#friendmance

[moontheoretist]

What if your companion just left you?

Bioware really did like toxicity in 2011 and in later years, don’t you think? Dragon Age 2 is the first game in Dragon Age series that doesn’t tie up your general bad behavior to your companions’ ability to leave the party. If you feed their rivalry and have it high enough or maxed, they will not leave. Companions only leave in very specific or quest related circumstances if not maxed, like for example:

Fenris leaves if you put off his personal quest in Act 2 for too long and tell him to screw off. And in Act 3 you can give him up to Danarius and companions that are with you won’t even protest, won’t fight you, won’t leave you in protest to what you did. Fenris will also leave if you sided with Orsino unless you maxed his friendship or rivalry. He can be persuaded to come back later on, but if you fail, you have to fight him afterwards.

Isabela can leave in Act 2 if your Rivalry or Friendship aren’t high enough. If you have high enough points on either end, she will come back, and you can still give her to Arishok.

Mage companions will leave you if you sided with Templars at the end of the game, unless you had maxed their rivalry or friendship.

If you don’t kill Anders while having the DLC with Sebastian, Sebastian will leave. But it is also at the end of the game.

Anders can leave after dissent if you agree that he should (so he needs your input and approval to do so, won’t do it on his own). He can also leave if you didn’t kill him and let him go, but sided with the Templars. If not maxed, you will have to kill him later on.

All of those technically use Friendship/Rivalry meter, but in the long run it is just the rule of “if you weren’t sufficiently good or awful to them, they will leave”, not the rule of “if you are awful they will leave”. They simply leave if you didn’t pay enough attention and gain enough points on either side, depending on the specific quests. It follows a rule of neglect in either friendship or rivalry. Which is a completely opposite of Origins where gaining -100 approval points with your companions literally meant they will leave you to fend for yourself and fight Archdemon alone as per the rule “you were an awful person that I won’t follow”. What’s more, DA2 keeps it so that if you lose companions, you will never lose all of them. You will still have one tank, one mage and Varric, who stays with you no matter what, at the end in order to be able to finish the game at all. In DAO however, you can end with one companion (Alistair) and fail to kill the Archdemon.

In comparison, the same year as DA2, Bioware released another game: Star Wars: The Old Republic, where in the first 3 chapters of the story you can have DS abusive and toxic romances with your companions. But those can’t leave you AT ALL. You can be an awful slaver that treats Vette poorly and still romance her. And even when you get separated from all of them, they all can still come back to you, they show willingness to come back in some cases, and you can decide if you want them back or not. You can push Jaesa all the way to the Dark Side, and she will come back later and if you don’t take her back, she will be locked out, but you can also kill her there.

You can ofc also have LS romances and ignore DS ones, but if you wanted to romance Jaesa specifically, it is impossible to do so in those first 3 acts if you didn’t play as a man and weren’t pushing her and yourself towards the Dark Side. She is the only companion locked out like this, as her LS romance was only added in 2021.

I can’t stress how much better it would be if in DA2 we got several different romance configurations depending on the amount of rivalry and friendship points we gathered, as well as a rewrite of the rivalry romances to be more like actual rivalry and less like thinly veiled abuse. Rivalry can be healthy. It doesn’t have to be toxic.

Anyway, in comparison to DAO and DA2, Dragon Age Inquisition goes in a complete different direction when it comes to measuring approval. The system technically still exists, but you as a player don’t see the bar, you don’t see your results, you don’t know how many points “approves” gives in comparison to “greatly approves”, so you can’t engineer your romance path in a way that you knew from the previous two games, but that change also kind of simulates dating behavior from real life. In real life, you also don’t know how much someone likes you, and you can only guess how much your date liked something. Still, I can observe a visible trend of “avoiding writing companions as people with principles” which was prevalent in DAO and gradually started to disappear till in DAI the only companions that can leave on their own if they hate you are Blackwall and Cole. Dorian threatens to leave, but still needs to be punched to actually leave, so he needs your direct input for him to do it. The rest won’t unless it was already pre-written (Solas) or were affected by a quest (IronBull can turn against you in DLC if you killed The Chargers). Sera can’t leave, you have to kick her out, which is very out of character for her as a Red Jenny to stick around if you were the most awful person in the world. Cass, Viv, Varric and Bull can hate you and still stay.

