Kinda rambly rant incoming, I hope it makes sense...
It's both wild and very sad to me, how often I can't enjoy lesbian/sapphic ships because they're subtly portrayed in a way that's so unrealistic and often overly sexualized...
And when I say 'overly sexualized' I don't mean that lesbians should be pure and can't have sex cause "that's dirty". That's not what I mean.
What I mean is that most lesbian relationships and even a lot of lesbian ships in fandom don't feel real. Because they're always made to be hot and super gendered where one is the hot masc dom part and the other is the sweet little femme innocent sub.
Like they can never just be together and love each other in a way that feels real and true... even though I'd love to see that. Because that's something that I could actually see and want for myself!!
I rarely enjoy lebian ships because I can't relate to them. Because they don't show what I would want in a relationship and oftentimes the women also don't feel like real people. Like the power imbalance is so extreme and it always turns me off a ship. And I'm not saying that dynamics like that can't exist, but it gets annoying when it happens All The Damn Time (and when it doesn't happen in canon then the fandom still turns the ship into this dynamic)
There's always the inexperienced one (who is the main character most of the time) and the one who is the cool lesbian hottie girlfriend. I can't find anything I enjoy in there because the innocent one never gets to be more confident or dominat and the sexy girlfriend is nothing more than the sexy girlfriend. Like so many "girlfriend" characters don't even feel like real people cause they're just there to be sexy and experienced and nothing more.
Like where are the real dynamics??? Where are realstic female characters who also Love Women??? Where tf are my realistic sapphic ships cause I kinda need them so so bad...
(Pls read my tags, they got really long but I explain a bit more what I mean there)
What Dragon Age: Origins and The Stolen Throne Do Not Understand About Occupation, Colonialism, and State-Building
Realpolitik for babies, a bit of historical examples and what the Orlais-Ferelden war could have been in a tonally different franchise. VERY long post for history nerds.
Colonialists do not come to your country just to rape women and abuse the locals for the sadistic thrill of a power trip. They come to extract resources.
Orlais should have come to Ferelden for high-quality wool, lumber from Bresilian Forest, ore from Frostback Mountains and untouched lands that can be turned into plantations, to grow grain there and sell it to the highly urbanized Free Marches, Nevarra and Antiva.
Stealing Loghain's dog or killing his mother is not an example of colonialism. It is a simple moral tale: evil individuals harming those less powerful in a personal way out of sadism. This could happen anywhere, between people of any ethnicity — an Orlesian lord and an Orlesian peasant family, or a Ferelden lord and a Ferelden family. Such atrocities occur because of economic inequality between the participants, it is the economy that drives conquest, transforming that inequality into both an economic and a racial hierarchy.
If the writers aimed to depict a real occupation, the Old Imperial Highway wouldn't be the only road on the map. Orlesians would have built an extensive network for two reasons: to connect mines and granaries to ports like Highever, Denerim, and Amaranthine, and to allow rapid military response to rebellion. Did you think the Orlesians were like Mongols, sweeping across the steppe on horses? Of course not. To be honest, even the Mongols brought infrastructure, just in different forms, like language (many Russian words related to taxation and trade have Turkic origins. Guess why).
Actually, I can use Mongols as an excellent illustration of my next point: colonialism is impossible without collaborators, and when the colonialists leave, it is often the collaborators who become the new rulers.
Don't believe me? Look at the history of Russia. Moscow became the capital only because its rulers used the Mongols to crush their rivals. They were the Khan's most ruthless tax collectors, brutally oppressing their own population to maximize profits. The logic is simple: the more you pay the colonialists, the more they allow you to keep for yourself. This is THE reason why countries that have suffered colonial rule often have a dictatorship problem.
The military is the most developed infrastructure occupiers leave behind, because its primary purpose is to terrorize the population into compliance. And that population is not afraid to use such tactics on itself, because surprise, rich people are assholes everywhere.
Colonialism creates a sick society that cannot survive on its own, composed only of enforcers and peasants. The enforcers cannot rule in the absence of the metropole; all they know is how to scare, torture, and kill. The peasants cannot rebel or gradually develop civil society, they have been terrified into submission. Colonialism systematically destroys the very social class from which civil society is formed: the free urban population. The metropole has no use for artisans, merchants, and scholars from the colony. At best, it will bring them to the capital as exotic curiosities for the elite. At worst, it will actively destroy them.
