#ive never had like healthy completely consensual sex

[bellocan]

hiii 1, 9 and eleven for relationship asks!!

1. do you prefer pure, innocent romantic interactions or do you prefer obsession and possession? or maybe a mix of both as long as it's relatively healthy and consensual?

ive never really had anyone like me to the point of obsession and possession! but i think id like a mix of both. i like cute and romantic gestures like leaving little flirty love notes or getting flowers or being incorporated into their creative pieces in some manner. there was a girl in high school that liked me that would refuse to leave my side when i was being dumb and isolating myself in the cold. and she'd keep my hands warm with hers. and she'd share an earbud with me and let me listen along with her. i didnt appreciate it back then but it melts my heart reflecting now.

after. my last relationship though. i also want to have zero doubts about the long haul so a little healthy possessiveness would give me a little reassurance! i want to indubitably be someones partner... i like feeling like im theirs and theirs only.

9. what was your longest ever relationship? how and why did it end?

my longest relationship is my first and only. it was ldr and it lasted about 4 and a half years. and i was engaged to them actually. had a nice little intimate christmas proposal in private and everything where i started off with christmas presents and led up to the ring!

in her own words, before she ghosted me, the relationship ended because "nothing has changed between us." she didnt feel like either one of us were growing. despite her finally working and being able to support herself somewhat. and despite me giving all my effort to address our pain points. although a lot of her pain points were nebulous due to fact of them solely involving just how she felt... and of course no matter what a person does, the other will simply feel how they feel. i would assure her that meaningful growth takes time and that measurable growth isnt instantaneous. i feel like she wanted to see her living conditions and her life in general change completely in a short amount of time.

in my own opinion, the relationship started falling apart about halfway through. she reached a point where she said she felt emotionally numb potentially as a result of her meds and couldnt feel intimacy anymore and didnt want to be intimate. i asked her to clarify since physical intimacy isnt my only want in a relationship and isnt even a deal breaker. and she said she wasnt sure. womp womp. despite her saying those things she ended up in bed with one of her university friends/flings. she said that she "just let him share the bed with her since he didnt have a place to sleep and nothing happened between them." and nah i dont quite buy that one bit anymore. especially since her roommate found the need to message me about it. there were a million different solutions she could have went with and she chose the worst one willingfully. at this point i tried breaking up with her or at least go on break. and she more or less guilted me into staying by accusing me of just wanting physical intimacy and sex lol... projecting much... from that point on forward i still put in as much effort as i could muster. but emotionally i was definitely colder. i definitely wasnt as vocal about my love. and then covid hit and the distance became greater. and it looked like it was getting back on track when the travel ban lifted and she stayed with me at my apartment for a month. and i actually believed that it was getting back on track at that point despite feeling uncertainty. and then she drops the break up a few months after blindsiding me.

11. describe your ideal type of romantic interest!!

i love creatives! whether theyre dancers or singers or writers or musicians or artists! i. feel like i have many types... i like confident passionate direct girls... ive been enamored by an architecture major whose hard work was both inspiring and. attractive. i would also put the girl at work i call texas girl in this category. watching her fiddle with components and be determined to resolve issues in any way she can... is attractive. i also like shy quiet. cutesy girls. mellow and sweet. i guess my ideal type would be someone confident and bold and direct... but can also be shy and sweet in private? someone thoughtful and kind. someone thatd make me feel supported and secure and undeniably loved. my love languages are words of affirmation and quality time!!! my romantic interest would be patient and mindful. and we would work as a couple to fix issues instead of shifting blame.

[maccreadysimp]

breaking down this anti-ian article bc it bothers me ( from the child of a bipolar mother and a male teen with same sex attraction ) while also providing valid reasons ian sucks ( from someone who likes ian )

ive had this drafted for a while so i dont think i cover anything from season 11

tw for i^cest and r^pe

he was with a married man

in this point it points out that he was with kash and he continued his relationship with kash even after linda put cameras in the store

“Ian didn't seem to care about how wrong his affair with Kash was or how much it could hurt Kash's wife Linda, whom he saw at the store regularly. “

that is a quote from that part.

