
Sword and shield
I don’t understand what happened to the Ferelden Grey Wardens in DA:I. Like, I don’t believe they’d go along with Clarel’s bullshit at all. Where are they? Did DA:I catch them in the middle of a retreat to Antiva or what?
Sigrun: (building a kickass sandcastle with Oghren’s kid) Relax already, Nate. Enjoy the beach. Look, the Commander’s doing a keg stand again. Go cheer them on. We deserve this.
Nathaniel Howe: (stress-squeezing a beach ball, never having relaxed or enjoyed anything in his life) Do you think everything’s okay at home?
Velanna: (sipping wine on a lounge chair) Sure.
Friendly reminders about Vivienne:
- She’s horrified & saddened when you find out what has happened to the Tranquil Mages
- If the Inquisitor & Dorian enter a relationship, no matter if she’s not friends with the Inquisitor, she will defend their relationship from assholes putting the relationship down
- She’s the only one to approve of you saving everyone during Haven’s attack
- If you blame yourself for Haven, she offers kind & comforting words
- When Cassandra blames herself for not being present at the Conclave & trying to save the Divine, Vivienne reminds her she did all she could & to not blame herself
- After completing Cole’s companion quest, Cole reads her mind & discovers a part of her cares for him despite all her vocal vitriol toward him
- She’s distraught over the violence between mages (those who want to rebel & those who don’t) & the innocent lives caught in the crossfire
- In Jaws of Hakkon, she offers condolences to Finn after he speaks about losing his father
Oh, but don’t forget:
- She’s just as adamant that the right outfit will make people respect you regardless of your race–when most people in the Orlesian Court find an elf, qunari, or dwarf in formal dress laughable at best.
- Iron Bull basically adopts her as a mother figure, and she tuts over him like one.
- She accepts Dalish mage training as just as valid as Circle training.
- She consults both Solas and Dorian on magical matters, even though she doesn’t get along with either.
- For all her ambition, she joins the Inquisition at the very beginning, when doing so is more likely to make her a social pariah than gain her any favors.
- Her biggest problem with dissolving the Circle is that there is no viable alternative in place to protect and teach mages.
- She climbs mountains and trudges through bogs in high heels and never complains once.

Finally finished Duncan from dragon age. He also has the grey warden pendant from my head cannon idea. ❤️
I love how it turned out.
Inquisitor: I’m feeling sort of existentially insane, but I’m trying to hold it together.
Cassandra: I’m so horny and angry all the time and I have no outlet for it.
Leliana: Stop snitchin’, motherfucker.
Josephine: When I walk down the street, I need everybody, all day long, to like me so much. It’s exhausting.
Cullen: I used to smoke crack.
Varric: The more you do stuff, the better you get with dealing how you still fail at it a lot of the time.
Solas: If it’s one of those “true or false” questions you should be able to add a third option, which is, “who’s to say?”
Vivienne: You have the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair.
Dorian: Then, for a backstory, I will pepper in the fact that I am gay.
Sera: STREET SMARTS
Cole: Things don’t exist until they exist.
Blackwall: And then I said, “No,” you know, like a liar.
Iron Bull: I took it, drank all of it, and said, “It’s perfume.”
Krem: Oh, well, thank you for asking. Well, you know how I’m full of rage?
Lace Harding: I’m very small and I have no money, so you can imagine the kind of stress I’m under.
Hawke: I’ll keep all my emotions right here, and then one day I’ll die.
Solas: Is there at least a movement to reunite Orzammar and Kal-Sharok?
Varric: What is it with you, Chuckles? Why do you care so much about the dwarves?
Solas: Once, in the Fade, I saw the memory of a man who lived alone on an island. Most of his tribe had fallen to beasts or disease. His wife had died in childbirth. He was the only one left. He could have struck out on his own to find a new land, new people. But he stayed. He spent every day catching fish in a little boat, every night drinking fermented fruit juice and watching the stars.
Varric: I can think of worse lives.
Solas: How can you be happy surrendering, knowing it will all end with you? How can you not fight?
Varric: I suppose it depends on the quality of the fermented fruit juice.
Solas: So it seems.And
Varric: What’s with you and the doom stuff? Are you always this cheery or is the hole in the sky getting to you?
Solas: I’ve no idea what you mean.
Varric: All the “fallen empire” crap you go on about. What’s so great about empires anyway?
Varric: So we lost the Deep Roads, and Orzammar’s too proud to ask for help. So what? We’re not Orzammar and we’re not our empire.
Varric: There are tens of thousands of us living up here in the sunlight now, and it’s not that bad.
Varric: Life goes on. It’s just different than it used to be.
Solas: And you have no concept of what that difference cost you.