Some could say “they can’t leave, because Breach threatens everybody”, but that argument was also true for the Archdemon case. Blight threatened not only Ferelden, but every nation close enough. Having an option to fail was something interesting that taught you how to not play if you wished to finish the game.

The system used in DAO was so far the best. It encouraged you to be friendly with your companions and punished you for being a toxic, abusive asshole that doesn’t care about them. It literally told you that if you want to save the world you need help, because you are not a god, you are not an independent entity that can do everything on their own, that people around you are not only needed but enrich your experience and you as a person if you treat them right.

I wish that system was kept till the end, but it wasn’t.

[nyehilismwriting]

hi so.... I've played the game a good time ago (back when chapter 4 released) and, uh, related to chapter 4... i remember getting a kiss scene w nash ?? or at least reading about someone getting it or something (my memory is kinda wonky) and i can't for the love of god get the scene again :") i know it's a bit... late (since we're already with chapter 5!!) but i need to scratch the bug in my brain and know if that scene is a hallucination or if it really happened :"))) (BTW. CHAPTER 5 ABSOLUTELY SLAPSSS)

yeah, so the kiss is in ch4 if you are rivalmancing nash and take the project pickup route :-)

[ivycrowned]

romancing astarion actually isn't that hard you just have to be more of a sarcastic/mischievous chaotic good type

[requiemforthestars]

Blood mage!Hawke and Merrill is kind of unhinged because they drain each other's life force in battle, just a little bit, just when the other is almost out of energy. They have to right? They're in mortal danger day in and day out. Everyone else thinks this is deeply fucked up, but the others don't get it. No one else ever gets it. Theirs is a love that is about sacrifice, about giving your life for each other, a love that is about obsession, about there being only one person who is there for you and understands you* (Merrill can lose her entire clan, Hawke can lose her entire family). A love that is about the one person you can trust to actually hold your life in her hands.

[thevaelguard]

Feel free to gush about why in tags/replies!!

[pink-sheep]

The pain and agony of finishing DA2 with a rivalmanced!fenris/companion and a mage!hawke thinking there would be content of it but finding out there isnt 😭.

[vigilskeep]

theoretical full hawke set:

keir hawke (he/him). andersmance. circle bethany. red with blue for flavour. sword & shield warrior, reaver, fierce fereldan dog lord who really just wants to keep his people safe (not that that ever works out)

alanora hawke (she/her). sebdivorce. warden carver. blue with purple for flavour. buff force mage who always tries to mediate, and sides with the templars right up until the, both metaphorical and the actual quest, last straw

aidan hawke (he/him). isabelamance. templar carver. purple with blue for flavour. blood mage, ambitious and defiant, charming and kind, something of a taste for luxury. ended up having more of a role in the chantry explosion than varric will ever admit

mairi hawke (she/her). fenrismance. warden bethany. purple with red for flavour. archer rogue, kind of a bitch, will say anything to rile up a response out of people. all sharp edges, and also always looks a little like she just got fished out of the harbour. my Scrungly. soft spots for fenris and large amounts of explosives only

rowan hawke (they/them). merrillmance. blue with red for flavour. spirit healer. very gentle-hearted, hates violence, struggles over the course of the game with unlearning fear of their own magic. i want to be absolutely clear that merrill is the high constitution buff battlemage in this relationship

[vilnan]

the satisfaction of getting fenris's full friendship without losing my mind in the process <3

[deeproadsdarling]

My one complaint about DA2 is that it feels like I spend so much of my time micromanaging character relationships and that it causes several of my choices to feel rather inorganic with regard to what I'd prefer to choose vs chasing friendship/rivalry points. So I basically have to pick between world state vs what relationships I want my Hawke to have with her crew.

