It really depends on how long everything else is and how long that part is and etc etc so it's hard to know from just a summary, buuuut from the summary it looks like the Keeper loaning Idrilla her staff is a major story beat, and that could be a good place to split it. Idrilla and her contact having their conversation about dalish/city elf relations sounds like a good bridge to the rest of the events.
I have yet to complete the first of my 4 playthroughs of All the Dragon Age Games - I'm in Inquisition, having completed both Wicked Eyes and Here Lies the Abyss, and leveling up a bit doing some sidequests in the Dales before going to the Well of Sorrows and shit. And YET, I keep playing DA:O instead - beginning, thus, my second playthrough. My Warden for this one is Mélusine Cousland. Named after a pretty fairytale, their parents didn't really think through the Unfortunate Implications of such an Orlesian name amidst Fereldan nobility. I expected them to be My Playthrough As a Straight Cis Girl, but they ended up being full of genderweird and LO AN BEHOLD I now have an AFAB femme nonbinary Warden to further hash out my genderthoughts* Mélusine is AWESOME. They have the prettiest little round face with large green eyes and pouty lips and long red hair and a flower crown, but carry a sword taller than they are and are built to tank. I've just finished the Fade with them and tbh there was little difference in damage resistence between them and the Golem Form! Which is impressive o: They are straightforward, not much for pleasantries in general, except sometimes when they do get a bit "I am a teyrn's daughter you know". And, of course, they're romancing the other Grey Warden Who Just Lost All His Family And Everyone Who Loved Him. They have a lot in common, and Mélusine's angry lil heart is already set on making Alistair king no matter what (though the possibility of ruling by his side will only occur to them a lot later). They maintained the Circle and managed to save both Isolde and Connor, but following my whole policy of having all playthroughs be flawed, they'll favor the Dalish while killing all werewolves and probably desecrate the Urn of Sacred Ashes. Obviously they're gonna be Queen Cousland and do the dark ritual. I'm rubbing my hands together in anticipation. * "I need an outlet for genderthoughts" was actually what made me decide to play Dragon Age in the first place! I just looked up cool games with customizable characters, went "well I heard cool things about this one" and fell down the sperglord DA rabbithole.
@witchknights, as someone who's written novelizations and is constantly tempted to do them, they can be sort of tricky. The thing is, everyone has played the game, so just reading in prose what we've all played isn't going to be very interesting. It seems to me though, that you're really interested in the behind the scenes stuff that we don't see in game, which is where a novelization can work. The DA fandom by design is more receptive to OCs, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Unfortunately, Cullen/OC is a pretty saturated ship (ugh I feel your pain on this .-.), so you might have some problems there. But I think if you've got something unique and well thought out, as well as some original plotting, you have a decent chance of standing out. I'd also maybe do some exploration of lore or Dalish culture or something like that, because that richness can draw people into a story with a pairing they wouldn't read. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.
ONE OF US. ONE OF US! im gonna to apologize right of the bat for rambling but i'm running on two hour's sleep yeah, i'm super weird about posting my stuff because i keep thinking it's absolute crap, but i promised myself i would publish something this year. and i did, but didn't continue it because continuing it the way i wanted would require contextualization, and kept having ideas for other stuff that idk, made me excited for it. especially because i've never written longfic. But yeah, I want to put more behind-the-scenes stuff, and with what we see in-game something like... I definitely don't plan on copy-pasting canon dialogue except when absolutely necessary and even then i'd prefer to paraphrase it, and i'm thinking of some stuff that's more challenging for me to write? I mean, I plan on following the general plot of the game, but rearrange bits and pieces so it's... like, Dorian and Idrilla would spend a lot longer on the bad future (and I am totally thinking of how fucked Frodo and Sam were at the end of LOTR when i'm thinking about them arriving at bad future!Redcliffe). Conquering the keeps would require a proper siege and strategy that is Cullen testing letting his training wheels as a Proper Commander go, because you can't convince me a 29 year old that commanded a city's worth of templars for like a year can be the general of a Huge Fucking Army and waltz into one of the most iconic fortresses of Thedas. The Fade sequence would be more nightmare/creepy and less Kill The Monster... stuff like that. Like, it's sorta challenging, because one of my inq's fears is deep water (justifying game mechanics, she almost drowned when she was a kid and nowadays panics when the water gets anywhere near her chin) and one of the monsters in the nightmare sequence would be the physical sensation of drowning while everyone else is seeing/feeling other stuff and cole is freaking out from sensing all those fears at once. Or like, red lyrium keeps growing out of her, stuff like that. I mean, everybodys just way too collected to be facing a demon made literally