egg scrambler

varric, deadpan: did that hawke woman put these thoughts into your head

juniper, deadpan: yes

And I know that it’s joked about a lot that he’s just really damn thirsty, that he really wants the booty or whatever, but the reality is, Solas is so starved for attention and genuine affection that he feels completely head over heels in love with her simply because she… treats him like a person. Treats him like a person and values his opinions, even if she doesn’t always agree with them, and uses them as a factor in her decision making. 

He talks to a romance Lavellan on several instances if you flirt with him about how “no one sees him for anything other than a pair of ears save for her” and how “he hasn’t been able to trust anyone in a long time”. The first flirt with him is about protecting him from the people who would kill him or capture him for his race and magic, things he cannot help but have. Other flirts are about helping him make friends and how he’s intelligent and has insight and strength no one else has. Insight that makes him a valuable partner and friend. 

There is actually remarkably little that is sexual about Solas’ devotion to Lavellan. I love “Solas is thirsty” jokes as much as the next person, but I also never want to lose sight of the fact that he fell for her because she is “unique”, a “rare and marvelous spirit” who shines more brightly over the ages than anything else in his bleak life. 

Solas is lonely. He is sorrowful. 

And for just one moment, one instant in his very long life, she broke through that and let him have someone else and be happy.

Solas loves her deeply and truly and could never express what she did for him, how much she means to him, because she helped to heal a bit of what hurts inside of him. 

carver is your surviving sibling because you chose to be a mage, but carver is also carver because his siblings were both mages. i'm not here to tell anyone what to think, if you think carver would have been the same person regardless, that's totally fine, but i think the carver who grew up with an "ally", a non-mage sibling who was like him is a fundamentally different person than the carver who grew up having to protect two mages.

similarly, the bethany who grew up with self-loathing isolation... i think that's a different person than a bethany who grew up with a mage sibling, particularly if that sibling felt differently about their magic. that's a bethany who couldn't blame only herself for the family's situation, who wasn't always the odd one out, the one with the biggest and worst secret.

i love that the narrative bends around hawke, creates an arc where the defining feature of the surviving sibling is isolation. loneliness.

dorian:

Hey I can finally yell that I had the pleasure of working with Green Ronin Publishing on the cover for the Fifth Season RPG — set in the world of the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin!

Hello, police? I’ve witnessed a murder. So, if you spare Loghain in DAO, kill Anders in DA2, and then ask Hawke about Anders in DAI… Hawke stands next to Loghain and just… indirectly verbally annihilates the man. I only wish that Bioware had included him awkwardly clearing his throat at that point.