What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

stars-collected:

Absolutely tangential to the point of that post I reblogged, but it made me think a little bit about adoribull fanworks and ones I enjoy vs. ones I don’t, and how I think it’s very easy for people to get too surfacey with the characters and essentially turn them into that fussy prig/slob dynamic without getting at the meat of their characters. I think two details about Bull and Dorian that are very important to my understanding of them but vary in other interpretations are:

1.) Bull puts on a show of being loud, messy, brashly honest, but this is an obfuscation tactic. He tells you more than any other person might, which might lead one to believe he has told you everything. He has not. I personally think he keeps his possessions orderly as well. Order is familiar and comforting to him. If he seems to be a slob, it’s belying the fact that he has a system he can understand and he sticks to it, because knowing where everything is and knowing your place is how you control your surroundings and keep from ending up dead, and allowing others to underestimate his awareness and his intelligence are vital to his effectiveness as a spy. Even when he’s done spying for the Ben-Hassrath, these would be behaviors hard coded into him by years of war and trauma.

2.) Dorian puts on a show of being a cultured, aristocratic, spoiled princeling. in many ways he is very sheltered and ignorant, but the performance of nobility is not his natural state of being. He complains about alcohol quality but secretly genuinely likes shitty beer. He fusses over his clothes, and the cold, and the poor living conditions, while sticking it out anyway and laughing off much bigger, more unbearable things on sheer principle. He’s a scholar and a gifted mage who brute-forces positive results in dire conditions and treats books like they’re trash.

image

I would hazard a guess that Dorian’s work/living spaces are always a total mess that nobody can make sense of but him and he’ll have incredibly expensive/rare tools and texts lying around in a heap of trashed diagrams and scribbled theories and findings. His handwriting is probably atrocious.

Point being, it’s easy to peg Bull as the chaotic one and Dorian as his polar opposite, and both of them would probably try to illicit that reaction from people, but it’s just what’s on the surface. Dorian thrives in chaos. Bull takes to the role out of necessity, but deep down order is so important to him he needs reassurance that it won’t literally drive him insane.

I feel like Vivienne is important to Bull as a friend because she provides proof that order and stability can be found in potentially maddening circumstances, and Dorian is also important to him because he proves that chaos isn’t inherently destructive. Both of them are important examples of living for oneself without apologies, changing a system to suit your needs rather than the other way around, and that’s an equally important lesson for Bull.

This totally got away from me and turned into my Feelings About Bull corner, what else is new.

SO MUCH THIS.

And like. Just to chime in from my POV as someone who has Way Too Many Feelings about Dorian Pavus, I’d argue that at least part of the reason why Dorian is so damn comfortable with chaos is because, day to day, the necessity of reaction precludes the luxury of introspection, and Dorian does not like to think about himself. About other people, about ideas, about the world around him, about gossip? Absolutely; you can’t shut up him on any of it, and even when he’s not talking, he’s into researching and theorising about the nitty-gritty. But contemplating his actual self, his needs and wants and history? Dorian would rather hunt through a mess of his own making, whether literal or metaphoric, than confront his own subconscious, and his chaotic systems of management are an excellent way to make sure that he always has a ready distraction on hand, even when he’s not in the field.

Because here’s the other thing: Dorian is messy in his environments, but meticulous with his person, and if we’re contrasting him with Bull, who tends towards the opposite, I think there’s some really interesting reasons as to why that is. Dorian has grown up with money and social privilege, so at a base level, he’s likely been raised to think that, while personal deportment is his own responsibility, looking after things is the work of lesser hands. Yet at the same time, the circumstances of breaking with his family and coming south have left him acutely aware of the fact that he’s never had any real ownership of or control over his environment: even at Skyhold, he’s aware of existing in a borrowed space, and while that means there’s a level of selfish obliviousness to his mistreatment of the library (for instance), it also speaks volumes that his developing notions of ‘home’, if you friend or romance him, are all anchored to people, not to places. He’s the walking personification of I Think That I’m The Worst So I Act Like I’m The Best: the chaos of his environments reflect his internal landscape, whereas his treatment of his body is the projection by which he most hopes to be judged.

