I got permission to draw @eedlitamm’s wonderful idea of Lord of the rings characters as Disney style animals, which are listed and described in this post, please go and check it out it’s amazing✨✨✨
Thanks again @eedlitamm for letting me know me draw your wonderful idea! I might do all characters in a different post later on! This was so so fun!!!
This drawing, and this moment, mean so much to me. I first drew this scene 14 years ago, and when I uncovered the old drawing a few months ago, I knew I had to redraw it. Old drawing and close ups are under the cut:
When I was 12 this was the best drawing I had ever done. The original concept was to have the map behind him because I don’t like doing landscapes and never have. For the new drawing, I decided against writing out the place names over the mountains for fear that it would be too cluttered. I also decided to change the shield design to a more Norman style incorporating his heraldry and I replaced the greaves with boots for purely aesthetic reasons. I KNOW he should be wearing a helm and it’s in the text I literally transcribed, but I do not care because seeing his hair is important to me. I *might* draw him in a helm in the future. If the universe wills it so.
More close-ups of the new drawing:
Dimensions are 18x24” and the media are watercolor, india ink, fineliner and gel pen. Writing the whole passage took over two hours and I got *so* emotional. fjggjgghkvhk *clawing at the bars of my enclosure*
I have no idea how many hours I spent on it in total but I have been tinkering on it for 3 months.
I was really afraid that I made him look too old by trying to render his facial expression. I am also concerned that I haven’t captured the full depth of his emotion. But I tried my fucking bestest and that’s all that one can do. If I am still a fingolfucker in another 14 years I will draw him again and it will be even better <3
So I’m obsessed with the idea that Dragon Age very clearly established that the elven religion is something reconstructed. That the tales and mythology are fragmented and oftentimes just wrong. I love that from the beginning, you were never meant to take anything at face value—nothing was sacred, not even the gods themselves. You were always supposed to question everything you’ve been told about these religious figures, and Inquisition just brought all of that into sharper focus. It wasn’t a sudden twist, it was the culmination of a slow unraveling. There’s this constant undercurrent of digging through the ruins of a broken culture, piecing together a puzzle with half the pieces burned or deliberately hidden.
And what makes it even more fascinating is how that mirrors how religious stories form in the real world. Mythologies evolve in layers—oral traditions get reshaped, gods get rebranded, stories shift based on who holds power. The “truth” gets filtered through so many lenses: politics, translation errors, cultural shifts. And Dragon Age leans into that messiness. It understands that belief isn’t built on facts—it’s built on stories that feel true, even when they’re not. And even when they are, they’re incomplete.
What’s wild, though, is that Dragon Age goes one step further than real life: it actually lets you meet the mythological figures. In the real world, you never get that. You can’t just ask Odin or Osiris what really happened. But in Dragon Age, even when you do meet them, you still don’t get the full truth. Because Solas has his own perspective, his own regrets, his own justifications and he’s not an objective narrator. He’s biased. He’s emotional. He wants to be understood, but he also wants to be right. So even when you’re getting the “truth” straight from the source, you’re still left questioning it. That’s such a powerful narrative move because it reinforces that theme of uncertainty. That history is never clean. That even gods are unreliable witnesses.
And now Veilguard is pushing this idea even further. It doesn’t just deconstruct the mythology, it confronts it head-on. The elven gods were real, in the sense that they existed, had power, shaped the world. But the way the Dalish revere them? That’s a myth. And both the characters and the players have to wrestle with that. There’s this moment of reckoning: the figures you thought you knew, the lore you trusted, even the stories the earlier Dragon Age games told you, they weren’t lies, exactly, but they weren’t the full picture either. And that’s commentary on storytelling itself. Even in a game—where you assume you’re seeing the “canon,” the definitive version—it reminds you that you’re still only getting a perspective. That video games, like history, can withhold, mislead, or simply evolve over time.
The first thing Jayce is aware of is the inconfoundable feeling of Viktor. Next to him, around him, intertwined atom for atom.
Anything else would be secondary.
When the rest of reality coalesces back into something his brain can process and quantify, his senses come back online like circuits, lighting up one by one and instantaneously.
Touch, hearing, sight, smell. Viktor, solid in his arms, still wrapped in the soft blanket Jayce had draped over his new body, his arms around Jayce's shoulders, hands clenched in the fabric of his coat. Viktor, breathing quick and quiet next to his ear. Viktor, the pale curve of one mole-dotted shoulder peeking from his covering, and his hair gleaming under sunlight, long and fading into that pale color, like sweetmilk poured into coffee. Viktor, clutched so close in his hands, Jayce can taste the faint ozone crackle of the Arcane lingering on his skin.
