#goldanna

[crowpendragon]

Day 3: Reunion

some reunions don't end as expected...

[dragon-age-tournament]

Round #1 — Match 93 of 104

Goldanna

“goldanna looked a long-lost royal bastard in the face and said “do you have money or not” and honestly? valid.

“fandom treats her like she’s a monster for not hugging the grey warden prince stranger who barges into her house. she’s washing clothes for a living, she’s stressed, she’s broke, she’s tired, and the “family secret” she’s been told her whole life basically amounts to “your mom died, you got nothing, and now some dude wants closure.” of course she’s angry. of course she’s not performing gratitude.”

“goldanna is one of my favourite little dragon age reality checks because her scene refuses to be comforting. you walk in expecting “aww, found family,” and instead you get a woman who’s been scraping by for years, raising kids, carrying resentment that has nowhere nice to go, and suddenly she’s supposed to absorb alistair’s feelings on top of her own life. she’s prickly, she’s unfair, she’s harsh, and it all makes sense when you remember what ferelden does to people who don’t have titles. i also love how the quest isn’t secretly about fixing her; it’s about what you do with alistair afterward. because goldanna doesn’t exist to soothe him, she exists to show him the world doesn’t always hand you the story you want and that’s a brutal, important beat in origins.”

vs. Rook

“Rook os really under appreciate cause of all the characters Rook is literally just some guy thrown into all this shit with probably the highest stakes and still even with all the main characterness and charisma and leadership about them they are the ONLY player character that can fail. I think that deserves a bit of recognition tbh” "Rook is a protagonist who was literally chosen by Varric to because they were willing to stand up for what is right no matter what. They fight against impossible odds (elven gods and the blight!) one of my favorite things about Rook is that they are a little impulsive but every choice they make is for the betterment of Thedas. Rook cares so much about their team!! And their faction!! And they want so badly to help. Also i like Rook’s idle animations so much. Me 🤝 Rook -> unable to sit still for more than 30 seconds ❤️"

Who should advance?

Goldanna

Rook

Voting ended onDec 31, 2025

[abyssal-ilk]

i really wish there were different dialogue options for alistair's quest with goldanna. where is the option to be like yeah, i know you wanted a family, alistair, and i understand this isn't what you expected, but goldanna doesn't owe you anything. she doesn't owe you acceptance. she doesn't know you.

[crossdressingdeath]

Y'know, people call Goldanna a bitch but if some random guy claiming to be the half-brother I thought died along with my mother during childbirth and who as far as I knew or had any reason to assume grew up in a castle being waited on hand and foot as a noble if not a prince showed up at my house where I was scraping a living as a washerwoman for me and my children and expected me to be happy to see him just because his dad fucked my mom (and in the process caused her death) I'd start throwing things at his head, so I think all in all she's being extraordinarily reasonable. I can understand Alistair being upset that she wasn't happy to see him but she doesn't know him and (supposedly) sharing genes doesn't mean she owes him love or even attention.

[becausedragonage]

WIP Wednesday

I was tagged by the remarkable @thedissonantverses!

This week I have a couple of things I'm sharing. I'm working on the Rue piece, beginning with her in Denerim after the darkspawn invasion, but sort of went down a rabbit hole yesterday because I wanted explore a bit of more of what Denerim looked like right after the Blight.

So two things!

The first is a letter from a wealthy citizen of Denerim who was writing someone who fled, and the second is from Ester, one of Goldanna's kids, who become a scholar or scribe of some sort when she's grown. In the first one I wanted to try the POV of someone with priviledge, and in the second, someone who'd been trained to write with a certain style but style managed to inject their own voice. Not sure what I'll do with either, but I needed to write them to get some stuff down and move on with the Rue piece. Anyhow, here are the first drafts of both:

Asshole Letter:

First and above all, please know that I, Father, and Ustan are all well. Most of the staff survive, including little Dottie, but have been regrettably absent from their stations in the aftermath of the battle. I trust all is well with you and though we’re separated by a great distance, I hope that you might feel the faint ghost of my hand on yours as I think of you. I also encourage you and your family to stay in Val Royeaux for the foreseeable future as Denerim is not fit to live in right now. 

The Darkspawn invasion has reduced large sections of the city to rubble and char. The widest streets proved a funnel, driving the hordes deep into Denerim’s heart and stampeding over homes and businesses. In their wake is utter destruction. They did not make it to the waterfront, but fires started by the invaders and defenders both did so that the warehouses, workhouses, and wharves no longer stand and can no longer accept or store the goods the city now finds itself in need of to supply its citizens. 

