Myths and Mischief

(The Blood of Arlathan Spoilers)

(Audio of Solas and Elgar'nan bickering in Rook's head. Audio script included.)

Solas: Elgar'nan! Lethallin! Ma banal'evanuris. Ma salin ar ghilana?

Elgar'nan: Fen'Harel! You have no power here!

Elgar'nan: So the Dread Wolf has arrived to defend his pawn.

Solas: Your cruelty forced my hand.

Elgar'nan: A hundred generations, and still the same refrain.

Solas: Again, you have caged our people, and again, I will set them free.

Elgar'nan: But you were always stubborn, Fen'Harel. Insubordinate. Unmanageable, even by Mythal's reckoning.

Solas: You have lost the right to speak her name.

Elgar'nan: Ma vallas ban! Shev gar, Fen'Harel!

Solas: The only reason Mythal joined you was that she knew the monster you would become if left unchecked. She thought to temper your brutish ego. Instead, you betrayed her. Murdered her.

Elgar'nan: (Chuckles) Only the first time, Dread Wolf.

[Elgar'nan talking to Rook]

Elgar'nan: Your struggle is pointless, and your faith in the Dread Wolf is misplaced. Give up. Save yourself. Save your friends.

Solas: The cruelty is nothing new, but what happened to the vaunted brilliant mind of Elgar'nan the mighty? The blight has left you blunt and slow, a monster, not a mastermind. You used to be a challenging opponent.

Elgar'nan: You saw me as an opponent. To me, you were an irritation. A fly buzzing ceaselessly.

Solas: I must speak to you in this tongue. It seems Elven is beyond your grasp.

Elgar'nan: As much as freedom is beyond yours.

Solas: Once the blight is free, it will rule this world, and you will be its attack dog. You will burn this world at its command, as Andruil did at yours, and you will leave only ruin behind you.

Elgar'nan: This world is ruined already! Your Veil destroyed it!

Solas: You could heal it. You have the strength to repair the damage without using the blight!

Elgar'nan: (Choked laughter) Save your games for the mortals, Dread Wolf. The blight is my blade, and it will take more than your tricks to get me to lay it down. Your whining comes from envy, Fen'Harel, but it does not have to be so. There is a place for you at my side in a new, glorious empire.

Solas: But it will not have eluvians, will it? June built them, and now he is dead. Our great cities came from Sylaise. Our deepest mysteries from Dirthamen.

Elgar'nan: I will restore it all. Their achievements will not be lost.

Solas: You were a bully who ruled over what others had built, and now the others are gone. Who do you have left? Ghilan'nain? You cannot rebuild a world by stitching together monsters.

True Kings of Antiva

I literally bought Origins way back when because you could romance Zevran. So you can bet your ass my first Veilguard romance was Lucanis.

The devil is whispering in my ear

Literally.

Saw this right before started watching episodes "haha yeah right, I love them but I'm not dragging out and dusting off the Xbox 360 for the first two games..."

*after episodes*

"I am a clown and wanna replay all the games..."

(Seriously, Dragon Age needs loke a Mass Effect Legendary edition so all the games are in one spot)

Da4 where how they get around the fact that solas is incredibly OP and a literal god is that during da4 prologue your protagonist begins by taking in an piece of an old eleven god soul (like Flemeth did). And like. Maybe you can pick which one? Or maybe your origin (please bring back origins) dictates which one? Or better yet - maybe you don't KNOW which one until halfway through the game and the decisions you've made thus far reflect who it is. And you can unlock a specific power set that's different for each god.

I'd literally pay to be able to pick Dirthamen (although I still think the Inquisitor had something aligned with Dirthamen because there's an awful lot of raven aligned things in DAI)

Also because I insanely miss Origins choice of starting and effect it had on the game

no, seriously.  orsino makes me so sad and i’m super mad that he died.  like INTENSELY mad. 

