Using fandoms to survive the existential horrors. Mostly Bioware, heavy on the Dragon Age. Occassional Mass Effect with a little sprinkling of Star Wars (Andor and Rebels my beloveds).
She/Her, freshly minted 4-0 elder millennial, would rather be making potions in the woods but forced to do Teams calls like a Corporate Grownup.
You can find my fic nonsense on AO3.
Tagged by @sorrygoldfish and @epiphany-jones. GO NOW and read what they're working on. It's incredible.
Also, what do you mean no one ordered a side dish of future soft smutty Crow trauma navel-gazing? Sorry, kids, that's what mama cooked today, so that's what we're eating.
(super rough, btw. Just throwing it out here for the vibes.)
For so many years he had always imagined the dark tunnel of his death—some alleyway, a shadowed turn too far, an inky black he couldn’t come back from—and he’d welcomed the thought. Imagined it dripping slow or spilling fast and whether it would be a relief to let his veins go cold and slack. A exhale as loud as a signature, a lucky blow, a flick of the Maker’s will.
He had surprised even himself, how hard he had fought not to go down, down, under the water.
The dark maw loomed over him now, quiet and hot. It frothed over his lap and his hips rose to meet it and his thighs burned with blood and muscle and this one, this one he thought he would welcome, too. Might willingly turn toward this lane, into a different sort of oblivion.
It wasn’t death his body chased now. Nothing so clean as that. He had no name yet for this hot-blooded brush he craved, this knife-edged closeness—none he dared to claim, to meet its knowing gaze. But he could no more stop himself now than he could have walked away from any other dark alley, any other long-gone promise of dark envelopment.
Please forgive if I forget a name but if you see this, consider yourself tagged, too! Let's dissect character trauma together, for funzies!
@adejareve @slothquisitor @dags-over-caravans @khayr @thewyvernrising @gatesofminrathous @gloaminghagette
Big Time Headcanon/Theory: Mythal was the Original Big Bad
Okay I have THOUGHTS about this post, especially after re-reading my Mythal post yesterday.
So, my very own personal headcanon/pet-theory is that Flemythal knew were Solas was sleeping - or at the very least she found out sometime during DAO and DA2. And not only that. I believe she got herself killed on purpose back in Elvhenan to provoke Solas into attempting the impossible: locking away the other Evanuris.
She controlled everything from the very beginning, and SHE should have been the final antagonist/villain of the whole series so far.
Dragon Age: Origins
During DAO she sends Morrigan, her next vessel, away with the HoF. Why? To teach her a lesson? To let her experience "the real world"? To harden her through war like she did with Solas? Because she needs her next vessel in a good position geo-politically (recognized as a hero)? Maybe she always knew (because 5D chess is kind of her thing) that Morrigan would attempt the "Dark Ritual" and get June's(?) soul back into a body, which she, Flemythal, can then absorb for power when she eventually takes over Morrigan's body? (That's even one of the contents of her Grimoire that she "doesn't want Morrigan to have" - ergo: she makes the party fight for it/pretends to be scared of a fight so Morrigan won't suspect that she's acting according to Flemythal's plan in trying to obtain the Grimoire)
Who tf can say, they're all on brand for her. BUT sending Morrigan away, for whatever reason, definitely gives her a lot of time to do secret shit without her nosy, sharply intelligent protegé watching.
I'm not 100% on whether Flemythal getting "killed" in her dragon form in DAO is "canon" for the subsequent games but it doesn't really matter whether she "dies" or "flees". As Solas says: "The first of my people do not die so easily." She could have had all kinds of fail-safes in place. (Like the amulet in DA2) How they work? Again, who tf knows. We'll never get answers on how embodied spirits ACTUALLY work re: fragmentation, reincarnation, soul vs. spirit, etc.
What I do think though, is that she was slowly starting to prepare her glorious return as god-queen of this new world. Because there were only two more potential Blights left after the 5th, and I think she wanted all those souls/fragments to add to her own power.
Dragon Age 2
OR: She wants to take down the Veil, free Elgar'nan, and kill him herself. ("I will see her avenged", "A reckoning that will shake the very heavens")
In DA2 she actually gives a ton of cryptic lore hints, but one of the most important ones is the line about "having an appointment to keep".
