#rather than set ages

[meirimerens]

damn i'd love to read them alleged VAs' papers too... don't know what else beyond the ages would be on here but i'd love to take a peep...

[vaguely-concerned]

This might be due to the fact that on my first playthrough I ended up creating a Rook more emotionally guarded than any of the companions except Minrathous-route Lucanis and perhaps Neve, so I was primed to look for it, but I never got the sense that the companions don’t care for Rook (the thought never even occurred to me until I saw other people post about it) — to me it seems much more like it’s Rook who keeps the last bit of distance, Rook who pulls away when the companions try to extend their care or worry too directly, who keeps themselves slightly apart. (Rook who is so full of grief they cannot know as grief and thus process that there’s no room inside them to let anything else all the way in, perhaps.) They deflect and flinch back when someone gets too close or approaches them too overtly about their feelings — especially when it brushes up against the theme of grief. They can offer care to all the companions who are grieving, come along to any number of funerals as emotional support, but the moment someone turns that towards them they shut that shit down Immediately, like when Taash almost gives the whole game away with ‘Like you’d know? You act like you haven’t lost anyone!’ and Rook just blandly responds ‘We’re talking about you’ and doesn’t engage. But they can also admit that they struggle with accepting compliments, or knowing what to say, or having confidence in themselves without Varric’s help.

Despite all their determination and even in their most stoic no-nonsense incarnation, Rook is awkward, with the struggles that entails. Someone who is eager and happy to be the helper wherever they can, and helplessly unequipped to know how to be the helpee, as it were. It’s not that the companions don’t return Rook’s attachment to them, there’s MUCH more of a ‘okay so what are the ways you will allow me to be good to you??’ desperation of care vibe behind all their invitations to conversations and hangouts together, to my mind. They bring Rook to their favourite places and share the things they love with them, they ask to spend time together (many times just to have their company, not because they have a problem they need help with! Sometimes the problem arises anyway b/c video game quest narrative of course), they bring them out for some direly needed grass touching, they introduce them to their families. Everyone is clearly getting the sense that Rook does Not want to talk about Varric especially (this is in fact what Harding says in banter, if she’s still alive after the reveal :’( ), but they are absolutely SCRAMBLING to find ways to show that they’re there for them even so. AND from the companions’ perspective, with the situation as they have the means to understand it, accepting that Rook isn’t ready to have that conversation and backing off is also a kind thing to do. (tl;dr: To Me Rook is that weirdly socialized friend who is a great hang once they’re actually there but you have to directly invite them or they don’t quite know how to initiate the contact themselves lol) 

Just as a crushing sense of responsibility for their family is a trait that is built into Hawke no matter how you play them or how you make them respond to that, I feel like Rook — however helpful and earnest, warm, charming, jocular, stoic or straightforward they seem at a surface glance — is always someone who struggles deeply with connecting to themselves and other people. (Emotional Intimacy, the Final Frontier.) As, indeed, is the case with all of the Veilguard companions too! It’s clearly a deliberate theme. These are all lonely people struggling with their sense of identity and belonging in some sort of way. AND having, working on and eventually starting to overcome these difficulties also makes Rook a direct foil for Solas, who doesn’t learn that lesson unless you corner him at the end of the world to force feed him his medicine lmao. They don’t manage to break out of the regret prison under their own steam, it’s because even struggling and grieving they have managed to create mutual bonds with other people who show up for them in turn now — and with all the protective walls of denial around what happened to Varric crumbling and making them less of a stranger to themselves, Rook is finally able to let them. An outcome Solas seemingly didn’t even consider to guard against, because he’s become that deeply entrenched in his loneliness, the utter isolation of the self — he can no longer truly imagine an alternative. (It’s not that he can’t form these bonds, obviously, it’s that he resolutely refuses to value them. Whether it’s because he feels like he doesn’t deserve it or out of a need for control or the martyr complex where he must sacrifice everything he loves on the sacrificial pyre of fixing his mistakes, all of the above and more, the result is the same. Mind!Varric, who I think is mostly Solas speaking, even calls this out directly. So yet again a situation where he has some self awareness about it and it doesn’t help At All haha. Solas falls to the temptation of making people into tools again and again and again, no matter how many times it comes back to bite him in the ass and the eternal solitude it traps him in.) 

