wisp on the wall

She became a soldier because she thought it was her best choice to avoid marriage, and while she succeeded on that point...

...her military career ended in disaster during the fall of Ventus. Her unit was abandoned to hold a hopeless post by the main command and they wound up being evacuated (and dragged to Minrathous) by a group of Shadow Dragons who were in the area on relatively unrelated business.

When she meets Varric she's bitter! She's short-tempered! The Nessus job was as much a snapping point as it was anything else. The year she spends traveling with Varric and Harding does a lot to unwind that and bring back her optimism, but the temper can still be brought back up by circumstance.

Notes about the relationship chart:

Ivy and Harding are extremely close by the beginning of the game. They joke that Ma's adopted her because they both have red hair (what actually happened is that Ivy wrote Ma a letter once while drunk and stuck it in with Harding's, and got a shock when Ma wrote back, because she's not used to getting letters back). They rib each other but there isn't a lot of shift in their dynamic at that point, because the friction in their relationship had mostly happened in their first months traveling together.

Bellara -> Her purple bit towards Bel at the beginning is less "distrust" and more like. "How much can I trust you to control this explosion." That kind of stays throughout because she doesn't understand a damn thing about magic, but she knows Bel's heart is in the right place, and she learns how far away to stand, and Neve has a special look just to keep her from making Bel feel bad.

Davrin -> She has an admiration of Wardens from the perspective of someone who's heard adventures centered around them, and once Davrin's convinced she's good for her word, they have a lot to learn from each other. They're each other's main sparring partners at the Lighthouse, even though it drives him nuts that she refuses to touch a shield, and it drives her nuts that he has bone to pick with every genius monster-hunting strategy she suggests.

(It might be ignoring a theme or missing the point but I headcanon that she finds a possibility for saving him post-game, because I want to, even if I don't have it figured out yet.)

Emmrich -> The bones ought not do that, she thinks, and in the beginning he reminds her of some authority figures from when she was younger, but his existential crisis does bring him down to a relatable level. Eventually. There's still the thing with the bones.

Taash -> Ivy relates to a lot of Taash's struggles with how they were raised what's expected of them. She sometimes fumbles in trying to support Taash in these things ("So how did you handle it?" "Uh, don't do anything I did."), but Taash eventually comes to value the fact that she'll just listen. And also that Ivy kind of agrees about the thing with the bones.

Lucanis -> "Distrust" isn't the right word for the purple from Ivy's end. I think it fits for Lucanis because he was backstabbed and left in a blood bubble prison only to be broken out by a pair from Tevinter, and it feels like a natural reaction. Ivy can empathize with some of these points and from her end it's more a rivalry-purple, because she's used to being fast, and she feels like he outclasses her in so many of her combat points. And then she helps Minrathous. To be honest the middle section of both of their bars should be more of a mess but I was done messing with gradients. They make it to a common ground eventually and her Duelist specialization comes out of her getting over her pride to ask him for help. In my headcanon this happens later after a lot of his personal questline, so I have to close my eyes and pretend I don't see when I use Duelist specialization moves early game, you see.

Neve -> They have some friction in the beginning due to their different perspectives on Minrathous, its problems, and how any of them could be best resolved. The ritual ending in a situation they both felt responsible for resolving, both felt like they owed something to Varric over, sort of glued them together long enough for them to come to understand each other's points of view and see that they both want a lot of the same things. Getting to this point lets them start appreciating each other on a personality level (this gets a big boost by how well their senses of humor mesh). Neve starts anchoring more than she realizes on Ivy's optimism, and Ivy starts hearing a Neve-voice in her head telling her to cool it and maybe not rush over five roofs, and it takes them both a while to settle it down into something they can work with. I have a lot I could type about this but I still want to do the ship chart so maybe there lol.