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.
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.