Now that we’re all on the same page about what was expected of Sera prior to playing the game, based on promotion materials, lets get into the actual game itself, starting with her introductory quest: A Friend of Red Jenny.

#LowElfEsteem is a series on Sera’s romance with an elven mage, discussing both the well and poorly done aspects of her writing, while also examining her character on a deeper level.

Sera’s introduction is quite honestly my favourite in the game. It reminds me a little of something out of a comic book. You basically just stumble upon a random apostate noble claiming he’s going to defeat you, only for this elf girl to jump down out of nowhere, yell “just say ‘what’” and shoot him in the mouth the second he does. In barely a minute we get a good taste of her character; she’s a rogue elf who hates rich snobs and has a very cheeky sense of humour.

But then things start to get strange. 

Keep reading

given that the maker is probably just a very powerful spirit that possessed andraste and returned to the fade after her death, the only thing keeping the maker from returning to thedas is the belief that he’s left in the first place

which means that outside of the known parts of the world there is a spirit waiting to be believed to return, but by this point is surely so inflated and warped by the conflicting beliefs of all the people in thedas and all the disgusting acts committed in its name that frankly, i’m more scared of what’s become of “the maker” than i am of the evanuris lmao

*whispers “the Chantry was a sociopolitical institution that maintained power through threats of Exalted Marches, had two standing armies that it kept in check through combinations of indoctrination, confinement and addiction and edited its own holy text in order to further the oppression of elves, relied on upholding multiple systems of oppression in order to further its own power, and deserved to fall apart as wholly as possible” into the distance*

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

shit just got creepy

Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

…what makes me so different?

Here we go someone who GETS IT.

Healing and Medicine in Thedas

This is a collection of posts and conversations about healing and medicine, both magical and non-magical, in Thedas.  A lot of it is necessarily headcanon, but reading through some or all of these may help people formulate their own ideas of how these work, for writing purposes.

If you’re aware of any posts, conversations, or links not included here that you think should be, please let me know or reblog and add.

going through the game files in dao and

shout out to the three sex workers who also work as guards for ser cauthrien

like, these three people are somehow holding down two physically demanding jobs and i applaud them for it

actually you know what i’m not done with this

guards wear armor. and carry swords. swords are a lot heavier than they look btw, i’ve held them. are these three the ones who can swing swords but have 0 visible muscle mass, or is being ripped a thing fereldens find attractive and sexually appealing in a woman? accidental worldbuilding through sheer lazienss

I mean, to be fair, my personal interpretation of Alistair is that he has a Thing for muscular women (in my AU fic his first love is the blacksmith’s daughter and then my Cousland who is a two-handed warrior). Even in my canons I romanced him with same said two-handed warrior Cousland and then my Amell, and we all agree swinging a polearm through the air like it’s a feather takes muscles (though my Amell’s muscle mass lends itself more towards being dense rather than visibly toned, still adds bulk tho).

To add to this, Anora is canonically like a stunningly beautiful woman. She’s also canonically a skilled warrior/rogue (I say rogue too because her childhood fave weapon was reportedly the bow, but that still takes muscles to draw back and fire with precision). So I’d definitely say there’s at least some support for muscular women being a beauty standard in Ferelden. xD

They also worship the ground Moira walked on, I believe she was sword and shield warrior? And Maric, the most Ferelden man to ever exist, had a thing with Fiona, a grey warden.

To put in my 2 coppers.. They’re also highly Andrastian, but in the way Orlesians aren’t– ie: Orlais favors very elven aesthetics even though they’d never admit it. Primarily because they killed so many of them and then indentured them. Fereldans on the other hand have that very heavyset Avvar aesthetic going, not to mention they are the country Andraste came from– whatever she would be presumed to be like, they’d likely appreciate more.

Given that, a skilled, capable and well muscled warrior would be the perfect sort of woman. Even if she weren’t large muscle wise, so long as she was good at fighting or tactics, that could well be a point of desire for them. 

The nature of the Veil

I never post meta because I prefer to write it out, but Wikipedia has some really great animations of the harmonic series.  I saw it and thought… what if this is how the Veil works?  What if the Veil is the dissonance that disrupts the consonant, harmonic nature between the real world and the Fade?

Fundamental

First overtone

Second overtone

Third overtone

There are waveform animations over at Wiki, but this presents a few ideas to me regarding partial breaches of the Veil/thinning of the Veil.  I’m not going to go much farther than this conceptualization because I don’t think truly this is how magic works in Thedas, but when the Inquisitor says, “The Veil is more like a vibration,” this is what I think about.

that moment when you ask patrick weekes about this and he replies with “spoilers”

That is brilliant.  What if THIS is the Chant?

If you overlap them as well they can become constructive or destructive.

Yes… I started thinking about the Veil being an anti-soundwave which creates a dead space between the Fade and the real world, and then my brain went off on the music of the spheres and vibrations and M theory and dimensions and um… This doesn’t explain how mages open the Veil and pull from the Fade, or why blood magic thins the Veil, but it’s an interesting concept and what if those circles around Solas in his tarot card are soundwaves?

That’s such an interesting theory! And maybe the destruction would be destructive interference? Or maybe constructive with the harmonics. That would be such an interesting take on the science of magic then? The ability to channel energy or sound waves. Hell the rift mage path would make a lot of sense then. (kinda like biotics in ME with dark energy?)

Force magic would make sense that way!  I love force magic.  Could you explain more about how this would explain rift magic?

