#have some dwarves

[rockityrockandstone]

I think the team are all from different cultures btw

Like they're all dwarves, but they(to me) obviously come from different backgrounds and such. Places with different social expectations and ways of communicating.

Like an accent or the use of slang. They're all speaking the same language, but the details can get lost if you aren't in the know.

Like. Idk. Gunner comes from a place where being stoic is seen as the norm. Not much emotional availability, but a very heavy emphasis is placed on caring for your community and protecting your family. He was raised to take care of others and sacrifice his needs for the good of the group. This made it hard to accept that sometimes he would need help. Thankfully being with the team has opened his eyes, and while he still works tirelessly to protect those he loves, he knows sometimes he needs someone to lean on.

Engie comes from a place where the dwarves are friendly and hospitable. Very calm and open, and being a capable, self-sufficient dwarf who helps your comrades is seen as the ideal. He was raised to treat everyone like family and to be polite and kind-hearted. He still holds onto his more wholesome values of course, but has learned that sometimes being harsh has its place.

Scout comes from an area where friendly roughhousing is very common, along with jabbing at your friends in a joking way. Being self-sufficient is expected, and being a well-rounded dwarf with the ability to take care of yourself and others is ideal. He was raised to carry his weight but always be ready to help others with their load. This has led to him being hyperfocused on being helpful to others while completely refusing anything in return, viewing it as weak. Over time he's gotten over it, mostly thanks to the team, and will now readily jabber on until he gets what he needs.

Driller is from somewhere. I have no idea where it would be, and I don't think there's a whole culture of dwarves out there that act like him. I think he spent a lot of his life alone and doesn't really understand how others work. That leads him to overanalyze how other dwarves act from an outside and then interact based on how he operates. Basically he thinks everyone processes things exactly how he does, and he has trouble remembering that the dwarves around him may not enjoy the same things he does. This led to the team perceiving him as unnerving and aggressive, which although true, doesn't fully encapsulate his person. He enjoys roughhousing that borders on actual fighting, he likes quiet and darkness and warmth, and doesn't realize that not everyone shares that. So he bites and burns and bombs, stands in dark, quiet places and ambushes others with his unnerving silence. He doesn't mean any malice, not really, he's just showing his care in his own unconventional way. It's taken a long time, but over the many years he's worked for DRG, the team has managed to show him how they operate, which makes for less uncomfortable situations. He still blows up Scout though. Some things don't change.

They're all from different places and have had different experiences in life, and they've all had different amounts of time to work on it. It wasn't always easy, but they're all in agreement that doing things together is much better than trying to go forward alone. Through thick and thin, through the fighting and the peaceful times, they've vowed to stick together, to support each other. And for that, they're the strongest dwarves around.

[jq37]

OK Brennan, if you aren't gonna let me have Aelwyn posted up in the manor at all times, having her use her dramatic villain skills to protect Adaine before going off to teach middle schoolers is the next best thing I could have hoped for. What a mental image--Ms. "I Came Here To Fuck" teaching cantrips to eleven-year-olds. Wild.

[professorjirt]

I’ve discovered my favorite genre of Bagginshield art is where Thorin is a lovesick idiot who is Losing It and Bilbo is unbothered or oblivious to Thorin’s suffering LMAO

[tomcat-tapes]

How about side by side with a friend?

Aye, I can do that.

[m4yh4ps]

Lobelia & Bilbo Siblings AU🍋🍀 + Lobelia's laketown garb🍋🐳

please love them🙏😔

[beecreeper]

I know that @bharv mentioning they wanted smut for their birthday was mostly a joke but... 👀

This is based on their fic Control which you all should *absolutely* go read and then also read all of their other fic

Hearts version and link to full under the cut!

Heart-less version here

[victorie552]

Ok, so Noldolantë, "The Fall of the Noldor" is a lament composed by Maglor about what happened before, during and after First Kinslaying at Alqualondë. It's such a good song that it's played regularly in Aman and Valar listen to it often (I swear, I swear it was in the Silmarillion I just can't find it now).