out of peoples worst nightmares. Or try to make the WEWH parts in a more mystery novel tone, putting some other stuff about what the inquisition needed to do to get closer to Celene instead of just "gathered enough Power through Grinding", stuff like that, and see the politicking and thought process behind her support for Briala, for example. tho that made me realize this will require reading TME and, ugh, orlesians. But yeah, my endgame ship is the most fucking common ship nowadays, isn't it? even I am getting tired of reading a bit, tho it's more a dislike for the constant stream of "INSTANT ATTRACTION!!! SUPER SEXY INQUISITOR!! CULLEN RUTHERFORD, HOBBYIST SEXUAL DOMINANT!! INNAPROPRIATE SEXUAL THOUGHTS DURING HIGH-RISK, SEXUALLY INAPROPRIATE SITUATIONS" Cullen/oc or "sickening sweethearts that call each other hubby and my dearest loveliest sweetheart all the time" Cullen/oc and it's aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalll that you can see in fics if the dragon age ao3 feed is not bullshitting me, or if i dont have an exceptionally bad nose for good fic. i'm guetting more and more particular on how i like the ship which is. yknow. an incentive to just write what i want to read myself. fuck it, she's gonna take her formal uniform off and put her armor on in front of him in a dark secluded corner of the winter palace during wewh and not a single mention to a boner will be seen, because they're both adults, Since my original PT i imagine their romance developing over a long time and many a heated disagreement over handling magic? like, she openly Doesnt Trust Him On Principle, especially after he starts with the very bad impression of suggesting sending thugs to scare her concerned family, and he's not really sure she's all that either (with good reason, because she's avoiding him) even if he canonically likes to watch her. after he finds her staff she apologizes for her previous hostility and they start talking more and find out they have some common ground and can respect each other's position, but it's only after the destruction of haven that they start to mend their relationship towards friendship and then like a year of pining and stolen glances and Ha Ha Look At Us Platonically Dancing At This Ball Ha Ha Doesnt This Remind You Of Promstuck until they finally solve things. And yeah, lore and dalish culture would be something that i would put a lot - she's the first, after all! i want to write about her huge loving family and what she learned from her dad and her issues with her mom and her friendship w her twin and her oldest younger brother and the letters and all that familial love. and how dalish she is, it affects even her relationship with cullen and is one of the reasons things take so long to click between them, romantically - there's a lot of serious issues to be overcome, like the fetishization of elves, and how many dalish girls get swept off their feet by a charming human who totes loves them 5ever until they're abandoned pregnant on some filthy alienage (she's seen that a lot). the cultural and religious differences, how forming families within the clans is important to the dalish, how interspecies relationships are seen in a bad light by everyone (example: king alistair and lady surana being mocked in orlais, Celene and Briala themselves), the issues with human templar and dalish mage that come from thedas's handling of magic and the chantry's role in the destruction of the dales... idk, idrilla is serious and had gladly given up romantic relationships for the good of her clan, and cullen is cullen, i headcanon him as someone who is very serious and careful on his relationships and has his self esteem issues and some hangups on physical affection because of (what i headcanon as) the sexual/romantic nature of what he went through in kinloch hold that he wasn't allowed to deal with in a healthy way during kirkwall. idk!! i'm trying to keep all this in mind when I write their interactions and i hope i can wrestle a good dynamic out of this. more like love born of friendship than love born from lust, yknow? But yeah, I'm concerned with trying to find a balance between all that and what people are actually going to read. it'd still be good to stretch my writerly muscles after an eight-year depression induced writer's block, but it is disappointing to be just another mediocre fic in a sea of cullen/inquisitor
@witchknights all of that sounds fucking fabulous and I REALLY want to read it. Also, this is fanfic, where you can play and have fun, which sounds like exactly what you're looking to do. You're taking scenes us players are very familiar with and writing them from perspectives that are your own, with details *you* have thought to put in. It really sounds like you're following your own perspective on how to approach these scenes and this relationship, and that's always how the really interesting stories are written, no matter how well-trodden the basic ideas are.
Since everyone else is addressing the mature, serious points, I just want to say that I have no goddamn idea where the whole dominant Cullen thing in fandom came from. He is a complete sub, and no one will convince me otherwise. (I mean obviously everyone is allowed to have their own headcanons and my opinion isn't any more valid than anyone else's... but he doesn't top, okay? Just no.)
people take the kiss and the bit where he wastes a lot of perfectly good ink and parchment and somehow decide this means he's Top McDommison, completely ignoring all the other bits where it's completely obvious that man has never had an iron anywhere near his fire.