I think this is about Solas.
Minor headcanon tangent: I think Solas performed the actual ritual to create the Veil in Skyhold (Tarasyl'an te'las - "The place where the sky was held back") but I don't think he/his body slept there. He probably took precautions and somehow managed to get away. Or he had someone, an agent, on standby to do it for him (not Felassan, he would have talked him out of it - someone who would have been obedient and loyal but not personally close to him). I think he somehow ended up in/near Arlathan. Which is north of the Waking Sea. Which is where Flemythal is headed in DA2.
The ritual being performed in the place where Skyhold now stands also makes sense with these codex entries. They mention how, while there are endless signs of elven civilization through the centuries, there is no ruin, no building (nothing beyond Fereldan ones, anyway). They mention how the natural spire/the mountaintop was "flattened". I think it was blown clean off during the ritual. (or Solas flattened it to have a large space for the setup of his ritual and everything involved was disintegrated.)
What does she want from Solas?
So, anyway, I think that during DAO Flemythal found out where Solas hid himself/his sleeping body, and she's about to wake him up to make him work with (let's be real: for) her again. And that's what she does after she leaves Kirkwall in DA2.
a) He contained the Blight twice already - he can do it again. And hopefully more skillfully this time.
b) She needs a confidant, a right hand, and Solas is so emotionally enmeshed with her (see post credits scene in DAI and the VG ending), just seeing her alive will pull him right back in. He may have rebelled - but never truly against HER. (She always took great care to make it seem like she was actually on his side and just "playing the game" "for the benefit of the People" against the other Evanuris.)
c) A second powerful being on her side who also & especially has the ear of the entire Fade? Very useful if/when the Veil comes down and she's leading armies of spirits.
d) Clout among those ancient Elvhen who were against the Evanuris - they might not follow her, but they WILL follow their former rebel leader (maybe with some coaxing).
e) Maybe it was even her plan all along to free Elgar'nan (and Ghilan'nain) when the Veil is taken down so she could kill him/them herself - in which case Solas' power and combat experience would obviously also come in handy. (Plus, from where Flemythal is at, Solas might still have unresolved stuff with Ghilan'nain - an additional motivator.)
I think DA2!Flemythal and DAI!Flemythal really aren't as on board with this new "tranquil" world as VG would have us believe. Both iterations of her still want ONE thing: Revenge. ("Mythal clawed her way through the ages to me, AND I WILL SEE HER AVENGED!") And "For a reckoning that will shake the very heavens."
Ultimately, I think Flemythal (this Flemythal) wants the Veil down and (subsequently) Elgar'nan dead. She wants to see herself restored to her former status as god-queen (who now, conveniently, rules alone), and she wants the elves - old and new - to be the predominant civilization of Thedas again. (Although, maybe she really doesn't care at this point - they're all servants and slaves to her anyway, no matter the shape of their ears.)
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Why? Why does anyone want to rule: power, ego, self-satisfaction, a warped understanding of "to rule is to protect", greed, and, in her case, "I showed them!" "My ex-husband can eat shit!"
Anyway. She wakes Solas up and gives him new orders: He needs to unlock his orb - either for her to eventually take/steal his power or just so he can match her (when she eventually gets "the Old God Soul"/June's power) and actually DO shit.
So Solas, feeling incredibly guilty over "having let Mythal die" (we'll get to that) and "ruining the world", gets to work. Mother Mythal knows best, after all.
He seeks out Felassan, tries to leverage his relationship with Briala into reclaiming the Eluvian network (very useful to Mythal and himself), which fails miserably because Solas severely underestimated how much time passed and how deeply connected Felassan has become to this new state of things. And he kills Felassan (/makes him tranquil), justifying his actions through his loyalty to Mythal (as always).
With the Eluvians a bust (for now), he strategically places his orb in the path of the Venatori and Corypheus, figuring that while HE wouldn't do large-scale blood magic to unlock it, these people definitely have no scruples whatsoever. And he's not even 100% on whether humans are people yet, so who cares? (I'm being a bit facetious.)
However, that plan, as we know, also fails and he is pulled into the events of DAI and probably(?) unable to contact Mythal - or she abandons him for a while (not out of character for her, imo). Maybe they also speak in dreams sometimes? But there's so many templars around, maybe Solas is too careful to try (often).
