#he is a city elf

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dog Meshi.

[saturdaysky]

Gale of Minrathous

Dragon Age AU where Gale is a Tevinter magister who accidentally infected himself with red lyrium. He's found a way to halt the lyrification. Mostly.

More tidbits:

Devout Andrastian with a bit of Leliana's "the Maker speaks to me" thing going, except it's "Andraste—so obviously a mage btw, I have 5000 words prepared and ready to go on this topic—sings to me, magic prodigy"

"therefore I am sure to be the one to unlock the secrets of this powerful, strange new lyrium that is singing to m—oh. golly. that went poorly"

joins the inquisition after he emerges from isolation and his former peers have all become Venatori. If his own folly has emptied the sand from his hourglass, why not spend the little time that remains to him serving Andraste's chosen?

0 moral qualms about blood magic except that all participants must be willing. All magic is neutral—its use determines whether it is good or bad

Tara is his possessed cat, who has lived far longer than a cat should, but Gale isn't complaining. who says abominations can't like chin scritches

talks about Minrathous, a lot

would break open the heavens to see the throne of the Maker, just for the experience

Final AU thoughts under the cut!

what the magisterium doesn't want you to see:

the staff that I know, deep in my heart, Gale uses and insists is artistic:

[puppetmaster13u]

Once more thinkin about this Prompt/AU

And I decided to sketch the level 1 forms the team (& Ellie) have along with sketches of their lvl 200+ Forms. I do believe Klarion is having a blast with his new friends and the Young Justice Team is going to have some Trauma from not knowing this is a Game.

Tucker: Lvl 1 Cat | Sam: Lvl 1 Sprout | Valerie: Lvl 1 Golem | Danny: Lvl 2 Dragon Egg | Ellie: Lvl 1 Celestial Snakelett

(Click for higher quality) Also they are all now Mountain Sized or Larger. Also pondering them all having 3 stages to their bossfights. Second stages is when they start using more magic & less "minions" and final stage is when shit hits the fan & the surroundings get Wrecked. Like Tucker summoning a literal storm & getting lightning charged, or Sam fully emerging from the caves, or Valerie unearthing herself and the team realizing the entire dungeon-city was On Her Back.

@victoria-has-no-secret @qitsin Both y'all reblogged with fun ideas so here @bleuyellow93-storytime you had very VERY fun tags so also here lol [If u don't want to be tagged I apologize] Aaand finally, @radiance1 I think you'd like these

[tanoraqui]

I’m not personally a headcanonner of Maglor living in Rivendell in LotR under a new name, but if he is, I adamantly believe that he is not Lindir (“song guy”) but rather Erestor (tentatively glossed “lonely brother.”) Tragic humor or bust!

[bluebellefoxx]

still not over the fact astarion has a grave

like bro,,,,,

someone loved you once, named you after the stars. you can no longer remember the sound of their voice.

someone loved you and buried you underneath a name they gave you, inscribed numbers too close together.

when you crawled from the dirt, hungry and terrified, they were not there. you hope somewhere silently, hidden even from most of yourself, they might appear as a savior in the night. they do not. you can no longer remember what they look like.

do they know what you are? do they know what you do? are they disgusted by you, what you do? you hope they think you’re dead. better for them, better for you. hope does not survive here long.

you remember a soft laugh, the warm sunlight a warm hand, a kind smile. someone loved you someone loved you someone loved you

they are here no longer

it is only you, and it is only him

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Veilguard vaguing:

It's not automatically a good thing, actually, that the game de-emphasizes or even outright removes racism against elves, and bigotry against other groups, from the story

[highly-flammable]

IDK if people will come for me for saying this but not showing how Sauron took control over the orcs for the sake of surprising the audience was not good writing.

Also, why was Galadriel just standing there watching Adar get stabbed? Asking for a friend.

[balleater]

i just want something to come up about the bright queen being older than ludinus in-game. i want them to have that moment of knowing that there was someone who was at least 200 at the Start of the calamity.

[lizzybeeee]

DATV explaining the 'Regret Prison'

A REGRET PRISON IS STUPID AND I'M TIRED OF PRETENDING THAT ITS NOT

TL;DR: a prison can serve as a metaphor but it shouldn't be entirely comprised of a metaphor.

From what I understood from what the game gave us: Solas has made a new prison to move the God's too - since bringing down the veil would free them from the Black City. This new prison is separate(?) from the fade or so far removed/contained that bringing down the veil would not compromise it...apparently. We interrupt his ritual, Solas gets sucked into the new prison he made, and the elven gods are free.

When Rook gets kicked into the fade they're physically there - which means it's a physical place in the fade, like how it was a mixture of physical/thought when we entered it in DAI. Which makes sense - the gods are real and living beings, they need to be in a place, there must be some aspect of physicality to it.

Alright, cool, it's a Black City 2.0 - I assume it's better defended to prevent people breaking in/out again?

NOPE.

