I can't romance Anders when i'm playing f!Hawke AT ALL it's so terrible, and has so much cut content. Varric was really heavy handed in the shitty romance writing at the time. He's not as bad with m!Hawke imho but that's a YMMV subject - i tend to prefer the girl romances for f!H and the dudes for m!H, personally. But Anders's my trash garbage child. My ridiculous trash garbage child.
HEADCANON ACCEPTED I definitely get that. Playing dude characters makes me feel weirdly uncomfortable though, so I tend to play exclusively girls or nb/genderfuck characters. That being said, romancing Merrill with a guy hits a bunch of red flag tropes for me. Like, rivalmancing her with anyone leads to an unhealthy relationship, but it just feels a lot worse with a dude because of the gender roles in play.
God, yes. I rivaled her with a male Hawke once - not even a rivalmance, just a friend rivalry - and I felt SLEAZY. In addition to the inherent gender stuff, the he sounds so patronizing toward her. D: (It's a good thing that I already disliked that Hawke because I loathed him after that. Blue m!Hawke is a condescending wet blanket, pass it on.)
blue m!Hawke rivalmancing Isabela makes me wanna run to the hills. But I don't like rival romances in general... I think the only one I started was Fenris's, and I ended up friendmancing Anders in the end. (Please light a candle for Simon's awful love life). It wasn't so bad and Fenris's friendmance is one of my favorites, but I don't know how it ends.
Gah, yes, blue m!Hawke is just as much of an asshole with rival!Isabela as rival!Merrill, it's awful. (I had my fail!Hawke go that route, too. I already kinda hated him, so...) Fenris's rivalmance comes out a lot like his friendmance, iirc. At least, with purple f!Hawke it came across that way - they (since that f!Hawke was agender) didn't sound patronizing, they sounded stubborn and more "I see your point of view and I couldn't disagree more." It felt more like a Homestuck-style blackrom where they came to respect each other. (It has been a few years, however, so take a grain of salt or two with that.)
Ahhh, much is explained. I didn't think about how f!Hawke romances would differ from m!Hawke differences. I also haven't played Awakenings yet. I may have to DL that Anders mod, although I haven't ventured into mod-land yet and I'm a little afraid to do so. She is a hot mess and I would probably dislike her if I knew her in person, but playing her is awesome. I wish there was a Carver for her to herd like a border collie as well. She's subverting all her Carver!feels onto Bethany, which must be overbearing as hell. Spoiler: nsfw Cassandra/Varric joke IDK, I think if anybody's getting pegged in that relationship it's Varric.
What scares you about it? Modding is pretty easy - drop files in a specific folder, there you are - and mods are generally perfectly safe. With DA2, I don't think there's any mods that can't just be removed if they cause a problem, with little to no effect on your saves. On Nexus Mods you can look at the comments on any given mod to find out if it has any issues you'd rather avoid.
My technical incompetence. *g* No, I figured it was safe, I'm intimidated by the process of getting them to work, but I'm reassured by this comment.
It's super easy, I promise. Download, extract from the zip or rar file, stick the extracted file (or folder) in the right place (my documents\bioware\dragon age 2\packages\core\override), and you're done. If you encounter a mod that requires fiddling with the chargenmorph.xml file, there's a program that can deal with that for you, but that's only if you decide to add appearance mods. Things like the Anders romance fixes require no further fiddling on your part, just drop the folder in.
Seconding Mercury on how easy the modding is for DA2. There was no toolset released, so all of the mods are pretty tame, and thus easy to install. The Anders dialog fixes doesn't completely remove the Twilight-esque angst, but you get all of his good content with MHawke that they for some bizarre reason thought shouldn't go in the femhawke romance... DA2--bless its poor, rushed, soul--will always need some headcanoning to make things satisfying. And while that can certainly make it frustrating or annoying, I've found its also made me develop, experiment, and give my own life to the story between the lines. Especially with the conceit of Varric telling the story. What is he leaving out? Why are some things framed in such a way? Like in my canon, Varric is /very/ particularly protecting Mara and Anders. Their relationship wasn't twilight-y, it was painful and messy and hurt everyone involved. And Varric doesn't want all that pain to be oogled at like some spectacle. So I definitely headcanon that he portrays them like he does to obfuscate how bad things actually where, especially since they did somehow manage to fix things and are now in a pretty good place together.
That's a really lovely way of thinking about it. I like how the framing of the story makes that kind of headcanoning so possible without feeling like you have to bend yourself into a pretzel to make it work. Bit of a silver lining to the necessity of needing some headcanoning to make things work.
I love how anything off/weird/not in line with your hc in DA2 can be blamed on Varric's storytelling. It certainly explains why there's so many random fights where Hawke and co take out tons of armed thugs For example, with m!Hawke, Anders mentioned that he and Karl were romantically involved. You weren't wrong there! #Anders's romance is so great the first time through tho #its been over a year and im still not over the feels that made me feel
Spoiler: more Dragon Age II liveblogging Another few hours into Dragon Age II and I got completely UTTERLY lost on the docks. My headcanon is that Agatha discovers the stairs they missed by trying to shove Bethany down them, after ninety minutes of Bethany mimicking her all "oh no, Bethany, how do stairs work? do I punch them???" Worst road trip ever. Also Fenris is awesome and I heart him, but he thinks that Bethany will go evil and Agatha is like >:(
I've found it's most enlightening to think of Fenris as someone with severe PTSD that's kept fresh by how he has to constantly look over his shoulder. (Literally; watch his idle animation!) It keeps me from getting frustrated with him, which I would even though he's one of my favorites.
PFfHAHAHA. That made me laugh. And yeah, Fenris has NO CHILL, but you really get why. Poor bloke has every reason to be paranoid.
@Mercury, do you know the path on the mod maker for the Arcane Warrior armor textures? The vaccum-sealed ones? I wanna retexture them for my EM but I can't find them anywhere :/
This one: i really like it but i also wanna make it look a little more comfortable because my Oindys is too cute for skintight chainmail. Sort of like this mod, but for the dudely persuasion. Spoiler: look at this face. this is not the face of someone who deserves the rashes he's getting
