ok alright. i am finally posting ✨where there's smoke✨ my inquisition au fic! newest chapter is here!
the premise, in short:
what if, after anders was notably an apostate who blew up a chantry building and killed a chantry leader... people are not particularly stoked when this happens again. except even more destructively. and this time with a Heathen Elf™️ found at the scene.
so, instead of seeing the prisoner as any sort of positive religious omen, (most of) the people in haven instead see her as a dangerous criminal, and react accordingly. and this starts to cause further problems. solavellan is also there eventually.
the premise, in long:
what if the tranquil didn't just all get turned into oculara offscreen, and actually were part of the plot.
what if anders and kirkwall haunted the narrative a bit more.
what if, a dalish elf who suddenly wakes up in chantry custody for a mass murder... assumes any personal information shared will lead to providing a target for an exalted march. and therefore doesn't share any. which only looks more suspicious lmao.
what if the dalish/city elf stuff was not written in a way that i personally found very stupid (it will at least, be stupid in a new, different way! diversity win <3)
[holds up incredibly minor npcs] "i just think they're neat"
what if leliana's rose vision and general heretical tendencies went somewhere. i think she can have a little a chantry schism, as a treat.
what kind of weird person would be like "hm yes. i love to wander around. as a visibly dalish apostate. all by myself :^)" and, what reasons might they have for going to the conclave directly, when it's literally Templar Central. here's her character tag uwu.
also i retconned some aspects of vg lore when i felt like it. didn't make sense and doesn't compel me! the elves don't need white guilt! solas cannot be arlathan's most special, invaluable, genius military mastermind, who singlehandedly won the titan war, and invented tranquility, the blight, eluvians, and sliced bread - then was still mythal's yappy lapdog who got laughed at in meetings afterwards. that is just contradictory fhdghfkdh.
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Here for an afira/triangles fun fact. is there a job she ever really wanted, why or why not does this make her job as inquisitor harder? How does or does Afira see a future outside the roll that might doom them? How does that play into the trope of doomed hero with the relationship with solas. Also, big ask, will you talk about how her status affects them both? Also hello, welcome to my mojo dojo question house.
oh gosh!! ok here are very scattered triangle lore rambles, based on what is currently in the fic timeline bc i don't want to jump ahead too far haha.
she... never specifically wanted a Job, bc she went from being "regular alienage child" to "uh oh! this little triangle is a mage! 😬" which, along with the [series of unfortunate events before she reached her clan] precluded developing any real sense of a future life path. she (briefly and impulsively) was like "well. it's not like i WANT to be the first or the keeper. but it's unfair to be denied the chance to compete for it!! what, just because i have a 'bad personality for leading' and 'the other candidates are from the keepers' lineage and also better trained'? smh! i will enter and win this contest! just because they said i shouldn't!!"
which then ended up in her winning being first, through somewhat dubious means. and then immediately assigning herself to roaming messenger duty. bc no one really wanted her to be a future leader, including her. all this basically just pissed off much of her clan, for no real benefit, aside from a vague sense of vindication. this is peak performance 📐👍
she generally thinks she is both Inherently Somewhat Evil, and also a very bad leader. which is only slightly true. but does stress her out very badly if she's given any indication that people see her as an authority figure, haha. currently in the fic timeline, no one sees her as that, and she is just expecting to be the funniest person at her own public execution, which is a role that she does feel qualified for. she is lying awake at night workshopping her Coolest Lines for this, bc she is normal.
i think in solas' case it's a bit... from his perspective, in this au, the entire "she is a prisoner" thing weighs on him a lot. no escaping the depersonalization and loss of autonomy that he's inflicted on this random elf! this is not really very good dread wolf behaviour to have gotten an innocent bystander held captive during his plans. he's so far scraping by on avoiding thinking about it, bc he doesn't believe she fully has feelings. but on the other hand, he has seen way too many miserable imprisoned elves trying to act calm about it, and despite probably(?) not having feelings, she acts exactly like those ones. so it's difficult for him to not sympathize 🍳
from triangle's pov, she is deadly serious about "i will kill to protect you btw :^)" as she sees it as something of a professional obligation from being technically a first. she currently, literally, just thinks solas is neat. weaow, he knows cool facts and is seemingly the most unhinged bleeding heart idealist she's ever seen in her life. what kind of weirdo sticks around in all this danger purely for humanitarian reasons?
