For all its faults Tumblr has truly ruined all other social media for me because my friends all have Instagram and are all trying to get me on Instagram more but every time I open Instagram there are like fifteen things screaming for my attention and when I get over myself long enough to start scrolling it's like. Where is my chronological dash. Where is the following-only option. Who are these people. Why are there so many videos. Everyone is screaming at me. And then before I know it I'm thirty minutes into scrolling and I haven't seen a single thing that I actually care about. At least on Tumblr when I see stuff I don't care about I know someone I follow has found a new interest.
fucked up how for a circle mage warden the joining is just the harrowing Again. secret test you have to take to become a full Member but u also don’t get to opt out and go be a regular person anymore once you’ve been tagged as Part Of It. nobody will tell you what the test entails but like half the people who take it never come back. and even when you pass the life you’ve earned yourself is all but guaranteed to be short and painful with a miserable lonely death. heart<3
like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.
“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.
“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.
eternal pet peeve is high ranking mages being called enchanters when “enchanting” is a thing in this setting, and it’s extremely specifically the one thing they can’t do
Started using the phrase “that’s cilantro to me” to refer to the presence of a story element that completely ruins a piece of media for me, disproportionate to its actual badness.
The Legacy DLC banter implication that Anders isn't just bad at cards, but is specifically for some reason bad at cards against Fenris. To the point where he uniquely owes Fenris a lot of money.
I don't even know exactly how this could be possible, because in most scenarios where you'd be playing card games, everyone is losing a given round's bets to the winner. The idea that Anders is somehow unique in losing money to Fenris makes me think:
Wicked Grace is a game where one player has a specific advantage/vulnerability in certain rounds, and every time Fenris is up, Anders plays cards really aggressively against him in particular, in a way he doesn't with other people (or the opposite is happening, Fenris vs Anders. Maybe both). Or
Anders and Fenris actually get together and play cards alone. Maybe even fairly often
Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday
isn't it wild that warden-commander invoked the right of conscription on anders with direct permission of the queen/king of ferelden and templars still didn't leave him be. isn't it wild that some of them were willing to drink darkspawn blood and bound themselves to another order just to get to him even though he was proven to be under warden-commander's protection. isn't it wild that the wardens had always been a golden ticket for mages who tried to get away from the circle and it was working perfectly fine for everyone else and then in his case it just didn't
But. I think it has to do with who was involved. Specifically the Warden, not Anders but the Hero of Ferelden. Yes, there’s some of a personal grudge in play against Anders himself during Awakening, but later, I think the extreme measures are political. It’s about who let Anders into the Wardens and what it means.
(Ended up going on way longer than I meant and my thoughts aren’t totally sorted so tucking this under a read more.)
Most Wardens seem to treat the Templar Order with respect - they’re an Order that in terms of skill are supposed to be on par with the Wardens themselves and they have Chantry approval and backing. (I don't think that's reciprocal either.)
But the Hero? The Hero saw how utterly incompetent the Order can be. Even if you side with the Templars during Broken Circle it’s still a show of what an utter shit-show of a job they’re actually doing that they need two junior Wardens to clear out a tower. And two junior Wardens and a handful of companions can do the job that Greagoir was waiting for a whole deployment of Templar reinforcements to do. If you side with the mages? Well - that’s a blow to Templar authority. And by taking in Anders the HoF demonstrates a dangerous trend of ignoring Chantry law and Templar authority entirely - of being mage-sympathetic. (Let alone if the HoF is a Surana or Amell.)
Not only that but outside of the Anderfels most Warden strongholds appear to be in unpopulated, rather isolated areas. Their political clout - and the Right of Conscription - doesn’t actually interfere with the Chantry’s power very often. Amaranthine is one of the three largest cities in Ferelden. It is the major port closest to Orlais and under the Warden-Commander’s rule it becomes a trading power that is threatening Kirkwall’s dominance in the sea trade during Hawke’s time in Kirkwall (probably not something that happened quickly). Kirkwall IS a Templar city. Meredith rules it just doesn’t have the viscount’s crown, she simply gets more obvious about it in Act 3.
The HoF is utterly untouchable. They’re also someone who in all their time as a Warden has never seen the point of Templars. Certain Origins have no reason to hold with the Chantry at all.
And then this apparently untouchable Warden that will never answer to Chantry authority is conscripting into their command mages with no love for the Circle (Anders AND Velanna) and letting abominations run unchecked (Justice).
Then, on top of all of this, you add in the fact that the Templar Order is very much an Orlesian Order at heart. The Chantry itself has extreme Orlesian leanings by dint of its location and how many of its upper ranks are recruited from the Empire. Orlais is an empire - a colonizing power that has some powerful factions that would very much like to reclaim Ferelden again. Wardens aren’t meant to get political but the Hero of Ferelden holds at least the title of Arl (never mind the ones that are queen/king-consort or the paramours of the throne) - and has definitively gotten involved in Ferelden politics before. No invasion of Ferelden is going to happen without having to consider what to do about them.
Anders, I think, was just meant to be a lesson. Not to Anders himself but to the Wardens - the Warden-Commander, the Hero of Ferelden, in particular. It was meant to be a reminder that the Templar Order does have power - that they are in control of Thedas where magic is concerned - and they’ll assert that against the HoF and their people if they want to.
Only...it doesn’t work? Not really. And the consequences are catastrophic.
tl,dr: I think the Hero of Ferelden scares the Templar Order and Chantry and they try to flex on the Anders issue because of it and they fail. Badly.
And! The Warden chooses who rules Ferelden through the Landsmeet. They can support Anora or Alistair to the throne, which puts the sovereign in the Warden's pocket, at least assumedly. It is in Orlais's (and everyone's interests, really) best interest to somehow cow the Warden, even by proxy, even if that's not an explicit order given to anyone. The Warden, the Hero of Goddamned Ferelden, has definitely become untouchable, and someone desperately needs to knock them down a peg or five.
