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flowersforthemachines · 5 months ago

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Asking #2 for OC questions!!

How long was the process before the character reached its final version? (or a version that would be clearly recognizable as the character?)

Tell me everything about our girl

thank you for the ask!! question from HERE

Omg, our girl... Honestly still can't believe anybody cares enough about Ghilasara to ask something. Like she can be *interesting* to other people. Insane.

This is going to be kind of long, but in my defence: you asked!

It took a really long while for me to figure her out. Like she wan't originally even intended to be a fleshed-out character - I just picked the options in the CC that (I presumed) would provide the most involvement with the plot: elf for the relevance regarding elven gods, grey warden for the relevance regarding... blighted elven gods, and mage because mages are typically the only class that gets special dialogue options. I thought I'd run through the game once with a very loose idea of a Rook, see what it has to offer and then make another Rook who could meaningfully fir the narrative at large with the help of hindsight.

And then I tragically got attached. By the time I finished my first run with her in the middle of November, I already knew I wanted to write something about her, even if I didn't really know what. In December, I wrote a tiny oneshot to nail down her dynamic with Lucanis (there was actually a time where I thought that maybe he wasn't the best partner for her, and she would be better off with Davrin. Maybe she would've been better off with him, actually, but it is what it is).

Then, I really got on working with her - I made a timeline covering her life from brith to joining the Veilguard (minus the 09:44-09:46. one day I will find out what she was doing at the time, but that day is not today), thought more about what kind of life she could lead in the Montsimmard and Ansburg circles (spoilers: not a very good one), what it meant for her to be a city elf, a mage, a warden, and wrote a bunch of pseudo-codex entries with tidbits about her life - how she got her face scars/lost her eye, what happened to her during the mage rebellion, some post-canon letters to/from her/Bellara/Lucanis, and so on. Which I haven't posted anywhere and should really find the excuse to pull myself together to do so.

The Ghilasara featured in the mercy-killing fic was inspired by the combination of the many discussions on how Lucanis was a poor fit for the position of the First Talon, and me once seeing the words "Rookanis" and "Divorce" mentioned under the tags of one post and then going wild with the concept. (kinda insane to think that one post altered the course of my thinking and writing so dramatically. I'd thank the user that made it but I feel like that'd be super weird)

Then it was just a lot Thinking. I didn't intend to be cruel when writing the fic - but I did want to make up a complicated dynamic between two flawed characters that had a history I could sprinkle around the work to show how much has passed between them. Which meant that she had to develop more flaws, which is where the guilt and self-flagelation (over Davrin's death and everything else she's done in her entire life), anxiety (over openly confronting some of her feelings and trying to avoid asking questions for fear of hearing answers she wouldn't like), and a sort of selfishness (of trying to have things on *her* terms at all times, even if the terms aren't always self-serving) came from.

Something like that!

#well that wasn't just kinda that was *embarassingly* long.#you see the downside of asking me questions is that I can start talking for prolonged amounts of time. sorry about that #oc: ghilasara thorne #flowers.txt

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theheartmold · 4 months ago

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tell us about how you first came up with the idea of Andrea!! did something particular inspire you, or they just appeared in your head one day, and that was it?

Andrea was originally a concept for one character that I split into two separate ones! Way back last year when they first dropped the possible factions for DA4, I was already chewing on the idea of a Crow mage. I read Tevinter Nights and had a clear vision of a Lucanis romance with a mage Crow who had a... fucked up eye injury that meant they could see a bit into the fade and was also a spirit healer. It was a lot going on but remember this was early drafting.

The idea of a mage who could see into the Fade was split off and from that I made Mailyr Ingellvar, my Mourn Watch OC who is the brother to @new-austin's Rook, Lorren :) Greatly enjoy him, my Davrin romancer <3

I didn't touch the Crow mage concept until after I'd finished the game for the first time. That was when I backtracked and did more research into the Crows, into Lucanis and Illario, and... yeah. Once I realized I wanted to make a character to pair off with Illario more than Lucanis, I decided to pick up my old Crow mage concept and dust it off.

I knew I wanted to keep the spirit healer aspect--the idea of warping that for the purpose of making a character who would know exactly where to hit during assassinations? Too good to pass up. (The idea of making Andrea a torturer came later; originally it was just to make them a precise killer, using magic to conceivably conceal some of their methodology).

I also decided that if I wanted to pair them off with Illario, I would need them to be a very ambitious character. So then I had to start thinking about what that would look like, the type of person someone would need to be to start politicking in the Crows like this (as I wanted to keep Andrea in house De Riva). What do they want, how far will they go to get it, what will they do if they don't? Those sorts of things. Once I'd planned out a loose concept (spirit healer, crow, elf) I started building on themes (ambition, self-preservation, desire).

