#it came from me having gotten into DA and specifically DA2 right when i was getting more politically aware

[rebelrevolutionary]

Are you the person who made antifa/anarchist modern AU Anders art like 5 years ago? Something about the way you used to draw noses seems familiar. If you are I just want you to know that those were my favorite pieces of Anders art. It was just so self indulgent for me and I'd kill to see them again :D

FGHNGFHHJFHFGHD YEAH IT WAS ME. i posted them on my main cause i didnt have this sideblog yet, but p soon afterwards i created this blog so thats why theyre not on here fghfhgfhg i was just a little baby DA fan back then 😭

you know what? ill just add them all here in this post for you, my fellow self-indulgent anarchist anders enjoyer

[tozettastone]

who are your da game protags / what are they like?

Oh I like to replay with different protagonists...

I admit my origins characters became kind of a wash? I didn't find the role-playing aspect of that game very compelling. But one of them at least: I had an Elissa Cousland with a two handed sword because there was some specific voice that didn't occur for the other backgrounds...? and I liked listening to her scream when the darkspawn popped out. She killed Cauthrien directly getting out of the estate (this was the hardest fight for me in the game because I had poor AOE but I like to think Elissa is just an ambulatory battering ram), and bullied Alistair into performing the rite with Morrigan. She came thiiiis close to not recruiting Nathaniel due to how his dad organised the murder of her whole family.

I'll put in a read more here to save your dash.

I did do a friendly/diplomatic/painfully earnest Hawke, though, because purple Hawke is very smug. It can be harder to raise points with some characters (Varric. It's Varric.) but also you don't have to put up with purple Hawke so. Pros and cons. I like to think of Marian as a hurt and resigned idealist who, unfortunately for her, feels very deeply. Romanced Isabela, and in my personal and permanent headcanon ran away with her to the sea. Kirkwall was a place where she was "trying to steer a sinking ship," but that really doesn't change the impact of the city on her! Being pirate scum is a hard life, too, but it's on a smaller scale, and Isabela makes, like, 89% of all difficult choices. Marian gets to switch her brain off and just do what she's told most of the time, nowadays. (I suspect this annoys Isabela, who is very interested in freedom and self-determination, but if nothing else it pays dividends when the ship gets attacked and Hawke is, like, right there, going from 0 to 100 on the murder scale in 0.2 seconds. And maybe Hawke will recover some, in a few years.)

I think this characterisation also makes sense with how protective Varric is over her in DA2 and DA:I. No, you can't talk to Marian. She's busy. Retired. Busy. Retired and busy!

DA:I... I have replayed DA:I with a lot of different characters, because it isn't the same six maps on repeat until i lose my mind, so this is ironically harder to answer. Initially, though, I went with playing a kossith/qunari and got sad when The Iron Bull was still way bigger. Why you gotta do me dirty like that, Bioware? Do you think players pick this race so they can NOT be the biggest character in every room? ;—;

But I liked playing a big horned bastard who turned out to be a mage instead of the more obvious big character-big sword dynamic. Unexpected. Also, should have gotten you a +2 on beating assailants with your staff or something. C'mon, she's like 8 feet tall, you know she hits like a freight train.

The first playthrough, I did a Sera romance! and while the duel in the Josie romance is also excellent, I basically have to roll a male character to avoid tripping and falling into a Sera romance now RIP. If I could write her voice (I cannot) I'd write Sera fic, she's so cute and, like... grating in interesting ways? And deceptively complex? The criminology grad urge to dissect her.

[a-friend-of-red-jenny]

i think an indication of the light (i.e. the talented writers.......) leaving the da series is that like origins is, in a lot of ways, a type of game i’m not usually into. i hate the way everything looks, i hate a lot of the mechanics, i have adhd and the idea of reading all that warden dialogue makes me want to take a nap and usually would really break illusion for me but i loved the game and i got so attached to my surana...i played through it twice with her to explore different options and romance leliana and zevran, and then when i got it on pc i made the same character, because i couldn’t think of playing it without her tbh, and modded the game to romance morrigan like i’d always dreamed of lmao. bioware made me create and live through this character and go through an expirience that for me, always culminated in a dramatic, fitting, emotional sacrifice. i am still touched by the story of my surana, who finally went out into the world and really got to know it and make friends in it for a short time, and then ultimately made the decision to die protecting it. nowadays i dont remember like..anything abt it except for the characters, but thats msotly because it got way overshadowed in my heart by 2

dragon age 2 is a rushed and broken piece of shti with half its story missing. i’ve probably played it all the way through about 9 or 10 times?? i made a bunch of different characters this time because i wanted to explore all the options (in a game where you explore the same caves 800 times and have the same argument through the entire storyline lol). i cared more about that game than i maybe ever have about a game? it made me love the series, somehow, even though i hated so much stuff about the da world bc its boring as hell tbh, because of the life in the characters. i romanced them all at least twice. i did everything i could other than side with the templars, and i like tried, multiple times, but i couldnt. the game made me feel strongly enough about it that i couldn’t bring myself to /pretend/ to agree with a socio-political stance in the game world because it went too strongly against my morals. a lot of the ‘choices’ you make in biowares are illusions of choice that mean nothing, but in da2 i feel like they were the best at both 1)hiding that, and 2)making some choices matter if only because YOU know what YOU did, even if it doesn’t effect anything.