During his time with the Inquisition, I think Solas still understands himself as acting on Mythal's orders, whether they're actually in contact or not. (We all know what happens during DAI, I'm not repeating all that.)
The big Flemythal lore drop comes when the Inquisitor actually meets her. This is where we get the "For a reckoning that will shake the very heavens" and the "and I will see her avenged!" lines. The way Flemythal behaves here, and going by what she says and how, I'm pretty convinced that everything is still going to plan for her. With Corypheus out of the way (which she will help with, of course, ever the benevolent problem-solver - so long as it suits her), Solas will be able to reclaim his orb and THEY will be able to enter the Fade/tear down the Veil and take revenge on Elgar'nan.
The big one
Slight tangent: She also masterfully manages to somewhat placate Morrigan during this exchange. In preparation for Flemythal taking over her body, she makes her believe that she regrets her emotional distance and neglect, and that she does care for Morrigan, deep down. Pretty obvious emotional manipulation, imo. Morrigan then, predictably, behaves like any abused eldest daughter being offered even just a scrap of a quasi-apology: she self-abandons again and lets Mythal's fragment possess her during/before VG. (Which Morrigan says is not "possession" in the classical sense - but Flemeth's personality also eventually mixed with Mythal - "no more separate than your heart from your chest" - so, in time, it will probably happen to Morrigan too, she's just in denial (or the writers forgot their own lore lol).)
The post credits scene of DAI where Solas and Flemythal meet (again).
And he doesn't seem THE LEAST BIT surprised to see her.
You'd think that his DEAD former lover/groomer/master/abuser/mother figure popping up in the Crossroads would warrant SOME kind of reaction from him. But nope. He approaches her completely naturally, as if he's RETURNING to her (tail between his legs, as it were). And they talk as if they both know about everything: the orb, the plan connected to it, why they needed it, etc.
(Also just LOOK at his posture: Head down, shoulders hunched, his expression pained - that's an agent returning from a failed mission, not a gleeful murderer facing his next victim.)
She softly chastises him ("You should not have given your orb to Corypheus, Dread Wolf") and they share what LOOKS like an intimate moment but is, in my opinion, actually a show of deep (performative-on-purpose) disappointment on Flemythal's part.
(Look at them! Those two are not equals! Everything in this exchange screams master-slave: her armored claws on his neck; the way he curls into her, holding on to her gauntlet and not her neck, shoulder or face; she's in full regalia, he's in simple, soft clothing;)
This is not a surprising meeting for either of them. The events of DAI have wrapped up, the orb is lost, Flemythal's plans are (for now) dashed.
I think Flemythal always had a plan B.
OR ARE THEY?
Just in case Solas would fail - because he has miscalculated before and she's known him for literally thousands of years. One could say she raised him (like Morrigan).
And that plan B is: Play the sacrifice. (Again.)
She puts her essence/fragment/power/whatever into the Eluvian (to seek out Morrigan) BEFORE Solas arrives. He doesn't know she has another fail-safe in place.
She lets him believe he killed her "for the good of the people" to further motivate him to really see his mission through to the end: take down the Veil, restore Elvhenan, and, with it, her (then in Morrigan's body) as its god-queen, enabling her to take her revenge on Elgar'nan.
Like, he killed his oldest friend, mentor, lover, mother over this goal - he absolutely cannot let it go now. Felassan was already huge, but making Solas believe he killed the most important, most influential person in his whole life with his own hands, that's the final nail in the coffin Dinan'shiral.
The Origin
So, a desperate, regretful, guilty, sad, heartbroken, emotionally fragile, cptsd-suffering former rebel leader does exactly what Flemythal expected: He severs all his nascent personal ties to this world and puts his all into fulfilling her last order: restoring Elvhenan, restoring "the People". "For her". Because she cared so much for them uwu. (and of course taking care of Elgar'nan because obviously it's all his fault and Mythal needed to be avenged.)
So this is DEEP headcanon/theory land but I think that with all this background it makes total sense to assume that Mythal planned all/most of this from as far back as her last meeting with Solas in Elvhenan (the "secret meeting" memory in the Lighthouse).
What was the situation?
