SPOILERS

i needed somewhere to scream about my dragon feelings.

[asheflemythal]

yall this is driving me absolutely up the wall because like yeah i was also very affronted by the lack of enslaved voices and lack of option to play AS a liberated/escaped slave fighting for your own and your comrades' freedom. I felt like the Shadow Dragons in general and the Shadow Dragon background especially were deeply lacking. I get it!

but

First of all the utter erasure of Fenris as a character in this conversation is making my forehead hurt. Like did I hallucinate him? Idk I guess. Clearly they've never done a story directly confronting the horrors and utter wrongness of slavery, so I must have hallucinated most of his dialogue and several other plotlines and minor characters from DA2 as well. I suppose I must have made him up. Okay.

Second of all, like, I get that some people who are specifically mad at one specific person for whatever reason but like I would just like to say that the comics and the recent cartoon both definitely exist and are canon too. These are also dragon age content and they do address a lot of the same stuff Fenris' original story did, quite directly. Perhaps I also hallucinated these.

Third of all, and this is a minor thing, but there are a bunch of background missions that do still involve freeing slaves, preventing the kidnap of people into slavery, etc. in places like the war table or as a side effect of a main quest. It's still THERE but yeah it's clearly been moved out of the spotlight, so why might that be?

Well. Here are two thoughts:

In Origins you literally had the option to profit from slavery. In DA2 there was an option to sell your own party member back to his abuser. You were not "supposed" to do these things, but they were there as options, as consequences of being near enough the player character that a choice was considered obligatory. Dragon Age has been getting weirdo reddit hate for the entire last decade specifically because as of Inquisition the games stopped giving you these edgelord-coded dialogue options. Being a human-supremacist or a mage-eugenicist was removed from the character creation matrix.

And finally, on a related note, in both Inquisition and Veilguard there is clearly a lot more consideration taken regarding what experiences are okay to inflict on the player's character in particular. To use the language most likely to get me dog-piled vy strangers, Inquisition and Veilguard are both very aware of and consciously trying to avoid potential triggers such as sexual violence, abusive authority figures from a character's past, domestic violence, and directed hate speech. These things exist in the world, they're wrong and must be stopped/confronted/overcome, but they really scaled back on the instances where any of these things can happen directly to you, the player.

I don't love this. As mentioned above I was very disappointed not to be able to mete out vengeance on the colonizing oppressor as an escaped elven slave. As an indigenous person this was an appealing concept, and I've seen other people express similar disappointment. However. However. Why might this be a risky road to go down as a game designer? Having said all I did above about avoiding direct violence against the player's character, I should imagine that this is going to sound obvious, but I think the lack of formerly-enslaved Rook was a conscious choice made to ensure the game is safer for people with personal connections to the real-world atrocities these events mirror, myself included.

I will never fully recover, as an Indigenous woman, from playing the City Elf Origin and its parallels which have been playing out in my country since white men first arrived and continue to this day. I understand why they included this, and on some level I think it was an important component of the story they were trying to tell about systemic racism, and tying the alienage system directly to the sexual violence without flinching was still a somewhat controversial assertion in 2010. I get it and I maybe even support it, but I also have to say that that violence was real to me and is embedded in my chest like a shard of glass to this day. So. Maybe really... maybe it's okay that they chose in later games to put some distance between me and the structural oppression. Maybe some little padded barriers were warranted.

I still think the Shadow Dragons fell tragically short, though. Personally.

[cardboardfisher]

You can pry the Lords of Fortune camp outfit out of my cold dead hands.

[vhen-harel]

Thinking about the Inquisitor and the sacrifice of their body time and time again.

The explosion of the orb forever marking them, changing them. Being forced in and out of the Fade physically. Solas grabbing the Inquisitor's hand by force to direct the power. The Mages or Templars channeling their power into and through their body (the Mark) to close the breach, the Anchor physically overcoming their body, slowly killing them, losing a part of their body.

This loss of bodily autonomy is so fascinating and so sad to me.

Their body literally becomes the battlefield and while they may be treated as a figure of divine will, what they actually experience is much closer to being sacrificed to sustain the world.

It makes me think of Solas who sacrificed his spirit self to take on a body - a body and mind used as a weapon. His body altered with the veil going up and then sacrificed once again to keep it up.

Both of them lose the same thing in different ways. The Inquisitor has it taken from them, their body and agency eroded by necessity and expectation. Solas gives it up, piece by piece, until there is no clear line between who he was and what he must become. Both of them, with their bodies, become a symbol of how the world is held together. And in the end, neither of them is allowed to remain whole.