Off topic a bit… Doesn’t the name Corypheus mean composer/ conductor ?Bioware’s just toying with us now. 

Corypheus DOES mean conductor! And if you’ll recall, the sentient darkspawn that the architect creates lament the inability to hear “the song” anymore.  It drove the Mother MAD.  What if the Blight is a physical expression of the “Song of the Veil.” The darkspawn hear the disruptive noise and are lulled by it. The song corrupts the Archdemon which thus leads a horde.  After all, the first darkspawn were supposedly magisters who attempted to enter the Fade physically.  Perhaps crossing the Veil exposed them to this song and they were eternally damned.

Also, if you remember, Justice describes the fact that Lyrium sings and Red Lyrium is BLIGHTED lyrium. 

It sings a dark and corrupted song that drives people mad just as the Darkspawn were driven mad by the Veil song. HOLY SHIT.

Solas is a damn Mad Scientist Mozart. 

My mind is blown right now/

I’m just going to ramble about a couple of things.

Dorian: Cole, do you hear magic?

Cole: Yes. I do. Don’t you?

Dorian: Spells sometimes makes a sound but… I don’t think we hear the same thing.

Cole: Don’t your spells whisper things to you? What is and could be, music in the mind of strange, far away places?

Dorian: Not lately.

Cole: Then we don’t hear the same thing.

I’m jumping in on this again but as me and @the-queen-of-thedas just discussed, the tranquil, who have the ability to use magic removed. The term tranquil means to be free from disturbance or calm. Which again, can be an indicator of this theory. Calm and quiet. 

It all makes sense!  God. 

I’m diving straight into psychoacoustics now - thinking about the lyrium brand on the forehead.  Our brains process sound in the temporal lobe (slight joke to myself because time does not exist in the Fade and the temporal lobe is where we put sound back together).  The auditory cortex is located close to the ear, and in order for us to understand sound our brains must first receive the electric impulses converted by the moving cilia in the inner ear.  Inside the auditory cortex is something called a tonotopic map, which contains in it cells that respond to specific frequencies, much like our visual cortex contains in it cells that respond to shapes, color, light, faces, etc.

What does this have to do with magic?  Bear with me.  In order to understand sound we must disassemble the frequencies and put them back together.  Then once these electrical impulses are received by the brain, the rest of the brain goes to work to process who, what, where, etc.  In other words, there is no sound without cortical processing.

How do templars use lyrium to negate magic?  How do mages dispel magic?  Perhaps what they do is disrupt the cortical process, making it so that the Fade-magic is not heard, and therefore the magic does not exist as it cannot be processed.  

I’m gonna jump in and add why blood magic might thin the viel. In biology it’s been proven that blood can make high frequency sounds when in contact with light (also as it dies it seems to scream, but that I just heard from someone who took a bio class and the instructure had the equipment to dementrated it). So in this theory, blood magic could make a sound vibration that is just enough to thin the viel.

HOLY SHIT!  I LOVE THIS ADDITION SO MUCH!?!?

I’ve been working with various iterations of sound as magic (healing blood mages being able to listen and sound out bloodflow, circulation issues, and breaking the molecular bonds in blood cells for the energy used in their magic and/or harvesting ATP from blood) and oh my GOD I love this so much.  THANK YOU FOR THIS WONDERFUL ADDITION.

before you make a joke about bela sleeping with anyone and everyone let me introduce you to a thing called canon

amazing

I’ll add Zevran:

When these two are serious you get a slightly different view of them. They are not always having sex. They have other things that they have to get done. They have other things going on in their lives that means they can’t be the sex-obsessed characters they often get portrayed as.

They have had a lot of lovers. They enjoy sex. They will joke about it, flirt and use their comfort with sex to their advantage (Zev’s bosom banter to distract Wynne) but they are not uncontrollable nymphomaniacs or sexual predators or incurably horny. 

The problem is ours, not theirs. We have this simple-minded paradigm where people exist on a spectrum between “pure” and slut and where you fall is defined by how tainted you are by sex. If you act as if there’s no such thing, you’re pure. If you dress, talk, act in a way that reminds others of sex or, God forbid, actually have it with any frequency (and with different people), you’re on the slut end.

Zevran and Isabella aren’t sluts. They have a healthy respect for sex. Zevran is concerned with consent (sometimes, asking him to your tent is a game of “Are you sure? Really, really sure?” from him) and skill  (“My only rule regarding sex, is that it be done well”). Isabella understands it’s power as a tool (Seneschal Bran) and a gift (Fenris). They don’t measure the worth of themselves or others by how often or infrequently they have sex. And when they aren’t having sex, they aren’t having sex. They’re sailing ships or fighting a Blight or helping friends or giving astute advice on politics. 

If all we see is sex when we look at these two, the obsession is ours, not theirs. 

An old post, but can we also talk about how the one time Hawke treats Isabela like this and tries to set her up with Du Launcet she defends herself? She doesn’t need your help Hawke and she isn’t going to sleep with anyone under the sun so fuck off.

Like seriously, Isabela simply appreciates sex for what it is and what more she is able to separate sex as it’s own. As in sex =/= love and love =/= sex, it’s consensual fun and release and Idk I just love that canonically Isabela has an open relationship with Hawke because she (and Hawke) knows sex isn’t an all holy expression of love.

Which Zevran is the exact same too, though he doesn’t have an open relationship with the Warden. His romance doesn’t “end” when you sleep with him, because sex is not a goal, it’s not the goal. Their romances continue on and in the end its the smaller affections, the smaller gestures that end their romance with I Love You.