The Blight exists. It's uncontrollable and it's making the other Evanuris basically unstoppable and invincible. It will eventually destroy the world. And I do think Mythal cared for "the world", at the very least as her own personal playground. She sees her husband and "children" slowly lose their minds as they grasp for more and more power. Political instability and unrest sweep the empire, ultimately also threatening her own position (because if she doesn't use the Blight, she'll eventually be toppled by the others).
Mythal is smart. She's been a double agent for centuries - keeping Solas and his expertise close, minimizing the impact of his rebellion on her own power (she's "one of the goods ones"), while also profiting from her seat at the table with the Evanuris.
She pretends to not believe Solas at first and goes to "confront" the other Evanuris. Just so the emotional impact on Solas will be greater, since he will believe it's his fault for burdening her with the knowledge of the Blight and "making" her seek proof by herself.
She gets herself killed. It probably didn't take much at all at that point to make Elgar'nan do it. She knows how the dagger works. She's seen other/former Evanuris (there were way more than just Elgar'nan et al.) die. She's taken precautions.
But most of all, she knows Solas: Solas is actually careful, almost timid, by nature (compare his voice lines as a spirit or sometimes during DAI when he's closer to "being Solas" to the way he speaks later/during VG). He didn't want to manifest, he didn't want to make the dagger, he's generally (at his original emotional core) against drastic action unless he's left with no other options. She's had millennia to observe him under emotional distress - in war(s), while he murdered in her service, during his rebellion. She knows his triggers.
And she knows that she is one of them. Likely because she set it up that way from the very beginning, grooming and molding him into something she could use. Their emotional enmeshment, his co-dependency, completely calculated on her part. (And we see her do it again with Morrigan, which is why Morrigan and Solas can't stand each other: they experienced the same trauma by the same mother figure - people hate seeing their own weaknesses reflected back at them in others.)
Solas may not have been ready to do anything really drastic before - centuries of rebellion and the Evanuris were still exactly where they wanted to be. They viewed him as an annoying, yappy dog who was kept in check by Mythal - but he sure as hell would be if Elgar'nan killed the ONE person Solas hung his entire personality and raison d'être on.
So. In order to get rid of the other Evanuris and the Blight (ergo: all competition & uncontrollable variables) in one fell swoop, Mythal had to trigger Solas into finally "embracing his potential" against all better knowledge. Against his actual, original nature: Wisdom.
Mythal's death finally and fully pushed him over the edge into corruption: Pride.
So Mythal dies. Solas is desperately distraught, not only because she's dead, but because it's "his fault" (he "let her go", he "gave her the knowledge", he "didn't try hard enough to convince her to join him", etc.). And in this fraught, volatile emotional state, grieving and angry and vengeful - like she knew he would be - he finally comes up with a plan on the same scale as the sundering of the Titans: the sundering of an entire area of the physical world from the Fade and its use as a prison for Mythal's murderer(s).
The problem: Solas is smart. But he's also arrogant (and not thinking as clearly as he could - a trade-off between Pride and Wisdom). The ritual he devises works, but it works "too well".
And instead of being brought back (maybe through the Well of Sorrows, maybe possessing a servant, maybe her plan was even to possess Solas himself) "right after" the imprisonment of the Evanuris and the Blight, both Mythal and Solas are incapacitated for millennia.
In the end, Mythal won, actually.
Which doesn't stop her from scheming, of course. She has nothing but time. She finds a way to still influence the physical world (like the corrupted spirit she is), until we finally end up with Flemythal and Morrigan in DAO.
When we look at Veilguard, Mythal actually gets basically everything she wanted:
Elgar'nan dies a miserable death (and she helped!), her vengeance finally achieved.
She has a new, powerful vessel with political pull (Morrigan).
She is, once again/still "the good guy".
Solas, the only one who could potentially uncover the truth about her and her plans (if he ever tried to look beyond his conditioning and enmeshment), is banished to the Fade.
The Blight is being taken care of by Solas (who she successfully blamed for causing it in the first place).
The Veil may be up - but that can change. She has time. And influence. And nobody will stop her if/when she decides she wants more power.
And if Kieran exists, she even has a new vessel already lined up (this time even a willing one from the get-go because "I will not be the mother you were to me").
