dracaenacamael

[dracaenacamael]

Conventional wisdom says that you should always ask an Omega’s permission before entering their nest. However the warnings always seem to be about sexual vulnerability and never about the dread 3x fireball 2x chain lightning combo that the Omega will end up sending your way.

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On the subject of dragon age origins, if you have a steam deck it will try to tell you that the game is not playable. This is a lie! It plays great once you’ve selected a set of community controls that work for you.

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Replaying origins for the first time in nearly a decade and I picked up Zevran last night.

Why have we been collectively rehashing the all the tired memes about the lockpicking and the antivan massage techniques when we could be focusing on the much more important parts of his resume: that he knows LOTS OF JOKES and SIX CARD GAMES?

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the fact that irving canonically survives through the end of asunder to be at wynne's funeral is so fucking funny to me. nothing but love and respect for MY unstoppable cockroach morally grey machiavellian mage dad!!! he's survived in his position through multiple attempted rites of annulment and blood mage plots popping up left right and center around him. the chantry keeps trying to stamp him out but his dodge game is simply out of this world, divine. civil wars, political machinations and minefields, chantry atrocities, this wily old motherfucker is dodging and weaving his way through it all, not-quite-no-hits-taken-running-it-but-honestly-close-enough-under-the-circumstances style. if solas does succeed in tearing down the veil I would fully believe that one of the like three people still alive at the end of it all would be a very weary 90 year old first enchanter irving going 'oh this shit again huh'. the maker has cursed him for his hubris and his paperwork is never finished (affectionate, it's fine he canonically loves paperwork)

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I just saw a post talking about the circle and I have no idea what that is? Maybe it's only because I've played Veilguard but is it like mage school?

In the northern half of Thedas it's a mage school yes, in the southern half it's a prison and its full title is the Circle of Magi, the wiki page for it is here if you want to give it a gander and this is the one for tranquility while we're at it

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hate when people are like "trust your gut! listen to your intuition!" like okay well my gut is telling me every person i lay eyes on is hunting me for sport and my intuition is saying i should find a secluded cave and live there forever so what do you suggest i do with that information

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-Varric didn't recruit him he was just passing by Minrathous and interrupted the ritual by accident. They just keep him around cause he has Solas in his brain. Neve and Harding are co-leads of the team.

-Brings total rancid vibes to the found family friendship group

-He does none of the companion quests because no one likes him, but he has all the factions at 3 stars cause he is good at killing things (and that's most of the missions let's be reals)

Bonus redeemed "i'm sorry, women" Oghren, quote by @blackxgold

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"I love you, Zevran. I hope you know that."

"Yes... Yes, I know that."

— commission art by @sinizade, posted with permission

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I think it's funny how Lucanis' "Rook is at low health" lines are INSTANTLY just full protect mode. Davrin just says "Get out of there idiot." Taash has one that's literally just "Rub some dirt in it" meanwhile I've known Lucanis for two seconds and he's screaming "ROOK!!!" "HELP ROOK!!!" "ROOK I'M COMING!!!!!" "HOLD ON ROOK!!!!!!"

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They didn't let Solas interact with Kieran in dai bc he'd smell the June on him and have a melt down thinking about their own parallels and also Kieran would doxx him on fantasy roblox by accident

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This backstory will definitely hold up in court

Someone in the north: man this blight sucks. If only the hero of ferelden, who stopped the fifth blight with the help of only one other grey warden was here. Alas, she hasn’t responded to summons from anyone since the 9:30s.

My rook, channeling Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3: actually, she IS helping the war effort, by sending ME. her ONLY DAUGHTER.

Amell: what are you talking about I didn’t send you to do shit.

Amell: you disappeared in the dead of night leaving only a note saying that you were “off to seek your fortune” but that you couldn’t do it in ferelden because you were trying to “dodge the nepo baby allegations.”

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A few pics of my beautiful granddaughter my Rook!

Some headcanons nobody asked for lol:

Savil Aldwir is an elf-blooded human mage. I have been playing Dragon Age as a melodramatic-but-also-comedic family saga since I found out that Hawke was related to the Amell family, so I decided that my Rook would be my Amell and Zevran’s daughter.

For the purpose of this continuity I’m headcanoning that “Aldwir” was Zevran’s surname before he was purchased by House Arainai, and that it’s fairly common among elves in northern Thedas. Rook does not share a surname with either of her parents because they thought it would be easier to protect her from being kidnapped and held for ransom by their many, many enemies if it wasn’t obvious that she was related to them.

Though her mother had a get out of jail the Circle of Magi free card through her affiliation with the Wardens, Savil did not, so she spent the first half of her life as an apostate (until Leliana became the Divine). Her excessively chill personality and tendency toward non-committal responses is a symptom of this (it is somewhat of a trauma response—she did not want to be noticed by anyone!) (On an unrelated note, she also just feels the need to balance out the antics of her ridiculous parents lol).

