blood mages deserve rights too

this is my dragon age blog and i have an elf problem

[mullingar]

[monsternobility]

sex is an intimate and sacred act. your body is a temple and you should not share it with someone who likes anders

[dorianpavus]

me: starts getting excited for dragon age 4

me to me, immediately:

[redredwiiine]

[msjessicaday]

[seksipomminpurkaja]

The true dragon age inquisition experience no matter how many times you’ve played it already

spending at least half an hour choosing your race/gender/class/speciality

spending an hour actually making your inquisitor

overexposured Leliana face (how did they get it that white)

*herald ate a very sour lemon while running towards the bridge and fell*

unnecessary loud bridge collapse

“the magic here is unlike any i’ve seen” r u sure about that Solas

i just want to secure some horses to the inquisition and need to kill the wolves i don’t wanna deal with that level million rift

find a passage to the wolf cave from the witchwood and realize your life is lie

I JUST WANT TO GET THE FINAL CAMP ON THE HILL AND THERE’S THREE BEARS

“we just opened them up, with äxes”

why are you greatly disapproving me i’m right mages should be free

“i can’t come in unless you open” aw cole

*montage to killing templars and failing to save anyone in haven because you have a bad eyesight and didn’t notice the woman under all the planks*

“wow i didn’t remember corypheus was that tall”

*causes and avalanche that busies all of Haven* they did that

unnecassarily long slow walk through the snow

the legend says once you gain the quest “to lure a dragon” all quillbacks and phoenixes disappear from the world in matter of milliseconds

where ht e  F u CK IS THE LAST TRAP

HOW THE FUCK IS CLAREL STILL ALIVE W HT A THE FCKU

the fact that you can’t accidentally walk in a dragon fight

except the one in crestwood please i just want to seal the rift

[dalishious]

Continuously pressing the skip button through the unskipable 20 minute long segment of singing, finding skyhold, then becoming Inquisitor

Wasting money on a ton of schematics you will never use

Ditto for mounts

Collecting all the elfroot (and iron) every time you visit Haven so you don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the game

Playing The Floor is Lava in The Fallow Mire except the floor is water and the lava is unlimited zombies

Except your companions don’t know the rules

Spamming these bad boys when hiking cross country

And using them to launch yourself off ledges to see how far you can fly

Saving your super abilities for when you really need them and then end up never using them

Bull is out again

Cole is out again

Parkouring your way up to horribly placed shards

“Fuck that shard”

Forgetting this isn’t Skyrim and insisting your mount can climb a mountain

“This should hold back the darkspawn” …You sure about that

Wondering if you’ve got the banter bug and just when you’re getting on a mount your companions start talking before cutting off

Sighing deeply as you run forever and ever through the whole lot of nothing in the Hissing Wastes

Playing Hide and Seek with giants in the Emerald Graves

Accidentally hitting brontos when fighting said giants and now you’ve got two giants and seven brontos and all you wanted to do was to grab some landmarks damnit

Taking advantage of the no fall damage at Skyhold

Ignoring fall damage everywhere else

Travelling across the Waking Sea all the way to Kirkwall to adjust the opacity of your eyeshadow because holy shit it was definitely not that strong in the CC

[hypokeimena]

two characters who have Seen Some Shit, the first time they Do It: identify and kiss each other’s scars in order to affirm the fact that they are here now together and Still Alive

me every time: 

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

sure y’all can say “dragon age: don’t trust the apostate!!” but andy pandy blew up a church and scrambled egghead wants to tear down the veil whereas morrigan saved alistair/loghain AND your ungrateful warden ass from death and after that did nothing that even warrants her being roped in the same category as these two.

[weedforcats]

THANK YOU I’m always so confused when people say that, how the hell did Morrigan fuck any of you over?

[b99network]

[miraamell]

I am too attached for my own good.

[zaefromthebay]

[wordsnquotes]

No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.

Sholom Aleichem (via koudelka)

[melisica]

Martin Creed

[maleficarights]

Me as a parent: If you want to cast curses and summon demons with your friends, I'd prefer if you did it at home where I know you're safe.

[maleficarights]

what she says: I'm fine

what she means: I am still very angry that Merrill was not the expert on elven lore in inquisition. she spent her whole life desperately trying to educate herself on the old ways, and this could have shown serious character development. I love morrigan but Merrill was meant for that role, that should have been Merrill in the temple of mythal, arguing with the dread wolf, calling solas out because she would have 100% known that some weird shit was going on. I will literally never get over this, this is the most missed opportunity that has ever been missed.

