#i genuinely want to know do people actually know whats up with oghren and still hate him or did yall just see an addict | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heniareth · 3 years

Note

I was really curious about what your opinions on the DAO companions are :) I know we have talked about some, but I'd love to hear more and about the others as well :D I hope it's ok to pose this as an ask :)

Sure! That sounds like a ton of fun. This might be a long one tho. Mind you, this is not the finished version of the answer. I'd like to link stuff and add a cut, but rn that's not possible. I'll update it when I can.

Edit: I have updated it ^^

Let's go alphabetically bc why not.

Alistair:

Sweet guy. So sweet. There was a moment when I was hard pressed chosing between him and Zevran (alas, Zevran won). Also, he's weirdly tall according to the wiki? How did I not notice that before?

Let's get a bit more serious now, Alistair is a great guy. The only reason he's not the hero of the story is because he doesn't want to. He has all the qualities of a leader: he's good at dealing with conflict (as evident with the conversation with the mage at the beginning. He gets where he wants to get without antagonizing the mage, but without allowing him to trample all over him). He's a solid tactitian and knows how to make allies (he suggests to use the Grey Warden treaties, after all). I bet if he was in the leadership position, he'd even not bicker with Morrigan. His moral code is pretty tight; some might say too tight, but I think it's less about the moral code and more about learning to judge people by their actions, not by the labels they fit into (Morrigan is a proud apostate and therefore bad. Wynne is a humble circle mage and therefore good). He also has a bit of a black-and-white way of seeing the world. I empathize a lot with Alistair, especially with his experience with the Chantry and his subsequent reluctance to deal with it. I really wish I had gotten to know more about concrete experiences he had during his training as templar, but he seems reluctant to talk about it (gee, I wonder why).

Since I've only played the game once, I haven't really picked up on Arl Eamon's abuse towards him, which apparently exists (Isolde, however... I mean, even if he were Eamon's illegitimate son, he's a kid, ma'am, he didn't exactly get to chose his parents. So that's so not okay). Alistair's way of speaking about them both, however, is either sign that he has not come within a hundred miles of acknowledging how much it hurt him, or that he's already gone through the whole process and has decided to forgive them. The latter shows a very strong character; yes, he relies on the approval and leadership of others, he has his issues, but he's already started working on them.

That being said, irl Alistair would be like a little brother to me. I'd tease him relentlessly (all in good fun and I promise to stop if it makes him uncomfortable, but he's just so teasable). I still wish the videogame gave him the chance to take important decisions for himself. But that, of course, would somewhat defeat the point of the game.

Leliana:

Another sweet, sweet person. Her singing voice is amazing. Her belief in the Maker inspires me (I'm a religious person and seeing religious characters represented in a positive light is Very Cool. It's also sometimes a source of discomfort, because the Church has done a lot of very messed up stuff and positive representation can sometimes veer into apologetics for things that should not be excused, but that's a whole other can of worms. The bottom line is that religious characters sometimes work for me and other times don't and Leliana works for me very much bc she's an outsider inside the Chantry).

Leliana is best friend material, tbh. I'd love to get to know her irl, discuss theology and philosophy and maybe even politics? She makes mistakes and has prejudices, but, tbh, so do I. And I do get the feeling that she tries her best to learn. From the times she intervenes in a conversation between the Warden and an NPC, she shows herself to be compassionate and open to the needs of others. What I get from her character is that she genuinely wants to help, which is something that I adore of her. I suspect that she sometimes has a hard time deciding wether she's a good person or not. She has killed and seduced and worked for a morally dubious person, and she doesn't show the same nonchalance about it as Zevran (though they both do discuss their line of work in very... professional terms). This is, however, more of a headcanon than actual factual canon.

I also very much enjoy her girly side, like her interest in shoes and dresses. She's one badass woman who also looses her cool about the latest fashions in Val Royeaux. I like that. Between her and Alistair, a non human noble Warden has as good a help to navigate the Fereldan court as they're going to get. Leliana is also, I can't forget that, clever and insightful. It'd be easy to write her off as the innocent chantry girl, but she's so much more than that. Her kindness is paired with foresight, I think. She knows that taking on the trouble to help now can go a long way in the future. I just have a lot of respect for her.

Loghain:

This one's gonna be short bc I didn't recruit him. He's an amazing villain and would probably be a great Warden as well. He reminds me of Denerhor from LOTR; once a hero/stewart of his people, ambition and desperation have driven them both down a terrible path. I have also only little idea about his past. People say he lost a lot, and I believe it wholeheartedly; it doesn't excuse the fact that he plunged the country into a civil war in the middle of a Blight. I don't have a lot of sympathy for short-sighted politicians. I wish he hadn't made himself regent. That's what I take away from his character.

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention that really impressed me was his death. I had Alistair duel him (that was a rough duel), and then it kinda just jumped to a cutscene of my Warden nodding and Alistair executing him. That didn't sit well with me. I didn't want to kill Loghain, and less so in front of Anora. But what impressed me was that Loghain just accepted it. That takes a whole lot of guts. Compare that to Howe's death, and how he screams out that he deserved (more, probably, or anything but death) and it's crystal clear who the more noble of the two is. Loghain strikes me as very lawful neutral, and any neutral alignment has the particularity that it can be dragged towards good or bad, sometimes without the characters noticing it (which is interesting from a DnD perspective; neutral is often concieved of as just as stable as good or evil, but that may not be true. But that's a different post). Anyway, Loghain's death was impactful.

Morrigan:

I could kick myself for not maxing out her approval in the first play-through. I got to enjoy a bit of her friendship by the end of it and boy was even that little bit worth it. Friendship with Morrigan is something that is hard-won. It's all the more precious because of that.

Morrigan is full of paradoxes, I think. She's incredibly wise in some ways, yet also very short-sighted (”just kill them, don't solve their problems”. Morrigan, dear, I'm not going to gain a lot of allies if I kill everybody who poses a problem to me). She is so intelligent, but emotionally... not so. She knows so much about some things, and very little about the next. She's incredibly wilful and knows what she wants, but follows Flemeth's orders all the time through. She hungers for power and independence, yet craves closeness, but won't allow herself to have it. She asks you to prove yourself to her and is extremely critical of your actions, I think, because she's afraid. She bites the hand that feeds her because it might hit her next.

Like with Eamon, I haven't managed to catch the undercurrent of abuse that seems to permeate Flemeth's relationship with Morrigan. Except there are signs, because there must be something Morrigan is scared of and who has instilled all that rage in her, and that's Flemeth. Also, she clearly hates/does not care about her and wants her dead (unless killing Flemeth was part of Flemeth's plan as well? Hm.)

Morrigan is that one person who you are nice to, continuously, because nobody else is. And suddenly she becomes less cold. And then friendly. And suddenly you're asking yourself why everybody hates her, because she's a really good friend! I just wish the other companions came to a similar conclusion, especially Alistair and Wynne.

Oghren:

They did this man dirty. He has such great lines and I'm convinced he was a great person before Branka disappeared. He has that dwarven warrior spirit, and while he looks like Gimli, some of his most impactful lines remind me of Dwalin or even Thorin Oakenshield himself. He could be so noble had he gotten some character development, damnit!

Oghren as he is written is somewhat disgusting. I hate the lechering comments and the drunkenness. And still, I don't hate him because of those amazing lines he has when he's actually sober. It's frustrating and I'll give him that character development myself if the game won't. I strongly associate the song Whiskey Lullaby with him, bc that's how he would have ended up if the Warden hadn't taken him along (warning: the song talks about suicide and alcoholism). Like I said, they could have done such cool things with his character. As he is written now... it's just sad. Moments of lucidity drowned in alcohol and creepy jokes. As you can see, I don't blame the character for either. The alcoholism happens all too often irl. The creepy jokes... I put that one on the writers' tab.

I actually think Oghren could have been a great mentor figure (I know, I shock myself as well sometimes). Next to the Grey Wardens, the ones who know most about fighting darkspawn are the dwarves because they have to deal with them constantly. Especially a warrior caste dwarf like Oghren could have brought a lot of that invaluable knowledge to the team, especially since there are no Grey Wardens in Ferelden but two extremely green recruits. Next, you get the chance to give Oghren the command of the teammates you leave behind in the battle of Denerim with the reason that he has lead men into battle before. Where did that suddenly come from? Oghren should have been right up there telling my Warden that they were doing this wrong, that they needed more food (and booze) and a confident leader to keep the armies they've called together going. Oghren should have been able to tell my civilian city elf who got recruited into the Grey Wardens a six months ago how one leads an army. How one presents oneself to inspire confidence, how one doesn't crack under the pressure, how one gets the leaders of said armies (some who hate each others guts i.e. Dalish elves and humans) to work together. And, last but not least, Oghren could have had a great story about grief. This is a man who has lost most of what made him (and what he hasn't lost he's spilling down the drain with every mug of ale). This is a man who, if you take him into the Deep Roads, has to see what his wife did to his family, how his wife got absolutely obsessed, and can be forced to kill said wife or watch her die. All Wardens loose their home and families at the start of the story. It would really have rounded the whole narrative out if the Warden and Oghren could have recognised their grief in each other and hashed it out somehow. Such as it is, Oghren is a depressed drunkard and there is nothing we can do about that. I find that frustrating.

Rascal (a.k.a. Dog):

Best boy. 100/10. I wish we had gotten to see the reaction of the different origins to the mabari (because elves probably have a whole different experience with them from mages or humans. And dwarves just... I think they straight up have none? XD). Other than that, no complaints. The name Rascal was the one I gave my dog because you have to be a right rascal to survive what he did and play the pranks he plays. Smartest breed in the world indeed.

Shale:

Shale is one of those characters that I recruited rather late in the game, so I haven't had the chance to explore their personality and worldview, really. I didn't even get to take them to the Deep Roads (this will be ammended in playthrough nr. 2). As such, I don't have particularly strong opinions on them (or her? The wiki refers to Shale as 'it', but that sounds weird). But, because I know so little about Shale, I have a lot of questions. First, what were they like before they were a golem? Shayle, as she was called then, was the best warrior of her time if I remember correctly. Why did she become a golem? Was it to be able to eternally protect her people? Was the sarcasm the golem Shale exhibits also part of the dwarven warrior Shayle or did that come later (if for thirty years you have nobody to talk to but yourself, you better be entertaining. And I can imagine how it could make somebody terribly jaded as well).

Next, how attached is Shale to their golem form, exactly? According to the banter, they infinitely prefer it to a squishy fleshy form. If that is the case, however, why go to Tevinter to try and become a squishy dwarf again? It's not like that process could be reversed if they wanted to become a golem again; if Shale survives to the end of the game, the Anvil of the Void is destroyed and Caridin is dead. Was the whole spiel about their indestructible form a façade? It might have been, but not because Shale actually disliked their form. I think it would have more to do with the loss of their memories and with the very invasive experiments and alterations of Shale's body made by the mage Wilhelm. The loss of memories means that Shale is unable to remember life as a fleshy creature. They might be deflecting by pretending that they didn't care for that experience anyway because of the superiority of their golem form. The modifications made to their form by Wilhelm would have alienated them from their body. In light of this, it's significant that Shale asks the Warden to decorate their form with crystals.

All of this is, of course, pure speculation. I may have easily missed or forgotten details that would disprove the above thoughts. All in all, I like Shale and I hope we meet them again in DA4 (given that it's mostly set in Tevinter). It's a liking from a respectful distance, because Shale is tall and made out of rock and also way more experienced than I will ever be (they are literally the oldest member of the Warden's little Blight fighting squad).

Sten:

Sten is another person I'd keep a respectful distance from physically. That seems to be the what he would prefer, at least. I've enjoyed his character a lot, especially because he seems pretty clear-cut at first, but slowly lets the nuance of his person show (gruff and stoic, but then he has an eye for art, a sweet tooth and he likes cute animals). It's also very interesting that there's no moment when you learn "the truth" about him the way you do with Zevran or Leliana. There's no big reveal about his life under the Qun before coming to Ferelden. He says he was sent to monitor the Blight, but honestly? If neither Ferelden nor Orlais knew there was a Blight, how could the Qunari know? I think he's lying, and he takes his secrets back with him when he leaves Ferelden. And yet I think I know him enough to say that a Warden who has become friends with him has nothing to fear from Sten.

One thing I find very interesting about Sten is how he thinks. His conversation about how women can't be soldiers has been analysed a lot on this page I think. He seems to be arguing based on a different paradigma than the one the Warden has. He also seems to have a very clear-cut view of the world. What is fascinating to me is that, when arguing with the Warden and learning about their culture, he is not necessarily becoming more lax about his worldview. I think it's more likely that he is expanding his paradigma, the structure of thought through which he understands the world. I don't think that he is now convinced that women can be warriors as well. I think he rather understands that, in Ferelden, the relationship between occupation and gender is different than under the Qun. Which of the two he thinks is more right or more agreeable, I have no idea. I'm also not very interested in that. But I find it fascinating how he always seems to be looking on quietly, gathering data, classifying it and trying to fit it into his understanding of how the world works. I wouldn't be surprised at all if his original party was a scouting party to see how vulnerable Ferelden was at that moment to outside forces. One thing I don't understand with all of this is why he urges the Warden to meet the Blight head on. No smart soldier would suggest that, except if they are foolishly proud (and Sten doesn't seem like that kind of guy tbh). I get that the Warden takes way longer to gather allies than expected because they first have to solve all of their allies' problems. But surely Sten sees the need to have allies? Is he just that impatient? Does he have a death wish (à la, I lost my sword and am without honour, better to die sooner than later and in glorious battle)? Was he his group's previous commander and is he now having trouble following somebody else's orders? Or maybe it's his way to make sure the Warden knows what they are doing? To push them into becoming the self-assured commander their allies will need once they're all gathered? I really don't know. I like the last option best, however.

For me, Sten is my fellow, more experienced soldier. Like Alistair, he can potentially be the Warden's brother in arms, but he's definitely the older brother here. He probably doesn't take kindly to tearful confessions of how hard everything is, but I feel like he's otherwise a solid rock to lean on. I feel like the Warden can trust him to do what is necessary and count on him no matter what, especially after they get his sword back. His devotion from that point on is honestly so powerful.

Wynne:

Wynne was such a support for my Warden (except with the whole conversation about love vs. duty and that she may have to choose between Zevran and ending the Blight and that she should therefore break up with him. Wynne had a point. Astala was so not willing to sacrifice her relationship with Zevran. But the whole conversation came at a point where she was already so disillusioned that she blew up in Wynne's face (”can i please just have one (1) nice thing????”)). But all in all, Wynne is great.

She has a lot of flaws. She was very marked by her life in the Cricle and, for all her age, she has little experience living outside of it. She is also a conformist despite her strong moral core. In a way, her ability to find peace with her lot in life impresses me deeply because it speaks to a lot of strength of character. Sadly, however, strength can be ill applied and used to suppress. I think she has convinced herself that the Chantry is right under (almost) all circumstances to be able to rationalize the life that mages live. She's had her son taken away from her as a baby and an apprentice killed. Her reaction seems to have been to convince herself that this was right, or for the greater good (and now I'm thinking about the Guardian's question at the temple of Andraste's Ashes; are you wise or do you just repeat what others have told you? The answer is not as clear-cut as it might be). This is why she is so irritated by Zevran and Morrigan. By aligning herself with the Chantry, she is, in her eyes, good. Zevran and Morrigan are not; they do not conform to Chantry morality and they defend themselves tooth and nails against somebody who would try and convert them. This is something Wynne never allowed herself to do; she always did the "right" thing and it has cost her so much. I'm not saying she was right (it would probably have done her some good to rebel from time to time, and to trust her own gut instinct more), but in light of this, it hardly surprises me that she's so judgamental. She has to be, or she would be forced to confront all the evil she has not fought against all those years and all the hurt that has been caused to her by the very institution she protects (and thank God she only tries to argue and can appreciate it when people have found a good life outside of her comfort zone. If she tried to convince by force or, for example, drag her former apprentice back to the Circle... boy oh boy that would get ugly). If you think about it, Wynne really is a good example for what happens if you live by a philosophy of always choosing the lesser evil.

Something that I keep forgetting over her grandmotherly and dignified character is how damn powerful she is. She has escaped the carnage at Ostagar; HOW!? She protected those mage apprentices in the Circle tower for God knows how long. In the battle of Denerim, she wades through an army and comes out alive on the other side. The wiki lists her age at 40, I think, but that doesn't make a lick of sense unless 75 years of age are the Fereldan equivalent to 100. This lady, about whom people make grandmother jokes, did all that. It's impressive.

Zevran:

You know, I would really love to know what Wynne thinks about the events at Kirkwall in DA2. It might be a disaster for her, or it might pave the way for one last bit of character development. She certainly didn't want to return to the Circle after fighting the Blight. That may be an indicator of some change in her stance on the Circle of Magi.