and the kicker is like, this is dorky as hell lol but in my mind’s eye i picture my surana in a relationship with zevran, leliana, and morrigan, because they were all characters i got invested in and stuck with me and i feel they made an impression on the character i created and put into the story to an extent that it would feel wrong picturing that character without any of them. she’s best friends with sten. she wishes her and wynne could get along better, as fellow mages. she...wishes the best for alistair. hawke is the same deal; the four og romances were each affecting and important enough to me that i end up deciding ‘my hawke’ is just dating everyone lol. i like all the characters too much to choose. i’ve thought so so so much about the hawke i finally settled on. about her relationships with her family and their past, things she feels guilty about, how she handles and expresses that guilt, how she feels deep down about every important character and plot point.

when i first got inquisition it was the most hyped i’d ever gotten about something. i would gush at my brother about the lore of the world for literal actual hours at a time in the months before the game came out. i borrowed money to buy it the second it came out. I played through the whole thing, like, 99% completion, the only achievements i was missing were ones that required a second play through or specific story choices i didn’t know about. I freaked out at my friends not to spoil anything because they’d finished the game before I’d gotten to the winter palace. I never finished a second playthrough. I started several other characters but I know on a few of them i never even got to the fight at haven (or past the pride demon, but that was as a mage on expert mode which i’m pretty sure is actually just not possible so rip i guess) I don’t really have a ‘canon’ inquisitor? I don’t really feel anything about the one I finished the game with. Even as excited as I was I spent the whole game annoyed that the inquisitor didn’t seem to have personality at all, let alone the choice of a personality that you could make with your warden or with hawke. I romanced sera.....and I actually felt bad about myself because of how they wrote everyone else to treat her. It actually made me feel unwanted and wrong as a young lesbian. I cried when sera was confirmed pre-release as a for sure, specifically Lesbian love interest. I loved her before the game even came out. It made me feel accepted in a time and place where I very actively was not, and when I was struggling, within finding myself as a Gay Youth in general, with the idea that being a lesbian, specifically, was a bad thing that I should choose not to be in lieu of a better, more progressive form of Gay. Cue a proud and unapologetic lesbian character, the first in the series, that everyone fucking hates and that you can kick out of the game at any time with little consequence. With a romantic story line that seemed like an afterthought, and to have less care and attention put into it than two straight options that actually WERE afterthoughts, because they weren’t even going to be in the game until mid-development. A lesbian with an opening quest for her romance arc that is basically just you running around to every other companion and listening to them list everything they hate about her, at worst telling you you’re making a mistake in associating with her bc shes stupid and disgusting and at best giving an obvious “well....whatever you think is best....hope that works out for you..........OUO;;;.....” That quest, if you keep romancing her, culminates in what is supposed to be both of you deciding “fuck what all of society thinks, we’re all we need” because, lesbians, right? thats the lesbian narrative? except homophobia doesnt exist in this world so we had to make everyone hate sera Herself in order to fit it in and that doesnt have any implications at all. and then you have sex; sera’s very sexual, because,,,,,,,,,,not because men think lesbians are hot umm........its because........uhhh........its empowerment!!! but i digress like i love sera despite bioware lol. and i tried to spend time daydreaming and fleshing out my inquisitor and her and their relationship and lives with each other and shit but all the thinking i did on it was forced. unlike my surana and my hawke, my inquisitor isn’t poly w/ everyone because i couldn’t bare to choose between characters i loved. i didn’t even romance most of them. i don’t even have a specific character in mind as ‘my’ inquisitor. the characters i liked the most, that felt the most well-written and fleshed out, were established characters from pre-existing da content. and the game even fucked up my hawke that i cared about and loved because they wanted to capitalize on how much people love hawke, and love Their hawke, but put in a weird hawke-puppet that had none of Any of the personalities you could give them, and that just said dull bullshit about how theyve seen what the corruption of blood magic can do, etc. etc. etc. like.....................................the magic is gone and their left with good characters they don’t know how to write and i mostly boring world with some interesting aspects they decide never to touch on.