Varric: Oh I know what it didn’t cost me. I’m still here, even after all those thaigs fell.
Solas: You truly are content to sit in the sun, never wondering what you could’ve been, never fighting back?
Varric: Ha, you’ve got it all wrong, Chuckles. This is fighting back.
Solas: How does passively accepting your fate constitute a fight?
Varric: In that story of yours—the fisherman watching the stars, dying alone—you thought he gave up right?
Solas: Yes.
Varric: But he went on living. He lost everyone, but he still got up every morning. He made a life, even if it was alone.
Varric: That’s the world. Everything you build, it tears down. Everything you’ve got, it takes—and it’s gone forever.
Varric: The only choices you get are to lie down and die or keep going. He kept going. That’s as close to beating the world as anyone gets.
Solas: Well said. Perhaps I was mistaken.Maybe I can’t change the world, but I can keep living.
The message is too important to keep within the fandom

hauntedhouse meme
varric is probably seeing the grim future when his publishing house publishes a posthumous “newly discovered lost manuscript” of his, which just turns out to be the first draft to Hard in Hardtown
Marian
Oh no, how dare a female character say something mean to the protagonist?
That’s… not the impression I’ve gotten at all? Like, maybe Anon knows a person who’s explained it that way, or maybe they’re just strawmanning because they like Bianca and can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t, but that’s not me nor anyone else I’ve seen with a dislike of Bianca.
Varric trusted Bianca with the knowledge of red lyrium and the thaig where it was found, and she decided her own curiosity took precedence over that trust. Not only did she study it herself, but she led Corypheus (in Larius’s body) straight to the red lyrium, and she gave him unfettered access without supervision. It’s unclear how long she waited between getting Varric’s letter about red lyrium at Haven and coming to Varric about Valammar, but given the time gap before “Well, Shit” pops (only after “Here Lies the Abyss”), she probably waited at least a while. She also didn’t come clean about what she’d done until confronted with the evidence.
“I was doing you a favor!” Bianca claimed about her reasons for messing with the red lyrium… Except she didn’t ask Varric before studying the red lyrium (let alone before involving a stranger), and she never told him she was doing it. She probably never would have told him if he hadn’t written her about Haven.
And then there’s their relationship:
Bianca: You’ll have to stop by before Bogdan comes back. You should see my new workshop.
Varric: I’ll see what I can do. You know your family will kill me if I stop by, right?
Bianca: They’re not going to kill you.
Varric: You always say that, and they always send assassins.
Inquisitor: After all this, do you think you’ll see Bianca again?
Varric: I always do.Varric: We write letters. Now and then, we manage to meet up. I don’t know if that’s “together.” Shit, it’s been, what? Fifteen years?
Inquisitor: What makes the merchant’s guild such a danger to her?
Varric: To be fair, it’s more of a danger to me. Technically, we’re not supposed to be within 300 leagues of one another. If it got back to the guild that we were seen together, they’d freeze my assets. And then have me killed.Varric: I heard the wedding was lovely. The one Bianca actually showed up for, anyway.
Bianca’s arranged marriage may not have been a love match, but ultimately she decided Varric wasn’t worth giving up her family, and she went through with it. In Varric’s dream, Bianca said, "You look out for everyone—me, your family, your partners… But who looks out for you?“ To me, this suggests that her leaving him for Bogdan was not about protecting him, but about prioritizing her own interests. Bianca doesn’t have anything negative to say about her husband, and she clearly has a very successful career as an engineer pursuing her own ideas. Yet she has continued to string Varric along for more than a decade, never letting him actually move on, all the while having her cake with her husband and eating it too with Varric… despite the fact that it puts Varric in literal, mortal danger every time they meet as well as keeping him in a permanent holding pattern where he can’t move on even when they’re just corresponding. And yeah, Varric is a big boy who can make his own decisions… but she’s the one who keeps dangling the carrot in front of his eyes.
Bianca’s “Get him killed, and I’ll feed you your own eyeballs, Inquisitor” line isn’t bad in and of itself—but it comes immediately after the revelation that she was responsible for Corypheus getting his hands on red lyrium, and after it’s been explicitly stated that her relationship with Varric—and especially her physically being there—puts him at risk of being assassinated. Which makes the threat more than a little bit hypocritical.
So I guess you could TL;DR my personal dislike of Bianca as that she’s deeply selfish, and especially that she’s deeply selfish in a way that has harmed and will continue to harm a character I care about a lot. She continually puts her own desires above the needs, wants, and safety of Varric, someone she supposedly loves (and cheats on someone she made a commitment to, to boot).
Maybe Bianca truly loved Varric. Maybe she thinks she still does. But someone who genuinely loves another person doesn’t treat them the way Bianca treats Varric.