before you make a joke about bela sleeping with anyone and everyone let me introduce you to a thing called canon
- Merrill: You’ve had many lovers, haven’t you?
- Isabela: Fewer than some think.
amazing
I’ll add Zevran:
- Alistair: Fair enough. Have you… had very many women in your time? I mean… you seem like the sort of man who would…
- Zevran: I have indulged from time to time, perhaps, when my interest is not elsewhere.
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.