As much as I love our "canon-divergent DAI" (and, mainly, BECAUSE my love for it), it cannot just always be Dragon Age. We with @starrythroat have changed a lot in it, and we do a lot of additional worldbuilding. I don't have any "publishing" ambitions, quite the opposite. But I DO want to have a full creative control, and the fandom framing just cannot give it to me, even if I slap "canon-divergent" onto it. So a new world, and a new story, is to be created.
Cassandra is a canon character, and I am not going to mindlessly copy-paste her into an original setting. That would be disrespectful, even considering my lack of ambition and doing all that just for my coauthor and me. I have already redesigned a lot in her, she doesn't look 100% like in canon in my art, but I will do more. I want her to feel like the version of Cassandra I draw, but also be a separate character. The new framing should help a lot with that.
That is not to say that we are abandoning DA, because - of course not! Obelerio started as a DA blorbo, and his first version will always be special to me. But I still want to try doing a whole separate story/setting for them. If I fail, I can always backtrack, so I lose nothing.
DA touches a lot of my favourite subjects and I always felt the need to expand on them. But as our story went on along with many headcanons and adjustments it became clear that these deviate too much from the source and this entire endeavour asks for a rewrite
And if I want to build it anew, it’s much funnier to do from the ground up for me rather than continue beating poor dragon age to make it something you want
I recognise that it’s very derivative but do I care? No. Fun it is
