OOC: Oh, Is It Infopost Time? I Love Infopost Time.
When exactly, I ask you, did I end up with a full stable of characters again? Anyway, I’ve got a new one so this infopost is guaranteed at least 20% not gratuitous.
Character: Merrill
Canon: Dragon Age
Class: Sophomore
So this is Merrill. Yes, she's from the same canon as not_every_mage, seeks_truth, and goodforsix. No, she's not from the same timeline as any of them.
Like Anders and Isabela, Merrill hails primarily from Dragon Age II, or Dragon Age: Fun With Religious Extremism, and will eventually grow up to be one of Hawke's friends and party members, which I affectionately refer to as Team Can't Take You Anywhere. I'm not going to recap the canon here, since my established canonmates have done a pretty good job of that already and any attempt I make at explaining it pretty much turns out like this.
Aggressively crying about Hawke, that's me. Sometimes randomly in the car on the way to work or something. (Gif also applicable to asking me about any of these fandoms.)
That's not much of an exaggeration. My apologies to anyone who had to read the increasingly unhinged "explain your canon" section of my app.
Merrill is an apostate mage like Anders, which is to say that she isn't kept under constant surveillance in one of the Circles of Magi, and as large swaths of the population of Thedas (backed up by teachings of the preeminent religion of the continent) believe that mages are a danger to themselves and other and thus fear them, that's pretty much illegal. Unlike Anders, she has a little more leeway there on account of being a Dalish elf. And -- okay, now I'm just going to refer you to Anders's original infopost to explain a little more in depth about how magic fits into the DA universe, because I have to give you a quick primer on elven culture in this world and that's going to be long enough. Elves in DA aren't quite like elves in most other fantasy settings. Sorry, Thorin.
The elves of the DA universe are not immortal any more. According to their lore they used to be, and then they encountered humans. Interbreeding and exposure to the shemlen, or "quick children," whittled away at their immortality and innate connection to magic; their average lifespan is about equal to that of a human now. The elves used to be a lot of things until they encountered humans, including the dominant and most culturally advanced race in Thedas. Centuries ago, though, they were conquered and enslaved by the ancient Tevinter Imperium. They won their freedom and a new homeland by helping the prophet Andraste overthrow the Imperium, but . . . then that new homeland got conquered again when the Chantry essentially called for a Crusade against them for refusing to convert to the religion founded by Andraste. Classy, Chantry. Super classy. As a result the majority of elven culture, history, and language have been obliterated.
And then the schism occurred. Those elves who chose to agree to their conquerors' terms and convert, or at least live as second-class citizens in human society, became known as the city elves; the ones who refused to do this are known as the Dalish. The Dalish are nomads, clinging as best they can to what's left of their culture and trying to reconstruct what they can of it while they move from place to place in the more rural sections of the continent. These two groups really do not get along. There's a common sentiment among the Dalish that the city elves have abandoned their own people and identity; conversely, many city elves think the Dalish are trying too hard to hold on to the past, and that all the old elven lore is just a bunch of baseless fantasies. Ultimately, though, all elves are second-class citizens in the eyes of a lot of humans in Thedas even if they're not enslaved in Tevinter, or servants or working class in Ferelden and Orlais.
Each Dalish clan has a Keeper, a mage who serves as clan leader. The Keeper is also responsible for preserving elven lore -- thus the title -- and, traditionally, protecting the clan from the Dread Wolf, Fen'Harel, the trickster god of the elven pantheon. All that knowledge gets passed on to the Keeper's First, their apprentice and appointed successor, and so on down the line. For the Sabrae clan, that's Merrill, who was originally born into the Alerion clan but sent to be First to Marethari. The Dalish try not to have more than two mages to a clan; it keeps them from attracting too much attention from the templars, who sort of let them slide on the whole apostate thing in the interest of, well. Not making elven-human relations worse than the already-terrible that they are.
Back to Merrill: she has pretty much no people skills whatsoever, and this is not a good trait in someone who's being trained to take over as the Keeper someday. Not making matters any better is how she's memorizing (written history is not really a thing for the Dalish) all this stuff about elven lore while everyone else her age is learning to do things that integrate better into everyday life. Keeper Marethari is concerned about this, and that's why she'll be sending Merrill off to Fandom. But not telling her ahead of time that she's going to someplace full of humans, because like pretty much everyone in DA2 she has good intentions but occasionally terrible execution.
