Rhyske

But in every other situation he is thoughtful yet not overbearing. Gives his opinion and is assertive but not forceful.

He is actually rather soft in his delivery and the point of this post is that I tire of people taking a few emotionally charged moments directly relating to him responding to circumstances that remind him of his trauma and using that as a basis of his entire personality.

“Yes. You have my word.”

Especially if you're playing Hawke as a mage, the way it's repeatedly driven into the player in act 1 that Hawke could wake up in the Gallows because they're a poor refugee and also not every templar has a price, some really just love to make mages suffer (even though you never do get caught; I really wish there'd been an instance where Hawke had to break out of the Gallows like the Warden and Alistair breaking out of prison in DAO) and if you go to the Gallows and like... listen to the mage NPCs idle dialogue, look at the way some of them that are allowed to roam the courtyard are cowering, listen to the monotone voice of the Tranquil merchant standing beside Solivitus, the templars' remarks about the mages not even being people, it's just so incredibly fucked up that it baffles me how there's even a question of whether or not Anders was right. Even some of what he says in banter with your other companions about the Circle is genuinely insane (what do you mean you've been fortunate, you just told Sebastian you were assaulted by the templars at Kinloch??? You were fortunate that you escaped??).

Tranquility is so genuinely horrifying as a concept, too. Anders' entire recruitment quest being about his own lover being made Tranquil as punishment for the crime of just writing to him, Alain mentioning that Karras has been in his chambers and threatens to have him branded if he tells anyone, watching Alrik tell a girl that she'll do whatever he wants her to when he makes her Tranquil, that one woman in act 2 who Alrik made Tranquil before he died having a conversation with her distraught lover about how she belongs to Ser Alrik now, the fact that slowly over the course of the game there actually are more Tranquil in the Gallows; I feel like it's one of the darkest things I've seen in a non-horror RPG. You get taken away from your friends and family forever if you're born with magic, and if you fail the test you aren't prepared for that they randomly spring on you to see if you can resist a demon you're executed, and even if you successfully pass that, if you make one wrong move or even if the templars just don't like you, you get fucking lobotomized and have no agency over anything that is done to you ever again.

Bioware: "is this what you want you freaks?" *adds the spreading legs onto the box, the sniper rifle, the ass shot, the dialogue*

And weirdly enough you’re really good at this: making pizzas and dealing with shitty customers and breaking up fights in the parking lot and pretending to be Duncan’s cousin on the phone so the utility company doesn’t cut off the power. But running a store is a lot of work for two dumb kids, so slowly you start accumulating a bunch of competent weirdos to help out, like the nun who left her convent because god told her to help you make pizzas, and the elderly school teacher who just survived a mass shooting, and the guy the papa johns down the street hired to run you over. And really there’s no way any of this should be working as well as it is - you’re absolutely committing fraud of some kind here - but you’ve managed to dodge the landlord every time he’s stopped by, and the health inspector never shows up to tell you to stop letting your dog hang out behind the counter and you’re all still kinda looking at each other and asking ‘are we allowed to just do this?’ before shrugging again and continuing to make pizzas, until somehow, through a series of unlikely technicalities, your doofus coworker ends up on the ballot for governor.

video game challenge: [1/5] quotes – Aveline Vallen, Dragon Age II (2011)

if you use proper capitalization in your fanfic, please also use proper capitalization in the summary!