Edit: I forgot that she is what the Circle considers a literal abomination! Holy cow, how could I forget that?? Anyway, her conversation about what being an abomination means is so... heartbreaking, actually. It's so tentative. So careful. "Am I an abomination? Am I the same thing that has killed my students? The same thing as Uldred? Am I lost and damned? Did I invite this spirit in? Is this my fault?" Like wow, Wynne is going through something huge right there. I love it. I have to continue playing the game to see what it ends up as, but it's fascinating and such a huge thing that she allows the Warden in on that.

Ah, Zevran, my beloved (he has stolen my heart so much it's not even funny anymore). He's funny, he's charming, he's so so loyal and it breaks my heart. Zevran is the one about whom I've read most meta: these three wonderful posts for instance, as well as this one about his possible lack of scars, and this one about his lack of freedom. All of these have influenced my opinion of him and they are great reads.

I have talked about Zevran with you before, so I'll just skip to the new stuff. I have come to conclusion that Zevran is an artist at heart. This is totally not biased by the fact that I also do art, but hear me out. One of his preferred gifts are bars of silver and gold. While those have the obvious utility of basically functioning as money (they can be sold to any silversmith or goldsmith and their value is pretty stable through time and in different countries), there's also this from his codex: "Zevran shows an affinity for the finer things in life—hardly surprising for an Antivan Crow—but his appreciation can be more poetic than he lets on. A simple bar of refined silver or gold, uncomplicated by a craftsman's hammer, is elegantly valuable." Tell me that is not an artist's eye that sees that gold and sees the beauty in it. Then, there's also the meta about Zevran the Seducer which I linked above and link here again. It talks specifically about how he lets himself enjoy the target and be seen in his enjoyment. Tell me that is not an artist's eye that beholds the beauty of something he is set out to destroy. Even his talk about his assassinations show this. He talks about it as an art, the way somebody would talk about the brutal intervention in stone that produces a sculpture. Yes, it's a rationalization of the act of killing and yes killing is still wrong. But he doesn't go on about it on a moral tangent the way Alistair or Wynne would (”this person was bad, killing them was necessary”) or even through the argument of survival like Morrigan would (”it was either them or me and it sure as Hell wasn't going to be me”). He talks about the pleasure of a job well done, of the satisfaction of striking the precise point and executing a plan to the perfection so as to minimize chances of discovery and to make a clean death possible. And pleasure in seeing and in doing, this I firmly believe, is absolutely fundamental for an artist.

My favourite part about my Warden and Zevran as a pairing is that Zevran precisely brings out that ability to take your pleasures as they come and to really savour them. Fighting the Blight is tough; it's so important to find good things amidst the chaos to stay sane. If Astala saves Zevran from himself by offering him a place to stay and a purpose, Zevran saves Astala from herself by keeping her from running herself into the ground trying to save the world.

There are some things I don't like about Zev. The incessant flirting, for example, sometimes makes me uncomfortable (it becomes enjoyable for me once the Warden and him are in a relationship, but before that? Nah, no thanks). I wish he would also leave the other female characters alone (and there's so many more shameless comments of his aimed at Morrigan, Leliana or Wynne than at Alistair or maybe even Sten).

---

And that's my take on the Origins companions (this was rather long. Whew ^^' I hope it was still readable and that you enjoyed it!!) Thank you so much for the ask!! It's been a joy thinking about this. I was worrying at first that the less prominent companions like Sten or Shale wouldn't get as much content but... well XD

148 notes · View notes

darthlordcommie · 3 years

Text

DAO Thoughts: The Nightmares

So, I’ve just played through that part of the game again, and I got to thinking about the nightmares that the sloth demon traps you and your companions in. Spoilers for DAO obviously.

Essentially, the nightmares you and your companions are trapped in are divided in are divided into two categories: fears and wants. My thought is that everyone was divided into what was more likely to keep them trapped.

Wynne: Starting off simply, Wynne’s nightmare is based around her failing to save the other mages. She’s surrounded by their bodies, trapped in her own guilt and grief over her failure. This makes sense. Not only is Wynne a healer who genuinely does care about people, especially the mages under her care, but she has an internalized self-loathing towards mages pushed on her by the Chantry, and might have fought a dream filled with her desires on the grounds that it wasn’t what she “deserved”. But because she’s filled with that internalized hate, it’s easy to make her feel as if she wasn’t enough, wasn’t good enough, that it’s her fault.

Morrigan: Morrigan is trapped by the image of her mother, Flemeth. While she claims to have known that it was definitely just a demon in the Fade, I think it was closer to suspicion that was confirmed by your presence. This is because not only does Morrigan not know all that Flemeth is capable of, but Morrigan is very much afraid of her mother. Even if it wasn’t actually her, the idea of even striking at the image of her mother seems to have terrified her, so while she could recognize the nightmare for what it was, she couldn’t break out on her own.

Oghren: Oghren is trapped in a tavern, surrounded by dwarves mocking his failures. This is essentially the nightmare he had lived for years after Branka left. And as seen, he was unable to emerge from the nightmare of his life without outside help. By keeping him there through his insecurities, which are the best ways to strike at him without reprisal, Oghren wasn’t able to overcome his own self-flagellation.

Leliana: Leliana is trapped within the confines of the Chantry, where she is forced to beg forgiveness for claiming to have had a vision. As she felt a heavy amount of doubt for her own faith without having your arrival to vindicate her, being trapped back at that point, having gone to the Chantry at her lowest, means that Leliana is stuck in that loneliness without you reminding her that she had chosen to act on her vision and leave with out.

Zevran: Zevran’s nightmare is more of his memories. He believes he is being trained and tortured as preparation to join the Antivan Crows, as he was in the past. You can break him out of it by reminding him that he had already become a Crow, but unlike any of the others, he won’t fight the demons, too terrified even of the images of his former masters. He holds a deep amount of fear towards the Crows, and it’s only with your help that in the real world and the dream, he can feel like he deserves to escape his nightmare.

Shale: Shale’s nightmare will be of still being trapped as a statue. Never moving, never being able to interact with the world. They do not believe themself to be able to move, so they can’t. It isn’t until you arrive, and remind them that they are in fact free, that they can move again, with the assurance that their prison is just a nightmare.

Dog: Dog is just asleep. You have to wake him up. Pretty simple.

Sten: Sten will be with the soldiers he came to Fereldan with. While he is aware that he is trapped in a dream, his shame and survivor’s guilt leads him to not want to leave. Ultimately, you have to remind him of his duty, and maybe his debt to you, for him to accept that he can’t remain in the dream forever.

Alistair: Alistair is with his (he thinks) sister, Goldanna and her family. For the first time in his life, Alistair’s fully content, and happy. You need to pull at him and remind him not of his duty, but of his memories. In order to get Alistair to pull out of the dream, he has to first realize it is a dream. Reminding him of his duty simply makes him feel as if he doesn’t want to, because he feels happy with his family. The tragedy that it was all a lie, and one that cannot be replicated in the real world, is one that hits him.

My point with all of these is that out of the companions who are trapped by their desires instead of their fears, it’s only Sten and Alistair. Both of them are characters with the strongest and deepest sense of loyalty and duty, and both are already living their own nightmares. Sten failed, his comrades died, he lost his sword, and he slaughtered the people who saved his life. At this point, the only thing keeping him going is duty, and the appeal of being able to at least pretend he hadn’t failed kept him bound in the dream. And Alistair. Alistair who wants, more than anything else, to have a family and to belong somewhere. He’d already lost his family in the Grey Wardens, and he wants to have happiness and bonds. He’d had nightmares, he was a Grey Warden after all. He knew how to fight through fear and grief, however hard it was. But contentment and happiness. Alistair has never had to choose between his desires and his duties before. He’s never had that luxury.

So, yeah. Just some thoughts I had.

#dragon age #alistair theirin #sten #morrigan #leliana #wynne #oghren #shale cadash #zevran arainai

29 notes · View notes

pikapeppa · 4 years

Text

Sten/f!Mahariel: Fall Into The Tide

It’s happening. 😂

Here is the first chapter of Sten x Yara Mahariel. ~3660 words; read here on AO3 instead. Dedicated to @irlaimsaaralath, who is a menace and whom I love. ❤️

In which Yara decides to follow Sten on his journey home, and everyone is basically like BUT WHY THO.

*********************

“So,” Alistair said. “You, uh. You know what you’re doing, right?”

“I do, in fact,” Yara said. “Right now I’m packing my satchel. Hand me that dagger, will you?”

“Ha ha,” he said flatly. “Very funny. Seriously though, are you sure about this?”

“What’s to be not sure about?” she said. With some effort, she pulled the jars of medicinal salve out of the depths of her bag and squished her clothes down to the bottom instead.

Alistair shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just… won’t you be, you know, bored?”

Yara raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think I’d be bored?”

“Because I won’t be there,” he said. He pulled a mock-sad face. “You’re going to miss my amazing impressions, you know. I just perfected my sober Oghren impression and everything.”

Yara smiled. “I will miss your impressions, it’s true. But I’ll manage. Sten will keep me company.”

Alistair grimaced. “That’s… kind of my point, actually. It’s Sten. He’s not exactly the most entertaining company you could keep.”

She huffed in amusement. “If I was looking to be entertained, I’d just stay here with Anora’s new court jesters over there.” She jerked her chin at Denerim’s central marketplace – or rather, the spot where the central marketplace used to be before the darkspawn horde had arrived. The darkspawn were gone now, but so was the collection of colourful merchants’ stands that had once stood there. Instead, the remains of a barricade had been piled into an impromptu stage, and on the stage stood Zevran and Oghren, who were entertaining a large and laughing crowd with some sort of increasingly lewd back-and-forth of riffing and insults.

“So what are you looking for, exactly?” Alistair said.

His tone was serious now. Yara finally paused in her packing to meet his eye. “I don’t know,” she said truthfully.

He raised his eyebrows. “And you think that sailing across the entire Amaranthine Ocean with Sten will help you figure it out?”

She gave him a small awkward smile. Alistair’s tone was still serious, as though he was really trying to understand where she was coming from. And although she appreciated his concern, she… well, she didn’t have an answer for him.

“I… don’t know,” she said again. “Honestly, I’m still surprised he said I could go with him.”

“I’m still surprised you even asked,” Alistair said.

“So am I,” Yara said wryly.

“So why did you?” he pressed.

She let out a little laugh. “I don’t know,” she said. In truth, she still wasn’t sure what exactly had compelled her to invite herself on Sten’s journey home. One second he was telling her what the infrequent celebrations were like among his people back home. The next second, Yara was asking to go with him, and he was actually agreeing.

And for reasons that Yara genuinely wasn’t sure of, the idea of sailing off to a completely foreign land with Sten was the most appealing idea she’d had since all of this Grey Warden business had begun.

Alistair scoffed. “And we’re back to the start. Maybe it is good that you’re going with him. You both talk in circles so often it makes me dizzy.”

She chuckled. “Thanks. I think.” She rose to her feet and hefted her bag into her shoulder. “Where are you going next, then? Are you going to try and find the other Wardens?”

“Actually,” he said brightly, “I thought that me and Oghren and Zevran could travel the country as a triple act. It’s already a set-up for a joke. Zevran had a really good one, actually, did you hear it? A human, an elf and a dwarf are going for a stroll when they stop by the side of a river to relieve themselves–”

Yara gave him a chiding look. “Alistair.”

He tutted. “All right, all right, you got me. Leliana’s going to teach me to become a bard. Can I practice my singing with you? I just need to warm up first.” He cleared his throat loudly, then placed one hand on his chest and began to sing. “Oh, there once was a maiden I wanted to kiss, but she worked in a tavern that smelled just like–”

Yara laughed and pinched his arm. “Alistair!”

He laughed as well, then sighed. “All right, all right, yes, I’m going to join up with the other Wardens. They’re still on their way here from Orlais, so we’ll run into each other, I’m sure.” He tilted his head. “Write to me when you get back, all right? Maybe they’ll let us keep working together. It would be nice to travel with someone who can actually cook.”

Yara hesitated, and Alistair’s smile faded. “Wait. You’re not… you’re not actually going to stay in Seheron, are you?”

She steadily returned his gaze. “I don’t know,” she said quietly.

He stared at her in silence for a moment. Then he stepped forward and hugged her.

She hugged him back and closed her eyes. A few moments later, he sniffled.

Yara drew back slightly. “Are you crying?” she said softly.

“No,” he said defensively. “I just – I smell something bad. I think it’s you. Did you step in Fen’ain’s you-know-what?”

His voice sounded distinctly muffled. Yara patted his shoulder. “Nope, no mabari poop. But it could be the darkspawn guts I rubbed on myself as an exotic perfume.” She patted his back and tried to release him, but he hugged her harder.

“If you do come back, write to me right away, will you?” he said. “Actually, you should write to me from Seheron. Tell me all about your adventures becoming a wild jungle woman.”

She chuckled. “You’ll be the first person to hear about it if I do. You be careful, all right?” She patted his back once more, then stepped back from him. “Dareth shiral, lethallin.”

“You too,” he said softly. “Assuming that meant something nice and not ‘you’re a stupid stinky human’.”

She gave him a tiny wink. “Would it be inaccurate if that’s what I said?”

He laughed, and Yara smiled at him one last time before turning away. She pulled up her hood to hide her long red hair and began silently threading her way through the market toward the docks.

Before she got more than thirty paces, Zevran sidled up to her with Oghren close behind. “My dear Grey Warden,” he purred. “You didn’t think you could slip away from the great Zevran without a farewell, did you?”

“Aye, the elf is right,” Oghren said. “You thought you could – burp – go sailing off without sharing a drink with us?”

Yara gave him a knowing look. “Does sharing a drink with you mean another sip of that horrible liquor you carry around?”

He pouted. “Not if you’re gonna talk about it like that.”

Zevran grimaced at Yara. “You had some of that swill he carries around? He offered it to you?”

She smiled. “I can’t tell if you’re more upset that I had some, or that he didn’t offer you any.”

“The former, of course,” he said. “I have nothing but a sincere concern for your health.”

Oghren harrumphed. “You’re just jealous you never got to take a swig of old Oghren’s special homemade brew.”

Yara raised her eyebrows, and Zevran laughed. “I assure you I have no interest whatsoever in your… special homemade brew.”

His tone was suggestive and pointed. Oghren blinked at him blearily for a moment before wrinkling his nose. “Aw, I didn’t mean–” He gave Zevran a look of deep disgust. “Not in a million years, you dirty Antivan nug-licker.”

Zevran gave him an exaggerated bow. “The sentiment is entirely shared, my pungent friend.”

Yara gave them an exasperated smirk. “Is there any particular reason you two are following me to the docks? Are you coming to Seheron too?”

Zevran laughed lightly. “I think not. We have no interest in floating Sten’s boat.”

Oghren loudly guffawed. “Aye, we’re not the ones who wanna polish Sten’s oars.”

Zevran grinned at him, then turned back to Yara. “It’s true. We aren’t interested in scouring his deck or trimming his sails.”

Oghren snorted some liquor through his nose, then hastily wiped his face. “Or – or, uh, what’s-it-called, what’s the word – manning his helm! Hah!”

Zevran burst out laughing and clapped Oghren on the shoulder. “I can’t believe you remembered that one. I’m so very proud.”

Yara pressed her lips together hard to stop herself from laughing, then gave them both a chiding look. “Is that what you two have been doing all day? Coming up with dirty nautical one-liners?”

“Not at all,” Zevran said smoothly. “I picked a few pockets as well.”

“And I won another bet against that smug bastard Teagan,” Oghren said proudly. “He had to cough up five royals.” He patted the coin pouch on his belt – or rather, the spot on his belt where the coin pouch was supposed to be.

His eyes went wide. “Wait. Where’s my…” He trailed off and looked up at Zevran with a scowl. “You!”

Zevran innocently held up the pilfered coin pouch. “Come now, you made it frightfully easy.”

“Give me that!” Oghren snapped, and he snatched the pouch from Zevran’s fingers. “Thieving pointy-eared ponce.”

Zevran snickered. Then Yara stopped and turned to them. “All right, boys, we’re here. This is where I leave you.”

“So it is,” Zevran said. He took Yara’s hand and bowed gallantly, finishing the bow with a light kiss to the back of her hand. “As we say back home, bonne niviati. I wish you a very rocky journey with the sea pounding against your prow, if that is your desire.”

Oghren chuckled. “Aye. And I hope you get to rut with the qunari too.”

Zevran snorted delicately, and Yara tsked. “Is sex the only thing you two ever think about?”

“It should be,” Zevran retorted. “If all anyone ever thought about was sex, what a fine world this would be, no?”

“Why are you goin’ to Seheron, by the way?” Oghren asked suddenly.

Yara looked at him. He was swaying slightly on his feet, but his expression was surprisingly sober.

She gave him a small smile. “You follow me from the market all the way to the docks, and this is when you decide to ask me this?”

“You know what, the dwarf makes a fair point,” Zevran said. “It seems rather unlike you to sail away like this. I would have thought you would continue your Wardenly duties.”

Yara blinked at him. “You think it’s a bad idea for me to leave my Warden duties?”