absolutely looosssinggg it. i'm so obsessed with movies which portray the woman MC in a highly specific job because the writers clearly think it's like "off-beat" and "quirky" but have no idea how the field works whatsoever.
i decided to try a romcom i somehow missed i the 2000s 'head over heels' and i got 3 and a half minutes in and we're introduced to the lonely MC with bad taste in men as evidenced by her extremely short list of ex boyfriends, including her first boyfriend when she was 11 or something because i guess that's still relevant in her adult life.
so she's resigned herself to never finding love and prefers to ignore men to focus all her energy into her career.
this job is immediately presented as though it's for spinsters with no hope of ever finding a man.
the mc's lesbian bestie (whose first line involves her being scolded for being too sexual in the workplace, but moving on) points out their colleagues as evidence that they're doomed to a romance-less, sexless life if they don't switch up their shared career path. the colleagues are three old women, so-dubbed "the menopause triplets":
these women are presented as if they have no idea what's going on at any given moment. this is 2001, and presumably this is an entry level job requiring low effort and no experience.
then their boss bursts into the room, unceremoniously bumping a large painting into the door jam and walls, announcing that it's a new project for our MC.
our MC is thrilled to see the painting. apparently it's a light in the daily slog at her dreary job for loser women with nothing going on in their lives.
And that job is? Conservator of paintings (specializing in Renaissance) at the New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The painting being handled like an old couch on its way to the curb?
The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian.
Her lesbian colleague who is presumably also a a highly trained & skilled curator finds it depressing that the MC is so excited about the painting.
it's a quirk unique to this MC that she cares so much about paintings, in her department at the metropolitan museum of art, where her colleagues find all that art business rather dreary. because we all know that's what conservators in extremely competitive museum positions are like.
I'm not saying there can't be lifelong love in here somewhere but I also just feel like the monogamous heterosexual marriage you're fantasizing about isn't necessarily best represented by the bacchanal. and that's okay. but i do stand by that.
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I am curious: what was 2015 era Solavellan like? I wasn't active in the fandom back then.
oh gosh, it was like
general da fandom: convinced that solas is literally Elf Hitler and anyone who liked him was Literally Pro-Genocide (i am so not kidding hfkdgshfd. imagine the worst and most tasteless things to say, and they were said). on top of the "solas is literally abusive to lavellan and it's disgusting that people romanticize this" general ship discourse.
the solavellan fandom, not to be outdone in being annoying:
Dark Wolf Coded Possessive Dom Solas x Gentle Virginal Naive Halla-Coded Lavellan is the most common trope
"what if MY lavellan came from a clan... that had fen'harel vallaslin... 😏"
"the reason solas is straight and elf-only is bc he wants female lavellan to Rebuild The Population with him <3 and this is good <3 yay"
the most egregiously "uwu i'm just a girl, explain everything to me solas, bc i'm so ignorant from living in the forest with my dumb clan that i always hated " style lavellans that were veering into full on noble savage tropes. yeah, let's ignore how lavellan is either the clan's first, or a seasoned enough hunter to be sent off alone on this wildly risky mission, after living her whole life in thedas as an elf who's in constant danger! she is Just A Girl... She Must Be Taught Things........
"if you don't let solas remove the vallaslin, that means lavellan is some kind of pro-slavery idiot who can't accept the truth, and the dalish are basically just cosplaying and don't even understand their own culture :/"
"what if ancient elves were all white, and so therefore the veil is what made darker skinned elves exist, as a symptom of their mortality and diminishment <3" someone genuinely wrote this fic premise hfdkgjfdg 💀
incredibly annoying "dorian is lavellan's Quirky Gay Bestie" type of writing (tbf, also an issue in the rest of the fandom, aside from the dorian shipping fics generally)
and in general i guess the da fandom was larger, and tumblr had not become quite so homogenously white then, which was nice. but also i think the amount of people getting racially harassed was much higher + it was pretty obvious just from a scan that white characters/whitewashed art were seen as more appealing in general. so i was just sort of lurking for most of it :')
Hope you don't mind the ask.
