#Dragon Info

[theload]

Some of my Embodiments, as drawn by my friend Drakontarachne on DA.

In order they are:

Light and Dark

Life and Death

Fear and Rage

Joy, Envy, and Love

Earth and Air

Water and Fire

Embodiments exist outside of reality, and are the personification and source of what they represent. Light is all light. Fear is all fear. etc.

[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 🖐,,

[tempo-takoyaki]

"Are you satisfied yet?"

[timethehobo]

Thinking about that concept sketch of the companions around the table again. Emmrich’s fancy posing. 🤭

[theload]

All the time in mythology, sadly. 😔

Has a worm ever gotten struck by lightning

[nipuni]

A warm up of Solas! Trying to remember how to draw him. It's been forever, bear with me 😵‍💫

[theload]

Thinking about Temeraire dragon wings.

And it feels like I've rarely seen art where the wings match what the book says, the first book says that Imperials and Celestials have six wing fingers*, and that European breeds have five.

*Terminology used in the book itself is spine, so in theory one spine could be the arm itself, but that feels like an odd descriptor to me.

[docwyattnews]

[theload]

Adding that Daniel Ogden has a third dragon book out:

It goes into how Germanic and Medieval Christian myths influenced the dragon developing from a snake/snake hybrid to what we'd more commonly accept as a Western Dragon, and I'd recommend it as a follow up to the first two (though would suggest reading the first two first, they're not needed but they're a nice framework for the Greek and Classical dragon that this book then builds on).

What's your absolute top reccomendation for books vis a vis dragon folklore, any region, any period, as restricted or comprehensive as you'd like?

Oooh that's a good question!

In general if primary sources are cited, it's tops. I would say the gold standard are Ogden's Drakon: Dragon Myth & Serpent Cult in the Greek & Roman Worlds and Dragons, Serpents, & Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds are great.

[fishofthewoods]

while i'm imperialposting. imperial dragon lore that makes me want to tear my hair out. web weave

[felassan]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has 700 characters and 80,000 lines of dialogue (140,000 lines including all the Rooks) in it: [link] They started casting the acting talent 5 years ago and have been working on it since.

Edit: According to the wiki, Dragon Age: Inquisition contains 88,000 lines of dialogue (edit 2 - I think this figure including all of the Inquisitors). I think I read somewhere that BG3 has over 500 NPCs?

[venusmage]

Recent sketch commissions I’ve liked

[seasmokes-rider]

My baby 😍

𝑫𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒐𝒏 𝑫𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚

𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐦𝐨𝐤𝐞

   The mount of Laenor Velaryon, son of Corlys and Rhaenys II. Although Seasmoke was an already established dragon before the birth of Laenor, the Sea-snake’s son adored his dragon. 

   A pale silver-grey in appearance, and the same size as Tessarion. Seasmoke was more of a traditional-looking dragon, like Meleys and Silverwing. He was quite a handsome dragon to gaze upon. With a tepid temper, he was rather easier to train and pleasant to be around. 

   Quite nimble in the sky, Seasmoke wasn’t the most fearsome, but he made up for it with enthusiasm. Like his rider, Seasmoke was pleasant to everyone, yet only deeply cared for a select few. 

   Seasmoke was often seen flying with Meleys and Rhaenys, for the majority of his life. 

𝒈𝒊𝒇 𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒕: @targaryensource, @drogonthered. 

[trulycertain]

On Dragon Age & Accents

(My unhelpful tuppence, as an English player.)

One small thing I wish had come up in Veilguard from previous games: the accent worldbuilding. It wasn't always consistent - DA:O only seemed to care about country or race, anyone non-human being generically North American and anyone human being mostly RP English unless they were Antivan; for regional accents, they seemed to purely use them for effect or go with VAs' natural ones. (There are about two bandit NPCs who seem to have badly-done Midlands English accents purely because they're not meant to be very bright; thanks, love Canadians reinforcing that stereotype. Anders being Lancashire seems to be pure coincidence because of his voice actor - you rarely ever hear the accent in any consistent way in other NPCs, and it's completely ignored in his very Southern DA2 recast.)

But by DA2, there seemed to be definite trends: Free Marches could be RP English or North American depending where you came from; dwarves tended to sound North American but there were exceptions for some people raised on the surface; elves tended to be either Welsh or Irish, which matches the "very old culture with a linguistically completely different root from Trade/English". Starkhaven is most definitely Scots.

And then DAI! DAI, my love.