“It’s not that,” Zevran said. “It’s simply… not like you.”

Her belly twisted slightly. He wasn’t wrong. Everything she’d done in the past year had been in the service of the Wardens. And even before that, she’d always done her best to serve the needs of her clan. The one time she’d done something even a little selfish was when she’d followed Tamlen into those ruins…

Tamlen. Her gut twisted again, this time with guilt and grief along with uncertainty. And as always, she pushed the feelings aside. No time, no point, she thought. Instead, she smiled at Zevran. “Are you calling me boring?” she said.

To her mild dismay, he didn’t smile. “Not at all,” he said. “I am calling you a woman of duty and honour. Dashing off on an impulsive adventure to a strange land where you’ve never been before, at great risk to yourself?” He shrugged elegantly. “You can see why I might express a concern.”

“It worked out well enough for you,” she reasoned.

“I had the great fortune of being defeated and dominated by you, my dear,” he said. Then he stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Though it seems you might be able to claim the same fortune with our giant stoic friend, if you flex your feminine charms. Of which you have many, might I add.” He slid a salacious look over her body.

“And that’s my cue to leave,” Yara said wryly. She playfully tweaked his ear. “Be good, all right?”

“Impossible,” he purred.

Yara gave him a chiding look. “It’s not, and you know it.” She turned and smiled down at Oghren. “And you. Be kind to Felsi–”

“Hey, not so fast,” he interrupted. “You didn��t tell us why you’re goin’ on this trip. If you’re not trying to climb the qunari, then what’s the big idea?”

Yara sighed and pushed back her hood. “I… don’t really know,” she said.

Zevran and Oghren raised their eyebrows, and Yara shrugged helplessly. “I just… it just feels like the thing to do. Call it a gut feeling.”

Oghren nodded slowly. “All right, a gut feeling. I can see that. I get those sometimes. That’s how I knew I had to leave Orzammar.” He scratched his chin. “Though sometimes it just means I have to drop a load.”

Yara barked out a surprised laugh. Zevran lifted his eyes to the sky for patience, then gave Yara a charming smile. “On that delicate note: farewell, Yara Mahariel. May you find that which you seek during your journey.”

“Aye,” Oghren said. “Find whatever you’re looking for, you hear?”

“I will,” Yara said. “I hope.” She playfully tugged Oghren’s braided beard, then gave them both a warning look. “Be good, both of you.”

Zevran winked roguishly, and Oghren chuckled. Yara smiled at them, then turned and made her way along the docks toward the Rivaini ship that Sten had hired for his journey home.

Sten was waiting for her with his customary stern expression, but he wasn’t alone: Fen’ain was sitting at his feet. As soon as the mabari caught sight of Yara, his tail started to wag, but Sten spoke to him before he could move.

“Remember what we discussed,” he said sternly.

Fen’ain shifted slightly but remained seated at Sten’s feet, and Yara smiled at Sten as she approached them. “You’re the only other person that Fen’ain listens to other than me,” she told him.

“This mabari follows wisdom and strength,” Sten replied. “It is a shame that humans are not more like him.”

Yara huffed in amusement. Then Sten folded his arms. “I was not aware the mabari would be accompanying us as well.”

She winced. “Is that a problem? Can mabari not come on the ship?”

“They can,” Sten said. “But he must remain on the deck. I will not have his smell in our cabin.”

Her belly jolted in a funny way. “Our cabin?” she said.

Sten nodded. “I paid for one berth. I did not expect company during the journey. You are welcome to share with me, or you can arrange for your own place to sleep.”

Her mouth was suddenly dry. Somehow she hadn’t thought about the logistics of what it would mean to travel on a ship with Sten. Not that she’d really thought about any of this at all, but still – the idea of sleeping in the same cabin with him…

She glanced at the Rivaini ship. It wasn’t that big. Did cabins on Rivaini ships have more than one bed? Did they even have beds, or did people sleep in hammocks or something of the like?

Her mind was spinning, but Sten was waiting for an answer. She licked her lips. “You… don’t mind sharing with me?”

He frowned. “Why would I mind?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Then she laughed nervously. This seemed to be the only thing she could say today.

He continued to frown at her for a moment longer, then shrugged and unfolded his arms. “I’ve grown accustomed to your presence at night in camp. You are welcome to stay.”

She smiled at him. “It almost sounds like you enjoy my company, Sten.”

He peered carefully at her. “Is that flirting?”

She burst out a surprised laugh. Fenedhis, her cheeks were turning warm. “Why, um… why would you say that?” she said.

“The other elf advised me to look for it,” Sten said. “Was that flirting?”

Bloody Zevran, Yara thought. She swallowed before replying. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I… I don’t know.”

Sten lifted his chin slightly. “It seems that there is a lot you don’t know, kadan.”

She laughed and idly tugged a lock of her hair. “So it seems,” she said ruefully.

He studied her silently in that way he had, like she was a puzzle that he was trying to solve, and Yara waited tensely for him to speak. Usually she didn’t mind his silence; it was one of the first things that Yara had come to appreciate about him, in fact.

That wasn’t to say she was bothered by everyone else’s talking. She enjoyed the others’ chatter, and the moments when they’d sat by the campfire talking together as a group were the moments when she’d felt most at home. In those precious moments, when Leliana was strumming her lute and Wynne was knitting a scarf and softly scolding Alistair while Zevran and Oghren insulted each other, Yara could almost fool herself into thinking that this was similar to sitting with Tamlen and Ashalle and Fenarel while listening to Hah’ren Paivel’s stories after the evening meal with her clan.

But as time went on, with the Ferelden civil war and the Blight growing more urgent and more gruesome, Yara had found herself gravitating more and more toward Sten. There was something about his stillness that called to her: the aura of calm that he maintained, no matter how terrible things became. Whether they were in Redcliffe trying to deal with demons, or being ambushed by bandits or darkspawn or giant spiders while travelling or while trying to find their way through the damned Deep Roads, Sten always maintained this enviable sense of quiet, even though Yara knew he was constantly thinking and processing everything that was going on. Even when he was irritated, even when he made his sarcastic remarks and questioned her actions, he still had this perfect sense of stillness and calm.

And Yara, in turn, found herself feeling more calm when she was around him.

At this moment, however, she wasn’t feeling particularly calm. Sten was still studying her with his particular brand of focused curiosity, and her heart was thrumming in an unnerving sort of way.

Worse yet, now she couldn’t stop thinking about Zevran and Oghren’s stupid nautical dirty one-liners.

She finally caved in and spoke first. “So, er, how long is the journey to Seheron?”

He raised his eyebrows slightly. “We are not going to Seheron. We are going to Par Vollen.”

She blinked at him in genuine surprise. “We are?”

“Yes,” he said. “I must report to the Arishok.”

“Oh,” she said. “No, I mean, yes – o-of course. That makes sense.” She rubbed her nose, feeling foolish for not realizing that Par Vollen would be their destination. But her chest was really jangling with nerves now. Going to the war-torn island of Seheron was one thing; she couldn’t imagine that stepping into a perpetual war zone would feel that much different than the horrors of the past year. Going straight to the qunari homeland was another matter, however.

“You are afraid,” Sten said.

He was frowning once more. Yara squared her shoulders. “Yes,” she said truthfully. “But I’m still going to come with you.”

His expression softened slightly. “It is good to master your fear. Your courage does you credit. I will show you our cabin.” He took a step toward the gangplank.

“Oh,” Yara said quickly. “Before I forget, I – I brought you something.” She shrugged off her bag and pulled out a rectangular packet wrapped in a piece of thin cotton cloth, then handed the packet to Sten.

He untied the cotton cloth and peeled back the corner of the protective waxcloth. “What is…” He trailed off, and his eyebrows rose.

“It’s cake,” Yara explained. “Dalish fruit cake. I made it last night. To make up for the lack of cake at the feast.”

Sten blinked, then lifted his gaze from the cake to her face. “Thank you.”

She waved dismissively. “I hope you like it,” she said. “It’s – I had to improvise a bit because there was no butter left in Eamon’s kitchen, not after the big feast, so I had to use applesauce which isn’t nearly the same, but–”

Sten interrupted her. “I like it,” he said.

She cocked her head to the side. “You haven’t even had any yet.”

“It is a thoughtful gift,” he said. “I appreciate it, kadan.”

His tone was slightly softer than usual, and Yara’s heart fluttered with pleasure. She smiled at him. “You’re welcome, Sten.”

He nodded, then carefully wrapped the waxcloth back over the cake. “I might even share it.”

She chuckled. “I would hope so. It’s a rather large cake.”

“I am a large person,” he said. “Compared to the rest of you bas, at least.” He jerked his chin at Fen’ain, who was still sitting attentively at his feet. “Go.”

Fen’ain bolted up the gangplank onto the ship. Sten looked at Yara once more. “Are you ready to depart?”

Yara took a deep breath and glanced back at the Denerim docks, which were bustling with activity. People were cleaning debris from the darkspawn destruction, using fishing nets to drag debris from the water and repairing broken boats at the dock and calling out to each other, and their children were running around and shouting and playing despite the mess. There were Chantry sisters and brothers giving out food and reciting bits of the Chant, and a few opportunistic merchants trying to sell goods that had likely been gained by ill means, and it was all so incredibly loud.

She turned to Sten, who was standing silently at her side. She looked up into his stern violet eyes and nodded. “Yes,” said. “I’m ready.”

#sten #sten dragon age #BED SHARING!!#the cake is NOT a lie #Fall Into The Tide #sten/warden #sten x warden #sten/mahariel #sten x mahariel #zevran #zevran arainai #oghren #alistair theirin #pikapeppa writes

65 notes · View notes

warwaged-archive · 4 years

Note

Morrigan and dynamic of the others in the origins camp pLEASE. Asking for dynamic reasons when I make you that surprise Leliana starter

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MUSES // always accepting.

you’re valid and also thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it ily mel

SO LET’S GO

this will probably be so long rip

Contrary to popular opinion Alistair is not the one she likes the least. She pokes at him more than she tends to poke at the others, yes, but honestly this is more evidence that he really isn’t the worst of them in her opinion; the ones she really doesn’t like, she tries to keep away from entirely (and we’ll get to those). Alistair, like Leliana, is not really the sort of person she’d be really amenable to, not only because of their ties to the Chantry (and they weight heavily on her initial views of both of them) but because Morrigan is not sympathetic to most other people at all at first. She has a very ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset, that combined with her certainty she has to look out for herself and herself alone really brings her to clash with Alistair in that he’s a lot more compassionate and caring. On top of that, Alistair is suspicious of her from the beginning, and Morrigan doesn’t really appreciate having to deal with that; and that’s without mentioning that after so long living in the Wilds, Morrigan is prone to attacking as defense. They’re both pretty mean towards each other as a result, specially at first, and their interactions are often antagonistic.

In spite of that, Morrigan and Alistair exchange lots of questions about each other’s previous lives and upbringings if only because they don’t care to be nice and are deliberately prodding even when subjects might be sensitive (still, it is a lot more than there is between her and some of the others, both in regards to her asking about them and in speaking of herself, even if she often avoids answering his questions). Given time, I do think Morrigan begins to see him in a friendlier light (which does not mean she is friendly, but rather that she’s not indifferent or that she hates him). By the time you go with Alistair to see Goldanna, for example, I personally take Morrigan’s answer to it to show that she actually cares a bit (she’s all like wtf Alistair you let her treat you like that?! you even helped her??? you know she won’t appreciate anything you do for her right???) because if she didn’t, Morrigan would very easily use a tone that was more that’s what you get for being an idiot who helps people, got what you deserved while her actual initial reaction is to be outraged because Alistair wanted to help someone who clearly didn’t value him or anything he might do. So yeah! tldr, in spite of how antagonistic they are towards each other, specially at first, and although she never entirely stops being mean to him, Morrigan grows to care for Alistair somewhat, in her way.

Leliana, like I said, is another one she begins being particularly unfriendly towards. Leliana’s introduction to their still small group is very tied to the Chantry and her belief the Maker set her on that path; and obviously, Morrigan is very much anti-Chantry and she doesn’t believe in the Maker at all, neither does she care for Andraste. Morrigan expects Chantry people to look down on her or consider her a threat or both; so her answer to that is to attack first. Leliana is pretty okay towards her on many of their conversations and Morrigan just cuts her off by being mean. Even beyond the Chantry relation, Leliana tells nice stories and try to talk about good things and look at things positively and Morrigan is not there for that (which sometimes is more of an emotional reaction than it seems, and which I think their conversation about mothers highlights in a nice way; she has no tales of nice things to share, and when she speaks of Flemeth and Leliana is like “oh... I see” Morrigan replies that she really doesn’t, which evidences Morrigan’s general treatment of Leliana at first and what causes that reaction: she doesn’t think Leliana can even understand where she’s coming from at all, and she doesn’t think Leliana cares to even try because her thing is pretty stories and holy powers and moral superiority which are things that don’t agree with Morrigan at all).

What she expects of Leliana at first is that she’ll act self-righteous and hypocritical; and she doesn’t really hold back from calling Leliana hypocritical when they all learn about Leliana’s past. That said, I think it would be from then on Morrigan would be less antagonistic towards her, or at least that she wouldn’t be so intent on simply cutting her off by being mean. Maybe it is because from then on she is able to see Leliana more like an actual person and less of a façade (because Morrigan does not believe the Chantry and its followers to be genuinely good and righteous as they would have others believe they are). Much like with Alistair, I also think they have one conversation that points at a much better relationship than where they started (the one about the dress! even though Morrigan is all aboslutely not!!! she never tries to cut Leliana off by being harsh and outright nasty as she is on other occasions). Towards her, rather than poking, Morrigan was initially very brusque towards, seeking to end conversations rather than provoking; but as she grows more amenable to Leliana, I can see that changing, and Morrigan getting to approach her and making questions of her own (as well as provoking her on occasion because she gotta be a little mean and poke a bit you know aksndkjsndf). Specially after they learn about Leliana being a bard, Morrigan tends to initiate conversations a lot more; she’s not exactly nice a lot of the time, but neither is she just trying to be purposefully mean to cut off conversations unless they turn to subjects she doesn’t care to discuss.

Oghren can die she doesn’t care. Maybe she’ll even help. If they never meet again after DAO it won’t be enough time. It starts with her wanting him to stay away from her and it just never changes. She wants nothing to do with him ever thanks

Morrigan begins with not being friendly towards mostly everyone, really. Wynne is another case of when this doesn’t really change throughout their journey. They clash very fundamentally on their stances about mages, and Morrigan does not hold back from demeaning mages that defend the circle. Wynne’s attempts to “help” or “guide” or assume in any way a mentoring role towards her are promptly shut down because Morrigan doesn’t think she needs that (she’s very much capable of taking care of herself thank you very much), much less from someone who spent her whole life glad to be imprisoned in a tower. There is one moment in which they’re less antagonistic towards each other, which is by the end of their discussion about the Circle. It is the one time Morrigan starts that conversation, and the one she shows some willingness in talking about herself to Wynne, though she gives no details; and Wynne takes the opportunity to try to present her side of the argument in a different light.

Even though Morrigan hears then, I don’t think she ever grew to be really friendly or to care for Wynne particularly. With them, the one moment that might show some sort of friendship-ness seems less like that to me, and more like Morrigan giving in to having someone older who did try to place herself in a position to offer guidance of sorts (if only because it’s such different guidance from that which Morrigan had before, and the particular topic they discuss is one that brings to surface some of Morrigan’s vulnerabilities, with their discussing her previous contacts with civilization, and how she ventured out on her own). In DAO Morrigan is still pretty young, and she has very very little experience with other people, and I think this is one of the moments where that just weighs a lot; she thinks she has to defend herself by arguing she was not always under other people’s protection, and she ends up being more open than usual because when it comes to her experience outside the Wilds, well, she doesn’t really have much experience at all and their conversation also suggests fear on her part where interacting with ‘the world of men’ is concerned. So it’s more one moment than a shift in their relationship in truth, I think.

She doesn’t trust Zevran, at first, but she doesn’t hate him. She’s not even particularly antagonistic towards him? Just suspicious with how he joins the group by attempting assassination and all asdkfnafn But she’s clearly very curious and makes lots of questions about the Crows. I think after enough time has passed it’s clear Zevran is not just waiting to kill them all, she’s pretty chill towards him. With time, he’d probably also be one of those she grew to care about somewhat, in her way. It’s just a lot easier for her to get along with people when they don’t seek a moral high ground (and she doesn’t presume they will, as with anyone tied to the Chantry), and with people that clearly had to deal with life in a way that she sees as more similar to her own experience. Also when people have similar stances in regards to freedom (which Zevran seems to have, given he tells her it is a fate worse than death to not choose who you serve) and generally speaking, value strength and don’t care as much to Do Things Because They Are Considered Right (specially when “right” is defined by very Andrastian views). So yeah! She’s mostly ok with Zev, as far as ok applies for DAO Morrigan.