ian gallagher was fifteen in season one, kash was an older man who bought him gifts and payed attention to ian ,, that was not on ian , none of that was ian fault because he was a child

ian wasnt open with lip

“ Ian didn't tell Lip about his preferences and forced Lip to figure it out on his own. Lip was instantly accepting of his brother's truth and even offered to help him figure out any confusion he might be harboring, so it's really strange that Ian wasn't just upfront with his closest confidant from the start.”

no , lip wasnt forced to figure it out on his own and he also wasn’t instantly accepting.

in this point it mentions that ‘they’re extremely close ( bestfriends and brothers ) so its strange ian didnt tell him’

like point 1 , ian is a fifteen year old boy, growing up on the southside , and thoughout the show it has mentioned multiple times that the southside isnt that accepting

back to lip -- lip wasnt accepting, sure he was fine but ‘helping your younger brother figure it out’ by having a (female) classmate give him a blowjob isnt helping

he secretly dated his best friends brother

“Most friends have an unspoken rule about not dating each other's siblings, but Ian broke this rule by secretly entering into a relationship with Mandy's closeted brother Mickey.”

the only thing i have to say about this is , he was still with kash and mickey was a boy in his age group who was gay , growing up in the southside ian probably thought he was the token gay so of course hes going to chase after mickey

he stood by as kash attacked mickey

“Ian didn't do anything to stop Kash from shooting his new lover, and didn't even tell the police about his boss' over-the-top display of jealous action so proper justice could be served.”

okay. because two men he had fallen for had gotten into a fight, there was a gun involved and he panicked, in the end after mickey got shot he went to him

now to address the quote, he didnt say anything to the police because he probably knew that that would bring shame onto kash and his family, along with mickey and his family who are very homophobic

oh yeah and it was like 2011 and cops suck and THEY LIVE ON THE SOUTHSIDE

he and lip tried framing terry milkovich

oh the homophobic and racist dad of his boyfriend and bestfriend who tried to kill him and r*ped his daughter ?

yeah , shit man , that was real bad they shouldn’t have done that /s

he dated jimmy-steves married father

“Ian didn't bother telling Jimmy the truth about his father and didn't end his relationship with Lloyd upon finding out that he had a secret wife and family, either.”

at this point ian is probably sixteen but that doesnt matter bc i wont even address that

he met him at a club and then used his relationship with ned to make mickey jealous which was one of the reasons he kept seeing him, he didnt tell jimmy-steve about the relationship or his father bc he shouldnt find out from him he should find out from his father , again like kash, ned was an older man who payed attention to ian and ned later did develop feelings feelings for ian

he stole lips identity to enlist in the army

he enlisted because he didnt know what to do with himself, its implied/stated that the army timeline was the start of his bipolar

“While impersonating Lip, Ian had tried to steal a helicopter and then proceeded to go AWOL.”

this is because of the bipolar he suffers from, it is referenced later in the series after he gets back and hes manic

ian refused to accept being bipolar

of course he didnt accept it, it is made very clear that his family thinks lowly of monica so of course if hes the lucky duck to get what his siblings demonize her for, of course he’ll not want to be it

“He refused to take medications that could alter his personality or mood.”

okay. this is why im making this whole post, this goes along with part 15 ( or so idk ) ,,

my mother , my dear mother, who is bipolar and doesnt take her meds because they are mood altering , my mom doesnt take med because she told me once that they make her feel like shit, she told me that a little after i was born she started taking them but realized she felt nothing, she felt nothing for my dad or for i ( making her numb )

she told me anti deppresents dont help either because when shes on them and manic it pushes her past productive and into angry

my dad told me that when my mom was on bi polar medication she would seem angry most of the time

he wasnt faitful to mickey

“Ian's bipolar disorder made him very reckless and impulsive and led him to be unfaithful.”

lets break that down.

ians. bipolar. disorder.

this plot point i actually didnt like, mainly bc ian never addresses it so ill give the article a point. but then i take away 2 because they have more of a problem with his bipolar messing with him rather than the fact he never apologized and they never worked it out

ian stole yevgeny

before i start quoting i should mention because his boyfriend, who has supported and helped him is suddenly telling him he needs help, he was helping raise yev so he’ll see yev as his own

“Ian failed to recognize just how crazy he was acting...”

cuting you off right there , he was in a bipolar state, he wasnt ‘crazy’ and isnt ‘crazy’

he cant even keep count of his number of partners

just slutshaming i see

he helped throw frank off a bridge

“His relationship with Frank was understandably never the same after that, as Frank struggled to get over this act of betrayal and cruelty.”

