ok alright. i am finally posting ✨where there's smoke✨ my inquisition au fic! newest chapter is here!
the premise, in short:
what if, after anders was notably an apostate who blew up a chantry building and killed a chantry leader... people are not particularly stoked when this happens again. except even more destructively. and this time with a Heathen Elf™️ found at the scene.
so, instead of seeing the prisoner as any sort of positive religious omen, (most of) the people in haven instead see her as a dangerous criminal, and react accordingly. and this starts to cause further problems. solavellan is also there eventually.
the premise, in long:
what if the tranquil didn't just all get turned into oculara offscreen, and actually were part of the plot.
what if anders and kirkwall haunted the narrative a bit more.
what if, a dalish elf who suddenly wakes up in chantry custody for a mass murder... assumes any personal information shared will lead to providing a target for an exalted march. and therefore doesn't share any. which only looks more suspicious lmao.
what if the dalish/city elf stuff was not written in a way that i personally found very stupid (it will at least, be stupid in a new, different way! diversity win <3)
[holds up incredibly minor npcs] "i just think they're neat"
what if leliana's rose vision and general heretical tendencies went somewhere. i think she can have a little a chantry schism, as a treat.
what kind of weird person would be like "hm yes. i love to wander around. as a visibly dalish apostate. all by myself :^)" and, what reasons might they have for going to the conclave directly, when it's literally Templar Central. here's her character tag uwu.
also i retconned some aspects of vg lore when i felt like it. didn't make sense and doesn't compel me! the elves don't need white guilt! solas cannot be arlathan's most special, invaluable, genius military mastermind, who singlehandedly won the titan war, and invented tranquility, the blight, eluvians, and sliced bread - then was still mythal's yappy lapdog who got laughed at in meetings afterwards. that is just contradictory fhdghfkdh.
There is something honestly very endearing about how you can't look away from all of the bad Solas/Solavellan/Dragon Age takes. Your dissertations are all so earnestly like "we're going this again? truly? haha?" but you never sound unhappy or furious. Just holding up a poor egg and a new thousand-word tag essay or reblog chain with citations that would put an academic thesis to shame every three to five weeks.
HAHA thank you! my toxic trait is that when i see a silly argument i feel compelled to put up a stall in the marketplace of ideas. placing the egg in a spoon and carrying him away from poorly thought out takes...
The flare-up in violence between Iran and Israel on June 8 was less about the two countries’ immediate goals and more a reflection of Iran’s
The body bags are coming. They have been coming since the renewed fighting began in March. And in Israeli political culture, body bags without a visible end — without the promise of a decisive result that justifies their weight — are the most corrosive political material in existence. There is no “mowing the grass” when the grass fights back with drones that cost less than the fuel in the armored vehicle they destroy. There is no restoration of deterrence when the deterrence never stabilizes long enough to be restored.
Here for an afira/triangles fun fact. is there a job she ever really wanted, why or why not does this make her job as inquisitor harder? How does or does Afira see a future outside the roll that might doom them? How does that play into the trope of doomed hero with the relationship with solas. Also, big ask, will you talk about how her status affects them both? Also hello, welcome to my mojo dojo question house.
oh gosh!! ok here are very scattered triangle lore rambles, based on what is currently in the fic timeline bc i don't want to jump ahead too far haha.
she... never specifically wanted a Job, bc she went from being "regular alienage child" to "uh oh! this little triangle is a mage! 😬" which, along with the [series of unfortunate events before she reached her clan] precluded developing any real sense of a future life path. she (briefly and impulsively) was like "well. it's not like i WANT to be the first or the keeper. but it's unfair to be denied the chance to compete for it!! what, just because i have a 'bad personality for leading' and 'the other candidates are from the keepers' lineage and also better trained'? smh! i will enter and win this contest! just because they said i shouldn't!!"