Shale doesn’t like her, Morrigan more returns the sentiment than starts it. But in spite of that, I’d say she’s. Not okay, but not bad. Just there. Morrigan doesn’t care much either way. It’s by no means like Oghren, who she seriously despises; Morrigan doesn’t mind her presence, but neither does she welcome it. She’s pretty neutral about Shale.

Sten is fun because he works the opposite way of most of the others, in that she begins being a lot more friendly-ish towards him but that doesn’t necessarily get better with time, quite the contrary. I think she’d want to learn about the Qunari, and that regardless, she’s more prone to feel some sense of kinship towards those who are not Fereldan nor Andrastian. He has zero sense of humor and so she obviously finds it very amusing to provoke him; but at the same time, when it comes to more serious subjects, Morrigan objects heavily to his worldview (specially towards mages and women). I think the only reason why it never grows to be an actually antagonistic relationship is purely because they never really discuss that; for the most part it’s a very superficial relationship in the sense there’s no really getting to know each other, even given time, and it sort of just stays like that.

#oof it did get long #and I tried not to go too in depth for it to not get longer kajsndfkasndf #but yeah! that's the sense I get from her relationship with them from her part ofc #alistair leli and zev end up being the ones she's closer to consider friends in any way post dao #then shale and sten and wynne that aren't friends but are? long time travel acquaintances ig #and oghren who she'd rather pretend doesn't exist thanks she hates him #aiushdfiaushdfiausf #there's a lot of ranting in that reply sorry #also if you want anything more specific about leli 100% hmu any time #you know I'm always glad to talk about things #<3 #copiesofme #* general: answered / DARK WINGS DARK WORDS.#* muse: morrigan / WITCH OF THE WILDS.#* character study: morrigan / MORE THAN THE MUNDANE.#* dynamics: morrigan & alistair / YOUR SELF AWARENESS DOES YOU CREDIT.#gotta make tags for all the other dynamics sometime aksdnfkajsndfjkasnf #but also in regards to in camp stuff specifically which I realize I didn't address #it's mostly a reflection of that #except when in camp she does tend to keep to herself a lot of time and stay quiet in her corner away from everyone else #and it'd be mostly rare that she seeks the company of the others #even so she'd be around when everyone is gathered around the fire or something #just you know a few steps away #bc she doesn't care to be there. clearly. of course she doesn't care to be included. nonsense.#aksjdnkajndf so yeah very much 'this is silly' judgmental way even though she's there when she could just go back to her own tent #bc while she doesn't acknowledge it there are nice things about being part of a group and she doesn't hate everyone nearly as much #as she tries to make it seem

7 notes · View notes

seyaryminamoto · 5 years

Note

I know this isn't your primary fandom, but I'm curious. What would you say are the problems with Thor: Ragnarok? For me, personally, it was the worst Thor movie. Completely unfaithful to the source material, bleeding of convenience writing and full of shoehorned bathos that killed any 'serious' moment.

Ha.. ha.. ha… ha…

I kind of was grateful no one had asked me this on Tumblr, but you just had to go for it, huh, Anon? Yeah, yeah you did, and now I have to do this. Now I have to rant. And risk getting a ton of people yelling at me for my controversial opinions.

But you know what? Quoting my good old buddy Oghren, “sod it”. This movie deserves it.

I think Ragnarok has no saving graces. It’s really that simple. I will of course elaborate on why throughout this post, but I’m really glad you believe it’s the worst Thor movie because so do I. In fact, I think it’s the worst of all the MCU, I can’t think of any I disliked more. Even the very controversial Ultron has more to its favor than Ragnarok, and that’s saying a lot.

So, where should we begin?

You’re quite right about it not being faithful to the source material, convenience writing oozes out of the screen all the time, it’s guilty of terrible humor worthy of a 14-year-old in the throes of puberty, and it’s incapable of keeping true to the previous established films in the same cycle. But there are explanations for all of this, of course.

First things first: when Thor: Ragnarok was announced, everyone was horrified and for good reason. No one who cared about Thor’s story and characters wanted to watch a horrible, nitty-gritty movie that would kill all the characters they’d grown to love over time. That’s what Ragnarok promised, initially. Remember the original design for the logo, when the movie was first announced?

Yes, it looked dark. Extremely dark. It sounded like it was going to be an angst fest. And nobody likes an angst fest (not true, a lot of people do, but not enough to make up for the tickets that wouldn’t have been sold if the movie had been dark instead of humorous).

So, after promises of making this movie the be-all, end-all for the Thor franchise, suddenly the executive team behind it was changed. That’s when the very acclaimed Waititi came into the picture. Not only did he scrap everything that had been prepared for the movie, but he did so by outright removing reported elements that could have genuinely made the movie better than its predecesors.

By this I mean, there was a lot Ragnarok could have, and should have done, to improve on what the previous movies did wrong. The first of such things was creating a better bond for the audience with Asgard, with the asgardians, with the people whose world we were about to see destroyed. This bond was not entirely absent for a large portion of Thor’s fanbase: there were people who liked Thor’s friends, the Warriors Three and Lady Sif. People complained about Frigga’s fridging, not only because it was unfair that she was relegated to that kind of writing in The Dark World, but because they liked her character too.

Were Thor and Thor: The Dark World less than stellar at the box office? Okay, sure, let’s say they were. Let’s not deny that. But…

The only MCU-related franchise with more content on FF.net than Thor is the Avengers. Thor has more fics on FF.net than Frozen. And if you think these fics are all from Ragnarok’s era, you’d be sorely mistaken: Thor Ragnarok came out on October 10th, 2017. I went back on the list of fics, turns out there are 422 pages: October 10th, 2017, is only the 56th page. The 56th. Please, let’s let that sink in. THAT is how much content was made for Thor before this damn movie even came along.

Don’t care for FF.net, though? I know a lot of people don’t. Do we really think AO3 will yield a considerably different result?

The “Thor (Movies)” tag features a total of 38,932 fics today. That’s thrice as much as what FF.net features. A total of 1947 pages. October 10th is at the 658th page. Again, more than half the content was written BEFORE Ragnarok. Not only this, but a lot of the content post-Ragnarok is quite likely not canon-compliant, as is typical in fanfiction (I saw quite a lot of Loki/Jane stories written after Ragnarok happened, and as anyone would know, Jane has been written out of the MCU so far, ergo the 2017-owards stories aren’t even necessarily taking Ragnarok into consideration).

Therefore, was the Thor franchise a box office failure? Man, I can’t even say if it was or wasn’t. But the fan response for Thor far outdid most everything else in the MCU. The thing is, it wasn’t the fan response Feige and the Marvel people were after. It’s basically the same concept as why Young Justice was cancelled back in the day: the target audience wasn’t responding to it as much as the audience they were actually reaching. Thor resounded the most with women, with an audience that saw a romantic hero where Feige and his cronies wanted a big buff moron who smashed on par with the Hulk. And that just wasn’t acceptable for these big executives.

Honestly, considering that the original Thor earned $449.3 million, and The Dark World earned $644.6 million, I don’t even know why they’re talked about as box office failures. Were they not as big as the other Marvel movies? I assume as much because of how people talk about them, and yet box office results that triple a movie’s budget should be far from failure. These movies were not flops. They may not have been the most successful with the critics and with a large portion of the audience, but like I said above, they generated a HUGE fan response. Bigger than many other fandoms related to the MCU (over at AO3, only Captain America beats Thor, from what I’ve seen).

So, my point is… would it have been THAT BAD to have a third movie that followed up on the previous two? Would it have been a box office flop? Considering that Marvel has a huge fanbase that watches every single movie they release without really caring about what’s in it, just because it’s Marvel, I don’t think it would have been a flop at all. Having Thor’s franchise as a less successful side of the MCU in terms of money, but more successful in terms of fanbase, would have been just fine, as far as I can tell.

But what do Feige and his buddies want? Money. And that’s why they went to Waititi.

Oh, people will say that Waititi was only an indie filmmaker, how could they know he was going to make a movie this big?! Well, the thing was, James Gunn was busy, so they had to find someone who was willing to make of Thor the same success Guardians of the Galaxy was and Waititi offered to do just that for them. Because, let’s be real: Ragnarok is practically a rip-off of Guardians of the Galaxy. Not only because of the style of the movie, not only because of the humor, but even because it’s fundamented on the notion of “unlikely team-up between different and damaged people united for the common goal of saving the world!”, which yes, you could say is the same notion that made Avengers what it was, but in Avengers there’s an actual effort to get the team together. S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted these specific superpowered people to work together to stop Loki. Here? It’s the same concept as Guardians of the Galaxy because a twist of fate, pretty much, brings all these people together by chance and they team up to put an end to a nasty threat. So, yes. Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off.

Why was it bad to recreate Thor as Guardians of the Galaxy, though? That’s what a lot of people might ask. Well, here’s the deal: you don’t expect Captain America to feature in something that feels like an Antman movie. You don’t expect Ironman to star as the protagonist in something more befitting of a Black Panther movie. Marvel movies are all largely similar in terms of how formulaic they tend to be, but they usually have their independent contexts, their IDENTITIES, and those identities aren’t easily replaced just like that.

Thor had its own identity. That identity was marked by Kenneth Branagh’s original Thor movie: it was practically Shakespeare in space. The development of the characters, its character-driven-storytelling, the organic unfolding of each situation, the understandable motivations of each characters, both heroes and villains, all of it made the original Thor something DIFFERENT in the early MCU. Ironman was the flagship of the MCU at the time, and Thor came out as a completely different story with ONE link to Ironman, in the form of Agent Coulson. Ergo, Thor stood on its own. Did it not stand as tall as the others, like I said? Big effing deal. It was its actual own thing. You could watch Thor without watching anything else and you would still get a fully-rounded movie.

Oh, but apparently it was a snoozefest for a large portion of the MCU fanbase who came here hoping to find the ten thousand action sequences from Captain America: The Winter Soldier or so. Shakespeare in space? That’s just lame! That’s just boring! Character-driven storytelling isn’t cool unless you have explosions on par with a Michael Bay movie!

Well, to such “critics”, I’ll just say: Ragnarok wasn’t exempt from making people fall asleep either. I already have heard of several people who fell asleep halfway through, and my own mother couldn’t even finish it in a single sitting because of how utterly boring and annoying she found it. She ended up enjoying Deadpool better and she usually hates gratuitous violence on principle. Enough said.

Alright, so moving on: what else comprised Thor’s original identity? Humor. Oh, sure, it wasn’t “14-year-old boy in the midst of puberty” humor, but it was still humor. How many jokes have been made about Thor’s mug-smashing? How about him asking for a large enough dog to ride? Darcy made a lot of people laugh too. Are we really going to pretend none of that happened because “Ragnarok is funnier”? Or is it everyone just forgot about those things, quite conveniently? Thor was hardly a dry, dark and gritty franchise. It’s never been like that. Pretending otherwise to justify Ragnarok’s complete shift of tone and character is absolutely ridiculous.

The Dark World borrowed from Thor’s original identity and built up from there and Avengers to create a story largely disliked by fandom and critics and pretty much everyone, apparently. Still… it had a ton of jokes. If humor was all that mattered, why the hell was The Dark World not as successful? :’D Thor hanging the hammer on the rack, Darcy tossing the keys into the crazy dimensional portal, “How’s space?” “Space is fine”, Loki’s entire prison break sequence, just about everything with Selvig? Don’t come at me now and pretend nobody found any of this funny because there were posts, memes, EVERYTHING, going around about all this. Ergo, why exactly is it that HUMOR was deemed as the one thing this franchise needed when it was ALWAYS THERE?

Thor’s franchise had its failings here and there, perhaps. Maybe they could have handled things better, like I said above. But the failings were not what Feige identified, as far as quality goes. Again, though, what we really were facing was a big ole money-grabbing scheme from a big businessman. And all the audience fell for it like lemmings leaping into nothingness.

What exactly did Ragnarok do, then, to garner my rejection, spite and absolute disapproval?

First things first, like I said above, Waititi did away with everything that gave Thor’s franchise an identity. I’m going to get this first thing out of the way, but keep in mind that this is just the start: Waititi’s movie started to make mistakes I could barely forgive it for by doing away with TWO female characters who, as I proved with the link above, one of them (Sif) was reported to have an important role in the movie before Waititi came along. The actress for the other character, Jane, had said she was “done with Marvel”, but this was misunderstood and misinterpreted by fans as “Oh Natalie Portman HATED working in Marvel SO FUCKING MUCH, that’s why they got rid of her!”, when in truth…

“As far as I know, I’m done,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know if maybe one day they’ll ask for an Avengers 7, or whatever.” She continued by saying that Thor “was a great thing to be a part of.”

Thor was a great thing to be part of. Was it just courtesy? Was it just for the press? Who the hell knows, but this hardly sounds like the VERY MUCH WORSE stuff Idris Elba said about filming the Dark World, that still warranted him returning roles in Ultron, Ragnarok and Infinity War:

“I’d just done eight months in South Africa. I came to England and the day I came back I had to do reshoots on Thor 2.” He raises an eyebrow. “And in the actual scene my hair was different, my…” He stops and gives an exasperated sigh. “I was like, ‘This is torture, man. I don’t want to do this.’ My agent said: ‘You have to, it’s part of the deal.’ ”

Idris Elba says outright, on a published interview, that working on The Dark World, that working for Marvel, is torture. And he’s still been in FIVE movies of the MCU. Please, let that sink in.

Back to the subject at hand: Natalie Portman’s reported willingness to return to the franchise implies that the popular myth that Portman didn’t want anything else to do with Marvel, as an explanation for why she was no longer involved with Thor’s franchise, is nothing but rumors without real basis. It means, ultimately, that she was kicked out just because making Thor a more romantic hero than the rest was just not the angle Feige wanted. Likewise, Thor’s other potential love interest, who was never explored as one by the movies and honestly didn’t have to be, was similarly given a very shitty deal in Ragnarok:

“I was asked, but the timing of when they were going to shoot and when Blindspot was gonna shoot — it was pretty much the same time,” Alexander told Yahoo. “So there was a conflict there.”

Things might have worked out though if Marvel had given her more lead time. “I was hoping for more of a notice from [the studio] so I could make it work, but it was a short notice thing,“ Alexander said. “They called and said, ‘Hey, by the way, would you come do this?’ I said there is no way I can make that work that fast.”

Alexander did try, but ultimately “It couldn’t happen. They were on a different continent!” For reference, Thor: Ragnarok was filmed in Australia.

For further reference, Jaimie Alexander’s show is filmed in New York. As far as I can remember, that was where she was when the Ragnarok call reached her. And all things considered, she was better off not showing up, seeing as the Warriors Three just died within less than five minutes of screentime for each of them. There’s absolutely nothing to say the same thing wouldn’t have happened to Sif.

Why were they absent, then? To please a large crowd of movie-goers who were very consistent about how much they disliked Jane’s character, how much they wanted her to die, how she ruined Thor entirely, and the stories go on and on. Turns out that, the one time Marvel decided to listen to their audience, they got rid of one warrior lady and one female astrophysicist. Funny how this time no feminists gave a shit about that, because Valkyrie suddenly was the strong female character they wanted for the franchise (particularly because she was POC and bisexual, I assume).

But alright, alright. These characters weren’t the most essential part of the franchise, and a new movie could have done without Jane no problem… she didn’t really have to be involved with Ragnarok, and I get that. She also didn’t need to be broken up with Thor just for this, though. Especially broken up without any onscreen evidence that their relationship was doomed or bad or unpleasant. The last we heard, Thor was absolutely proud of her: suddenly she’s just not with him anymore and he’s just fine with it, apparently? Just… why? How? Couldn’t they just ignore Jane altogether instead of breaking them up with a single line in such a stupid and insignificant way?

Either way, accepting Jane and Sif are gone is relatively bearable, despite I really don’t like this, despite it means taking away one character who was essential to the two original movies and another who was meant to finally have her turn to shine on this one. But heh, that’s only the tip of the Ragnarok iceberg.

Finally getting into the movie’s content: my first question is how was Thor in Musspelheim? How did he get there? When? Why? The movie asks these questions for humor. It expects you to laugh at Thor’s monologue just because, but it doesn’t really stop to consider that maybe it SHOULD answer those questions. That maybe the last time we saw Thor, in Ultron, was A LONG TIME AGO. And within that time, he allegedly returned to Asgard because he left through the Bifrost and he should have found Loki impersonating Odin ever since, especially if Loki is so obvious about what he’s doing.