Yessss! I'd love to see an actual story take place in the Bad Future. Also it would be great time for establishing a close friendship between Dorian and Idrilla that steers a good distance away from "gay best friend," which, while it's not a problem in the game, I've seen a TON of fic where Dorian is gay-best-friended and it was awful. Yeah .-. You might even consider aging him up, because honestly the games timeline for him is fucking stupid. No one is gonna make a 21 year old fucking /Knight Captain/. Not even Meredith. I'd read the fuck outta this. One thing you might consider is a series of short stories/novellas of the bits you want to write instead of one long fic. It might let you just write the things you find interesting and keep you from rehashing canon. Also shorter goals tend to get completed xD I say this from experience. I'm so glad I'm not the only one who gets grumpy about Dom!Cullen. In his romance with my Lavellan, she can occasionally convince him to be a little more pushy (cause she's a switch), but most of the time, his teeny tiny wifey domme's the fuck out of him. And their magical bondage sexy times is helpful for him processing the trauma of Kinloch Hold. So yeah. Sub!Cullen 5ever. Also submissives can be very into sex and want to instigate >.> This is a thing, people.
@Kittenly I was thinking about aging him up a couple of years and establishing that Meredith made him captain during act 3, so he's still young, but wasn't promoted the minute he stepped in Kirkwall. And like, she'd have done it as a sort of bribery when he started to think she was going too far, something like that? Give him some other motives to hesitate to be the commander of the inquisition beyond the lyrium addiction - like, he has gotten authority he didint deserve before and screwed up, and he doesn't want to do that again, something like that.
I sort of head canon that Justinia imagined the inquisition would be much closer to what it apparently becomes if you keep it around after trespasser - a small force under her, with the goal to mediate things and keep the peace if Templars and mages couldn't reach an agreement. I think Cullen would be qualified to take care of that, especially with the assistance of people like Cassandra. The inquisition blowing up (ha!) caught him with his metaphorical pants down
@witchknights I think that's a really nice plan for Cullen. It makes a lot more sense for him to be made Captain during act 3, and I really like it being sort of a bribe. nice cognitive dissonance there. Also that's a really nice headcanon for why Cullen is Commander! I think I'll have to adopt it, as making Cullen Commander is a rather odd choice, given his lack of experience. Like he lead a group of templars, but that's not a military o.o
@Kittenly Meredith gives me the feeling, and i'm not sure where i got it from, of a controlling parent that like... whenever she starts seeing independent thought goes "look at this thing i got from you! you've been so good these days, such an obedient kid, i am so lucky to have such a good child you make me so proud!!" and making these positive reinforcement things we do to dogs, but to their children. I think it's because i interpret young cullen as feeling really betrayed by his supperiors in kinloch hold and just generally deprived of affection, i think it's something templar training would do to kids - even if he wrote his family it's not the same thing, at 13 the superiors would end up becoming the parental figures? i mean, i had teachers that i really admired at that age whose approval meant more to me than most of my family's and i wasn't in Full Time Brainwashing Church Camp for Drug Induced Superpowers. when he starts serving in kirkwall he is spewing the same discourse meredith is out of anger and trauma and feeling betrayed, and he is a valuable asset amid the younger recruits who dont share the same passion - you bet everyone knew what happened to him, that she used his torture as a warning sign against weakness and fraternization and feeling pity for the mages she held prisoner - but as he starts to work these issues out and all the way to act 3, when he can't convince himself her harshness is needed, it's when he starts climbing the ranks because it becomes critical that he continues thinking the way she wants him to, he has to be surrounded by people like Alrik, he can't stay so close to what is happening to the mages anymore. so it's both a way to keep more control over what he's exposed to and also a way to make him think he shouldn't think about that because he's doing such good work, he's rising so fast and everyone who supported him is so proud. stuff like that... But yeah, that's my preferred explanation for why he's commander, because it doesnt make sense otherwise.
@witchknights I like that headcanon a lot, too. Have you posted it on tumblr at all? I'd like to have it on my blog.
@Mercury http://witchknights.tumblr.com/post/133010427495/i-was-talking-about-this-elsewhere-and-idk-if-i this?
Seconding Mercury HEART EYES MOTHERFUCKER. Tell me about her (or tell me which page you talked about her so i can refresh my memory with a face)!
I don't think I've talked about her?? My hawkes aren't as developed as the other characters because the story is right there, but she's Diplomatic/Humorous, and I headcanon she's in a triad with Merrill and Isabela (she's with Merrill in-game). She used to (unintentionally) get allllll the girls Carver was interested on. She's pro-mage because of the examples she had, but is sort of religious and very willing to throw Meredith a bone because Beth is her hostage in the Circle, so she has some trouble with Anders because she tries to help him, but keeps her distance from the Underground and things like that (my other Hawke is very involved in the underground, but he's an Angry Apostate). Other than that, her default attitude is to avoid anything serious or polemic or depressing as much as possible, and she absolutely adores listening to Merrill's and Varric's stories, as well as reading a lot of silly, "lightweight" books.
She's also literally the only character I've ever seen make that particular hairstyle look good. Amazing. *_*