It's also a more or less common fanon that Maglor continues writing Noldolante through the whole First Age. Makes sense - it's about fall of the Noldor, and Noldor did a lot of falling back then.

Headcannon time: So my first thought was that Noldolante must a long, long, long epic of a song. So it probably has many parts, right? Iliad has 24 books/parts, somehow I think Noldolante would be at least just as long, and there are longer epics. And again, just like Iliad, unless you're a scholar, in the daily life you don't really listen to/read the whole thing, just reread and repeat the most dramatic fragments. What I'm trying to impress upon you all is that the story would have different segments, or chapters, if you will.

And if Maglor continues to write the story during the FA, there would absolutely be a moment in the lament where the OG Noldolante becomes Noldolante 2, and even Noldolante 3. There may be the same musical motif or something, I decided that Maglor IS that good of a bard to keep it all consistent enough so you know it's all the same story, but the style changes a lot - it's been 400 years in the making, let The Music Elf have fun!

So, Point 1: Many, Many Parts, basically Maglor's FA WIP

My second thought was that, while Feanor invented his alphabet, elves learned their history mostly through oral tradition aka songs and spoken stories. Noldolante is definitely a historical record, where a historical event was archived for future generations.

(It was a also a way to deal with grief, guilt and blame Maglor and all Noldor have faced regarding First Kinslaying - free therapy! But that's not what this post is about)

Archived.

My 2.5 thought was that Noldolante isn't just recallings of how pretty and horrified the beach looked during the murdering or how mad and sorrowful the sea was at everyone during the voyage or even how awesome and charismatic Feanor looked during his speeches that every single Noldo was ready to fight Morgoth barehanded in his name - no, this is a record of who killed who, who got killed by whom, and how.

Noldor and Teleri knew each other (were friends, even!) before the First Kinslaying, so I'm confident that after a lot of interviews, detective work, and cross-referencing, Maglor could and would create a very good... name list. Practically every Noldo and Teler present during First Kinslaying would get a stanza in a song, more if he killed someone, most if he killed many people. Killers and killed would show up twice, first in a fragment listing the killers and their victims, then in a part listing the victims and their murderers. Basically it's the same thing twice, but from different POVs. With when, where and how included.

(It was seen to be in bad taste to compare kills during Maglor's Regency, when most of his interview-part work happened. People did it anyway. There were a Saddest Kill, Funniest Kill, and Weirdest Kill discusions. There was a Tier List. These were weird times to be a Feanorian Noldo.)

(It WAS in Bad Taste, but at least people talked about it. I cannot stress enough how much free therapy this lament provided)

(Little did they know, when Teleri started getting reembodied in Aman, they had very similar discussions, but more in a "I can't believe he killed me like THAT" way. Long, long, long after the First Age. Noldolante is a gift that keeps giving)

So, Maglor had all the historical grith and no common shame to create a "We Killed All These People And We Feel Bad About It" banger of a song, and every Noldo had a very personal reason to at least remember the fragments they are in. It's a hit on a scale never seen before.

(I'm not sure how to tackle the issue of Nolofinweans and Arafinweans learning about Noldolante after crossing the Ice. But there were discussions. There was anger, there was "????", there was controversy. Basically, the song got bigger and bigger rep no matter what your opinion on it was. By the time of Mereth Aderthad it was an important cultural and political piece and at least Fingon's forces were included in the main song. It had parodies.)

Point 2: Archive Function/Kill count storage. Cultural phenomen, every Noldo included

This is where my personal nonsense begins: Main Noldolante was done, there was nothing more to say about First Kinslaying, all killings and deaths were well documented.

But the Siege started. And the Noldor kept dying.

It was less dramatic than it sounded - between the big battles the siege was maintained, but orc raids also happened and sometimes one to few Noldor died in skirmishes. The legal procedure was to document the death of a fellow elf and send a word to king Fingolfin. The cultural procedure, technically started by Feranorians but adapted by many more, was to send the name, common characteristics and cause of death to Maglor's Gap. After few months, King Fingolfin would send reinforcements, short condolences and financial compensation if they had family. After few months, family of an elf would also receive a personal lament for them and a place for them in a Noldolante.