But nothing indicates Thor really had been in Asgard since then. Not at all, because when Thor returns to the Observatory, he runs into Skrull or whatever Eomer was called here. Skrull isn’t a newcomer, he’s not only just taking the job: he’s been here long enough to fill the place with shit he stole from all over the world by using the Bifrost (something worth wondering about, since who the fuck was opening and closing the Bifrost for him when he went on these trips, exactly?), but also by using his new position to appeal to women. Thor is surprised and confused because where is Heimdall? Well, Heimdall’s been gone for a while. And Asgard’s become a big ole’ shrine to Loki. This, then, proves Thor hasn’t been home for a while or else he would have at least seen the building of statues and the sudden shift in the population into Loki worshippers. Where the hell did the Bifrost take Thor after Ultron, then? If it was indeed Asgard, how is it he only realizes NOW that Loki is the one ruling when Loki has already spent a few years on the throne and, if this is his way of ruling, it should have been fucking obvious he wasn’t Odin since day one, according to this characterization? (This, despite we saw he was pretty good at his impersonation of Odin in The Dark World, he only made a tiny mistake that Thor was unable to notice anyhow, so he should’ve fooled Thor just fine)

So, first plothole, first inconsistency, first example of convenience writing and it happens barely ten minutes into the movie. But alas, I need a detour. I really do.

Loki’s a complete and utter idiot in this movie. There’s no other way to describe him. I’ve always thought part of Feige’s frustration with the Thor franchise was Loki’s massive popularity compared with Thor’s. Not that Thor wasn’t popular, but Loki was the first villain to actually warrant a fanbase in the MCU (and although Killmonger more or less got a fair share of people fawining over him, I honestly don’t think it was on par with the Loki phenomenon). Loki committed a crime for a MCU movie: he wasn’t there just to build up the hero’s legacy, he was there to tell his own story. We saw Loki develop from an uncertain ally of Thor’s to an outright enemy, to a begrudging ally, all over the span of Thor, Avengers and Thor: The Dark World. Which Loki do I prefer? The first one, of course. Avengers didn’t do him many favors, and The Dark World also could have handled him better.

But here’s the funny thing: Avengers built him up as a villain to defeat, but that meant Loki had to be menacing, had to be smart to some degree, he had to be respectable. He was smarter in the original Thor, yes, and he’s smarter in the Dark World too, but still, he was worthy of a certain respect in all three movies in terms of how he was built as a character.

Ragnarok obliterated all that respect. Ragnarok reduced Loki to a joke, a really bad joke, about how narcissistic and egotistical he was. He wasn’t smart, he wasn’t competent, he was constantly outdone by Thor in just about every regard, and there was nothing for him to do other than provide the audience someone to laugh at, and someone to project all their LGBT headcanons on, after the way they built up his situation with Jeff Goldblum’s hedonist character. Not that they needed to do that for Loki to be interpreted as LGBT, the fics I referenced above pretty much establish he’s been interpreted as of every sexuality you can think of, all because the original myths did establish him as someone with a very complex sexual identity.

But the point is, people told me Loki was amazing in this movie. I heard so much about that, how he finally got what he deserved… he got to be a laughingstock? That’s what he deserved? Oh, wait, he got to play second fiddle for Thor and accepted that as his place in the world. Was that it? I don’t even care if Loki doesn’t get to fulfill all his ambitions and dreams of recognition: I do care that he’s reduced to nothing but that, when his character was ALWAYS MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN THAT IN EVERY OTHER MOVIE HE SHOWED UP IN. Being told that THIS is how Loki should be handled? It’s the same as being told the Avatar comics did a brilliant job at characterizing Azula, when I’ve written a fuckton of critical posts that prove that’s not the case.

So, when you give me a Loki whose entire purpose in Asgard is to turn it into Lokiland? You give me a joke. You give me a laughingstock. You give me something unworthy of the previous stories that established his character, amidst many things, as a man desperate to find a place where he belonged, desperate to the point where he could commit heinous acts to fulfill his quest, which is what made him a villain in the original film. And why, oh, why would anyone do such a thing?

Well, that’s because Taika Waititi had the brilliant idea of making Thor: Ragnarok as a standalone movie. I’m not kidding, it’s all right here:

“To be honest, what I did was I tried to approach it as if there were no other films.” Waititi explained. “I wanted to make this a standalone film. I loved Thor 1and Thor 2, but if I was going to make this film my own, I couldn’t have come in and tried to make a follow up movie, to try to make the next episode. I wanted to do my own thing.”

He says he loved the first two movies, but I question that’s true. Someone who loved the original movies would have likely avoided a fuckton of mistakes Waititi made in Ragnarok, mistakes that anyone who actually gave a crap about the first movies would have considered utterly ridiculous. When Waititi decided to build Ragnarok as a standalone, he did away with EVERY SINGLE CONCEPT ESTABLISHED FOR THOR IN THE MCU.

EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

First Thor movie: Thor’s character is established as an arrogant guy who would send his world to war just because his pride was injured. This arrogant guy gets his power stripped away from him, as punishment for his irresponsible behavior, and it’s not until he reflects on his actions and eventually takes a step forward to stop the Destroyer when he was at his most vulnerable, that Thor finally becomes worthy of his powers again. His attempt to reason with Loki works, but he pays for it with his life, pretty much, until his powers return to him.

So… how is this situation soooo different from Ragnarok’s big fight against Hela? I’ll tell you how: Thor actually displays vulnerability in the original movie, something that hits home much deeper than “OMG I HAVE UNLIMITED POWER INSIDE ME, I DON’T NEED MY HAMMER!”. His pleas to Loki have the intent to SPARE his friends, to spare an entire town of people who don’t know him and probably never will. His fight with Hela has no pleas. He just gets his eyeball plucked out and is forced to watch Hela destroy his city just so he can rage into talking with Odin (if I recall right) and then go Super Saiyan. Because, uh, the power was always inside him!

After an original movie where the power was in choices, in the choice of sacrificing himself for everyone else, Ragnarok is a movie about obtaining literal power to smash your enemy with. You tell me which is more complex and compelling for an intelligent audience.

Oh, but was it deeper in other senses? The talk about colonization and culture erasure and all that was something so new to this franchise!!!

No. It fucking wasn’t.

Movie one opens with a story about the Frost Giants terrorizing the humans and the Asgardians taking them down. The story didn’t end there, though: the story continued when we visit Jotunheim with Thor to discover it’s a completely nasty ruin, as though they haven’t recovered at all from the war and everything Asgard took from them, including a treasure as valuable for them as the Casket of Winters or whatever it was called. And amidst what Asgard took is Loki: how much clearer can the message get? Odin STOLE Jotunheim’s prince for the chance of using him to broker peace between the realms when he deemed Loki ready for said task. He took Loki as a baby and yes, raised him, but he saw that child and thought he was looking in the face of an opportunity. You’re going to tell me that’s not more meaningful, that doesn’t drive in deeper the message about how harmful this sort of colonialist and supremacist culture is (Loki was raised to think his own people were monsters, driven to madness to the extreme where he was going to exterminate his own people just to show his father that he was a worthy son? Seriously, how were there no attempts to interpret this from a post-colonialist point of view, but there are for Ragnarok?), than some dumbass exposition scene with some old paintings in walls where oh noes, turns out Odin KILLED PEOPLE?!

BIG FUCKING DEAL!

WE’VE KNOWN THAT SINCE THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF THOR’S ORIGINAL MOVIE!

Just, how the hell is this a big damn surprise to ANYONE? ESPECIALLY TO THOR! He was willing to destroy Jotunheim because they ruined his parade: HE WAS DOING IT TO FOLLOW ODIN’S EXAMPLE. THE ORIGINAL MOVIE NEVER SHIED AWAY FROM THIS.

Oh but the surprise is that Odin had a daughter he locked away and hid from the world because he was ashamed of what he’d done? Just… how was he ashamed? When did we see Odin ASHAMED in the previous movies? As much as they tried to portray him as mellowed out, he always acted like everything had been necessary for peace. He outright says in The Dark World that he will immolate Asgard in its entirety if need be to defeat the Dark Elves. Please, how are we genuinely pretending NOW that Odin was hiding any of what he’d done, any of what he was capable of, from Thor or from Loki or from just about anyone?

This is also the part where the original myths and themes of Norse Mythology start to debunk Ragnarok with astounding ease. Original myths that, surprise surprise, the first two movies abide by with much more respect than Ragnarok ever could.

Norse mythology is complex and rich and arguably the second most recurrent mythology in popular culture right after Greek mythology (I reckon Egyptian used to be the second but has dropped in popularity in recent years). I am far from an expert with Norse mythology, I actually am most confident with Celtic mythology, in particular the Irish Mythological Cycle, but that’s not the point: anyone who hears about Norse mythology is likely to have heard about the characters we met in Thor, and about the afterlife according to these myths.

Death in Norse mythology can lead people to different places, not too differently from how it is in other mythologies. Let’s see what the lands of the dead are like:

Valhalla is an afterlife destination where half of those who die in battle gather as einherjar, a retinue gathered for one sole purpose: to remain fit for battle in preparation for the last great battle, during Ragnarök. In opposition to Hel’s realm, which was a subterranean realm of the dead, it appears that Valhalla was located somewhere in the heavens.

Hel’s realm is separated from the world of the living by a rapid river across which leads the Gjallarbrú that the dead have to pass. The gates are heavy, and close behind those who pass it and will never return again. Hel is the final destination of those who do not die in battle, but of old age or disease.

As these two are the only ones that matter for this movie, I figured I’d bring these up. There are of course thousands of various interpretations on how these afterlifes work, and some people say it’s not so cut and dry, but in general, it’s understood that Valhalla is pretty much an honor.

This honor was extended to Frigga in The Dark World. The only good thing about her death in that movie was that it established HOW death works in the MCU’s Asgard. She died in battle: she was given the greatest honor and sent to rest in Valhalla. The land of heroes who die in battle, fighting for their own.

Hel, on the other hand, should be the afterlife for those who die in less worthy ways, meaning, not in combat. Death in combat is considered one of the greatest honors in Norse culture, from what I’ve understood from all the stories I’ve seen that are set in Norse or Viking settings, and not dying in combat wasn’t a favorable prospect for just about anyone. Deaths outside of combat are, of course, accidental deaths, diseases, old age, you name it.

Hel should be connected to Hela, the character from Ragnarok. Hela should preside over Hel, the unwanted afterlife for so many people who would rather die in a much worthier way.

Hel showed up once before in the MCU, by the way. In the very controversial and despised Ultron. And no, I’m not talking about Thor’s weird-as-fuck delirium about Asgard. I mean in this particular dialogue…:

Natasha Romanoff: Thor, report on the Hulk?Thor: The gates of Hel are filled with the screams of his victims.[Natasha glares at Thor and Banner groans in despair]Thor: Uh, but, not the screams of the dead, of course. No no, uh…wounded screams, mainly whimpering, a great deal of complaining and tales of sprained deltoids and, and uh… and gout.

Gates of Hel. That’s a direct reference to actual mythology. He could have said that Hel was full of Hulk’s victims, just like that, but he outright references the GATES. Ergo… Thor knows Hel exists.

PLEASE LET THAT SINK IN.

When you arrive at Ragnarok, Hela is a complete mystery for Thor. Oh, you can come up with whatever in-world explanation you care to, I honestly wouldn’t bother making up one to begin with: Ragnarok is built on the premise of defeating Hela, Thor’s scary sudden sister he had no notion of, who was locked away in some weird ass prison and who happens to be called Hela, but has no connection with Hel.

None.

Why do I say this?

Because her powers allegedly are connected to Asgard.

Allegedly.

Can someone please explain why should Hel’s powers have a connection with Asgard when there was such a bloody obvious possibility in making Hel the realm she’s connected to? She’s the goddamn REGENT of Hel! That’s not even up for debate in Norse Mythology, out of all the things that can be debated! But instead her power comes from the LIVING? It comes from VIOLENTLY KILLING WARRIORS WHO FIGHT AND DIE DEFENDING THEIR HOMELAND HONORABLY?

I’m going to outright say it: Hela should have gained NOTHING from a militaristic approach at attacking and destroying Asgard. If the plan was to make Hela a big shock for everyone, a plot twist… she should have spread disease and old age through Asgard. And then people die dishonorably.

And they end up in her realm.

And she could enslave them and use their souls to fuel her own power or so.

Please, do tell… how is this not a much more myth-compliant approach than “Oh lookie she’s just this SUPER BADASS FIGHTER! And she can take down ENTIRE ARMIES all on her own by FIGHTING!” How isn’t this more consistent with what was already established by the MCU? (oh wait, Waititi doesn’t care to keep things consistent, I forgot…)

Man, I’ve played Dragon Age: Origins a fuckton of times by now and one of the saddest and truest things I’ve seen in it, which connects with my own reality, is one of the riddles on your way to the Urn of Andraste: how did Andraste and the Maker destroy the Imperium’s army? Through FAMINE. Through HUNGER. What’s more disgraceful than living to EAT? Nothing feels more dehumanizing, and I can tell you that just fine considering that in hyperinflation that’s EXACTLY what venezuelans like myself live like right now.

Why didn’t Hela starve Asgard, then? Why didn’t she do something that Asgardians simply couldn’t FIGHT against, seeing as that’s all they know how to do?

Oh, again, because Thor is an ACTION HERO! That is the identity Feige and Waititi HAD to build for him! That’s what he ALWAYS was supposed to be!

I’m going to share now one of my favorite things about both Thor and The Dark World: the way Thor finishes his final battles.

In the first film, Thor defeats Loki by destroying the Bifrost. He uses Mjöllnir to destroy someTHING, not someONE. Hammers can be used to build and destroy, Thor used it to destroy at that particular point in time. By destroying, he stopped the chaos Loki was unleashing with the Bifrost and saved an entire realm.

The Dark World? Thor isn’t the one who comes up with the way to defeat Malekith, since it’s Jane who makes the wacky portable portals stuff. Nonetheless, Thor is the one out in the fray, fighting the big bad… but how did he take down OP Aether-addled Malekith? Not by shoving a fuckton of lightning into his face, he already tried that and failed. Nope: he nailed the device Jane built. He nailed it right into the motherfucker’s chest. And then Malekith gets portaled away and killed by his own ship. Again, it’s not Thor using POWER to kill his enemy, it’s Thor using a hammer’s natural damn use to his favor. It’s Thor using his BRAIN.

THOR.

USING HIS BRAIN.

THINKING SHIT THROUGH.

USING HIS AVAILABLE RESOURCES TO FINISH A FIGHT EFFECTIVELY.

NOT POWERING THROUGH EVERYTHING LIKE A DURACELL BATTERY ON DRUGS.

People out there who complain about how Infinity War gave Thor an axe instead of letting him be powerful all on his own piss me off, I won’t lie. Because Mjöllnir was NOT a crutch for Thor. It was a tool, in all senses of the word. It’s like pretending Doctor Strange’s cloak is the secret to all his powers. The entire first movie is about showing Thor that the hammer, that POWER, does NOT define him: why the FUCK did he have to lose it in Ragnarok, and suffer about it like he’d never been parted from the hammer when it happened just the same in the first damn movie? Hell, the first movie stole ALL his lightning and thunder-related powers and he STILL managed to find true worth in who he was after that! He still learned what he needed to learn to be worthy of his hammer again! This movie, though? It rewards Thor for losing Mjöllnir, ZERO GROWTH OR DEVELOPMENT NEEDED BECAUSE FUCK IT, HE DIDN’T LEARN A DAMN THING IN THIS MOVIE by making him superpowerful just because it could. And Thor ends up winning the day without using a hammer in the way a hammer should be used, breaking with the pattern of the two previous movies: again, the identity of the original movies gets tossed away completely.

It’s not cool. It’s not amazing. It’s devoid of all meaning. Thor losing his eye just like his daddy before him? Another piece of crap devoid of meaning. Thor didn’t need to lose a goddamn eye to be “parallel” to his father, because he’s already in the position where he has to take charge of Asgard to become king, and nothing’s a more apparent parallel than that.

Funny comparison time: did you watch Lion King 2? A lot of people think it sucks but when I was little I looooved that thing with the force of a thousand suns. Now, if you did watch it, remember Kovu? Remember the part where Zira scars him, leaving him to look just like Scar? The drama at that point is that Kovu has been groomed all his life to kill Simba, just like Scar killed Mufasa. He was “chosen” for the job, and all his similarities with Scar not withstanding, Kovu’s growth pushes him to NOT WANT TO FOLLOW ON SCAR’S FOOTSTEPS.

So, when he gets the same scar but acts entirely differently from how Scar would have? When he chooses to love rather than to hate? When he takes a stand for peace rather than to further stir up war? He’s choosing to be different from the lion whose example he’s been forced to follow all his life!

When Thor fights Hela… what does he do that is in any sense different from what Odin would have done, in his shoes? Could someone perhaps enlighten me? He fights Hela, he doesn’t extend a hand to her and offer her a second chance. He fights to defeat her, he gets Loki to unleash Surtur on Asgard and destroy it with Hela in it. Oh, wow, he distanced himself SO MUCH from Odin’s legacy by, uh, destroying his homeland and killing his sister. That’s not so different from locking Hela up for eons, let alone so different from saying that he would sacrifice as many asgardian lives as were needed to end the threat of Malekith.

Oh, but Thor saved lives, didn’t he? Sure he did!

No, he didn’t. Fucking Heimdall was the one worried about protecting people. Who the hell would have saved them if Heimdall hadn’t been there? Who the hell would Thor have saved if Heimdall hadn’t protected people and created that weird underground refugee site? If Thor had arrived and Heimdall and his people had been caught all along, who the fuck would he have saved? NO ONE.