-he’s an elven circle mage, which makes this story tragic from the beginning because he was most likely either literally kidnapped from his family in an alienage or a dalish clan, or literally ripped from the arms of his circle mother

-he’s first enchanter.  being an elf, he would have had to work ten times as hard as the humans to even be CONSIDERED for that role.  but he did it—he must have done absolutely EVERYTHING right, and then done BETTER than that, and he still gets treated like shit for things beyond his control.  never mind of course that in order to BE first enchanter you have to be a faithful traditional andrastean mage who is also a fantastic mage within the boundaries of circle magic

-he works so hard within the laws of the circle and the chantry to try and make his people and the city of kirkwall safe. he never even had a chance to escape and become an apostate—and even if he’d wanted to, i don’t think he would have tried.  he had to protect his people not able to leave the circle, and he still couldn’t manage it. 

-i say he never had a chance to become an apostate—but not just that, i don’t think he ever had any chance to leave the gallows.  the amell/surana wardens were conscripted and left because of that, wynne was recruited into the effort against the blight, anders ran and kept running until the wardens conscripted him—but orsino had no such chances. 

-he’s so, so fucking smart.  jfc he studied enough blood magic to become a hulking abomination and kept it secret from meredith?  holy shit this man is a genius—he’s completely WASTED in the circle

-this quote: “Why don’t they just drown us as infants?  Why give us the illusion of hope?”  christ almighty i want to cry just from reading that

orsino is literally one of my favorite da characters and i am super mad that he died that isn’t cool orsino is so great

Actually his story is even sadder than that. World of Thedas 2 offers a larger version of it and it breaks my heart.

- He was born in the alienage of Ansburg, in the Free Marches, and brought to Kirkwall when he was very young. He was neither an exceptional mage nor a terrible one, which suited him fine. He just wanted to live in peace and stay far from the templars’ eyes and rage, without drawing their attention to himself.

- He passed his Harrowing without problems and pretended to be happy. Later he befriended a human mage girl, Maud, who missed her family terribly. Despite being able to receive letters from home, that only worsened her depression. It affected her studies and the templars started to keep an eye on her.

- Orsino, worried, begged her to focus on her magical studies and try to be happy, because, despite everything, she “still had her life.” To which Maud replied: “This is no life, Orsino.”

- She killed herself by self-immolating in a closet and Orsino never forgot her words. He started to fight the templars, to rebel to them, and stopped obeying every word they said.

- When the First Enchanter of the Circle died without naming a successor, Meredith intervened, saying Kirkwall needed no First Enchanter. Orsino realized the templars would have stripped the mages of the few liberties they had left and volunteered as First Enchanter, the other senior enchanters rallying behind him.

- He was the youngest First Enchanter to hold the position in Kirkwall not just because of his own merit - as you said, Orsino is an incredibly clever mage -, but also because nobody wanted the position.

- He fought valiantly for his fellow mages during the years and in the end felt forced to use blood magic: the more he fought, the more Meredith pushed him back and tightened the collars around the mages’ neck and he thought that could be the only possible solution to finally end it.

Like alot of previous notes / comments, even though I think Bioware has never outright said it, I think the entirety of DA2 is told through Varric's point of view, told under semi-duress /holding/imprisonment by Cassandra and is very much an Unreliable Narrator. Varric is very much established and developed as protective of his friends, so be forced to tell post-events of what happened to someone trying to hunt down your friend(s)?

On top of that, when you talk to Varric in Inquisition about Orsino, and choose the option "it doesn't make sense!" It's one of the very few times, and the knit time I can point our from memory, when you get disapproval from Varric

Uhhh please go listen to this. I stumbled on this gem the other day and my heartttt. Lost Elf is such a beautiful piece of music, but the added piano makes it like a 1,000,000x better. Give the creator some love!

DRAGON AGE 4 [x]

LOOK AT THESE CHARACTERS

IM SCREAMING

youre doing amazing sweetie

maybe he likes tea, it just has to be the 1000+ year old good stuff. ;)

CONFESSION:

  I think it’s very very stupid I couldn’t have Bethany AND Carver when I played a rogue. Balancing the party my ass.            

