You Can't Save the Spider *and* the Butterfly
Dragon Age, Doctor Who, MCU, Final Fantasy, cats, etc.
Feel free to add me as a friend on any site profile I link to on here, but do keep in mind that my Twitter is a private account. This doesn't mean I won't add people back, just that if your Twitter name and your Tumblr name don't match, I might need you to shoot me a message so I know where I know you from!
(Current avatar is cropped from a painting of my Elissa Cousland by roryseviltwin.)
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A Final Moment at the top of Fort Drakon
We fought our way to the top of Fort Drakon,. past the ogres and the assassins, the shapechangers and...
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Alex was here. Be warned.: Let’s Play A Game
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nooooooooooooooo
[laughs to keep from crying]
Anders is a proficient gardener. As a healer, you’d need all sorts of medicinal plants within arm’s reach; why not grow them yourself? It’s quite relaxing and is the only real break he lets himself have from his normal MAGES MUST BE FREE rage.
(Not to mention all the catnip he must grow. I’m imagining him cheerfully plucking elfroot while every cat in the neighborhood surrounds him.)
YES.
How does your character smell? Do they wear perfume or cologne, use scented soaps, oils, ointments, lotions? Why do they smell the way they do? If they do not wear perfume or cologne [or anything else previously listed], why do they not?
[eg. a noblewoman might smell like her favorite perfume and reek of it if she wears a strong enough scent, a blacksmith might smell like their forge and maybe singed hair, a chevalier might stink of horse and body odor, a chef may smell like their kitchen, a drunk might have alcohol on their breath, etc.]
This would vary pretty drastically for Elissa depending on her current circumstances. For most of the Blight, she’s spending her time fighting monsters and camping in the woods, so I’d imagine she and everyone else with her would all be a bit… earthy.
When she’s “at home” (whether home is Highever before the Blight, Redcliffe temporarily during it, or Denerim/Amaranthine afterward) it depends on what time of day most likely. Even as queen, she often visits the practice yards for exercise before lunch, so during and immediately after those visits she’d be sweaty; I imagine she’d take her daily bath immediately after this, though, so in the afternoon and evening she’d smell like whatever oils her maids put in the water for her—most likely light floral scents, but I haven’t decided yet what specifically would be her first choice.
UNEXPECTED QUIRKS OF YOUR WARDENS.
So I’m curious if anyone else gives odd or not expected traits to their Wardens.
Elysia Surana: She actually has an eidetic memory which was one of the reasons she was so good with her studies.
Avalon Cousland: Has a pathological fear of crossing bridges and children’s dolls.
Foxglove Tabris: Is a superb cook. If she wasn’t a Warden and didn’t kill Vaughn there was a good possibility she could have become a royal cook, perhaps international.
What about your Wardens?
Well, the only thing that makes her scream is a spider… but I guess the most unexpected quirk is the fact that she can travel between Ferelden/Thedas and another world. The Couslands came to Thedas 800 years ago (in 2:35 Glory just after the end of the second Blight) from an advanced world called Areth. There is a portal under Castle Cousland connecting the two worlds. Make no mistake, Lys is a Fereldan. but Arethian ideas helped make Highever a more tolerant, open society with chances for all to prosper ( and live long). So I guess that’s the main quirk in Lys’ quiver.
The original Arethian settlers were Jadyn and Melysande (Melys) btw - Lys is her namesake.
Liam Amell on the other hand - no unexpected quirks. He’s solid as a rock, sensible, pragmatic, excesslively talented and - well he’s in love with Morrigan - is that a quirk?
My Wardens are all very uninteresting.
My not-evil Cousland (Moira) is an amateur artist/cartographer and a compulsive diarist, but she’s not especially good at any of those things, and she knows it.
My Amell Warden (Esme) does magic. Sleight-of hand magic. Now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t pulling-coin-out-of-Alistair’s-ear magic. Her light fingers also make her deft at picking pockets, boosting keys and palming cards… she’s sort of a grifter blood mage, I guess.
My Elissa is constantly trying to learn new languages. Most of her languages have been actually taught to her, but one summer she found a book on the Qunari with some rough translations and tried to teach herself Qunlat from it. She didn’t get very far, but she knows a good number of root words if not a full vocabulary or the grammatical structure of the language. She used to bite her nails when she was contemplating things, but has trained herself to only bite at the pad of her thumb instead (not the nail itself) anymore. She also discovered while seeking Andraste’s ashes that she’s terrified of heights, since she was the lucky guinea pig who got to cross the phantom bridge during that trial.
Vrania Amell (while technically not a Warden) more or less is a walking “odd trait” so I don’t even know where to start for her. >.<
I’m trying to remember/decide if this is right or not: Jory is shorter than Daveth (even though I’m pretty positive their models are the same) - Yes/No? Thoughts?
