#sve1tka

You should see, she’d say. A million ports, a million festivals lighting up the nights, a million possibilities he was never supposed to see from behind tower walls. Life, real life. Worlds away.

Kirkwall wasn’t much for Summerday celebrations either. Start of the rainy season. A few flowers in windows, a few white-robed children running to the chantry between the raindrops, huddled under oiled cloaks. Anders didn’t think of Isabela’s stories again for years.

But in Val Royeaux, there’s a whole secret language encoded into those Summerday garlands with Orlesian deadly serious frivolity - cartloads of blossoms carried up to the mansions, probably with coded messages to complement the ham that tastes of despair, but flowers talk down in the less gilded streets too. Parades of masked revelers toss garlands to the crowds with hopes and promises woven into them, love, hope, a change in fortune, a turn for the better written into physical form.

Justice always did appreciate a bit of symbolism.

iiinteresting! especially given that components include things like diamonds (for a 1st lvl spell!) which are scroungeable for your player-character types, but like, caleb's absurd incense-and-paper budget is more gp than the average peasant must see in a lifetime. idk enough abt dnd lore to know whether that's an inherent limitation to arcane magic or an intentional class barrier, but now i'm super curious!

On Talks Machina just now they said Caleb has spent ~650 gold on paper and ink so far in the campaign! That’s not even to get new spells, it’s just to transcribe them so he can use them, which is so wild. And he started out flipping his shit in happiness that Nott had 13 gold for him to buy books. It adds so much to why his world would absolutely be upended by the chance to go to the Soltryce Academy, which by everything we’ve learned so far seems like a free ride/all expenses paid kind of education, and why young Caleb would be feel so much loyalty to his teachers (on top of the fact that he clearly had a very patriotic upbringing).

Anders always used to keep count of each day outside of the Circle, each escape he managed to stretch a few moments further. A week. Three weeks. A month. A year. A lifetime - he wants to but can’t ever quite believe the Warden’s promise of that, even while his second summer outside the tower wears on, even raising a glass in an Amaranthine tavern openly, with no templars or chains in sight.

It’s harder for him to celebrate those days wrested back from the Circle now. There’s no time in the Fade, just now, and now the Circles are still standing, and now, and now, and this may not be the Fade but he’s no longer sure time moves here either, one day looking much like the next. The faces in his clinic change. The Chantry doesn’t. The city doesn’t. Voices of long-dead Tevinter slaves that no one else can hear still crying out for justice, for Justice, as he watches Fereldan miners head down into the pits.

Hawke, though. Hawke, cheerfully offering him the Knight-Commander’s head on a spike. 

Wherever Hawke wades into the mire of this city, things change. And he can almost see time moving again. 

Makes him believe he can really do this, find some path to a future that looks different than the present.

He’s counting again -  hours until he can put out the lights and lock the clinic for the night, minutes of footsteps to Hawke’s door, moments of breath-held hesitation, wondering if Hawke’s door will be open.

don't worry about it, the football players are a nice wholesome presence on my dash. it's like hey, i don't know those dudes but i'm glad they're friends, haha :')

@sve1tka I think in regards to actors, the RPF thing is a little more understandable, because people sort of take the chemistry between their characters and then add in whatever positive vibes they give off when they do interviews together or the like. Stacking the definitely manufactured on top of the at least partially manufactured but also at least partially sincere--I’m thinking of Mulder/Scully fans who also want Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny to get together as an example. Their characters have spent so much time on screen together building their chemistry, and the actors seem quite close in real life, so the conflation of the two kind of makes sense. And I think really popular actors probably take that sort of thing in stride, so long as it doesn’t get creepily intrusive. And their public personas are also things they created, to different extents depending on the person, so there’s a level of detachment for them as well.

also 'from his expression anders wouldn't have guessed anythng was wrong'-- idk if you're into ask-the-author type questions, but i'd be rlly interested in your thoughts re: blue!hawke and anger.

So for me, Hawke's blue-ness is very tangled up with his apostate-ness, with magic being linked to emotion and with being taught by his Circle-trained father about the importance of remaining in control at all times, with not accidentally expressing his anger by burning the house down or getting too chatty with a rage demon in his dreams; and little tiny kid mage!Hawke going from being someone who could roughhouse and get into normal kid fights with his friends to someone who really couldn't do that anymore; and with the need to deflect attention, to be polite and get along with people and make sure he's not resented, make sure he's not someone you'd want to turn over to the templars if it came to that, but at the same time not letting people get close enough to find out his secret.

If he can keep his anger from showing in his magic or in his dreams, then keeping it from showing on his face is comparatively easy.

And also the blue dialogue is all about being understanding, being able to put himself in other people's shoes and sympathize with them - and that's a survival-as-an-apostate thing too, needing to be good at reading people, even people actively trying to harm him, especially them - so to a certain degree, he genuinely doesn't get angry at some situations when he probably should, just because he can understand where the other person’s coming from. Like, yeah, the Dog Lords gang jumping out and attacking him at night is a pain, but hey, if Hawke hadn't been lucky enough to have family connections in Kirkwall then he could easily have been one of them. Yeah, his friends turned on him in the Fade, but you can't hold people responsible for what they do in a dream; and yeah, Aveline's so shaken by that dream that she's now sincerely wondering out loud if maybe Hawke should be locked up in the Circle after all, and that's a little bit terrifying, but you know what, she's just shaken and that's understandable for someone who has no experience with the Fade, she wouldn't really turn him in, and he should have known better than to bring her into the Fade in the first place when she wasn't at all prepared for it, that's his own fault - or so says his overdeveloped sense of responsibility and guilt. 

Rather than getting angry, he tends to get tired or bitter, the way he sounds in Inquisition. Because when things go wrong or when he hears about yet another injustice, it’s rarely a shock.

yah, but there's something sort of pleasingly galaxy-brain about a character who puts so much effort into his theatrical trickster persona, only to have it fool the audience more successfully than it fools any of the other characters in-universe, which i think molly would appreciate if you caught him in the right mood

hey yeah, i'm just getting into it as of cr2. it's such an interestingly different storytelling format, and the rare ensemble cast thing where i genuinely like every single one of em a lot. haven't looked into the fandom enough to know the popular opinions, but i'd be interested !

I haven’t watched anything from the first campaign yet either, but I’m really digging the second. A lot of compelling storytelling, and I really like that you can tell these people are all friends (and/or spouses) in real life and they’re all having a good time. Like Travis shouting at Matt, “you crazy motherfucker!” just after he pulled something new and cool in one of Fjord’s dreams--they’re just as invested in the story and as delighted by it as we are, and it shows.