#ostagar ylva's soooo funny to me

[vigilskept]

Ooh I love this ask game so much, I love yapping about my Wardens and hearing about everyone else's, so have a couple of questions from me (or skip/ignore them if they aren't fun for your kids)

What is the Warden's name? Does it have a meaning behind it? How do they feel about their name?

How would you describe the Warden's personality before and after the prologue? Did it change much or did they remain the same?

1. What is the Warden's name? Does it have a meaning behind it? How do they feel about their name?

isaac & chaya are both names passed down in the family. isaac's named after his paternal great-grandfather & chaya's named after her aunt (adaia's sister). neither have particularly strong feelings about their names, but the convention of passing down family names is about to get much heavier connotations in the next generation with chaya and nelaros' kids (adaia & isa...... ough)

roshan's name is a bastardisation of revasan (lit. the place where freedom dwells) that's more common in the dialect of his mother's clan. she's the one who named him, before leaving him in ashalle's care shortly after his birth. he only even found out his mom was from a different clan during the last arlathven when he met his aunts and uncles, so it's a bit... complicated.

salin's full name, shiva'nasalin, comes from shivanas (dedication to duty) and enasalin (victory). it's a long name and a bit weighty. to her it represents her responsibilities as the keeper's second, though duty starts to take on a different meaning after the blight. if she's shortening it she vastly prefers salin to shiv (did NOT like that daveth was trying to make it sound more shem-y)

diya's named after her great-grandma (mom's side!) it's a pretty unusual name in ferelden, but that's bc her parents migrated down there from seheron :) "diya" is a name that's native to seheron, while her surname surana comes from the northern dalish dialect's form of "sulahn" -> to sing. her name's one of the only things she has left that ties her back to her heritage, so it's probably the one thing she would never try to scrub away from her past!

gavin, qadir & ylva are also family names. gavin's named after a maternal uncle, qadir after his (nevarran!) paternal grandfather & ylva after an ancestor in house aeducan who the deshyrs confirmed as regent for her son 9 years in a row (which could mean nothing)

2. How would you describe the Warden's personality before and after the prologue? Did it change much or did they remain the same?

i could go on forever, so i'll just talk about the ones who go through the biggest changes over the course of the prologue: roshan, salin, gavin & ylva. the others change a lot throughout the blight but these 4 get hit the hardest by the events of their respective origin.

for roshan & salin the events at the elven ruins are brutal because they lose tamlen then their clan. it's loss piled on loss, and i think they both feel the clan's refusal to keep looking for tamlen as a personal betrayal. for roshan because he can feel that tamlen's still out there, but no one wants to listen. for salin because she's dedicated her whole damn life to this clan and done everything to be a good second to her keeper, and she's just casting aside the lot of them like they're dead weight.

by the time they reach ostagar, roshan feels sick with guilt and lonely and angry. salin's trying to cover her grief by holding even more tightly to her rage. they are both in a very bad place.

gavin's in a similar place, though his anger's directed at duncan rather than at his family. he's been dragged out of highever kicking or screaming more or less, and when he does make it to ostagar no one will let him seek out fergus. he's told he has to wait until after the battle. it's 180 in character motivations, because he starts off bitter towards his father for keeping him away from ostagar (bc what if he accidentally reveals himself as an apostate!) only to reach ostagar and not give a damn about the blight at all.

you might expect ylva to be feeling similarly, but fortunately she's actually insane :) she does feel a little pity for trian, though in the end she knows she would've had to kill him herself if he couldn't manage to bow out on his own. still, getting killed by some duster their little brother paid off is just undignified...

mostly she's thinking about how to leverage her experience fighting darkpawn to help her advance through the ranks. she's not giving up on the crown, not by a long shot, but dwarven politics is a long game and she knows her interests are best served by doing some serious damage to the darkspawn up here. this also means that for the first time in her life she's showing an interest in the surfacer politics. it's a major shift from orzammar & she feels like she's playing catch-up

warden/hof questions