That story beat from The Stolen Throne, where Orlesians drive some of Fereldan farmers off their land, makes no sense. Why would you destroy your own profits by killing the workers for your mines and plantations? Are you stupid? Such a tactic only makes sense in the specific case of settler colonialism, which is a very different type of evil, and I don't think that's what's depicted in the canon.
We do not see Orlesian peasants moving into Fereldan farmlands. We hear nothing about Orlesians burning down forests to make space for new farms. We are shown no new cities, towns, or villages built by Orlesians. If this were true settler colonialism, about a third or a quarter of Ferelden would be Orlesian or of mixed heritage, with border regions and new towns being 90% Orlesian. King Maric wouldn't be able to do a thing about it. How do you deport a third of your country? That's the whole point of settler colonialism: it alters a nation forever, or simply destroys it over time.
Let's return to my historical example. Do you know what happened to the sophisticated artistic traditions of Kievan Rus' during the Mongol occupation? None survived, because the artisans were not needed by the new state. Do you think it was just the Mongols' fault? No, absolutely not. The only place where older traditions survived was Novgorod. And do you know what Moscow did to Novgorod when it "liberated" the country from the Mongols? It fucking destroyed it. The "enforcer" class forged by occupation will do anything to remain in power. It will colonize its own people and destroy their very soul if necessary.
The Muscovite rulers did not abandon the tactics they developed to serve the Khan. They perfected them. They could have made the country more democratic, like Novgorod, they could have invested in resurrecting artistic traditions and regrowing the urban population. But no. Their state model was built on extracting raw resources, and for that, you only need dirt-poor farmers and a military to keep them in check — and to conquer new ones from time to time.
Realistically, after liberating itself from the Orlesian yoke, Ferelden would have been primed for its own expansion, perhaps into the Korcari Wilds. It's more convenient to cut down their forests than to further deplete Ferelden's own. The occupation and rebellion would have given Fereldens the military experience to crush scattered tribal neighbors. Other Fereldan exports could have been furs (as with Russia) and perhaps pearls (did you know that northern rivers used to have them in abundance? Korcari Wilds have a colder climate and enough rivers). The fur trade alone would be an excellent excuse to conquer the Wilds, much like the push into Siberia.
Ferelden should have had a strong collaborator class. Ruthless teyrns, arls, and banns who kept their titles and enjoyed King Meghren's favor by being his best tax collectors. Puppet rulers are necessary to make occupation palatable and efficient: they would be hated but tolerated because they are Fereldan. Meghren's court should have been split between them and imported Orlesian nobility — the latter likely from poorer, ambitious families, as well-established dynasties don't typically cross the sea to seek new opportunities.
A farmer's son is unlikely to make history. If I were rewriting the rebellion, I would make Loghain the son of a minor loyalist bann, murdered by the Orlesians for failing to quell a rebellion. His father would have seen serving Orlesians as the lesser evil, a way to ensure his people still had a Fereldan leader. The Orlesians would kill him for being a poor manager—if you allow an uprising to happen without alerting the authorities, you must be disloyal yourself.
This way, the tragedy of Loghain's father would still be tied to Maric. He would die in the crossfire between the rebellion and Orlesian paranoia. Loghain would learn a bitter lesson: his father was a bootlicker, but it didn't save him because he wasn't ruthless enough to be a good manager. He would be torn: "Do I join the rebellion to avenge my father, even though he was a collaborator? Or am I too smart to join this suicidal crusade of naive fools and thugs?". In the book, Loghain isn't thrilled about the rebellion at first, so I would keep that intact.
The view of rebellion as a fight between "The People" and the occupiers is a mythologization that comes later. In reality, it is almost always a civil war between collaborator elites and anti-collaboration aspiring elites. ALL. EMPIRES. RELY. ON. COLLABORATORS. IT. IS. THEIR. WHOLE. DEAL. The people who joined Maric's side weren't "noble liberators"; they were a different faction of the elite, fighting to take control for themselves.