Whereas Bull has been raised a soldier in an environment where everything is done to benefit the group: he’s keenly aware that making a mess for the servants is a shitty thing to do, that you need to try and keep your space and possessions tidy, but his treatment of his body is still utilitarian, even neglectful. He makes no effort to acquire horn balm as a luxury, even though he misses it and itches without it; he uses his body as a battering ram, because he views himself as, ultimately, expendable. Bull very easily gives his lovers what they need, but is taken aback by being individually humanised if you romance him and give him the necklace of the kadan; is startled by the idea that he be valued for himself alone, and not for what he can do. Bull is used to being judged by the competence of his external actions, and while he’ll deliberately manipulate that perception at times (pretending to be a coarse, gross merc, for instance), it’s always done to a purpose. But for all that he counts on his size and physical incongruity to act as another type of distraction, it’s also the biggest clue to who he is beyond what the Qun made of him. The missing eye, where he stepped in for Krem; the scars that prove his stories and his individual – not collective – role in acquiring them; the way he drinks and fucks in a performance of non-Qun indulgence that isn’t really a performance at all – that’s the truth of his internal life, but not the one he wants you to focus on.

Basically, the way Bull and Dorian treat their selves vs their surroundings is representative of their respective contexts and emotional baggage, and is written – I would argue – in a way that directly invites you to contrast them. Case in point: for both characters, when you talk to them after certain serious personal events (Dorian after Redcliffe; Bull after being in the Fade, if you take him there) you’re given the option to ask both of them the same question – “Are you all right?”. Ask it of Dorian, and you get that rarest of things, an honest, unromanticised answer: “No, not really.” Ask it of Bull, however, and he disapproves, because what he wants is to be taken out of his head, to focus on the physical rather than the emotional. Dorian, who spends all his time projecting an image of surety and confidence, responds to crisis by craving open, unambiguous concern for his wellbeing: by being allowed to admit his own weakness without being mocked for having it. Whereas Bull, by virtue of being both successfully compartmentalised and terrified of the prospect of succumbing to madness, spends a lot of time introspecting about himself, his mental wellbeing and his goals: so when something does get under his skin, he doesn’t want to be forced to acknowledge it, but to be reminded of his own strength – to be allowed not to think for once.

Dorian looks after his body because it’s the only thing that’s been consistently his, in defiance of the fact that it was his body – and therefore, by extension, himself – that his father wanted to change; he neglects his environments because they were never his, and because, while he has a concept of home, it now applies primarily to people, not places. Bull neglects his body because he was raised to think that it wasn’t really his own; that it – and therefore, by extension, himself – was primarily a tool of the Ben-Hassrath; he respects his environments precisely because they aren’t really his: his fledgling concept of home applies to people, not places, and he respects their right to occupy a given place more than he respects his use of it. This is why it’s not a coincidence that Dorian and Bull, whenever we see them in Skyhold, both occupy shared spaces – Dorian in the library, Bull in the tavern – when all the other LI’s are clearly hanging out in more personal, or at least more private, locations: their environments are liminal with their selves.

ANYWAY as you can clearly see I have a lot of FEELINGS about Dragon Age, PLEASE CARRY ON THANK YOU.

(via w4rgoddess-deactivated20200825)

  1. powerofthedragonflame reblogged this from lonicera-caprifolium
  2. trianglebird4 reblogged this from adoribull
  3. elroncl reblogged this from herald-adaar
  4. soapywrites reblogged this from adoribull
  5. valakiir reblogged this from adoribull
  6. adoribull reblogged this from lonicera-caprifolium
  7. starlightwrites reblogged this from sumomoblossom77
  8. sumomoblossom77 reblogged this from veritasrose