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faction swap ⚔

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idle days

— (hawke)

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some more baby hawke in lothering, waiting for da to come home

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quick sketch bcs I'm lazy

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The Antivan Mafia

The Antivan Crows operate like the mob, especially when it comes to recruiting desperate members of the public in a system they uphold. They're also... a genuinely legitimate power with close connections to the King of Antiva. These things are both true.

Antiva appears to operate according to and be ruled by a system of merchant houses (including the Crows) and merchant princes (arguably including the Talons).

I posit, veering into headcanon territory, that if we're thinking of the Crows as the mob, we should extend that thinking across all of the merchant houses across all of the Antivan city states. (Of course, other houses often outsource their murder to professionals.)

In terms of understanding what the Crows are, and especially what the Crows we see in Treviso are, @ravioliage brought up the great example of the Yakuza being the first to send aid in the 2011 tsunami, and further, that the largest organized crime networks throughout history "donate food in bad neighborhoods" so that people think kindly of them and become fodder for recruitment. Meanwhile, that gang or mafia or whatever is actually responsible for the fact that the neighbourhood is a bad neighbourhood, and that the people there "can't afford to eat."

They do this because this is how you maintain power over people. You keep them moderately content in a system that's designed to feed on them, or you at least keep them blaming something other than you. The problem from here, as we the audience try to establish what is justifiable for our viewpoint characters according to our own morality, is that the Crows are also established within a system of merchant houses that have very little reason to operate in any other way.

By which I mean, the other merchant houses also operate like the mob, feeding on the people at the bottom to keep their entire operation spinning. The Crows are contract killers, with lives that very much seem dedicated to the job, in a set of rotating institutions that stab each other in the back all the time. The other merchant houses create silk and wine and the basic necessities of life, perhaps with more ordinary lives, but in a system where hiring a killer is a normal way to do business.

I think the reason that Lucanis sees "his" kind of commerce as not all that different than the other houses in Antiva is because, as far as he can tell, it's not. He gets hired by someone on the inside to kill the head of the family so that they can take power (in some of the extended media), which he likely considers evidence that they're not so different from the Crows themselves.

There's no reason to think that the other houses in Antiva operate according to a more optimistic model than the Crows do. If the merchant princes don't run their own "mobs" (with their own guards and men-at-arms, and their own ability to hire mercenaries), then at their best, they're still playing a Game of Thrones.

Is there an escape from that kind of system? If you care at all, do you leave or try to make it better? If you're Teia, you fight—and you might be wrong to do so, because your default response is to aim to slit a hundred throats by nightfall. If tomorrow there are a hundred more, then you have more knives.

The problem with systems is that you take the ones that shaped you with you... wherever you go.

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whatever. go my teuta bridges.

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"Something's wrong." "Yeah. We're up here, away from the fun." — The Wigmaker Job, Courtney Woods

Bonus flats-only version! 🙌

(Illario also has a five o'clock shadow in WMJ, it turns out—a last-minute addition 😂 )

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Resting before next assassination 🌅🗡️

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In War, Victory

In Peace, Vigilance

In Death, Sacrifice

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mikoshi's guided meditation

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More of him.

His stupid smile I'm gonna hurt him.

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hey it's Portfolio Day!

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Johnny

I tried a few different lighting variants, and eventually kept the one that looks like him sitting at the fire in the Badlands with the nomads, just laughing and playing his guitar.

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Links and info | Commissions are OPEN

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daily draw #5-6 OOOoobbhhh buddy they got me bad with this one . 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹

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Sorry, Your Honor, ‘But Have You Seen Her Lore?’ Is A Valid Defense

My friend just sent me the speedpaint. I want a freaking iPad now uuugggghhh, it was sooo fun to use, I hate my life. Anyway, here ya go. I always redraw the nose like a million times in every drawing LOLOLOL I can never get it right on the first try! I think it turned out pretty decent for drawing her from memory. Whatever, this is the only thing I got done after a whole day at uni, my classes were useless af.

But can we talk more about Caterina Dellamorte?

I want to devour this woman’s mind in the same way I long to consume Illario’s. To reach 70 years like a crow—and worse yet, to bear the title of First Talon—is profoundly awe-inspiring, even terrifying. Rook is singular because I would’ve soiled myself merely sharing a room with her. I crave to know who this formidable woman was before she lost her FIVE children and SIX grandchildren.

Do you think the scent of flowers lost all meaning for her after so many funerals? How much grief can a mother endure before her heart grows numb to it? It’s horrific, it’s tragic—and yet she stands there, unbroken. I can do nothing but revere her.

I want to believe she was as passionate as her grandchildren, as bleeding-hearted as Lucanis, as fiercely alive as any of them before everything was torn from her—because that makes it all the more agonizing. Amidst this endless mourning, which surely lost all meaning somewhere in the recesses of her mind, did she cling to faith as a woman of devotion? Or did it, in the end, estrange her? Is that why Illario and Lucanis are such "bad" believers? Did such suffering draw her closer to the Maker’s teachings, or force her to recoil?

I am convinced she was hardened to the point where only one purpose remained: to ensure the survival of her grandchildren, her last living kin. And she succeeded, by the way! Yes, child abuse is wrong (says the victim, lol), but I can’t bring myself to judge this woman by her circumstances. She did what she believed necessary, and in the end, they both survived—in one way or another. She forged two master assassins who serve the world better alive than dead.

So why, Caterina? Why tear apart the last family you had left in this world? Instead of teaching unity, instead of bequeathing your more-than-capable grandchildren the title as something shared—why make them doubt each other? Is your favoritism deliberate, or just another of your fatal miscalculations?

I have my own headcanons, of course—that Illario resembles his mother too much, and his mother, in turn, bore the face of the man Caterina once loved so fiercely she built a family with him. But this is just me trying to force logic into the void.

Why craft a perfect team, a fusion of a master assassin’s finest talents split between your two grandchildren, only to turn it into a battle for supremacy? Was it this same blindness that led to the slaughter of nearly your entire bloodline? Or is this the scar tissue of too much grief, calcified into cruelty?

I could spend entire lifetimes turning this woman over in my mind and still never voice every thought I truly harbor about her. I can’t help but press the weight of my own traumas into these musings—yet I also believe that’s precisely what draws me to her with such violent force. She’s fascinating. She’s excruciating. I adore Caterina Dellamorte, and let NONE of my fanfics convince you otherwise!

And please, for the love of god, never take Lucanis or Illario’s internal monologues as gospel in my storytelling. This character is devastatingly intricate. Profoundly layered. A tragedy unto herself.

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good with the leccy ☝ (trying to figure out caz's face girl help)