#brightflight

I knew you in another life You had that same look in your eyes

Throw Hawke off the battlements and become a ‘savage’ Tal-Vashoth

da:o minor character

i gotta rep my man, gorim saelac.

i credit the aeducan origin for getting me into the series, it was my first choice b/c i’ve been in love with fantasy dwarves since i read the hobbit in fourth grade. the political intrigue and society was part of it, but the other part was that bioware gave me a soft-spoken dwarf boyfriend and then took him AWAY.

i like gorim b/c he’s clearly steeped in his caste and what it means to be a warrior or a saelac. his father was second to endrin before him, and he’s willing to play the dirtier games of orzammar. and yet at the same time he’s hurt by it. he doesn’t suffer as lower castes do by any means, but his relationship with aeducans who choose romance has gotten him beaten. there’s no way he’ll ever get to marry her, and even if he’s not in a relationship with aeducan i think the qunari (and oghren for that matter) demonstrate the issues with raising people from a young age to be warriors and nothing else. i wish he could’ve been a companion or in-camp merchant because his perspective would’ve been interesting to contrast with oghren’s.

da2 minor character

the side characters in da2 are one of the games strengths over its predecessor imo, so this is a hard choice. i love feynriel, for example, and i like marethari’s character, but i’m gonna talk about saemus.

saemus is so sweet? we don’t get nearly enough of him, but i love seeing him 3 years later in act 2 and how much he’s learned from hawke and how much he’s inspired by them. especially if you take his side in act 1. i think if he had lived he could’ve made a real difference with the qunari, maybe not in-game, as he was still coming into his own when he died, but afterwards? it isn’t often you have leaders who are willing to try to understand the qun, leaders in the south especially.

also? that boy is gay.

da:i minor character

i could probably go on forever, b/c this ranges from ppl like krem and harding who are Perfect Angels to ppl like charter who is also a Perfect Angel but she’s not as focused on.

i’m gonna go a little obscure tho and say i love colette, bran kenric’s student. seeing an elf from the university of orlais, something that was alluded to in the books, was super fun. helping her with her research and eventually uncovering that the person she’s been helping kenric research was, in fact, and elf himself? so often elves in game are framed as rediscovering their past via elvhenan, which is reasonable and i love elves who do that (merrill is like my second fave character after all...) but it was nice to see one who ends up rediscovering her people’s past between the fall of elvhenan and now.

Sopping wet and covered in bits of shattered glass and broken plaster dust and bits of wood – some of which was also coating the surface of the water in the deep, deep copper tub which had so very helpfully broken her fall through the window above, Hawke felt – well, a bit less quick on her feet than usual, say.

She stood up, noting in passing that the Arishok apparently liked his baths scented with imported Par Vollen jasmine oil, and brushed at the front of her armor with a studious unconcern which was almost surprisingly felinein an avowed dog person.

“Oh, my,” she said, looking around her with an elaborately affected surprise as though only just noticing where she was. “This… isn’t my bathroom.”

       A thick-lipped line exhausts the will of his face. His black eyes, trained on the capsized water, irritation burning just below the dapple of temperance, then rolled up and up until the scar above the compound was laid bare. Through it he could see the night accompanied by a lonely lance, shouts in Qunlat rebutted by the Arishok’s steady baritone --  taasath -- two syllables was all it would take to send away (reluctantly) the response to the crash.

       In his hands, which are distinctly as uncovered by the usual bits of armour as the rest of him, is a weighted cloth; ceremoniously massaged against the rough padding bordering claws, the various pigmentation of reds that made up his vitaar besmudged upon it.

       A growl echoed through the area. Not from him, but from his roof-bound guard. The mugger that thought themselves lucky to have escaped Hawke’s wrath through this blunder now faces the misfortune of impalement just on the edges of their earshot.

    “And that,” tipped his horns toward the sounds, “is no longer your concern.”

tbh iiiiit’s not terribly appropriate actually? “thee/thou” is not just an archaic pronoun, it’s the familiar or the casual form, like, it would be unbearably impolite of her to address someone higher in status than she is by that, rather than by you. tolkien himself even plays with this at times, as in the Athrabeth, where Finrod “thees” Andreth and she calls him out on not knowing her well enough to talk down to her like that.