(Side note: All due credit to not_every_mage for helping me decide on this as the point in time from which to take her.)
So here's a few things to know about Merrill, appearance and personality-wise. First and foremost, she is an absolute and total space case, and generally oblivious to most standards of social interaction. Like, we're talking "got lost on her way home from the market every day for three years to the point where her friends actually gave her a ball of twine" levels of absent-minded.
She's also not great with grasping figures of speech, and in a lot of ways is super innocent:
Oh, honey.
Oh, and since Merrill makes a cameo in DA: Origins if you pick the Dalish elf origin for your Warden, that's the one that's happening in the future of her timeline. For now, though, the Fifth Blight is years away.
As is the case with elves in most fantasy worlds, she's got a slighter build than humans do, prominently visible pointy ears, and -- this is more unique to the elven character design of DA2 -- big ol' puppydog eyes. Please ignore the facial tattoos in the icons; she won't get the vallaslin until she's 18, I just haven't Photoshopped them out yet. She speaks with what we would know as a Welsh accent, and has this quirky speech cadence, and is voiced by Eve Myles, and it's adorable:
In general, she's prone to babbling and super enthusiastic about everything, cares a lot about her friends in her awkward way, adores animals and thinks big scary guard dogs are cute, and knows very, very little about the world. Or common sense.
Yeah, Hawke questioned that choice of words too.
What she does have is a very singleminded, even obsessive, determination to restore her people's lost history, and this combined with aforementioned lack of common sense is what leads her to make a deal with a demon and turn to blood magic in canon. (Don't worry, this is a long way off for her yet.) This is yet another case of "noble intentions, total failure to think this plan through," which might as well be the overarching theme of DA2.
At the moment, she's got some pretty basic, mostly nature-based spells: flinging rocks at people, energy bolts, and such. So she won't be, you know, injuring people with their own blood or anything on that (disturbing) level. But she's the cutest little future blood mage, honestly.
Who ends up having the most adorable friendship with Isabela.
On to quick, at least partially copypasta, bullet point recaps (and maybe a gif or two) for the rest of my girls:
Name: Tali'Zorah nar Rayya (goforthe_optics)
Canon: Mass Effect
Class: Junior
I don't know why I wanted the facepalming gif. I just did.
Name: Euphrasie "Cosette" Fauchelevent (wildandbrave)
Canon: Les Misérables, book version
Class: Junior omg how did that happen
PB: Amanda Seyfried
Just . . . pretend her hair is brown here.
Name: Éponine Thénardier (filleauloup)
Canon: Les Misérables
Status: Townie
PB: Samantha Barks
. . . not a gif, I just like this picture.
Name: Tahiri Veila (weetuskenraider)
Canon: Star Wars Legends (you know, that thing that used to be the Expanded Universe), New Jedi Order series
Status: Teacher
PB: Emilie de Ravin
There's also Kennedy (brat_inslayage), who is the only one of mine (!!!) not on island and thus not appearing in this infopost.
And finally, me. The person who seems to have acquired an entire set of girls who spent a lot of their childhoods socially isolated in some way or another and are all prone to babbling. What. How does this happen.
Name: Shanie
Place: Los Angeles
Character: Merrill
Canon: Dragon Age
Class: Sophomore
So this is Merrill. Yes, she's from the same canon as not_every_mage, seeks_truth, and goodforsix. No, she's not from the same timeline as any of them.
Like Anders and Isabela, Merrill hails primarily from Dragon Age II, or Dragon Age: Fun With Religious Extremism, and will eventually grow up to be one of Hawke's friends and party members, which I affectionately refer to as Team Can't Take You Anywhere. I'm not going to recap the canon here, since my established canonmates have done a pretty good job of that already and any attempt I make at explaining it pretty much turns out like this.
Aggressively crying about Hawke, that's me. Sometimes randomly in the car on the way to work or something. (Gif also applicable to asking me about any of these fandoms.)
That's not much of an exaggeration. My apologies to anyone who had to read the increasingly unhinged "explain your canon" section of my app.
Merrill is an apostate mage like Anders, which is to say that she isn't kept under constant surveillance in one of the Circles of Magi, and as large swaths of the population of Thedas (backed up by teachings of the preeminent religion of the continent) believe that mages are a danger to themselves and other and thus fear them, that's pretty much illegal. Unlike Anders, she has a little more leeway there on account of being a Dalish elf. And -- okay, now I'm just going to refer you to Anders's original infopost to explain a little more in depth about how magic fits into the DA universe, because I have to give you a quick primer on elven culture in this world and that's going to be long enough. Elves in DA aren't quite like elves in most other fantasy settings. Sorry, Thorin.