And now here they are! :3

#askbox #flowersforthemachines #really good question #i can go into a lot of detail as to how i build characters; it's my favorite thing to do #character development and character design are my passions #but this is a really quick breakdown of the thought process that led to andrea's early stages #oc: andrea de riva #oc: mailyr ingellvar

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invinciblerodent · 2 hours ago

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pick your tropes! thank you for the tag @starfightrpilot — you can find her post here!

i'm working my way through things and wanna mix the characters up a little, so among all my different flavors of shitty children, let's do my most awful son Petyr-

Some of these sort of happen canonically (like him meeting the parents) or semi-canonically (like Shadowheart meeting his parents in the post-game), and I have this very loose pet modern AU I like to play with in my head sometimes (in which she's a gothy med student moonlighting as a bartender, he's a grumpy loner of a forest ranger with a beat-up Range Rover and a prickly attitude that barely covers up how much he actually cares for his chunk of the woods, and Halsin is the friendly medical researcher who spends his weekdays in the library and his weekends hiking, so their lives all kind of run into each other and then they all fuuuuuuuck), but other than that, I think these are the kind of tropes I can see him in. ❤️

.... probably nothing that relies on like, big, sweeping, saccharine romance, or love at first sight- he's far more the type of guy who'll find himself in a relationship partially against his will lol. Anything involving him will inevitably fall under the very loose, booktok definition of "enemies to lovers", just because he's, well. Kind of a bitch, what can I say.

Secondly I kinda wanna do Ver's version too-

Very tentative in adding the "proposal & wedding" bit because I kinda don't see her and Davrin getting formally married (who really cares about that after the war, yknow), but if I interpret that as "dramatic declaration of devotion and expression of intent to grow old and raise their feathered son together", then it's 100% that.

I just like them messy and pining but still very natural and simple while still hitting it on the dl, you know? They're friends-to-fuckbuddies-to-lovers, and that's kinda my favorite dynamic.

(and "secret dating" in the sense that "they're fucking, and somehow everyone knows, but it's not like they're TOGETHER-together; for a while the fact that they are in fact dating is a secret mostly only to them")

adding the NSFW versions under the cut as well-

rude that this thing dared ask me to choose between my two beautiful children, orgasm control or multiple orgasms. Sophie's choice, por qué no los dos, etc etc.

I think I should be able to put outdoor sex as all caps, bold, italic, underlined, and flashing red with how easy that choice was (rogues do it stealthy, rangers do it outside, he's both, it's fine)- and if it counts as somnophilia if the sleeping party is woken up by being felt up, then I'm pretty sure I've already written that for him, lol. (I have a short tucked away in one of my notebooks that was sort of about a loose, almost-immediate post-game scene, a "who knew it would be so nice to wake up together in our bedroom after the war" kind of fluffy thing that started that way, but yknow. It's one of those things that'll likely never see the light of day.)

I think he'd take the piss far too much to be able to do anything in the realms of roleplaying/s&m/power play. He's not the guy who'd be able to take that seriously, at least not on a consistent basis.

(Really funny that threeway is in there, as if Halsin isn't like the tides in their lives, in that he arrives at predictable intervals, and then proceeds to bang someone against some rocks with the force of approximately seventeen tons of water.)

Getting it out of the way, she's 100% fucked an ex before. There's not even a question on that. I think she's one of those weird people who don't go scorched earth with past partners, and instead (horror of horrors) actually stay friends with some of them. Incomprehensible, but, I mean... she's a boarding school orphan/military academy brat with baggage the size of the Anderfels, I can't really picture her not having some messy, self-destructive habits when she was younger. That includes some yo-yo relationships with people who weren't good for her.

The rest, well... Warden stamina is legendary for a reason, he takes the PC on forest walks basically every date (who knows how and where those end 👀), and I feel like the 'dirty talk' bit needs absolutely zero explanation. (With the kind of playful banter they have? I can picture it very easily.)

....... And I will hear nobody ever telling me that gingerwort doesn't have a mild aphrodisiac effect. That's like story-inbuilt fanfic sex-pollen. It's not even my thing normally, but that scene had me cackling, partially because I was so sure of the exact fics it would spawn.

#squirrel plays bg3 #squirrel plays datv #oc: petyr wildbrook #oc: verbena mercar #out of the drafts with ye foul beast before i lose my mind #can you tell that it's been consistently like almost 40°C here #can you tell that i'm losing my grip on reality #and that my brain is slowly boiling in my skull #goodbye off i go to take another two hour cold bath

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