#Marcus is het; but mixed and nonbinary; so. neither cis nor white or quite a man

[invinciblerodent]

you made me laugh very hard thinking about max volume BASS-BOOSTED CARELESS WHISPER, thank you for that. please say more about this thorne i'm besotted

Aah, thank you kindly! ❤️ (watch me proceed to rant for about an hour about him lol)

As a quick summary, Tristan Thorne was born in Ferelden in roughly 9:13, in a village (that's more of a homestead rather than a true settlement) near Lothering- aaaand then promptly (kind of, sort of) died on the battlefield of Ostagar in defending his home when he was just 17 years old. Except luckily, he survived his injuries just long enough for the battle to settle, and curious spirits (Compassion, Courage, Hope, Loss, and others) to take notice, and begin pressing against the Veil.

It was a spirit of Purpose who was drawn to the dying boy's sheer determination to keep drawing breath, and touched his mind, saving his life in the process (through what some might consider a deal, though that opens up some unfortunate lines of discussion)(it's not a demon, I swear! .... maybe!) to allow the spirit to come and experience our world through his eyes.

Wandering the wilderness, dazed and disoriented and with the Blight in his veins (and a spirit invisible to all others riding piggyback), he was found an uncertain amount of time later (could have been days, weeks, or months even) by the arriving Orlesian Wardens somewhere near the Wilds, and was promptly recruited, as they thought him on death's door.

Tristan then took the Joining with remarkable ease (a curiosity the Wardens also noticed- really, it was almost as if the draught had no effect? But that's impossible, that could only happen if the sickly boy was somehow already a Warden without even knowing? He must just have remarkable constitution)(could it have had something to do with the curious herbal mixture he got from a local lady to calm his nerves the night before the battle? who knows), and fell naturally in line with the Warden teachings.

Fast forward roughly 22 years, he is now 39-40 years old, doesn't talk much about his life before beyond calling Ferelden his home, and is a decently respected Senior Warden with a secret not many have ever known of, on top of a bristly, brusque attitude that makes him difficult to get to know, and a propensity to head single-mindedly towards any goal (and flout rules in the process), as if drawn on a string.

He's also not great with people, has not had a relationship since that one time in his teens (in part because he's not sure how it all is supposed to work, but he's fairly sure you can't exactly open with "by the way, I'm kind of not sure if I'm even really alive" and have a romance start from there, or keep something like that a secret long), has quite a few scars that chronicle many blows that would have felled any fully mortal man (and many more tattoos that tell of the same), and likes to do embroidery in his spare time- by his claim to keep his fingers' fine motor skills from deteriorating, but also because of his secret affection for pretty things.

...... In a more meta sense, I made him because I wanted to toy with an undead/necromancer dynamic before release (and before learning about Spite, I thought possession would be a unique way of doing that- egg on my face lol), so Tristan is not exactly an abomination. Not really.

Nor is he a zombie in the traditional sense, or wholly separate from-, or even truly fused with Purpose, like we've seen among the companions before.

I think he... sits kind of in the eye of a three-way Venn diagram between Wynne, Cole, and Anders: he's someone kept alive partly by a spirit who is not just influencing the world from across the Veil and is fully present, but also isn't trying to exert control of the host body, OR a person of its own right, and rather acts more as a silent, approving passenger. They're not the same person or completely separate, and they're not in the same place, but also not apart. If that makes any sense.

I like to think that since Tristan and Purpose are very closely aligned in their goals and temperaments (and have been together longer than Tristan has lived on his own before, which gave them time to grow to trust one another), the separation between them is pretty much nonexistent- you can't draw a line of demarcation between them any more than you could separate yourself from your right hand.

This makes it somewhat difficult to tell whether they even have an impact on each other, whether it's him who was made more bullheaded by his connection with Purpose, if it was Purpose made more humane and compassionate by its decades in the world of the living, or if they just found each other by chance and ended up meshing and merging perfectly without much of a need for a conscious compromise.

I liked the idea of this remarkably close synergy between mortal and spirit being fascinating to Emmrich, and prompting a thorough study (both arcane and medical) of Tristan, which would sort of then turn into a more.... personal interest as well.

I've not yet gotten far past the prologue in that game yet, but I think it'll be very fun after finishing my very Emotionally And Conventionally Intelligent Ingellvar to explore this lonely, self-reliant, gruff man, and playing through his little gay crisis as he gets swept up by Emmrich's charm embarrassingly quickly.

It'll be really nice to roleplay as he discovers the Magic of Friendship, slowly becomes the third single dad of the group (only his children are basically everyone except for Emmrich and Davrin), and finally lose his v-card before he'd literally become the 40-year-old virgin.

.... i also found this after making that post, and it has been making me giggle for the past day- it sounds like you're outside his head and listening in to the sound escaping through Tristan's ear: