Home of Malaric “fuck the Chantry” Surana

Legacy | they/them | adult This is my Dragon Age sideblog

[apostate-surana]

Hello, I’m Legacy and this is where all my Dragon Age content will live.

I’m in the midst of playing Dragon Age: Origins for the first time and will be updating this post as I get further into the games. I will be posting my live updates on this blog as well.

I’m a chronic OC collector so also expect to see a lot of rambling posts of my own. My grasp on DA lore isn’t the strongest yet so there may be some inconsistencies as I progress and learn more. My main OC right now is my Warden Surana, Malaric, who I’m currently playing.

[artschoolglasses]

"That could be easily rectified."

"Of that I have no doubt. You are most skilled. If you haven't killed me, however, you must have kept me alive for some purpose, yes?"

Dragon Age: Origins

[vigilskept]

david gaider: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “the stolen throne” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

you: yeah whatever. this book ain’t shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear these guys are like. gay

rana vigilskept pacing on the dashboard: it was never about ferelden. i mean it was about ferelden. but his attachment to ferelden itself is actually about maric . who he is in love with and who he resents and grieves and can never process the loss of because there was no body to burn. he will never have closure. he burned down the country to hold on to what little he has left and he will never have—

[atiya-nagrano]

idk alistair and zevran always seem to be set up as opposites, not just in fandom but in the game and in their conversations w each other, but i do think at least some of that anxiety — more on alistair's part than zevran's, but the reverse is there, too — is bc they do have some uncomfortable things in common, foremost amongst them a rly complicated relationship to sex.

like yes. yes, zevran has a ton of sex. it's his job to have a ton of sex. when he tells the warden that his mother died giving birth to him, thus making her his 'first victim, as it were', while some of that is abt trying to make you feel sorry for him so you super won't kill him or kick him out........................................that's just kind of fucked, right?

and is that not how alistair feels? is that not essentially what goldanna tells him?

alistair and zevran are both described as bastards. alistair has more reason to have negative associations w his father, bc his father lived longer, but i don't think there's any reason why zevran shouldn't have ambivalent feelings towards a man who eloped w a woman who, as a result of leaving her community and support system, largely had no one to help her when that man died and ended up dead in a brothel herself. he calls it, 'the oldest tale in the book'.

i think they both have rly thorny and tangled relationships w sex bc they both have significant reasons to identify it as a site of power and coercion and ruin, it's just that zevran was told that was what he was good at and what he was going to do for the rest of his life, and alistair was sent off to be raised in an environment that reinforced the idea that sex is bad, sex is dirty, sex is forbidden, sex is smth you should not want to have.

idk alistair in their banters seems p determined to let zevran know that he doesn't think zevran is a v good crow or assassin, that he's not sure zevran is up to the task.................which feels like projection. but gradually it becomes a fascination that borders on fixation w zevran's presentation of himself and his masculinity. zevran, for his part, just keeps up his facade. and i think at least part of that has to be bc he's looking at alistair, who is a royal bastard, and doing his best not to think abt rinna.

[randalltier-deactivated20230711]

couples t-shirts that say "TRAPPED IN A NEVERENDING CYCLE" and "THE CYCLE"

[bubonickitten]

DA:O/Awakening mage reference post

Decided to do a DA:O/Awakening mage/mage rights screenshot masterpost for reference, similar to this one I did for DA2.  

Feel free to use any of these screenshots if you need them for meta/argument/etc. purposes as long as you link back to this source. Also feel free to add to this if you want.

Very long post under the cut (mostly due to images and image descriptions). CW for Tranquility, abuse, torture, suicide, and solitary confinement.

Keep reading

[ikarons]

i say we let varric write schlocky novelisations of dao also. doing unspeakable shit to the character of the warden

[deorlingas]

✨ A slow day for the Vigil's Keep Grey Wardens ✨

[loopofrosewood]

always enamoured by the canon vibes of the mage warden & jowan friendship. the implied many personal crises of jowan's that the warden has made fun of him for and/or helped him with. him being the warden's like, only friend in the tower despite or because of them being a favorite of the first enchanter. him presumably being the one to help the warden settle into the tower given he's been there longer. "you're like a sister to me, but maybe if-" but he only says that if you ask him why you guys didn't bang In Front of his girlfriend. both of them potentially immediately getting distracted from breaking jowan out of the circle by a cool talking statue. the constant way the warden can rag on him and the resentment and jealousy on jowan's end. the way he did totally leave them out to dry during his escape and only makes a move to protect them if they betrayed him and he didn't know. and then they can flat out kill him later. literally awesomeeeee

[featherfangart]

9:31 Fort Drakon

I realized that outside of spice I haven't really drawn them kissing before. Fixed that.

[apostate-surana]

FUCKING GUN CONTROL??????? DA mages were supposed to be a metaphor about GUN CONTROL???????????