Fortunately, our districts have, for the most part, been spared. Most of our houses were quiet as so many, like you, sought refuge in our family homes in Orlais or the Free Marches, and that quiet seemed to prove uninteresting to the horde. It was also a great help to have the hired men guarding the gates as they harried the invaders and encouraged them to pass by the estates. 

But the rubble and char! Nadia, it is not only cluttering the ground and  making many streets impassable; It is in the air! Stone dust and ash clogs our noses and coats our clothes. Oh, the ash For days and days and days after the archdemon had been defeated, guards and soldiers hauled cartloads of bodies out of the city, Fereldans and darkspawn alike, to be burned in heaps in the fields beyond the gates. At night the sky was orange and from dusk to dusk the remnants of those who died floated in the air and settled onto us and everything we own. The city is a graveyard, and those of us who survived are the grave markers.

 If there is any good to come of this, it’s perhaps that the precarious, ramshackle buildings of the alienage, all wood and ever their own blight upon the city, has been cleansed by fire. Its residents seem determined to stay and consume precious sparse resources and while your brother has argued that it might be best to escort them out of the city, others have insisted their labour will be needed to aid in rebuilding Denerim. It’s a moot point regardless, as the Dalish fighters have, as yet, refused to leave and guard the gates to the alienage as if the city’s guard might sweep in and dispatch them all at any moment. There is talk they may donate timber to our elves, bringing it in through the devastated streets and bypassing those of our people who have no roofs over their head and are reduced to sleeping in Chantry yards and under tents. It is a display of barbaric ingratitude for the favours Anora has granted them at the behest of the Warden Commander. 

Ester's Writing:

I’ve spent several years collecting the memories of those who survived the Fifth Blight at the request of ____ University in Denerim. They mean to collect the stories and archive them for future study. Some bright scholar realized that while we have books and ballads and scrolls of tales of the heroes of past blights, there is precious little regarding ordinary people and simple matters of survival during and after one. Some think it would make a valuable resource in case of future blights, while others, myself amongst them, think it would help us better understand who we are as Fereldans when pressed and the millstone. 

I have also thought that if I recorded my own memories, it might help me understand myself a little better. At first, I did not think that the daughter of a washer woman could really add much that was valuable to the record, but as I recorded what others recounted to me, and saw the value in what they shared, I realized that it is only in the sharing that the stories gain worth. It is only by the act of letting others examine what I share, that I myself can recognize their significance. So I write. 

By my vow I record the experiences of an 11 year old child, as coloured and perhaps refined by some 15 years of distance, of the aftermath of the Battle of Denerim. Perhaps I will write more of the time before the battle, but that time haunts me most and requires an exorcism before I can proceed with the rest. 

My mother hid my siblings and I in our cellar. She and my oldest sister had planned for this. Mother decided that our best chance was to stay in the city and prepare as we could for what the Blight might bring to Denerim, as travel had become dangerous on the roads leading north. Many of our neighbours had chosen to flee, but our sticking place was the house Mother rented because there at least, there was a roof, a cellar, and each other. 

For months before, Mother had built a small supply of goods and food. It amounted to just a few barrels in the end, but enough that when the fires were lit on the city walls and she urged us down into the dark space beneath the house, there was enough to keep us reasonably ___ until the noises stopped above us.

I'm tagging:

@thedissonantverses, @alinnsurana, @marokiya, @thatgaymerguyb, @mythals-whore, @aubergion, @fivekoboldsinacoat, @dmonfoxfire, @serendipitousoracle, @mossandrock, @mageofquandrix, @biowaredisasterbisexual, @pixiedurango, @nyx-de-riva, @himluv, @athenasdragon, @operative-arrow, @the-night-wizard, @the-font-bandit

[fernacular]

I love drawings of Alistair where he’s visibly half-elf, but I can only think of it as an AU, since, considering what Ali’s story line in da:o is, if he was visibly of elven heritage it would DEFINATELY have come up. So, it wouldn’t work in canon.

BUT.

Oh man an au where Alistair looks elven is so much fun to think about.  So he was told his mother was an elven servant right? which adds layers to the idea of a human noble being the one to get her pregnant, and even more emotional nuance to Goldanna’s whole deal.  Isolde’s dislike of him as a child would almost certainly have racial under(over)tones, and him being accepted into the templars would have been highly unusual (perhaps a bribe was involved), and the way his fellow trainees treated him would for SURE support his hatred of the whole affair.  The Grey wardens with their more laissez-faire attitude towards anything not darkspawn related would have been such a relief.

