you’re refusing to look at the situation for how it is, because all you want is to justify yourself and your anger.”

“Look whose talking.”

“Shut up.” Adjusting the olive, military jacket that she kept draped over her shoulders, arms outside of the sleeves, “Just shut up for one minute. Listen, just because people are on a different end of the political spectrum doesn’t mean they’re monsters, doesn’t mean they’re incompetent, that kind of thinking is a load of bullshit. You get angry about they way some of them, not all, some, treat you and spread misinformation? You’re equally bad for doing the same, and, hell, you might even be worse for wanting to smash everything in sight. There are people on the right who are also good, well intentioned people, and they want some of the same things that we do, they just have different ways of achieving those goals. The way you talk only widens the political divide, and if we want to go anywhere in this country it should be hand in hand, not hand in throat. You just refuse to see things this way, because you wan to feel as if you’re right, as if you are smarter or better than them, and in the end your politics,” her voice grew louder and louder, and two of her friends started to walk over to her, to try to cool her down,”are nothing but a way for you to pat yourself on the back, to stroke your ego. Its masturbation. You don’t give a shit about politics, you only care about yourself.”

For several seconds Beatrice was quiet, a little startled since she had never seen the woman blow up in this way, so she only stood there as the Mistress’ friends got her to walk away, trying to get her to cool off. Aroused in a strange way that had made her uncomfortable, Beatrice decided to yell, to the woman who was walking away, “Oh yeah? Well look who the angry one is! Its you!” Hoping that her response would cover up her embarrassment from her body’s reaction, she decided to go somewhere that wasn’t crawling with other activists, somewhere where people didn’t know very much about politics, and Beatrice could heal some of her injured pride.

Ending up in a smoothie shop, Beatrice was talking to a single mother who had been interested in the girl’s appearance, and had asked if it was rude if she “wanted to ask questions about what it was like to be transgender.”

“It is,” Beatrice nodded, seeing the women get embarrassed, “but I will answer anyways since the damage has already been done, and I can be pretty reasonable. What do you want to know?”

“Well, what made you realize that you were, you know? Was that something you wanted to do, or..?”

“I knew from a long time ago that I was a girl inside, so I had decided to just, you know, transition already and now I’m happy.” Beatrice had, actually, never felt that she was a woman, and only decided to hop on the transgender train when she had realized that people were taking her seriously because she had come from an area of “privilege” (a concept she still couldn’t figure out, but said about fifty times a day), so she decided that she could just don a showy wig, give herself a woman’s wig, and then people would have to start taking her more seriously, and if they didn’t she would feel like she was being oppressed (even if it wasn’t in relation to her claiming that she was trans, and was something as simple as accidentally being bumped into, or calling her out on her shit) and would use that anger to give her a reason to talk politics at the people who didn’t want to listen to her.

Awkward, but genuinely curious, “So, what does the transition, how does that work? Do you still have your, um.. Downstairs equipment?”

“Well, everyone’s journey is different, and a lot of people chose to take hormones, or get the sex reassignment surgery, but I didn’t really need to do any of that.” Actually, she had attempted to undergo hormone replacement therapy, but it ended up giving her a nasty case of gender dysphoria after a couple weeks, which made her consider suicide, and was a good reason to flush the estrogen pills and the testosterone blockers down the toilet at the mall. “See, I know that I’m a woman, and I’m confident in the body I have, because even if it is large, hairy, masculine, I still know that its a woman’s body, because my brain is calling all of the shots. Which, let me remind you, is a woman’s brain. If I grow a mustache,” which she was in the process of doing, “that is no sweat off my back, and if you ask me, a lot of other transgirls are way too needy. They think that if you want to be considered a woman, you have to look like a woman, act like a woman, but they’re just, like, falling into all of these stereotypes of what a woman actually is, you know? They fall into this consumerist trap that tells them that they need to smell like flowers, or play with barbies, or wear lipstick, grow tits, have the ‘right’”, said in air quotes, “hormones, but that’s all just something they’ve been force fed. Don’t even get me started on transguys.”

“Wait, there are transguys? Like.. Girls that turn into guys?”

“Yeah, but they’re all a bunch of traitors to women. They’re just opportunists who want to try to be on the winning side, and all of those fuckers-”

“Language!” Covering her kid’s ears, not aware of the fact that her child has said much worse in the company of their small friends, such as “suck my fucking ass” or “shit faced bitch hole”.

