#realising I have more headcanons probably for my warden than for hawke for some reason

[mogwaei]

Mogwaei, tis the anon obsessed with Ouroboros return. Needed to pause and run a lap around my house!! I wish to kiss your brain for the Fade scenes (maker I love Hawke and Alistair and would love to know more about their canons for you) I’m so excited to keep reading I needed a pause and fangirl a moment🫡

AHHAHA I LOVE YOU ANON

I'll put some aimless thoughts beneath the cut for you <3

Ngl I think writing Fade scenes is where my strength lies. I certainly have the most fun writing those above anything else. The possibilities are endless! 😌✨

Lemme seee uhmmm my Hawke is a bastard and she knows it. She's a horrible person and will do just about anything to skirt responsibility. She's largely self-serving. This attitude (and her pettiness) is how she ended up as the last remaining Hawke. After DA2, I think she realises just how isolated she has become and decides to keep digging - i.e. figure out how deep this shit goes (the idol, red lyrium, etc) because if there's redemption to be found for her, it's finding answers. If really pressed, she might confess something like "I'm doing this for those I hurt", but in reality, she's doing it mostly for her and Varric.

And Varric is really the only one she cares about and loves deeply. I hint at them having a romance here and there throughout the fic...they keep it hidden but they're definitely secretly married LOL. Hawke's other love is magic. And blood magic.

As for Alistair...?? I'm not sure what to say here! His relationship with Novferen was not a romantic one, though she did lead him on for a while because she's a horrible person and thought to teach him some kind of fucked up lesson. If you think my Hawke is terrible at all, Nov had no restraints like family or friends to think of. Power hungry, manipulative, and at the beginning she was often cruel for the fun of it. Her true love is Morrigan and if there's any light to be found within my wretched Warden, it's thanks to her. Except, I think every companion eventually found a little give with Novferen, but MAN did they have to weather a storm to get there. Leliana has a little dialogue about her in chapter 148.

But ALISTAIR, RIGHT. Nov would have grown to tolerate him. She kept him off the throne because she was pissed she couldn't take it (as a dalish mage, not a chance shhh i know it's breaking canon). If she could have put a nug on the throne instead of anyone else, she would have. Or let Ferelden burn because she wanted the throne. Right, ALISTAIR: she had no patience for his 'naivete' and he despised her cruelty toward everyone they met. This caused the others in the crew to sort of lean on each other on occasion out of emotional-survival...and I like to think they really really wanted to weather Novferen out of spite. He and Leliana fought back at her with kindness and it did eventually work. To an extent. Nov's another one of my ocs who hates "hope", if that adds any more shape to the weird picture I'm trying to paint.

anyway...I guess that's something to chew on lol

[agendratum]

okay so i just spent a really long time looking though all my old notebooks in order to find my notes on coming up with names for my dragon age characters, because i thought that remembering the logic i used for them might help me come up with a rook's name that would be more natural for my world state. and in the process i discovered several things:

a. it is NOT easy to find something specific like that in my notebooks. i kind of remembered how the page where the names were written on looked (i was wrong), but i didn't remember the exact year. and for context i have been leading some kind of a diary/journal since literally the day i learnt how to write. and i still have all of them. yes, after high school diaries mostly transformed into bullet journals, and after i dropped out those transformed into notebooks for anything and everything with no system other than dates, but i never stopped actually having a notebook. which is also where most of my creative drafts are

b. i very rarely wrote years on my notebooks. dates always. years - FOR SOME REASON NOT

c. i have two places where i keep my journals, apparently. and i didn't sort them chronologically very well

d. there are A LOT of notes on some creative ideas i had in the past that i have no idea what they mean now at all. what if i was cooking back then......

this is where i slowly started to find my da notes, thank god. read more to spare your dashes, but by god i'm noting my discoveries down

so first of all i discovered, which is something i forgot about, that i was trying to come up with a full name for ruth, my warden. because at some point i thought that ruth, the name i originally came up with, didn't sound very elven, so it had to be a nickname for an actual full name

well, i didn't exactly come up with ruth. i guess it wasn't long after i read fried green tomatoes, and when the game asked me for a name, i probably looked back at my bookshelf, thought, HEY the old time lesbians book! and named my warden after one of them lesbians from the book

so my notes on her full name are....

first of all, i looked at this and was like, what was the fucking reference. i had no idea. didn't feel like some dragon age inspired elven language, but i filed this for later research, cause i still haven't found others' names

second of all, i don't know how i feel about this "final" full name. not surprised i forgot i even had this thought process. but let's just say this is non canon. and besides, considering she's trans, that would make even more sense that her name is just ruth. that is her name that she chose and it doesn't matter much if she had any other names before that. that is all left behind, if not in her clan's memory, than in that cursed mirror

moving on i found the pages where i was making my hawke's name

so i just, while writing this, realised what happened. i think back then i was still mad you can only play as a human in da2 (listen i was yet to find out da2 is one of the best games ever made) so i was trying to headcanon my hawke as a half elf and make him a name that would reference his "elven" name. i don't think it makes any sense, there is not a single elf in amell's family (who i learnt a lot about today, while scrolling da wiki again). but yeah, his elven name was tariam? and that in human was tarjei

i will decree this also non canon. he's just tarjei, it's fine.

then i found the notes on my first, now also non canon, inquisitor, lavellan, who things didn't work out with

i do think corriro is a fun name tho, i'm happy with it

but once again, i used the same mysterious reference for elven names. what the fuck is this. anyway, i tried googling what i might have looked for back then, and i think i found exactly that. it was a pikabu (russian reddit basically) post from 10 years ago with a guide on how to make elven names, where op gave a link to their source, which was a post from 2010 made on one of them text roleplaying forums that i used to love so much (i mean i never rped on this one specifically but still the nostalgia)

links for my personal peace of mind:

pikabu post - https://pikabu.ru/story/yelfiyskie_imena_mozhet_komu_interesno_budet_1690760

rp forum - http://elfs.f-rpg.me/viewtopic.php?id=6

still no actual source given to what elven language this all is referencing. tolkien maybe?? idk, but not dragon age's elven that is for sure

and then i found one little note from january 2019, when my canon inquisitor, kehaar, was born, that just listed all my canon names again: ruth, tarjei, kehaar. with no notes on how kehaar's name was made. thanks me

overall, idk if this will help me come up with rook's name. especially since rook would be growing up in rivain, not in ferelden, and not with dalish elves. BUT fun journey

i need to sort my belongings oh my god