Also, this concept of “Thor saving a few civilian lives WHILE MILLIONS GET SACRIFICED” might as well apply to Odin’s destruction of other cultures because of how they threatened Asgard too. Heck, Bor’s destruction of the Dark Elves is presented in the same light too in The Dark World. Ragnarok attempts to make people feel bad about all the deaths in the shallowest way I’ve seen, because for one thing, it tries to criticize the previous movies by being oh so shocked by Odin’s massacres when everyone and their uncle KNOWS that Odin’s been killing cultures and worlds and things since day fucking one. But it basically spits upwards when it says “Asgard is its people, not a place” and… kills the majority of the people, along with the place. Just… what the hell was even the point of pretending Asgardians would be refugees rebuilding elsewhere when, on top of it all, they all died in Infinity War anyhow?

Now, let’s think about it: how many named asgardians do we know who survived Ragnarok? We know Thor, Heimdall and Valkyrie. Loki is a honorary asgardian, I suppose, so let’s say he counts. Who else? Oh, damn, no one. I’m all out.

And THIS is where Ragnarok was always supposed to improve on the rest of the Thor movies. THIS. Because in a movie that was going to kill the Warriors Three, Sif, Odin and as many asgardians as they could, you had the reasonable obligation to make the audience GIVE A SHIT. Constant criticism for the original Thor movies by less passionate fans is that they didn’t care about any characters aside from Thor, Loki and Heimdall (cue my surprise when they all survive Ragnarok, it’s almost like it was fanservice, oh my!), and that Asgard was BORING.

Ragnarok should have tried its best to make Asgard less boring. It should have tried to make the less popular characters relevant, interesting, valuable…

What did it do? Killed them all. Every warrior dead. Sif would be dead too, if Jaimie Alexander hadn’t been too busy to go to Australia. Every last one of them would be dead. And as for Asgard? As for the place we should see Thor cares about soooo much?

We saw more of Asgard in The Dark World, of their customs, of their complexities, and the majority of the movie is spent elsewhere. We saw more of Asgard, obviously, on the original Thor, where half the movie is spent there. Ragnarok’s response to that, though, is to practically spend the entire fucking movie in a literal trash planet, because getting out of there was so very vital to the movie! When, uh, ending up there was already a fucking pointless waste of time in the first place.

Let’s think about it: why exactly did we need our heroes to end up there? Hulk could have crash-landed somewhere in Asgard. Valkyrie could have been an actual Valkyrie, not a cast-out drunk trying to forget her days of glory and misery. We could have seen THE Valkyries in action, gearing up to fight a serious threat, and people would be fawning about such a huge damn female army, on par with Wonder Woman’s amazons…!

But no. We went to a trash planet instead, all to make a shitty version of Planet Hulk, which yes, I haven’t read, but the people I know who did read it say it was a complete disservice to a story that was so much more complex and serious than the trash heap we were given through Ragnarok.

And, most importantly… all to make the movie FUN. All so Thor could have something else to do while everyone died in Asgard. All so he could indeed be incompetent as defender of his realm because in the end he couldn’t save most of them. And it didn’t even matter to him that he didn’t, that’s yet another thing that pisses me off: he mourns his father a lot, spends the movie bitter and angry that Odin had died just so he can have an understandable reason to be pissed at Loki, and sure, he wants to go back to Asgard and save his people from his sister. But I can’t remember him seeming genuinely concerned about what fate awaited his friends and the people he ruled. Of course, neither did Loki, but as Loki was portrayed as an egotistical maniac the whole movie, it’s no surprise. Our hero, though, should have a bigger heart than this, right? He did before, didn’t he? He did everything in his power to get Malekith to leave Asgard alone, including risking the life of the woman he loved, no less!

But naaaaah, in Ragnarok he did a lot for his people, uh-huh, sure as fuck. That’s why he spent all his time in trashland making jokes and having fun except for most the time he was dealing with Loki, because by then he got pissed because Odin’s death is all his fault. Just like Frigga’s death. Just like everything because Loki sucks and Thor is forever mad at him. Thing really is, he has pressure to leave, but you don’t really feel it going by his attitude. If everyone you knew and loved were about to die by the hand of your unknown sibling, would you be chill, trying and failing to flirt with a girl by tossing a ball to a wall so it can hit you right back?

Thor’s entire character in Ragnarok is cringeworthy. This isn’t just because he was so vastly different from who he was back in the other two films, it’s because of how he acts, how he behaves. How he takes next to nothing seriously, starting from Surtur, all the way to Asgard’s destruction. This is the man who was actually characterized for FOUR films as someone with a sense of humor, but with a strong sense of duty and honor that makes him an even better man than Steve Rogers (reminder of the hammer scene in Ultron, Rogers can’t quite lift the hammer yet, Thor’s supposed to be a worthier man than him, according to whatever criteria Mjöllnir uses). And here? Here he just jokes around, he wastes his time, he acts like a complete bufoon as he has stupid arguments with Hulk and deals with Jeff Goldblum, and flirts with Valkyrie, and outsmarts Loki (hell knows how, considering how incredibly idiotic Thor felt through this entire movie, but that’s how stupid Loki was in it too).

The ideal way to compare how Thor was written in the original films and in this one is the romance. Where in the previous movies Thor is charming, confident, treats women with respect (he supported Sif in her efforts to prove herself on par with any man, he encourages her to survive and live to tell her stories herself, he listens to Jane’s explanations about space and offers his own stories when she wants to hear them, and so on), in Ragnarok he meets Valkyrie and acts like, again, a 14-year-old fanboy who just met the celebrity he faps to every night in his bedroom. He’s nervous, he’s giddy, he’s trying, TRYING to impress her! Before anyone chimes in to say he’s meeting his hero, of COURSE he’d be nervous… please, no. Thor is a goddamn prince, as good as a king already. Thor has met countless people in his life and treated them all with the same amount of respect. He has NO REASON to dumb himself down and behave like a fanboy with Valkyrie. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t funny. It was absolutely out of character, that’s what it was. For he wouldn’t be trying to flirt with her, let alone so poorly, even if he’s interested in her romantically. No, he would respect her, first and foremost. He would admire her without seeming a complete idiot in the process, the same way he did with Jane. He wouldn’t be trying to impress her by acting like he’s cool, but coming off as an idiot, because he supposedly grew out of his stupid arrogance all the way in movie 1. But naaaaah, not when he meets VALKYRIE! Nope, because she’s SPESHUL!

Give me a break.

I’m sure there’s more about Thor, but I think I’ll leave him alone for now. I already did my piece on Loki earlier, so now… two newcomers.

Valkyrie bothers me. No, it has nothing to do with Valkyrie breaking the stereotypical blonde warrior aesthetic that people expect from Norse mythology stuff, because hell, Heimdall doesn’t bother me and never did just because he’s not aryan. Honestly, it doesn’t matter in the least what color they are.

What does matter with Valkyrie is that her change of heart and motivations make absolutely no sense.

When we first meet her she’s just scavenging trash to drag to Jeff Goldblum. She’s drunk, but she’s tough as nails and she gets everything done anyways. Is it ideal? No. It feels insulting, even, considering this is how the movie chooses to portray a valkyrie and its only heroic female character. But whatever, let’s move forward…

When Thor realizes what and who she is, he goes fanboy mode. Valkyrie dismisses all reminders of her past life, and as far as I can remember, she did that at least twice. Maybe thrice, I can’t recall that much. When Thor asked her why she didn’t want to help him save Asgard, her answer directly implies she remembers perfectly well what happened the last time she dealt with Hela and she is still too grief-ridden about it to bother fighting her again. Thor throws a tantrum, Valkyrie still refuses to go along with him, all ends just like that.

But when Loki does the ONLY useful thing he did in the entire movie, as in, hi-jacks Valkyrie’s memories and makes her relive everything, she changes her mind. Why?

Oh, because she reclaimed her past? Because she had forgotten it? BULL.FUCKING.SHIT. Valkyrie didn’t forget JACKSHIT about her past! The answer she gives Thor, initially, shows very clearly that she remembers EVERYTHING and refuses to go back anyhow. Because Hela is too powerful for her to defeat. But one forceful blast to the past makes Valkyrie not only NOT feel violated, which honestly blows me away, sure she hit Loki afterwards but I wouldn’t exactly be so chill after someone got inside my head and forced me to relive my worst memory, but it makes Valkyrie decide that she wants to help Thor now.

WHY?!

There is NOTHING reasonable that has changed since she told Thor what she did. NOTHING! She didn’t come to a conclusion such as “well shit my life sucks badly enough here, I might as well go die”, nor does she have a heartfelt conversation with Thor about how hard this is for her but that maybe she can correct the mistakes of her past if she helps him out now. No, man, this movie doesn’t need anyone to have believable behaviors or motivations, because Valkyrie needs to join Thor so she can play the Gamora to his cheap Peter Quill, and if her brain needs to be bent backwards to join this team, so be it.

Again, let’s put things into perspective: was there ANY need for Valkyrie’s character to be exactly what it was? Why couldn’t she be the only line of defense in Asgard to endure against Hela’s attack, for instance? She’s presented to us as the only representative of this really cool elite group of fighters… and she’s just doing Jeff Goldblum’s dirty work. Please… can someone tell me what was the point of doing this?

Ah, wait, I know: COMEDY. Because that was the priority established by Waititi and who knows who else, because that’s what mattered most. So, was it fun to have a serious warrior lady kicking ass in Asgard? Nah, it was fun to make her a drunkard who’d fall over sideways when collecting Thor for Goldblum because she’s drunk. Haha. Funny.

Valkyrie is wasted potential. That’s the truth of it. She could have been amazing, but as it is, I find Sif a thousand times more interesting than Valkyrie because at least with Sif I can see where she’s coming from, I can understand her storyline even without her ever being at the forefront of any movie. Question now, why did it have to be Valkyrie? Why couldn’t Sif be the one helping Thor in Ragnarok? Fucking hell, why couldn’t it be BOTH of them? Aside from the obvious “we forgot Sif existed until ten seconds before filming the deaths of all of Asgard’s warriors” explanation, it’s because you can’t make the Guardians of the Galaxy formula work with well-rounded individuals, Nope, you need broken people. And what’s more broken than a warrior who lost her will to fight? Who lives to drink, like my good buddy Oghren who I mentioned back when this post began?

Valkyrie, then, is not a full-rounded character. She’s more convenience writing. She’s a happy coincidence for Thor, because woah, what are the odds that the ONE PERSON WITH ASGARDIAN PAST would find him in trashland? They’re not good. In fact, they’re pretty bad. But that’s what the movie needed, so that’s what the movie got. And how do you get her to change her mind about fighting when she’d given up? By convenience writing. Not even a pep talk, like what Jyn Erso got in Rogue One from her dad, which made her switch flip completely and she did a 180° regarding her opinion of the war and battles between the Empire and Rebels. I complained a bit about Jyn changing her mind so easily… but compared to Valkyrie? Jyn made a fuckton more sense than that. At least you could see where she was coming from when she changed her mind. At least you could say a fiber of her being was touched by her father’s words. Valkyrie was touched by Loki’s invasion of her mind? By what, exactly? By Waititi twisting her character over because otherwise his GOTG team-up wouldn’t work?

The absolute worst part of Ragnarok is realizing that, as a cheap rip-off of GOTG, it failed not only to hold up the identity of any Thor film before this one, it failed to imitate GOTG properly. GOTG felt organic, this feels forced. GOTG felt like a good story to tell, because it was a group of renegades, pretty much, saving the entire galaxy even though they’re nobodies, even though they’re as good as mercenaries, even though they’re a team brought together by what feels like random factors (but it’s not that random because, as a reminder, all of them minus Drax were after the Orb, and in the break-out Drax joins them because he hopes they can help him fulfill his quest for revenge). Everyone in GOTG has reasons to fight, though, reasons to work together. They seem to barely stand each other, but they’re convenient for one another at the start and they bear with it.

Ragnarok fails to achieve GOTG’s success in terms of storytelling because Ragnarok featured Thor as good as begging everyone to help him. Reluctant team-ups like GOTG’s are achieved by having two or more characters work together for a common goal, or for goals that they can only achieve with each other’s help (I have used the same resource in writing in the past plenty if times as it is). But when you have to feature a character BEGGING others to work with him, this formula doesn’t elicit the same feeling. It doesn’t result in “wow, look at all these unlikely heroes working together”, it results in “aw look at ‘em helping the little guy who needed them”. Thor offers everyone a chance to fight a battle that, in general, doesn’t concern them. Hulk has nothing to gain from fighting Hela. Valkyrie has no reason to fight her again, as she’d given up and displays no believable motivation to go for a rematch. Loki does have reason to fight, but Thor doesn’t trust him and it’s not until the last 10 minutes of the movie that Thor finally trusts Loki again, just because Loki is doing exactly what Thor wanted him to.

Give me a Valkyrie who has spent AGES looking for Hela through the universe, hoping to fight her, and upon hearing she’s back, she wants revenge. Give me a Thor who tells her “hey, maybe you can avenge your fallen comrades, but there are a lot of people who are still alive that we have to save too. Maybe revenge isn’t the only thing that matters”, and then Valkyrie reasons with what her motivations had been. Give me a more HUMANE Valkyrie, and that way she won’t be here merely to fulfill the typical and criticized “strong female character” trope, whose entire character arc revolves around being a cool fighter and being the object of admiration/affection/love interest of the main character, because newsflash, that’s what happened with her. The so very despised trope of “strong female character”, right here with Valkyrie.

Was Sif any better? Why, yes, I’d say so. Because Thor didn’t want her. Because she was only friends with him, because her life as a warrior took priority over any romantic interests she might have. Because her eagerness to go down in history in GLORY makes her near suicidal in movie 1, to the point where Thor has to make her snap out of it and force her to understand her life is worth more than the stories she wants people to tell about her in death. THAT is a character. THAT is a genuinely interesting female character, who got snubbed in all the films she featured and even in the one where she didn’t, precisely because she didn’t. Because her strength has flaws, because she’s not invulnerable, because she’s prone to failure, because she has loyalties, because she lives to serve her people. Sif is Valkyrie done right. Valkyrie is, like I said, a “strong female character”. And no, that she’s bisexual makes no damn difference, especially when said bisexuality is only known to people who follow Tessa Thompson on Twitter and general fans who look for information on characters outside of the movies themselves. Either way, if she had been shown making out with a girl onscreen that wouldn’t make a difference: she’s still only here to beat people up and to be a potential love interest for Thor, because if she’d had believable, understandable, EXPLORED motivations, she’d be more than that. But she doesn’t. Her entire character revolves around those two things. And that’s a failure in my eyes.

Finally… Hela. Why is Hela a terrible villain, on par with losers like Obadiah Stane, Malekith, the cheap excuse for Baron Zemo from Civil War, Darren Cross… honestly, spare me naming them all because frankly the only ones I wouldn’t lump together with the bulk of Marvel’s villains are Loki and Vulture, but my point is, Hela was all about appearances, all about the acting pedigree of Cate Blanchett, and nothing about making her into a decent villain. Why’s that?

I’ve talked in the past about why Marvel’s villains generally fail, and it’s because they’re not built to be characters but foils. Marvel’s not so subtle approach at storytelling holds a certain principle at its very highest, and said principle is that the story is about the HERO. The villain can’t be more developed than the hero, else you’re failing the movie’s purpose. Only a few of their movies failed at this (I can only think of Thor and Black Panther as examples of not keeping true to this precept), everything else does it just fine. Why, though? Because the villains are completely generic. Because they’re here to further someone else’s storyline, and not to have one of their own.

Loki had his own storyline in his first movie. You watch his ENTIRE thought process through Thor, you see that he didn’t start off with the “I’m going to annihilate Jotunheim!” idea, it’s something that builds up as the story unfolds. You meet Loki as a troublemaker, capable of very chaotic messes such as what happens during Thor’s failed coronation, but he’s not stupid. He’s not trying to cause a war, he’s just sabotaging his brother because, curiously, Loki is right about Thor at this point in time: Thor is NOT fit to be king, and Odin agrees eventually. The simplest provocation caused Thor to wage war on an entire realm, just because he wanted to rule Asgard RIGHT NOW. Loki’s mischief revealed this about Thor, but it wasn’t done with the intent to completely ruin Thor’s life: Thor’s reaction to Loki’s scheme is what reveals that he’s not ready to rule at all.

It’s especially clear when you recall that Loki ends up facing the truth about himself during the fight in Jotunheim: Loki has no idea what his true heritage is. He knows he’s been sidelined and treated differently, but he has no clue what’s up. Where Black Panther features a Killmonger who has already come to terms with his heritage and his connection with Wakandan royalty, Thor treats us to the ENTIRE PROCESS of Loki’s slow but certain collapse. He starts off fine, but he ends up losing all sight of who he is, of everything that matters, because his parents weren’t his parents, because he was lied to all his life, because his brother was favored over him all along and NOW, in front of us, he has come to understand why.