And that deep deep loneliness… There but for the grace of… well the theological state of thedas being what it is right now, let’s just go with the grace of Something, Presumably go you as well, Rook. The same capacity/tendency to pull away from connection clearly lives in them as well in some form (again, for whatever reason and with whatever motivations and instincts behind it for any individual Rook). Solas and Rook coming together to create a blood magic paper doll of the mind Varric in response to acute loss and loneliness is one of the most deep , deeply fucked up and invasive acts of intimacy I’ve ever contemplated. I don’t think that’s accidental, there’s something There’s Something Wrong With You (there’s something wrong with you that’s also wrong with me (derogatory)) here that resonates no matter how both parties would hate to hear it. (A fitting legacy for Varric and his wild ‘I made my best friend into a story because it’s the only way I know how to love with this desperation of sincerity’ brain to leave in the narrative, methinks. I feel he’d appreciate it on a craft level, if nothing else.)

If you read through all of Rook’s potential backstories, one of the common threads through all of them, along with a certain maverick ‘I’ll do whatever it takes’ streak, is a sense of profound alienation. They did something or have some sort of quality that made it hard for them to fit in with the group they’re from, causing a conflict that cuts them off from parts of their identity as it’s been up until now. All of which also adds to how important Varric is to them — he was clearly able to break/see through some of that and be closer with them, even in the relatively short time they spent together. No matter what else goes to shit, they can trust that a) Varric sees them, b) he genuinely likes them and believes in them not despite who they are, but for it, and c) he’s got their back, we’re in this together kid. And then he is gone, and it takes them the whole game to be able to bring themselves to accept that and know themselves again, be able to let new relationships in fully. The very understandable ‘the last time I let someone in, they got stabbed before my eyes and the world ended’ flinch away, even if they’re not consciously aware that’s what it is. Anyway I love Rook. So much space to play around in here as to WHY they might feel or react like this, even when the framework is more defined.

[softbabyfeferi]

hhi do u lske erisolkat if uve made stuff of them already thbenSORRY i havent checked but umm cdoul u make agere hcs of the three of them if u hvaent already heh thankyou :-)

hihi you have no clue how excited i am about this req my main is literally @erisolkat omg

erisolkat agere hcs!!

🦈 kitkat n sollux switch between being cgs and littles but eridan is just a little. when kar n sol regress at the same time he freaks out or he regresses as well and its like a playdate

🐝 karkat loses all his volume control when he regresses and eridan will cry at anything then karkat will cry because eridan is crying and sollux isnt the best at comforting them so he scrambles for whatever he can do to help lol

🦀 its not super kiddo friendly but karkat still loves loves loves watching romcoms when hes little. so sol and eridan just patiently watch them with him. and he doesn't have his filter up so he jus watches happily rather than getting mad

🦈 sollux doesn't regress nearly as much as the other two, he doesn't let himself, but sometimes when he gets really stressed he does get little

🐝 eridan can be anywhere between 1 sweep and 3 sweeps, karkat tends to end up from 2 sweeps to 3 and a half sweeps, and sollux tends to regress to 3 and a half to 4 and a half sweeps (though a couple times hes been Really Stressed and got super little like 2 sweeps. made karkat n eridan promise not to mention it ever)

🦀 sollux's favorite activity when he's little tends to be troll minecraft. he likes to make those bee houses i dont remember what theyre called APIARIES. he likes to make big apiaries :]

🦈 they all get very sleepy when regressed. big cuddle piles in the rumpusblock with all of them asleep. the other trolls will walk by and not even notice it cause this happens a lot

🐝 nobody really has the coordination or attention span to make food when even one of them is regressed so they all tend to live off snack foods lol

🦀 plushies yay. its predictable but they have plushies aligned with the emojis i used actually- a crab a bee and a troll blahaj from troll ikea

[amasdoodles]

A Young Elven Mage Within Kinloch Hold circa. 9:29 Dragon Age

or better to say this is a redraw of in the library by auguste toulmouche with my oc surana

[synonymroll648]

headcanon that as sophie ages, she gets more and more off-put by how she still looks twenty at some age past 40. the only wrinkles she has are smile lines and a barely-there crease between her eyebrows that never leaves. no gray hairs. it doesn’t feel like there’s any physical evidence of how much stress aged her too fast.