‘was never the same after that’ frank never liked ian, ian was probably his least favorite and that point is very apparent

also , it wasnt just ian , his siblings and his boyfriend caleb

he left a healthy relationship to be with mickey

he fell in love with mickey at 15 , mickey was a comfort and always someone to fall back on, when mickey was taken away and no longer in the picture his heart still obviously was with mickey and when mickey came back he didnt know what to do

he told mickey he had a boyfriend but because mickey has been such a constant in his life he finally has back of course he couldnt resist

he liked trevor, i could tell he did but trevor wasnt the one he watched get r^ped by a russian prostitute, he wasnt the one ian was secretly dating bc it would be a death wish other wise, he wasnt the one there when ian was manic or depressive ( at the start )

he tried blackmailing an old client for money

“Instead of raising the money in an honest manner, Ian chose to visit an old client from his time working at the Fairy Tail and blackmail him into funding the shelter.”

because he felt indebted to trevor and wanted to make it up to him, it would have taken longer to do it in ‘an honest manner’ when his sister would have gotten it instead, he knew how much gay youths like he once was needed a safe place

“He grew up wanting to be nothing like his father, but this whole money-making scheme was straight out of the Frank playbook”

because thats all he knows, he grew up with that ‘playbook’ so of course hes going to take a page out of it, he is nothing like frank , franks money making schemes are selfish and for his own greed while ian wanted the money to help build a safe space for lgbt youth

he let fame inflate his ego

of course he did, hes a southside kid who was destined to fail

also it is very apparent that during the gay jesus era he went off his medication which didnt help

“Before long, he just completely forgot about his ex and focused solely on being a deity”

as much as yes, he did let it mess with his head, he was trying to still help lgbt youth and was going against anti gay churchs , in the end it didnt work out for him because he was off his meds and went over board

he stopped taking his meds

see previous point and ‘ian refused to accept being bipolar’

he actually wanted to stay in prison

because he was doing good in there

ian was helping others and was spreading awareness about lgbt with in the prison , and as him and jail scenes go , we can see people were listening to him and he was trying to make it safe sane and consensual

he let down his army of followers

“Ian admitted that most of his actions were completely irrational and the mere results of his bipolar disorder.”

he didnt want to, we can see this, because he knew he would let down everyone, his family were the only ones to ever ground him and they knew it would be the best option for his own mental health

during the gallavich wedding we can see that a lot of his supporters still have his back because they must know how hard it was for him to put all of that success on something he can’t control

he constantly wasted his potential

this is actually the only point in this article i actually agree with , so only 1/20 i agree with

his relationship with mickey wasn’t actually great

“Mickey spent the first several years of their relationship denying his feelings for Ian.”

he was raised by a homophobic and racist father who he knew would react the way he did when terry had caught the two that one day

“Even after he finally embraced his true self, Ian's bipolar disorder kept them from becoming truly happy together.”

yes but mickey was there for him the entire time and helped him through it, he told him he loved him which was really big for him and did his best to care for him

“They couldn't seem to remain faithful to each other for more than a few weeks.”

back to the point about ians bipolar but for mickey he wanted monogamy , now that scene in s11 may say otherwise but it is very clear that he wants a monogamous relationship with ian and ian ( after getting help ) wants one too, and in the later seasons they are monogamous

“When Mickey asked Ian to run away to Mexico with him, Ian refused.”

he wanted to, it’s obvious, but ian has his family and didnt want to abandon them again, i think part of him knew he would see mickey again because they always find eachother, he gave mickey all of his money and wanted mickey to have a good life

“Their relationship was simply never healthy.”

no it wasnt, but thats why the ship is great in its own way, the gay closet kid raised by a homophobic man is obviously going to have a lot of baggage , and ian who is bipolar and struggling with himself will also have a lot of baggage , but in the end they love eachother and that really shows in season five and season seven specifically

that is all lol ,,, this is long sorry

now, i am not a ian apologist , i love ian but hes a dumbass sometimes

actual valid reasons ian sucks

genuinely believes frank is worse than terry

yes frank was definitely abusive but terry is definitely worse ,,

mentally/physically/sexually abusive , the whole nine yards

terry hired a prostitute to r^pe his son , threatened to kill him and ian on multiple occasions , r^ped his daughter who ended up pregnant and is actively racist