Look up real rebellions:
Do you think the Spanish Reconquista was a simple Christian vs. Muslim war? It was a complex civil war where Christian kings routinely hired Moors as mercenaries and allied with Moorish taifa (petty kingdom) rulers against their Christian rivals. El Cid, a national hero, fought as a mercenary for both Christians and Muslims. It was not a crusade but a slow, political land grab.
Do you think the Sepoy Mutiny was a war for Indian independence? It was old Mughal and Maratha elites versus massive sections of India that supported the British. The British ruled through a network of collaborator princely states and employed vast numbers of Indian soldiers, the Sepoys. Even this iconic rebellion was an alliance of convenience between disgruntled elements of the old ruling class trying to oppose those benefiting from the new order.
Do you think that the Algerian National Liberation Front led unified people to freedom? The FLN spent as much time massacring rival nationalist movements as it did fighting the French. It used terror to coerce an often-ambivalent population, assassinating "collaborators" who were sometimes just people who wanted to live in peace. This should have been an element of Maric's rebellion! A peasant doesn't care who is his lord, and doesn't want to die just so his wife and children can pay taxes to a different man.
This pattern holds even for slave revolts, because freed slaves don't want universal freedom, they want to have their own slaves. Free people of color joined the Haitian Revolution for equal rights with white people, not for the abolition of slavery. They owned one-third of the plantations and one-quarter of the slaves. After the French were defeated, the revolution devolved into a civil war between Black leaders over who gets to control the new state.
The conflict between Ferelden and Orlais is loosely based on the Norman conquest of England. While William the Conqueror did systematically replace Anglo-Saxon elites, he also allowed many to keep their power in exchange for loyalty. It was the dispossessed elites who resisted, the collaborators had no reason to rebel. Norman rule left a lasting legacy: new bureaucratic tools, Latin-derived vocabulary, architectural influence, and a shift in England's political axis from Scandinavia to Continental Europe.
Realistically, Loghain should have been a ruthless, dispossessed minor noble with military genius and a grudge against everyone. He would have picked Maric as the only viable leader who didn't want him dead and could best serve his ambitions. Maric would make him Teyrn of Gwaren because he is fucking terrified of him. A ruthless pragmatist who owes his position not to lineage but to his own cunning and blade? That's a potential kingslayer. Gwaren is both a reward and a punishment: a position close to the king, but in a logistical nightmare of a region that makes gathering allies for a coup nearly impossible.
A "liberated" Ferelden would be a failed state in the making. The new houses coming to power would be a junta, seizing the juiciest lands from defeated loyalists. The new crown would be bankrupt, forcing Maric to grant his elites significant autonomy and tax exemptions in exchange for their loans and troops. They would essentially be independent warlords. This is the classic post-revolutionary fallout: the central authority is weakened by the very powers that created it.
Ferelden would remain a client state in all but name. Its economy would still be tied to exporting raw resources, with Orlais and its Free Marcher clients as the primary buyers. The new Fereldan oligarchs would own the enterprises left by the Orlesians but lack the expertise and capital to run them, they would have to take new loans and hire foreign specialists. The skeleton of the nation is still foreign.
Many collaborators would have survived, fleeing to Orlais and the Free Marches with their wealth and expertise. They would form a bitter diaspora — a permanent fifth column waiting for a chance to reclaim their holdings.
The war would have devastated craftsmen and farmers. The new powers, to service their debts, would enclose common lands for more profitable sheep runs. The very people who cheered for liberation would be economically crushed by their "liberators." Some will turn to banditry.
Denerim's alienage would swell with refugees from the war-torn countryside. The new regime, even more cash-strapped and xenophobic than before, offers them even less. The elves become a social bomb. Loghain's deal to sell them to Tevinter would be a brutal form of social engineering — quelling unrest by "relocating" a surplus, discontented population to "countryside" and "coastal cities". It would take a lot of time for the elves to realize what is truly happening and to where they are really being deported.
Let's get back to my historical examples! I mentioned Novgorod specifically for a very good reason. The main danger to Maric after the rebellion would be his most powerful ally, the Couslands.