And the LANDSMEET. For me it was always pretty cut and dry that Anora should be on the throne, Alistair had no interest and she was obviously a more effective politician, plus girl power or whatever. She was somewhat of the underdog once Alistair’s name was put in the ring. But if Ali was a known half-elf? That would complicate the HECK out of things. Not only is there more incentive to put him on the throne because imagine an elven ruler of Fereldan and what that could mean, but it would also be harder and involve more work. It would put Ali and Anora on more even footing in the race for the throne. It would just be so cool. 

Aaaaa anyway. sorry. rambling. Point is visibly elven Alistair is a really cool concept and I wish it was in the actual game. thank you and goodnight.

[uchidachi]

It’s that time of the month when i get fiercely protective of minor unsympathetic fictional characters, and this time I’m crying about Goldanna (Alistair’s supposed half-sister from Origins)

First off, she has every right to be angry. She’s been alone since a young age, she works for scraps to raise five children, and Alistair comes in out of nowhere to reopen old trauma about her mother’s death. She doesn’t know he’s had a rough life too, for all she knows he’s been raised in a palace or some other place befitting a king’s son (he doesn’t contradict her when she assumes he did, or that he is very rich). He offers her 15 sovereigns, which was chump change even for my warden, and I started out broke af in wizard prison.

Secondly, there’s no reason to doubt Goldanna’s truthfulness when she talks about her mother’s death. She worked in the castle, was taken advantage of by the king, and died giving birth to Maric’s son. Goldanna was told the baby died as well, (and this was likely true, she only thinks otherwise when Alistair shows up and claims to be that child) so she is left all alone!

(Slight aside: the argument that it is too coincidental that Alistair and Goldanna’s brother were the same age doesn’t do anything to contradict her story, she doesn’t claim they are, nor ask for Alistair’s age or birth month. In fact, it makes the rest of Alistair’s story more cohesive when you think the babies were not born around the same time: Eamon brings home a baby with a sob story for Isolde about how he’s the King’s bastard and his mother just died in childbirth, and Isolde looks at six-month-old Alistair and knows for damn certain that #1 this is not a newborn and #2 Eamon is lying to her. She just had the part he was lying about wrong.)

Additionally, the very old Andrastian amulet that Alistair was told was his mother’s, do we think it belonged to Fiona? Or was this a family heirloom taken from Goldanna’s mother’s corpse, and given to baby Alistair to “confirm” the story about his parentage?

From Goldanna’s perspective: The King just died. Soon after, the nobles call for a landsmeet to determine the new ruler and who should come by her house but his bastard half-brother! He asks how much she knows about the circumstances of his birth, and offers her 15 gold to shut her up. Along with the one coin she got as a child, she has been paid 16 sovereigns total to be an unwilling participant in a royal coverup & her entire life was ruined.

So yeah. She’s allowed to be a lil bitchy.

[ooachilliaoo]

Goldanna

He was nervous. Really, really nervous. The stumbling over his words, shifting his feet, twiddling his fingers kind of nervous. More nervous than she had ever seen him. And given that, in the space of the last few weeks, he’d confessed to his true parentage, given her a rose to tell her she was the one bright spark in all the darkness, asked Wynne for advice on how to woo a woman in her hearing, and kissed her… that was saying something.  

Was it wrong that she found it so adorable?  

Probably.  

But that didn’t make it any less so.  

She could well understand why he was nervous. It wasn’t hard to see that family was incredibly important to him. She supposed that they were similar in that regard, despite coming at the issue from virtually opposite ends of the spectrum.

She’d had her family her entire life. Mother, father, brother. Then a sister-in-law and a nephew… And they were all gone now. She missed them terribly, every single day.

But he’d had… nothing. No mother to speak of; an absent father. Of course, she would do all that she could to help him reclaim even this tiny part: a sister he’d never known.

All she hoped was that the real Goldanna lived up to the one he’d imagined in the Fade. She’d hate for him to come out of this feeling disappointed…

It was just the two of them. She’d figured that would be best.

Though he probably wouldn’t have minded Leliana or Wynne joining them, she hadn’t wanted to overwhelm Goldanna. The woman was just about to find out that she had a half-brother she never knew she had. Elissa assumed it was a revelation that would go down better if said half-brother didn’t turn up on her doorstep trailing a number of his friends.   

Now that she saw just how nervous he was, she was even more glad. At least with only her present he could hopefully relax a little more than he might have been able to with the others. It hadn’t helped that when they had first come across the… well, not to be impolite, but ‘hovel’ really did seem like the most appropriate word. When they had first come across the hovel that his sister lived in, he’d almost turned tail and run.

“We can go in whenever you want,” she said gently as they stood outside. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Read the Rest on AO3