frank on the other hand will make gay jokes but in the end doesnt give enough of a shit , he has attacked his children on multiple occasions but not to the brutality that terry has ( this isnt me excusing it )

sorry ian , terry is worse

never apologized

he never apologized for all the shit he put mickey and his family through, never apologized to mickey for cheating on him , never apologized for all the manic and depressive episodes mickey endured with him

never apologized for walking away when he couldn’t handle it, in hall of shame mickey actually acknowledges this saying ‘its youre whole MO’

debbies sexuality

he has constantly made statements saying debbie isnt gay and that bothers me because , why does it care ? as a gay man and as a gay man who soent time with a lot of lgbt youth wouldnt he support his sister even if shes just ‘experimenting’?

in the recent season he doesnt seem to care and doesn’t say anything but it still bothers me

mickey only getting like 80% of his heart

okay look , i get what ian means when he says this , everyones hes been with has made him who he is but fucking hell dude ,, shut up , thats your husband , thats the love of your life you shouldnt be saying shit like that , especially to him

and then this man had the audacity to say mickey probably feels the same about past flings when he knows that ian is the only one hes probably ever been with/serious about

obviously there is probably more but those are the main ones that come to mind

—

before anyone brings up the trans or bi thing im going to explain my thought process for him

like ive probably mentioned multiple times he grew up southside and obviously only ever grew up with lgb and not t ,, trevor did inform him a lot and ian became supre accepting of everyone,, sexual preference isnt transphobic but i do think he approached the matter badly

now the bi thing , legit all i think is that he doesnt hate bisexual people its just that the man he really liked slept with a woman and never expressed any heterosexual attraction so it probably just suprised him and pissed him off because caleb did cheat on ian

—

if you read this far HOLY SHIT THANKS LOL ,, im not adding things that i think are pro about ian this was just me breaking down that article and giving my two cents :)

feel free to message me and talk to me or send me articles like this about any other character/relationship and i will totally break that one down too lol

thanks for letting me rant

[gondalsqueen]

Chapters: 8/? Fandom: Star Wars: Rebels Rating: Explicit Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla Characters: Hera Syndulla, C1-10P | Chopper, Original Characters, Kanan Jarrus, Ezra Bridger, Sabine Wren, Garazeb "Zeb" Orrelios, Alexsandr Kallus, CT-7567 | Rex, Mart Mattin, Wedge Antilles Additional Tags: Pregnancy, vague mentions of abortion, future character death in the background, Season/Series 04, Established Relationship, Oral Sex, Chair Sex, Table Sex, sex during pregnancy, chapter 2 has lots of sex, Secrets, the best pilot in the galaxy, flying combat, character injury, canon torture, flight of the defender, rebel assault, Jedi Night, Major character death - Freeform, Grief, Morning Sickness, Counseling, Masturbation, Dreams, Traditions, Space family, Inappropriate bets, Lothal, Shopping, down time, Space Combat, Battle of Scarif, Rogue One - Freeform, hammerhead corvette!, Yavin 4, Stardust - Freeform

Summary: “Hey!” Zeb caught her at the ramp. “You have GOT to be kidding me.” “Why?” “Because that child is about to drop out of you at any moment, that’s why!” “It’s not an X-wing, Zeb. G Force isn’t that bad in the Ghost.” “So you’re going to fly into battle?” ... Yavin IV was busy, busy, busy. One of their spies had tied Order 13 to a program called “Stardust,” and they had something to do at last, just trying to unwind it all. Some sort of doomsday machine.

“Better that than those Defenders,” Hera remarked.

“Would you rather fight one convor the size of a rancor,” Zeb asked, “or a hundred rancors the size of convors?”

Sabine had come back from Lothal with her. “You’re funny,” she told Zeb.

“Hey, trying times! Somebody’s got to make an attempt at humor.” 

“And we appreciate the attempt, Zeb,” Hera said, patronizing.

“You two always team up on me! I miss the boys.”

Sabine stuck her tongue out at him.

By night they were reading everything they could about babies, scrambling to get ready. “These texts are stupid!” Sabine would complain, waving a datapad. “They give directly contradictory information! And then they tell you you’re evil if you don’t do what they say.” 

“What I want to know is how any babies have managed to survive at all, if you judge by the number of things you can screw up,” Zeb commented.

Chopper didn’t think it would be very hard. Ten pound Kanan Jarrus had to be easier to control than the larger version.

“Show me the science behind any of this!” Sabine continued her tirade. “This is all just opinion. Somebody has to have done good double blind studies on babies somewhere in this galaxy.”

When her own soon-to-be-baby kept her from sleeping, Hera scoured the holonet for anything related to hybrid Twi’lek/Human children. Despite the presence of what had to have been millions of children, they were statistically so rare that the medical studies weren’t particularly… informative. She had to resort to getting information from that least trustworthy of holonet locations, the messageboard. She took everything with about fifty grains of salt. “A hybrid child is special,” one woman wrote, just before advising sticking magnets to the baby’s skin to call down Force powers. Hera rolled her eyes. One father very practically advised: “Raise them somewhere diverse and the identity crisis won’t be much.” A third brutally honest mother said, “If you’re a human woman, just go straight for the c-section. It’s going to happen anyway.”

And there were pictures… A three-year-old with short lekku and marbled skin. A ten-year-old who had just won a sports tournament standing next to his father, whom he looked nothing like. A little girl with blue skin and two blue ponytails in place of lekku. Most of those children made through genetic matching and implanted embryos, wanted and tried for for years…

Most hybrid pregnancies didn’t make it, she discovered, the genetics too mismatched to create a viable child. Those invariably ended in early pregnancy, though, and the consensus was that any fetus who made it this far was probably safe. Hera recalled the weirdly appropriate adage about not counting your chickens before they’d hatched, but she wasn’t too worried. Any kid that could kick like that was bound to be healthy. And he looked good on all the scans.

The scans… 

“Everything in the right place, everything the right size,” the technician had said at her last visit. “He’s playing with his hands. And look at this! Do you see that?”

Hera did not.

“He’s already got hair.”

Hair. Her child. 

She should really have seen that coming, but it completely floored her.

She was thirty-nine weeks along—nearly full term for a human, not quite full term for a Twi’lek—when the Battle of Scarif took place. And she was too kriffing fat to make it to the war room when they called her. 

But she heard the speech the Erso girl gave in replay, and she could have kicked herself for not being there to give it momentum. “What chance do we have?” They were Hera’s own words, angrier and more jaded, perhaps, more desperate, but the sentiment the same. “The question is what CHOICE?” Fight now or die.

When the klaxons went off, Hera all but ran towards the Ghost. 

“Hey!” Zeb caught her at the ramp. “You have GOT to be kidding me.”

“Why?”

“Because that child is about to drop out of you at any moment, that’s why!”

“It’s not an X-wing, Zeb. G Force isn’t that bad in the Ghost.”

“So you’re going to fly into battle?”

Objectively, was her child’s life was more valuable than her own, or Zeb’s, or that of anybody else in the galaxy who would be murdered if they didn’t succeed? “Yes,” she answered.  

“Hera, you’re—”

“Look,” she snapped. “It’s now or never for this fight. I’d rather have him die clean, not knowing any pain, than be hunted slowly, terrified. Or taken into some camp…” She trailed off. Did Zeb even know what she was imagining? Where did he think those Inquisitors came from? No, she’d rather have her child die now, with her.

Not that dying was going to happen. 

“I’ve got nose gun,” Sabine called.

“Okay, okay,” Zeb grumbled. “IF you’re really going, nobody’s getting turret gun but me!”

From the Phantom’s rear guns, Chopper demanded to know what they were waiting for.

“Good, then,” Hera grinned. “Let’s go take some back from the Empire.”

Rex waved them off. “Good luck!”

“We don’t need luck!” Sabine told him. “We’ve got the Force!”

…

Scarif. Graveyard, the word would come to mean. Hera flew like she’d never flown in her life, the hundreds of ships around her tinged with light at the corners of her vision, her hands and mind just a half-step ahead of the chaos. This, strangely, was her peak. She kept them alive.

But they had to get that stupid kriffing planetary shield down. “Are you listening to the Admiral? Bombing runs!” she shouted over the chaos on the comms. “Aim for the ring! None of this matters if you don’t get the shield down!” They were still just flying defensive though, few of them even able to mount a run. And those who did were blown into shrapnel after one pass.