I wish they had given you either an option to choose which twin survived, a complex/tough quest or thing to do for both twins to survive, or it was an option on a subsequent playthrough.  

For instance, in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn there were a few characters (Pelleas, Sephiran/Lehran) that you absolutely could not recruit the first time you played through the game, but could in subsequent playthroughs.  

anyway something I hate about video games is when they make some assertion about the fictional society not being homophobic and yet the society is still heteronormative like. that’s not how things work

example: skyrim sexual orientation isn’t really talked about at all afaik and every person who can be married can be married with either character gender but like: everything is straight. I haven’t played skyrim in a while but like it’s all straight I feel like also there’s things people say in it that are heteronormative and are in there bc the people creating it didn’t see it as a problem or at odds with their apparent homophobia free society and like how can you create a fictional homophobia free society when you ain’t free of your real life assumptions. Anyway

I’ve noticed this with misogyny too, like when you go to pick your character’s gender in dragon age it says something about how men and women are considered equal and there are equal numbers of men and women in the army and in leadership positions etc.

and then you go to actually play the game and the overwhelming majority of the soldiers are male, soldiers are constantly referred to as “men,” there are characters who will say blatantly misogynistic or sexually aggressive things to you (like, blatant enough that it must be misogynistic on purpose)

and it makes me die

Some of this has to be because the people who made these games are almost exclusively straight white dudes - and while they may have had the intention of being inclusive, they literally cannot imagine what a world without heteronormativity and misogyny would look like. They give us the game mechanics to be a woman warrior or to marry a character of the same gender, but they didn’t extend this train of thought to imagine how a society where this was normal would be different from ours.

In Dragon Age, for example, the major world religion is centered on a woman, lead by women, with all-female priestesses. AND YET in everyday life characters still interact as though men are naturally in charge and express surprise at a woman issuing commands. This is directly contradictory and frankly lazy world building to suggest that people raised in a system lead exclusively by women would still somehow end up expecting male leadership, as though sexism was a sort of natural law that would happen in any society. It’s not. Also, the founding myth of their religion has the original sin as sexual jealousy rather than punishing female sexuality, which would suggest totally different social norms around monogamy, sexual orientation, and the whole idea of promiscuity. Instead they’re… More or less exactly the same as our society, slut-shaming included. This makes no sense!

It’s a complete failure of imagination, not to mention frustrating and sad.

This is what I was always trying to talk about/explain in Dragon Age about the frustration with the sexual orientations.

Because there’s a clear difference between Word of God vs. Maybe Pick Up in Game vs. What’s Actually In-Game due to Game Mechanics.    For instance, Iron Bull.  

Word of God (the devs) tell you that Iron Bull is pansexual as opposed to bisexual (such as Josephine).

But you’d never be able to pick that up in the game with all the evidence around Bull.  The ONLY sexual partners Bull EVER talks about are women (the chantry mother in Haven, the kitchen/tavern ladies, etc).  The only other option (outside of your, say, male Inquisitor) is Dorian.  But THAT only happens if you have the two in the party long enough to unlock the specific companion dialogues, and THAT has been proven to be bugged. 

And on top of that, you are limited by game mechanics.  The game only allows you male and female.  There are no body sliders and no ability to choose your pronouns, thus IN-GAME not allowing you to play a trans or non-binary individual.

And don’t get me started on Solas.  While the locking-the-romance-option-to-elves-only makes some sense given the story/characterization around Solas, locking it to also female-only doesn’t make sense given the elvhen society.  

The official Word of Dev/God statement was already listed above, but I have a little bit to add to this.  Because I was just as confused for the longest time (and plus Iron Bull was the first time I ever heard the word pansexual back then).

