#DA4 spoilers

[madrosie]

I think the lack of suitable roleplay avenues really hinders Rook but I think my biggest take away as I'm almost through my third play through it's Rook isn't SUPPOSED to be the leader. Rook is Han Solo, the plucky side kick who thinks outside the box on Varric's team and then Varric dies and Rook is left, completely out of their depth and is essentially a project manager. My sister is a project manager and while she is very knowledgeable and good at her job, she's basically co-ordinates people who are more specialised than her and wrangles them into getting shit done.

She's the one checking in on everyone making sure they have what they need to hit their targets and keeping them on task and liaising with different departments to make sure they're all working together, and that's essentially what Rook does.

What’s really jumping out at me on my second playthrough is that the writers of the first three games understood that your character was the main character. The Veilguard writers clearly thought that the main characters were their characters, the companions.

Every scene is about setting the companions up as cool or competent or sympathetic. Often, this is done at Rook’s expense. The companions get all the witty one-liners; Rook’s attempts at humor not only frequently fall flat, but are frequently called out for falling flat (even when they’re completely automatic and the player has no say in them).

The companions have all the knowledge and skills; Rook just brought them all together and gives them all pep talks so they can focus. I’m trying to edit out all of the comments where Rook is like “Um… what????” from my videos, and let me tell you, it takes WORK. There are A LOT of them. I can count on one hand the number of times when the Inquisitor or Hawke comes across as dumb, but it seems to be a built-in, unavoidable part of Rook’s character. I have not selected a single “purple” option in all of Act 1, and Rook is still coming across as the kid who tries to be the class clown to cover for the fact that he’s always confused. Rook’s role in most scenes is to say “Uhhh… what?” so that the companions look smart.

Rook is always the one offering sympathy and never the one getting it. No one actually comes to comfort you after Varric’s death. No one asks you how you’re feeling about having to lead the team now that Varric is gone. No one tries to reassure you or give you advice for dealing with the trickster god haunting your dreams. We’re told that Neve could keep Solas out of your head, but she never actually offers to do this for you. No one comforts a Shadow Dragon Rook when Minrathous is destroyed or a Grey Warden Rook when Weisshaupt is destroyed. Rook’s problems don’t matter. Only the problems of main characters matter.

Rook is a secondary character in their own story.

[fleetsblog]

You cannot convince me this man doesn't desire Rook as much if not more as a Lich

Please enjoy some of my Rook x Emmrich, because this game and man have me in a death grip

[teamdilf]

No, I don’t ever think about the fact that Solas is the last of his kind and singing an ancient song alone until Lavellan reunites with him and shows him she learned to sing as he does so he has his duet partner after thousands of years alone.

Definitely don’t turn it over in my head constantly. 🥹

[sky--phantom]

These two idiot crows with a similar idea

And I can't believe it worked out both times

[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.

[wickedsnack-art]

Judgment of the Dread Wolf

[storybookhawke]

To exist and create and love is to also be filled with Spite and rage

[gwinaesfer]

"The Veil Guard didn't actually care about Rook" the Veil Guard was so desperate to get Rook back from the prison they tried to make a ritual dagger of their own to rip the Veil apart and look for them

Rook wasn't their boss, Rook was their home

[melorambles]

very smoothly explains the gap that I'd noticed but hadn't truly managed to think through

man... in Veilguard it really is so so clear how much Lucanis yearns for connection, how much he laments having barely anyone who is a tangible long-term presence in his life. Illario and Caterina are IT until he meets Rook, he tells them.

but he grew up in the Dellamorte estate. A huge, huge manor that would not just have servants, but STAFF. payrolls full of people who clean and cook and keep the place running. And we know he had some amount of free reign around the place. He explored in the tunnels and basements and found the secret entrance/exit while playing alone. He learned how to make churros and cook other food from the kitchen staff. Someone taught him to knit. So... where are those people? Where's the kindly cook who became a second mother, or the maids who watched him play? He would know their names and remember them, if they were around long enough. And it's NOT just some rich boy privilege that makes him forget they're there, because we know he sees the working class as people who with real lives. In The Wigmaker Job, he knows elves in the alienage, who think well enough of him to let him use their secret routes around the city. He risks the whole mission and breaks rules to let one single serving maid go--they're not invisible or somehow lesser to him. He was raised as a Crow, he's been trained since he was a boy to be observant--he'd listen for the names and details about the lives of servants who were around him all the time as a child. And he is also kind and gentle, so he would reach back if they offered him any kind of affection

Which means their absence in his life is intentional. Caterina must have had the staff rotated often enough that he couldn't learn who they were, and discouraged anyone from talking to or connecting with the Dellamorte boys--she probably thought she was keeping them safe. Keeping them from having people who might matter and therefore could be used against all of them--not to mention it's way easier to slip a poisoned treat to a trusting child, or convince them to follow you out of the estate to an undisclosed location. Her paranoia after losing all her children and other grandkids warped into isolating the Dellamorte boys utterly from any kind of connection and affection outside of herself, and then she withheld it anyway, because she was afraid of getting hurt again too (<- not an excuse, still abuse). And she is NOT a kind woman, who would look over a transgression--servants disobeying her orders about staying away from her grandsons would mean losing their job at best and probably physical punishment along with it. Or maybe you just never saw that coworker who dared say something kind to a crying child again.

It's so sad. And makes it so much more meaningful that there WERE occasional times he got away with it anyway. I wonder how much those cooks risked when teaching him how a kitchen runs, and to make his favorite dessert. If they had some excuse for it, or were all sent away once Caterina found out. Of course he'd stop trying to make friends with any children of the staff his age, if any time he did, the whole family got moved to work at a summer villa in the country instead. If the people who cleaned his rooms were different every month. He'd notice that anyone who he tried to get close to just ended up out of his life entirely, and so eventually Caterina wouldn't need to keep isolating him intentionally as he grew. Lucanis learned. He started doing it himself.

[beaulesbian]

that escalated quickly

[galedekarios]

what it feels like to take emmrich and davrin with you as your team

it's basically just emmrich 'gentle parenting' volkarin vs davrin 'tough love' the warden

[warden-commander-of-ferelden]

I love him your honor

[covertleathers]

I was having a kind of LAN party with a friend playing it at the same time and we were both like...yeah he's dead. As soon as we got to the Lighthouse and no one was talking to him.

Okay I want to know.

[thismission]

two of the sexiest lines in this game fr

[pancakesprince]

arvel mahariel - he/they

hes 50 years old now.. never experienced twink death

edit: part 2

[sky--phantom]

Neve and Bellara during the Forest of Spirits