They are the Novgorod to Maric's Moscow — mercantile, naval, cosmopolitan, and likely seeing themselves as the king's equals. Their power is dangerous because it isn't based solely on feudal loyalty. Considering that they're a well-established dynasty with a port city, It's logical that they might have been collaborators, perhaps negotiating a separate peace with Orlesian commanders on terms favorable for all sides involved. Maric and Loghain would have discovered this. The result? A new deal. One Cousland is executed as a traitor and another lives as a "loyal vassal", with the house's history rewritten to glorify a patriarch who "died heroically in battle."
The Muscovite state is a very good analogy for a more realistic Ferelden. The army, the only organ fully developed under colonialism, would become the primary institution. Maric would rely on forces modeled on the Orlesian legions he fought—used as much to crush internal dissent as external threats. Unable to trust the old feudal elite, who either longed for a return to Orlesian rule or plotted to start their own dynasty by killing the last Theirin, Maric's power base would be a new "service nobility" — people like Loghain, military men and tax collectors from politically irrelevant families, chained to the throne by a "land for loyalty" scheme.
In this world of realpolitik, Cailan's plan to marry Celene isn't stupid. It might be immoral, but it is very pragmatic. He represents a significant faction of the elite who look at the ledgers and see only one solution: reintegration with Orlais on better terms. Nobles drowning in Antivan and Marcher loans want the Imperial treasury to assume their debt. Those who profit from exporting wool to Orlais want tariffs removed. Some simply see no value in Fereldan sovereignty when compared to Orlesian universities, canals, superior architecture and chevalier academies. Ferelden has only mud, stone keeps, and debt.
Becoming a semi-autonomous Grand Duchy within the Empire would be good for many. Oligarchs would become counts with seats in the Orlesian government, their sons would become chevaliers, trade would flow freely. The Blight would become Orlais' problem to solve.
Loghain knows what the cost will be. Could Anora, raised in the authoritarian, land-owning oligarch style, ever play the Grand Game? Could she be a banker? She is a warlord's daughter, not a smooth-talking merchant's heir. Loghain's decision to elevate a despised man like Rendon Howe is brilliant realpolitik: a tyrant with no other allies is far more dependent and less dangerous than a strong, popular leader.
Alistair's naivete represents the mythology of the rebellion — the pure, heroic tale people tell after the dirty deeds are done. His shock at the realpolitik is the shock of a boy raised on stories confronting the monstrous machine his father actually built. It is soul-crushing.
This is the story Dragon Age: Origins could have told: a civil war for the soul and future of a nation. Maric could have been a liberator who became a tyrant to secure his liberation; who betrayed his allies; who built a state in the image of his oppressors; and who left a legacy of institutional paranoia that doomed his sons, his friend, and his kingdom.
The canon wants players to feel like heroes restoring a broken kingdom, but in a devastatingly realistic version, the kingdom was born broken, forged in the fire of betrayal and built on the rotten foundation of colonial collaboration. The Blight is the physical manifestation of the spiritual corruption that has festered in Ferelden's soul since the moment it "won" its "freedom".
ok basically. matthew is better than you because he is aware he is better than you and behaves accordingly. i think he is genuine about being nice and thoughtful to staff and workers etc and this is sincerely one of the values that he was raised with, but at the same time he knows his own position and knows that it Means Something to people when he approves of them. so by giving his approval even though it is genuine it simultaneously reinforces his own magnanimity and thus his persona. and when he is out of his element he tries to maintain said persona but it’s very clear he gets nervous. the most interesting part to me is his interactions with other nhl players, the first arm being with the panthers where there is obviously affection but due to his status/personality there is a proportional entitlement to mess with them in an almost familial way. i think this is apparent as early as the budlight one-timers vid with benny (<333) but obviously he grew into it with more experience and success - the delight he takes in pranking the team, his media tour which is in many ways separate from the team, things like the chuckles/giggles dynamic and matthew/reino chiclets appearance where you can tell the other guy takes their cues from him. even when regina george likes her friends she can’t help being regina george… the second part being when there isn't the long-term team bond he can be so mean it kills me. was most apparent in the 4 nations jt miller group chat situation which was so fucking funny and evil i think about it all the time.
on the other hand sasha is better than you because he is literally just better than you and this is so self-evident he doesn’t have to do anything to prove it. and he would never do anything to prove it, unless he is drunk or you are anton lundell. and even matthew has to acknowledge this fact but at the same time he doesn’t resent it because sasha purposely carved out space for him and allowed him to code into the dna of the team to an extent he wasn't permitted in calgary. and matthew especially early on was clearly amazed by this and how well he and sasha understood each other, and as a result will be genuinely deferential to him not out of perceived status difference but because he actually wants to do it. CASE IN POINT the . the helsinki old market hall date videos that torment me everywhere i go.