Loki’s entire journey parallels Thor’s. Where Loki grows more unhinged, Thor is humbled and grows into letting the goodness in him shine, in letting the better traits that make him a decent man pull through while he lets go of his arrogance and his belief that he’s entitled to a throne and to everything he could ever want. Their journeys happen simultaneously, and THAT is unique to any Marvel movies. You don’t see that anywhere else. THAT is what made Thor so successful with fans: it wasn’t JUST Thor’s story, it was Loki’s too. The Dark World at least gave Loki the courtesy of a small arc of his own. Ragnarok? Jokes at his expense and a diva complex that resulted in him coming back to help Thor merely because that would mean he would be regarded as hero and savior to Asgard. How is it not cringeworthy?

But that’s not what I was trying to get to, nope. No, my point was Hela: what was the purpose of Hela, in the end?

Ragnarok, traditionally, is brought upon the world by Loki. He’s the one who supposedly ends the entire world, causes the massive fight of the gods and wreaks havoc comparable to the Christian Apocalypse. But Loki can’t do that in Ragnarok because he has too much of a fanbase and can’t be guilty for such heinous crimes, can he? Nope.

Let’s, instead, find someone else to blame everything on. Are there other options for this role? Surtur, Amora, maybe? Oh, no! Let’s go with Hela! Who IS Hela, anyways?

In one iteration of the comics, Hela is LOKI’S DAUGHTER. Never, from my understanding, was Hela anyone’s sister, let alone Thor and Loki’s. Is it that terrible to make her Loki’s daughter? Well, yes, because that’d mean Loki would have to know of her existence and that would cause more problems than Waititi wanted to handle (plus, gives too much protagonism to Loki, and he certainly did not want THAT!). So, Hela had to be something else. She had to be something personal for Thor too, but making her an old flame would be too much (despite uh from what I read she even had a kid with Thor in one iteration of the comics? So it wouldn’t have been completely out of left field?), because we don’t want Thor having multiple romances, we don’t even want him having a full romance, because that’s why the first movies failed! Nope, that can’t do.

Oh, wait a minute, I know! Let’s make Hela Thor’s SECRET SISTER! AHAHA, PERFECT! Because it’s not like he already had a brother in black-and-green clothing who was snubbed and given a shitty deal by their dad and who came back from said betrayal by Odin to destroy everything Thor holds dear. It’s such NOVEL storytelling, so unique! So unexpected! We totally never have seen this story told before!

Hela is a cheap rip-off of the original Loki. Just as the entire movie is a rip-off of GOTG. Hela TRIES, so very hard, to be as impressive and imposing as Loki originally was. Hela fails. Why?

Because for one thing, she’s a crappy retelling of Loki’s story. She has nothing new. She’s not impressive in any regards because she does nothing unexpected, nothing that makes her ANYTHING aside from a bad villain Thor needs to defeat. Loki was Thor’s friend and brother once: Hela generates no such conflict because she could easily be Odin’s former slave rather than daughter and the story would be the same. She could have literally ANY relationship to Thor and nothing would change. Why? Because her being Thor’s biological sister does NOTHING for the story. It creates no bond between them, because the bond that existed between Thor and Loki was established during AGES of growing up together. Hela has no such thing, ergo, you can’t pretend that her being Thor’s sister will amount to anything just because Odin handled her poorly (newsflash, Odin has been handling shit poorly since the first time he showed up in the MCU and most of Thor’s problems in his movies come from that, ergo this is, again, nothing new).

For another thing, Hela is here to take Loki’s place as the complicated family member Thor needs to get in line. Hela is, I theorize, Waititi’s wish fulfillment for what he’d like to have done to Loki but couldn’t because he needed to be around to keep his fanbase appeased and buying tickets for the movie. Hela, though, was new. Hela was irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Hela could turn into all of Loki’s “evil” and “chaotic” impulses, while Loki is reduced to narcissism and cheap comedy, and this way Hela is turned into a cartoon villain who’s only here to break everything because she allegedly obtains her power by doing so.

I already got into it before, but I guess I’ll do it again: Hela’s connection to Asgard is absolutely idiotic. There’s an entire damn realm named after her, connected to her. It’s like saying Hades from Greek Mythology obtains his powers from the Olympus. Or like saying Satan derives his powers from Heaven. No. That makes no effing sense. Therefore, destroying Asgard to destroy Hela feels stupid, and defies all logic. But they needed Hela to cause a catastrophe in Asgard, otherwise you can’t justify destrying Asgard by using Loki to, HAHAHA, HONOR THE ORIGINAL MYTHOLOGY, HAHAHAHA, AFTER ALL THIS TIME OF SHITTING ON IT AND UNDERSTANDING NONE OF ITS CONCEPTS, NOW THEY WANT TO HONOR IT, IT’S THE ONLY FUNNY JOKE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE!

It’s bad enough that the movie fucks over Loki’s character as it does, but it attempts to make him a good, dutiful brother who steals the Tesseract from the vaults but still takes Surtur to the funky flame thing. The destruction of Asgard is ultimately done by Loki, but not really, no, it was Surtur. And not really, no, it was because Thor asked Loki to. So, in the end, it’s actually Thor who killed Asgard and his sister. But um, they were being faithful to the myths, sure.

Hela is a failure of a villain as usual for Marvel. Her story is presented via exposition, via TELL, NOT SHOW. We don’t witness the crumbling relationship between her and Odin because that would have required for her to exist since the first movies. No, we are told all about how Odin used her as his ideal tool to KILL PEOPLE!!!1 (I think I raged enough about this before, didn’t I…?) and then locked her up somewhere because she was too dangerous! Compared to Loki’s very palpable fall from grace, Hela’s character arc is absolutely insignificant. People only liked her because she was hot. That was it. Like I said earlier, Cate Blanchett’s doing. Had it been any less than stellar actress, Hela wouldn’t have garnered more than a couple of shrugs.

I guess it warrants to say Odin was probably the only thing this movie maintained close enough to the original movies (despite he was poorly written in his death scene anyhow). Odin making shitty decisions seems to be one of the main story points in Thor’s franchise, so I suppose that’s not out of line. Ironically, though, staying true to the same variable with Odin is… pretty damn old by now. All of Thor’s movies have featured Odin being controversial, doing shitty things for his perceived greater good (from stealing a child of another culture to comparing his son’s girlfriend to a goat), so Ragnarok isn’t even telling us anything new about Odin. It’s also not telling us anything new about Odin and Thor’s relationship, because we already know Thor loves the man despite it all, and whatever shitty decisions Odin made, Thor accepts them. He did since the first movie, he does again in this one. Zero new information.

As for a few more inconsistencies:

The Bifrost. Remember how Loki activated the Bifrost and destroyed a lot of Jotunheim by leaving Heimdall’s sword in place, back in the first movie? At one point in Ragnarok, the sword stays in place again and nothing happens. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The scene could have easily happened without the sword there, too. But nope. It stayed in place for no reason, and what came from that? Nothing. Just, a completely absurd situation where, again, Ragnarok is inconsistent with the original Thor.

Another inconsistency, this time one that people laughed about becuause “it fixed the Gauntlet problem”. Reminder: the Infinity Gauntlet shows up for the first time in Asgard’s vaults in the first movie.

In Ultron, though, inexplicably Thanos is wearing the Gauntlet and saying he’ll deal with everything himself (what did he even have to do with Ultron is a pretty good question, one I still have no idea what its answer is). When this happened, people thought Loki was working with Thanos and gave him the thing. Or Thanos broke into Asgard and stole it. But ultimately, it meant Thanos had the Gauntlet and we were doomed, right?

Ragnarok “solved” this problem by featuring Hela saying the Gauntlet in the vault was fake. She knocks it over and says that’s just a shitty copy of the real deal. Fast forward to Infinity War, though…

Tyrion and his buddies fron Nidavellir built the Infinity Gauntlet for Thanos. It happens before Thanos even has access to the Time Stone. Ergo, Thanos couldn’t have made the dwarves craft THE ORIGINAL GAUNTLET and then, I don’t know, used the Time Stone to show it to Odin ten thousand years ago just to get him to make a fake version of it to put it on display for Hela to knock over later. Even if he had done that once he gains access to the Time Stone, someone needs to have at least a shred of common sense and ask themselves why the fuck would Thanos do something so pointless.

Because ultimately, a plothole becomes even more absurd when the attempt to fix it just fucks it up more more. The fake, copy of the Gauntlet, which looks EXACTLY like Thanos’ Gauntlet, existed first. It’s like saying Windows was the original when Bill Gates outright worked for Apple and got his ideas for his own business and OS through working on the MacIntosh. No, Windows isn’t the original. Neither can Tyrion’s Gauntlet be the original because IT MAKES NO SENSE WITH ANY TIMELINE YOU CAN THINK OF.

Had Ragnarok ignored the Gauntlet, nothing would have happened. The destruction of Asgard could have meant this proto-Gauntlet died with it. Thanos could have simply asked the dwarves to make him a new gauntlet because the one that existed was in Asgard, out of his reach by Ultron’s time, and simply gone by Infinity War. But oh noooo, they had to FIX THAT! Well, good fucking job, as usual. You created yet another stupid ass plothole, Waititi. Congratulations.

In short… Ragnarok’s big success comes from it being a “funny” movie with scatological jokes about anuses and orgies, for instance, with Thor making a complete dunce of himself throughout the painful two hours of movie (I don’t even know if it was two hours but it felt like an eternity to me), and let’s not get started again with what happened with Loki. The movie fails at establishing new characters anyone with common sense would be concerned about because they’re as complex and deep as a puddle on asphalt, and it fails at characterizing old characters too. The movie does its best to be funny, but the constant efforts to be funny are akin to a stand-up comedian who is desperate to make his audience laugh at whatever cost. It’s forced, it’s stupid, it’s consistently unfunny, at least it was for me. I can honestly say I laughed at zero points in time in the movie. Was I predisposed to dislike it? I’ve been predisposed to dislike a lot of things before. That the movie failed to subvert any of my expectations is hardly my fault: it was exactly every bit of a failure I expected it to be.

Because when they turned that original logo into a garbage new one, worthy of 1998 Word’s WordArt, when they released a trailer that was HUMOROUS, I knew I wasn’t going to watch something worth my while. You can make comedic stories about the end of the world, people have done it in the past, but Thor did not lend itself for that sort of thing because Ultron establishes Thor is going to be RESPONSIBLE for Ragnarok. Thor has a responsibility to the end of his world. And the Thor we knew, originally, wasn’t the type who would smile and shrug if his mistakes would cost the lives of millions of people.

This is like telling a version of Harry Potter where Harry, faced with Voldemort’s second rise to power,decides to go look for Horcruxes in casinos and strip clubs because hey that’s more fun than an endless camping trip. Well sure, it’d be more fun, but it’d make absolutely no sense and people would die while he enjoys himself and fails to find a single damn Horcrux, right? It’s also like telling me that in Avatar, when Zuko reveals Ozai is going to use the comet to destroy the Earth Kingdom, Aang goes “Oh wow… that’s a shame, huh? So, how about we go back to playing now?” instead of thinking he had to prepare and fight with Ozai to put a stop to the man.

It’s telling me that the destruction of Asgard, of Thor’s world, of his realm and kingdom, is a fucking JOKE. And if we’re not supposed to take it seriously because Thor won’t take it seriously, the movie is a failure. I never felt like any of the previous Marvel films wanted me to take them as jokes, not even the most comedic of them. I did with Ragnarok. Because all that death, all that destruction, all the sacrifices made, brushed past Thor like water from a shower, that he just dried up and walked away. Because the destruction of his world, of his friends, of everything he was supposed to protect, indeed isn’t deserving of a serious treatment because selling movie tickets via comedy is more important. Because quality, consistent, COMPLEX, storytelling isn’t anywhere near as important as making your audience laugh.

Well, congratulations, Feige, Waititi. You guys should have been stand-up comedians instead and left movie-making to people competent enough to make something worthwhile.

This movie is singlehandedly to blame for my loss of interest in MCU matters and in the Thor franchise. I would still write the occasional story for it, I would still enjoy other people’s works about it, but right now? I’ve even blacklisted a bunch of terms so I can see as few Ragnarok posts as possible. And precisely because I want nothing to do with it have I never gotten in the way of people who do enjoy it unless they outright ask me for my opinion, as you did, Anon. If anyone enjoyed Ragnarok despite EVERYTHING I wrote here, that’s on you. I don’t need any arguments to convince me that I’m wrong and they’re right about why this movie has some worth. The contradictions, conveniences, poor characterization and lack of creativity that went into this film will not go away just because someone excuses them one way or another, so if anyone is hoping to “enlighten me” about why this movie is actually brilliant? Save it. For your own good.

So, after these twelve thousand words on why Ragnarok is the worst MCU movie for me… is there anything left unsaid, really? I suspect so, because I watched it too long ago to remember every detail. Still, I’d have nothing good to say anyhow, so it’s probably for the best that I stop now that I’ve made my case quite clearly, right?

#thor ragnarok #*happy sigh*#well frankly I can rant a lot about this and sometimes I feel better afterwards #that's probably the one thing I can say in its favor

185 notes · View notes

secretsfromwholecloth · 4 years

Text

Dragon Age II, day 5.

The post-coital arm stroking in Merrill’s romance cutscene, reblog if you agree.

The sweetness. The realism. That is a thing I have done to people.

The more characters I meet with amazing voices provided by VAs who are actually from the relevant country, the more inexplicable the casting of Zevran becomes.

When I do an RPG series playthrough like this, I research and plan out my class and romance choices to experience a nice cross-section of stuff that appeals to me. (My first four Watchers in Pillars were the result of just this sort of planning to make sure I bagged the set of romances and faction alliances without making myself look cis or homophobic. I get twitchy about these things, OK?) For this run, I read up on my romance options and picked out Alistair, Merrill, and Blackwall, constructing the rest from there. Alistair was the obvious choice because he’s cute and appealing, of course. With Blackwall it became obvious very quickly that I was seeing myself in him; I’ve got a long speech on that prepared that I’ll give you when I actually meet him. I thought I’d picked Merrill because she was adorable, but...”lonely person researches the ancient past of their culture as a way of connecting with them even though the present-day community wants no part of them”? I, uh, may know something about that. Oh, Merrill. I hereby decree that Taran is giving you a shit-ton more hugs somewhere just offscreen.

So, Merrill, Varric, and Sten are writer-siblings, huh? Clearly madame loves me and wants me to be happy, because she’s taken very, very good care of me.

I love it when writers don’t hate me, whether for being fat, AFAB, non-binary, aro and/or ace-spec, a rape survivor, mentally ill, or just generally kind of weird and terrible. The Deadfire team won my undying loyalty that way, and Ms. Kirby has now done the same.

Hey, Isabela, get back here, I hadn’t had your Questioning Beliefs conversation yet!

Oop, time to fight some Qunari.

Stroud? The Grey Wardens are here? Thanks, guys!

BETHANYYYY *sniff*

Honestly, Taran would be having a much easier time of the whole “losing pretty much his entire family” thing if the last non-Gamlen relative standing didn’t resent him so much for the whole “packing her off to the Wardens” thing.

That’s...a lot of hostile Qunari. Welp. Let’s do this.

And now, on to Act 3. Meredith, you’re terrible.

Oh hello, Delilah Howe. Why, yes, I’d love to go looking for your brother. :D :D :D

Oh, Nathaniel, I’ve missed you. I think Anders has missed you, too. Hm, you sound a little off, but I suppose you’re in rough shape right now.

*sniff* Bethany!

Nate, Bethany, you two take care of each other. You can bond over your messed-up families and how fucked up everything got because of the Blight. Oh, hey, get Nate to tell you some stories about her majesty the Warden-Commander, he’s got some good ones. (Oghren’s got better ones from the Blight, assuming he’s still alive, but he’s best kept away from pretty young women for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Maybe get those second-hand from someone less...sexual-harass-y.)

Honestly, Taran doesn’t even have the energy to misread the situation and give Nate a threatening speech about his intentions. Just...take care of his sister, buddy. Because he apparently can’t, and you’ll never, ever convince him that she doesn’t need a big brother to protect her.

(As far as shipping Nate/Bethany, I find I rather like it. But we’re waiting until after this happens to have them fall for each other, right? An 11-year age gap is period-typical and doesn’t have to stop a pair of adults from doing anything—I’d be a hypocrite if I said it did!—but I’m a little more comfortable when it’s 26/37 than 23/34. Besides, that way they’ve had time to get to know each other, which is how I like it.)

A new Act means a new round of scouring the hinterlands for crafting resources and loot. Wheeeeeee kill me now.

...Zevran? Are you sending me after Zevran, Nuncio?

Oh, Zevran. I’ll admit, I did kind of miss you. I still wish you’d had a genuine Hispanophone VA, though. And wow, you look different.

You’ll never convince me that Zevran isn’t on retainer as their majesties’ convenient assassin friend. Or at least that he won’t be once he finds himself back in Ferelden.

