(this is sha-brytols teehee) fellow justice enjoyer 🫵 may i ask what is the lore with him and your cousland
I recognise that URL! (and this one, don't worry, I knew it was you)
The lore between Elissa and Justice is VAST AND UNKNOWABLE
No that's not true, it's just... extensive. Elissa started life back in the heyday of DAO and DA2, sort of I think 2012ish. I had mained DAO as a F!Tabris and considered that my canon as I went into Awakening, but when I joined fandom through Deviant Art and Tumblr and LJ (in its death throes) there was a very pervasive corner of the fandom that were adamant that F!Cousland was THE canon origin, very similar vibes to some of the Solavellans, and went out of their way to look down on and shit talk other origins, ESPECIALLY F!Origins who romanced Alistair. Because only THEY could marry him, only THEY could become Queen, only THEY had the TRUE fairy tale ending. There were mods exclusively for F!Cousland use, all kinds of drama and elitism
She started life as nothing more than a spoiled noble party girl who pouts too much and doesn't like being told no, drinks too much and has too much sex. Brought a lot of scandal on the family name, etc. Just a real smear on the Cousland legacy. But as I played her and started writing about her, I realised there was more to it than that, and she became a little more jagged around the edges. The alcohol and sex were coping mechanisms, addictions, ways to temper her mood when everything got too much for her. Anders and Justice were supposed to be a bad metaphor for bipolar, were they Jennifer? Well, what does it actually look like when someone struggles badly with mental illnesses in a world without any significant manner of mental health care? How does a noble family try to sweep an aggressive child under the rug, how do they hide her outbursts and her tears, how exhausted are they by years of nannys and tutors being driven away?
She was a perfect choice for a grey warden, and she hated every minute of it. She felt trapped by it, like a cage she couldn't get out of, and she HATED being told what to do. You think Alistair had a breakdown after Ostagar? Elissa straight up went non-verbal and did nothing but drink for days. A lot of the events of Origins were just sheer dumb luck, and Leliana and Alistair doing a lot of the talking on Elissa's behalf. She made Loghain a Warden, and Alistair retaliated as king by giving her Gwaren, knowing explicitly how much she'd hate being a ruler. She retaliated in turn by declaring Gwaren unfit for human habitation due to the Blight and gave it to the elves, founding a new elven kingdom in the process. He retaliated AGAIN by giving her Amarathine, and specifying it was for the Wardens so she couldn't worm out of it
And incredibly, I didn't set out to make Elissa fall in love with Justice. It just so turned out that having a suicidal, mentally ill young woman suddenly encounter a creature that saw beauty in everything and didn't judge her the way everyone else did and treated her with respect and kindness did something to her, and he started out with a case of hero worship as he does in game, seeing the Commander as a noble and virtuous paragon of goodness defending the land against darkness, and instead learned a great deal about the complexity of life by watching her struggle to live
I wrote about them here if you so fancy. With an apology that it's unfinished because I swore off DA fandom in 2015 due to the... everything, and I've only just started dipping my toes back in again. But it covers the events of Awakening all the way up to the end of the siege of the city and I think it's quite good if I do say so myself