Yes, every lament Maglor created in that time was technically part of the Noldolante. Noldolante 1.5, if you will. Laments make in that time were very customized, and simpler than Noldolante Main, but were still considered a part of the same song. Of course, nobody was expected to know and remember laments for every single Noldo, younger Noldor born in Beleriand could even only know fragments about their family members. Only Maglor would ever know Noldolante in full, but it was understood that everyone had their place in The Song.

The results of Great Battles were harder to document, but Maglor did that. Of course, Dagor Bragollach was hard on him personally, but he worked his way through.

(High King Fingon forbade creating laments for his father. There were no songs for Fingolfin. Apart from in Noldolante, of course. Of course. Maglor did not share the lament with anyone, but he sat long hours and many nights with a blank paper before him, looking at the candle flame and thinking of the past and the future. The song unsung, but there)

Nirnaeth was... Maglor was never more hated and more approached at the same time than then. Still, Noldolante grew and grew, as if people knew the end was near.

It was Second Kinslaying that destroyed the myth of Maglor's song. Feanorians didn't know the Sindar they killed, but surely, they couldn't just left their names unmentioned like they did with orcs? So, Noldor talked, but the battle happened in caves - it wasn't uncommon to find dead bodies in empty rooms, with no witnesses to what happened. Surviving Sindar didn't want to share any names, even when Maglor strong-armed some into talking with him, and good for them. Maglor made a big lament anyway. Maglor, wild, with no shame and dead brothers, with legacy crumbling around him. Noldolante, with holes.

After Third Kinslaying, Noldor didn't want to talk. Lament for Sirion didn't have any names. Clearly, songs weren't a way to go anymore, it was always about live witnesses. And so Maglor raised the twins.

Lament for Maedhros was sung repeatedly. There was no one to hear it.

Point 3: Only Maglor knows Noldolante in full. But that doesn't matter, because everyone knows the important part: the Noldolante is finished. The Star of Hope rises in the West and the story goes on. The Fall has ended.

[mrkida-art]

Sketches of Dís from March that I never uploaded (oops) .

[annoyinglandmagazine]

Caranthir at the annual Feanorian strategy meeting: You know, we could just chuck it all and turn to piracy. It would be a LOT easier.

[confusedlucifer]

trying to figure out how to draw my Rook so i made the tiniest ref sheet for them !

they're a child of a Mortalitasi and a dwarven noble working at the Nevarran embassy, neighter of whom wanted to endanger their status by keeping a child and so they were left at the Grand Necropolis after birth. later adopted by a pair of castless dwarves that came to the surface from Orzammar, they grew up with remains of Orzammar culture, but the Necropolis always called them back. Mourn Watch gave them a real meaning and purpose - dwarves can't get possessed and for the first time in a kingdom ruled by mages they felt like they could be useful. the rituals and the reverence toward the dead and spirits was instantly familiar and welcoming. they got their Mourn Watch tattoo sleeve after finishing their induction and they got their face tattoo to honor their castless adoptive parents after their mom died. they got into an argument with their father trying to talk about the whole gender thing before getting surgery, though they kept their given name. they never did resolve it before it was.. suggested they leave Nevarra for a while after the War of the Banners, their only keepsake from home being their dwarven steel sword.

they first come off as stoic and harsh but its mostly that they are impatient and sometimes clueless with social niceties, and kinda really miss their home. they feel like Varric hired them for being a blunt instrument and that's the only thing they can offer the team, only eventually letting their walls down around Varric and Harding before the start of the game. of course never expecting they would ever run into another Watcher and fully be themself around someone again ..

