#this is the plot of Dragon Age

[reactionimagesdaily]

[proxycrit]

(I point. Gently, in the voice of somebody who’s mind touched by the outer gods, i whisper truth in your ears:

Your honor the horses are now lesbians

(Anyways here’s the designs)

[flashhwing]

i love the kirkwall squad because they all have such protagonist energy. any of them could be the main character. except for varric but he did that on purpose. any of the rest of them could be the main character

[feykrorovaan]

Girls don't want boys, girls want fully romanceable dwarves in Dragon Age.

[b4kuch1n]

yay! I drew these quite literally three years ago. dragonheart!milo and raihan! a knight on a doomed dragon hunt being lifted out of his station by a small village medicine man. together they become magic lawyers and overthrow the government

the main details in these do survive into the iterations I’ve drawn (instead of these actual designs I spent time to make el oh el): the “leaf” diamond quilt/gambeson and the plaited coattail for milo, the “atypical” weapons, long coat, and large number of scattered fake gold trims and accessories for raihan. I think I lost raihan the hat and added a cape for milo further down the line because like this their general silhouettes are too similar for my liking lol

[corseque]

this is like the first conversation scene of Dragon Age: Origins, and if we'd paid attention to it, we would have seen it was clear foreshadowing that the elven gods were "wrong" in a way that the Dalish don't expect. I've seen people claim the elven gods plot is some annoying new direction in the story that is made up to throw the series off track from what it's really about. so let me repeat myself

this conversation happens in the first ten minutes of Dragon Age: Origins

also I figured out how to use the Origins Toolset to look at the dialogue trees so you're all in a world of hurt

[niofo]

really funny thinking about an inquisitor who was neither friends nor enemies with solas. they're showing up in dreadwolf like, solas? ah yes, we were coworkers once, i don't really know the dude, but i guess i need to help to stop some end of the world crisis again before they let me retire.

[danielnelsen]

You can interpret these however you like, and I’d love to read your ideas for other origins or extending these ones in the tags (etc)!

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

sorry no matter how often i play i will never get over his jrpg ass looking design fdslfkjlksf

[theharlotofferelden]

Remembering when BioWare was doing PR for DAI (which at the time was close to release) and they had a picture of the whole gang standing in front of a table and someone pointed out the placement of each character closely mirrored that of Michaelangelo’s Last Supper with Solas in the position of Judas and all I can think of is readwithcindy taking the piss out of one of the ACOTAR books for having heavy handed symbolism like:

“See Solas is in the position of Judas because it’s like A Foreshadowing and symbolism that he’s like Judas. The inquisitor is like Jesus in this way (very holy) which means that solas is going to betray them at some point. Because of the foreshadowing and the fact that he’s standing where Judas would be.”

[pinayelf]

maya tabingdagat, inquisitor gabe trevelyan’s close friend, ex-circle mage and ex-tranquil just trying to figure out how life works again

(Maya is not a Trevelyan please don’t tag her as one!)

[faeryfrogs]

nothing that hasn't been said before, but I need bioware devs to make solas the secret companion of dreadwolf a la loghain mac tir in origins. to accept him as a companion you have to lose out on the approval and/or presence of another companion, who leaves your party (parallel to loghain-alistair and anders-sebastian). then the player base can take out their feelings on him. they can break the egg or put him to work fixing his mess. parallel to hawke/stroud/etc in inquisition, you can choose to have him sacrifice himself as well. would also like an option to mail him off to lavellan and let him face her wrath/rehabilitation. cathartic as hell

[ziracona]

Okay but what I can’t get over is when you meet Anders, and he explains Justice, he says his anger and hate corrupted Justice and overwhelmed him—changed him—and he’s miserable and guilt-ridden and full of so much self-hatred and fear of hurting someone he loves again and certainty he will, that he takes THREE YEARS of being in love with Hawke who is actively pursuing him, before even considering risking a relationship.