I feel like Daveth SHOULD BE shorter than Jory (because Jory is a knight who grew up with good nutrition while Daveth was a street urchin who was recruited by the Grey Wardens and probably didn’t get very much to eat during the years that are most critical to bone development).
In my headcanon, the Ostagar scenes take place over several days. Jory starts out as the classic knight in shining armor, standing tall, striding with seven-league boots, and Daveth starts out as very much a guile fighter who sticks to the shadows and seldom shows his full height, but as the challenges happen, Jory starts to realize his inadequacy. He stoops, his step becomes more tentative, he starts acting his fear. Meanwhile Daveth starts building confidence, he stands straighter, walks with a more determined step.
They both fail the test, but at least Daveth dies having proven that despite the circumstances of his childhood, he’s more of a man than Jory could ever have dreamed of being.
I figure Daveth would be tall and lanky, sort of all knees and elbows, but I like your reasons for how their attitudes and postures change. I might steal that for my head canon mental image of the characters.
I’m trying to remember/decide if this is right or not: Jory is shorter than Daveth (even though I’m pretty positive their models are the same) - Yes/No? Thoughts?
this is actually the thing that bothers me the most about the DA setting
HOW
DOES A SOCIETY CANONICALLY MIRED IN A PRE-RENAISSANCE TECHNOLOGICAL, AGRICULTURAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL STASIS DUE TO MAGIC
PRODUCE SO MANY EFFIN’ HUGE TOMES AND BITS OF PAPER EPHEMERA? i mean holy shit even penniless elves have multiple books that would be astronomically expensive to produce. I don’t think they have presses, either, since there’s mention of “poorly copied leaflets” in a quest instead of “poorly printed”. I guess the answer here, like the reason why they’re stuck in the middle ages in the first place, is also magic.
..and I guess it says more about me then the game that THAT’s my biggest hang up when it comes to DA’s worldbuilding continuity.
In a world of magic being a carefully controlled factor in most Chantry-influenced countries,
I want to believe that perhaps a less-glamourous role that Circle Magis fulfil is working as scribes. They can enchant quills to magically follow every stroke the scribe-mage makes, so a scribe-mage can possibly copy dozens of books at once with an army of enchanted quills and piles of fresh leaflets. Apprentices are stuck with the task of book-binding and keeping pages in the right order. The Circle then ships these copies out to book-dealers.
My second suggestion is that the dwarves would certainly have mastered the printing press. At the very least, they write stuff into stone, right? If they make the effort to write in relief (where the letters pop out of the stone, rather carved into it) they can make copies of the stone original with printing press techniques.
So a benefit of dwarves trading with the surfacers: spreading their printing technology to the rest of Thedas.
I’ve always assumed a combination of the same. Mages, priests, and tranquil work as scribes topside, and any and all other technology that doesn’t match the supposed time period is the result of the dwarves. I even gave Oghren a pocket watch of sorts, that my Warden is kind of like “okay, if you say that thing tells us what time it is without a sun I’ll take your word for it” when she sees it.
runawaydragons Asks:
brennacedria Said:
Okay, so there are two Vranias: Dragonborn, and Amell. Dragonborn!Vrania has never really changed, but while her personality is very similar in some ways to what Amell was like before becoming an apostate, she’s not the one we’re really concerned with here.
Now then, as for Amell, where to even begin?? The ONLY thing that has stayed consistent with her from the very beginning has been her self-imposed mission after the Mage-Templar war begins, the very short version of which is just to fuck up the day every templar she can. I mean, she’s deliberately snuck into Kirkwall to try and find the formula Anders used for his explosion—she’s not a nice girl! More importantly, aside from the name (which was supposed to be just a placeholder, until it decided that it was the only possible name for her and fuck me if I wanted it changed, that wasn’t going to happen), gender, and that she was a mage she was left deliberately vague. No mention of race or physical appearance was given in her original story on purpose. She was supposed to just blend in with her surroundings after all. I had ideas about some of these, but nothing firm.
So, it’s not like things have changed with her since she was created, so much as just that she’s grown from vague ideas to more concrete ones:
- Originally, I was convinced she was an elf, not human
- She was “supposed” to be Nevarran
- The face-changing came much later, during a shower-brainstorm-session where I wondered who she might be, and thought, “what if she was the Warden? why hasn’t she been recognized if she is?”
- That led me to making her Amell, rather than an elf, which also meant she was from Kinloch Hold and not Cumberland; as an Amell, it would be possible she’d know the Amell/Hawke estate from childhood, which would be useful since she was trying to find a way into Darktown
- Wanting to keep her in my main head canon led me to making her Amell, but not the Warden
- the face-changing also came from trying to figure out how she could manage to avoid the templars for ~10 years from her escape during the Blight until her capture in Kirkwall; I figured out that she technically has a way of bending light around her to create the illusion of a physical change. The pink/purple hair came from being silly in the CC when I first put her together for screen shots, and she decided she liked it
- I discovered sometime last spring/summer that she’s technically been at least bordering on the line of maleficar since she was about 15 years old. That said, she views blood magic as a weakness; all of her mind-controlly-stuff is done with a combination of other spells, mostly from the school of entropy.
siawrites Asks:
brennacedria Said:
Elissa is technically the oldest-existing of my developed characters. (Honorable mentions go to my Revan, who I’ve made three times but never gotten more than a few hours into the game due to technical problems, and my Oblivion character who has personality but no real development.)