We get there and it's a 'regret prison'?? It's tied to the regrets of those within it? Composed of regrets??? Solas had to wait for the right moment for Rook to be sufficiently 'full of regret' that they could switch places?

So is the prison tied to Solas's regrets? If so, how can Rook escape? The prison seems to work around the idea that it relies on the regrets of the person it's holding to work - which is how/why Rook was able to be trapped and later free themselves (along with whatever remains of the team apparently being able to do something on their end, not that we hear about it).

WHICH IS STUPID!

Are you telling me the prison intended to hold to megalomaniac elven gods was going to imprison them based on their own regrets? Is Solas assuming that Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are as self-pitying as he is? They'd break out quicker than Rook did! He made a time out corner for the elven gods to sit in and gave them an out if they reflected on their emotions/regrets or decided that they don't regret what they did. Elgar'nan, a spirit of tyranny, is not going to 'regret' his actions - he is going to justify them by telling himself and others that he knows what's best.

We can come across some of Solas's regrets in the prison if you run around a bit and explore:

Remnant of Failure - talking about the orb from Inquisition.

Remnant of Parting - talking about Mythal

Remnant of Reflection - more vague, talking about the Titans I believe.

So maybe he altered it - maybe he intended the prison to be 'locked' with his own regrets because after a millennia of having a pity party he still can't bring himself to self-reflect and look to the future. But what if Solas died? Or if his guilt lessened - would it diminish the strength of the regret prison?

We already have pre-established lore (though DATV has shown they don't really give a crap tbh) that once the being that has claimed/altered an area of the fade is slain, it's influence diminishes both in and outside of the fade. So if the prison was tied to his regrets then it would require Solas to basically live forever to keep it stable - especially if he brought down the veil and removed the one barrier that kept the world and the fade apart.

Rook and Solas needed some assistance to exit - but it doesn't seem like it was much! Solas used his dagger and Rook just...got out through a fade tear? This is Solas's 'more secure' second prison? It has a worse track record than the Black City! If Rook - who is not an elven god - managed to escape the regret prison what is to stop anyone else from breaking in and out of the prison?

And what did Solas intend to do with the blight - the bulk of which is apparently in the black city?? If bringing down the Veil would free the gods in the black city doesn't that mean that the blight would also be released?! Did he have a plan? Why does he go fully ahead with bringing down the veil at the end if the black city is still there and filled with blight?!

I get it: the 'regret prison' is a metaphor for how Solas holds onto the past and how Rook can move past their regrets and grow. He's trapped by the past - it's a prison. Cool. But this prison is supposed to by a physical place to contain the gods - not just to solely contain Solas. The mission is literally called 'A Cage for Gods'.

The Black City is an actual place that's so far out of reach of anywhere else in the fade that no mage can ever reach it while in dreams - let alone physically, which was only done once and took tremendous effort/blood sacrifices. It made sense - it was cool to see floating in the sky in DAO!

Though it's not said specifically, it's strongly implied that Arlathan is the Black City. You can see in the concept art that floating elven city is exactly the same as the black city in DAO! It's this foreboding thing just lurking in the sky - a constant reminder of the sin that led to the horrors of the blights and darkspawn. A real place with lore and history that also serves as a metaphor for the hubris and destruction of those who call themselves gods and act as tyrants -> for both the evanuris and the magisters.

I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS BIOWARE!

WHAT IS THIS KINGDOM HEARTS NONSENSE???!!

[fenharel-is-so-swell]

While I’m on my ✨Race in Thedas✨ rant let me just explain why the blending of Dalish and City Elves bothers me personally.

As I said previously, I’m mixed. I’m specifically black in the ‘descendants of enslaved people’ way. I grew up in a predominantly white area but finished out highschool in a diverse school with a high number of first gen African immigrants.

(I promise this is pertinent) My relationship with race has always been complex. I benefit from a proximity to whiteness due to being mixed, but I of course still experienced rampant racism and an identity crisis.

In elementary school we had to do a yearly genealogy project. In some ways, mine was easier than the few other black kids in my class. While their families were nearly untraceable past 2-3 generations, I could just focus my effort on my mother’s side. Though, I faced ridicule because OBVIOUSLY I wasn’t white, so obviously I couldn’t be German. While I may have shared DNA, I felt much less experientially connected to the ‘family tree’ I did my reports on because their lives could look nothing like mine. They walked through world without the color of their skin first. So, of course the next year when a culture week came up and we were encouraged to wear clothing representative of our heritage I went the other way—I asked my dad to buy me a dashiki. I still I faced ridicule and still it felt foreign. I had no cultural ties to the patterns, my family never wore them, I’d never heard of the foods we looked up that were mainstays on the Ivory Coast. I may have shared DNA, I may have shared racial trauma, but my culture was different. I was black I wasn’t African.

