#WHAT A DAY TO BE A DRAGON AGE FAN

[jibberjibbsart]

Solas and Lavellan reunite

[elfcollector]

Now, we should return to our duties. Before I get too...carried away.

[knife-eared-jan]

Weeee, it's done! Ever since I learned that the Solas romance has a cut sex scene that according to rumours had its assets reused in this Mass Effect scene, I went a little unhinged. You can just picture this entire scene with Solas at the Crestwood waterfall instead. It feels so him.

I've not done any art in years and I wish I was at least somewhat good at shading to do it justice, but like. I had to get it out of my system lol.

(That no one who owns both games seems to have ported Solas into Mass Effect yet is a tragedy, and should anyone ever want to volunteer and record it, my life would be yours forever.)

[secretsimpleness]

Bad dreams again? Who’s on watch tonight, with time to comfort you? HoF Surana, All The Companions Except One / Dragon Age Origins (c) Bioware

[anaugust]

Some angst with my inquisitor and Josie

I know I'm allowed to post non-sexual nudity on tumblr but I'm scared I'll get marked as nsfw blog. Anyway, uncensored version here.

[ghost-bard]

I feel like every time i hear about solavellan its talking about like “oh when they reunite and solas and ooooo” or like. Something angsty like one of them dying or something.

Anyone elses lavellan wanna just kill him like straight up

And i dont mean this in a hating solas way (irl) but at least in my lavellans case they went through hell and back in inquisition, and finding out solas wants to tear down the veil, effectively destroying the world as they know it, was the final straw. As in they were barely keeping it together before, and this caused them to spiral. Like a mental break happened. And that manifested in a very uh. Violent and hunting down solas at all costs kinda way.

[leescoresbies]

if it's of interest to anybody at all, here's my big picture review of veilguard after my first playthrough! it's not all negative - i think there's a lot of gameplay reasons to really love the game but it also lands overall as a weirdly disjointed, sanitized, and at times soulless followup to a game series that's known for being kind of messy, polarizing and opening doors to argue about inherent contradictions and bad decisions.

i'm a dai HATER so the things i loathed about that game i loathed here too, including a very hateful and lazy engagement with oppression, history, religion & cultural connection, & everything to do with modern elves engaging with their past.

good things: combat! maps, just pure enjoyable playability, scenery, the home base setup, companion banter and some of their relationships, at times the protagonist.

things i hated: immersion, commitment to the bit, an almost dismissive attitude about previous lore and worldbuilding, how all the lore reveals are pulled off, a fear of anything challenging or crunchy that ultimately just pissed off players who love the "argue about inane nonsense" part of da games!

under the cut for spoilers

the good stuff is GENUINELY good. i can tell a lot of focus and time went into elevating some of the clunky parts of previous da games. the character creator! the HAIR! it's so genuinely beautiful and at times breathtaking in its design (realizing that mountain is a titan??) and deeply enjoyable to look at. i LOVED the combat playing as a mage, and loved being able to respec any time to try things and experiment. flexible, entertaining, flashy and fun. inquisition's actual gameplay was such a slog for me as someone who isn't motivated by minmaxing combat strategy in any way, so i loved this.

a lot of people are comparing it to the two new god of war games - for good reason! i think it took a lot of positive notes from them, which is one of the reasons why it's so darned fun to play. it moved away from the party mangement rpg setup of previous da games and, while i do miss that and also understand why people might be frustrated by the change, i think it resulted in a game with compulsively playable combat and a navigable world that's a lot more constrained and exciting - both bigger than origins and da2, and more locked down and specific than dai. this was all a major win, with a few art design things i did struggle with (like the outfits? why? and the fact that you can't preview fits when you buy them from vendors?) i think this let the environments shine, and exploring them was so exciting.

however -- the comparisons to god of war reveal what my fundamental biggest problem with the game is. the GoW games are beautiful, thrilling to play, full of epic fights -- but for me anyway, at their core they're so good because they're a deep dive into a really complicated relationship between two people. they focus on a very specific story, and let that story unspool as you move through the world. the environment supports the story, not the other way around. characters fight and scream with each other, and have friction in their worldviews, and make decisions they regret badly. and the story is linear enough that there's nothing ambiguous or loose about any of it. sure, mainlining those valkyrie fights is fun but the games are incredible because they let the characters really have space to develop their points of view, make hard decisions, get pissed at each other!

DAV does none of this. offers no friction that isn't surface level, gives its characters no space to have contradictory or complex political opinions, and does not touch its own thorny and convoluted worldbuilding that's built on fictional oppressive systems (that are allegorical for real oppressive systems!) there is no discussion of slavery, even though the companions include a tevinter mage and two elves and your character can be an elf, a freedom fighter, or an ex-slave (which i discovered in one-off banter between laidir and taash?????? what?). there is no religious friction between people of different backgrounds. there is no depth or history or context.

the only time the game tries to think about its oppressive systems is when its telling the story of the ancient elves (powerful elf mages oppressing other elves), and has its elven characters (marginalized in the world they live in! they are forced to live in slums and work as servants or be enslaved, or else abandon society to hold onto their fractured history! hello!) APOLOGIZE for the decisions of their ancestors. the moments where bellara or davrin or the veil jumpers discuss how their people's lost deities returning (people who, again, have been slaughtered over and over and over by fantasy catholics for believing in them) and, surprise!, being power-wielding evil aristocrats who enslaved them are few and far between. it's disrespectful and dry and so, so, so boring.