“Karabast!” Zeb had missed a line-up shot at two TIEs. It had been a bad angle anyway, and if they’d stayed there for another three seconds to get the shot, another fighter would have finished them off quickly.

“Hey!” Hera called over the pilot’s channel. “HEY! Get your heads on and work together! Y-wings make the bombing strikes, X-wings run defensive! Holy Force, people, get in the game!”

After that they got a couple more shots in. And then Admiral Raddus brought in the new hammerhead corvette, that beautiful beast of a ship, and Hera got to watch one of the more glorious wrecks of her career, that thing diving and just PLOWING through metal and it was… victory.

Pyrrhic victory. 

They’d gotten the information out. Vader’s ship chased the Tantive IV away just before they jumped, but Tantive was fast, and they’d make it.

The Ghost came out of hyperspace a short jump later, one of the three steps that would take them back to Yavin.

“Holy kriff, Hera, that was some flying!” Sabine declared.

“Yeah.” She was still waiting for her breathing to recover. The Ghost’s shields were at more than half.

“You know if they chase Tantive IV down, they’re going to be coming for Yavin next,” Zeb told her.

“Yeah.”

“Did you SEE that thing? It’s operational.”

Chopper suggested several rude technical malfunctions he’d like to perform on that thing.

“Yeah, Chop, you show them.” Hera rolled her eyes.

“Hera—” From the nose gun, Sabine turned to look up at her, that straight-browed fretful face that she made. “Don’t go back to Yavin. It’s time for a break. Fly to Lothal.”

Her stomach twisted painfully at the suggestion. No, not her stomach—her uterus was taking up all the room these days.

“You can comm them that you’ve gone on leave. You should have gone a week ago.”

She did feel a little funny. Post-battle adrenaline probably, but who was to say?

“Okay.”

“Really?”

“Chopper, get down here and chart a course for Lothal.”

[lelianasface]

My Thoughts on The Masked Empire (Spoilers)

Okay, first of all, TME wasn’t about Brialene at all?

Briala’s hero’s journey is at the center of the novel. She’s the protagonist and Celene and Michel are side characters who serve as foils to her character. I don’t read much western literature outside of what I need to in my English classes for my minor (I’m an English minor), but I saw a huge Shakespearean influence, particularly from Henry IV and King Lear. I noticed this because one of my own characters is basically a foil of Hal (deliberately) before I read TME but his arc was about coming into his own as king of Ferelden and figuring out how to do right by minority groups, and not the exact fucking opposite.

Back to Briala!

She comes into her identity in the book, by overcoming her internalized racism. The book mentions how she’s more embarrassed at least as a child about her “dusky skin” than being an elf so a big fuck you to all who whitewash her in fanart- but it’s more than that. While Briala, unlike Michel, never expresses a desire not to have been an elf at all (or elf-blooded, in Michel’s case) and hardly shies away from her heritage, she initially glorifies the Dalish, though the book clearly frames her as more circumspect than her fellow city elves, who see them as an ideal and hope for the future. At the end of the book, however, she puts the city elves before the Dalish, as it seems to her from her dealings with Clan Virhen that they are not going to help the city elves, or that they do not consider the city elves part of their own. (While this is admittedly a one-dimensional view of the Dalish, and one clan does not stand for them all, the Dalish are very concerned with blood purity; given that one of their insults is “seth’lin” or “thin-blooded,” I do think she made the right call, though I hope at least one Dalish clan proved her wrong. )

Disclaimer: These are all just my opinions and I often have a really unorthodox way of analyzing things.

The call to adventure comes when she goes to avenge the death of Lemet. When she’s arrested/captured by Gaspard, Briala is forced out of her comfort zone farther than she’s ever been. Celene razing the slums of Halamshiral begins to open her eyes to Celene’s truth- that in reality, it’s Briala’s hand which has been making the lives of the city elves better, and that she doesn’t need Celene to do it/Celene isn’t doing it fast enough/Celene isn’t doing it for the right reasons. Felassan serves as the supernatural aid which pushes her to save herself. Entering the forest (or wherever tf they went once the Civil War started) was the beginning of her transformation. Her challenges come in the form of her physical and mental battle. During the battle with the sylvans, she realizes they feed off rage and fear- her rage and fear towards Celene. Her internal battle mirrors the supernatural events in the forest. She is tempted back towards ignorance to the painful truth that though Celene loves her, it will never be enough for her to really fight for the elves.

