#crackmonkeytrash

alia tabris is pretty canon divergent; she's a hedge mage, for one! rather than giving her up to a circle when the magic came, alia's mother insisted on hiding the magic and keeping her in the alienage; not really free, but certainly closer than she'd have been in a circle. very bethany and mage!hawke.

anyway, alia is only nineteen when the game begins, and hasn't really trained her magic much; she keeps it hidden even through the kidnapping up until she finds shianni and vaughn, at which point she's so furious — and also trying to repress her magic so violently — that it slips out and she freezes him, and then shatters him into tiny little pieces. she takes the blame for everything with the hope that that will avoid a purge, and even once she joins the party her sense of her own magic is weird. she ends up finding that, while she learns to be decently proficient with a staff, she prefers channeling magic through her body — there are lots of uses! gather a great deal of force magic in your fist and then release it all at once when you punch something and you can knock down walls with relative ease. launch yourself across the battlefield with a combination of force magic and barrier magic around your legs. channel entropy magic through a dagger in another's gut...the options are limitless!

there's an element of like...how do i put it. for most of my characters, across series, becoming A Hero is a net negative; it inflicts a lot of additional trauma without enough gain to offset it. like, all my hawkes, almost all my inkies ( dove is the exception ), many of my wardens...they hate being The Champion/The Inquisitor/The Warden. but for alia, becoming a warden was the first time she got to eat enough, was free to explore her magic, had real, close bonds — the first time she was really allowed to act as young as she is. she seems very childish at times because this is the first time she's been allowed to be a child. not that there's no pain associated with becoming The Warden, but it brought her more good than harm. she's happy to be the warden, for all she might wince from being called a hero.

that being said, while she's great at leading a small group, she finds that she struggles immensely at being warden commander — she doesn't feel like she's good at it. and while she's not as bad as she THINKS she is, the fact remains that she's not great, either. origins is a lot of positive character development for her, but all the dlc she mostly undergoes negative development due to feeling like she just. keeps. failing others. this motivates her fleeing the wardens a little earlier than most of my other wardens, do — that and a desire to see zevran again, of course.

as for johana — she's leliana's beloved! she remains with leliana even once leli becomes divine victoria; spends a lot of time being annoying about how her "naughty priest" fantasies are all coming true. they never actually officially marry ( there's just so rarely time ) but at some point they just took to calling each other wife/my wife/etc and it stuck.

leliana is such a revelation for jo; she experienced a lot of comments from her family and others about being attracted to women, and her parents desperately trying to hook her up with a man takes on a particularly gross energy when johana is an out and out lesbian, and given how misogynistic howe is i can't imagine he didn't have opinions on the warrior woman also being gay. she's internalized that while few people will outright disallow her from loving women, that there is something inherently less holy / Right about attraction to women. not that this results in any hiding; jo leans hard into being The Problem Child, enjoys the relative freedom that comes with, and decides that if attraction to women is wrong then she'll just Be Wrong and not try to "fix" herself. but still, it's hard to carry that. and here comes leliana, bi supreme, who is at once the most holy woman she knows and who is also flirting with her and outright about being attracted to women.

it blows johana's mind, and leliana and johana's frankly bonkers devotion and loyalty towards her drives a lot of johana's actions. she makes a lot of Good Moral Choices ( as opposed to utilitarian morally questionable ones ) because leliana's there to remind her that she's capable of being merciful and moral and kind.