#back to the dragon age mines

[darethshirl]

Rules: Make a poll of your favorite female characters (no limits - as many or as little as you want) and see which your followers like the most!

thank you to @fadedsweater for tagging me! 🥰 this was FUN (probably only fun for me specifically lmao but oh well!! still counts!)

super tempted to add more but I'll keep it to 10 I GUESS 😤 tagging back @sarsaparillia, @hollyand-writes, @melisusthewee, @rosella-writes, @dreadfutures, @roguelioness, @queenaeducan and any other mutual I'm forgetting!

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[alenkosx]

"You like to walk a little too close to the edge." "So do you."

[hellamorte]

my name is zevran arainai. adventurer and occasional assassin.

[fenharel]

💀

[eva-taash]

𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦

[teiasviago]

#he did open his eyes 🫶

[maharellasa]

SOLAS in Dragon Age: Inquisition ↳ dev. Bioware

An elf, bald—the golden locks had been part of the mask. An oval face with full lips, and a tiny scar on his brow. Pointed ears, previously hidded under the mask and wig.

[ai-no-kokuhaku]

the things that are happening in his office :)

[skyhavens]

Breach.

[ziggstheenby-2]

What who posted this haha it wasnt me I dont ship brinkborg whatre you talking about thats so silly why would you think that hahahahahahah-

(it was me i do ship it i love these guys dont tell anyone)

Pose reference is from the amazing @albanenechi !!

[burningblake]

SOLAS & LAVELLAN in Dragon Age: Inquisition ↳ featuring Esenya Lavellan

Most people act with so little understanding of the world. But not you.

[deputyrook]

I’m actually gobsmacked by how bad the AMA/Q&A answers are, that we got from the devs today. I guess I’ve been giving the writers way too much credit because it’s becoming very clear that for some aspects of DAV’s writing, they just really did not even think about their setting, lore, or even the characters they created for this game alone. Literally so many of the answers make no sense whatsoever. John Epler what are you TALKING about

[stdismas]

Games Played in 2024:

baldur's gate 3 ( 2023 ) | dragon age inquisition ( 2014 ) | dragon age: the veilguard ( 2024 ) | red dead redemption 2 ( 2018 ) | resident evil 4 remake ( 2023 ) | silent hill 2 remake ( 2024 ).

[veilkeeper]

in addition to lrb, i don't necessarily entirely agree with that post but i also don't... disagree with that post. in terms of my disagreement, i think there's value in having a leader who can inspire a group of talented, intelligent people and keep the team pointed in the right direction through the chaos. after all, that's essentially what varric also would have done had he survived. so i don't really doubt rook's place in the team, or why they lead.

(especially since, contrary to what people were saying in the notes of that post, rook does have something no one else does: a connection to solas. they are the only one who can talk to him and get information on ghilan'nain, elgar'nan, and the blight, and it is those conversations with him that the team can then work off of to make a plan. i think it's disingenuous to say that rook has no Special Circumstances that makes them the leader of the veilguard. no less special than previous world-saving protags, at least.)

however i do think more should have been done by the writers to make rook... more notable? when we first got news about the game, i thought we were going to be playing as an established member of a faction; if not a prodigy, at least someone who had done the work and was making a name for themself. then we actually get into the game and.... well. The faction reps at least vaguely know you, but in several instances you're barely on the radar. mercar is so low on the food chain they don't even know the viper's real name (despite that being information he'll give a completely unaffiliated rook basically as soon as they meet), and laidir is so replaceable that taash hasn't even ever heard of them. aside from your Big Fuck Up that got you sent to work with varric in the first place, there's no real indication that rook has ever done something worth noting, there's no skills or contacts or stories that can give you a leg up.

i feel like there was a missed opportunity—in the game, the factions feel more or less useless. rook gets some flavour dialogue that can be really fun, but they have no substantial impact on the story or in any of the quests. thorne can conscript the mayor of d'meta's crossing in a one-off unique interaction, and then for the rest of the game there's nothing for anyone else. rook is a [insert faction here], and it doesn't do anything. varric might as well have just grabbed a random guy off the street and said "you've got this, kid."

[fenharel]

Hmm...