#zevran

[pauvre-lola]

obligatory yearly zevran drawingue...................

[imrowanartist]

A stubborn little Crow

[maiwong1]

Zorro Zevran

have reference

[atiya-nagrano]

do you think zevran worries about how his identity and personality have been affected by his upbringing with the crows? do you think any core aspects his identity and personality have been affected adversely or otherwise by his upbringing with the crows? is there a side of zev that's like the grew up in a brothel side of his personality with its own relationship to the grew up training to be a crow side of his personality? do these questions themselves reveal an unpleasantly fatalistic relationship with how upbringing affects future identity that zevran would reject wholeheartedly (and how justified would he be in doing so)? idk, talk about zevran and the facades for a while if you'd like :')

yayyyy i love these questions. this is going to be so long (':

i think that the biggest point of tension between rinna and zevran is that she makes him think consciously abt his identity and personality and how those things have been affected by the crows. origins is the first time he maybe ever tries to think abt it on purpose, and even then, a lot of the time i think he's being dragged kicking and screaming into it — and this is assuming the warden in this instance is curious enough to give him the space to do that.

i rly like his embarrassing comment directly to caridin's face when his answer to 'should we deny ppl their agency en masse if we can make use of them?' is lmao come on, isn't that just how the world works? isn't that just the way things are? sort of! but not rly!

rinna, to me, was a v lonely outlier in the crows, a woman w enough self-possession to be utterly saturated in a lack of autonomy and still able to decide she would act to change the system regardless. in origins, zevran is the v lonely outlier — a barely-ex-crow in a group of ppl who had their own specific upbringings, to be sure, but not his. he gets to learn in real time when a belief he thought was objective turns out to be v much not.

still, there's a part of him that's clearly been struggling to reconcile itself for a while. that part takes over if you decide to annul the circle or wipe out the dalish clan. there is a part of him that can take a stand. is it abt things taking what he feels to be their natural course vs interfering? i think so. he can reflect on his own agency in those moments. he can decide it's worth it to say 'this is wrong.'

it's difficult to piece out how much of his personality comes from age 7 and younger vs over a decade of indoctrination, and that's prob up to individuals to decide, but for me, he did have some agency in the brothel. he had ppl there who cared enough abt him to tell him abt his parents and particularly his mother, ppl to give him the gloves to remember her by. ppl to locate him within a community and history that were his. he was not a blank slate when the crows bought him.

i am currently thinking abt how much he would not want the ppl who knew him as a child then to see what the crows have made him. i'm playing around w the anxiety that comes from not knowing what the actual core of yourself is but being terrified that someone else knows who you are, and will be able to take one look at you and see the damage in a way that even you yourself can't bc you're swimming in it.

like i think ultimately, is he afraid that he's a bad person? no; that seems like a moot point. is he afraid he will never be a good person? debatable. he has no idea who he is. he's afraid he'll pluck out all his feathers and find nothing beneath.

it's what's v juicy abt his role as 'black shadow', actually. taking on an identity of smth that only exists bc of smth else. a redundancy, a shadow that's black. the imprint, the silhouette, the sign & signifier of presence but not the presence itself. at once entirely legible and completely ambiguous.

at some point you have to stop going 'well i'm doomed!' sure, okay, but what are you having for dinner, you know? he has so many shifting identities and is so painfully aware at all times of the power of perception and how he can use the way ppl adjust him to fit their expectations or needs to accomplish things — which, to be clear, we all do. we are all always managing shit all the time, but when you're aware of it, it can make you feel like the loneliest outlier of all at best, an utter monster at worst.

a facade is so much less complicated than an identity, right? he has to start choosing how he wants to identify. letting go of the myth of a normal, stable identity, that thing everyone surely has, that thing he would have if he hadn't been broken so early on and then over and over again. gotta just start choosing, gotta just figure out what feels most doable.

[rpgchoices]

Unfortunately I really love the "romance interest sleeps with player/seduces player because they have ulterior motives", it's my favourite thing ever!!!

[maiwong1]

okay

[maiwong1]

paralive....

[artschoolglasses]

Zevran + Taliesen (part two)

Dragon Age: Origins