I want my friends to be friends but oh boy is it complicated (Dragon Age 2 spoilers)

Originally posted to tumblr on January 26 2018. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

Carver: You know, Fenris, I have a tattoo.

Carver wants so badly to impress the other hugesword-wielding warrior in the party. He keeps going at it from the exactly wrong angles, though.

Fenris: You have a what?

Carver: A tattoo. A lot of us got them before Ostagar. It's a mabari. For strength.

Fenris: Does it curse you with the ability to reach into a man and tear out his insides?

Carver: Uh. I can make it bark.

Fenris: Please don't.

Fenris’s disconnection from any elven community or culture bothers him more than he wants to admit, and having a human point it out doesn’t help (on the other hand Varric, being both a non-human and not very in touch with his own group’s culture, ends up being someone Fenris can relate to on that, which I also think is the reason that in canon Varric is apparently the only one of Hawke’s companions who ever gets to call Fenris “Elf” like it’s his name).

Fenris: You are a very odd dwarf.

Varric: And you thought I was joking about the pin.

The lyrium markings are a bundle of trauma and make for a delicate topic to try to bond over. Both Carver and Merrill bring them up as something that makes him similar to them, which to him is presumptuous and belittling of his experiences—Carver and his friends getting tattoos together and Merrill having earned a mark of adulthood of her people that she takes pride in are pretty positive associations. Fenris gets his share of moments of being an asshole and acting like he’s the only person in the world with problems, but even when uncalled-for it’s mostly out of being very unused to his problems being anything but belittled.

Interestingly his reaction to Isabela also comparing his markings to tattoos, also in Act1, is more welcoming.

Isabela: Where I come from, they're called "tattoos". Sailors get them all the time.

Fenris: Not made of lyrium, I'd imagine.

Isabela: Not a one. And the pictures are different—usually breasts.

Fenris: I suppose a pair of lyrium breasts tattooed onto my chest would make things better.

He’s still snarky about it, but he doesn’t seem to take offense, and even makes a joke by the end of the conversation. It helps that she doesn’t treat it as something they have in common, the markings just remind her of tattoos on sailors she’s met. Isabela also actually does have experiences similar to his, which Fenris probably doesn’t know in great detail, but maybe he can tell. I think she can tell about him. Part of Isabela’s carefree-seeming way of approaching even difficult topics is her shield of presenting herself as more shallow than she is, because invested means vulnerable. I think a lot of her banter with Fenris is, under the flirting and inappropriate jokes, also probing how far she can go with laughing about something Fenris has probably cried about and if he’s there yet to laugh, too, because she’s found it helps her. Sometimes it works for him, too, sometimes it doesn’t.

Carver’s interactions with the other companions are sad in their own right, even when his awkwardness is amusing. To begin with, they’re not so much his friends as his older sibling’s. Carver isn’t really getting to have a life of his own at the moment and most of the world treats him as just an extension of Hawke. He’s only 19 years old, but has already fought in a war, in which all of those friends he got tattoos with likely died. All we hear about Ostagar in DA2 is that it was a battle and it was lost, but it wasn’t pretty, my Warden was there and can attest. Mage!Hawke wasn’t, by the way, so (at least in canon, where on a playthrough where he makes it out of Ferelden alive, Carver is the only non-mage sibling) no one in his family really does understand his trauma. There’s Aveline, but, well, they have their own complications.

And Merrill’s life isn’t as sunny and trouble-free as Fenris thinks, either, and she feels very alone without her clan, and seems to have been a bit ostracized even among them. Out of those her age she was close with Tamlen and Mahariel at least, but she’s lost them both to the Blight. She wants to befriend the other elf in the group, and especially if she was there during Fenris’s recruitment she knows he’s been through a lot and sympathizes. Fenris wants nothing to do with her, though, and to him her loneliness seems of her own making, so the sympathy is one-sided, and rejected as pity besides.

Act1, A.K.A. everyone has all their walls up and it’s both frustrating and fascinating to watch.