#also not 20 minutes after finishing the templates i dropped my tablet pen and it broke.

[thetapirsarehyperfixating]

hi! first time making an original post in like years. anyways

this is my canon timeline for dragon age, written out in prep for veilguard's release :> larger versions of the busts, plus assorted rambling, below the cut.

eventually, i am probably going to cave and post some stuff about these bastards on ao3 - if you are interested, this is where to look: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tapir_boy/works

SARRELAN TABRIS: as im writing this post my partner looked over, saw sarrelan, and went "thats my fuckign WIFE". so shes highly reviewed

Sarrelan is the Warden-Commander and Hero of Ferelden, the woman who killed the Archdemon, ended the Fifth Blight, Arlessa of Amaranthine, and winner of Vigil's Keep's Biggest Bitch award twenty-two years and counting. she is full to the brim with autism, which is part of the reason she looks so. mad. all of the time. she doesn't mean to, she just does not Emote well and so comes off as being more aggressive than she actually is. now don't get her wrong, she is also full of rage and kind of jumps to violence as a first resort, but she is capable of listening to people and generally does like people, like she thinks good people deserve things and wants to give them good things. she just never looks like she does.

she's got kind of an immediate bond with Alistair, something to be said about him being basically the first human man who's ever treated her with respect and actually listened to her when she takes control of a situation. ive seen interesting commentary out there about how alistair immediately turns control of the situation over to the HoF and how that can be really disorienting/frustrating/upsetting for some characters, but its kind of the opposite for sarrelan. shes had almost two decades of experience getting into shit with her cousins, shes used to taking charge and she likes having that control, and its a relief that alistair doesn't try to fight her on it.

zevran is a little more rough-going to start as they're both very different people - zevran is used to reading more into people's body language, and sarrelan's body language is very disassociated from her actual emotions, so he does spend a good while thinking he's in like Imminent Danger while sarrelan's in the corner trying to figure out if she actually Likes this guy flirting with her. (she does).

zevran semi-accidentially insinuates himself in alistair and sarrelan's relationship right after it starts, half-jokingly offering to have a threesome to help them both get over their nerves of losing their virginity, and then oops oh no they all caught feelings and no one knows how to deal with it. they only figure their shit out a few days before the battle of denerim and it's as sarrelan is On Top of the archdemon, getting ready to kill it, still unsure if Morrigan's ritual will work and if she'll even survive this, that she's able to tell them she loves them.

zevran's earring is the only piercing she has, and she treasures it greatly. she's a two handed warrior and has a sword bigger than herself. shes also gone 1v1 with an orge alpha and survived. canonically. id say i have video proof but i dont. just trust me bro

(TW FOR SA, NOT GRAPHICALLY DESCRIBED)

CONNOR HAWKE: local man made of 20 different types of trauma in a cool chestplate

connor is actually adopted into the hawke family! long story short, he was born in kirkwall and was taken to the circle there, and only left because his enchanters conspired to smuggle him out after one of the templars assaulted him. he fled to ferelden where he came across the hawke family, who took him and his daughter in and helped him fake a new identity with them. he's not happy to be back in kirkwall, but the city is a part of him whether he likes it or not - it's eating him alive but without it, he doesn't feel like himself. he's a very dedicated and loyal person, usually to his detriment, but he feels like he can't keep running from the threat of the templars anymore, he has to do something to fix this makerdamned city now.

(TW IS OVER)

he's got Something going on with the whole kirkwall crew, it just never really expands into anything for years because he's basically married to the job. but his life has been intertwined with these people's since he met them, and at a certain point all of those feelings mesh together and he's sitting there at wicked grace night and realizes he might be In Love with all of them, and then he has to make a hasty exit before he has a complete and total breakdown over it. during the timespan of DA2, anders is really the only person he has a romantic relationship with, because justice is getting tired of anders holding himself back from maybe the one other man in kirkwall who would support him no matter what, and kisses connor like the day before he has to leave on a longer quest to the sundermount. connor makes them discuss their feelings afterwards and they end up figuring it out, although the rest of the kirkcule are like. still fucking each other and are by no means exclusive at this point. the rest of them just never talk about it, because things go downhill in act 2 FAST. like, within a month he loses his mother, almost gets dragged back to the circle, has to fake his daughter's death, completely destroys his relationship with carver, and almost dies fighting the arishok.

the connor hawke of reality and the Champion of Kirkwall that gets immortalized by varric are two very different people - basically by the time that connor gets the name of Champion, he's already been working on maintaining a public persona that he just calls Hawke, and after everything with his daughter being sent away, he never lets that mask down again. he really considers Hawke to be a completely different person to Connor, and varric tries to help cement that difference in the Tale of the Champion. Hawke's story is that he was always Ferelden, his daughter was adopted and really did die, and he had no idea anders was getting so radical until the moment the chantry exploded - connor's story is that from the moment he sent Lila away, he was planning to find some way to take down Meredith.

he and anders spend a lot of time inbetween acts 2-3 trying to figure out more peaceful ways to address the chantry and bring some - any - oversight to the circles, but when all of that fails, they finally resort to plan dynamite. when all is said and done, they go to amaranthine to be reunited with lila, and then go on the run trying to help the mages break out of the circles and evade the templars. when he hears that varric was kidnapped by cassandra and that she's looking for him to speak at the conclave, he sees it as an opportunity to make a case for the rebel mages, and goes despite all the warnings not to. he survives in the fade up until the questline where the Herald goes into the fade, finds him alive, and drags him back home to see his daughter again. then he stays in skyhold to basically act as an advisor to her, and when the rest of the kirkcule get their hands on him, it kind of spurs him on to finally address his relationship to the rest of them.

connor is a force mage by default, but given how long he spent in Ferelden living on the run from the templars, he mastered both casting without a staff and fighting without magic. he's both tall and strong, but he manages to avoid scaring people off through sheer Dad energy.