which then ended up in her winning being first, through somewhat dubious means. and then immediately assigning herself to roaming messenger duty. bc no one really wanted her to be a future leader, including her. all this basically just pissed off much of her clan, for no real benefit, aside from a vague sense of vindication. this is peak performance 📐👍
she generally thinks she is both Inherently Somewhat Evil, and also a very bad leader. which is only slightly true. but does stress her out very badly if she's given any indication that people see her as an authority figure, haha. currently in the fic timeline, no one sees her as that, and she is just expecting to be the funniest person at her own public execution, which is a role that she does feel qualified for. she is lying awake at night workshopping her Coolest Lines for this, bc she is normal.
i think in solas' case it's a bit... from his perspective, in this au, the entire "she is a prisoner" thing weighs on him a lot. no escaping the depersonalization and loss of autonomy that he's inflicted on this random elf! this is not really very good dread wolf behaviour to have gotten an innocent bystander held captive during his plans. he's so far scraping by on avoiding thinking about it, bc he doesn't believe she fully has feelings. but on the other hand, he has seen way too many miserable imprisoned elves trying to act calm about it, and despite probably(?) not having feelings, she acts exactly like those ones. so it's difficult for him to not sympathize 🍳
from triangle's pov, she is deadly serious about "i will kill to protect you btw :^)" as she sees it as something of a professional obligation from being technically a first. she currently, literally, just thinks solas is neat. weaow, he knows cool facts and is seemingly the most unhinged bleeding heart idealist she's ever seen in her life. what kind of weirdo sticks around in all this danger purely for humanitarian reasons?
absolutely looosssinggg it. i'm so obsessed with movies which portray the woman MC in a highly specific job because the writers clearly think it's like "off-beat" and "quirky" but have no idea how the field works whatsoever.
i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.
so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.
this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.
the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":
these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.
then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.
our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.
And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?
The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.
Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.
it's a quirk unique to this MC that she cares so much about paintings, in her department at the metropolitan museum of art, where her colleagues find all that art business rather dreary. because we all know that's what conservators in extremely competitive museum positions are like.
I'm not saying there can't be lifelong love in here somewhere but I also just feel like the monogamous heterosexual marriage you're fantasizing about isn't necessarily best represented by the bacchanal. and that's okay. but i do stand by that.
I am curious: what was 2015 era Solavellan like? I wasn't active in the fandom back then.
oh gosh, it was like
general da fandom: convinced that solas is literally Elf Hitler and anyone who liked him was Literally Pro-Genocide (i am so not kidding hfkdgshfd. imagine the worst and most tasteless things to say, and they were said). on top of the "solas is literally abusive to lavellan and it's disgusting that people romanticize this" general ship discourse.
the solavellan fandom, not to be outdone in being annoying:
Dark Wolf Coded Possessive Dom Solas x Gentle Virginal Naive Halla-Coded Lavellan is the most common trope
"what if MY lavellan came from a clan... that had fen'harel vallaslin... 😏"
"the reason solas is straight and elf-only is bc he wants female lavellan to Rebuild The Population with him <3 and this is good <3 yay"
the most egregiously "uwu i'm just a girl, explain everything to me solas, bc i'm so ignorant from living in the forest with my dumb clan that i always hated " style lavellans that were veering into full on noble savage tropes. yeah, let's ignore how lavellan is either the clan's first, or a seasoned enough hunter to be sent off alone on this wildly risky mission, after living her whole life in thedas as an elf who's in constant danger! she is Just A Girl... She Must Be Taught Things........
"if you don't let solas remove the vallaslin, that means lavellan is some kind of pro-slavery idiot who can't accept the truth, and the dalish are basically just cosplaying and don't even understand their own culture :/"
"what if ancient elves were all white, and so therefore the veil is what made darker skinned elves exist, as a symptom of their mortality and diminishment <3" someone genuinely wrote this fic premise hfdkgjfdg 💀
incredibly annoying "dorian is lavellan's Quirky Gay Bestie" type of writing (tbf, also an issue in the rest of the fandom, aside from the dorian shipping fics generally)
and in general i guess the da fandom was larger, and tumblr had not become quite so homogenously white then, which was nice. but also i think the amount of people getting racially harassed was much higher + it was pretty obvious just from a scan that white characters/whitewashed art were seen as more appealing in general. so i was just sort of lurking for most of it :')