I am curious about your thoughts on the handling of Solavellan in DAV, considering your recent Solavellan (re)posts.
haha no worries, i love solavellan rambling!! >:)
i had a few longer posts on it here and here and here if you want to see them! i was thinking about it a bit when trying to clarify my plans for my writing purposes. tumblr is effectively the rubber ducky i talk to for that hkgjdhs.
i'm also legally obligated to hold up my fic for Extremely Slowburn Solavellan Content, while i juggle 12 chantry schism plot threads. it's not very far in but i think it is clear that my triangle is unsuitable for vg due to her personality haha 📐♥️🥚
anyway i think out of universe, veilguard solavellan is primarily like.... a very egregious and somewhat misogynistic ploy on behalf of the writers?
imo, the fandom is very funny for somehow managing to pin the blame on vg being bad on the ~solavellan fans~, as opposed to the writers. like they repeatedly set solas up as plot relevant (whether people like him or the romance or not, he was clearly intended to be the focus of the game) and then hyped up the romantic focus/solavellan content in all the marketing to lure in his fans...
...and then went "umm sweetie, we actually cannot and will not write about slavery, social unrest, elves, or romance in general. and the narrative lead hates solas <3 you're welcome <3", after everyone had paid for the game. wild! and that's not even including the weird disdainful lines IN the game script towards it. this is abnormal behaviour for game developers! the derision towards romance as a genre is so gendered, and i think actually it's quite disappointing that the broader fandom, despite being generally somewhat leftist online, is unwilling to really talk about that.
in universe, it is theeeeee blandest and most obnoxiously Heteronormative version of the ship and i hate it, haha. i fear i am completely disinterested in solavellan when it's like.... 100% lavellan just being led along by solas' choices, and never actually Doing Something that takes him by surprise and alters his plans? and frankly the entire draw of the ship, to me, is not really about "uwu our love will endure 🥺" and lavellan somehow Passively Enduring all the bullshit solas puts them through, and softening his heart with pure virtuous forgiveness and unconditional love or whatever.
it is actually about lavellan, an extremely precariously situated dalish elf who's in danger already, being unhinged enough to see a non-dalish elf they only met 2 days ago (who is actually their most loathed religious figure, who has been either a pawn or a soldier or unwillingly deified for most of his life, and is notorious for breaking himself/other people out of jails) and then go "hey solas! i would do anything necessary to protect you from captivity! :)" completely unprompted.
i feel like you could make a Truly Harrowing Grimdark fic out of veilguard if you actually just. take the offscreen events seriously, and retain the previous stuff like "blight is incurable" and "elves are oppressed" and "evanuris are unkillable through any means found in millennia, even when they kill each other" and "the black city is already 2 steps away from breaking open, and it's inherently tied to the veil"
so then it's really like:
rook interferes with the ritual, releases 2 evanuris and the blight into thedas. multiple countries begin collapsing under darkspawn and famine. i think even orzammar goes quiet? i don't agree with the "oh ferelden got blighted and it was fine!" argument, bc this is now like 3 countries over a huge geographical area, and it's said that famine is looming and the survivors are few enough to fit into individual cities. that's REALLY bad.
everyone is now aware that the cause of this is the Evil Elven Gods, from their religion already banned by the chantry, but that elves were known to practice in secret. retaliation begins. all the elves in thedas are now seen as suspect at best, and responsible for this at worst.
rook's team is busy having coffee, organizing a book club, and cooking for each other cutely. occasionally bickering with solas, but not asking him any useful questions about this whole trainwreck, or about what his plan actually was, before.
tevinter and the antivan crows remain powerful through everything - tevinter is now completely unchecked, bc no other part of southern thedas would be able to repel their influence. tevinter practices mass slavery of elves, and the antivan crows do as well, in a slightly different way, in that they bank on elves being considered attractive and good honeypots for assassinations. and that's not good, because...
it's revealed that not only did the Evil Elven Gods cause all this recent carnage, they also invented the blight! this is a huge W for tevinter. their greatest national embarrassment can now be pinned on their ancient enemy. they immediately argue that the original magisters were actually just being brainwashed by the Evil Gods, and actually, thedas is SO lucky that tevinter destroyed arlathan. it was an evil place worshipping evil gods!