[x-letsbreaksomerules-x]

they weren’t kidding that anders rivalmance is bad

[persephoneggsy]

Now that I’m on my (xx)-teenth replay of DA2, I’ve been having thoughts on Marian Hawke’s relationships.

Varric (Rival): They’re not exactly friends. Oh, Varric tried, but Marian’s extremely antagonistic and selfish attitude made it pretty hard to stick up for her in a lot of situations. He doesn’t like how her instinct is always to fight first; like seriously, the woman has no sense of tact. Sure, there are times he finds her fun to have around (mostly when she’s threatening someone he doesn’t particularly like), but on the whole, they don’t get along. Doesn’t stop him from basing characters on her, though, and that’s Marian’s main gripe with him. The thinly-veiled “Marielle” character from Hard in Hightown is absolutely nothing like her; she’s more like what Varric wishes she was like (though Marian is more upset at how Varric portrayed the characters based off of Carver and Sebastian). Don’t get her started on “The Tale of the Champion”, she absolutely despises it. She never gave Varric permission to write down her life story, much less sell it so OTHER people can read about her, and the fucker made a lot of shit up because she barely had him around enough for him to know what really happened. After the book comes out, she refuses to even speak to Varric. The only thing that manages to break this is when Varric writes to her about Corypheus, but even then, she prefers not to speak to him at all when she’s at Skyhold. To Varric’s credit, he gets it. He finally leaves her alone.

Anders (Rival): She’s immediately on edge around Anders since the first thing he wants her to do is fight Templars and break a mage out of the Circle. And, you know, he's also technically an abomination. Marian, someone who looks out for herself and her family, doesn’t give too much of a shit about the plight of mages (or rather, she’d just prefer to not think about it), so naturally Anders finds her frustrating, especially since she herself IS a mage. They’ve gotten into a lot of arguments over the years, mostly started by Anders pestering her; Marian is content to ignore him whenever possible. She also hates his whole “you were luckier than most mages” thing he keeps telling her. She knows she was, but he doesn’t know her life, and even if things were better, they still weren’t good. The one point of credit she does give him is that he offers free healing to the downtrodden — Marian acknowledges he’s better than her in that regard (she’s a healer, and a better one than him, but she’d absolutely charge money for her services). However, after the events of "Dissent", she can't stand him anymore and sends him away.

Merrill (Rival): Honestly, Marian found her a bit annoying at first, and Merrill’s use of blood magic didn’t help improve her opinion of her. But for the most part, Merrill’s sort of a neutral presence to have around, and Marian gets used to her over time. For her part, Merrill finds Marian fascinating but equally aggravating. Since in my headcanon, Merrill becomes close friends with Sebastian, she can’t really understand why he likes Marian as much as he does, but she acknowledges that they both seem good for each other. Also, because Marian softens up towards Act 3, she makes more of an effort to befriend Merrill, due to her being Sebastian’s best friend. She takes a more active role in looking out for her — they’re still by the game’s logic “rivals”, because there was no way Marian trusted that whole eluvian thing so she didn’t give Merrill the tool she needed to fix it, but they have a lot of conversations afterwards that sort of mend that rift.

Fenris (Friend): He’s actually Marian’s best friend. They’re both brooding, aggressive assholes. He’s the only person who doesn’t give her shit for her attitude and even encourages her at times, so she finds him easier to talk to. Fenris likes having her around, too, since she never gets on his case about his feelings towards magic unlike some OTHER mages he knows. Soon enough, Marian is confiding in him, and he in her. He’s the first person she tells about her growing crush on Sebastian (though he knows her well enough by that point that he already guessed she had a Thing for him). They can communicate pretty much exclusively through grunts and eye contact, to the confusion of most people around them.