We may see the sun rise over Minrathous in a "woohoo, the good guys saved the day" kind of way - but actually, the true villain, the one who pushed Solas into a body, coerced him into making a weapon of mass destruction, coaxed him into taking part in a genocide that would ultimately lead to the Blight, which is the reason for every single subsequent tragedy - MYTHAL, is the true winner. Even as the status quo is seemingly upheld.
She got exactly what she wanted, the same way she always has: scheming. plotting. ruthless pragmatism. manipulation.
I don't care for Veilguard's sanded-down, sanitized version of Flemythal/Mythal AT ALL. Everything we've seen of her in the three preceding games fits much better with this interpretation, and that's the hill I will personally die on.
In my idealized version of Veilguard, we actually fight against MYTHAL. And we can influence Solas to either finally side against her an recognize her as the monster she is, or we lose him and face him at her side as her loyal attack dog. THAT would have been an absolute banger.
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Disclaimer:
a) All this does NOT mean I think Mythal is a "bad character" or that people who like Mythal or interpret her differently are "wrong" or "bad people". I'm simply arguing for my point of view on the basis of what the text of the games provides. And my perspective is inherently biased because Solas is my favorite character of all time, and in my opinion, Solavellan is THE romance of all time. Please don't view my personal headcanon/theories as an invalidation of your own. Fandom lives through its multitude of perspectives and I appreciate other people's opinions even when I don't share them <3
b) All this does NOT mean that I hate Veilguard. I've said again and again that I enjoyed Veilguard for what it was, especially for the closure it gave me after 10 years of unresolved Solavellan angst. It is possible to critical of a thing you like/enjoy.
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Thank you for reading this far, I hope you had fun(?) - I certainly did <3
Tagged by the darling @sorrygoldfish and saw @dags-over-caravans and some others doing this today, so why not?
Rules: Go to Pinterest and type in the prompts below. Whatever image pops up is your image. Prompts: Colour, Quote, Character, Hobby, Accessory, Song Lyrics, Flower
I, uh. Don't hate it?
Special shout-out to this lightly cursed image which wasn't the very first to come up for "accessory" and thus didn't make the cut, but which might have been first in my heart:
I am just. Way too in my head about everything right now. So how about a little bit of in-the-head shenanigans for you all?
Thank you to @slothquisitor and @epiphany-jones and @sorrygoldfish for the push from the tags to put something out there!
Calling in @adejareve, @dags-over-caravans, @thewyvernrising, @gloaminghagette and anyone else I might have missed!
He’d expected a bombastic display—a thunderous storm, a cloud of fire above the crater—some vainglorious sign that the supposed god of vengeance was come back to the world.
Instead, there was the sudden sensation of a blade in his hand. Just there, as it had ever been. A sharp need to reach and grasp and pierce and slice, as he always did, as he would again. The fight was won already. He could see it. He knew it. Four Venatori just behind him. Heart, throat, lungs, neck. Too easy. Nine more after that. No matter they stood out of his sight. He knew how to dispatch each one, could already count every slash and stroke, could feel the hot spray of reckoning across his eyes.
No! Spite pushed for control of his limbs. Not real!
Hacedor, it felt so good. The rend of flesh. Snap and cut and sweet resistance.
People talk about how Lucanis isn't actually the one who's impressive and say he's only able to get a shot a Ghilanain because of Spite... But his handling of the Spite situation is deeply impressive to me.
He doesn't just hold out for an entire year, he makes a deal that means his worst concern is shared custody of his body. Most mages can't even do that.
Calivan says, "It was supposed to take a week, at most!" Thedas has five day weeks (we think).
There are three records that we are able to access (one note just says it goes on for pages and pages.) Prisoner 36 succumbed after 9 days. Prisoner 20 succumbed after 18 days.
The longest we have a record of anyone else holding out is 100 days, and after that time they were taken over by a demon of passivity.
He and Spite aren't just working together. He's already learned how to move in order to take advantage of Spite's wings. That takes practice, collaboration, and patience.
He's mentally and physically strong enough to hold a demon back while Spite is furiously trying to stab someone at point blank range.
Basically? Outside of the Avvar, what Lucanis has done is basically unprecedented. He's also experienced and talented enough to adapt to an entirely new fighting style within the span of one year.