Here Taran thought he’d track down some relatively nice apostates, he’d turn them loose, they’d be grateful, it’d be nice. Nope, here he is putting down abominations. He took Templar powers in the first place because he could be more useful and less dangerous to the mages around him if he could dispel or no-sell magic that went wrong instead of having to attack them. It’s wearing on him.

See, this business with Emile is how he wanted all of them to go.

Oh, Anders. It’s understandable why you would lie, considering what you’re actually planning, but...augh.

Anders, stop. We get it, you think blood magic is awful, but a) considering what you’re up to, are you sure you’re an improvement, and b) ragging on Taran and Merrill’s relationship feels kind of icky coming from someone who was so damned loud about wanting Taran for himself. You won’t get them to break up any more than they’ll get you to call off the bombing.

Sister Nightingale? *bouncyclaps* It’s after midnight, though, so I’ll have to go see her tomorrow.

#dragon age #dragon age ii #taran hawke

2 notes · View notes

a-gay-bloodmage · 5 years

Note

11, 12 & 20 ;)

Wow, okay! I ended up going on and on (and on and on and on…) for these, so I’ve posted ‘em under the cut!

Thank you for the ask!

((From this post!))

11. Top 5 favourite female companions?

5. Velanna: It’s rare that we get to see angry elves. Elves who are sick and tired of humans burning them out of their homes, sick of racism and human policies, and just sick of everything the world’s thrown at their people. Velanna, despite her “abrasive” (or worse, “bitchy”) personality, is, at her core, a wonderful person. Sure, pride was a part of the reason she stood against the humans trying to burn her clan out, but, if anything, it was her overwhelming resilience and defiance that made her take a stand, even if it was against what many considered better judgement. I love angry elves, especially Dalish ones. I think that the Dragon Age series needs more elves that won’t just play to the narrative of “elves were weak and violent against The Righteous Humans so they deserved what happened to them” because they didn’t deserve any of that. Nobody oppressed deserves to be oppressed. Velanna knows that. She’s incredibly talented and strong-willed and it’s wonderful to see. But, almost above that, is the fact that she’s still a young woman, naive to the world outside her clan. And, honestly, I find that adorable. She believes Oghren’s obviously false stories about dwarvern babies, and can’t handle being flirted with. And her ears are adorable. The bigger the ears the better.

4. Sera: Okay, my love for Sera’s a little tougher to describe than Velanna. On one hand, I adore her character. I absolutely love her design, her openness of and love for sexuality, and her chaotic-neutral-with-a-guarded-heart-of-gold personality. I just… hate how she was handled. So, therefore, I have taken Sera as my own. I love her obvious neurodivergence, and how it’s the opposite of all the more widely-loved neurodivergent characters we usually get. She’s loud and unfiltered, she’s impulsive and often reckless, and she gets angry when she’s sad or angry or confused. I think, personally, that her character is a type we should see more, and that, more importantly, we should sympathize with more. Sera, at her core, just wants to help the people that have been spat on by society, the “little guy” at the bottom of the social ladder. She’s fueled by a love of adventure and want to do the good thing. And I really do admire that. I love characters who aren’t afraid to get in trouble for doing what they believe to be right. And her romance is so cute, she’s so obviously smitten by her Tadwinks and it’s downright adorable. And her friendship with a male PC can be just as cute, really. It’s all the fun of the romance without the sexy-bits. And I love how close you can become with her, living life after the Inquisition with someone who likes you for you, not because you’re the supposed prophet of someone. I think that Sera is one of the few characters that genuinely couldn’t care less about where you’re from or what you do, so long as you make an effort to understand her and her feelings, and don’t work against what she works for. Not to mention, she’s got a stupid sense of humor that I just love. Her banter always makes me laugh and I so appreciate everything about it.

3. Merrill: I’ll start this out by saying, unapologetically, that I am completely in favor of blood magic. I love blood magic. I think it’s an unharnessed force of magic that could be used in so many unexplored aspects of magical fields, and that it’s use in healing could revolutionize the art if only people would get over it’s taboo. That being said, I adore Merrill. Not only is she connected to the Dalish Warden, but her connection to them ends up leading her to becoming one of the most intelligent characters in the series. Not only is she a Dalish mage somehow surviving in human civilization (even if she does get lost sometimes…), but she’s working to undo Darkspawn corruption of an ancient elven artifact. That takes not only immense skill, but the upmost patience and dedication to discovering knowledge lost for Creators-know-how-long. And, being completely honest here, Merrill is one of the cutest characters in the series. Her absolute adorable-ness is one of the most prominent in the series. You can’t argue me on this. I’m right. I adore her voice actress, and could listen to her banter for hours upon hours. And her face is just… pure adorable. Those big green eyes just make my heart melt, honestly. Anyway, like with Velanna, I really appreciate having elves that take immense pride in their cultures, and do whatever they can to protect their people. With Velanna, it was standing alone against humans trying to attack her clan. With Merrill, it’s calling upon “forbidden” magic to restore not only parts of her people’s past, but (even if this part was… in vain) to cure the people she loved, Mahariel and Tamlen. There’s so much goodness trapped inside this tiny elf, it’s a miracle she doesn’t burst at the seams.

2. Leliana: Okay, I know I go on and on here at a-gay-bloodmage about how much I hate the Chantry and every single thing that comes out of it, but Leliana is an exception. As much as people like to claim that she’s annoying, that she’s too forward, that she falls in love with the Warden no matter what they do, I can’t help but believe that this is not only wildly exaggerated, but part of why she’s such a good character. First off, the claim that she’s annoying. If anything, her enthusiasm toward saving the world only makes me love her even more. Also, she never forces her beliefs on anyone who tells her they don’t believe in her god. She had a vision, she believes in it, and she wants to help. Whether or not you believe her is up to the player. Her forwardness is just another part of her charm to me, as well. I think that there’s something so wonderful about a woman who is just so in love with all the good things in the world that she can set aside the bad in their favor, that she can look to where people see an absentee god and see a loving, embracing figure. That warmth is so beautiful to me, and I love to shape my thinking after hers, preferring to believe in a good force in the universe instead of fire and brimstone and all the nonsense. And when people complain that she keeps ninja-mancing the Warden? So what? Again, I love that. Sure, it can mess with some relationships in-game, but she accepts a no if you give it to her. I think her love toward the Warden is so sweet and pure, to be honest. She loves the person she’s following out of actual admiration for once, and not out of manipulation, like how she was with Marjolaine. I’m an absolute sucker for characters with love too big for their heart, and Leliana fits the description quite perfectly.

1. Morrigan: Fuck you. I love Morrigan. Okay, that started off a little strong. I just really love her. I not only think she’s breath-takingly gorgeous, but her personality just draws me to her. Of course, if she were an actual person I had to interact with on a daily basis, well, maybe I’d have a different opinion, but we’re talking about video game ladies here, fellas. They can be abrasive and petty and prideful, but eventually, we get to see behind the proverbial curtain. And… God, I can relate to the serious case of mommy issues in this one. I do think that if I weren’t such a passive person, I’d be quite like Morrigan. Pushing people away before they can get too close to see why you’re hurting inside. I find it easier to deflect while she prefers to simply shove and jab and bite until you give up trying. I empathize with her, and I only wish I could’ve done more to convince her that staying with the Warden, romance or not, would’ve been welcome. That she didn’t have to run away, to take on the burden of an (at the moment) unwanted child alone. She’s secretly so caring and kind, but she just doesn’t understand that people can be loving due to the abuse Flemeth put her through. I know she wouldn’t appreciate the physical contact, but I just want her to lie her head in my lap and talk about her feelings. Poor little witch never learned how to express herself in a positive manner… And yet I love her regardless. And when it comes to her role in Inquisition, I hate a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. On one hand, she showed just how much she’s grown to care for Kieran, and it makes my annoyingly-baby-loving-heart just melt into a gushy pile of love. The fact that she refuses to be the mother Flemeth was to her? I cried. (“I am many things, but I will not be the mother you were to me.”). On the other hand, I wish she wasn’t the “expert” on elven lore. I blame bad writing. But one thing Inquisition really got right? Yeah, I’m back on the Kieran relationship again. I just love it so much… Her desire to be a better mother than her mother was to her is one I hold dear as well, and the reason why she’s my favorite female companion in the entire Dragon Age series.

12. Top 5 favourite male companions?

5. Alistair Theirin: First of all, I unashamedly love Fiona and Maric. Just going to put that out there. I love and actually admire Alistair for a lot of his qualities. As someone who went through years upon years of horrible abuse from the people who were supposed to be taking care of him (Fuck you Eamon and double fuck you, Isolde), was sent to a Chantry against his will and forced to become a Templar, and someone who promptly quit the order after seeing what it did to mages, Alistair’s proven himself time and time again to be a resilient and compassionate person. I think that most of my love for him comes from the fact that despite seeing how much bad was in the world, Alistair still worked to be a good person and to create something positive in the world. I personally make him King in most of my worldstates, not because I think it’s where he “belongs” or anything, or because I somehow am delusional enough to think Anora would be a bad ruler, but because he’s shown to have a lot more compassion than any other ruler. He’s sympathetic to the plights of the mages and the elves, despite not (knowingly) having any connection to them. He’s a solid, overall good boy who covers up emotional pain with humor, and I love him one hundred percent.

4. Dorian Pavus: Dorian is one of the characters that I think gets a lot of fandom love for reasons other than my own. He’s beautiful, and charming, and unique, and a wonderful gay man in a video game (an unfortunately rare thing), but I love him because I can relate to him on a deep level. That fear of disappointing those you love because you’re not what they think you could be, that hiding away your issues behind a veneer of “it’s alright” is best because then you’re not a burden and people don’t see how damaged you are. It’s hard for me to open up to people, and Dorian really is just one of those characters I can’t help but love, despite the fact that he reminds me so much of myself. And, another thing I love about him is that he’s not pale. I know that can be seen as a stupid thing to love someone over, but coming from an Italian family, seeing a character from a place modeled after Rome not being pale makes me so happy. I, myself, am pale as hell, but knowing that finally, finally, we’ve got someone from a Southern-European modeled country that doesn’t look Scandinavian makes me so incredibly happy.

3. Thom Rainier: I think that this is going to be a common theme in my explanations, but I love Thom because he’s not perfect. As like with Dorian, Thom hides behind a facade that makes him feel like he’s something better than he believes himself to be. And he’s a character that fucked up in the past, and fucked up badly, and he bleeds for redemption. He suffers and works and suffers even more in order to prove himself to really be the man he’s become. Very rarely do we get treated to a redemption arc that makes characters actively work for their redemption, face the consequences of their actions, and stick to the principles they claimed they’d stick to. He’s self-deprecating, believing himself to be damn near worthless, his only reason for existing being to help others and work to repent for what he did in the past. Believing you’re undeserving of love is a thing I know a little to well, and having a character genuinely believe themselves to be so without being seen as attention-seeking was great, if not a call-out for my self-loathing ass. Thom is a severely underappreciated character in this fandom, and I really wish that wasn’t the case. He’s an older character, but honestly, he’s about the same age as other characters like Cassandra or Varric. Just because he isn’t conventionally attractive doesn’t mean he should be pushed aside for other characters. I love my big bear husband so much.

2. Anders: Oh, Anders. My lovely, beautiful Anders. My bisexual, mentally ill, selfless, revolutionary, darling Anders. I can’t help but love him. Of course, I love him both before and after Justice, but for differing reasons. In Awakening, Anders was simply someone who just wanted to escape, to be free for once in his life, and to enjoy what the world had robbed him of. There’s something heart-wrenching about seeing a character so obviously hurt being cheerful like he was in Awakening, especially when you see more into his backstory in Dragon Age: II. He, much like Alistair, used humor to distract people from his true feelings. He was a hopeful spot amongst some other companions who wore their pain on their sleeves. In Dragon Age: II, Anders became even more of a favorite for me, simply because I could understand a lot of his pain. I, too, am someone who exhausts myself caring for others, putting the needs of others far above myself. Of course, I know I could never even hope to have mental fortitude like him, but seeing someone so intent on tearing down institutions that have ruined so many lives helps me work to do so myself. Besides, I’m an extremely anti-institutionalized religion person despite being decently religious. Seeing someone who believes in the Maker but not the Chantry was refreshing. It was welcome and wonderful. And, as someone who struggles with mental illness (in my case, things along the lines of ADD, chronic stress, anxiety, dysmorphia, etc.) seeing someone who struggles from mental illness (”possession” that covers a whole lot of shit I’m not really one to put labels to) not overcome but co-exist with his mental illness and find love and purpose was really good for me. I don’t believe for a second that Anders was overly controlled by Justice, only pushed to do things he was to scared to do before Justice came along. In every worldstate of mine, Anders is spared and stood behind. His actions are justified and supported. Fuck the Chantry and Fuck Me Anders. (Sorry, I had to)

1. Zevran Arainai: Zevran was the first character in the Dragon Age series I fell in love with, so of course he’s at the top of this list. And my love for him isn’t just because he’s handsome (even if that is quite an attractive reason), but because he’s a good person who both tries to hide/downplay his goodness and does all he can to do what he knows is right. First of all, once again, like with Dorian, I love seeing Mediterranean-coded characters as non-white. Seeing someone come from a Spanish/Italian-coded country not look British is so beautiful. Of course, I would never say someone claiming that he’s Latino is invalid. There’s one hundred percent reason to believe that, and I support their headcanons. But to me, I relish in the fact that someone from a darker-skinned area of Europe is seen as a beautiful character. He was one of the first darker-skinned European characters I’d ever seen, and that certainly guarantees him a place in my heart. Moving on, I also see a lot of myself in him, though that isn’t exactly a good thing for him. Of course, bisexuality is a huge part of both our existences, and words can’t really express how much I love a canonically bisexual man. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, in all honesty. I thought it was a headcanon until I read that you could romance him as a male PC. So, of course I made my first character and romanced the hell out of him. Though, on a bit of a darker note, I could really sympathize with his reasoning for leaving Antiva. As someone who’s struggled with suicidal thoughts and certainly suicidal idealization (that whole “I wish I could just stop existing” bullshit), having someone not only deal with the problem of depression but actually get better was incredible. The idea that with enough love and compassion and understanding the pain would ease was a wonderful message I really took to heart. In addition to all of this, which is already a whole lot but I just can’t stop talking about him, Zevran is empathetic. He’s compassionate and understanding. He advocates where other companions stay silent. He’s got one of the most in-depth arguments against allying with the Templars, and his anger towards the Warden, while thinly masked as calm, when the mages are slaughtered in compelling and just compassionate. Not many “ordinary” people are willing to fight for those they don’t know or understand. But Zevran does. And when slavers attempt to sell people in the Alienage into slavery, Zevran does his best to convince the Warden to do the right thing, despite owing them a blood debt. He could be putting his life on the line once more if they don’t agree with him, but he does it anyway. And, you know what? Fuck it, he’s beautiful. He’s goddamn gorgeous and I want all 5′2″ of him.

20. Favorite fantheory?

Andraste was a mage. I absolutely adore this theory and I can’t help but throw my entire support behind it. I find no reason else why a somehow ordinary woman would be chosen by the Maker in the Fade (“World fell away then, misty in mem'ry, / ‘Cross Veil and into the valley of dreams / A vision of all worlds, waking and slumb'ring, / Spirit and mortal to me appeared.” -Andraste 1:10, “Long was his silence, ‘fore it was broken. / For you, song-weaver, once more I will try. / To My children venture, carrying wisdom, / If they but listen, I shall return.“ - Andraste 1:14) because she had a wonderful singing voice (magic is often referred to as a song, and this page on the wiki is quite informative) and could somehow make natural disasters occur in her favor to drive out Tevinter (“The air itself rent asunder, / Spilling light unearthly from the / Waters of the Fade, / Opening as an eye to look / Upon the Realm of Opposition / In dire judgment.” -Exaltations 1:2). Magic, in itself, is never said to be evil in the Chant, only that those who takes the Maker’s gift of magic and turn it against one another are evil (“Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him. / Foul and corrupt are they / Who have taken His gift / And turned it against His children.” -Transfigurations 1:2) Personally, canon aside, I believe that if Andraste could see the current state of the Chantry, she would be appalled. Especially the Chantry in Tevinter, seeing as it endorses slavery (“At Shartan’s word, the sky / Grew black with arrows. / At Our Lady’s, ten thousand swords / Rang from their sheaths. / A great hymn rose over Valarian Fields gladly, proclaiming: / Those who had been slaves were now free.” -Shartan 10:1) and prohibits the mages from using their magic to their full potential (Once again, magic exists to serve, not to be enslaved). Sorry if this is a little messy, but Lord Do I Have Opinions.

#holy shit i went on for a WHILE THERE #asks #dragon age #dragon age origins #dragon age ii #dragon age inquisition #da velanna #da sera #da morrigan #da merrill #alistair theirin #dorian pavus #da blackwall #da anders #zevran arainai #original content #headcanons #andraste #THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU I LOVE RANTING

29 notes · View notes