And I fucking believed him. I thought ‘That makes sense. Spirits are influenced by how they’re believed to be (a great example being the awful things that happen to poor Justice on a Rival!Path in DA2), and their environment, and what they’re pushed to do. He’s clearly not a demon, which tracks, because that only happens to a spirit corrupted completely away from their core being, and Justice and Vengeance aren’t antonyms—they have solid overlap. So, it’s more like he’s unstable and a little bit shaky in his sanity, dealing with this, but still very much a spirit and himself—just also sort of unwell.” It made sense. I really thought Anders would understand what was going on.

It wasn’t until beating the whole fucking game and having complete context, that I was able to look backwards and realize that’s entirely wrong. In Awakening, Justice has /exactly/ the same personality as in DA2, just more stable and calm and curious, less unwell and fractured. That’s what I said before? No, not exactly. What I mean is, Justice pushes Anders in Awakening to consider a more active role in defending Mages. He’s forceful and passionate about doing the right thing—hell, when you meet him, he’s championing a bunch of humans in the Fade to save them from a demon by force. He changed, yes. But it wasn’t his personality. It was his stability.

Anders’ feelings of anger and hate and desire for justice and vengeance didn’t hurt Justice at all; those feelings are all just ones. It was his fear and guilt that did. It was the way he’s been raised his entire life by the Chantry to consider himself dangerous and violence dangerous and action dangerous, and caring too much, fighting back, standing up, using magic to fight back, all dangerous and bad. It’s his /fear/ that he is wrong and bad. It’s his religious trauma over his own existence biologically as what he is. Justice didn’t change. Anders was afraid of what he and Justice did—were able to do—what Justice did to protect him. And immediately assumed he was the monster and he was at fault, because as much of a rebel as he is and as much as he believes Mages are not monsters and deserve to be free, like basically all minorities who had to unlearn the bigotry they experienced their whole life, he has not been able to stop applying to himself rules he long ago stopped apply to everyone else in the world.

And that fear, that belief Justice had been warped and hurt by him, and schism in his own mind about not just what Justice means, but what it means as it relates to him and what he’s allowed to do and want, and it making him evil as a person to pursue even if he thinks it’s right, /that/ is what warped Justice. That’s why Justice is unstable and unwell and their relationship is fractured and strained, despite caring for each other, and Justice’s overwhelming desire to help Anders. Anders is terrified not of Justice, but of himself. And in retrospect all of this is made so clear by his two paths in DA2.

Since gaining Justice, Anders was immediately attacked and almost killed by another Warden, and had to flee, and it was bloody. He ran to Kirkwall and kept his head down, struggling to help as a doctor for refugees in the slums, risking freedom and life every day by practicing magic as an apostate. He’s utterly alone. He spent years fleeing the Circle and being dragged back. As a youth, he fell in love, and they separated him and his boyfriend and took him to another tower. He kept trying to escape. He was left in solitary confinement for an /entire year/ after his seventh escape. The wardens saved him, and he had a home and freedom for like 6 months in awakening, then the Wardens bowed to the Chantry’s demands and initiated a Templar to follow him literally everywhere like a prison warden and that hard earned freedom and community was lost. He saved Justice’s life by letting him live in his body, but in doing so was proclaimed an abomination and almost killed on the spot by the Templar Warden, and fled, alone again. In Kirkwall, he isolated himself to try to keep others safe, and spent his time healing. Then he meets Hawke, and goes to save his first love from being made tranquil, only to find the Chantry is using their own church to bait him, and he has arrived too late, Karl is gone, and he is nearly made tranquil himself, then forced to kill the only person he’s ever loved when Karl regains his person for seconds and begs him to do it before he’s a mindless slave again.

From here, he spends the next 7 years helping heal Hawke’s team, smuggling Mages out of Kirkwall to save them as part of an Underground Railroad, championing mage rights and protesting, writing manifestos, healing refugees and the poor, and doing everything in his power to make the world better. No one in Hawke’s party, except determinately Hawke (and determinately Bethany as well, before, well), takes him and the plight of Mages seriously. He’s treated as an extremist and an annoyance and over the top for regularly talking about the fact that, you know; his minority group literally is being killed in the streets and turned into mindless slaves for the church every fucking day, and no one is stopping it. He becomes more and more desperate and isolated and the situation gets so bad, Justinia has ordered an Exalted March to purge Kirkwall, and Meredith has sent for the Right of Annulment to kill every mage in the circle, about half way through Act 3. And still, no one does anything. He’s completely alone, even in just, fucking validating the severity of the suffering and death and injustice they face.

If Hawke treats Anders like a monster, like an abomination, and Justice like a demon? Over the course of those 7 years of being dismissed, abandoned, and outright attacked by the closest things he has to friends, he becomes less and less stable, more and more lost to the Chantry fears he’s a monster, less sure of himself and his identity, more alone, and confused, and broken, and hopeless. Pulled in too many directions and giving up in despair and trying to fight at the same time. And Justice gets worse. He becomes believed by everyone to be a demon, until even Anders is uncertain and afraid of them both. And then Justice is torn between hurting Anders, and letting innocents die, both of which go intrinsically against his nature as a spirit, and what happens to Justice is what happens to any spirit forced to be and forced to act outside of its nature: he begins to be warped into a demon.

If Hawke is a friend to Anders, and he is not alone in his fight for his people. If Hawke helps him, and reassures him, and he is able to stabilize his mind and emotions and realize he’s not a monster, and his cause is just, he and Justice stabilize together, and no longer have even the issues they do in Act 1, because his warped view of justice and his fears are overcome, and with Justice’s sense of self not constantly threatened, the problem is removed. They both get to be happy, and well, and cohesive. It empowers Anders to see he’s right and just, and to make hard choices rationally, and find who he is and what he wants, with great assurance and passion, and Justice to retain who he is and stay a spirit, while both help the world.

And anyway it just makes me extremely upset that Anders even with all his conviction and belief, has still had such fear and guilt over his very being drilled into him by the Chantry, that he truly believes he’s the monster in his relationship with Justice, and a danger to everyone around him, and it’s the Chantry the whole time. It always has been.

[quitefair]

Dragon Age Lore Breakdown: Gereon Alexius

Started working on my accursed DA fic again, and the research rabbit hole led me down the In Hushed Whispers path. And I found out a bunch of things about this dude that I realised I never knew before.

Anyway, ramble under the cut.

Before he became a Magister, Gereon Alexius was first and foremost, a researcher of magic. One that was trying to push the boundaries of what magic could do, particularly in the field of ‘traveling through and controlling both time and physical space’.

His research partner (and eventual wife) was Livia Arida, a researcher who focused specifically on the Veil.

Gereon’s father, Magister Alexius, was your typical Tevinter upper class dude – focused on power and bloodlines and image. House Alexius wished Gereon focused less on the theoretical and more on magic with practical uses.

Gereon's father thus gave up his post as Magister to his nerdy ass son in the hopes that he would become more invested in politics like he himself was.

Instead, Magister Gereon used his position to ‘became a tireless champion of education, criticizing his peers for pouring the Imperium's funds into the war with the Qunari at the expense of the Circle and demanding better schooling and institutions of higher learning for the Soporati.'

His codex entry is more telling of his backstory and character than anything he's displayed in game lmao.

He continued his research in a diminished capacity, and subsequently married his long-time sweetheart and research partner Livia Arida. He also took a position as professor of thaumaturgy at the Minrathous Circle.

[They use the word ‘thamaturgy’ here very liberally, and I’ve not seen this anywhere else in my Dragon Age research. We all know the DND connotations, but I would like to take the meaning of the term as ‘boundary breaking magical research’, since that’s what Gereon is known for. Like idk the Thedosian equivalent of fringe science.]

