MsBarrows' Maunderings

lifeofkj:

kinlochhold:

melysandecousland:

I always interpreted the dialogue below (under the read more) to mean Alistair was born and living at Redcliffe Castle before Arl Eamon married Isolde.  That the Guerrin wedding was put off due to King Maric’s opposition.  And that once Isolde arrived at Castle Redcliffe, Alistair was treated worse and eventually Eamon sent him off to the Chantry at Isolde’s insistence.  

I also believe Isolde’s continuing hatred of Alistair is clear when she meets him again with Teagan after the battle with the undean - “Alistair.  What are YOU doing here?”  Her tone just drips conrtempt at best.  

I believe that she may not have known he was Maric’s son - Eamon may have kept that secret.

Just to provide some age check points - in the Stolen Throne after the battle of West Hill Rowan remembers her brothers Teagan , 8 and Eamon 15 - that’s in 8:99 Blessed.  So it’s not unreasonable to assume Eamon met Isolde while recovering the arling sometime after Maric defeated Meghren  and that they didn’t marry until the early teens, due to Maric’s opposition.  

I;d appreciate any thoughts or canon which provides a different viewpoint.  This, btw, has nothing to do with the “Who is Alistair’s mother discussion”.  It’s just - was Alistair living at Redcliffe before Eamon married Isolde?

Game dialogue re: Alistair’s childhood:follows below: 

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While I think Alistair can be  a very unreliable narrator at times, I’ve always accepted this dialogue at face value, since he is quite specific about the sequence of events and the cause/effect. (I also find it interesting that Connor’s birth would have come right about the time that Alistair was banished to the Chantry. *shrug*)

I have always assumed that it is no coincidence that Alistair was sent to the Chantry around the time Connor was born. And that Isolde didn’t know, or didn’t believe, the truth about Alistair’s parentage.

Agreed, it’s also been my headcanon for ages now that Alistair was already at Redcliffe for some time before Isolde and Eamon finally married. I peg part of the reason for the wedding happening so late - some years after Eamon most likely recovered Redcliffe - as being that *Rowan* opposed their marriage, so it wasn’t until after she died that Eamon finally married Isolde. After which Alistair spent several years growing up as an orphan in the stables and kennels before finally being shipped off to the chantry at age 10. And that Connor was born after Alistair left.

And I’m also of the headcanon that Eamon never told Isolde what Alistair’s true parentage was, so she’s never stopped believing that his is actually Eamon’s bastard (especially if Eamon had any kind of relationship with Goldanna’s mother before their marriage, or even was just known to sleep with his servants when the mood struck him).

As they waded back, Loghain gave Alistair a sideways look. “Remind me to make sure that proper swimming in on the list of skills you learn this summer. As the other Grey Wardens and I have found, there’s places in the Deep Roads where it’s turned out to be a necessary skill.”

“Swimming? In the Deep Roads!?” Alistair exclaimed, giving him a startled look.

“Unfortunately yes. The dwarven construction has stood up remarkably well for how many centuries it’s been abandoned to the darkspawn, but there are still places that have flooded, not to mention the presence of underground rivers and lakes in the natural caverns. In fact one of the places that’s at least partially underwater is just down from that cave. The fact that darkspawn made it out that way tells me it likely hasn’t flooded any worse than it was thirty-odd years ago. Most darkspawn don’t swim well at all; they generally sink instead.”

“Well, that is good news,” Alistair said, and made a face.

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It was a ride that Alistair felt he would remember the rest of his life; first the race to catch up with the army where they were already making camp a couple of miles away, then heading to Gwaren at as much speed as they could make. Loghain was worried enough that he had Dorn split the army, the slowest horses and the baggage train being left to pack up camp and then follow at their own speed while the remainder raced ahead. He also requested that the wardens – most of whom were on poor mounts – be remounted out of the army’s horses, so that they might all be in the forefront of the run to Gwaren. Dorn agreed, knowing how big a difference even one warden could make in a fight, and most particularly in a fight against darkspawn.

The two dwarven engineers were also brought along, what remained of their supplies loaded on a pair of mules who loudly protested the speed of their journey at first, but were given little choice but to race along with the horses. The pair of dwarfs seemed little less happy than the mules, liking neither the speed they were moving nor the height they were having to travel at. They rode without stopping, only slowing as necessary to rest the horses enough so that they wouldn’t founder.

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flutiebear:

Hey kids, do you like stories about:

• powerful women in positions of religious, military, political and nautical authority?
• POCs and other minority groups with actual agency who contribute meaningfully to the plot and spare none of the fucks for stereotyping?
• queer characters who aren’t defined by their sexuality and whose sexuality isn’t treated by the writers as some sort of self-congratulatory pat on the back but who have goals and motivations reasons for being in the story, i know right, what a concept?
• terribly broken people finding each other and creating new and weird and wonderful families?
• medieval zombie apocalypses?
• dudebros who are adorable and yet kind of suck when you first meet them but then they grow up and take responsibility for their lives and whose maturity isn’t presented as this horribly tragic destruction of their innocence boo hoo but as them getting awesome?
• people finding love again after royally fucking it up the first go-around?
  