[officialgleamstar]

you characterize that man as a strict domtop because you think he’s domineering and suave. i characterize that man as a strict domtop because i think he’s repressed and weird about penetration. we are not on the same team

[luffenmeihn]

I'm yours.

[asheflemythal]

- white hair due to magic (trauma variant)

- thinks he's a monster due to abilities he did not ask for

- thinks he can never have a normal life or normal relationships due to said abilities

- kind of a bitchy twink despite definitely having blood in his teeth

- desperately WANTS to be fixed despite being very sure he cannot be

so. a new fucked up little guy dropped recently........ and i have spent like twelve hours reading about Kappa. unrelated.

[flowersforthemachines]

Bellara Week Day 3 + Day 1 || Blight + Reclamation

[datvcompanionweeks]

These gifs are beautiful. The shift in tones brings depth and warmth against the Blight in Bellara's eyes and skin. It's such a wonderful contrast. Thank you so much for sharing!

[asheflemythal]

today i realized that i'm not very good at writing white people humans.

[asheflemythal]

scrapping and starting over on that origins polycule thing i started ages ago bc i decided alistair should get to have a Great Love after all, and the resulting shuffling-around did THIS

to my whole group relationships map (friends, enemies, with or without benefits, etc)

gonna try and keep as many of the characters as i can as intact as i can but i might need to make some pretty drastic changes so that everyone still has at least one good friend to talk to and i don't accidentally make any of them so lonely they let themselves get eaten by the magic zombies.

[asheflemythal]

definitely keeping:

Cullen's mage crush Ariulahna although she is once again open to some tweaks. Core features: friends with mutual crushes in Kinloch Hold Circle Tower, forcibly separated from one another by the Blight/Uprising/etc., she's related to Lavellan for some special indigenous angst in later volumes, has an interesting or unique magic warranting First Enchanter Irving's interference in her sentencing (currently thinking of building her around Origins' Crushing Prison spell because yikers) and this is the one that goes on to be around a lot in later volumes. She'll work with Leliana and maybe also Morrigan over the years, and specifically will be around for Cullen in Inquisition during his sobriety journey as well.

Mirae, city elf dagger-lesbian, borderline feral, this one and the next one are (to me) the ugly beating heart of this story, though since Ariulahna features so heavily in my larger timeline, all three elves are pretty essential. Mirae and Zevran mirror each other a lot, which can be dangerous at times. When Leliana talks about "my love" and "she's on her own quest" in Inquisition, this is who she's talking about. "Like dogs, Shianni."

Ghil'alani, the Dalish warrior. Originally really had my heart set on this character being non-binary but I put most of that character into my eventual Inquisitor so who this character is as a person is now a bit... blurry. As the Dalish warden is the only one for whom the Joining literally saved their life when nothing else could, this is always the origin I think meshes most with the super idealistic hero-complexy type, someone who is so ready to die for this cause because they were already on bonus time, who has FELT the infection and knows there is no happily ever after for them, thus nothing to be gained by self-preservation.

Lea Amell: Not from the same tower as Surana, a human mage who is related to the Hawke siblings yes, one of three characters who I had drafted to have been older wardens in the party. Okay in a fight but absolutely indispensable in the building and managing of a party camp, a travel caravan, or even a smallish army. Has a very close but slightly bickery relationship with Wynne, though they've only met a few times before this.

Duran Aeducan: Events of Aeducan Origin happened some three years ago, ending with him being marooned into the Deep Roads, collected by a unit of Legion of the Dead, and smuggled to Weisshaupt to their cousins with the Wardens. Lives a very monk-like life, he believes he is equally to blame for the death of his eldest brother, and thus would never consider seeking any kind of power or recognition again. He is a trained and very competent military commander, but will disappear immediately if confronted with a meeting, let alone a function.

Characters to be written:

Brosca! Difficult relationship with her mom, really loves her little sister, ?????? i haven't found her yet i don't think.

Cousland: Loving family slaughtered, illusions about the world shattered, is she broken and despondent? Terminally cheerful and in denial? Feral like Mirae? I don't know! Is she gonna marry Alistair? I DON'T KNOW?! Like given the above she would fit easily into that slot i guess but i just think Alistair avec Cousland is boring. I don't know...

I am gonna need to break out the stickers and string for this one. All told, there are a minimum of 14 people in this camp, 16 if you count the dogs (which you probably should), and up to like 20 if you count Bodahn and the various other folks who will come and go.