DAI kept DA2's trends, while finally giving us more complexity and regional accents, albeit limitedly (and still with some inconsistencies). Finally, we have a (vaguely Germanic) Nevarran accent! And Miranda Raison did such careful work constructing it! The Avvar, Ferelden's mountain folk, sound Northern English. I'd hazard a guess that several sound Yorkshire, actually - this matches the whole "the Orlesians got up there less" lore in real terms; Northern England and Scotland, particularly Yorkshire, was under Viking rule longer than the South, which became Norman-conquered earlier, and there are subtle dialectal differences to this day. (Similar thing happened with the Celts and Romans, and the Avvar are blatantly Celtic and Pictish). There's a reason that RP ("neutral posh") English is Southern, from the seats of power. Cullen's from Honnleath, somewhere smaller and less Orlesianified, and while it's softened by the character's travel and the VA's own posher bents, there are moments the Northern English accent gets leaned into, a little similarity with the Avvar. It's a coincidence but it works so well, lore-wise. Sera's VA sounds... Derbyshire? I think? which is Midlands/Northern border and sounds more than Northern enough to keep a consistent Fereldan sound. And in terms of NPCs? A lot of Fereldan NPCs suddenly start turning up Northern, albeit less broad in their accents! Have a listen round the Crossroads. I remember Gaider mentioning Dorian wasn't originally meant to be Indian, they sealed it for sure when they cast Ramon Tikaram, at which point everyone went, "Yup, let's run with it", cast his dad accordingly, and Gaider figured that Dorian was either part of a pretty big migrant population (which, other than the Dorian Gray reference, the fact his name roughly means "from across the sea" also makes sense), or quite a lot of Tevene folk natively were. Considering Tevinter started as essentially "mage Rome" and morphed into, even according to the writers themselves, "mage Byzantium" and it's very close to Seheron, which I feel is North Africa/Middle East influenced - Tevene folk being akin to folk of Turkish, Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Bengali backgrounds makes a ton of sense.

It is... exceedingly rare to hear working-class British accents in fantasy series at all (unless Brits make them, and then we're still often peasants or generic NPC #2, a la Origins). It is even rarer to have a fantasy series bother to keep immigrant accents and show the moulding of them through the generations. And I can only think of one other video game that has consciously cast British Asian actors, that's how rare it is even in games that supposedly care about representation - despite the fact that Asian folk make up something like 30% of our population.

Now: would I like some more background on why some accents in the Marches sound British and some don't? Yup! Would I have liked to have more regions in the elves' Irish accents and the dwarves' NA? Yup! But do those really matter? Nope! They would have been lovely icing on the cake, but the underlying cake was great. The plot didn't need it. It didn't have to be perfect, and the filtering of British culture through Canadians, and strategic anachronism? Those are things I love about Dragon Age. I loved how much they seemed to be trying and how much they were thinking about the lore. And I loved hearing a "British accent" that finally made sense to me, not played into the long attempts by toffs to stamp out everything North of London or outside England.

And then Veilguard sort of... forgot about it most of it? Adored that we could play as a Geordie! I really, really love them continuing pointed casting of folk with British Asian ancestry for several Tevinters (*waves lovingly at elek and neve*). But then... uh... look! Working-class Tevene people with generic Mancunian accents! To show they're working-class! That's fantastic progress... for Origins. But lore-wise, by DATV we've already shown that Manchester and Northern English accents live... *points at Ferelden* somewhere over there. We're back to "Tevinters mostly sound like generically evil English folk", as in DAO and bits of 2, which, sure, Dorian doesn't contradict - but then why not have everyone sound Southern, like him? Or add a different tint to it? And no, I am not saying everyone should put on bad "ethnic" accents, and I do appreciate the number of American, English and Mediterranean accents in Tevinter showing a very Roman "you're a citizen of the Imperium but you might have been born in one of its several countries" - but…

Gideon Emery's slight Afrikaans tint made a ton of sense with Fenris and what part of Tevinter he was meant to be from, even if it was unintentional; Jennifer Hale's take on Krem was going for English but came out more Aussie to my ear. Something like those could have been really interesting. But that also means that, including Fenris, we've now had several slaves with an accent that reads... quite posh, to English ears. Same with Neve, who is supposedly proudly from the shithole part of Minrathous, but she and several others have very RP "posh" accents (while others like Tarquin and Elek are Mancunian). Now, not everyone picks up their local accent! I am one of those people! I ended up cursedly plummy for a long time! But... we had hints through the series that Tevinter class markers would be very different from Fereldans', but they're now the same, for some reason?

Add that to the fact that they didn't want to make even one VA suffer through doing the Nevarran accent... See, it makes total sense for Emmrich, who's a posh professor who's done a lot of international study and would probably have learned Common as a second language with a very generic, "neutral" accent; he also was very concerned about appearances with his class background and trained himself not to give much away. And I'm sure the Mourn Watch has international students. But no Nevarran NPCs sound pointedly Nevarran? Not a one? Kal Sharok has hints of something interesting going on but it's rare, and the Anderfels is just... full of sad English and American-sounding people. Rivain is supposedly Caribbean and there are a bunch of actors of Caribbean descent they could've cast, but we only have one NPC sound even slightly so? That's when it stops being "Trade is taught with a neutral accent and there are a lot of Fereldan immigrants and slaves in Tevinter" and starts feeling handwavey.

Basically: I wouldn't mind if we'd gone with most fantasy games' "Eh, we cast broadly based on sound, stereotype or none of the above"; I'm very happy to just go with it. However, DAI told me to pay vague attention because the accents meant something. Then DATV has heel-turned and is telling me "Nah, go with it" the way Origins did. My ears are... confused, to say the least. And we're back to "'working-class' has one accent, and characters with something to say who aren't cast as stereotypically plucky underdogs are all Southern and posh", which just... makes me really sad. I don't hear people who sound like me, my family, or my friends growing up, in Dragon Age anymore. I did hear they had a different voice director in DATV, so maybe it's that?

[deathberi]

[timethehobo]

Just some lil fellas cos I wanted to try the other companions too!