#DA:I

[notenoughdragons]

okay so i actually wrote something for this bc the idea possessed me, please enjoy everyone :3

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The ruin’s… well, ruined. Half a cave, perhaps an underground temple, but the walls on the surface are mostly rubble. Still, beside the entrance looms a statue of a wolf, overgrown with moss and lichens and ivy, yet otherwise whole.

Solas sucks in a quiet breath. Saar gives him a look.

“You all right?” she asks quietly. Felassan is already climbing onto the statue’s back, egged on by Sera.

“I—yes. Of course.”

Saar watches him a moment longer, then pats his back. “All right. Tell me if that changes, will you?”

“Saar!” Sera yells. “Look! Does Fenny wanna play fetch?”

She’s holding up a big stick, pretending to throw it for the statue. Saar snorts out a giggle. Felassan, meanwhile, stands on the statue’s back and is resting his elbows on the wolf’s head, watching all of them.

“What is this, the tenth statue like this?” Saar muses as she approaches. “Someone either really wanted to make sure the Dread Wolf stays out, or they actually liked him.” She reaches out to pet the wolf’s snout. Felassan’s eyes follow the motion like wisp lights.

“There are stories of Fen’Harel where he—” he begins.

“Legends born from nothing but superstition, I'd wager,” Solas interrupts flatly from behind Saar.

Saar keeps her hand on the stone. Lets her magic seep through her skin. And from deep within the carved rock, a whisper responds…

“This isn’t superstition,” she says. “I think—someone tried to protect this place? There are, were wards woven into this. But they set them into a statue of Fen’Harel, like he’s… I don’t know, the guardian of this place?”

Felassan rests his cheek on one hand, eyes still lilac-bright. His gaze drifts somewhere past Saar.

“I wonder what he’d think of that,” he says. “Of you, calling him a guardian, I mean.”

“Well, I know what Keeper Deshanna would call me for it, and it’s a reckless fool.” Saar chuckles. “But she called me that for plenty of other reasons too.” Absently, she pats the wolf’s flank as she goes past it to the entrance of the underground area. “Let’s see what he’s protecting, huh?”

“Thank Andraste’s knickers and tits and ass,” Sera groans. “I thought you were gonna have another hour-long yapping about old elf shit.”

Saar grins. “Oh, I can do both, trust me.”

Halfway down the stairs, she turns around to see where in the blights Solas and Felassan have gotten to because neither of them made so much as a peep. They’re still standing before the entrance, staring at each other. Felassan’s leaning against the wolf statue’s chest, arms crossed, radiating belligerence. Solas’ knuckles are pale where they wrap around his staff, his spine a stiff line. Saar half expects them to start screaming at each other and is about to haul them down the stairs…

“Oi! You two’re gonna get grown over if you keep loiterin’ like that!”

Like a spell releasing, they relax, and turn to follow.

That’s gonna explode at some point, Saar is pretty sure. But for now, they’ve got a ruin to explore.

Solas had to kill Felassan because Felassan would have heard that a man named Solas joined the Inquisition and signed up immediately just to follow the Inquisitor around and be like “you know this reminds me of a Dalish legend about Fen’Harel stop me if you’ve heard this one before have I told you about the time Andruil almost tricked him into being her lover for a year” while Solas sweats bullets in the background knowing he can’t interrupt or stop him without looking suspicious as hell

[chromunist]

The Creation of The Veil

[animezinglife]

I'm a firm believer (just from the example he's already set) that Cullen is naturally/instinctively inclined towards all of those peak "high romance" gestures that women love.

We already know how he'll hug and hold the Lady Inquisitor and kiss her cheek while letting her rest back against him.

Which, by the way...🥵

But also:

Hand kissing? He's all over it. If the Inquisitor goes through Trespasser, he'll kiss both hands (her automail one and her own) to make sure she feels it.

Forehead kisses? Done.

Hand at the small of her back when they're walking somewhere? Definitely.

Arm rested [a little protectively] over the back of her chair or seat without smothering her? 100%.

