SopheroniPepperoni

How beautifully it ties together his role as a warden vs. his nature as a gentle boy who would sing to halla. Halla who don’t give their trust to just about anyone.

How it examines the hardening of heart under the pressure of being the shield between the world and the blight that Davrin refuses simply because he’s too kind and too caring and too sweet despite it all.

How him choosing to call a blighted monster by her name says more about him that anyone else; how he chooses to be humane over anything else. I would trust his judgement of monsters vs. non-monsters simply because he’s willing to acknowledge humanity where everyone else would see a monster (as does he, at first, when he lacks information).

Couldn't resist drawing a little retro-esque travel poster / postcard of my favourite city in Veilguard! I can already smell the coffee~☕️

Leyendecker study but it's Lucanis ✨

A few years ago, I read an essay by a romance writer who openly admitted that her books were trashy, formulaic, and not Great Art. But what she said is that she gets fan letters all the time. From women with six kids whose only time for themselves is reading her books. From women in abusive relationships who read her books to give them hope that loving relationships exist. From women with depression who manage to eke out some pleasure reading her books. From women whose lives are awful and who read her books to give them the strength to live another day.

And– she points out– the writers of Great Art have many virtues, but they do not generally get fan letters from people whose lives are miserable and who seek out comfort and joy from the books. Because most of the time when our lives are awful, we don’t seek out Great Art. We seek out, well, literary fast food. We seek out emotionally manipulative hurt/comfort or fluffy coffeeshop AUs or Mutual Pining where there is Only One Bed.

The full alphabet was found and has been made into a font.

Some notes:

Elvish uses a symbol for spaces between words. They do not use punctuation. K and Q are the same Elvish letter.

The elvish writing in DA4 is a 1:1 mask of English and can be decoded! The pic below is out of date, as the whole alphabet was found. In addition, Tevene, Anderfels, Antivan, and Nevarran alphabets can be linked to each other!

The general template of letters seems to follow three concentric hexagonal shapes: A major outer hex, minor middle hex, and major central hex. Dots also occur in text on outer hex vertices not touched by lines though this is more noticeable in carved text than in handwritten examples. Carved text seems to follow a linear pattern left-right (or up-down in some examples). This is my Rook's name "Dinaelya" written in the carved text format:

Meanwhile, handwritten Nevarran seems to follow a zig-zag pattern going up-down and left-right like so:

I think it’s fairly clear that she resents Hawke for a number of reasons: knowing Malcolm better than she does (implied at the end of Legacy), failing to save him/acting as the head of the family despite the fact that she’s clearly not stepping into the role or even trying, the dead twin, etc. Moreover, I think it’s fairly obvious that Leandra and Malcolm were very much what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet hadn’t had a typically tragic ending: they were young, impulsive, and in “love,” but once you’ve given up everything, what does that really leave you with? A partner you barely know, who you’ve put all your trust into despite that, and despite however much Leandra says she puts love above all-else, we see even in her conversations with Gamlen that this very much isn’t necessarily the case, and she carries a lot of her bitterness with her. She wasn’t ready for what running away really meant, she was young enough to have very likely acted impulsively on a romantic ideal that didn’t pan out in any way she’d actually hoped.

It’s a really dysfunctional, bittersweet relationship, and I can’t at all blame Hawke for thinking this. Hawke’s already got a guilt complex a mile wide, no matter how you really play it; there’s a reason they take on all this responsibility that isn’t even necessarily theirs. With Malcolm, it’s all responsibility, and honor, and doing the right thing no matter how hard it is, and with Leandra, it’s all guilt, residual affects of growing jaded with where unchecked romance really leads.

