something something andraste guide us

Spite: OUR Rook.

Serena Hawke

“Me? I’m no one. Lived near Redcliffe all my life. Herded sheep for my neighbor. When the Inquisition came through my village, I helped by telling them everything I knew about the area. Then I signed on. Wanted to see the world before it was swallowed up by… that thing out there.”

anyone can offer you a chance to see the world. adventure, beautiful foreign sights, respect for your skill, status when you go home, community and camaraderie among your fellow fighters. chances that you might never usually get as an ‘ordinary’ person, in this case living in a rural area as a (fantasy) minority. honestly for me the whole “get out there and see the world!” thing specifically evokes the real world evil of like, classic military recruitment rhetoric. it’s all a big adventure! never mind what you’ll be doing and who you’ll be doing it to.

and our first sight of harding is a confident smirk when she kills. (which we’re supposed to feel fine about and maybe think that she’s a #girlboss, because remember the mages and templars are Crazy, so killing them indiscriminately is fine. but let’s imagine dai is a serious game.) she obviously took very easily to violence in the inquisition’s name before she’d met any of the inquisition’s leaders, before the inquisition had a real direction, and before they had a simple-to-justify, no-longer-human enemy like corypheus. if she could be convinced to do all that by the inquisition’s scouts, then why not anyone else offering the same things? why not an inquisition that was actually, you know, an inquisition?

despite leading with wanting to see the world and not even mentioning any kind of moral motivation, harding definitely perceives herself as a good person and i don’t think she would go for anything that didn’t have a veneer of righteousness. she takes pride in the inquisition and what she believes to be its purpose. but any organisation can say they’re doing it for the good and order and stability of the world, right. any organisation can pass you that message through a recruiter who at least sounds like they believe it. and as a scout on the ground you’re so far from the war table that you will never really know why the people directing you are making their decisions. and you opt to kill whoever they tell you to kill anyway. even in some impossibly hypothetical world where those decisions are all just and measured and necessary, can it ever possibly be moral to just hand over your conscience like that? to kill blindly because those are your orders?

i feel like harding’s narrative veers so closely to real world recruitment rhetoric that i don’t just find it uninteresting to be like Yay It All Worked Out :), i find it Bad. this is not heroic when it happens in real life and i don’t think it should be heroic here. i know i’m in the genre where Pure And Honourable Warfare Of Our Innocent Boys And Girls Against Inhuman Monsters or Perhaps The Inherently Evil Foreign Horde of Baddies is virulently everywhere but i think that’s precisely why we should be aware and critical of it and thinking around it not just accepting it as fact you know

Based on Loghain’s armor here and Anora’s dress with the ferelden sigil on the chest

THE RANDY DOWAGER QUARTERLY: EXHIBITIONS.

INQUISITION EXPOSED.

An extra-thick annual edition of the suspect quarterly:

The Randy Dowager puts a bow on the year by gifting us the illustrated Inquisition Exposed, being a modern epic of love, betrayal, duty, breaches torn, breeches torn, a slip of fade-tongue, the eternal struggle between concerns mortal and passions mysterious.

Eeeee!

I commissioned @sadmages for some silly pictures with my fave Awakenings trio - Inara, Anders, and Nathaniel - based on some awkward family photos and they turned out AAAAAMAAAAAZING!!!!

I'm currently writing the fic that explains where Inara and Anders' relationship went wrong, and I have loads more Awakening content on my AO3.

STEN • THE CHARIOT

ladies, ladies!!!!! we got a butch coming through!!! there’s enough of him to go around!!!! 💋

sketch page commission for @/orzamargarita of his rook Fishnet 🐠

Knight Enchanter of the Imperial Court (2025)

(With dialogue from Origins, II, and Inquisition!)

My pal @boltlightning had this galaxy brain idea! I decided to build it out for fun.

Inspired by the 45 by 45 connections puzzle by Thomas Colthurst, and using its code as a base, I have made a fun(? hopefully!) game for people whose brains are full of Dragon Age quotes.

Here's how you play:

Click a quote that you recognize, then click on another quote spoken by the same person to stack them together.

Keep on clicking quotes and adding them to the correct stacks. (You can also add two stacks together.) When you have collected all of someone's quotes into one stack, it will show that your collection is complete by transforming into their name.

Don't worry - you don't have to finish the game in one go! Even if you close the window, your progress should save - as long as you come back with the same browser/device, you can continue where you left off.

The game will be complete once you have collected 27 stacks of 12 quotes each by 27 different Dragon Age characters. (All from DAO, DA2, and DAI! Sorry, I just haven't played DAV enough to have a brain full of quotes about it.)

PLAY THE GAME IN-BROWSER HERE

1. you immediately marry her

2. there is some reason for you not to marry, or some reason that your relationship will always be inherently unacceptable and illicit no matter what you do, to the extent that a marriage could not make this situation respectable or possibly you straight up can’t get the chantry to approve one for whatever reason

3. josephine montilyet, the Social Expectations woman, that’s her Whole Thing, has decided with zero words of dialogue on the subject to throw her reputation down the drain for no reason

YOU CAN’T JUST... DATE... we are in the setting that alistair fucking theirin comes from. that vivienne comes from. you can’t just DATE as EQUALS. either you are married or one of you is the mistress (gender neutral) and it’s not josephine bc her background is always higher status than yours! is it even possible for her as an unmarried woman to have a mistress (gender neutral) and still be acceptable in society let alone influential and universally beloved which is the requirement for her whole job and life purpose? and if you are that woman’s mistress (gender neutral) then for the love of god can we please talk about it and talk about WHY this is happening and the social forces at play because that is surely central to the dynamic!!! is it because you’re a woman? a mage? because you’re not human? i straight up can’t think of a reason for non-mage male trevelyan unless i just pretend something crazy like he’s already married?

if josephine is only asking you to marry her after ten years (TEN YEARS) then basically my only reasonable interpretation is that this relationship was for some reason that level of illicit and it has taken ten years for her to either literally change society enough for it to be possible to marry you, or to decide she does not care abt what everyone thinks actually. that’s all i’ve got. it’s so frustratinggg that the josephine romance wants to play with the high stakes and drama of courtly romance but it doesn’t understand what the stakes should be at all. this is the “whispers of an affair to bring people’s status crashing to the ground” region of thedas! this is the character for that! there’s all her rumour spreading and matchmaking war table missions! let me marry that woman or make it the big deal that it should be that i can’t! angry grumbling continues