• fabulous facial and/or chest hair?
• conversations about shoes?
• abuse victims refuse to be defined by their trauma but instead go out and do things besides feel sorry for themselves?
• men who aren’t threatened by competent women but instead inspired by them?
• terribly socially awkward people learning how to make friends and influence people and also how to turn into spiders?
• fashion-conscious golems?
• canonically trans characters?
• alcoholics whose wives left them for another woman and who’ve lost everything and everyone they’ve ever known and okay maybe they’re also super gross and farty but nbd because everybody deserves a second chance
• the downtrodden throwing off the chains of their oppression and messianic healers of broken people tearing broken political systems to the ground?
• men with really big noses?
• unreliable narrators and unconventional hero narratives and shove your damn hero’s journey already because this sure as hell ain’t it?
• body horror that is actually really fucking horrible and not just torture porn icky but like nightmares-for-days icky?
• doggies?

Then have I got a series for you:

faejilly:

phdfan:

Hi everyone,

I asked the community how many hours you’ve played Dragon Age, and I thought I’d give an update on the numbers.

So far I have had 37 respondents.

The average number of hours playing Dragon Age: Origins plus DLC (including Awakening) is 274 hours.

The median number of hours playing Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening is 200 hours.

The average number of hours playing Dragon Age 2 plus DLCis 254 hours.

The median number of hours playing Dragon Age 2 is 200 hours.

Here’s a pretty graph displaying my results so far:

I’m still interested in more responses - I’d love to get to 50 respondents, if possible - but even just up to 40 would be great.

So please share, and thank you to all of my participants so far! :)

signal boost

Steam reports that I’ve played 742 hours of Origins. Sounds about right, given as many completed or significantly-progressed playthroughs I have.

Added up the individual played times of my DA2 characters, and it came to about 58 hours total. Also sounds about right; one completed playthrough and three stuck in Act 1  (one still at the docks just after finishing intro, ouch).

(via foxghost)

DA:O post game of the “Connor saved and sent to the tower, Isolde later died giving birth to a daughter, Rowan, who is also a mage” variety.*

Anyway, working on a bit in Birds and had the following paragraph crop up:

Rowan nodded, though Zevran guessed from her lack of response that she knew little of her brother, he having been taken off to the tower before her birth. He wondered if the boy had ever been allowed a visit home, if the siblings had ever met at all, or if Rowan would only be getting to meet and know him at all once she herself was immured in the tower as well.

And now I’m wondering what that meeting would be like. Figure a Connor who’s now 18-20 years of age, either already Harrowed or soon to be, and a Rowan in the 6-8 year old bracket. He’s only ever seen her once in his life, when he was allowed home to see his mother’s ashes scattered, at which point she was just a baby in her wet nurse’s arms. She has no memories of him at all, though she’s heard of him from both their father and their uncle. And possibly heard (or overheard) a scary story or three from incautious servants of what happened in Redcliffe during the Blight Year, when he was possessed.

Too many WIPs already, plus plugging away at attempting an original story, so I’ve no time to feed this bunny myself.

* - I know the only time baby Rowan crops up in the epilogues is when Connor dies, but it’s not actually ruled out by the epilogue slides, as they merely focuses on Connor’s outcomes instead of mentioning anything about Isolde, as far as I recall.

Alistair cautiously followed Loghain to the edge of the vast sinkhole, not liking being so close to the drop, especially after Podge having told them the day before that the stone was still unstable. But he didn’t want to hang back when Loghain was so clearly unconcerned about it. He just hoped the commander was right.

The commander. He couldn’t even remember when he’d first started thinking of Loghain by that particular term. Other than that it had to have been fairly recently, and he hadn’t even been aware of the change in his thinking that allowed him to do so. There was a time he’d have seen applying that title to Loghain as some sort of betrayal of Duncan, and everything Duncan had been and stood for. But… it wasn’t. Loghain was, if anything, very much like Duncan in how he perceived and carried out his role of Warden-Commander. Which was, in many ways, a deeply disturbing realization for Alistair to be adapting to. There was so much he’d admired in Duncan, so much he’d hated in Loghain… Was it Loghain who had changed, or just his own perceptions of him? Considering the question made him uneasy. He put it aside for another time.

Loghain was standing silently, just looking at the huge pile of dusty rock far below, an odd expression on his face. Alistair looked back and forth between the two, wondering what Loghain was seeing that he wasn’t. Some memory it evoked, perhaps; he didn’t think Loghain was actually seeing the pile. He waited a while, then cleared his throat; they didn’t have all that long until everyone would be leaving, the charges set off to collapse the tunnels and deny the darkspawn any further easy exit from here.

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heretherebdragons:

As requested by Irish-Changeling, here is all the information I’ve been able to glean about the Chasind from the various books I have. Sadly, “World of Thedas” has only a single paragraph (that I’ve been able to find, anyway). However, the Green Ronin RPG books were a richer source of info. 

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All-Melee Playthrough - Set 3 of 3

Post-Landsmeet stuff, Right dragged Loghain off to do Soldier’s Peak and then they went and practised Archdemon slaying on the High Dragon at Haven. In the story it’s one big fight but in-game I had them do it three times with different group makeups, and was very pleased that I managed to kill it all three runs.

And then it was off to Denerim (via Redcliffe) to fight through the city and slay the Archdemon. Without ever using the armies either (I almost never bothered with them after my first few playthroughs). And Loghain redeemed himself by taking the final killshot. *Cue gross sobbing*

This is also the playthrough that largely inspired my “What Must Be Done” Loghain-centric fic. If I re-wrote that one now I’d probably handle it a little differently, it’s a bit too much of a “blame it all on Howe” fic, but there’s still a lot going on in it that I’m very pleased with, such as Loghain’s mental state during all of this.

P.S. - note potion numbers in the screenshots where the UI is visible. I spent a lot of money making potions for this playthrough; rather overdid it, actually. On melee-oriented runs since I haven’t gone quite so overboard!