dragonagesummer - Tumblr blog

[dragonagesummer]

exploring Origins Toolset (a gift that keeps on giving) and the V.A. directions for Arl Howe are FASCINATING. he has a secondary thought appended to every line of dialogue during the opening scene of Human Noble Origin -- and the insight into his psyche is somehow even more fucked-up than I thought

Bryce: I'm sorry pup; I didn't see you there. Howe, you remember my daughter? Howe: I see she's become a lovely young woman. Pleased to see you again, my dear.

Friendly, but hollow. "Here's the necessary exchange of pleasantries nobles must go through. I'm kind of preoccuppied with making sure your father is on track for my secret plan."

Cousland: Is your family here, Arl Howe? Howe: Oh no, I left them in Amaranthine, well away from the fighting in the south. They do send their best wishes.

Distracted. "I left them well out of harm's way. Though I don't want you to know harm is coming."

Howe: My son Thomas asked after you. Perhaps I should bring him with me next time.

Gauging the player's reaction. "My son wants to marry you. I don't approve, but mentioning it may get you to trust me."

Cousland (version 1): To what end? Howe: Ha! "To what end", she says! So glib, too. She's just like her mother when she talks like that.

Friendly, slightly menacing undertone. "You don't fool me, girl. You're playing dumb, but you're smarter than your reply suggests. I won't underestimate anyone in your family."

Cousland (version 2): ...Thomas is a few years younger than I am. Howe: As you get older, those years make less difference. A lesson often hard won.

Elsewhere. "It doesn't matter how old you are. You won't be getting any older."

THIS IS CRAZY. THIS IS A CRAZY THING TO SAY. OR THINK SECRETLY AS YOU'RE EXCHANGING PLEASANTRIES

[dragonagesummer]

hello! you know a lot of dragon age lore so i thought id ask you— i saw a post earlier that was discouraging to me aa trans person where the op said that veilguard having top surgery scars in the cc goes against established worldbuilding. does it make sense for top surgery to be possible in thedas? thanks

my rule of thumb is that in a world where healing spells exist, there’s absolutely no logical, believable reason for it not to be possible. you don’t have to go back and provide sources about historical surgeries—which is something i personally know nothing about—for this to be true

like, i just can’t take this line of thought seriously. ohhh we can have floating cities and magical neon lights and spirit healers who can mend injuries just by passively standing next to you, but we draw the line as soon as it’s something that would make our trans players happy! it’s so transparent. do not listen to these people or let them discourage you

if you want to get into the worldbuilding potential of it—which is just fun to do—we can probably guess that for the top surgery scars to be as neat as they seem to look in the veilguard character creator, similar to modern ones, magical healing was involved. now i do believe that the chantry might get suspicious of body-altering magic, that magical power is hoarded by the circles in the south and the wealthy in the north, and also that “out” trans people are a minority in thedas. so i’m not saying that this is something easy for your average guy to get hold of. that’s where you can feed it into backstory. are they powerful and connected enough that they could find specialists willing to go beyond the ordinary? or do they have underground connections to hidden apostate healers, whose only priority is what helps (or perhaps just how much you’re willing to pay)? do they belong to a culture that might not be restricted by the chantry’s norms about gender or magic, like the dalish or the rivaini? or do they belong to a mage-focused community or order, who among themselves do whatever they like? endless options

some might be referring to a line in dai from krem, a trans man, where you can ask him about potentially changing his body with magic and he essentially says he wouldn’t let magic that could do that anywhere near his body, though when he was younger he might have dreamed about the possibilities. firstly, krem is absolutely not the gold standard for trans representation and nobody should care about being flexible from what bioware put out a decade ago. secondly, krem is a random mercenary who knows one (1) mage, who spends the entire time insisting she’s not a mage. i very much doubt he’s the no. 1 source for what might be magically possible in this or any regard

also ultimately, and i cannot express this enough, you can do whatever you want forever. it could be absolutely fundamentally impossible in-world somehow and it would still not be that serious to be “unrealistic” in the dragon video games. don’t let anyone discourage you from making the character you want to make. it being an option makes it canonically part of thedas, end of. they put it in the game and nobody bitching about it can take it out

[dragonagesummer]

the dichotomy of man

[dragonagesummer]

considering if, for my first playthrough, I want to go with my solasmance worldstate (revas my beloved) or, in keeping with tradition, I want to use my first playthrough of each game as the worldstate for the first playthrough of the next

in that case, we'd get adaar (my beloved) on the warpath against solas, brosca (my beloved) hopefully happily married to her wife the pope, and hawke having lived past the end of a tragedy (anders and entire family dead)

revas' worldstate has surana as the warden and ex-bf alistair on the throne of ferelden, mage hawke with carver in the wardens and anders romanced, and the inquisitor having disbanded the inquisition but wanting to reach out to solas someday, somehow

