#locked tomb levels of the horrors of love. i ship it but in the way that I want to make it sadder and more gutwrenching each time
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just going about my day idly contemplating how some of the ways hawke can interact with a romanced anders are not at all unlike how they interact with leandra (and a bit of carver too, especially with a purple hawke), and then thought about my hawke in the timeline where he romances anders and was hit straight in the face with 'was he ever actually in love, or was he just desperately trying to renegotiate with his mother's ghost in any way he could' and now i need to lie down. this is the power of dragon age 2
#'you don't know my mother' haunting me through the years#dragon age#dragon age 2#hawke#On second thought let's not go to Kirkwall; it is a silly place#there are of course as many ways to do/read that relationship as there are players to interact with it haha and all valid!#but my personal version of handers is sooo fucked up and bad times for everyone involved and I love it haha.#this is a relationship neither of them should have been in and that made everything worse and everyone unhappy in the end#locked tomb levels of the horrors of love. i ship it but in the way that I want to make it sadder and more gutwrenching each time#to be clear this is a very mutual two-way kind of fucked up but I think varric in his loyalty and love would downplay hawke's side of it#for huge swathes of their relationship anders is not in a mental place to be a good partner and the emotional blackmail is Not Okay#(but it's just like how mother used to make it! hawke's soul cries sadly as it reaches for it hungrily)#which is in some ways fair enough no one could accuse him of not warning you ahead of time fjskda#but hawke is messy about it in a way only available to a covert people pleaser who has never had a millisecond of therapy#with some added stuff that my hawke is always acespec in some form and when he gets together with anders...#is the sex something he doesn't particularly care to have or not have but it 'makes anders happy'/he longs to feel wanted *and* needed#and also a way he gets out of ever being *actually* vulnerable (which I think he'd had to be with varric for example if he Went There )#'you want the hawke who's in your head so badly and I kind of wish I were that hawke too. so let's be collaborateurs with that fantasy'#(and then maybe if I do it right every time you'll finally be happy hawke says in his heart looking at this leandra-anders phantom form)#(and echoing stuff in varric's relationship to hawke but I think the important distinction there is that varric -- is a craftsman haha#he KNOWS when he's lying/making up a story he KNOWS the difference between what is and what he wishes the world was#(I think there's some deep longing there to not know; for it to blend together or have the power to change things. but he always knows)#which ironically leaves him in a better position to actually see and understand hawke the person#even as he is creating hawke the literary figure. almost to protect him in some ways? god da2 is so full of STUFF!!! I adore it)#and of course anders gets so disillusioned with hawke's inertia and lack of action (you all but married this man anders!#you should know this about him he's already carrying the whole family and city on his shoulders if you add a gram more he'll collapse!)#and hawke feels so desperately hurt that the promise anders seemed to make that he'd be enough -- that he could fix things for him --#('I'm the one bright light in kirkwall and that apparently doesn't count for shit so I'm just slowly turning to ash for you')#turned out to be untrue. anyway. sad now. imagine them meeting like twenty years on what the fuck could you even say to each other then#(I can't imagine Hawke ever physically hurting anyone he loves so he just tells Anders to leave at the end of DA2. they COULD meet again
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Nona the Ninth Reaction - John 1:20
i honestly hadn’t considered that John would have access to a bunch of other info, like the FTL planning to leave everyone behind, via the politician he’s puppeting around. he’s practically running the government of this unspecified country at this point. i mean i guess it was good practice for everything he’d later end up doing as Emperor
‘I’ve got plans for that arm’ um. what. y'know what i really really don’t want to even know
for a guy who keeps saying he didn’t want to nuke anything he’s reallyyy leaning into the nukes every chance he gets
something i find very interesting is that John possibly also has powers besides necromancy that he’s seemingly glossed over a lot? even though they’re very toothy, he can apparently grow roses, and earlier C— talks about him potentially stabilising the North Glacier like that’s something he could definitely do. i wonder if it is actually possible to use thalergy, the life energy stuff, which really never gets mentioned that much tbh, in a similar way to thanergy?
ok how on earth is ‘Cows exhibit mourning behaviour for other cows’ such a goddamn impactful line. like its a really chilling moment of John confirming that he’s willing to start a nuclear war rather than let the ships leave. and it’s also objectively fucking ridiculous
John’s reflection here on his friends doubting him, and how ‘People don’t forgive, not really’ is very interesting considering his actions at the end of HtN, where he asks Augustine if they can have a ‘fresh slate’ in the wake of him killing Mercy. idk really what i’m trying to say here, but i do wonder how much John really meant what he was offering there
well what with Ianthe, Harrow, and Kiriona, John certainly took M—’s remark about recruiting teenage girls in the next cult to heart
what i’m personally choosing to take away from this chapter is that multitasking is the true villain of the Locked Tomb universe. get some sleep and stop trying to do six things at once kids, or you might just end up nuking the entire earth
‘I can’t Sister. It’s too big’ i’m quite frankly a little disappointed that John didn’t take the opportunity to make a ‘that’s what she said’ joke here
holy crap, the nun shooting herself is certainly a moment. this is really leaning into the eldritch horror of what it would be like to be a human and aware of the Earth literally screaming at you
there’s such a tragic contrast between M— literally begging in her last moments for them not to shoot John vs Mercy being the one to kill him & John killing her so horrifically in return
John’s been essentially levelling up in necromancy as all of these chapters have progressed, but it’s a truly horrifying level of power he displays here. it’s not even the nukes that end up killing a lot of people, because John points out that he was able to just straight up snap the necks of about half of the entire world population
so much about this chapter is just walking the line between absurdist comedy and abject horror, but there is something just so … viscerally disturbing about the mental image of John literally just eating dirt as he consumes the soul of the Earth
THIS is where the Barbie comparison comes in??? this?! John modelled a body for the remains of the soul of the partially-absorbed soul of the earth after BARBIE?!! talk about taking Barbieheimer to a whole new level
‘I drank them in, and it wasn’t enough’ someone better at comedy than me has probably made a very Hungry Caterpillar joke about this chapter
‘You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar’ DUDE. ok i stg i made the Hungry Caterpillar annotation immediately before i read like the next page and saw this
‘I picked you to change [...] I still love you’ well, there’s some form of answer about how John actually got his necromancy in the first place. there’s something so awful about being a human being given powers you just straight up can’t really comprehend by a being so much bigger than you out of love
the message reads ‘THE/TOWER/HAS/REACTIVAT’. at this point i can’t really think of anything else it could say other than ‘reactivated’. and given this is the chapter where John describes himself as becoming God, there’s something very poetic about the chapter heading being John 1:20, in which John the Baptist confesses that he isn’t the Messiah
#lemon natalia reads the locked tomb#the locked tomb#tlt#the locked tomb liveblog#nona the ninth#it took me a good two weeks to realise i'd written corona instead of kiriona
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