with all the fire of the sun

BG3, Dragon Age & other RPG sideblog. i follow from saltpotion. he/him

[soulbrand]

thecityofdoors -> soulbrand

i am going to make a more fleshed out pinned at some point. probably. maybe

current fixation is dragon age. mostly just a lot of reblogs. unfortunately too tired to oc post most of the time. i do daydream about them constantly though. hopefully one day i will find a way to just beam them directly into all of your minds. then you’ll see

[maharie1]

[domirine]

day 24 - isabela, dragon age 2 happy pride month!

[dykieran]

actually wait. my google drive backed exactly one screenshot up to be transferred to my new computer.

[dykieran]

thank god this was saved. what would i do without her.

[toskarin]

the bioware writers room carefully crafting dragon age 2

[seracadash]

[leliwardens]

Sincerely and unequivocally, fuck the Chantry.

The Chantry isn’t morally gray. It’s one of the most evil systems in Dragon Age, and I have no idea why parts of the fandom keep pretending otherwise.

The thing that drives me crazy is that the games themselves repeatedly show you what loyal followers of the Chantry are willing to do. They lie. They manipulate. They justify atrocities. They put the Chantry above friendship, family, love, freedom, and basic morality. Again and again the series asks, “What happens when a good person is completely loyal to the Chantry?” and the answer is absolute, “There are no good people who follow the Chantry”

The most likable Chantry characters are almost always the ones moving away from the Chantry, questioning it, or outright abandoning it. The moment a character is completely committed to the Chantry, they start justifying things that most players would consider horrifying.

And before someone says “but Blackwall” or “but Leliana,” those characters don’t make the Chantry look better. They make it look worse.

Blackwall is not a good person. He murders innocent people, including CHILDREN.

Leliana’s entire character arc demonstrates that if she remains loyal to the Chantry, she will ultimately choose the Chantry over friendship, loyalty, and basic human decency.

The Chantry has zero redeeming qualities. A system that destroys individuality, punishes independent thought, brainwashes dissenters, wages wars of conversion, and treats entire groups of people as tools rather than human beings is evil, and it is indefensible. (x)

[velnat004]

petition to nuke the whole veilguard subreddit because this might be my last straw for this group

[anarchopuppy]

sometimes being a fan of something means not wanting them to make any more of it

[atiya-nagrano]

idk alistair and zevran always seem to be set up as opposites, not just in fandom but in the game and in their conversations w each other, but i do think at least some of that anxiety — more on alistair's part than zevran's, but the reverse is there, too — is bc they do have some uncomfortable things in common, foremost amongst them a rly complicated relationship to sex.

like yes. yes, zevran has a ton of sex. it's his job to have a ton of sex. when he tells the warden that his mother died giving birth to him, thus making her his 'first victim, as it were', while some of that is abt trying to make you feel sorry for him so you super won't kill him or kick him out........................................that's just kind of fucked, right?

and is that not how alistair feels? is that not essentially what goldanna tells him?

alistair and zevran are both described as bastards. alistair has more reason to have negative associations w his father, bc his father lived longer, but i don't think there's any reason why zevran shouldn't have ambivalent feelings towards a man who eloped w a woman who, as a result of leaving her community and support system, largely had no one to help her when that man died and ended up dead in a brothel herself. he calls it, 'the oldest tale in the book'.

i think they both have rly thorny and tangled relationships w sex bc they both have significant reasons to identify it as a site of power and coercion and ruin, it's just that zevran was told that was what he was good at and what he was going to do for the rest of his life, and alistair was sent off to be raised in an environment that reinforced the idea that sex is bad, sex is dirty, sex is forbidden, sex is smth you should not want to have.

idk alistair in their banters seems p determined to let zevran know that he doesn't think zevran is a v good crow or assassin, that he's not sure zevran is up to the task.................which feels like projection. but gradually it becomes a fascination that borders on fixation w zevran's presentation of himself and his masculinity. zevran, for his part, just keeps up his facade. and i think at least part of that has to be bc he's looking at alistair, who is a royal bastard, and doing his best not to think abt rinna.

[autoneurotic]

[kirkwallguy]

the convo wrt zevran and leliana originally being gay and being made available to the opposite gender because of homophobic backlash is really nuanced, especially considering the fact that there is only One gay man and One lesbian companion throughout the entire series. like yeah i actually would've liked if homophobia hadn't prevented a gay writer from writing a gay character, actually. but 15+ years after release i feel like we just need to accept that these are bisexual characters in a medium where bisexuality is also underrepresented and move forward.

but i feel like the discourse always either tries to paint bi people wanting representation as homophobes who don't understand the lack of gay rep, or gay people hurt by a lack of gay characters as biphobes who want to erase canon bi rep. when really the REAL issue is the way dao and dai consistently prioritise straight-locked romances. 🫩

[point-maitimo]

« Bethany ».

«  All these years I tried to understand what Andraste saw. Why she had to lock us up. But my powers come from the Maker… and I just cannot believe that is His will.  »

( commissions • patreon • redbubble • ko-fi )

[vielens]

[chanafehs]

The Lady Vivienne, enchanter of my heart

[atiya-nagrano]

in retrospect so funny that zevran chooses the anvil of the void to pipe up w his opinion. in orzammar he’s like FUCK harrowmont that guy SUCKS and then they get to the murder machine and maybe notes morrigan pointing out that it’s a deeply powerful magical artifact so he feels safe enough to add, “actually fine and normal to sacrifice ppl it’s exactly like farming if you think abt it!” and it’s just the most batshit thing to say abt personhood. and caridin is Right There going :|

[atiya-nagrano]

like he’s not wrong in the sense that ppl die in exploitative systems, yes, but unfortunately v funny of him to be like aw you wouldn’t do that to me when the warden asks him if he’d like to be a golem (again right in front of caridin) and the warden immediately firing back “how do you know?” and he maybe has a flashback to five minutes ago to hespith’s poem and the eleventh mangled corpse from branka’s expedition and branka’s villain monologue abt using her subordinates as darkspawn fuel so he can go yeah i guess i can see how in this instance i should have just journaled abt this.

[bleedthebeat]

🔥 Zevran 👀

his past with doing sex work under the crows heavily colors his feelings on sex as a whole, how he offers himself to the warden out of self-defense. he enjoys sex, but it’s important to remember that in the past he’s had sex because he was ordered to and/or because he, as an elf, was seen as desirable by humans and inherently sexualized and objectified due to that. he explicitly says that that’s why the crows like to recruit elves. there’s a lot of baggage tied to his relationship with sexuality. reducing him to a “slut” or a “whore” as a joke minimizes his character and also comes off as biphobic.

also everyone who romanticizes the crows in vg needs to go back to origins and exhaust zevran’s dialogue again. a) it’s extremely unlikely that, as the game states, rook de riva “chose” to join the crows, and the hardships of crow training being referenced as a joke at most is appalling. b) if he had a kid they would not be a rook de riva. he would never let anyone he loves anywhere near the organization that abused and destroyed him. and zevran destroying the crows isn’t just getting revenge for what happened to him, it’s because they’re a deeply corrupt institution that participates in illegal slavery, abuses and kills children, and treats elves like objects. he wants to destroy the entire institution so no one else goes through what he did

that kind of got off track from zevran specifically, so. i’ll just also add that zevran “reforming” the crows or becoming their new leader is immensely out of character