#sve1tka

[carabas]

The first days of Bloomingtide are a time for somber reflection and prayer, the chantry sisters of Kinloch Hold had always told Anders, and never mind the kind of festivities depicted in the lurid, swiftly confiscated novels Karl used to sneak into the dorm, or lovingly detailed by a pirate who spent the Blight regaling him and the rest of the Pearl with tales of far-off Llomerryn and Dairsmuid and Rialto until they all blurred together in his mind into a riot of brilliant colors and music and entangled limbs and garlands thrown over a lover’s neck.

You should see, she’d say. A million ports, a million festivals lighting up the nights, a million possibilities he was never supposed to see from behind tower walls. Life, real life. Worlds away.

Kirkwall wasn’t much for Summerday celebrations either. Start of the rainy season. A few flowers in windows, a few white-robed children running to the chantry between the raindrops, huddled under oiled cloaks. Anders didn’t think of Isabela’s stories again for years.

But in Val Royeaux, there’s a whole secret language encoded into those Summerday garlands with Orlesian deadly serious frivolity - cartloads of blossoms carried up to the mansions, probably with coded messages to complement the ham that tastes of despair, but flowers talk down in the less gilded streets too. Parades of masked revelers toss garlands to the crowds with hopes and promises woven into them, love, hope, a change in fortune, a turn for the better written into physical form.

Justice always did appreciate a bit of symbolism.

Music rings from every street corner into one great overwhelming noise, and masked, a fugitive in disguise in the shadow of the ruins of the White Spire with its spire toppled, Hawke snatches a garland out of the air and ropes it around Anders’s shoulders, a fragile string of fulfillment tugging him in close.

[palecrepegold]

sve1tka replied to your photo “Oh check it out, some people talking in Liam O’Brien’s mentions came...”

iiinteresting! especially given that components include things like diamonds (for a 1st lvl spell!) which are scroungeable for your player-character types, but like, caleb's absurd incense-and-paper budget is more gp than the average peasant must see in a lifetime. idk enough abt dnd lore to know whether that's an inherent limitation to arcane magic or an intentional class barrier, but now i'm super curious!

On Talks Machina just now they said Caleb has spent ~650 gold on paper and ink so far in the campaign! That’s not even to get new spells, it’s just to transcribe them so he can use them, which is so wild. And he started out flipping his shit in happiness that Nott had 13 gold for him to buy books. It adds so much to why his world would absolutely be upended by the chance to go to the Soltryce Academy, which by everything we’ve learned so far seems like a free ride/all expenses paid kind of education, and why young Caleb would be feel so much loyalty to his teachers (on top of the fact that he clearly had a very patriotic upbringing).

I know to some extent it’s flavor, but I really think it’s significant that Caleb (and Liam as a player) emphasizes his spellcasting gestures and using the components. From what little bit I’ve looked into it, basically every generic material component (molasses, iron filings) is something the player can just assume they have on them as part of their general inventory, unlike the pearl for identifying magical items or the diamond for chromatic orb (and where did Caleb get that, I wonder? Did he say?). It’d absolutely be normal and fine for Liam to just say, “I cast slow,” and not elaborate at all, but he’s very particular in getting into the tangible aspects of being a wizard. And I personally think that’s part of Caleb’s story and how he had to essentially relearn magic after he left the asylum. Unlike the aristocratic/academic magic that young Caleb would have learned from esteemed scholars and high-ranking government ministers, everything he does now is scrounged from the basics, from stolen scrolls and dimestore components and literally a spellbook he found in a smutty bookstore. I know he was very afraid of being recognized at the Victory Pit, for good reason, but I think anyone watching who had a structured and formal magical education wouldn’t see a former Soltryce student in the way Caleb does magic now. And I think it’s fair to assume that a vast Empire with deep pockets would be able to educate and maintain powerful war mages that any insurrectionist groups or smaller, poorer neighboring countries wouldn’t have a chance against.

[carabas]

There’s no time in the Fade.

Anders always used to keep count of each day outside of the Circle, each escape he managed to stretch a few moments further. A week. Three weeks. A month. A year. A lifetime - he wants to but can’t ever quite believe the Warden’s promise of that, even while his second summer outside the tower wears on, even raising a glass in an Amaranthine tavern openly, with no templars or chains in sight.

