do you ever just stare into your coffee and fervently hope that in the DA3 codexes we’ll get to read excerpts from “Hard in Hightown 2: Siege Harder”?
I keep seeing all these “homg sexah dwarves omfg” posts and all I can think is:
nice to see the rest of the internet catching up with the Dragon Age fandom.
(via sehnsuchttraum)
The story exists even when there are no witnesses,
kissers, tellers. Because secrets secrete,and these versions tend to be slapstick, as if in a candy
factory the chocolate belted down the conveyor too fastor everyone turned sideways at the same time by accident.
This little tale tries so hard to be humorous,wants so badly to win affection and to lodge.
Because nothing is truly forgotten and loved.…
As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story.
when it would be truer to say nothing.
I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is,
I’ve invented so much and prevented more.
But, I’d like to talk with you about other things,
in absolute quiet. In extreme context.
To see you again, isn’t love revision?
It could have gone so many ways.
This just one of the ways it went.
Tell me another.
- ‘one love story, eight takes’ by brenda shaughnessy
Character You’d Be Best Friends With: Varric Tethras
If I am Kirkwall, then there’s only one choice for my best friend.
Varric.
Building on what I wrote yesterday, Bartrand’s St. Petersburg is Orzammar; he spends his entire life trying to chase a dream that never really existed except within him. But if Bartrand’s St. Petersburg is Orzammar, then Varric’s is Kirkwall: A city as damaged and complex as he is, whose twisted city streets he paints with such fondness you’d think it were a City of Serenity rather than the City of Chains.
To Varric, Kirkwall is so much more than a home – it is an idea, a promise, a narrative unfolding. It is the Janus head twin to Bianca, except that hers is the story he’ll never tell and Kirkwall is the story he’ll never stop telling.
Varric and Kirkwall; Kirkwall and Varric. It’s always the two, always together: the confident dwarf in the Hightown Merchant’s Guild; the trusty lush spinning tales in a seedy lowtown bar; the businessman making deals with Darktown thugs to protect his friends. He has his hands everywhere, in everything, because he owns this space, as much as anybody can own a story; and by the Maker, he’ll hold onto it as tightly as he can.
Separate one from the other and Varric will pine for Kirkwall like a lost lover. Remember how he complains about heights when you take him to Sundermount, or how he bitches about nature when you take him to the Wounded Coast – or even how he moans about the Deep Roads on the expedition? All that complaining hints at the real truth, which is simply that Varric hates to be separated from Kirkwall; he needs the place, just as surely as it needs him.
In some ways, I think the relationship between Varric and Kirkwall is DA2’s ultimate codependent relationship, one that overshadows anything you’d find between Garrett and Anders or Marethari and Merrill, but it’s so subtle and so deeply interwoven into the narrative that it’s easy to overlook. It’s the symbiotic relationship between storyteller and creation, between narrator and narrative; one cannot exist without the other.
Nobody will love a story quite like its author.
And Varric is the best kind of author: The kind who believes the best of his characters, even though he knows the worst. He acknowledges their faults, but sees them not as deal-breakers but as shadows that make the bright spots brighter. He knows the contrasts within them, the light and the dark, and he loves them anyway, because that’s what a writer does; he loves every one of his creations because they are part of himself. That Isabela (who nearly starts a war) and Anders (who does) come off as sympathetically as they do in DA2 should be evidence enough of this.
So if I am Kirkwall, then Varric is my best friend, because he sees deeper into me than anyone else; he’s walked my dank Darktown sewers and my sunlit Hightown promenades; he knows my secrets and my history, and the potential I have to become something more than I am.
He knows the fears that organize my faithful; he knows my chains and how to break them; he knows the lost and the poor and the dispossessed that inhabit my dark spaces, because he put them there, these reflections of himself, so that he wouldn’t be lonely either.
If I am Kirkwall, then Varric is my best friend, and I am his, because I will give him purpose and power; I will give him free reign to become the best version of himself; I will give him the assurance he needs that even in his darkest times, he is never, ever alone.
Varric was born three years after his father’s exile from Orzammar, into the world of the Merchants Guild: the Ancestors never spoke and Paragons were the heroes in tall tales; the number of dances a kalna lady gave to a lowborn ascendant boy were more pivotal than the reign of kings. While Bartrand ran the businesses and drove House Tethras ever higher up the social ladder, Varric looked after the family and their retainers. His mother, Lady Ilsa, suffered terribly from the trauma of her disgrace and exile, finding solace in liquor and smoke. It fell to her younger son to try to curb the worst of her drunken rages, to keep her from becoming a matter of public scandal, and to care for her when she fell ill from her excesses. Though he is famous throughout the Merchants Guild for his stories, Varric speaks rarely of himself or his family. Most of Kirkwall knows him; everyone has bought him a drink at least once—for the sake of his fictions rather than his family connections.
so much is made of anders’s lies in the game (despite his initial honesty, which is another kennel of nugs entirely) that sometimes i wonder if that, too, is part of varric’s sleight of hand, part of his method of storytelling, and part of his motivation for it. work with a character whose actions, whose cause, whose choices, overshadow your own, and no one thinks about the dwarf in the corner of the taproom—what his littler lies may be. a tweak here, a touch there, and what he omits—what he doesn’t reveal—goes unnoticed in the wake of what he is sharing.
some of the best narrators go unseen, but that doesn’t mean his hand, his touches and flourishes, aren’t everywhere. sometimes they’re more obvious than not—and hey, that’s probably on purpose, too. draw attention to something you don’t want to talk about, make ‘em laugh, and in the aftermath the attention’s been diverted, right where you wanted it to wind up.
It’s not too much of a stretch to say I obsess over this very question. :)
You guys, I just realized why any peeks at a bare-chested Hawke in DA2 have him all smooth and superhairless, despite the shaggy hair and beard.
YOU GUYS REMEMBER WHO IS TELLING THE STORY, RIGHT?
Eliminating the competition, baby.
Tee hee. Oh Varric. You jealous ol’ sot.
Nice catch :)
Here’s a um. Test splice of audio files I put together. It isn’t perfect, but by God, it’s 6AM and I’ve got no mind left.
Prooooooobably not worksafe.
I went a little overboard. It’s not just Anders. It’s pretty much the entire male cast. Anders, Garrett, Carver, Varric, Fenris, Sebastian.
I’ll be under this huge rock over here for the rest of the day.