Isabela (Rival): They got along well enough, at first. Isabela thought Marian was a riot, though like Varric, she though she could use more tact. Marian thought Isabela was fine, she just wished she would stop flirting with her. Then the Tome of Koslun thing was revealed and Marian was PISSED. She hates that Isabela lied to all of them for years, she hates that she was stupid enough to steal a religious relic from the fucking Qunari, she hates that she was inadvertently protecting the reason the Qunari were stuck in Kirkwall for so long. Marian absolutely despises the Qunari and hated dealing with them (though ironically she earned the Arishok’s respect), so she ended up blaming Isabela for that, too. So it was kind of a shock that Marian didn’t let the Arishok take Isabela when she returned with the Tome. She was tempted to, but she didn’t want to give the Arishok anything else. They never really recover from the incident. She also doesn’t help Isabela get her new ship (I’m not letting a goddamn slaver walk away just so you can have a new ship, seriously.)

Aveline (Rival): Honestly, they don’t interact much, because I think it’s weird that the captain of the guard would go traipsing around old dwarven ruins and the sewers with Marian and her gang of rabble-rousers. They have more a professional type relationship, with Aveline calling in Marian if she needs something done that the guard can’t normally handle on their own. Marian doesn’t care because she gets paid. She helps Aveline with Donnic, though, because at the time she was asked, she was still dealing with her apparently “hopeless” crush on a certain chantry brother. So she figures, shit, someone in this shithole city deserves to be happy, even if it’s Aveline. She’s (rightfully) furious with Aveline after the whole “All That Remains” incident, but I think she doesn’t take it as personally because they’re not friends. She does start charging more for her services afterwards, and I think Aveline feels guilty enough that she doesn’t protest that.

Sebastian (Friend): I think I’ve gone on enough about Marian and Sebastian that I don’t really need to elaborate on how they feel about each other. I will say, that due to Sebastian’s influence, Marian becomes much more “diplomatic” (though not completely. She’s still a bitch at heart ❤️). She lets herself be vulnerable and remorseful, in large part thanks to his counsel. Maybe enough so that she tries to repair some of her bad relationships (like Merrill, and I think she tries to smooth things over with her mother and later uncle Gamlen, too). On his end, I think Marian’s influence makes Sebastian bolder and more assured. I like the idea of these two polar opposites finding each other and helping each other heal, even taking on some of the other’s traits (though ultimately remaining themselves at their core).

(Bonus) Tallis: Marian hates Tallis. You can’t say shit like “I think you’d be happy under the Qun” to a mage (you know, they people whose mouths they sew shut) and expect her to just be chill with you afterwards. Plus, you know, she misled Marian about the Heart, got her captured, and still had the audacity to ask for her help without explaining what was really going on.

[nyehilismwriting]

it's so unfair of you (/j) to put the really good nash scenes in ch 4 behind the rivalry route because i love them so much its hard to make my operative be angry to them but the tension is just so juicy (and um. well. the kiss.!). will we miss out on more nash romance stuff if we dont go down the antagonistic route with them?

as I've said before, the rivalmance and friendmance are paced differently - there will be different content for each one, but it doesn't mean they're going to be unbalanced! I've been sharing rivalmance bits because that's what I'm writing at the moment, and when I get to the friendmance I'm sure I'll do the same :)

[breninarthur]

bruh why is the plot of da2 stressing me out so much

[flashhwing]

the way Merrill immediately “you can’t do this, you have to know this is wrong” if you side with Templars, and you have to convince her. the way nobody has a similar objection if you side with mages

[thisghosts-obsessions-again]

Please! Please! I need a fanfiction of them meeting 😭 Preferably with Noe crushing on Vlad or something... I'm sure he's doing this to protect him.

[villainanders]

Someone NEEDS to stop me before I do another fenhawke playthrough