LILA HAWKE: hey look theres that daughter we've been talking about

Lila is very much her father's daughter, but she doesn't have his same talent for acting calm or friendly, if she doesn't like you she Will tell you to your face and she will not work with you. (cullen.) after hawke's "death" at the conclave, she kind of becomes the defacto leader of the rebel mages, which is definitely a normal amount of responsibility for a twenty-one year old struggling with ongoing mental health issues and overwhelming grief to handle. shes doing great

(slight detour: to address some of the weirdness with DAI's timelines im having there be basically 3 factions of mages in the rebellion: the Circle mages, who want to remain under the circles with the exact same setup as before; the College mages, who like the idea of having their own spaces and want some oversight, but also some oversight of the oversight to address the rampant abuses of powers; and the Hawkes, the rebel mages who want no circles and no templars and the ability to live their lives in the same communities as non-mages. the Circle mages mostly look to Vivienne for leadership, the College mages are rallied behind Fiona, and the Hawkes were roaming the continent with Connor, now working loosely with the Inquisition with Lila.)

she's got some health issues - she's shorter than varric by a few inches despite being a human, she has moderate asthma, and semi-regular psychotic episodes, mostly auditory/visual hallucinations and paranoid episodes. bubba, the family mabari, acts as a service dog for her when he isn't doing the same for connor, and i imagine at some point between inquisition and veilguard, she has her own mabari who works full-time as her service dog.

she is one of the co-inquisitors for DAI, but she is not the herald of Andraste; she wasn't actually at the conclave when it exploded, she was down in haven with varric and anders, but she kind of gets roped into everything because cassandra says "youre a hawke, you're going to get involved anyways" and lila... can't really argue with that, she's just mad that cassandra was right. arisas is the diplomatic one, she's the more experienced one, and they honestly balance each other out really well. it frustrates her to no end that arisas is almost literally twice her height.

lila kind of regards her time in amaranthine as the best of a really, really shitty situation - she hates that she lost so much time with her father, that her teenage years were so tumultuous and that she had so many milestones of her life and she couldn't talk to her father about them, she never got to introduce her first girlfriend to him, she had to come out to him over letters, and while she has a lot of respect for the wardens in amaranthine and appreciates them for taking her in with no questions asked, she hates that she lives in a world where that had to happen in the first place. sarrelan is the person who made her realize she might be kind of butch, and zevran taught her how to actually fight instead of just using her magic for experimentation. connor never kept a grimoire after fleeing kirkwall (too obvious and too much evidence, especially if it got lost or stolen), but she does, and it's filled to the brim with notes and homebrewed spells.

ARISAS ADAAR: please help him he is too young for this

arisas is by far the youngest person to get involved in a major political conflict in my canon - he turns 16 during the events of DAI - and he is trying so hard to keep people from learning that information. he grew up in tevinter, taken there from par vollen as a very young child, and doesn't have the greatest grasp of southern mage/templar politics and is very confused by everything happening at the start of the game. he joined with a mercenary company as his first job, and was only with them for a few weeks before they got hired for the conclave, and he was Not getting paid enough to get a crash course in the differences between southern mages and tevinter mages.

ari is a lot more hesitant / cautious than lila is, partially because he has an anxiety disorder, and partially because he just knows a lot less about the south than she does. if it were up to him, he would not be in charge of this mess, but he's the one with the Anchor so he kind of has to be. he takes to the diplomacy pretty well, and he at least always finishes the paperwork that josephine sets in front of him (unlike liia, who will get distracted and go do something else halfway through). it does mean that he is constantly sleep deprived

inquisition is probably his first big exposure to a lot of queer people in very close proximity to him - between lila, leliana, dorian, and bull, it's the first time that he's really considered that people could be queer, much less trans, and it starts to make him question some things that he really doesn't have time to question. and, as the game continues, it doesnt really seem like questioning it will do him any good, as the inquisition continues to erase him and fill in the blanks with the Herald of Andraste, so he basically goes "even if i am queer, looking into it now will do me no good, because no one here is going to listen or respect that" and continues on like normal. (post canon he does figure some shit out, although he still uses he/him pronouns).

ari looks up to bull a lot, at first because he's a qunari who actually follows the qun, and ari is very curious and kind of wants bull to take him under his wing and become a father figure to him; but when bull becomes tal-vashoth and leaves the qun, ari tries to reassure him that he's the same man regardless of the identity he ties himself to, and that there's no shame in acting outside of the qun if it means protecting the people he cares about. bull in turn tries to help ari come out of his shell and maintain his sense of self in the midst of everything that comes with being the herald.

he struggles a LOT with having his identity erased by the inquisition, being both revered and reviled and rewritten with every step he takes. it makes him feel just thorougly inhuman and alone, and causes a mental breakdown after trespasser. he tries to stay in politics for a few years post canon, tries to help dorian with reforming tevinter with all this newfound influence he has, but being in the spotlight so much is detrimental to his heath, and he ends up having an early retirement in his mid-20s. he moves to kirkwall and raises nugs. this is the greatest his life has ever been.