I keep seeing people buying into the idea that the dalish are playing pretend at elven culture or “larping ancient Arlathan” and it’s pissing me off because:
1. Huge portions of Dalish culture have absolutely nothing to do with ancient Arlathan. They’re not trying to imitate ancient Arlathan, they’re researching ancient Arlathan and trying to reclaim the culture that was violently taken from them, but by the dragon age there’s been like 1800 years since the fall of Arlathan and thats important to them too. Their nomadic traditions, for example, are a refusal to live under human rule after the exalted march on the dales, it’s nothing to do with Arlathan. Their traditions are not an accurate recreation of ancient elvhenan because they’re not supposed to be. They’re not playing pretend at ancient Arlathan, they’re being modern dalish.
2. A lot of people seem to think the veil going up and the fall of Arlathan were the same event, but there was actually a period of nearly 2000 years between the two. 2000 years where the evanuris weren’t there and elves, who previously spent decades on simple conversations, were mortal and lived to like 80. 2000 years where most of their information was inaccessible and people died before even a fraction of history could be shared between them. This is when the truth of the evanuris was forgotten and they were established as benevolent creator gods. When the dalish were able to begin researching ancient Arlathan another 800 years later, pretty much all the information they’d have on ancient Arlathan (a period spanning probably 20,000 years at least) would have been from the tail end of this period. The dalish did not just pick up a book that mentioned the evanuris and start assuming. They researched the history and culture of late ancient Arlathan and got what is most likely a pretty decent picture of it. It’s just that late ancient Arlathan was itself 2000 years and a great catastrophe removed from the truth, and pretty much all the surviving historical sources were propaganda in favour of their ancestors oppressors, which is not the fault of anyone (except, you know, the oppressors in question). 2000 years will do that.
Solas has this attitude because he’s an immortal being who’s like, at least 20,000 years old and thats counting from when he took physical form. A period of 3800 years is nothing to him, it’s nap time. He can’t comprehend that thats an absolutely normal length of time for cultures to develop and change dramatically and understanding of ancient history to get warped.
For the last day of Lucanis week, I'd like to share something... a sweet secret! 💜
When Rook and their team rescue Lucanis from the Ossuary and bring him to the Lighthouse for the first time, in the first cutscene, they can tell him that they don't want to leave him alone with a demon (if the romantic dialogue option is selected).
Lucanis responds by telling Rook not to worry about him. Normally, the camera is behind Rook at this moment, far away from him, so we don't get a good enough look at his face.
Well, I need everybody to know that this is what Lucanis looks like up close when he responds to Rook:
1. How do you lose a Giraffe? She apparently scaled a cliff that served as part of the enclosure (which the other giraffes in the herd had shown no interest in climbing.)
2. Well it should be easier to find her, she's a whole ass giraffe? Yeah, you'd think, but Texas ranches are fuckin huge. The man has apparently hired a helicopter and several drones to aide the search, but no luck yet. She's been seen on some game cameras on the nearby ranches though. But she's sneaky.
3. Why does a random guy in Texas have a herd of giraffes? Because it's Texas and we have basically no exotic animal regulations. No really. If you have enough land out in the hill country, you can just own stuff. It's fuckin nuts.
What's sending me is the "described as having rounded ears", as if to distinguish her from other stray giraffes that concerned neighbours might encounter.
something that makes me crazy about lucanis and illario is that they both project such different versions of themselves onto each other. like they know each other better than anyone but they're also complete strangers to each other. the versions of each other that exist in their minds are both idealized and villainized. they're both so confident in knowing how the other thinks but they're so off base. because most of their intimate "knowledge" of each other is projection
There’s just something incredibly crunchy to me about the way Lucanis‘ evident moral code interacts with the job he was born into and is outwardly proud of.
Throughout various conversations with Rook as well as party banter, Lucanis reinforces that yes, he was born into this business, but he also actually wanted to be a Crow growing up.
We know from both Tevinter Nights and conversations with Teia and Heir that he is regarded as very competent at his job by his peers, too, to the point where some of them (Viago) might actually be a bit intimidated by him.
We can infer that he prefers doing his job to general socialising, and that he is a bit of a workaholic. From various interactions about the impact of his possession on his ability to do his job, we know that his self-image and self-confidence is very much tied to his work.