[dragonborn-lavellan]

*a friend and I are discussing how Cullen never gets a break and everything he's been through*

Me: I really hope by the time of Veilguard he's retired. I doubt it but I hope for his own sanity he is

Friend: I hope he’s relaxing on a beach somewhere far far away sipping margaritas and not having vivid nightmares about his friend related trauma

Me: I hope he's on a beach in Rivain or something. They seem to be mostly doing fine

Friend: Buuuuut knowing his luck, even if that were the case he’d end up somewhere where Varric’s books have a cult following and he can’t turn anywhere without being bombardes by the horror filled saga that is his friend writing erotica about his other friends love lives

Me: Yeah he thinks he's escaped the chaos and then he walks into a store and sees Varric's book staring back at him. He just turns around and leaves

Friend: Or worse- a lifesized cardboard cutout of Varric promoting a wall full of the books. Somehow the cardboard cutout has an even deeper neckline

Me: Oh, of course it does. Cullen points out that his shirt doesn't actually go down that far and the shopkeep is like "oh? Do you know him? I heard he had the cutouts made special" and Cullen just sighs heavily and asks for the biggest book they have so he can bash his own head in with it

Me: Because it sounds so much like something Varric would do and he's so tired

Friend: He gets so used to the lifesized cutouts (that he may or may not have casual conversations to himself with when he thinks no one is looking) that he doesn’t notice actual Varric is there for a book signing while he’s passing through town and he scares the everloving shit out of him

Me, laughing: Varric sees him and calls out "hey, curly!" and Cullen's blood goes cold. Dread washes over him

Friend: Even better. Varric is like right beside and/or directly two feet in front of him when he says it

Me: Oh absolutely he is

Friend: Cullen screams like a little girl.

Me: Yes he does. Varric just laughs

Friend: Because fuck everything else that badass dork has been through. That moment is the scariest thing he has ever been through. No amount of training or battle experience could prepare him for that moment

Me: He was there when Corypheus attacked Haven and Skyhold, he led the siege on Adamant Fortress. He's Commander Cullen. But seeing Varric at a book signing after he "retired" to Rivain is the scariest goddamn thing he's ever experienced

Friend: And he adds another tick to his shame tally

Me: He just can't get away from that dwarf

[notenoughdragons]

so… with the. let's call it hindsight, sure, of having played veilguard………

marching into the deep roads to kill the remaining archdemons would have been a good plan, actually. like, i personally think the whole 'uhhhh yeah killing the archdemons killed or at least nerfed the evanuris they're connected to, to a degree where they're basically not a problem anymore' is a weakass copout to get out of actually Dealing with them in any meaningful way

but! ~~~canonically~~~, killing razikale and whatever elgar'nan's lizard is called, WOULD have diminished him and ghilan'nain to the point they couldn't cause any more problems. would it have fixed the blight as a whole? nope! but getting rid of the archdemons who rally darkspawn sure would've been an improvement!

………and it would also have brought the veil down. apparently. bc they decided to make it so that the life force of the evanuris themselves sustains it. which—look, okay, i'm not gonna get into it. let's just say it's a weirdass decision that feels Designed to get to the specific set-up of veilguard's ending (solas being able to promise he's totally not gonna bring the veil down, bc rook&co killing elgar'nan will do it for him)

so, pretending for the moment this was all definitely already planned exactly like this when da:i was made… why is solas so against it? it's basically doing the work for him! get the veil down and deal with the evanuris in one fell swoop!

the only thing that's LEFT is. y'know. the blight. locked up in the same prison as the evanuris.

and based on how veilguard shakes out, i don't think solas (or the devs, for that matter) actually had a plan to deal with that

like, in trespasser, the blight doesn't even come up. what solas talks about is the evanuris, and how he "had a plan", so… now we're kinda forced to assume he Also had a plan of how to deal with the blight. but given how he acts in da:i, see (far) above, he clearly doesn't think there IS a way to deal with the blight!

even in the fucking ~redeem~ ending he's like, yeah i can't cure the blight but i can try to soothe it like. buddy. my dude. the prison in veilguard is A NEW THING, bc he had to fucking pivot after he lost the orb like, what could your plan Possibly have been before that???

and look okay i can't not talk about the fact that the games/devs clearly don't want to deal with the blight anymore. yes, i know the sixth blight is all over veilguard, i know you walk across blight pods for half of that game, i know they literally explain where it comes from and what it is, etc etc

(sidenote, i just. deeply dislike the responsibility musical chairs veilguard plays wrt solas. oh the veil cutting off the fade entirely wasn't intentional actually? oh The BlightTM is fully his and mythal's fault actually?? christ, he already Had a perfectly good tragic guilt complex.)

but at the end it just… kind of gets fixed? apparently? bc the veil's not leaky anymore??? neve or bellara can get fully blighted and it's just GONE at the end, you can just walk over blight pods for the entire game and you're Fine, there aren't gonna be anymore blights-the-event bc the archdemons are all dead, there have been MULTIPLE instances of ppl cleansing the blight (merrill with the eluvian, fiona getting de-tainted, SOLAS WITH THE LYRIUM DAGGER) but it NEVER gets explained how, or is attempted to be used elsewhere

it's just, oh, we can't cure the blight nevermind that the hof has been looking for that Since Origins but we also don't need to! don't even worry about it! we just armaggedon-ed half of thedas with it but it's fine!