(maybe she dyes more grays into her hair to feel better about her reflection, the more time passes by. maybe, on bad days, she contours wrinkles into her skin with makeup. maybe the bad days get more frequent as she ages outside the human lifespan. maybe.)

[monabee-draws]

So we're leaving behind class-specific non-combat options? Cool

(Hear me out--)

In DAO and DA2 you only ever really needed a rogue in your party for non-combat access to hidden things like chests (and sometimes even when you had them they couldn't manage it 😮‍💨.) But DAI introduced class-specific tasks for everyone - fixing walkways and barricades for mages, bashing down walls for warriors, and of course, lockpicking for rogues. This meant that for optimal exploration, you need at least 1 of each class in your party. The game knew this: your starting party was balanced around this (Solas/Varric/Cassandra) and you meet a balanced number of extra companions as well. This system works in DAI because you can take any three companions along so long as you maintain the rogue/warrior/mage ratio! It also means you can double-up on a class at your leisure - whether one duplicate of your own, or just any character you always want along. So mage!Inky/Dorian/Cass/Cole works! But so does mage!Inky/Blackwall/Cass/Cole. Etc. Etc.

Having just 2 companions limits you to always choosing characters from the two classes you aren't playing yourself. Mass Effect gets away with it because every level is atomized and you can specifically spec to that encounter (robots? Bring someone with Overload, biotics? Get that Warp.) Open world maps don't work the same way and require a more 'jack of all trades' mentality. This means deprioritising companions of the same class as you🥺 which is honestly a shame. Maybe the combat will encourage more same-class reactions like Mass Effect or allow for cross-class ability building (like ME's mixed classes) to make up for it and give the players more room. Or we all just pick our faves and ignore all the secret rooms instead 😂 we all know no one is keeping Zev around for his abilities with a bobby pin

[whartonists]

One of the several things that are very frustrating about how the Maud storyline played out this season is that, from Maud's perspective, the con she plays makes little sense; Oscar isn't an important enough or wealthy enough target for this to be her last great con before she disappears off into the ether, but without that motivation she fact that she burns the bridge behind her by disappearing means that she won't be able to play New York society again.

Perhaps her plan is to play multiple cities, far enough apart (in distance as well as the timing of the cons) that word hopefully won't spread; perhaps there was a reason she wanted to cash out as it were as soon as possible and latched on to Oscar because he happened to be nearby and wealthy enough. But we get no indication of her motivations, and that is what is so irritating and unfulfilling about this plotline; there is no attention paid to her as a character, rather than a hollow mover of plot, at all.

And this, in turn, makes that whole plot feel rudderless and absurd. The necessity of it is indisputable; it has to happen to precipitate the Ada-Agnes role-reversal at the end of the season, and so I'm not saying Oscar shouldn't have lost the money or even that Maud shouldn't have taken it (though there were plenty of more interesting and historically informed ways that plot could've played out). But the fact of creating a character, especially a female character, who is so transparently a plot device rather than a person the writers spent any time thinking about, is deeply frustrating--especially on this show, which otherwise so reliably treats its female characters like human beings.

[qqchurch]

hearing about the new adashima manga chapter dropping and people cheering and then not even a day later the series as a whole is getting tarred because of implications that its male author is a pedo for "being too obsessed with writing about high school girls", c'mon now 😭😭😭😭

[wheelercore]

Theory with no coherent proof on my part: brenner only visibly ages rapidly when a portal is open.

[mariocki]

Shadows of Fear: Sour Grapes (1.9, Thames, 1971)

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

"What? Uh, eh - eh, no. Nein."

"Habla... usted español?"

"Uh, no hablo. Inglés. English."

"Ich spreche kein Englisch."

"Oh, wonderful. Here we go."

"What d'you think he wants?"

"Feel free to ask."

[vaguely-concerned]

this expression rook makes sometimes where they press their lips together to smile and it's all rueful and fond in a way that looks like it hurts a bit. cry if you agree

[astramachina]

i really coasted by with getting DHTM done in only a couple of months. this one, tho? this one's gonna be The Big One.

[seventh-district]

.

[mccleans]

[doodle17]

How old is everyone in that future AU?

Ehhhh I don't really have set ages for them anymore, but everyone is about 19+ years old. In fact, they're all ranging around 19- late 20s