#jowan

[mul-tik]

Lily girl... run....

[snuffysbox]

Doing a Jowan and Surana of 'Dragon Age Origins circle mage'-fame retrospective in 2025, yep.

[loopofrosewood]

always enamoured by the canon vibes of the mage warden & jowan friendship. the implied many personal crises of jowan's that the warden has made fun of him for and/or helped him with. him being the warden's like, only friend in the tower despite or because of them being a favorite of the first enchanter. him presumably being the one to help the warden settle into the tower given he's been there longer. "you're like a sister to me, but maybe if-" but he only says that if you ask him why you guys didn't bang In Front of his girlfriend. both of them potentially immediately getting distracted from breaking jowan out of the circle by a cool talking statue. the constant way the warden can rag on him and the resentment and jealousy on jowan's end. the way he did totally leave them out to dry during his escape and only makes a move to protect them if they betrayed him and he didn't know. and then they can flat out kill him later. literally awesomeeeee

[haeanotnon]

(not) Grey warden, (not) Explosion, (not) Blood mage

P1 || P2

[deorlingas]

some sleepy mages after a day of magic shenanigans. Kinloch Hold prequel has taken hold of my mind and will not let go.

(sequel to this little piece)

[thatwavephenomenon]

The Circles to me are Toxic Academic Settings pushed to Nightmarish Extremes. Your magic manifests and suddenly you're locked in a tower with other children to study, study, study to be a mage. You have to get a Good Grade at being a mage. Oh, but that's not what you want? You do not fit in? Too bad, because if you want to have a future, you can only be a Good Mage. A mage who follows all the rules and who can be productive and useful. Only the best survive! All those who died were weak! And you do not want to be weak, do you? You do not want to be like them, those stupid weak mages who can barely maintain a shield and who will fail their Harrowings. Right? Of course not. You must be a Good Mage. You must be The Best mage. You must succeed to survive.

[the-cryptographer]

I might be reaching a bit, but I think something else that Lily and Jowan communicated to me that I think isn't really so succinctly captured in later games is some amount of crossing the aisle on how templars and Chantry initiates are often used and abused and punished by the Chantry in the same way that many mages are.

And obviously they were trying to capture something adjacent with Samson and Maddox. And Alistair and Sebastian were also given over to the Chantry without their consent, and Sebastian compares his own situation to Anders's in banter, "You were given to the Circle. I was given to the Chantry. Hawke was driven away from home by the Darkspawn. None of us are free," but he sounds like a friggin idiot because it totally fails to account for his class privilege and how he is treated differently by the Chantry as a Prince, versus how Anders was treated as not only a mage but as the son of poor immigrant farmers. And of course Alistair is actively a candidate to be Ferelden's next king in Origins.

But Lily and Jowan really are the same. And Lily so obviously does not want to be where she is!! And she was likely given to the Chantry as a child and now they're expecting vows of chastity and poverty from her and she WANTS OUT of it just as much as Jowan WANTS OUT of the Circle. And she's looking at this guy who really all of Southern Thedas is telling her is worth less than her just for being a mage but, you know, she's not seeing the differences between them. She's seeing someone who wants out as much as she does. And according to the Chantry, seeing this and saying this is apparently so threatening they have to put her in the torture prison for it.

[artist-rat]

why would she say that