sorry i don't have a conclusion here this just makes me Scream

I GUESS THE TITAN SOULS ARE JUST GONNA BE LOCKED UP AND IN PAIN FOREVER BUT IT'S FINE, WE DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THAT ANYMORE

Okay so I'm giving @corseque 's super-important audio of all Solas' comments about the Blight a second (or fifteenth, whatever) listen and taking notes as I go.

Solas doesn't think for a second that once the archdemons are gone the Blight will be gone. Which really makes sense because it's the Blight that makes them an archdemon, not the other way around. Supposedly, they're blighted when the darkspawn reach and corrupt them. But of course that begs the question of why it's only darkspawn (and uh, honorary darkspawn like the Wardens) that hear their call. Anyway, the way he says it, it sounds more like the archdemons are a limiting factor than a driving factor.

Varric: "What's so confusing about endless darkspawn?" Solas: "A great deal!" So yeah, whatever the plan was, he didn't foresee darkspawn as a consequence. So did he not foresee them existing at all, or not foresee them being free to cause problems? Worth noting that it's really clear both in general and in Descent that dwarves as a whole were a huge blind spot for him.

He is really really surprised that the Western Approach ever recovered from the Blight. Pretty clear he didn't think that was possible.

He thinks that everything the Wardens have done up til now is a deeply misguided effort that's served (mostly accidentally) as a delaying tactic. Gotta say, with the information we have at hand, this point pairs about as well with the last as a nice dry red with spicy pickles. If the Wardens shouldn't have done what they've done, but he didn't think recovery from the Blight was possible, I'd love to hear what he thought the alternative was.

Same dialogue as above, but when Solas talks about stopping the Blight and when Blackwall and Varric talk about it, one gets the distinct impression that they're talking at cross purposes, because Varric and Blackwall are talking about the experience of Blights, as in, periodic events, whereas I think Solas is talking about THE Blight, that is, its true nature, which is yet untouched.

He thinks Erimond is dumb as shit, which is fair and valid. "That's madness! For all we know, killing the Old Gods could make things even worse!" he says. Well, he knows a lot more than "we" know, but it's entirely possible that he doesn't for sure know this. Increasingly clear that he thinks it, though.

I'd forgotten just how pissed off he was about the Grey Warden plan to kill the Old Gods before they were corrupted. It really doesn't give "hey you're killing my relatives" energy. It really gives "wow that would fuck us all" vibes.

Of course, with a side of my remembering that Solas' besetting flaw was always thinking people should know better even though they don't have access to the knowledge he has. That flaw I WILL grant. He displays it repeatedly--you could even say the writers went out of their way to make the point.

"The Blight is the real problem"

"The fools who first unleashed the Blight on this world thought they were unlocking ultimate power." Anyway yeah those are the absolute core of everything here. The Blight is the real problem and the Blight was deliberate. Deliberately made or deliberately freed.

Even during the events of Inquisition, Solas obviously sees Corypheus as secondary to the Blight as a danger.

Cassandra suggests that the archdemons were really just dragons--"Pets to those who no longer exist", by which she probably means the Old Gods, not specifically the gods of Elvhen, just because of her cultural background. Solas finds this suggestion amusingly wrong--a quiet snort, and "I would not go so far as that."

Last notes: he doesn't sound like he thinks the Blight can be stopped, and he's adamant that it can't be controlled. Which is presumably why he broke the world in an attempt to contain it, assuming I'm right that that was the underlying reason for the Veil. That it didn't quite work the way he'd hoped is also pretty evident, though I wanna be clear that I assume he was working from a place of desperation, and that not knowing every possible outcome of an action is not a condemnation of having taken it.

[loredrinker]

I love seeing all the posts pop up on my dashboard of new players to Inquisition - I enjoy seeing it through your eyes. And to those revisiting again after years, may you find new things to stoke your imagination!

I too am enjoying another playthrough as I get through my second playing of Veilguard.

They are so different but so hand in hand.

Play on!

[thatwavephenomenon]

It's SO funny that the Inquisition was, essentially, mostly a bunch of liars.

