#ugh its horrific and harrowing help

[ominouspositivity-or-else]

i think one of the most harrowing experiences of trying to unlearn hating your body and trying to figure out how to love and accept yourself as you are is seeing other people around you do the opposite.

for me, it's specifically my little sisters that get to me. i completely understand when my peers struggle. we grew up in the same time, with the same kinds of people raising us.

but my sisters? my little sisters? they're between the ages of fourteen and twelve!!!! You are little, you are perfect, stop thinking about how many calories are in a treat and wondering if it's "worth it"! Stop thinking about being a bigger size! Stop thinking about not wanting to eat too much!! YOU ARE TWELVE!!! YOU ARE FOURTEEN!!!!

And part of it becomes my fault, i feel like, because i know better. i need to do better. if my mom won't do it, if my aunts won't do it, if my grandma and my dad and my brother won't do it, then it's on me, because I KNOW bETTER.

it's all on me, i've been given knowledge and i must use it. but i don't have the right words. never in time.

[hawkepockets]

May be I missed the lore dump but I would like all the context for your de riva (backstory? how they ended up with the crows? how they ended up with varric? feelings on this whole elven gods thing?), please ?

u did not miss anything!! ty for asking ♡ monster of a post below.

BACKSTORY. she 👇

was born in the antiva city circle! her mother, a very devoutly andrastian mage, prayed fervently the whole pregnancy that her baby would be A. a girl and B. a non-mage who wouldn’t have to live like her. specifically she prayed the novena to divine theodosia ii, antivan folk saint of childbirth, on a loop. so the baby was named. get ready. divina theodosia ii novena de la torre. and was a baby boy. and a mage. and taken by the templars to be raised in a different circle tower, at salle.

even before her egg cracked, and despite the other apprentices joking about it and giving her 100 nicknames, she held onto her birth name as the only keepsake from her mother. but to be user friendly, i’m just going to call her rook this whole post.

she wasn’t a great student of magic—plenty of power, but a tendency to overshoot and blow things up in the classroom. she was also incredibly open-hearted, friendly, & gullible even with the templars. it didn’t bode well for her harrowing.

but when she was 15, the mage rebellion erupted, the templars broke from the chantry, and a contingent of loyalist mages decided to flee from salle’s unguarded circle tower and make a run for antiva city, where there might be more safety in numbers against the extremely religious & fearful antivan populace. rook went with them, to stay close to her friends and in the hopes of finding her mother at the antiva city circle.

the guide who was supposed to meet them and arrange the caravan, though, was a crow from house de riva. in exchange for transport and protection, they demanded not just the agreed-upon formari treasures looted from the tower, but also all the apprentices. if the mages refused, they could try life as apostates on the strees of salle with the crows and rogue templar mage hunters after them. they really had no choice. so the apprentices were handed over.

house de riva had recruited an ex-templar, who went by just “ser,” and had a scheme in mind: DIY an early harrowing with ser’s inside knowledge, put the ones who passed through fledgling crow’s training, and boom. they’d have a secret coterie of mages, the only crow mages, to use against the other houses in a play for the higher talon ranks.

without access to circle-grade lyrium or templar executioners, ser devised this test: viago would poison the apprentices, they’d each be locked in a solitary room while the poison took its course, and anyone who lasted four days without succumbing to the poison or the temptation to call for a spirit to help would be “harrowed.”

out of the dozen or so apprentices the de rivas had purchased, 4 passed, including rook, who grit it out thanks to her unwavering trust (totally misplaced) that this was just a test and that viago was too babyfaced and serious to have dosed her with anything really deadly. on the fourth night, viago brought her the antidote and won the total confidence of de riva’s most naïve and good natured mage forever. ugh.

the other three mages took to their reeducation like… crows.. to.. whatever crows take to. trees? and learned stealth, cruelty, and subtle uses of their magic from ser. rook was just not cut out to be an assassin. she was too clumsy, her magic was too loud, and she had a horrific habit of giving people—crows! the crows who bought and poisoned her!—the benefit of the doubt. she followed viago around like a mabari. and if she didn’t get her head in the game, ser was going to kill her.

ser said as much while throwing her out of a training session a year in for still lacking control—she was supposed to be a cunning piece in the crows’ internal game of power, a knight for house de riva, and she was stupid! ser had no use for pawns who couldn’t think more than one step ahead or look around a corner!

it was viago who told rook to get up off the floor, suggested she might be a different chess piece, and arranged for her to start training with imelda de riva, the house’s ageing dueling champion. (the crows are about public theater as much as private violence!)