She can be a caring figure, certainly, when she feels like it, but finding her to be a truly supportive one it a little harder for me, when she relies on her eldest child the way her younger children do. There’s such a lack of responsibility on Leandra’s part: something must always be someone’s fault, because surely SURELY there must still be some good left to come out of a foolish decision she made as a teenager. Their status in Kirkwall is Gamlen’s fault (which is true enough, but he DOES have a point in that she’s been away from home for 25 years; anything he does to drag the “family name” into poverty and squalor is his own doing, and while it’s hard to support his methods, he’s at least grown up enough to recognize the reality of his situation. Is Leandra’s anger at her brother entirely unjustified? No, but at the same time, she continually fails to recognize that she gave up her status, her family name, and her inheritances, and this attitude doesn’t come out of nowhere, suddenly rekindled after two decades of “hiatus.” It’s a failure to take responsibility. 

TL;DR, I seriously appreciate just how incredibly fucked up and dysfunctional Hawke family dynamics really are. It’s a family full of love that Hawke would and continually does put their life on the line for, but it’s not a healthy one. It’s not a supportive one. And I find it really telling that despite Malcolm’s questionable allegiances as an apostate, it’s THIS name that Hawke chooses to symbolize and hang onto, despite the fact that Leandra is clearly very ready to step back into the role of a noble that she’d “left behind.” Is it any surprise that Hawke seems so used to the responsibility, so easily stepping into the role as head of household when their parents are so embittered, disillusioned, and in Malcolm’s case, paranoid and uncommunicative?

Hawke’s so used to being the parent, being the one to take up responsibility that of course it’s going to kill them when they fail; they’ve been conditioned to impossible responsibility and the constant looming threat of guilt.

[Summary: Davrin and Rook take the measure of each other during their first meeting in the Anderfels.

Assan's not the only one with ruffled feathers, here.]

Davrin’s blood is singing through his veins, his hunter’s focus locked into place.  There’s a certain trick to keeping far enough away from bands of darkspawn to train Assan on their scent, without risking battle and injury every time.  They’ve tracked this particular group over the better part of the day, winding farther up into the high canyons.  The band has kept well enough away from the trainers’ camp for the most part, but Davin’s started seeing more signs of darkspawn closer to where they started this morning.  One hand is close to the hilt of his sword as he scans the scene again, nostrils flaring as he inhales more of the metallic and sour scent of the taint.  Assan shuffles close to him, a soft curious sound in his throat as he looks around, too. Davrin absently places his hand on Assan’s downy head, gauntleted fingers lightly scratching through the griffon’s feathers.

Davrin kneels to study a print in the dirt, mind divided between tracking and trying to gauge how best to hone Assan’s instincts, when he hears footsteps and a scattering of stone chips sound along the small canyon that leads back to their camp.  Assan’s head shoots up, ears twitching and alert, and a small spear of pride shoots through Davrin even as he jumps to his feet, muscles tensed.  The constant hum of the Blight in his veins is too distant to be darkspawn, but he doesn’t recognize the two sets of treads coming closer.  Whoever they are, they aren’t Lancit and Remi.  Assan leaps to a rocky outcrop and begins prowling in the direction of the noise, a low sound in his throat.  With a curse, Davrin hurries to keep up with his charge, losing sight of Assan within a few moments thanks to the fact that Assan can fly, and Davrin has a distinct lack of wings. 

“Assan!”

He hears Assan let out his hunting shriek, and Davrin lopes up the last steep rise before laying eyes on the scene before him.

First, it was extremely lore-consistent. I don’t know how to tell people this, but the Grey Wardens simply are sort of shady— it’s part of their charm. In DAO alone we found out they:

- kill anyone who refuses the joining

- are definitely using a blood magic ritual to induct people

- tried to usurp the throne of Fereldan

In DA2 they:

-Forced Malcolm Hawke to perform a blood magic ritual against his will to contain Corypheus, by threatening to kill his family

- Built a giant prison in the mountains they didn’t tell anyone about and that someone could wander into and not be able to escape

- the entire Corypheus thing. They didn’t even tell the other Wardens like what he was or how dangerous he was.

DAI:

- the demon army thing was pretty bad

And that’s not even mentioning any stuff from the books or comics or shows! That’s just stuff in the games!

