i love you foils i love you gothic doubles i love you clones i love you alter egos i love you twins and false identities and shadow selves and reflections and ghosts and eidola and puppets and masks and
bioware really wants me to romance fenris for whatever reason
circle mages and nationality is sooo interesting. you’re from this country. you’ve been stuck inside a circle tower so long that you can’t remember what this country even looks like. you read about your own home in books; you half remember it like a dream. the only time you are ever likely to see it is if you go to sit at its monarch’s right hand, or if at the templars’ whim you are sent away from it forever without warning or explanation. they still expect you to fight and die for this country, whatever country you’re in, whenever you’re called upon. and you’d do it, too, just to prove you belong here. you want to go home. you’ve never had one
Ursula K. Le Guin
not to advocate for MORE sexism in bioware games or anything like that but like...the "gender equality" in DAO is so poorly thought out and by that I am SPECIFICALLY referring to women in the Grey Wardens.
Sure yeah Alistair makes that off-hand comment about how "there aren't many women in the wardens" that's more indicative of the writing team's sexism than anything else, but genuinely speaking I think there's actually a valid reason for women to not be allowed in the Grey Wardens.
You cannot tell me that Alistair and the HoF were the first to discover what Broodmothers were and how they were made. You cannot tell me that Grey Wardens have been fighting back Darkspawn for centuries and they do not know about Broodmothers. And if the Grey Wardens know about Broodmothers, then they must know that sending female Grey Wardens down into the Deep Roads is a bad fucking plan.
I can understand concessions being made during a Blight; hell, being a Grey Warden is such a Shit Job that I can understand the Grey Wardens being willing to take in anyone. But like...the women who join cannot go down into the Deep Roads for their Calling. And I would argue that them going down into the Deep Roads at all is a bad plan unless they've got some equivalent of a suicide pill with them in case of capture by Darkspawn.
It honestly is baffling to me that there's NO mention of protocols for female grey wardens during their Calling or expeditions to the Deep Roads being different AT ALL. All it would take is Alistair saying something along the lines of "So that's why there's so few women in the Wardens" after they discover the Broodmother.
Because a woman joining the Wardens isn't just risking death.
She's risking a horrific, violating transformation that turns her into a creature that endangers everyone.
someone please explain the concept of poverty to aveline
YOU ARE AWARE OF ONLY ONE UNREST; OH, NEVER LEARN TO KNOW THE OTHER!
Going mad over Silver being told “The crew will look after you” in the final episode of season two as the crew’s surgeon is about to cut off his leg despite Silver’s repeated pleas that he doesn’t want him to, and part of it may be due to the unbearable pain he’s in, but I don’t think that’s all of it.
Randall died one episode ago. When Billy introduced Silver to him at the beginning of season one, he said that Randall had been injured while in service of this crew and that the crew owed it to him to take care of him despite his infirmity — because of his infirmity. As a disabled man, Randall has no future outside Flint’s crew in the harsh world they live in.
Silver knows this. As we approach the end of season two, he’s slowly becoming a true member of the crew, “I” becomes “we” and “the men” becomes “my men” or “my brothers,” but he can still walk away from them if he chooses to do so. By cutting off his leg, even with the best intentions in the world, the crew is tying him to them more securely than any contract or blood pact to these men and — for the time being — to Flint’s captaincy. His very ability to walk away from them is literally being limited, which we see in the beginning of season three as he struggles with his new wooden leg.
Silver has gained the infinite loyalty of these men at the price of his leg and maybe even of his independence — he can still leave them and try his luck elsewhere, he knows how to make himself useful, but no matter how charismatic he is, the first thing people will probably always see is his wooden leg. He has become Randall. Despite being in the throes of immense pain, I think Silver realized what he was about to lose. Even if a part of him had still been entertaining the possibility that this was just a temporary situation, from this point on, he has no choice but to serve these men to the best of his ability because now they’re in a symbiotic relationship.
It’s a very grim answer to the question his entire season two arc is asking: where does he belong? What is his place in the world? In the end, he who held most of the cards in his hands at one point is not being given a choice: he’s staying here, with this crew, echoing the question Flint asked him earlier in the season — where else in the world would you wake up and matter like this? It’s the only place left in the world where he can matter now. The infinite possibilities have collapsed down to one. The man who wanted everything, who could be anyone, is now forced into a single role and can only play it genuinely.
So one of the best minor twists in the original Dragon Age Origins, is the reveal that Herren is a desire demon, a reveal you will only ever learn if you play through the alternate timeline campaign Darkspawn chronicles where the main PC Warden dies and the darkspawn wins.
I love how this one, simple revelation completely turns over everything that the first game tells you about demons and spirits on it's head, something which would be expanded on in later games, but also how it fits in perfectly with everything else shown in the game.
While abominations creates absolute hideous monsters when formed, Desire demon abominations march to a completely different drum, as we see with Connor, where the demon leaves him perfectly physically healthy.
Desire Demons also are the only ones in game who flat out does not need an outside body at all to function, as shown with Kitty not having possessed a cat, but instead taken the form of one.
They also have far more well thought out and logical plan making than any other demons, capable of making plans that could actually work in the long run.
Which brings us back to Harren, the lover and business partner of the genius blacksmith who forges your best blade in awakening, and dragon armor in origins.
Here we see a Demon that has integrated completely into human society, has found an actual relationship with a human that satisfies his needs, and as shown with the way he acts exasperated by his lovers eccentric nature, he has clearly grown beyond the basic nature of a desire demon, into a human who at the end of the day, still retained his demonic powers(as we see in the darkspawn chronicles.
In other words, he is a demon version of Cole, introduced long, long before Cole was a thing.
I love how you can go back to the start of Dragon Age, and realize that they really had figured out the rules of this universe from day one.
(backup blog for @frostbackmountaineering!) | they/them. biracial; reconnecting nahua. | art is under #art tag; ramblings are under #imhar.txt | mostly just using this account to follow/interact.
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