It’s harder for him to celebrate those days wrested back from the Circle now. There’s no time in the Fade, just now, and now the Circles are still standing, and now, and now, and this may not be the Fade but he’s no longer sure time moves here either, one day looking much like the next. The faces in his clinic change. The Chantry doesn’t. The city doesn’t. Voices of long-dead Tevinter slaves that no one else can hear still crying out for justice, for Justice, as he watches Fereldan miners head down into the pits.

Hawke, though. Hawke, cheerfully offering him the Knight-Commander’s head on a spike. 

Wherever Hawke wades into the mire of this city, things change. And he can almost see time moving again. 

Makes him believe he can really do this, find some path to a future that looks different than the present.

He’s counting again -  hours until he can put out the lights and lock the clinic for the night, minutes of footsteps to Hawke’s door, moments of breath-held hesitation, wondering if Hawke’s door will be open.

And counting the days as he mumbles I can't believe you’re still with me, one morning he didn’t expect to have and then another, and every one feels as much of an impossible victory as these days wrested from the Circle, days into weeks into months into years.

[palecrepegold]

sve1tka replied to your post “I promised myself that I’d keep the football to non-football content...”

don't worry about it, the football players are a nice wholesome presence on my dash. it's like hey, i don't know those dudes but i'm glad they're friends, haha :')

They’re very good boys! And it’s comforting to me that they can be so openly affectionate and positive about their friendships with their teammates--maybe if a bunch of top athletes in the world’s most popular sport are big softies who love hugs and gently teasing each other on Instagram, humanity’s not so bad after all?

[palecrepegold]

@sve1tka I think in regards to actors, the RPF thing is a little more understandable, because people sort of take the chemistry between their characters and then add in whatever positive vibes they give off when they do interviews together or the like. Stacking the definitely manufactured on top of the at least partially manufactured but also at least partially sincere--I’m thinking of Mulder/Scully fans who also want Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny to get together as an example. Their characters have spent so much time on screen together building their chemistry, and the actors seem quite close in real life, so the conflation of the two kind of makes sense. And I think really popular actors probably take that sort of thing in stride, so long as it doesn’t get creepily intrusive. And their public personas are also things they created, to different extents depending on the person, so there’s a level of detachment for them as well.

it feels more morally complicated when the people involved aren’t actors, for me anyway, because it’s missing that level of detachment. When someone’s shipping people, they’re picking through their real lives and clinging to certain bits while disregarding others. Romanticizing a post-game hug between teammates, for instance, as if it were done by someone who didn’t also make seventeen instagram posts in the past week talking about how much they love their wife and kids. It feels different to make up parallel universe versions of real people, create and get invested in relationships between them, and then also go back and use real things those people do here on earth to validate your creation. I’m left wondering how well people who do this manage to maintain that separation between the real person and the fake one. I’ve definitely seen jokey posts where people express annoyance in someone talking about loving their spouse, as if that were a facade they put up to hide their real, ship-validating feelings. It wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed reading.

What I come back to in terms of how far I’m comfortable with going when real people are involved is: how would they feel if they knew about it? Like, I can imagine a (professedly/presumably heterosexual) male athlete being fine with or flattered by knowing a bevy of women have fantasies about boning down with them. I can’t imagine them being equally okay with fantasies about them boning down with their teammates, especially when those fantasies are written out or drawn in explicit detail. Which is something they could find very easily if life ever brought them to typing in a search for their own name on this website. The chance they ever do that is about 0.01%--rich people with physically demanding careers, spouses, and young kids probably don’t have a ton of free internet browsing time--but it could happen. And if it did, and you were the shipper who made that art or wrote that story, how would you feel about knowing you upset this person you’re supposedly such a big fan of? Would you insist to them that it was all fiction, even though it used their name, their face, and their friendships? 

I’d hope that those fans cared enough about the people in question to keep what they wrote or drew private and non-searchable, but I keep seeing someone on instagram whose username is literally realperson1xrealperson2 leaving comments on both realperson1 and realperson2′s actual accounts, so.

[carabas]

sve1tka replied to your post “out of control, handers?”

also 'from his expression anders wouldn't have guessed anythng was wrong'-- idk if you're into ask-the-author type questions, but i'd be rlly interested in your thoughts re: blue!hawke and anger.