@brightflight​ oh my guy you’ve no idea how long I’ve thought about this like thats exactly how Hravanis would act and thats like partly why I like it too cus? The point is she is LIKE that, so I get to put more emphasis on those she respects, the fact that she might address Elrond as 'you' 'your' but not perhaps Galadriel is just idk man I get a kick out of it. 

But thats more of a side thing that I would personally enjoy and I realise I’m bastardising the original meaning. The point would be the original meaning wouldn’t matter, more the mun’s perception of it, which usually is that ‘thee, thou ect’ is an archaic and weird way of speaking. They thereby get that she talks strangely, it’s just me creating a shorthand way of showing she’s weird without me having to constantly mention it in the description which can be a pain at times. 

“…is this is a trick question?” Hawke asked suspiciously, regarding the man she’d first been introduced to as a Magister and now knew for the very Archon himself. And he really looked the part now, wearing his big fancy formal robes of heavy teal fabric and layered leather… as much armor as it was for show, she judged it. Smart boy.

She dug the toe of her boot into the side of the man she’d trussed like a pig and dropped at the Archon’s feet. This one was a Magister, or at least so he’d claimed when she’d tracked him down and he’d decided to posture a bit and try to scare the skin off the poor unmagical southern girl. Hadn’t worked. She’d faced down real dragons before. Some discount knock off version with two legs and a dragon hood wasn’t about to scare Margaux Hawke.

(But honestly, what was it with that dragon hood? The flappy bits on the side looked a lot more like bunny ears than dragon horns. Not intimidating.)

“In any case, your Imperialness,” she said with a little grin. “In this case I suggest you spare it just long enough to make this traitor sing like a pretty little lark.”

Your Imperialness. By the Maker. Radonis wetted his lips and moved his eyes from the kneeling man to her, all in all a quite level stare. He’d played with her before, somewhat amiably, entertaining himself with her wit until she’d learnt who he was --- now he was not playing, nor in the mood for it.

From his side, Flavius corrected, a little pointedly: « Your Imperial Majesty. »

« Don’t you worry, Flavius. The Champion’s memory is what it is, seems like. » With a slowness of movement, he turned again to the prisoner. Radonis couldn’t say that he recognised him, though he most certainly recognised that expression --- the clenched jaw and downcast gaze, a characteristic mix of pride and shame tightly intertwined with a healthy dose of fear.

She made her way back from the water pump and the messenger boy to where her tet made rest on the outcrop of a town –– barely more than a congregation of three huts and twice as many contaminated ranchers, really –– with mechanic steps and in complete, condemning silence. Only in silence, the word. Only in dying, life. 

“Farson took the city.” Her voice passed through a mincer –– strangled, pained. 

“We must go back. We must catch up with the survivors. Steven will have–” She broke off. Steven’s head is on a pike with the Troitan banners. She closed her eyes. She breathed, she opened them again, she started again. “Roland will have them flock to him, for sure.”

        Michel, for his part, had nothing against Marchers  —  or Fereldans, generally, but it was the former for which the name Hawke gained its fame, and even the more esteemed despite Kirkwall’s reputation of late.  

       It wasn’t uncommon for chevaliers to head to the Marcher states to find a use for their blades, whether running the tournament circuit for a little extra pay and glory or offering the swords to a distant relative through an Orlesian connection generations back. Another life, and Michel might have pursued something similar himself, safely removing himself from the viper’s nest of the imperial court and its scandals. But he’d gone the opposite way and embedded himself in Val Royeaux instead, missing what seemed like a relatively straightforward way of life in the city-states.

       ... save for whatever intrigues had raised Hawke out of a commoner’s irrelevance to become a household name. A hero, some said, but others would describe her as a trouble-causing lowlife thug who had only been in the right place at the right time, or maybe the wrong place at the wrong time.

       In either case, despite her person being pointed out to Michel by more than one gossiping friend in the tavern, they’d made no proper introductions to one another since arriving in Skyhold, even as one champion to another. One ... ex-champion to another, even. Word was that she was hardly less of a vagrant wanderer than he had been until the Inquisition had taken him under their merciful wing, though it wouldn’t have been the point of conversation Michel would choose to start their acquaintance.