👇 imelda!

instead of a stealthy assassin, rook trained as a brawler, martial artist, and performer. her job for the crows was stage fighting (with real bloodshed) by day for the entertainment of salle’s people and the furthering of de riva’s political aims, and by night, cleansing crime scenes with gouts of scouring, full force magical fire. raw power and eagerness to help had never been among her limitations.

she’d found her niche and loved the pyrotechnics! and she was even more grateful to her “big brother” viago for helping her become useful to the crows.

unfortunately around this time came her first run-in with lucanis, and the end of the de riva coterie… ¬‿¬

VARRIC.

rook was 25, in treviso as part of viago’s retinue, when she met varric—in the middle of ambushing the antaam prisoner caravan and liberating their captives in a classic, flashy crow display to the delight of civilian onlookers—and the despair of viago, who knew—while rook didn’t—about the larger, joint house operation rook was compromising.

viago told teia he’d already interfered enough on behalf of an overgrown fledgling who’d only ever brought him trouble. teia, catching his drift, suggested rook go with varric to look into his conspiracy theories, and not come back to antiva until the occupation was over and viago’s retinue was home free in salle.

rook was pleased to have a chance to play the good guy, and she liked varric and harding. but she’d lived her entire life in one panopticon or another, taking orders, and she didn’t know how to tell varric, without outing herself as an awful person, that she missed the crows and hated when he gave her choices…

ELVEN GODS.

rook is andrastian, so thinks of the evanuris as basically the same thing that corypheus was said to be: old, blighted mages with delusions of grandeur. solas leans into this to get her trust and hold her interest: the “creators” are just an allegory! the evanuris are flawed, blasphemous mortals! she’s soooo smart for apprehending that! and so on.

she is beside herself at having released them, though. another classic rookie fuckup!!

IF YOU READ THIS FAR THANK YOU AGAAAAAAAIN (◠‿◠✿) here’s some more rook smiles

[cyprith]

I read Gideon the Ninth and I’m conflicted.

I mean, would we really be so excited about that ending if Harrow were a guy?

The novel starts out, Gideon HATES the Ninth House. She hates it for good reason. She is tormented there every. single. day. She is, essentially, a slave. She has no ability to leave the Ninth House. Every time she even makes an ATTEMPT to leave, she is BRUTALLY beaten back down. We can assume she’s been attempting for years now because I think I remember her mentioning she’s up in the double digits of escape attempts. And the person who beats her down and grinds her under heel the most?

Harrow.

Towards the end of the novel, she even says that they’ve been brutally fighting for their entire lives. They’d go at each other frequently, fights that Gideon was whipped for and Harrow was not, regardless of who started it. She remembers one time that Harrow scratched chunks out of her face. This is a person she hates and has hated for--again, I cannot overstate this enough--her entire life.

She only even goes with Harrow in the first place because A. Harrow tricked her, trapped her and literally beat her into submission. and B. Because she realized that she had no other means of escaping the Ninth House--which even Harrow admits is a prison--and figures that she’d rather die somewhere else than die in the Ninth House.

She continues hating and barely tolerating Harrow for probably about 60% of the novel and then she just... decides? that maybe Harrow isn’t awful after all? And that maybe she likes her a little?

Harrow, who beats her into submission to get her way, threatens her FREQUENTLY with murder and the use of her literal corpse as necromancy fodder, who got her WHIPPED and fought with her constantly? Harrow, who beyond considering Gideon as a person for like, .02 of a second once has showed literally no other flicker of redemption? That Harrow? I’m supposed to believe that maybe she’s not that awful after all?

And then, THEN. One of the only people who has ever shown Gideon kindness, who she admittedly both likes AND finds attractive, turns out to be Big Queen Lich and Gideon just... suddenly becomes Harrow’s #1 fangirl?

Gideon was psychologically and physically abused by the Ninth House. She was kept as a slave, with no freedom or agency. Harrow tricked her and then BEAT HER into getting her here. And now, one person who was legit nice to her basically says, “Hey yo, I’mma kill all these other guys but I like you okay. I won’t kill you. Just back off for a minute, lemme get to work.”

And Gideon, who should have NO LOYALTY to anyone in this bar suddenly decides to SACRIFICE HER ENTIRE LIFE so Harrow can become a Queen Lich too and defeat the Queen Lich that was nice to her. And then we suddenly see from Harrow’s POV that she’s like grieving and shit because she really liked Harrow after all and just didn’t realize, what? that WHIPPINGS weren’t how you made friends?

Fucking what? What the fuck?

Harrow was an unrepentant asshole for 92% of the book aside from that one time she went all shifty and made eye contact for like the first ever time and tried to say that maybe she actually needed Gideon’s help after all. But I’m supposed to believe that she’s grieving for the slave she spent a lifetime torturing?

That she’s so broken up that the first thing she does upon waking up to Necromancy Jesus at her bedside is to ask for Gideon back? Really? This little shit?

Nah. I don’t buy it. Yeah, yeah, she had a shitty childhood too or whatever. Fuck that, she was basically a princess. I’m sorry if she didn’t like being rich and in charge. It must have been so hard for her having everyone do whatever she said including--oh yeah, BEATING GIDEON INTO SUBMISSION.

If Harrow was a dude torturing this girl her whole life, I don’t think most people would buy it either. I mean, sure, some 50 Shades people would be into it, but I hope to god at least it wouldn’t be marketed as a “romance” then. Who am I kidding it totally would

Ugh.

It was a well written and engaging book. I think I’m only this upset because I loved Gideon so much as a character, it hurt me for her story arc to end on such a wet fart.

I wanted so badly for her to take the Queen Lich’s offer and just fuck everybody. No, she can’t trust the Queen Lich, but she can’t trust fucking anyone anyway so what would that even matter? Why not just take everything she’d ever wanted and get the hell out? Fuck the Ninth House, fuck all the other houses that let this happen to her and Book 2 Gideon the One and Only can be the next biggest bad and bring the whole universe to its knees.

Anyway, TL;DR: cool motive, still absolutely horrific human being undeserving of personal sacrifice.