So for me, Hawke's blue-ness is very tangled up with his apostate-ness, with magic being linked to emotion and with being taught by his Circle-trained father about the importance of remaining in control at all times, with not accidentally expressing his anger by burning the house down or getting too chatty with a rage demon in his dreams; and little tiny kid mage!Hawke going from being someone who could roughhouse and get into normal kid fights with his friends to someone who really couldn't do that anymore; and with the need to deflect attention, to be polite and get along with people and make sure he's not resented, make sure he's not someone you'd want to turn over to the templars if it came to that, but at the same time not letting people get close enough to find out his secret.

If he can keep his anger from showing in his magic or in his dreams, then keeping it from showing on his face is comparatively easy.

And also the blue dialogue is all about being understanding, being able to put himself in other people's shoes and sympathize with them - and that's a survival-as-an-apostate thing too, needing to be good at reading people, even people actively trying to harm him, especially them - so to a certain degree, he genuinely doesn't get angry at some situations when he probably should, just because he can understand where the other person’s coming from. Like, yeah, the Dog Lords gang jumping out and attacking him at night is a pain, but hey, if Hawke hadn't been lucky enough to have family connections in Kirkwall then he could easily have been one of them. Yeah, his friends turned on him in the Fade, but you can't hold people responsible for what they do in a dream; and yeah, Aveline's so shaken by that dream that she's now sincerely wondering out loud if maybe Hawke should be locked up in the Circle after all, and that's a little bit terrifying, but you know what, she's just shaken and that's understandable for someone who has no experience with the Fade, she wouldn't really turn him in, and he should have known better than to bring her into the Fade in the first place when she wasn't at all prepared for it, that's his own fault - or so says his overdeveloped sense of responsibility and guilt. 

Rather than getting angry, he tends to get tired or bitter, the way he sounds in Inquisition. Because when things go wrong or when he hears about yet another injustice, it’s rarely a shock.

But then there’s Anders, with all his open anger at the way the world treats mages like Hawke. And this is part of why I love Blue Handers specifically and Blue Hawke's development into a revolutionary, it's one of the many reasons Hawke's so drawn to Anders, because Anders' whole thing with Justice is that he can't hide his anger anymore, he doesn't try to deflect with humor like he did throughout Awakening, he can’t turn a blind eye or become resigned to the injustices that keep going on every day. He cares so deeply and he wears every emotion on his sleeve. And where Hawke is used to the state of the world and the way mages are treated and is just trying to survive in it and do the right thing as best he can, Anders says the world should be better than this, you deserve better than just trying to survive, this is wrong and it's okay to be angry about that, it's okay to want the world to be better than it is.

[palecrepegold]

sve1tka replied to your post “It is a tremendous relief to me that CR fans on this site are finally...”

yah, but there's something sort of pleasingly galaxy-brain about a character who puts so much effort into his theatrical trickster persona, only to have it fool the audience more successfully than it fools any of the other characters in-universe, which i think molly would appreciate if you caught him in the right mood

This is a fantastic observation and I love it. Hopefully Taliesin is enjoying it even if Molly can’t.

[palecrepegold]

sve1tka replied to your post “Getting into CR is interesting because on the one hand, there’s so...”

hey yeah, i'm just getting into it as of cr2. it's such an interestingly different storytelling format, and the rare ensemble cast thing where i genuinely like every single one of em a lot. haven't looked into the fandom enough to know the popular opinions, but i'd be interested !

I haven’t watched anything from the first campaign yet either, but I’m really digging the second. A lot of compelling storytelling, and I really like that you can tell these people are all friends (and/or spouses) in real life and they’re all having a good time. Like Travis shouting at Matt, “you crazy motherfucker!” just after he pulled something new and cool in one of Fjord’s dreams--they’re just as invested in the story and as delighted by it as we are, and it shows.

I could watch Liam and Sam play their respective characters all day, especially in scenes where they get to build off of each other. I think they mentioned that in the previous campaign, their characters didn’t really see eye to eye and weren’t super close, so they’re really enjoying the chance to do something different this time around and be best friends in the game as well as out of it. The devotion that Caleb and Nott have to each other as companions/found family is worth the price of admission alone. The whole Nein’s interactions definitely remind me of some of the better dynamics of the DA2 crew, though obviously in an Act 1 kind of way--I think technically they’ve only been traveling together for two weeks in universe, which is fucking wild considering the massive amount of shit they’ve managed to get into so far.