So they’re shady. It’s okay! They’re my little woobie guys, idc if they’re sort of shady!

But the plot in DATV is about all of those previously established issues coming back to bite them in the fucking ass, as they should! Knock knock, it’s the consequences of your actions, baby! The chickens are home to roost

(Which is just good storytelling. Like if you set up a bunch of issues and then never pay them off or anything that’s bad.)

Destroying Weisshaupt was inspired! Firstly bc Davrin is Weisshaupt, metaphorically (bulwark against the darkness, etc, I already made a post) so it serves his character arc. But also because it strips away the pageantry and the grandeur from them; no more castle for you! No more myth!

Davrin explicitly tells you that the First Warden is a traditionalist; he represents the historical attitudes of the Wardens. They do not accept help, they do not give up their secrets, they are standing alone against the dark. And it doesn’t work! He’s fucking wrong (and very punch-able). Being secretive and isolationist is a mistake that costs them nearly everything.

But also, and I’m not sure how many people experienced this on the first go-around, the game does ultimately come down on the side of the Wardens always trying to do the right thing. You CAN talk the First Warden down, because in the end he’s a Warden, and he might be stubborn and curmudgeonly and miserable but he CARES about the world. He came to do good. He admits he was wrong and he helps you. Because the heart of the Wardens is about selfless service to other people. In Death, Sacrifice.

Stripping away Weisshaupt and the glory and pageantry leaves the Wardens at their most vulnerable and forces them to return to their fundamental principles: helping people. That’s what Lavendel is about. Helping individual people and preserving every life possible even if it doesn’t feel that glamorous or heroic. Lavendel isn’t a significant place; it doesn’t matter, but it matters so much.

And then, the Cauldron.

First off, do not at me about Last Flight. I don’t think people should have to read external materials to play this game and understand it. If the information is vital it should be presented to the player in the text.

The Cauldron is the repository of the Wardens’ secrets; it’s where the keep the bones of the Archdemons, the secret to the Joining, ancient and dangerous weapons, as well as the bodies of the griffons, which represents their most shameful errors. Isseya is the avatar of the Wardens’ mistakes; she’s been hurt by what they made her do, and her pain was never acknowledged by them. They buried her story and her suffering like they bury everything they don’t want to deal with and are ashamed of. They left the bones of the griffons, whose deaths they directly caused, to rot because they were too sad to acknowledge them.

But it was wrong to walk away, it was wrong to bury it. Isseya makes sure that they can never do that again, that they have to own what they did and take responsibility. By discovering who she is and by restoring her personhood to her, by reminding her of her love which drove her to her anguish in the first place, Davrin saves her and he saves the griffons. He doesn’t do it using violence, because another sin of the Wardens is just assuming that they can kill their way out of their problems, which the game disproves by revealing the origin of the Blight. You can kill as many darkspawn as you want, you will never fix it! The Titans’ dreams do not need to be slain, they need to be healed.

Isseya is in so much pain because of her incredible love for both the griffons and the Wardens, and because of her guilt. Look what she builds! An alternate Weisshaupt, a distorted reflection of her home. She entreats both Davrin and Assan to join her, because she doesn’t think she’s trying to destroy anything. She’s trying to save them! She wants them to come home. “I am their mother,” she says, and she’s right. She saved them, then, and she ends up saving them now! Because she made Davrin and the other Wardens look, unflinchingly, at what they had done, it will never happen again. She was going about it wrong during the game, but she was ALWAYS trying to save them.

Davrin, Antoine and Evka represent the Wardens’ commitment to being different. They let Flynn undergo the Joining without becoming a Warden, they reveal secrets to non-Warden Rook, they offer to help the Viper without asking for anything in return. They ask for help and offer it freely. If the Wardens are going to persist into a world without Archdemons, they HAVE to change. They can’t be what they were anymore. The game is asking what a Warden is when they have to be more than their oath, when they have to live. It’s a great exploration of and expansion on previously established lore.