#the real TLDR is I love!!! restoration!!!! and magical theory!!!!!!

[everybodyknows-everybodydies]

okay so before I can talk about some things I have to establish some other things, and I'm shaking all the bees out of my brain today with great vigor, which means, without further ado: a brief overview of How Does Restoration Work (according to people named Mouse who are me)

point zero: for the most part, simplistically, each school of magic can be thought of as a manipulation of something. enchanting and conjuration fall under different strains of manipulation of souls, illusion as manipulation of the mind, and so forth. restoration is manipulation of the body.

now first (and this might be stating the obvious lol, but I have to state it): it does not work 1:1 exactly like it does in-game. people do not actually have the handy-dandy HP bar, illness/injury does not translate to a single number ticking downwards, and healing is definitely not just "make number go back up" in a matter of seconds. when you're at a point where a hypothetical HP bar would be nearly depleted, anything that's fast is not going to have the kind of long-term payoff that you need, but it might get you somewhere safer so you have the time to dedicate to actually properly healing.

secondly: in order to fix something, you have to know how it works. magic is a tool; any tool is only as effective as whoever is wielding it. it doesn't take a lot of knowledge to close a paper cut that didn't even bleed, but a severed tendon is going to be a very different story. an accomplished healer must have extensive knowledge of the body and its various systems in order to ensure their healing attempt is not going to inadvertently cause a whole slew of other problems. doctors today go through over a decade of schooling and training; in the US at least you're looking at a minimum of four years of premed, four years of med school, and three to seven years of residency. personally I think healers should also be the school of magic that requires the longest time spent learning because... there IS so much to learn! an additional note is that restoration has the benefit we do not of being magic, though: I think that in a world where healing is executed largely through the hands with magic, it stands to follow that you are not going to want to physically open someone up every time you need to check something inside the body, and so for my purposes this leads us to healers cultivating a specialized, passive sense of the bodily interior through touch. I've described this previously as a bit like echolocation as magic is channelled through the body and allows the healer a sort of "sixth sense" of precisely what's going on and where, though an in-universe analog might be a highly-refined version of "detect life".

(but Mouse, one might say, that's not a restoration spell! correct! the classification of magic is arbitrary! now put a pin in that thought because it will be important at a later date. not today though stay with me here.)

thirdly: as any tool should not be alone in the toolbox, magic can be used as a supplement or supplemented by mundane resources. if you have the time for it, an open wound will benefit from being stitched together to hold shape before applying magical healing, resulting in the need to produce far less scar tissue than a wound that you try to heal without closing it first. you still need to know how to use a tourniquet, how to handle a dislocated shoulder, how to drain an abscess, etc. just like you wouldn't whip out your power tools to hang a single photo frame, you have to know when to rely on magical healing and when to take whatever steps you can non-magically.

fourthly: magical healing has limits. manipulation of the body is not an all-powerful solution. no deus ex machina healing here. the two major restrictions are (1) the body's natural capabilities, and (2) the body's preexisting material. a body is capable of much more than we generally achieve in day-to-day life and nobody is running at 100% capacity 24/7 (because you would die, very fast). restoration can amplify measures that are already in place, such as stimulating platelet clotting/fibrin production over a cut to scab it over rapidly - and then, if taken further, providing the energy for tissue repair to move entirely from cut to scab to scar. crucially you will note that you cannot skip a stage! the healer is using what the body already has available, just allowing it to happen on a compressed timescale by boosting the energy available and providing external direction. there is a LOT of potential regarding what a healer could be capable of just by stimulating production of different hormones or shuffling brain chemistry alone. but! to reiterate! restoration is manipulative, not additive: a healer may be able to reattach a limb if they get to you in time, but they can't grow you a new arm out of nothing.

fourthly, subpoint: magical healing has cost, for both the healer and the patient. the more severe the injury/illness is, the longer it will take to heal and to recover fully from the expedited healing process, and thus the more energy the healer has to expend. a healer is limited most sharply by the depth of their own magicka reserve; practicing to expand the amount of magicka one has access to is just as fundamental a skill as learning anatomy and physiology. this is why most healers don't work alone! being able to literally split up the work - I'll take the broken leg; you focus on the slipped rib - reduces the probability of running out of magicka mid-patient and allows for fewer required follow-up sessions to ensure recovery is proceeding the way it should.

(fourthly, sub-subpoint: this is also why Colette Marence, the only professional healer in Winterhold, deserves a significant raise and a vacation and if anyone asks "is there a healer around" somebody ELSE can take care of it for once-)

fifthly: potions! we know that alchemical concoctions are a separate beast entirely from magic as executed by a mage - namely, I point here to spell absorption/spell reflection not being triggered by drinking a potion. this could take us down a separate rabbit hole about alchemy tapping into the innate magicka stored in reagents and the way THAT works, but for now the relevant question is: how does a healing potion differ from a healing spell? primarily the difference is capacity for intent and direction: a healer, being a person, can focus in on the specific site of injury and identify exactly what's wrong and exactly what steps need to be taken to fix it most efficiently. a potion does not have this capacity for specificity and is instead subject to the direction of the body's natural systems. ingested, it will be dispersed through the digestive system and through the bloodstream; applied as a salve it may work faster, but this usage is limited to external injuries. strong healing potions therefore are great for boosting your natural healing capacities long enough to get you to an actual healer for more serious cases, and may be all someone relies on for less serious cases - similar to using over-the-counter medication for a cold versus going to see a doctor for bronchitis.

tldr: restoration IS a perfectly valid school of magic, and just because it emphasizes mundane knowledge alongside esoteric magical knowledge does not make it any less fascinating or worthwhile. thank you <3

[foxx-queen]

flemeth in da4

so I've been replaying inquisition and reading a lot of theories about what might be up with flemeth / mythal in da4 - most people seem to agree that she's definitely not dead and that we'll see her again, whether as a piece of herself like in da2, or through whoever drank from the well of sorrows. I'm seeing a lot of flemeth / mythal is actually going to be the big bad of da4 , but I'm actually leaning the opposite way.