[dragonagesummer]

chile's true form

[dragonagesummer]

want to be clear that if i ever talk about a headcanon and then later discuss a headcanon that is directly contradictory to the first one, that’s because headcanons exist in a quantum state where they are all simultaneously true and not true up until the point where i discuss it in detail, in which case that is the one that is true in that instance. schroedinger’s headcanons

[dragonagesummer]

reblog if you ARE a mage, if you SUPPORT mages, or if you like to OPEN templars’ WINDOWS in the middle of the NIGHT and put DOZENS of NUGS in their BEDROOMS

[dragonagesummer]

thinking about the disaster that is surana and alistair from start to finish. how she’s already hardened when the game starts, how alistair looks at her and thinks ‘but maybe we could be soft together,’ and how surana looks at him and thinks ‘maybe we could.’

thinking about how isolde dies at her hand to save connor before they’ve even made it a week out from ostagar. thinking about how easily she settles into the ends justifying the means in the wardens, because the ends have always justified the means if it meant she could last another day in the circle. thinking about them looking at one another and wondering if the divide between them was always there or if it grew without them noticing.

[dragonagesummer]

Commander, why does the King call you "babygirl"?

[dragonagesummer]

five of cups ✶

artfight defence! @nev-jpgg

[dragonagesummer]

Ao3 version that lets you open the 'director's cut' where I, the author, explain every detail in excruciating detail to you and what it is in reference to.

[dragonagesummer]

Do you ever wonder about Wardens that joined during the Blight? I dont mean Daveth or Jory, or even the PC, I mean Wardens from entire countries outside of Ferelden who like, joined in anticipation for when Ferelden was overrun by Darkspawn, preparing to die to keep the Darkspawn away from thier boarders, to go down swinging sticking it to the Archdemon, or at least die trying.

Only the fight never comes. These rookie chucklefucks somehow stop the Blight in under a year. An unprecidented ammount of time when previous Blights were considered short if they took decades to stop, nevermind the aftermath of the taint on the land, but somehow, just 2-3 novices manage to set the speedrun record of stopping the apocalypse at a year. And depending on your worldstate, they don't even have the decency to have died doing it like they were supposed to, either.

How robbed, do you think some Wardens felt? How many of them do you think felt absolutely rattled at the injustice of it all? You had this destiny, even if it was as one soldier against a hoarde, you were going to die a hero in a blaze of glory, even if it was just as a soldier keeping the hoardes away from the smallfolk. Only, no. That isn't what the Maker or Creators or Anscestors had in mind for you. You threw away your life, shortening it to 30 years from now, for nothing. Your blaze of glory is going to be in a deep dark tunnel miles from the surface overwhelmed by darkspawn or you become a ghoul.

How sick with jealousy, do you think some wardens are, after Origins?

(Sorry for the ramble, I was thinking about Last Flight and how it went in depth on that Blight and blacked out)

i think about this a lot actually when thinking about the orlesian warden-commander who replaces a dead HOF. the orlesian wardens didn’t come to help you in dao because they decided to cut their losses, let the darkspawn have ferelden, and prepare. for a year. weisshaupt must have been sent to. a continent full of wardens were mobilising and surely recruiting like mad. and then nothing. it was all for nothing, there is none of the fight you promised these new wardens in exchange for their lives, there is no reasonable answer for any of the powerful people you requisitioned resources from, and if the dark ritual was done, the warden who made it—someone with no training, who is nothing like you—didn’t even die! they didn’t even pay the price for the glory, and maker only knows how they gambled with the grey wardens’ duty to achieve that.

i think it was a missed opportunity not to get one of these people as a companion for awakening, actually. would’ve been really fun to have that resentment turn to respect as they realise you earned all you won

of course all the orlesian wardens who come after the blight die like suckers off-screen at the start of awakening so maybe it’s for the best the fight was never up to them

good thing to think about for grey warden rooks who are 40+

[dragonagesummer]

Zevran doodle cause of this tweet

[dragonagesummer]

Hi! Long time! I've been obsessed with Dungeon Meshi! Have some Delicious in Dragon Age

[dragonagesummer]

we DO grow old and happy. btw.

[dragonagesummer]

i know varric’s beardlessness is because he doesn’t like being culturally dwarven but if bioware generally gives all dwarven men full beards and is too cowardly to give female dwarves any beards then i have to wonder if, while humans and elves read him as, in isabela’s actual words, a “paragon of manliness”, dwarves ever think it’s, like, a gender thing?