alistair
Cosimo Galluzzi

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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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taylor price
One Nice Bug Per Day

tannertan36
🪼
cherry valley forever
YOU ARE THE REASON
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Keni

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Xuebing Du

blake kathryn

if i look back, i am lost

pixel skylines
Mike Driver
ojovivo
KIROKAZE
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@ladyhighever
alistair
anders parroting chantry talking points at merrill and chastising her about spirits is never not funny to me.
Dead wife montage but it's all slow motion shots of your dead wife throwing grenades and doing backflips and oneshotting the enemy with their long range weapons
Leliana
Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.
I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.
me everytime one of my seemingly non-specific homoerotic text posts breaks containment
if bioware weren’t cowards mwardens could fuck oghren after his wife dies (either by your own hand OR by killing herself in front of you both)
"Baldur's Gate 3 is old news now lol that was three years ago"
Would you believe my favourite game of all time that I still regularly play is from 2009
Seriously though, the way some people treat liking media as if it has an expiration date is so weird to me. And three years is still so recent in the grand scheme of things anyway, actually!
Seeing everyone excited about Dragon Age again has inspired me to draw Alistair 🌹 (and also to reinstall and start another playthrough of DAO haha)
In war, victory. In peace, vigilance. In death, sacrifice.
& to be clear dragon age deserves None of this careful thought and analysis. because the answer always actually comes down to "the devs are racist" and "the devs are misogynistic" but it's fine. let's play touys
if the carta have no mages because they’re dwarves and the dalish have no hope of legitimate access to lyrium because the chantry runs that trade, then surely there’s room for a deal to be struck where if a dalish clan is lucky enough to have a surplus of mages then the spares could do stints as spellcasters for the carta in exchange for a lyrium supply. there is no point to this thought except my desire to throw factions with opposing vibes together so i can make up character dynamics
and then there were none
My dragon? Aged.
My mass? Affected.
Okay. Just so we’re clear on this: hunting down assassins (that is murderers for hire) is ‘murder’ and very wrong. And completely worth making a giant scene about in the middle of the courtyard.
But, say, the offences committed against the Qunari – the…
Elthina in action
Good point. I agree that Elthina is the power behind Meredith.
Also, there is an interesting factoid here: we must remember that the current Divine is, if memory don’t fail me, senile. I mean she has something like Alzheimer ò.ò
This means that the central authority is weak. When central authorities are weak, “lower” authorities seize power. This commonly happened during middle age when the Pope was weak: bishops and cardinals rose in power.
Elthina is weak-willed, but canny. And in Act 3 we heard about how the new Divine wants to send her away. But the new Divine can’t, because Elthina has her seat and her power and will keep it at all cost. Because she knows that if she steps down now, she will not have the same amount of power.
Yes – Beatrix had dementia, and you’re right about the decentralisation of authority.
I’m not sure I’d say Elthina is weak-willed, though. Or, to be clear, I think the authorial intent is that we see Elthina as a kindly but ageing diplomat who is trapped between equally obstinate groups, but I don’t think that fits very well with the rest of the facts.
I think Elthina is very narrow in her goals, and the ‘weakness’ we keep hearing about is more a matter of people misjudging her aims. She won her reputation as a diplomat, ‘particularly [in disputes] involving the powerful Templar Order’. The closest we ever get to seeing her do that is when she comes between Meredith in Orsino in Act 3 – but all she does there is tell them both to stop talking, which is kind of the opposite of mediation. The only other thing that might count is Sebastian’s short story, which suggests that she is very good at getting people to think that what she wants is what they want.
But apparently she did step on some Templar toes at one point, and earned the respect of the city for it. That seems likely enough. After Threnhold was ousted, she had a shadowy revolution to manage: the nobility could hardly have liked ceding so much authority to the Chantry. Somebody had to smooth the ruffled feathers. Meredith is an excellent candidate for Knight-Commander, because while she is tough and perfectly willing to do brutal things if she believes they’re necessary, she doesn’t seem like a natural politician. She doesn’t know how to win people’s affection, and her primary motivation is just that she’s terrified of mages. As long as she’s allowed to run the Circle as she sees fit, she’s not going to cause her superiors trouble. People sometimes grumble about Meredith, but Elthina looks good.
Then there’s … well. All of Act 2. The Dumar family is becoming a problem. Marlowe is probably manageable enough, but he’s not exactly happy. He keeps calling in Hawke to try to find out why his city is on the brink of war, and Hawke just keeps discovering that the Chantry is doing it on purpose – his worst nightmare. Seamus, though, is going to be impossible. He’d be much harder for the Chantry to control. He is conveniently removed and Petrice, if she gets caught, goes too. If Hawke covers for her, she’s demoted to curb her not inconsiderable ambition.
The Qunari uprising is just a matter of manufacturing the Threnhold situation all over again: the city is in peril, and the Chantry just has to take on power to protect it. In the long term, the only way the city gets a proper Viscount again is if Hawke backs the Templars. Then they’ve got themselves a ruler so dedicated that they actually participated in an Annulment. They’re secure again.
Kirkwall was under Orlesian rule for a while, and still shows some signs of that. I suspect the Game is understood by the nobility, though they don’t play it as they do in Orlais. The whisper that Elthina is weak makes sense from people who honestly believed she would keep the Templars at bay, and found she didn’t when that no longer served her interests, and from people who need to pretend they believe that because she’s much too powerful to oust openly.
I think Elthina makes more sense as a strong leader, with her eye firmly on the Sunburst Throne. Make herself the power in the Free Marches, and she’s a good candidate. She’s just not a leader who cares very much about the people below her. The trouble, for her, comes when she loses out to Dorothea. Then she pretty much has to hold onto Kirkwall to have any chance of getting another shot – and her position is awkward, because her actions don’t necessarily match the new Divine’s political agenda.
But she and her various underlings have by then pushed the city to breaking point.
Really interesting breakdown of Chantry politics in the Free Marches here.
YMIR Heavy Battle Mech - Model 34-A
Unhinged Text Posts: Leliana Edition (Part 2)
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