As Felassan guides Briala, she traverses the abyss; one could argue that her arrest and capture by Gaspard is the abyss but I don’t think so. The low point is realizing all of her patience with Celene has been for naught, and she’s stranded in the forest with a clan that does not believe she belongs, after being rejected by city elves who think she doesn’t understand their plight after living in the Winter Palace. It is realizing that though being Celene’s lover is the only life she’s ever known, Briala will always be a handmaiden to Celene, just a pawn in her game. When Briala overhears Celene’s false promises to the Dalish, she hears the same lies and promises that she has believed for as long as she’s been with Celene. She finds herself without a group to call her own.

Moving through the eluvians, Briala becomes more confident, and her transformation accelerates. She finally realizes the truth Felassan has been guiding her towards- that Celene was the one who had her parents killed and that Celene does not care about anything as much as she cares about her own power; power for the sake of power.

She bests Celene by ordering Michel to keep Gaspard alive- not with daggers, but by using the rules of the very game Celene killed her parents over. She beats not only Celene, but Lady Mantillon, by depriving Celene of one of the most valuable weapons in her arsenal: Briala herself. And she asserts that she will save the city elves and she is one of them. Whatever privileges she had, she was essentially a prisoner there, and the harassment she received from humans there, sexual or otherwise, marked her apart from them. Whatever fancy clothes Celene’s influence “gifted” her, it was a poor mask to wear. No one would ever consider her anything other than an elf. She embraces this truth and promises to give her people a better life with her new

The final gift Felassan, her mentor, gives her before his death, is the gift of time. By refusing to take the passcode (so Fen’Harel can’t get it) she is able to begin her revolution before the events of Tresspasser, and in my canon, my Inquisitor enlists her as the eluvian expert, so hopefully she regains control of them.

Archetypes/Tropes:

Hero/Innocent- Briala

Mentor- Felassan

Trickster- Imshael

Shapeshifter- Celene

Knight (this one isn’t really an archetype but it’s obvious)- Michel

Villain - Gaspard

I don’t think Celene was the villain, though she was a villain. I do she’s more compassionate than, say, Lady Mantillon was. However, actions trump intentions every fucking day, and that doesn’t mean fuck all given that she prioritized her power over the poor elves in Halamshiral :(

The fact of the matter is, while Briala goes through a complete hero’s journey, Celene returns home to the winter palace without having learned anything at all, which is a fucking shame but it’s what it is. She has become better at the game. If there’s a “moral” here, it’s that Celene had the potential to be compassionate and the potential to be a true ally to the elves, but over the years of playing the game, the “mask” she wore became harder and harder to take off. That mask became who she was the longer she had it on, and by the end of TME, there’s nothing left of the girl Briala may have once loved.

By Inquisition, it’s possible she had become a master of the game, but the fact that she couldn’t reign in the response to a single play shows otherwise. There were a thousand ways to overcome the situation in that theater- the fact of the matter is, she already wanted to quash the rebellion by force and she used the play to justify it, playing into Gaspard’s trap. When I say I don’t think of her as a villain, I mean that she’s not a textbook bad guy but she IS an antagonist and someone who did shitty things that need punishment/to be defeated or vanquished OR a pretty darn massive redemption arc. Given that you can kill her in DAI but you can’t redeem her, it’s clear which path she’s headed down regardless of whether she’s alive in your canon.

RE: Brialene

Celene is downright cruel to Briala and the fact that even in private at some points, Briala calls her “majesty.” The fact that she needs to sneak out of Celene’s room, like, it’s not healthy in the slightest and I’m really fucking sorry Briala had to go through that TBH. Celene may have loved Briala, but if she really cared about her, she would NOT have kept her in that situation; she would have let Briala go, because while the relationship was a respite for Celene, Briala was constantly thinking about keeping Celene happy and even feeling obligated to have sex with her so she could get sleep, which is yikes??? Like, if I woke up at 4 am groggy as shit and my gf was awake, I wouldn’t want to have to placate her with sex. I’m not saying it wasn’t consensual, just not very healthy. Also Celene...killed Briala’s parents and then slept with her for years w/o telling her which is????? Bad???????

In conclusion: if you ship this, please just think about it for a hot second and then stop.

Also some light reading on tropes if you find them interesting like I do:

TV Tropes