[glaivemaiden]

I’ve just seen the most incredibly wrong thing about Zevran on my dash and I need to say something.

Zevran was groomed from childhood to be a killer. He had no choice in the matter. Kill or be killed, that was his life.

Now I see where people would be coming from, saying he’s done so without remorse if they never bothered to get to know him, but here’s the thing. He takes an impossible mission to kill two Grey Wardens, who are famed warriors of great skill and are not to be trifled with. I say impossible because that’s what he wanted. He didn’t want to succeed. He wanted to die. Your character sparing him is a mercy he neither expected nor wanted when it was given.

If you go down his romance path, or even just get to know him well enough to get him to stay after Taliesen confronts you, you would know this. You would know he does this because he’s filled with a profound guilt after he allowed Taliesen to murder the woman he loved because he trusted the wrong man. He laughed and spit on her corpse and when he found out he was wrong, he became suicidal. That is not the reaction of a person who lacks remorse.

And frankly, with this in mind, his humor is no longer the trait of a callous person. It’s the defense mechanism of a person so broken by what his past made him that he has literally zero faith in himself as a person. He can’t see himself as a good person, he hates himself for what he did. He’s aloof in his interactions with the Warden because he doesn’t think they would believe him.

LIke at the end of the day, Zevran did shitty things, but those things tore him apart. He’s not happy with himself and it takes the literal entire game, which spans the course of a year, to believe himself worthy of love or respect.

And that’s it, really. 

[thefairyknight-deactivated20180]

Zevran was as much a slave as Fenris ever was.

He was literally bought. For coin. He tells you how much. Then he was tortured, broken, and trained to be what the Crows wanted him to be. There were eighteen recruits bought by the Crows the same year as Zevran. Two survived. Two. One of those other survivors is Taliesin, aka the closest thing Zev has to a friend if the warden doesn’t befriend him, aka the guy he has to decide to kill if he wants to stay with you.

When Zevran wanted to leave the Crows, they tried to kill him.

And it makes me so mad because the ONLY reason people don’t realize this is because Zevran downplays this and always insists that his situation could have been worse. He was one of two kids who survived horrific torture and he thinks that makes him lucky, because he survived. He got bought for three sovereigns by a criminal organization and he thinks that makes him lucky, because other kids who were in a similar position ended up suffering even worse fates.

What doubly pisses me off about it, though, is that Zevran’s natural personality - the one that starts to sneak through when he’s not around the Crows any more - is fantastic.

Like, okay. This is Zevran. Talking to the Dog:

Zevran: I noticed some dog drool in my pack this morning.

Dog: (Happy bark!)

Zevran: Not that I like to make accusations. And I even appreciate the artistry behind a good burgle when I see it, to tell the truth. But leaving all that drool as evidence? Sloppy.

Dog: (Happy bark!)

Zevran: I’ll take that as an apology.

Dog: (Happy bark!)

Zevran: I’m so glad you’re pleased. It really is quite something to find such enthusiasm in one’s companions.

Dog: (Ecstatic bark!)

Zevran: I agree. Go, team. Hurrah.

I just… he is like that. He makes jokes and pleasant conversation and waggles his eyebrows and if left to his own devices and not asked to kill people, he is ridiculously sweet.

Wynne tries on numerous occasions to get him to talk about feeling guilty over his past, and he rebuffs her by commenting on her bosom… but to the Warden, he actually will open up, and admit that he feels so guilty he tried to commit suicide.

The truth is, Zev wants very desperately to get away from the Crows. He just doesn’t know what he’ll do with himself when that happens, necessarily, whether or not he can do something other than what he’s been trained for, and if he can actually process his guilt over his past without wanting to die. Like a lot of people stuck between becoming a total monster to survive or being killed over matters of conscience, he’s taken a third option: lying.

It’s probably worth noting that Zevran is one of the few characters whose dialogue can completely fail to reflect his approval losses. He can cheerfully converse with the warden while you ding yourself down and down and you’d never know if you didn’t have the counter telling you so. Because he is wary of you.

You literally have his life in your hands. He’s an escaped slave who’s been taught his only value is as a killing tool, and his life literally rides on how useful you find him.

So then if, on paper, his primary use to you is as a Person Who Kills Stuff, why would he ever confess to having reservations about killing within earshot of a warden he doesn’t completely trust?

