#crow studies

i TRULY cannot express this enough: that villa is a tomb and if we do not get him out of there we are burying him in it

lucanis does not want this job. he has straight up canonically always avoided thinking about this by assuming he would die before it becomes something he has to deal with. he reacts with paralysed disbelief to being given it and seems to have barely registered it for the rest of the game. and even if he did want it, lucanis is not capable of this job. none of his skillsets are managing people, or making ruthless calls, or watching out for himself. the only driving force behind him being pushed into this is caterina, who will not be around to do the admin and protect him from external threats forever. and she only wants him to do it in the first place because she had a good heir—his mother—and has needed to project that dead daughter onto lucanis for his whole life, to believe she hasn’t already gambled and irrevocably lost her family’s future decades ago. but lucanis’ incapacity to ever say no to her, which is what lets him stay that eternal teacher’s pet, is one of the most obvious shining examples why he would be so bad for the job!

it would be an uphill battle for anyone to recover control of an assassin house that until last week was being run by your cousin who tried to kill you. it would be an uphill battle for anyone to lead the crows in the aftermath of the antaam occupation. it would be an uphill battle for anyone to cope with the fact that relying on viago and teia—which lucanis with his resources and skills has no choice but to do here, even if he didn’t simply like them and make choices based on liking people because he is not a strategist—presents them as an alliance that any other ambitious talon must cut down to get anywhere. three out of eight of the talons is such a ludicrously dangerous number. it does not take an overwhelmingly brilliant mind to notice that there’s more of us than there are of them

the best man for the job would still be fighting for their life, and lucanis is far from the best man. caterina was! and she still lost five children and six grandchildren holding it! that’s so many! have you guys ever seen that one post about people who kept getting a new outdoor cat every time the last one got eaten by cougars and it was pointed out they were basically just feeding cats to the cougars. that’s what caterina dellamorte was doing having kids

the points in lucanis’ favour off the top of my head are the weight of the dellamorte name and reputation, that his victory over illario was decisive and public, and simply the fear factor that he is a god slayer and, lest we forget, a fucking abomination. is that enough to keep him alive? for how long? under what level of constant anxiety and moral degradation for his very soft over-caffeinated heart? all for the questionable gain of several large and empty villas and the privilege of dragging out the slow and lingering death of a family that, you guessed it, you love it, it’s the thedas favourite: has no! next! generation! heirs! at all!!!

(unless illario has a bunch of kids somewhere. i think that would be objectively pretty funny, a sentence i managed to type most of before feeling ill. oh god we need to get them out.)

thanks for tagging me @thearcaneuniversity ☺️

the last song you sang aloud: “last time (i seen the sun)” from sinners, i think ? but i sing aloud so much that another song might have snuck in 😭

your favourite crisp flavor: salt & vinegar !!! it’s gotta be. 😤

the last book you opened: Persuasion by Austen; i’m at the very end once again !!

earbuds, headphones, or nothing:

headphones, for sure

the last place you went, other than home: my best friend’s graduation party !! & before that, the uni library heheh 🙈

a color that looks good on you: grey ! especially warm greys. light blues also look pretty good.

the last trailer you saw: mmmm, it might not have been the last one, but the one my friends and i talked about most recently is for the movie Him (the horror movie about a football player?)

we simply continue to keep him working with us. can’t hang out with the crows, he’s too busy, very important contracts! teia, you can handle the first talon housekeeping, right? it’s so sad how caterina’s letters keep getting lost. the crossroads postal service is hazardous like that idk

we drastic intervention illario into a decent replacement if we have to get him possessed to do it

we engineer a rom-com scenario where lucanis has to abandon it all at the last moment in order to rush after his beloved in an airport or like at a gondola dock or whatever the treviso equivalent is of that trope

we drag zevran from wherever he’s been hanging out and sic him on the rest of the crows but ask him very nicely to please spare the ones we like

we have bellara use big sad eyes while pointing out what the contents of the veilguard fridge are going to look like if he lets anybody else do the grocery shopping around here

we strategically place self-help books near the pantry disguised as romance novels

we bankrupt house dellamorte through some kind of non-violent leverage-esque scheme so there’s nothing left to run

we get davrin to casually mention that the wardens can’t truly quit and see if it triggers an instinct to prove the crows can do something the wardens can’t

we explain to him very carefully that as much as we love it when he kills people for us, there are other acts of service we would prefer day to day, to which alternate lifestyles may be more suited

we tell spite in confidence that caterina sucks and we just kind of wait and see what it does about it

we destabilise antiva’s coffee supply and force him to seek it elsewhere

we make pointed comments until something happens about how everyone needs to wear nice and identifiable rings so it will be super convenient when we inevitably get murdered for being the first talon’s nearest and dearest and something needs to get sent to him in a box

and i think there’s a logical reason for this as a Move On The Board. from caterina’s perspective, viago is a bit of a wild card: he has his own ambitions and motivations and bitternesses, his skill set makes him unpredictable if he does decide to be a threat, and he holds himself quite distant from the other talons. whereas teia, by her own internal narration’s admission, loves and respects caterina and has considered her a mother for “the past twenty years”. (which would be since she was eight.) i can see why it would be useful to caterina to lightly encourage viago being under teia’s power, so to speak. it’s stabilising. caterina’s genuine fondness for teia is both an added benefit if it goes right and not enough to stop her using her for something like this.

here’s the more experimental part: it does make me wonder if caterina also lightly encouraged a previous attempt at gently bringing house de riva in line, which was, unfortunately for everyone involved, attempted via flirtatious dagger.

i think they left this open to player headcanon in a way that i personally find delightful and entertaining. the incontrovertible canon facts are that he worries about them, that he is distinctly less bearable when they’re not around, that he has so much faith in them that he puts all their failures down to them being thoughtless or acting out on purpose, and that he expresses all of this via frustration when it’s clearly love. why and how we got to this point is up to you!

so i can only really talk about how i’ve been interpreting that. to Me, viago is so uptight and distrustful that i would struggle to believe in this dynamic if he hadn’t known rook for a really long time. which makes sense, because crows who belong to a house grow up together. i mentioned this way back when we first saw footage of him with rook de riva, but to me he talks to you a lot like an older family member who still kind of thinks of you as a kid. i read into it as him acting sort of like the equivalent of an older brother with a big like 5 or 10 year age gap, but that is obviously dependent on your rook’s age and feelings

i am going to delve into closely-canon-based headcanon territory for a moment but show my workings as i do it. viago is not from a crow family like lucanis. he is not related to whoever was his predecessor as house de riva’s guildmaster. he is a royal bastard who elected to join the crows rather than be exiled, because that is, for some fucking reason, the system they have in place. since his memories prior to the crows are distant boyhood ones, and the crows typically start training early, i think we can guess that he was at most a teenager when he joined the house

please take a moment to picture lanky teenage viago de riva, with all his distrust and temper, accustomed until now to certain noble comforts, terrible at making friends, inclined less towards physical strength and more towards poisons and the fantasy equivalent of excel spreedsheets. does anyone honestly think for a second that when this kid arrived, all house de riva’s scrappy cutthroat embittered crow recruits didn’t immediately smell blood in the water? does anyone honestly think he would have had a good fun time or been well-liked? that he eventually rose to talon by asking nicely or indeed anything other than his ability to cultivate fear as the foremost poisoner in the entire antivan crows? does anyone, for that matter, believe that every crow knows how good at poisoning viago de riva is because his afaik unmentioned predecessor died of super 100% natural causes?