as an example: lace harding (red head, white, grew up on a farm, follows fantasy catholicism) gets a whole moment where the player can lament in her feeling her religion's truths have been turned upside down. you can also say you're a fantasy catholic! bellara and davrin (both a fictional minority in the game, both represented by real-life minorities) are never given that space. and neither is rook.

there's no space for any of the characters to wrestle with those contradictions! to draw connections between themselves and solas, for good or bad! to hold him accountable! there's a reason so many people were expecting a game about a slave revolt in tevinter in the last ten years, because at some point we expected these things to come to a head and explode, changing the rules of the world. that would have been satisfying! leveling a city for no reason with no narrative impact is not.

at the end of the day, i wasn't convinced by the elven god lore reveals -- this is true about DAI too, and i hated it at the time. i wasn't convinced that anything world-shaking was actually world-shaking. i'm a serial RPG character repeater (i've played every background for dao at some point but have settled into a character i love and will play her over and over and over again) and it took me hours and hours to connect with rook because i was so disconnected from her background.

essentially i feel that: this group of writers have inherited a universe with a TON of baggage (racism, sexism even though they say there is no sexism, confusing lore, many worldstates, etc etc) and a ton of possibility. rather than embracing any of these things and trying to commit to saying something, even imperfectly, they ended up saying very little. being scrappy and caring for your friends is good! being evil is bad! there's nothing along a sliding scale of those two opinions that might present itself, and no space where somebody good might also hold opinions that harm somebody else.

the thing that makes da2 so beloved, even though it's repetitive and kind of ugly and at times a bit half-baked, is that the characters hold their own, dig into their opinions, evolve as their circumstances evolve. and so does hawke! i actually wish DAV had just given us a true background for rook and let us play their story, because trying to do everything has resulted in a game that says almost nothing, and seems almost disinterested in the fact that it's a dragon age game at all.

[emopulco]

sure, let’s romance the Iron Bull what could go wrong

[cuntstable]

a bit dissapointed on the games journalism on veikguard too ive seen in certain places because like every dragon age fan ive seen is like ”Okay it looks good and we are not suprised that the first trailer looks like it does” and then like people who played origins for 2 hours back in 2009 and whos job it is to babyrage about games online went Omg it looks cartoony and cringe (just like all the other dragon age games are), lets massdownvote the game trailer like we do with 70% of upcoming games. because of the Woke. and then a few games journalists ive seen and whos work ive liked before have just been like Wow looks like dragon age FANS arent excited guys ! ☹️

[mako-designated-driver]

Codex Entry #39: The Grey Wardens

The first Blight had already raged for 90 years. The world was in chaos. A god had risen, twisted and corrupted. The remaining gods of Tevinter were silent, withdrawn. What writing we have recovered from those times is filled with despair, for everyone believed, from the greatest archons to the lowliest slaves, that the world was coming to an end.

At Weisshaupt fortress in the desolate Anderfels, a meeting transpired. Soldiers of the Imperium, seasoned veterans who had known nothing their entire lifetimes except hopeless war, came together. When they left Weisshaupt, they had renounced their oaths to the Imperium. They were soldiers no longer: They were the Grey Wardens.

The Wardens began an aggressive campaign against the Blight, striking back against the darkspawn, reclaiming lands given up for lost. The Blight was far from over, but their victories brought notice, and soon they received aid from every nation in Thedas.

They grew in number as well as reputation. Finally, in the year 992 of the Tevinter Imperium, upon the Silent Plains, they met the archdemon Dumat in battle. A third of all the armies of northern Thedas were lost to the fighting, but Dumat fell and the darkspawn fled back underground.

Even that was not the end.

The Imperium once revered seven gods: Dumat, Zazikel, Toth, Andoral, Razikale, Lusacan, and Urthemiel. Four have risen as archdemons. The Grey Wardens have kept watch through the ages, well aware that peace is fleeting, and that their war continues until the last of the dragon-gods is gone.

—From Ferelden: Folklore and History, by Sister Petrine, Chantry scholar

[baekuras]

Finished Veilguard and...yeah no I need more of it and every companion actually wtf do you mean they won't make DLC for this game???

[impmansloot]

idk if that dadw solas model is final or real whatsoever but god i hate it!! they removed his funky little features and made him look Normal, this is Not My Solas. the face shape and proportions are just not right like im shaking and crying they cishetified an already cishet (?) man... who asked for this????

[crows-of-buckets]

For some reason whenever I brainstorm for my eventual solasmance Lavellan I always imagine her leaving on bad terms with him and swearing to stop him no matter what it takes. However. Just had the idea of Lavellan solas and Varric being in a weird love triangle. during inquisiton only Solas and Lavellan would happen, then They break up and Lavellan is with Varric within a year. Queen of moving on or whatever. Cole gets dropped right in the middle of whatever the fuck they've got going on. Rest of the inquisiton is immensely intrigued by them

[midnightwind]

I think it's very funny and telling that because I fucked up like 2 things in DA:O I thought I was going to have to replay it all before I moved on to the other games, DLCs included

but Inquisition used a third party website where you have to manually input your choices so it didn't fucking matter and I could skip playing 2 myself

[kwyoz]

im staying away from anything dragon age related that isnt tumblr, some of the mfers in this fandom are so annoying.

[tiny-huts]

I really admire Matt's dedication to making DND a more goth friendly environment. Dude whips out another blood magic based subclass every time someone leaves him alone for so much as twenty minutes