[revvethasmythh]

thinking about morrigan having kieran is actually so sad for me. because obviously she grows to love him, but in her own words he was "a means to an end." we don't know exactly when that changed. this was a ritual given to her by her mother, she was told to do this by her mother. to become pregnant, to carry a child to term, to raise it for the sole purpose of preserving the soul of an old god. "a means to an end." what does that look like when, even though your mother who tasked you with this is dead, you still choose to go through with it because it's the only way to save the life of your friend or lover? you uphold flemeth's directive. you save the life of someone important to you. all it costs is the loss of self and the loss of body that accompanies pregnancy and motherhood, and you have to do while completely alone. obviously morrigan did want to preserve the old god soul, whether for herself or because flemeth impressed that desire upon her (or some mix of the two), but did she ever want to have a baby? she loves kieran. he became her son. but having a baby when you didn't particularly want one is a huge sacrifice for "a means to an end"

[revvethasmythh]

and to make it all worse, she's like. 20.

[adansey]

sebastian vael:

[apostate-surana]

Dragon Age: Absolution does Tevinter better than anything attempted by Veilguard and I will stand by that

[apostate-surana]

You cannot under any circumstances make me believe that Morrigan is actually legitimately attracted to men

[stonesense]

(I’m the anon who asked about Zevran/Mahariel) I had no idea your blog used to be called ZevSurana, I’m new here! But that’s very adorable 🥰 and that brings up a wonder I had and you seem to be the one to ask.

I have no idea how to find this dialogue because I don’t have a save to boot up for it and it isn’t on youtube that I can find - but someone mentioned that Zevran is the one who actually fights the hardest when you intend to slaughter the mages and side with the Templars in Broken Circle. do you have the dialogue or can you sum up his argument? is that why you think he and a mage are such a good fit?

(I love him with Brosca too but I actually really love him with Cousland as well because they grew up as opposites and come together anyway)

“i am hardly the person to lecture on the worthier points of human nature, but surely this is a fine time to display the oft-lauded virtue known as mercy? i deserved to die, and you spared me. why are you so quick to condemn these mages?” “magic can kill. knives can kill. even small children launched at great speed could kill. why single out the wielders of one and not the others?” “i’ve taken the lives of many throughout my career, but this is no measured act. there is no chase, no hunt, no dignity in this... there is only slaughter.” “committing genocide just because something might happen is more than the mark of a weak mind. it is insanity.” “flattery would normally distract me, but not today. inconvenient, no?”

yes, zevran argues really quite strenuously in favour of the mages, and purely on the moral grounds that murdering a bunch of people because they might be untrustworthy is evil. ah, what high standards we have for men. no, but really, i do think this is striking and brave. he is very aware that the warden could change their mind about letting him live at any time, and the “nervous laughter” the voice actor was asked for on some of these lines shows how aware he is that he is taking a risk with his own life by standing up for the mages. and yet he does so anyway, for complete strangers he’s never met, going as far as to call the warden insane to their face. when he first starts talking, the VO comments say his tone should be uncomfortable and awkward, but as he keeps going and the warden fails to persuade him or change their own mind, his lines are spoken “fervently, he feels strongly about this”

most amell/suranas will likely never know that he would do this, but i think it’s meaningful nonetheless that he would. so yes that is one reason i think they make a compelling pairing. otherwise, they have a lot in common. both zevran and the mage warden were separated from any kind of family at a young age and brought into the power of a large and powerful institution that caged and trained them while never valuing their lives or having anything like their best interests at heart. emotion and attachment were considered dangerous in these settings and thus discouraged. surana also shares the experience of being forcibly distanced from elven culture during this process. it’s really charming to me to have two lost kids like zevran and the mage warden eventually find each other and learn how to live and love freely together in a way they never got to before. and knowing for sure that zevran would defend my mage warden from the templars as unflinchingly as my mage warden would defend him from the crows rlly sells that kind of ‘you and me against the world’ dynamic

also he gives approval for considering a deal with a demon in the soldier’s peak dlc lmao. truly the supportive boyfriend that every blood mage needs

[stonesense]

there have to be templars who are good at it

[stonesense]

sorry i realised moments later that this might be read as “there have to be good templars” this isn’t about morals i mean there have to be templars who are actually good individually at fighting mages. i’ve never seen one in the games but there has to be somebody who’s figured it out

[stonesense]

like the thing that actually makes me mad about templars is that i think anti-magic as a fantasy skill specialisation rocks it’s one of my favourite concepts ever but dragon age is too dedicated to beating the Maybe They Have A Reason For Being Oppressive idiot moral question to death to focus on the most important thing which is making their skillset fuck like hell. if a templar’s presence in a fight was actually devastating to a mage then we’d be in business . but they literally don’t even get that good 😭