#pew pew queue

okay, SO. i’ve talked about this fic with a few people, but i’d love to share it with the world at large. i had seen art based on a fanfic, but no link to the fanfic, so i reverse searched a bit of the passage to try to find it. i found this random fic on fanfic.net (no idea anyone even used it for dragon age) that had no relation to the original fic, but intrigued me enough i kept reading it.

the basis was that hawke was this evil, horrid, cartoonishly awful blood mage that was a menace to kirkwall, and anyone around her. already a fascinating premise, because how many times do you see hawke portrayed as inarguably in the wrong? like the true antagonist of da2?

it was so interesting to me, and even more so how the companions reacted. no one liked this hawke, she was utterly unlikeable. instead, they banded together and followed after her in order to negate the disasters she left in her wake. hawke was still their rallying point, but instead of hawke keeping their merry band of misfits together by the skin of their teeth, the companions united in spite of her, working together to keep kirkwall safe from hawke.

it was easily the most interesting da2 party dynamic i’ve read about.

additionally, the author portrayed blood magic in a way i hadn’t previously considered. hawke was happy to use other peoples blood, of course, but also heavily relied on her own blood. and it was a detriment to her health. she was described as anemic, pale, scrawny, underfed. i guess it sounds like common sense, but i really hasn’t considered the health risks of constant blood loss when using it for magic. and having their MC be described as so sickly and unhealthy was entirely new.

i would have hailed the author as some kind of writing genius, but something terrible happened:

hawke got better.

she decided she’d had quite enough of accruing the enmity of everyone and their dog (literally, the dog hated her too) and used blood magic to make a spell that would make everyone like her. the backlash caused a entirely foreseeable effect: it made her more likeable.

it was then that i realized that what i had been reading was the prologue, which set up this cartoon villain hawke in order to compare and contrast her to the new, improved hawke, who was sweet and kind and everything the old hawke wasn’t.

i felt like i'd been punk’d.

it’s possible that things get reversed or more interesting later on in the fic, there were plenty of chapters when i stopped. i’d read a few more just in case, but after the author described how eating properly and stopping blood magic had changed hawke's appearance, giving her 'curves in all the right places', i realized this fic was no longer what had captured my interest.