ALSO: the national teams are destabilizing to this dynamic because on the us team matthew has established a reputation that extends beyond the panthers, and sasha is not part of it. AND YET! matthew turning away from an opportunity to scrum with sasha despite saying he was going to run panthers playing for other countries + spotted chatting with sasha after the game despite saying he was going to ignore other panthers during the tournament. and the matthew + am34 as captain dynamic being so laughably different from the matthew + sasha as captain dynamic that it was reinforcing of 1619 exceptionalism. the foundations are solid <3
ALSO: marchy is interesting because in many ways he plays matthew’s game and has done so for longer so matthew “has” to defer to him i.e. faceoff s2e6 where he waits for marchy to say that he never apologizes for chirping someone before agreeing, which i thought was unusual for him (and he was not fully comfortable doing it But he was very enjoyably prickly that entire episode so). rly good contrast between that + matthew’s general accommodating nature toward marchy despite his reputation eclipsing parts of matthew’s - and then marchy saying the chirp matthew lobbed at him when he was a bruin is one of the only ones that’s goten to him. the team is at the center of everything matthew does and directs his approach to other people… and sasha IS the team but he is also More and Special.
I've been thinking about trying to form my own sort of order of the Holmes canon (yes, I've been very inspired by other current Holmesian content) since I'm trying to get back into the annotations that I used to do and I'm at a loose end as to what to do with my life at the moment, but I really find it difficult to read the stories as examples of chronology, if that makes sense.
I've obviously been proven wrong time and time again as many people have wrote their theoretical canon chronologies, but part of me seriously feels that that's impossible. If they were supposed to have an order, ACD/Watson would have wrote it that way (again, my own personal opinion, I'm not trying to impose rules in the fandom because that would make all this boring). But, since he's our favourite unreliable narrator, he mixes up dates, changes them- sometimes he tells us, sometimes he let's us figure it out for ourselves.
There's the whole idea of the game, the 'true' meaning of the Holmes books and what ACD was trying to tell us. I, of course, am inclined to think that the mysteries aren't the main story, it's Holmes and Watson's relationships that are supposed to be focused on, so dates just aren't important to me. I don't believe Watson when he feels the need to include exactly when something happened, because it looks like he's establishing an alibi. Diverting attention from something.
And, I don't know, maybe I am taking it too seriously, but half the time I read the 'cases' and I doubt they even happened (as in, within Holmes' London)- a good example is obviously The Blanched Soldier wherein two men are kept apart from each so they don't endanger their reputation... a very diluted version of events, I know, but a brief example of my feelings on this. The cases are metaphorical, symbolic- cover ups.
I'm being extremely cryptid because I'm reevaluating my reading of the canon, and finding it surprisingly easy to ignore virtually everything Watson tells us to find a deeper story running through it all (not that there's anything wrong with serial crime stories- that's why I started reading in the first place).
I plan on actually forming a little bit of work on this- I doubt it'll go any further than this blog, but it'll be entertaining nonetheless, and I hope that at least a few people will understand where I'm coming from.
continually getting into fandoms where i disagree with the ao3 tag wranglers assigned to it about whether a character or pairing should have their own separate tag that doesn't just lead you to a different one
while many times this goes unspecified, as many authors think it goes without saying, it's an inescapable truth that a non-insignificant amount of characters in the western canon come across as profoundly white, cisheterosexual and christian in their demeanor and in their values. speculating about how a character might change if you altered any of those groups invites a deeper exploration of these aspects than you're likely to encounter in most corners of fandom.
not to mention, how much more inviting these arguable blank canvases seem to be when it comes to fandom engagement, vis a vis explicitly non-white, non-cishet, non-christian characters.