Playing dragon age origins as a City elf I saw myself for the first time. I saw a woman divorced from her original culture, ripped from her roots by an imperial force but still incredibly steeped in a rich world created by survival and painstaking effort to hold onto oral tradition and what blended history the alienages could. I saw my grandmother singing gospel on the weekends, the church ladies in their outfits, the greens, the pecan pie, the stories of struggle the community shared, the village it took to raise all my cousins and get our older family and friends through chemo and childloss and hard financial times. In hearing about different alienages I saw the distinct cultural differences between Harlem, Oakland, Birmingham, Houston, Atlanta.

Playing as a Dalish elf I saw a facet of the African-Immigrant experience I came to know in high school from my friends who immigrated. I saw the culture more closely connected to the various countries they came from, but still scared by the vestiges of imperialism and colonialism. They were all unique, just as Dalish clans are. My Nigerian friends ate different food, had different rules, wore different clothes, had different cultural practices than my Kenyan or Nigerian friends. I had a couple of North African friends from Morrocco and Egypt that still felt grounded in the history of Africa but were so different. I saw the physical differences in them like I saw them in further DA entires in the Dalish from Antiva or elves from Tevinter.

(And better yet to see this dichotomy in culture I didn’t have to face more trauma porn on black bodies)

As I continued digging into elven cultures in southern Thedas I saw even more complexities of the diaspora that matched my experience. They way both city and Dalish elves looked down upon each other one for ‘assimilation’ and being ‘weak’. The other for holding on to ‘strange’ cultural practices and being ‘primitive’.

Growing up at a crossroads of many racial and cultural experiences I relished in the nuance, the way both cultures were painted as a people just trying to survive and hold onto themselves. A people distinct and resilient, a people not too unlike from each other and while aloof still marginally less wary in solidarity. They were both full of individuals that interacted so vibrantly with the world and life they lived in.

Flattening that in Veilguard initially devastated me, then enraged me. That’s not just poor writing, that’s borderline racist. It indicates that the differences don’t matter, the pain, the struggle, the culture, the history none of it matters because ‘an elf is just an elf’ at the end of the day. And that’s fucking gross.

[detectiveneve]

alright with 30+ hours. I'm gonna yap about my personal itching beef, since I'm having a ton of fun. but.

I think by far one of my biggest issues with the game is how much they flattened out thedas' social & political landscape. maybe for ease, maybe out of fear of tackling their topics "badly," but the way that they both want to address tevinter's slavery, but have also extremely downplayed elven subjugation & oppression as a longstanding lore, is sooo... frustrating.

I think the story so far is pretty solid, I'm having a GREAT time, I enjoy all the cast, but it does feel like it could've been a lot deeper if they'd fully accounted for the breadth of these longstanding lore realities that come with magic & class & whether one is human or elven or dwarven. I've gotten NONE of that, AS an elf shadow dragon. davrin going "that'll endear us to the world..." about the gods being elven is insane -- elves are already oppressed under the structures of thedas! tevinter is where all of this STARTED. similarly, the lack of interaction between magic & class is like... craaazy to me.

these structures are present throughout the entirety of each game, it should feel different in each location. it just feels clumsy to both want to address the social issues of slavery, etc. present in thedas, and ALSO flatten out the differences between city elves & dalish, not emphasize it more especially with an elven origin... like wdym. wdym. that one of the biggest mentions of it with an elven rook is the scroll lore where rook goes "it's about time someone acknowledged what my people did..." about some guy who praised the elves. a shadow dragon elf rook will have been living with a very specific systemic structure of oppression for their entire life. WHY isn't that here. the story structure I'm having a good time with, the characters I'm having a good time with, but goddd it could have been so much deeper if it had actually incorporated some of the complexity & nuance of these social structures in thedas. you look silly trying to both include these themes of shadow dragons breaking slavery and ALSO pussyfooting around The Origins Of How We Got Here. that's not even getting into MAGIC, and how being a MAGE should mean something different in different places. like. whahrhrrhrhrhrr.

[quirkwall]

Sometimes Davrin looks at my Rook with such love and compassion in his eyes (the two of them got stupid close stupid quickly), that I forget he wasn't the dating sim romance route this time around.

[wepepe-draws]

Quick sketch of my Hero of Ferelden, Mandala. He’s my Inquisitor little brother.

Just like his sister, he falls for an apostate 🤭

[ghost-bard]

I feel like every time i hear about solavellan its talking about like “oh when they reunite and solas and ooooo” or like. Something angsty like one of them dying or something.

Anyone elses lavellan wanna just kill him like straight up

And i dont mean this in a hating solas way (irl) but at least in my lavellans case they went through hell and back in inquisition, and finding out solas wants to tear down the veil, effectively destroying the world as they know it, was the final straw. As in they were barely keeping it together before, and this caused them to spiral. Like a mental break happened. And that manifested in a very uh. Violent and hunting down solas at all costs kinda way.

[lelianasbong]

horrifying, actually, that cyrion's response to his lesbian daughter begging not to be forced into an arranged marriage with a man is "unmarried you're a child forever :)" and "but grandchildren :("

it's such a parent response but [motions to years of repression and trauma]

[andielienartspace]

A young boy from Tevinter

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