elves across thedas are, presumably, facing violently forced conversion to andrastianism at best, or massascres, exile, and enslavement at worst. in this trying time, at least they have. uhhh. bellara's white guilt to help advocate for them, as she said maybe they shouldn't be trusted after all? oh ok. well if the elves themselves say they can't be trusted...
in most people's eyes, this immediately reframes the entire chant of light. if shartan was an elf, and he wanted to give his people a nation where they could worship Evil Elven Gods... how could he have been truly allied with andraste? did HE betray her, actually? is this why the dales never helped with the blight and deserved to be destroyed?
harding discovers and reconnects to the titans - concludes that, despite being alive and sapient and having their literal blood being mined out of their bodies by their estranged children, their time is over. presumably, they stay comatose and in eternal suffering until uhhh. idk. either the dwarves run out of lyrium or the titans lash out into mass earthquakes when they reach their limit(?). who knows!
you can prop up a regime of... immortal mages in nevarra. having mages with immortality went super well for the elves, no problems. imagine if, say, the chantry was destabilized and these immortal mages no longer have anything to fear from anybody else? surely they wouldn't take power forever. haha. don't worry, these ones are really nice, they're just into uhhh. summoning spirits into corpses to create huge labour forces. and they're goth.
meanwhile, the Evil Elven Gods have been killed! yay! but actually, are they going to stay dead...? all the evanuris ganged up together to kill mythal, and she survived for millennia. they would've certainly known about her dragon and tried to kill it, too - if they failed after that, that means they're truly unkillable in some way. solas was trying to kill these guys for however many centuries - if it was as simple as "boss fight the dragon and then the evanuris" he would've done that instead of some galaxy brain reality-altering stuff that knocked him into a coma?
so, they're gone for now. luckily the blight and the veil can be held up! by one guy who's uhhh. in eternal solitary confinement, watching the last of his people get hunted down by the chantry. and he's not really immortal. and tevinter may be gunning for him anyway, and they now have enough slaves to access huge amounts of blood to reach the black city again. and the veil thins by itself whenever there's anything like "war" or "suffering" so... it's about to turn into swiss cheese.
anyway, what if dragon age was about a young witch in a fully post apocalyptic setting, looking for unblighted food and water while dodging rival warlords and tevinter slavers, and elves have become reclusive and nearly extinct, and the veil is so thin, and the black city is so close, that it can actually be seen in the sky like a portent of doom. also there are book clubs still.
actually this could be so wild if it's alongside a really low-approval, brutal, chantry stooge type of inquisitor worldstate, haha. like fully "ally with templars, kill the sentinel elves, kill the wisdom spirit, screw over the dalish whenever possible, gaspard on the throne, embrace the herald of andraste concept" type of situation.
like yeah. no WONDER the inquisition found nothing of use in the 10 years they were hunting for solas. they were busy becoming a new branch of the chantry. they're not going to find any useful info on the heretical elven gods or the blight or the ancient magisters - that's not maker-honouring! they end up descending rapidly into corruption within years, and had zero possible leads except for "send varric and his single random protege to intercept solas, i guess?" which doesn't work.
and then it turns out the protege is both really incompetent, and not taking the issue very seriously, while the inquisition itself struggles and fails to protect southern thedas from the enormous amounts of blight and chaos being loosed on it.
anyway smash cut to like 200 years later, when some poor dumbass in this severely post-apocalyptic, earthquake/blight/war/demons/undead ravaged landscape of thedas, is once again trying to access the black city. to see if they can dredge out the rumoured last remaining person with the required magical knowledge to fix things. third time's the charm(?)
so, you know how rook can inexplicably encourage lavellan to reunite with solas, and THEN stab him? and lavellan does nothing? well. let's say they do actually interfere, try to stop rook, and then rook has to kill them before stabbing solas and sticking him in the omelas containment prison.
yay! thedas has been saved from being drowned in demons, by drowning half of it in blight. high fives all around.