I think flemeth / mythal will end up being one of the good guys / helping the mc in da4. tldr at the end cause idk this is long 

one reason I'm hoping for this is like, bioware is leaning real hard into ‘the elven gods are all evil’, and honestly I think it would be nice for the dalish to have at least one god who wasn't like that, but bioware isn't exactly great when it comes to the dalish so. also yeah i’m biased because i love her as a character and think boiling her down to the ‘real bad guy’ doesn’t do her character justice. 

my thinking is basically this - solas wants to bring down the veil because he wants to restore elves to the way they were, and he has zero investment in the current world / thinks it's terrible, unless he's friends / romanced the inquisitor. flemeth / mythal however has been around for a long time, and we know her attitude on the elves / dalish is very different to solas'. whereas solas can't stand what the dalish have become and refers to them as not being his people, flemeth on multiple occasions speaks of dalish with pride. unlike solas, she's witnessed their fall and the way they've rebuilt themselves, and how they've created a culture they value and find strength in, and even though it's based on a history that isn't entirely 'correct', she admires them for it. we don't know the extent of her involvement with the dalish, but from the fact that they have a whole name for her and she's had dealings with them we can kind of assume she's spent time with them a fair bit. when she says 'you do the people proud, and have come far' that comes from a place of having seen what the elves where, what they went through, and what they are now, and understanding that it has value.

even aside from elves, flemeth has intervened many times in history, which yeah could mean that it's leading to her being the big bad, except that a lot of things she's done have resulted in the world being saved / something good happening. if all she wanted was the destruction of the veil, which would lead to the destruction of the world, I don't see why she would care if the darkspawn overwhelmed thedas. she's been an important part of stopping the blights, because shes invested in the world as it is now.

so heres what I think - flemeth wants to see the veil come down, without destroying the world. solas doesn't care about preserving the current world, but a lot of what flemeth seems to have done involves keeping some sort of balance. she wants to preserve the old magic , but she also understands and values change, which solas doesn't. flemeth talks about how 'she was betrayed, as I was betrayed, as the world was betrayed, and I will see her avenged' and while that could be about wanting revenge on the elven gods who killed her (which seems to be the main argument about her being the big bad), I think shes actually talking about the damage done to the world by the creation of the veil. we know that when solas created the veil it really fucked the world up - it destroyed the elven kingdom, and is probably the reason why the dwarves can’t perform magic / don’t dream. flemeth says that ‘things happened that were never meant to happen’ which again i think is talking about the veil, rather than the fact that mythal was murdered. its also like, if she did want to see the elven gods punished for murdering her... thats literally already happened. that’s what solas did when he created the veil, even though in the end the greatest damage was to the world itself. 

flemeth could also be talking about what happened to the dwarves. we know from codex entires / murals etc that mythal seems to have led a war on the titans in the early days of the ancient elves because the titans were creating the earthquakes, that she killed a few, and their bodies were mined for lyrium. she also later shut them away because she realised the power there was too dangerous, which lessened / destroyed the dwarves connection to the titans. it seems that at the time the ancient elves thought it was a mercy to the dwarves because they appeared to behave as if they had no free will (like the dwarves in the descent dlc living inside the titan), but that later mythal seemed to experience regret about this. its possible that she realised the dwarves lost something intrinsic to their very being when they lost their connection to the titans – we know that she later granted dwarves dreams that were said to fill some emptiness they felt. we know dwarves don’t dream now, which is presumably because a. mythal died and b. the veil was created, forever severing any last connection they had to the fade. this is possibly why we see statues / depictions of her in the deep roads / guarding that dwarven tomb that was created pre-blight. perhaps one of the reasons why she was murdered was because, along with speaking out about how power hungry the evanuris were becoming / being against slavery, she was in some small way trying to restore some of what the dwarves lost. 

again this comes back to like. her wanting to restore / fix what was without destroying what is. flemeth is by no means perfect or a ‘good’ person - she’s described as being ‘able to throw something away something as easily as she can take a life, or give it back’, and basically being the entire spectrum of grey between good and evil. its possible that she is using solas as a tool to bring down the veil, because without that theres no chance of restoring what was, but i think somehow she’ll end up doing something to create balance rather than simple destruction. that would also explain why she never stops solas / lets him kill her - without it being a whole oh she’s actually the Real Bad Guy. and yeah since the evanuris will have to be dealt with if bringing down the fade releases them , if they do have to die in order for the world to be fixed, i’m sure she won’t exactly mind. but when she talks about the ‘reckoning that will shake the very heavens’ i don’t think she’s talking about like. the literal end of the world. i think she’s talking about how the world will inevitably be changed and shaken up by what she’s planning, but it will still be there. 

tldr : flemeth / mythal isn’t the ‘bad guy’ of the series. she’s been working on her own agenda for years, which yes does involve allowing solas to tear down the veil, but in the end she values the world as it is now, and considering that her character is supposed to be basically the definition of a grey character, she’s exactly the kind of person who could find a balance between what was, and what is. also would be neat if she ends up creating this new ‘balanced’ world, ending the dragon age, because the whole series has been shaped by her, and she herself is a dragon.