He never once gives any indication that he has issues with the killing part, that he feels any remorse over 'delivering a letter people don't want to receive'.
For all intents and purposes, we can infer that Lucanis likes being a Crow and is proud of his competence at what he does.
And yet.
While he is generally insuciant about the nature of said work, he tells Emmrich, somewhat exasperated, that he has never killed an innocent by his own terms. He is aware of the judgement his profession faces from outsiders, an while it appears to annoy him more than anything else, he does have an answer ready, indicating that he has thought about it before instead of simply brushing it off.
Because he *is* very emphatic, evidenced by various conversations with our companions (almost any of them, really, excepting pretty much just the ones where he verbally spars with Davrin), though Emmrich is perhaps the only one who puts it into words (talking about how everyone on the team has killed before and how the Venatori and Antaam will care very little *why* they killed them).
He cares about his friends getting paid for the valuable services they provide, emphasizes with Bellara about finding her brother unexpectedly alive and unfortunately changed, recognises why Lace might have grown up a people-pleaser, does his best to teach Taash about killing like a Crow and making them feel good about their exploits, he immediately offers to pay the Shadow Dragons' expenses after the Dragon Attack if Minrathous has fallen to the Venatori, ... He sees people, and cares about his friends.
And even after it's clear that Illario betrayed him, tried to have him murdered and got him tortured and possessed instead, Lucanis places the love for his brothercousin above the revenge he has any right to desire.
And knowing what we do about Zevran, it is very likely that Lucanis could only retain both that empathy and his pride in his job because he's been incredibly privileged in his work.
For the past several years, Lucanis has been paid almost exclusively to kill people who genuinely deserved to die, according to his own moral code (because he hates bloodmagic and slavery). And even before that, he has been able to refuse or spare targets when he decided that they didn't deserve to die (the servant acting in self-defense, the teen too young to be defined by one mistake) - despite stating in conversation with Rook that a Crow doesn't simply refuse a task by their Talon.
He can afford to spare innocent bystanders even when it might endanger his mission or his identity (TWJ).
And then there's the banter where Davrin presses Lucanis about what he would do if someone paid him to kill Davrin (or any other friend, presumably).
Lucanis does a pretty determined job of dodging the question; apparently, this is a question he does not care about exploring too deeply - what he would do if he *was*, for whatever reason, ordered to kill one of his friends.
Because none of them are innocents, and old enough to know what they're doing. Pretty much all of them have had plenty of opportunity to make enemies who would see value in seeing them gone.
Because good people can still make enemies; there *can* be merit it assassinating them. It wouldn't go against his professional principles.
It would go against his personal feelings though, and given how much of his self-worth is tied to being a good Crow, that's ... a difficult position for Lucanis to find himself in.
Because the 'big, soft heart' that Teia teases him about has always been there - being the First Talon's heir apparent, is seems obvious that Lucanis has never been forced to kill someone he truly didn't want to.
And *then* there is that last lock in his mind prison - having Illario voice his own doubt that maybe he's always been a monster, even without Spite; maybe there's no one in there worth saving.
I can't help but wonder if that fear isn't in some way connected to that friction between the emphatic, caring friend and the ruthless killer. That guy who risks his own life to save a perfect stranger and *punish* the one who wronged them (instead of just doing his job cleanly and professionally).
That guy who makes even his colleagues (nay, his betters, hierarchically speaking) shudder at the thought of him.
And all that, more than the backstabbing nature of the Crows and his own (perceived) disdain for administrative work, is what would *really* doom him as First Talon, in my opinion: Having to choose who lives and who dies in accordance with Crow politics and finances vs. his own values and principles.
100% yes. Yes to all of this. Shouting it from the rooftops. His real privilege was never about money or status, right? Right?!
But also consider: we know on some level Illario doesn't care the same about morals and ethics and the little guys. We never really find out why, though. Did he have to do all the dirty work while Lucanis got to keep his conscience clean? Did Illario realize this, on some level, even if he could never quite verbalize it? Did Lucanis know the type of contracts that Illario took? Did he care? Or did he handwave it away?
What would that do to each of these insane, broken men, after years and years?
romaincrisis
stormborns
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