[charamei]

Some more of those travelling Keeper headcanons, because seriously, you wouldn’t believe how many problems these guys solve:

The reason we’ve never heard of them in-game is quite simply that a bunch of mages, travelling alone or in tiny groups, who act as the backbone of Dalish society are really vulnerable to Templars. The Dalish would rather let humans continue believing that exile nonsense than risk the Chantry completely crippling their communications network in a single generation - which it could do, if it tried. Lavellan’s ‘We gave them to other clans, or…’ line is them nearly breaking silence, catching themself, and stopping just in time.

They carry news between clans - everything from ‘So-and-so has had a baby’ to ‘The Grey Wardens request our help to fight the Blight; the army meets at Redcliffe in four months’. They also ferry clan members between clans, if a swap is taking place, and valuable artefacts between clans, if somebody wants to borrow somebody else’s arulin’holm.

They act as independent judges during times when a clan’s Keeper is too involved to be neutral, or when there is a dispute between two clans who can’t reach an amicable settlement on their own.

Some of the braver (or perhaps stupider) ones will venture into alienages periodically to perform marriage, birth and death rites. Needless to say, they’ve been avoiding Kirkwall in recent years.

Also, you know, sometimes Dalish kids elope and need a priest.

They take on apprentices, when there are children in need of training. Some of the really brave/stupid ones will even smuggle mage kids out of alienages before the Templars come down on their heads. (These kids, in turn, often grow up to be the ones who’ll wander back into alienages…)

They also take on clans in the case of a Keeper, First and Second all dying, or if the only clan mage left standing is too young to take on full responsibilities…

…on which note, yes, they can do vallaslin too.

There are Dalish myths about them - both the normal kind of myths, in which they are usually total badasses, and the urban legend kind, the ‘I hear they have somewhere secret to go to commune with the gods’ kind. They actually don’t, but hey, a little mystique is good for the image.

Don’t ever raise your blade to a travelling Keeper. They bear a vast, sacred burden, and the least we can do is treat them with utmost respect. If you really think one’s possessed, then you’d better have some damn solid proof.

[a-really-bad-decision]

Okay, but I really love this idea, because not only does this solve so many of the stupid, lore breaking problems that popped up when they introduced the “three mage limit” thing, but it’s also explains a lot of the more handwavy aspects of Dalish culture:

Wandering Keepers organizing Arlathvhens, passing word between clans like “Hey, so the big meeting’s gonna take place in the Brecilian forest exactly in five months, you in?”, and then acting as mediators and repositories of knowledge for the those who can’t make it. Cause you know that a Keeper up in the Anderfels isn’t gonna drag their clan on some three month journey to the Kokari Wilds, just to spend two weeks arguing over whether or this chamberpot was dedicated to June, or Syliase. They’ll still want to know what went down, of course, which is where these guys come in.

Wandering Keepers who act as walking libraries, who transcribe books and scrolls and maps that have weathered the ages to the point of near illegibility, and make sure every clan has written copies of their legends and histories - because they know better than anyone else that oral tradition alone isn’t going to keep after one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years. 

They’re also census takers for the clans. No one really knows for sure how many Dalish elves are wandering around Thedas, but these guys will be able to give you a damn good estimate. And if it looks like a clan has shrunk past the point sustainability, they’ll step in and negotiate with other clans who’ve got too many mouths to feed, or too many orphans after their run-in with that asshole Lord So-and-So’s hunting party. 

Maybe some even act as rudimentary genealogists, who can tell you which family line is most likely to produce a mage child, or whether there’s any risk of inbreeding in inter-clan marriages, because this guy’s grandmother’s half-brother is actually her father’s father, who ran away and married into the clan two generations ago.

“Some of the really brave/stupid ones will even smuggle mage kids out of alienages before the Templars come down on their heads.” I am willing to bet cold, hard cash that this is what started the whole “the Dalish will steal/eat your babies” legend. (Besides, ya’know, good old fashioned racism superstition). Some stranger shows up one day in the alienage, looking and smelling like they haven’t left the woods in years, drops mystical knowledge in your lap, and then vanishes a couple days later with several young children in tow? The elves will know what went down, but to any humans who might be watching, it’ll look like someone straight up absconded with a bunch of their kids, and everyone was too terrified of this mysterious wanderer and their secretive order to even consider standing up to them.