200 years pass. reva, loyally, is spending all this time trying to figure out a way to free her boss. the world, as established, starts fucking collapsing about 2 minutes after the ending of veilguard.
reva, alongside a ragged, pathetic group of postapocalypse thedas residents (your pc included!) finally manages to get a way to crack open solas' jail and pull him out, in order to get his help as the one magical expert who might be able to fix things. this jailbreak is partially possible purely bc uhh. the veil is so nearly Gone that the black city is basically just visible in the sky now. lmao.
solas, world's unhappiest pride demon, is at like 2 hp after the stab wound, and also completely grief-stricken and embittered by watching his lover get killed trying to protect him, and the solitary confinement. he is SO unlikeable at this point. his ass is not doing stuff like "helping random refugees" or "approving of asking questions" or "playing mind chess to cheer up his friend". he's only in it out of a vague shred of sunk cost "i guess i put in enough effort into trying to fix the world already, may as well keep going" and pride demonesque "hm i see i'm Once Again the only one who can solve this". there's a 90% chance he betrays the whole party, minus reva, just for enrichment.
however, reva has now spent a long time living on thedas and trying to work with the pathetic cringe fail mortals she once despised. and she's romanceable/befriendable.
so reva is now in the position of starting to have her allegiances shifting bc she's getting attached. and solas would disagree both out of pride demon principles, and the very apt point of "don't care for a mortal, bc they'll die in front of you, and perhaps even because of you, and it'll be the most miserable thing you can ever experience". unfortunately, the one weakness of ancient elves seems to be: random earnest mortals who look at them like this 🥺 one time.
and then... idk. reva's in a strange combo of going through solas' Inquisition Crisis, while also being in a felassan 2.0 situation with an even MORE embittered and murder-happy boss - but he does owe her one for the prison break. but also, how would she react to his inevitable betrayal of the party? who would she side with? is it actually possible to make solas be less than 90% pride demon by volume, or is it too late for his better nature to win out?
anyway that's the optimistic sequel to veilguard! they do still have book clubs in this game btw :)
ok, i had to add another point to this, bc of @crimsonphantasmagoria's very good post about The Fucking Moon's Orbit:
so let's say that... after being stabbed by rook, elgar'nan is either dead, or dead-ish. so at best, he'll probably pop back up in a host mythal-style, but he's probably not powerful enough to put the moon back in orbit?
this causes widespread Tidal Chaos and natural disasters as the moon is thrown into a random direction away from planet thedas. ghilan'nain was mentioned to have all kinds of deep sea creatures, that would probably be disturbed by this - thedas now has pacific rim style beasts coming out of the water and stomping around.
there's also the issue of, uhh. where is the moon going?? and is it coming back? personally i do not know about astronomy, but i think the coolest option is that the moon gets further and further away for a while, becoming very small in the sky, and then rapidly getting much bigger. the last surviving thedas astronomers (probably in tevinter, bc it's the diplomatic hub <3) announce that the moon is going to fully crash into the earth and obliterate it within a few decades at most. this causes mass panic and religious crises.
and this is when the ragged pathetic mortal squad + reva, dredge solas out of the black city and try to fix the world one last time, in the shadow of all these compounding mistakes that have led to unavoidable doom.
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i got tagged by @virshiral! here is solas having a really Normal Reaction after running into mihris <3
"No need to show off on the kid's behalf," Tethras says.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to."
"Come on. All that elfier-than-thou stuff - don't you get tired of it? I'm tired just watching it."
Bitterness would be unfair, directed at whatever lonely, Stone-severed sort of dwarf Tethras is. And, yet. Fairness is not something he's ever managed to find or cultivate in any great measure, in all his years on earth.
"I was not aware it was competitive to speak my own language, Master Tethras," he replies, voice a little cold.
Tethras clicks his tongue. "Touchy enough to play dumb! Nevermind, then." He gives a magnanimous wave of his hand. "Go on. Don't let me get in the way - should I hold up a scorecard?"
How charming. How glib. It would be a waste of the dwarf's limited time; as Solas has already failed, and the People have already lost, over and over, by any possible measure. Unfair bitterness sharpens to equally unfair irritation.
"As insightful as your commentary is," Solas says, flatly. "I did not ask for it. Not all of us prefer to bare our chests and loudly proclaim our forgetfulness of where we came from."
Tethras flashes him a glittering smile. "Can't knock it until you try it, Chuckles."
i will tag @hallahart and @epiphany-jones if you feel like it ;o;
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