She spent most of her childhood in Amaranthine, and is wildly jealous of Mila getting to grow up in an objectively cooler fortress.

I did not know any of the Veilguard characters’ ages before I started playing this game, but Savil can’t be more than 20 so sorry about the 15 year age gap, Neve! It was truly unintentional hahaha.

She cares about ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP. This is part of the reason she works in Arlathan as a Park Ranger Veil Jumper. She wants to avoid worrying her loving but overprotective parents, so when she writes home, she only includes boring essays about the flora and fauna of the area she’s currently in, along with one notable drawing of a bear with the caption “only you can prevent wildfires.”

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Oghren: get that fucking elf AWAY from me there's nothing he can do to make me dislike him less i don't trust him i don't respect him he's pathetic and the warden is stupid as hell to not have killed him when we had the chance

Oghren a couple of drinks later: Zevrannnnnnnn you're pretty cool nevwr let anyone tell you how bad you are. at killing people.. You're good! Hope you and the boss are happy tgetherr you two are so annoying but love is love and I!!! love u man. I m iss my wife

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when neve has a crush

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kinda upset by how many people are insisting that davrin's narrative is more about assan than davrin

it's really not

everything revolving around how davrin interacts with assan is also him talking to himself

which is a perspective problem that all of the companions have

they are all people who are too in their own heads to be able to resolve some of their deeper fundamental conflicts, because all of them are deeply lonely and alienated from their respective social environments, convinced in various ways that they cannot relate too others or be related too in turn, which is one of the things that makes them the perfect team to hunt down solas, who has the same problems writ large across the ages.

and in overcoming their issues and turning to rook and each other for external opinions while solas observes rook it demonstrates that other courses of action are possible and that there is value in trusting others with their loneliness and vulnerability but ANYWAY

davrin pretty clearly projects his feelings about his own upbringing onto assan, including the very

clearly present problems he has experienced as a dalish warden, if we let ourselves see them. he's not turning around to us and saying directly that he's been treated like shit by humans for most of his life in any run i've had so far. he also doesn't need too. he demonstrates it with the positions he holds.

how he advocates for not revealing the truth behind the origins of the elves, because it will make their lives harder than they already are.

how he tells assan that he needs to toughen up or he'll get chewed up by the world. that he's meant to be a hunter. that it's in his blood. it's what he's for.

how he changes his mind when he sees assan interact with the halla. how it clearly reminds him, along with his reconnection with endrin, that he was once a little boy who sang to halla. that he is more than violence, more than the hunt, more than a living weapon meant to be used once and then disposed of.

i've barely touched on his romance at all in my current run but like. please. even without it, just from my first run:

davrin is so clearly afraid of abandonment, of rejection. of letting his guard down and letting people in because it might compromise his dedication to his chosen path - *as are they all, in different ways, which is on purpose* - that he is trying to raise assan to protect him from davrin's own pain.

which doesn't work! that doesn't work.

davrin looks at assan and names him arrow. davrin looks at himself and calls himself a weapon. davrin doesn't let himself return to his clan because he anticipates their rejection. because he already didn't fit in with them to start with. davrin never gives us his last name.

the unity between warden and griffon comes when davrin stops just projecting his own pain and fears onto assan, and learns how to work with assan as he is. In doing so, it makes him realize he can be more than a weapon. That there's an option for him beyond sacrifice and vigilance. That he can find peace. it is a reconciliation of disparate aspects of his Self, which is another recurring narrative thread in the game.

Davrin doesn't have to completely disconnect from his people. He doesn't have to himself separate and away from everyone, protecting them from what he perceives as his inevitable end, or from harming them. Assan can just be Assan, and Davrin can just be Davrin, and they love each other.

he reconciles himself with his complex feelings around his clan, finds value in the lessons they taught him that he chafed against as a younger man. he reconciles himself with the complex history of the wardens, and looks for a different future with them too.

assan is bright and vibrant and alive and new and, to borrow davrin's word, "pure". He can be anything. He reminds Davrin that he can be anything, too. Assan is a catalyst, he's not the actual focus. He is the catalyst for realizations in every scene we see him in in Davrin's personal quests, which are always actually about Davrin.

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i thinkit would be cool if there was an omegaverse but for salmon instead of wolves. Like when the time comes certain members of society get really juicy musclewise and get yiffy fangs and are suddenly compelled to return to the neighborhood they grew up in and 96 hours later show up barefoot in full starvation mode and ravaged by walking through interstate traffic to fuck whoevwr smells the best in the local burger king. Then afterwards they die and disintegrate to be eaten by seagulls in the parking lot

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