Viktor, his honey eyes looking at Jayce, wide, disbelieving, alive.
"Jayce," he says, in his soft voice. The slight stretch of the 'A', cradled tenderly. The silky softness of the 'C', sibilant, always - somehow - sensual, even when Viktor was calling his name for the fourth time from across the lab at three in the morning.
Jayce has Viktor in his arms and they are alive.
"It worked," Jayce whispers, and his hands are already cradling Viktor's face. A laugh bursts out of him from some place he thought had been buried in a gulch forgotten by the apocalypse. "IT WORKED!"
He ignores the jolt of pain his knee sends shooting up his spine as he goes jumping up to his feet, fists raised and a howl of incredulous, manic triumph shouted up to the clear skies overhead. He remembers the first prototype for the Hexgates, the hellish trial phases, and he remembers the day they got an apple from one side of the room to the other. Jayce had screeched and jumped and paced, babbling like a maniac while Viktor stood, silent and awestruck, holding the apple in his palms like it had just been placed there by the hand of a god. When Jayce finally collapsed onto the floor, half laughing, half crying, Viktor had wheeled his stool over, flicked open his little pocket knife, and wordlessly split the fruit in two, handing half over to Jayce. He'd been certain he could taste the magic they had harnessed. That day pales in comparison to this moment.
He wants to sprint a mile. He needs to scream, he wants to laugh, and cry, and he needs to make a plan to orient himself and find food and get Viktor some clothes, he's still only wearing that goddamm blanket-
"It worked! Viktor! Viktor, we did it, it worked!" He shouts, hands clasped around Viktor's cheeks again, and he smacks a kiss off Viktor's forehead because he can, because Viktor is here, and they're together and alive, they're alive, they're alive-
His body allows him a few more moments of frantic, unrestrained celebration, before it starts warning him, Alright Talis, you've had your fun, now lay down, you're about to pass out, because that sure is a head rush he's feeling isn't it?
He stumbles to the ground the same way his laughter trails off from a manic giggle to heaving gasps, giddiness fizzing in his chest, his head, his whole goddamn body, and he stares up at the clouds, floating unbothered overhead. They might as well be in a different universe. It's entirely possible that they are.
It doesn't matter. Especially not right now. Jayce forces himself to breathe, even as he can't stop smiling, arms splayed out over his head. There's a soft shuffling sound, bare feet trekking uncertainly through the soft grass. He raises his head from the grass, because he would recognize Viktor's gait anywhere. There's a moment, suspended from the rest of reality like a crystal hanging in a window, that Jayce swears he will preserve in his memory to his dying day. Of Viktor, of course, and the way he's looking down at Jayce in this moment.
Haloed by the sun, even more beautiful than when he had towered over every soul in creation, wreathed in magic and might - because this is Viktor, his Viktor, with his thin, uneven shoulders, and the slight crookedness to his nose from a fall as a little toddler, and moles everywhere, and untamable hair, and his beautiful golden eyes that can only be outshone by his beautiful golden heart, full of kindness and curiosity and ruthless drive to do good.
Had it seriously taken the apocalypse for Jayce to realize he loves this man above anything and everything?
It must be written quite plainly on his face, because Viktor's eyes widen as he realizes something, and takes a step forward, to-to what?
With that thought lancing his chest and lighting up his brain in bursts of color, he very nearly rockets to his feet, knee be damned, when Viktor's wide eyes go even wider as his knee buckles and the bubble bursts a little.
"Ngah!" he sputters, arms flailing, the blanket flapping a little as he instinctively reaches for a crutch that rudely neglected to materialize on the other side with them. But Jayce is already moving, arms outstretched. Viktor reaches back, and he is caught in broad hands that immediately pull him closer and squeeze him to Jayce's chest. They fall back onto the grass, Jayce giving a little oof! as Viktor's weight lands atop him.
For a second they're nose to nose, and Jayce looks up at Viktor with all the love in every atom in his body. Viktor looks back with the same love written plainly on his own face.
They don't say a word. They don't need to - Jayce tugs him close once more, presses his cheek to the top of Viktor's sun-warmed head, and Viktor listens to Jayce's heart thunder under his ear. He's lifted, ever so slightly, by Jayce's breathing, a gentle rocking that provides a steady countermeasure to his own rabbit-fast pulse. Jayce holds Viktor like he'll never let go again, and he might just not. Viktor tucks his head under Jacye's chin and he starts laughing as it hits him too.
That they're here, together - and no matter what's waiting for them beyond this meadow, beyond this moment - that will never change again.
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