The elves of the DA universe are not immortal any more. According to their lore they used to be, and then they encountered humans. Interbreeding and exposure to the shemlen, or "quick children," whittled away at their immortality and innate connection to magic; their average lifespan is about equal to that of a human now. The elves used to be a lot of things until they encountered humans, including the dominant and most culturally advanced race in Thedas. Centuries ago, though, they were conquered and enslaved by the ancient Tevinter Imperium. They won their freedom and a new homeland by helping the prophet Andraste overthrow the Imperium, but . . . then that new homeland got conquered again when the Chantry essentially called for a Crusade against them for refusing to convert to the religion founded by Andraste. Classy, Chantry. Super classy. As a result the majority of elven culture, history, and language have been obliterated.
And then the schism occurred. Those elves who chose to agree to their conquerors' terms and convert, or at least live as second-class citizens in human society, became known as the city elves; the ones who refused to do this are known as the Dalish. The Dalish are nomads, clinging as best they can to what's left of their culture and trying to reconstruct what they can of it while they move from place to place in the more rural sections of the continent. These two groups really do not get along. There's a common sentiment among the Dalish that the city elves have abandoned their own people and identity; conversely, many city elves think the Dalish are trying too hard to hold on to the past, and that all the old elven lore is just a bunch of baseless fantasies. Ultimately, though, all elves are second-class citizens in the eyes of a lot of humans in Thedas even if they're not enslaved in Tevinter, or servants or working class in Ferelden and Orlais.
Each Dalish clan has a Keeper, a mage who serves as clan leader. The Keeper is also responsible for preserving elven lore -- thus the title -- and, traditionally, protecting the clan from the Dread Wolf, Fen'Harel, the trickster god of the elven pantheon. All that knowledge gets passed on to the Keeper's First, their apprentice and appointed successor, and so on down the line. For the Sabrae clan, that's Merrill, who was originally born into the Alerion clan but sent to be First to Marethari. The Dalish try not to have more than two mages to a clan; it keeps them from attracting too much attention from the templars, who sort of let them slide on the whole apostate thing in the interest of, well. Not making elven-human relations worse than the already-terrible that they are.
Back to Merrill: she has pretty much no people skills whatsoever, and this is not a good trait in someone who's being trained to take over as the Keeper someday. Not making matters any better is how she's memorizing (written history is not really a thing for the Dalish) all this stuff about elven lore while everyone else her age is learning to do things that integrate better into everyday life. Keeper Marethari is concerned about this, and that's why she'll be sending Merrill off to Fandom. But not telling her ahead of time that she's going to someplace full of humans, because like pretty much everyone in DA2 she has good intentions but occasionally terrible execution.
(Side note: All due credit to not_every_mage for helping me decide on this as the point in time from which to take her.)
So here's a few things to know about Merrill, appearance and personality-wise. First and foremost, she is an absolute and total space case, and generally oblivious to most standards of social interaction. Like, we're talking "got lost on her way home from the market every day for three years to the point where her friends actually gave her a ball of twine" levels of absent-minded.
She's also not great with grasping figures of speech, and in a lot of ways is super innocent:
Oh, honey.
Oh, and since Merrill makes a cameo in DA: Origins if you pick the Dalish elf origin for your Warden, that's the one that's happening in the future of her timeline. For now, though, the Fifth Blight is years away.
As is the case with elves in most fantasy worlds, she's got a slighter build than humans do, prominently visible pointy ears, and -- this is more unique to the elven character design of DA2 -- big ol' puppydog eyes. Please ignore the facial tattoos in the icons; she won't get the vallaslin until she's 18, I just haven't Photoshopped them out yet. She speaks with what we would know as a Welsh accent, and has this quirky speech cadence, and is voiced by Eve Myles, and it's adorable:
Click to viewIn general, she's prone to babbling and super enthusiastic about everything, cares a lot about her friends in her awkward way, adores animals and thinks big scary guard dogs are cute, and knows very, very little about the world. Or common sense.
Yeah, Hawke questioned that choice of words too.