[vaguely-concerned]

Origins is of course the DA game most closely in conversation with and playing around with Tolkien (right down to the walking talking poetree haha) -- and even more so than most works in the larger western fantasy tradition derived from Tolkien's work that DA:O also hails from and owes a lot of its Stuff to, what makes the game so great to me is that it's doing so very deliberately, and is subverting and deconstructing those tropes and entrenched ideas in some very interesting ways without at all denigrating what it's commenting on. (it doesn't have the almost disdainful undertones of the vein of fantasy that seeks to make the world more 'realistic' ala the more tedious reactions to G.R.R.Martin's work, for example, despite having the darker fantasy bent to it.) among other elements it adopts, what I find the most fascinating is the choice to use the same literary device/conceit Tolkien did in ostensibly only having in-universe biased sources and works to deliver the world through (which I feel is an underappreciated thing about his approach but is part of what makes his world so enduringly compelling and real-feeling -- the feeling of real scholarship devoted/applied to a made-up world. the grounding effect of a good diegetic footnote about source criticism, truly).

many things to be said there, and I'm glad each following game has taken on different perspectives and lenses and traditions to view the world of Thedas through because if you stick with that one too closely for too long I fear we could teeter precariously close to Pratchett's famous and bitingly accurate accusation of most modern fantasy of that era just being about rearranging the furniture in Tolkien's attic lol. and while you could accuse DA2 (my perfect wife who has never done anything wrong in her life to be clear) of many things, that's not one of them, they are pulling on some completely different strings for that one and both the game and DA overall is better for it, to my mind. as so many things in this series: worth staying with and exploring for an installment even if it might get stale if all of it was like this! people are understandably sad about the elements from previous games that they liked which were lost along the way, but that capacity for reinvention is to my mind a huge strength of dragon age as a whole.

(I think Veilguard is coming in as a close second in Tolkien conversation-ness if only in outlining/revealing the worldbuilding that indeed may have been planned since DA:O around the animosity that SHOULD by all rights exist between dwarves and elves in this universe (as per Tolkienesque tradition standards). but doesn't really because you see: politics and the many pitfalls of conservation of knowledge over the ages. our ancestral enmity got semi-intentionally lost between the floorboards of history and you know what. maybe for the best. the humans are already up to so much shit you gotta keep your eyes on them at all times you can't be brawling with each other in the deep roads while they're still around getting up to their nonsense or they'll just pile up even more of it)

[mirkwoodest]

A guy told me that Tom Bombodil shows up in rings of power so now I have to watch it. Sorry to all the haters, HD Tom Bombodil is exactly the kind of bait they needed to reel me in.

[wonderlandhour]

*talking about how to deal with the magical monsters during halloweek*

Yuu: Leona, call your brother. We need to borrow Cheka. Does anyone else have any young children we can borrow?

*Everyone else, confused*

- The Next Day -

Cheka, wailing: why are you ruinin the pirate ship! I really wanted ta see it!!!

Magicam Monsters: *panicking because they're being recorded and shamed for making a kid cry*

Ruggie: this is fucking genius

Leona: *proud af of his future mate girlfriend and nephew*

[nastiiuu]

Bilbo and his dwarves

[fartholder]

God the lore around humans is fucking me up. Everything up until Veilguard suggests that humans did not exist in Thedas until around the time the Veil was created:

The elven calendar records the arrival of humans as taking place 4500 years after the founding of Arlathan (250 years before the creation of the Veil).

There is no direct mention of a world pre-Veil in human history. The chant does however claim that the Maker created "opposition in all things" before creating humanity, but again - the humans only came after.

The ONLY thing, as far as i know, that disproves all that is Solas telling Mythal he has "no desire to live as humans". Which means:

Elves and spirits were familiar with humans as far back as during their war with the Titans.

Spirits like Solas associated the act of existing physically with humans - not dwarves.

The only thing I can come up with to reconcile these pieces of information is that humans existed naturally in Thedas, were driven north due to the Elf-Titan war, and then later being able to return when Elvhenan fell. The displacement of the humans wasn't significant enough to be remembered by the elves or the dwarves (there was a fucking war going on).

It could also just be Veilguard being silly. But it does make sense that humans would flee from a continent with constant earthquakes and increasingly powerful spirits. Still odd that none of this survives in oral history.

[smittyw]

DUNMESH STYLE STUDY with my ocs.. !!?!??? !

this was rly rly fun i think more ppl should make room in their hearts for daydream hour obsession