#i cant think of any ancestors ie having any

[14t3-to-th3-p4rty]

noe that i think about it.. is there any precedent of trolls growing facial hair? like at all?

[confusedlucifer]

sitting on more thoughts about Veilguard so spoilers under the cut

now a few days after beating it i keep coming back to the main issue i have with this game, in terms of missed potential. the thing about Veilguard isnt that there isnt mature writing, its just that its SO inconsistent. sometimes even inconsistent with its own lore, but primarily inconsistent with what the characters talk about vs what you actually experience in game. you can have really interesting discussions with Neve about the corrupt heart of Tevinter, slavery, all of it but you dont really see any of it. you only get a very filtered view of Dock Town, where yes there are huge class differences on display but not even a smidge of the ever present slavery and opression of other races by Tevinter Magisterium. some of it is brushed off in dialogue as war propaganda, but when you have a faction that is supposedly a resistance against slavery and all of these old practices, and you dont actually get to see what they are fighting against its just. so odd. (Crows are a whole other issue but at least with them you get a real sense of what they are fighting against with the occupation). Bellara's quest is genuinely really touching and i think brings some great writing and performances from her VA - her wrestling with the feelings around her gods/ancestors turning out to be violent, genocidal maniacs who will eradicate even her own people if it means securing their empire and the fact that her religion and culture was based on worshipping them and their ancestral land that was built on this blood. that is a really rich topic to dig into in 2024. not to mention her brother turning out to be a MAGA brainwashed cultist. this is a level of writing that dragon age has rarely even tried to touch as a series i feel, and yet. we don't actually get to see/hear the Dalish culture wrestle with this at large, not even in Codex (unless i missed something). similar again with hearing about Kal Sharok but not really getting to see anything - weird or out of the ordinary about the dwarves and no reaction from Orzammar.

there's more in general but its really just. boggles the mind, like what happened? why are the game assets so different from what the characters talk about? even if there wasnt time to add more in game, why wasn't there more in the Codex? and when the game utilizes the Missives, the characters kinda forget about it (ie Inquisitor writing about the mayhem ongoing in the South vs Harding just popping in for hiking here and there and never mentioning being worried about her family or anything).

for my money i cant say the game is bad on all fronts, and i cant say its great but it keeps just kinda wrestling with itself with these moments of brilliance under the sanded down edges, its just frustrating and a little sad. i keep thinking of it like the repeated caves and giant spiders of dragon age 2, where in my mind i salvage the writing and my favorite characters out of the absolute mess that the game is technically, except its me saving my favorite moments of Veilguard and readjusting the game world in my brain to be more in line with what the characters actually talk about.

[himbopunk]

okay so i am brainstorming for dragon age au yuvan lore right so

im thinking the heirloom that causes the abilities are a depiction of symbols of falon'din and dirthamen, specifically an owl (or a cloaked figure stylized like an owl) and the spindly pointy parts of a varterral clutching around it. falon'din has this whole thing about travelling beyond the veil where others cant follow and then theres the story about dirthamen going to find him, also falon'dins symbols get attached to lusacan, old tevinter dragon god of night which would carry some similar symbolism for the abilities attached for yuvans ancestors who wouldve lived in tevinter

i think the ability theyd gain from it is like. an echo of whatever that original ability falon'din had might've been. like, we've seen the ways that certain stories about elgar'nan and ghilan'nain were true just in that theyre like insane abilities beyond the scope of any current magic. i imagine like, falon'din's ability to travel some place Beyond what others could percieve had some truth to it, especially since this is before the veil so like what is this Other Place that hes able to occupy? idk.

anyways i think logistically it translates to like a shadowstep type thing, i feel like im cheesing it a bit by just reflavoring some of yuvans original powers but like it works thematically? and elgar'nan has light powers so it makes sense that theres shadow powers around somewhere. and its one of those powers that seems like, regular mage bullshit to anyone unfamiliar w magic but to those who are its like, okay this isnt the fadestep thing or whatever, and this isnt necromancer magic ive seen before, this is something else, youre going Somewhere Else how the hell are you doing that

(also i think it would also be cool if this was an ability originally given to some like, old elven assassin type group during the elven empires war with old tevinter, leans into how yuvan is kind of rogue-y despite being a mage. kind of funny bc its now remiding me of taash's line to lucanis about becoming invisible to a dragon by standing in its shadow or w/e and the idea that this could have actually been something some type of assassin could have done like millenia ago is pretty fun.)

(also since yuvan hung out around skyhold for a bit at like 19ish and almost joined the chargers theres the option for solas to have recognize this is some falon'din magic shit n quietly be like what the hell. yuvan would hate this old man asking him questions though. whats it to you weirdo i dont know you)

ANYWAYS on the yuvan end of things. not sure how the amulet got into his ancestors hands but its at this point a family heirloom given to the chosen son when they come of age (given they are skilled at magic). and though Anyone can be a caster, yuvans family is originally from tevinter which seems to still carry a lot of good old fashioned patriarchal ideas so i think it makes sense that even women in the family skilled in magic would get skipped over (its a Tradition thing its nothing against them) + if the inheritor has no sons then presumably he'd give it to one of his nephews or something

i think their ancestors had activated it with a bit of blood magic to access the full abilities, which then compiled the ability further when the previous user dies, keeping a piece of each user within it idfk. regardless that had long since fallen out of practice (its been like. hundreds of years probably?) and honestly even proximity to the artifact ie whoever had inherited it has some type of further skill in like entropy type magics than even well-studied mages in that field. (perhaps why they moved to nevarra?)

anyways. yuvan has a bunch of brothers, even more than he realizes on account of his father having an affair, and i think his father is considering whether he wants to give the heirloom to one of his sons with the other woman and hides it somewhere. he fights with yuvans mom about this a lot. at some point, being a little shit 12 yr old that he is at this point, yuvan finds and steals the amulet out of frustration with his dad being The Worst all the time. but when hes stashing it away, he cuts his hand on it which basically Activates it and bestows upon him the Whole of the original shadow+entropy abilities. which he now has to both learn to control and hide on top of all the other risks of being a barely trained young mage (i like to imagine he gets cut on one of the varterral limbs, which then clutch around the owl cameo part of the amulet once its activated)

so then you get into the family drama angle. his dad realizes the amulet is missing, it starts a whole fight that results in the outing of his secret second family, and the stress causes yuvan to lash out with the new magic he was struggling to hide, which are obviously stronger than his dads or brothers because he did accidental blood magic to unlock something much older than they did by just being around it. (the outing of yuvans powers around the family secret is always adjacent to him being outed as a trans man, because the horrors are gender affirming. but in this case the horrors had nothing to do with it, he stumbled into the magic likely how he stumbled into the realization of who he was, and was inevitably punished for both)

anyways obviously his family splinters because as upset as everyone is about the whole amulet thing, short of killing yuvan they cant Detach him from it, and more importantly was the reveal of his dads fuckery. yuvan is stuck w his dad, moving in with the Other Family. his dads not. accepting by any means and openly blames him for what happened to the family. he literally only keeps him around because again, cant detach him from the heirloom and he refuses to let the amulet back out of his sight after all this. but after all this he basically outright refuses to train him, not-so-secretly hoping that yuvan will fall victim to a demon and become an abomination and has to be killed, allowing his father to then give the amulet to one of his "real" sons. yuvan instead trains in secret, where he meets mav (who can help a bit due to mourn watch training but only so much cuz this is still a relatively unknown form of magic). ofc his dad gets worse over time, potentially outright threatens his life?? so yuvan bails altogether out of nevarra entirely to make sure hes as far from his family as possible