This reaction caused Beatrice to scowl at the woman, and she complained that, “You are impeding on my right of free speech! My right to self expression. Fucking snowflake.”

After she had left the store, Beatrice had decided that she should stop by her house in order to prepare for the day’s demonstration. Inside her living room was a large, black velvet painting of Mao Zedong, who she believed to be a great hero, a true revolutionary, a wonderful leader. She also had scattered photographs of Stalin, Castro, and Kim Jong-Il, because she believed that everything that capitalism had said was a lie, and believed that since these figures were generally reviled, they must have actually been heroes. Their propaganda also seemed as if it was enough to convince her. She also had a copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography, right on her coffee table, placed so that everyone could see it, but she hadn’t read very far in, and basically cherry picked quotes that validated her desire to use hate and force for political means, ignoring most of the actual book, especially the last section. Before she was going to head down to the protest at the library, which was hosting a lecture by a white nationalist, mainly because the library believed that anyone should be able to speak if they fill out the proper paper work, no matter what their views may be. Beatrice was hoping that she would be able to smash in the guy’s windshield.

Over at the protest, the Mistress had reluctantly showed up, and was trying to voice her conflicted feelings to a friend of hers, “I don’t know if we should be protesting or not, it seems like we might be strengthening their cause, but it also seems like we would be doing the same by letting them spew those awful ideas.”

“Well,” her friend had replied, “shouldn’t we let everyone know that these people just aren’t welcome?”

“Yeah, but it seems like the more we complain, the more that they point at our complaining and say ‘Hey, these people are trying to silence us, they’re a bunch of fascists who want to police language!’ And then people start to wonder, you know, wonder what people are so upset about. They think the people being protested seem so calm and reasonable, so what’s the issue? Why do they have to have their first amendment’s rights stepped all over?”

“That’s not what the first amendment represents, though. They have their right to voice their ideas, and we have the rights to voice our ideas about their ideas. Isn’t the fact that they want us to stop complaining and let them go on with their terrible views a way to censor us?”

“No, no, see, then you’re just looking at what they’re doing and you want to flip it around on them, you’re trying to do the same thing they’re doing. They have a right to complain about us complaining, just like we have a right to complain about them, and they have to state whatever biased facts they have about immigrants naturally having the impulse to rape women, or whatever it is that they make up. But, they still see us complaining, and they use that to strengthen their point, because it doesn’t matter that we all have the right to complain, since most people don’t look that deeply into it. So they can paint us as trying to step on their rights, just like you tried to paint them as stepping on ours, except they can use that to bring more and more people into their cause, giving them free publicity.”

“But shouldn’t we not allow all of this to go on? Shouldn’t we prove that its not okay for the right to-”

“The far-right.”

“What?”

“Its not the views of the normal right, they’re far-right views, they’re the extreme. Its important to make that distinction, because without it then they seem more normal, and their cause and comments start to become more and more acceptable.”

“So what? They’re still-”

“No, there should be no ‘so what’. Think about it, you know Beatrice and how we all pretty much hate her?”

“Yeah, she’s the worst. Not only is she annoying to be around, but she all makes us look terrible.”

“Exactly, she makes us all look bad. When she does what she does, she becomes an extreme for everyone to focus on, there only needs to be a small amount of people doing something for the rest to get overgeneralized. Same happens with the white nationalists, people like us tend to think that they represent the right, when they’re just as much as a sore as Beatrice is for us. Because, no group is truly homogeneous, nothing is black and white, everything is just fucking grey. See, you and me are talking about this right now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone shares our opinions, thinks or talks like us, has the same views. Our views aren’t the same views as everyone else in our side of the political spectrum, just like the views of Beatrice don’t really represent a lot of others, because she’s an individual. Sure, she may be a transtrender, she may be in politics for all of the wrong reasons, her views may be shitty, but that only reflects her as a person, she does not represent the whole.”

“You’re really focused on her right now, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I feel bad for blowing up at her.”

“Didn’t she kind of deserve it though?”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Speaking of the point, why did you think that we shouldn’t protest? That was never fully explained.”

“Oh yeah, sorry, and I didn’t say that we shouldn’t protest, I just meant that it was a gray area for me, because people wont look at the gray of what we are doing, they will only look at the most surface level parts. The only people who will listen to our message are the people who already shared the same opinions, while the people who we would need to convince are going to use us to make their cause even stronger. And, I’ve wondered if it would be better to just let them exist, to stop coming out and trying to stop them, just to let them have no opposition and let people smell the bullshit, but that’s how we got here. A lot of those shitty people did get ignored, and their views weren’t challenged, and it gave them enough time to build their causes, and now the bubbles are so thick that they’re too hard to burst.”