[asheflemythal]

scrapping and starting over on that origins polycule thing i started ages ago bc i decided alistair should get to have a Great Love after all, and the resulting shuffling-around did THIS

to my whole group relationships map (friends, enemies, with or without benefits, etc)

gonna try and keep as many of the characters as i can as intact as i can but i might need to make some pretty drastic changes so that everyone still has at least one good friend to talk to and i don't accidentally make any of them so lonely they let themselves get eaten by the magic zombies.

[asheflemythal]

damn, i lost it. someone was on my dash recently about how Lucanis is not an edgy character and anyone who thinks so wasn't paying attention and i....... i have some thoughts.

primarily:

there's edgy characters as in characters who behave like little edgelords. Morrigan, for example. Just a little edgy guy who's always gotta be contrarian, who will double down if you call her bluff because secretly she IS kind of freaking out that she just suggested random murder, but the worst thing she can imagine would be you guessing that she's not as hard as she acts. she's gotta keep up that facade no matter what! edgelord behaviour.

and then there're characters whose designs are edgy. Fenris is the poster child. His opinions are actually quite conservative, pretty consistent, firmly held, and in fact he will get really mad at you or other characters for being edgelords. You could NOT call him an edgelord. But at the same time, that is definitely an edgy boy. A survivor of at least two (up to five) kinds of child abuse, who can just rip a guy's heart out if he's mad, and is now stuck in a war between what he sees as two different kinds of oppressor.

And thus, I present to you this:

Luca is most assuredly not an edgelord. He loves the quiet pleasures, holds on tightly to any scrap of calm he can find, but he is also a mage-killer who is developing decidedly mage-like abilities, literally has had an extra soul crammed into his head that is constantly arguing with him and even hurting him physically when it does not get what it wants, and in the process experienced ???? amounts of physical and psychological torture. He's barely even had a chance to change clothes from that when he is saddled with avenging someone he always thought was invincible, and later being betrayed by the one person he thought he had left. Bro is out here suffering, the WHOLE time, and that absolutely qualifies as an edgy character design imho.

Anyway my point is i 100% agree he's not at all an edgelord, but i do still think you could call him an edgy character? Also yeah he's got the wings. That's up there with the lyrium ghost as far as edgy character designs (visual/gameplay).

[greelin]

unfortunately i will always view demonic possession as romantic. This is because i have issues & problems

[mohntilyet]

also just saying but i think illario as a mage has some very fun applications. in this beautiful world lucanis is partially trained to be his own personal templar. caterina sees magical power and fears it, but loves it enough to want to control it. lucanis is fed lyrium to help “manage” illario despite illario’s self control being so drilled into him that he’d resist all temptation. magekiller gets a whole new meaning and despite lucanis and illario’s best attempts at being brothers, some kind of real camaraderie that rises above the resentment once in a while, how do you ever get over the fact that he is trained to kill people like you. lucanis is even more miserable. mage-templar tensions in a new and weird exciting way. and then the lyrium that is in lucanis’ body is the perfect place for a demon to settle in and thrive so caterina inadvertently creates a mage so backwardsly repressed that he can’t even get possessed otherwise he Loses some imaginary fight with his grandma, vs. a templar that’s been taking so much lyrium that a demon burrows its way into him. anyone else understand me orrr

[asheflemythal]

Late night trip to buy cat food cause i'm an idiot and let it run out, nearly walked into my ex from like a decade ago because somehow my dumb ass forgot we've been broken up since 9:31 and when i awkwardly swerved at the last minute and ran down the stairs instead i swear to the Maker he looked like he was gonna cry.

[corvus-frugilegus]

Your OC as the Patron Saint of...

Rules: Take this uquiz as your OC and share your result!

Ty for the tags @rookinthecrownest @rookamell @nonagesimus !! if you haven't done this yet: @ofcrowsanddragons @beepoven

[asheflemythal]

yeah....... yeah.

and yeah. they are as precious as they were supposed to be. maybe they shouldn't be.

[asheflemythal]

me chewing on my pencil waiting for people to clock that kpdh is using the audible vocal effects specifically to signify demonhood and that's why it's so pronounced sometimes and just flickering in and out other times

[asheflemythal]

how would i even live without your venom in my soul, blinding myself with rage for your benefit? without your claws in my chest, dragging me out through these streets every day like a fish on a hook? what... what would be the point of such a quiet life? i would take a thousand blades for you before i lay down and waited to die in this mausoleum of a house. why shouldn't i?

i was not created to hide and luxuriate, and i certainly was not made to watch.