[[This also assumes a scientific hierarchy within the study of magic within Imperium society, which I doubt they will explore in DA4, but gods that would be so fucking fascinating.]]

Anyway, Gereon and Livia had a son, Felix. Despite both his parents being mages, and particularly gifted ones at that, Felix was a very weak mage, one that could only cast very simple spells and with great effort.

Gereon’s father saw Felix as a weak link, described him as ‘just barely more than a Soporati’. Because of this, he tried to have Felix assassinated. Typical Magister behaviour.

Livia, being absolutely… livid (yeah I went there lmao), intercepted the assassin, and in turn, fucking had Gereon’s father assassinated instead. This ensured Felix's safety and secured Gereon as head of House Alexius.

Anyway, if it wasn’t clear how much Livia and Gereon loved Felix, you should know by now. Since he couldn't learn much magic, they brought in tutors from all fields – history, art, music, literature, etc, ensuring that anything the boy could study was offered to him on a silver platter.

And although Felix wasn’t a powerful mage, he seemed to have inherited his parents’ analytical minds, and therefore was a gifted mathematician. Recognising this, his parents sent him to study at the University of Orlais.

In the meantime, both Gereon and Livia continued their boundary breaking research. At this point, they decided to take on assistants and apprentices, since they could not involve their son in their research.

While Livia took on ‘half dozen of the most promising young students of the Fade and the Veil throughout the Imperium’, Gereon chose only one apprentice.

You know who it was.

So they continued their research – with Gereon and Dorian focusing on breaking the boundaries of magic itself, while Livia and her apprentices sought to determine the effects of such magic on the Veil. Kind of like an unstoppable force vs immovable object situation.

[There's also what I can only assume is an artist's rendition of their notes in The World of Thedas 2, which is... well.]

[The description included: Careful study is paid to the eyes of the nug. Based on the drawings and a limited deciphering of the text, the author seems all but obsessed with understanding what animals see and how this might differ from our own perception of reality.]

[[Edit: apparently the images above aren't from Gereon's notes, but from a book called Grim Anatomy. Dissecting this book is a whole nother post so we'll leave it at that.]]

They were apparently super close to a breakthrough. But we can’t have nice things in Thedas, can’t we?

In 9:38 Dragon, Gereon and Livia travelled to Orlais to visit Felix. As the family travelled back to Minrathous (or Hossberg - Dragon Age is never consistent with the lore), they were attacked by hurlocks. For some reason, Gereon wasn’t with his wife and son when this happened.

Livia is killed and Felix is tainted.

Gereon is obviously filled with survivors guilt, the grief of losing his wife, and the fear of now losing his son to the taint. He stopped caring for anything other than his son’s health, and this affected his relationship with his research, and by extension, Dorian.

This led to an argument over how distant and strange Gereon was becoming, and eventually Dorian parted ways with Gereon.

In the gap between this and the events of Inquisition, Gereon is now part of the Venatori. It can be assumed that the reason he joined was because of promises made that the Elder One can save Felix from death.

[We can probably extrapolate that Gereon somehow understands that Corypheus is a darkspawn, and so that adds to the weight of his belief that Corypheus can cure Felix.]

It is this time and space bending research that is the foundation of In Hushed Whispers.

Once Gereon is defeated, you can judge him in Skyhold. If you decide to take him in as an agent, he can continue his research for the Inquisition. (Though canonically all it yields is this amulet. Which isn't even unique, you can get it in random loot drops anywhere. Sad.)

[dailycupofcreativitea]

I got these super awesome lovely painted drawings from @chickenoptyrx!!! My delusions are being fed! I am eating well today! Look at 'em being frenemies! No one better to do the "asshole tol and frustrated smol" dynamic than Chicken 😭🙏

Also the dialogue between them is officially 100% canon it literally suits them so well 😭🙏

[time-awa-y]

I think it's interesting how even though Coles a spirit he never really seems to notice (or it isn't directly stated in the game) that Solas is like an elven god, like he obviously picks up some vibes but still