But anyway, Elissa. I first rolled her about a month and a half after getting DA:O (so… March/April of 2010, cause I didn’t get the game right away), and she was intended to be literally nothing but a silly “I want to be queen” sort of story. Other than insisting that she be allowed to grow into a real character, the biggest change she’s gone through since her initial creation that I can think of is that she was originally a warrior, not a rogue. Her fight style was all pretty much the same—dual-weapon sword/dagger, etc—but I’d just played probably 85% of the game with a Dalish rogue and I wanted to play warrior just for comparison. And, while I did finish that first Elissa save as a warrior (on PS3, so no option to change her class halfway through like on PC with the dev console) every time I’ve rolled her since has been as a rogue. It just fits her personality better.
As for physical design, that’s mostly stayed the same since the beginning. When I got the game on PC last year, I ended up changing her primary hair style to the low chignon from the LOTC mod, but that’s about it. (And technically, she still uses the original high bun from the base CC until about the first visit to Denerim, but then switches to the other style for the rest of the game. I’m just normally too lazy to save, change the hairstyle with Face Replacer, and reload the new save to continue on. So, she usually just goes around in her late-Blight hair for the whole game instead unless I’m trying to get specific screen caps.)
I’m trying to think of anything personality-wise that has changed, rather than game mechanics and physical design… Actually, one big one is that she DOESN’T want to be queen—she’s quite content as a Warden—but accepts it when hardened!Alistair decides he could do a good job as king after all. Also, head canon Elissa doesn’t declare at the Landsmeet that she’ll be queen; he actually proposes about two months before. They were planning to announce it at the Landsmeet, assuming they won (they did) but due to certain other head canon events, it’s announced a few days later by the Grand Cleric instead.
Anonymous Asks:
brennacedria Said:
I’m on my phone right now so I can’t pull up links and what not, but it’s been said and/or implied that Grey Wardens who join during a Blight don’t typically get the full thirty years. I’ve taken it a step further and decided that for my Elissa, between having the archdemon in her mind during the Blight, and striking the killing blow herself, that her time was cut even shorter than usual for someone who joins during a Blight. That said, she does at least survive as far as 9:39, which is approximately when she meets Fiona, but I don’t know yet beyond then.
Edit: I didn’t think to clarify this last bit when I was originally typing the reply on my phone, but Elissa only said she was leaving for her Calling when she left in 9:37; she never actually passed through Orzammar into the Deep Roads, and there is a very small handful of people who knows that she is, in fact, still alive. Alistair, unfortunately, cannot be one of them otherwise he’d have gone off searching for her the same way he’s gone searching after Maric in the comics.
buttsofjustice replied to your post: March 30th 2013, 6:01:39 am · 4 hours ago Having…
i’ve had thoughts of my warden meeting fiona as well.
The main threat-not-threat I’ve had running in my head since having this idea yesterday morning is Lissa having figured out who Fiona is, mentioning it, and then Fiona asking very coldly what Missus Warden Queen is going to do with that knowledge. Elissa points out that since she’s been “dead” or “on her Calling” for about three years, though, there’s not a lot she can do (so far as informing Alistair is concerned). Then it fizzles out again.
whuffiesmind replied to your post: March 30th 2013, 6:01:39 am · 4 hours ago Having…
Since Gaider pretty much said “the only canon is that there is no canon” I say write it if you want to. Or just ignore it and write it anyway. ;) So says the person who wrote Justice 10,000 something years in the future, though… :P
I’m not worried about canon of the whole universe so much as I’m worried about the who’s-where-at-this-exact-moment for that one incarnation of the universe. In Neria’s world, or in any of my other Hawkes’ worlds, anything goes. In Hero/Champion/Revolutionary (Elissa/Ria/Vrania’s world) I’ll do AU-ish actions, I have some definitely not-discussed-in-canon motivations to actions (I wrote Morrigan as being willing to transfer the ritual to Elissa, if it had been possible, after which I assume she’d have stayed on to “tutor” the child instead of running away to raise him), and I have that one AU origin. But I have to know who’s doing what, and when, then I want to fill in the blanks—and since there’s no apperation or teleportation that’s ever been mentioned, I can’t have even a mage in two places at once. Well, unless it’s Flemeth, I guess. She can be as many places as she wants to be, but I haven’t had a reason to discuss her ever again. (This sort of thing is why I had to stop Vrania’s post DA2 story for now, because I have to know exactly where Cullen is and with him in the next game, I’d rather wait to write then rewrite all over again.)