Varric is an unreliable narrator who according to Bianca tends to make up stories about what he wished would have happened. The Iron Bull is a Ben-Hassrath who will mostly act the same whether you've sacrificed the Chargers or not until *that moment* in Trespasser. Vivienne, while always frank in her opinion of you, is also absolutely a master of The Game. Sera runs with the Friends of Jenny, appears immature and pulls pranks on people, yet she does it with such skills that she is rarely caught. Solas is Solas. Blackwall/Thom Rainier? NO ONE does it like him. The advisors are not exempt either. While Leliana is obviously a spymaster, Josephine can and will destroy someone's reputation with nothing but a glove planted somewhere compromising. And Cullen? Is really cagey about his time as a templar. Even the Inquisitor is a fraud. Willingly or not, you gain an army because people believe that you are the Herald of Andraste. Which is patently false.

Then there's Cassandra Allegra Portia Calogera Filomena Pentaghast, Seeker of TRUTH. Cole, whose job is to blurt everyone's secrets aloud. And Dorian, who left the nest of backstabbing vipers that is Tevinter, only to traipse through sand and snow and mud with this organization of lying liars.

10/10 team no notes

[abyssal-ilk]

i need everyone to consider vivienne and dorian bonding over taking care of the inquisitor after the end of dragon age inquisition as the mark progressively gets worse and worse. vivienne with her past of watching bastien get sicker and sicker and dorian doing the same with felix, and seeing it repeat with the inquisitor. take my hand 🖐,,

[heylavellan]

hey. dont want to use ea app? dont feel like putting your computer in danger by turning off security settings to play a game?

pirate it. when you bought the game, you expected to be able to play it. you already gave them money. pirate it.

websites like freemediaheckyeah can give you the resources you need to do it. what you'll want specifically is a repack, because that cleans up the files and makes it smaller. often they come with all the dlc installed. use a vpn (mullvad is really good and around 5$ per month).

i had to play da2 with a repack because i couldn't disable certain settings on my laptop, it needs them to run. the game believed i was trying to hack it or whatever, so i couldn't play a game i owned on my pc. i could run the repack. you can still mod the game!

EA: Origin shutdown - date and information

"On April 17, 2025, Origin will shut down, as Microsoft has stopped supporting 32-bit software. If you use Origin, you need to upgrade to the EA app, which requires a 64-bit version of Windows. If you need help, learn how to: - update to Windows 10 or Windows 11 - download and install the EA app."

"The EA app doesn’t support 32-bit versions of Windows. You’ll need to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system on your device to play your games. See if the version of Windows you’re running is 32 or 64-bit."

[source and more info]

[pintura]

Genesis / Apocalypse

[heliomanteia]

I really wish everyone playing DA:I for the first time a happy Dorian game

[0ccuria]

You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[thedissonantverses]

I actually teared up reading this. Like the fact anything I did was enough for you to keep going means the world. Thank you so much for being brave and showing yourself off because that’s what all this is for. That’s why I want to participate in fandom again. It means so much to me to see other people creating and not for any other reason but for love and because they can. Thank you so much!

For all the drama in the Dragon Age fandom, for all these bad takes from large accounts treating fanwork like content and art they claim to love like a commodity, for all the low engagement and the harsh environment, the coolest fucking thing that’s happened the last two months is I’ve had no less than 5 people tell me they’re writing again thanks to me.

How could I ask for more than that?

Keep writing. Keep drawing. Keep sharing.

Cause legit what’re we doing here if it’s not building community?

Anyways if you’re struggling to create today know you’re not alone and there’s at least this corner of the Dragon Age fandom still has your back.

[fyeahcole]

By asphodellesart

[chromunist]

what if we kissed in front of the fresco depicting how the dread wolf is the secret guiding force of the inquisition ???

[lavenderprose]

Why have I seen two people today refer to Cullen as being a 'princely' romance. My man has been a functional addict for fifteen years and he's in ACTIVE withdrawal when Inquisition begins. He is recovering from the in-universe equivalent of a Percocet addiction and he's not doing well with it. Just because he's sweet and he ducks his head and says I've never met anyone like you doesn't mean he's a flouncy Disney prince. He also THROWS things across the room because he's in pain and yells at his friends and goes quiet and distant in the War Room. He says things like, "I never considered a future before I met you," and he MEANS that shit. Cullen Stanton Rutherford was probably going to Lay Down And Die after the Breach was closed, IF it was ever closed, before he met the Inquisitor. It's strongly implied that that's what he DOES do if you tell him to continue taking Lyrium. You definitely do not have to like his romance and you're allowed to be critical of his character but saying that he's the Princely or Vanilla romance option is discrediting all of the character development he's gone through and is in my opinion just a bad faith interpretation overall.