“Its like cult members. Their ideas are so reinforced, they have this nonsensical vision of the outside world, and any idea to the contrary just makes them double down on what they’ve already believed. Its what they’ve been conditioned to do, it would be like trying to convince somebody that the moon doesn’t exist.”

“Exactly. And now I feel that, when we protest, they just use it to reinforce their delusions, and now its like actual discussion has become impossible, its just two groups trying to talk over each other about their political views, while they try to convince the other, with no intention to actually change their view points.”

“And not only that, but, like you said earlier, our side isn’t completely clear from this. People like Beatrice-

“People like her have their own bubbles, and then that gives the people in the other bubble, the far-right bubble, somebody to point to and say ‘Hey, look how delusional and out of touch with reality these people are! They’re living in a fucking media bubble, they can’t even understand any other side of the issue, we’re so much better for not being like them!’”

“And the people in the far-left bubble point and do the exact same thing, so they’ve become, like, codependent to reinforce each other’s views.”

“Yeah, and when you add in the whole black and white complex, then they start to see it as more than just far-right or far-left, they star to think that it represents all of the left or all of the right. And now, its just a huge fucking mess, and I think I’m getting tired of all of it.”

“The end times are coming.”

“No, that’s a shitty way to look at things, because this is nowhere near that bad. Its just bad for a moment, we’ve hit a sand trap. We’ll get out eventually, it always happens. A Republican comes into office and fucks things up, and then a Democrat comes in and patches things together, and it just keeps going on like that. After this term or the next, the other side are going to be the ones who are going to be the angriest, and then when they are done we’re going to come in and take their place.”

“Isn’t saying Republicans screw things up an overgeneralization?”

“The Bushes, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Hoover, they were pretty bad. But I guess it looks at the way you view it, because there are people who believe that these were great men, while they may be the sort of people that make us a little agitated. Its all perspective.”

“If its all perspective, then is anybody right?”

“Yes, one side is more right, since neither is perfect, but a lot of people don’t care for that, they just want the side that makes them feel better. Maybe we’re the same way and don’t realize it. We live in a time where people care more about feelings then facts, and everyone thinks they’re exempt, so what changes things if we feel the same way?”

“We just have to make sure to keep our minds open then, we have to be willing to hear the other side out.”

“Yeah, but what if the other side starts saying shit like black people are genetically predisposed to crime, or that immigrants are some of the most violent people in the world, or that we should have a peaceful genocide?”

“Just because we have to be open minded, Mistress, doesn’t mean that we have to accept everything that they say. You can still be open minded and call bullshit whenever it arises. There are two sides to every story, but both sides aren’t valid.”

As the protest was going on, Beatrice had arrived with a large group, all dressed in gray, all of their faces covered, ready to join in on the protest. Without wasting any time, they began smashing car windows, throwing trash cans through store windows, they really like to hear glass break, set trash cans on fire, and generally started breaking everything that they could. People started pulling out their phones to record the chaos that had ensued, and in no time there were reports that the protests had started to become violent, even as the main and original group stayed where they were, continuing to picket and chant.

Eventually the police had intervened, and as the night grew violent, destructive, and chaotic, order was eventually restored, but a few of the violent protesters had been apprehended. One of them was the Mistress, who was cuffed when she was found, hiding from the police (she was actually trying to get away from the tear gas that was deployed, and generally unpleasant to stand in), and another was one of the gray demonstrators, who had claimed that she had a message from her group. She declared that they were anti-fascists who wanted to make it so that fascism could be outlawed, she said she was so angry that she wanted to burn down the white house, she claimed that the current administration should be shot down, she claimed that she was the leader of the group and went on a confused rant that seemed more self serving than anything else. Not only was the Mistress, who declined to say anything to the press, lumped in as an accomplice with Beatrice, but the anarchist group that Beatrice had showed up with was furious that she was caught, even madder at the fact that she got their ideology wrong, while the general protesters where dismayed by how violent everything had suddenly turned, and the speaker they protested (who believed that it would be bad for Syrian refugees to enter the country, because they would eventually enter the gene pool) had raised in popularity.