I think a lot of the confusion of Iron Bull’s pansexuality (as an in-game issue) comes from how it was presented in the game.  I think about it in three ways:  player character experiencing the romance, what the gamer can pick up from dialogue/source in game, and Word of Dev/God.  The problem is with pansexual Iron Bull is that the game essentially fails on the first two options and the ONLY way you would know that Iron Bull is pansexual as opposed to bisexual is Word of Dev/God.

1) Player character experiencing the romance.  This is what I consider that I, as the player, an controlling the Inquisitor and playing through Iron Bull’s romance.  The problem is that DAI restricts you to ONLY male and female character models; there’s no other options, there’s no body sliders, and as far as I’ve been able to find there’s no other way to express your gender in the game (non-bi, genderfluid, trans like Krem, etc).  While you might headcanon or write your Inquisitor as something else, the GAME restricts you to only two (male, female).  So when you interact with the Iron Bull romance it comes across as bi rather than pan

2) Gamer picking things up from dialogue/game sources.  This is what I consider interacting with Bull as a character, other characters interacting with Bull, and what Bull is saying.  Aka, would I be able to pick up on the fact that Iron Bull is pansexual.  The answer is a really big no because, in fact, there’s very little presented in game outside of an Inquisitor romance that Iron Bull is available to both male/female.  All of Iron Bull’s dialogue about his bed partners involves women (the chantry mother/priestess in Haven, the cute kitchen maid, let the servant girl bounce on top and tell them tits look nice, etc).  In fact I think the only way the player would know that Iron Bull is also interested in men is if you were to try to romance him as male Inquisitor and find out it works, or if you don’t romance him and he gets with Dorian (which, from what everyone is saying, is incredibly buggy and you have to play a long time for the party dialogue’s to pop up).  So in-game, you would barely if at all pick up on the fact Iron Bull is bi and wouldn’t be able to see that he’s actually pan.  (Unless the conversations about Krem are supposed to count, but those in no way come across as Krem/Bull slept together?

3) Word of Dev/God.  So, in the case of Iron Bull, the ONLY way that the average player would even know that Iron Bull is pansexual is that someone involved in the game development process said so.  In this case, it was Bull’s writer of Patrick Weekes clarifying it.  And while that’s great that we have an official word on it, it basically means that there are some rather poor game designs if we couldn’t have picked it up on our own in-game

CONFESSION:

Dragon Age: Origins is by far my favorite of the trilogy. However, the entire Orzammar sequence seems entirely irrelevant in the grand scheme of, well, everything. They remain reclusive in later games no matter what, and we never hear from them during Inquisition, if at all. Not to mention, the whole shebang is the longest, most drawn out sequence out of them all. I wish there was a way to skip it entirely.            

I’m gonna have to agree on some parts.  The only relevance in later games is one mission on the Kirkwall docks if you happen to stumble on it (I THINK you have to have Bhelen on the throne and he’s sending assassins to kill the survivors of Harrowmont’s family) and one War Table mission (you need to look at Dwarven records for something; if Bhelen is on the throne you get to see it but if Harrowmont is on the throne he locks you out)

I think my dislike of the sequence is (1) how long and drawn out it is, and (2) is the only major quest in the entire game with a “compromise” option / forces you to go with the lesser of two evils.

Elves:  Side with elves (kill werewolves), side with werewolves (kill elves) or force the guy to break the curse, elves live and werewolf curse broken.

Mages: Side with Templars (kill mages), side with mages, and a technically third option I forget.

Humans/possessed boy:  Kill the boy, sacrifice the mom to save boy, sacrifice the mage to save boy, or go get the mages and everyone lives.  

But once you get to the dwarves, your ONLY options are put Bhelen on the throne (he’s going to provide a lot more freedom for the dwarves AND in later games BUT he’s basically murdered his entire own family to get here) or Harrowmont (who is going to keep the dwarves in the same restrictive society).

had fun working on this commission bust for @myth-and-mischief, their interpretation of Dirthamen. Thank you again! 

!!!!

Again thank you so much! He looks so great in your style!