What she does have is a very singleminded, even obsessive, determination to restore her people's lost history, and this combined with aforementioned lack of common sense is what leads her to make a deal with a demon and turn to blood magic in canon. (Don't worry, this is a long way off for her yet.) This is yet another case of "noble intentions, total failure to think this plan through," which might as well be the overarching theme of DA2.
At the moment, she's got some pretty basic, mostly nature-based spells: flinging rocks at people, energy bolts, and such. So she won't be, you know, injuring people with their own blood or anything on that (disturbing) level. But she's the cutest little future blood mage, honestly.
Who ends up having the most adorable friendship with Isabela.
On to quick, at least partially copypasta, bullet point recaps (and maybe a gif or two) for the rest of my girls:
Name: Tali'Zorah nar Rayya (goforthe_optics)
Canon: Mass Effect
Class: Junior
I don't know why I wanted the facepalming gif. I just did.
- Is a quarian who came to Fandom on her Pilgrimage, hoping to find something useful that she can bring home to the Migrant Fleet and prove herself as an adult and contributing member of society.
- Is an engineer, and pretty handy at cobbling together working technology out of scavenged scraps.
- Is also pretty handy with a shotgun, a pistol, and the boot knife she goes around with when she's not in the dorms.
- Super does not trust artificial intelligences due to her people having been driven off their world after losing a war with an AI race. (It's a bit more complicated than that, though.)
- Is pretty damn good at hacking AIs. This miiiiiiiight be related to the above point.
- Is stuck in that envirosuit due to quarians' extremely fragile immune system.
- Also can't eat your food, due to having dextro-based DNA. (TV Tropes link, click at your own risk!)
- Has three fingers/toes on each respective appendage.
- Also various and unspecified-in-canon cybernetic implants.
- Hails from shortly after the opening scene of Mass Effect 2; she just found out Shepard was dead a couple of weeks ago.
- Is from a universe where Shepard is female and Ashley survived Virmire, which made meeting Kaidan a few weeks ago fun.
- Has a more detailed infopost here if you really want more of my excessive rambling.
- Speaking of rambling, she'll do that when she's nervous.
Name: Euphrasie "Cosette" Fauchelevent (wildandbrave)
Canon: Les Misérables, book version
Class: Junior omg how did that happen
PB: Amanda Seyfried
Just . . . pretend her hair is brown here.
- Is from Paris in 1829.
- Actually has brown hair. I tried to alter the icons accordingly. Tried.
- Is basically the nicest person ever.
- Is honestly a talking animal sidekick short of being a Disney princess.
- Was going to a convent school run by an extremely ascetic, strict order before Fandom, but is adapting pretty well to not being so sheltered any more
- Has no idea her adoptive father is an escaped convict, or that his name is really Jean Valjean; as far as she knows he's Ultime Fauchelevent.
- Had a rough, abusive childhood with the Thénardiers before Valjean rescued her from that. She's largely healed from that, and isn't bitter about it.
- Is a gigantic nerd.
- Honestly doesn't get why people, particularly doesnotkneel, think she's attractive.
Name: Éponine Thénardier (filleauloup)
Canon: Les Misérables
Status: Townie
PB: Samantha Barks
. . . not a gif, I just like this picture.
- Is from Paris in 1832, and a different reality than Cosette.
- Was spoiled by her parents until they lost everything, after which point her father had no compunctions about pimping out his daughters and turning them into petty criminals besides, or physically abusing them.
- Was badly wounded at the Rue de la Chanvrerie barricade in the June Rebellion, but survived and somehow managed to stumble into Fandom. (The June Rebellion is real. The Rue de la Chanvrerie barricade is not.)
- Works at the post office.
- Lives in the abandoned warehouse district, in a smaller warehouse that she's managed to turn into a pretty comfortable place by now, even if she did use blackmail to get the utilities working.
- Has a pretty shaky grasp of morality, though she's getting better about it; she tries to be a decent person but doesn't always know how to go about doing that.
- Has no idea why Cosette tries so hard to be friends with her, but lets her get away with it.
- (Okay, secretly she's glad.)
Name: Tahiri Veila (weetuskenraider)
Canon: Star Wars Legends (you know, that thing that used to be the Expanded Universe), New Jedi Order series
Status: Teacher
PB: Emilie de Ravin
- Is a Jedi.
- Used to date Jaina's younger brother Anakin, and was pretty emotionally wrecked when he died.
- Also dated Ben Skywalker (momslilassassin) while they were both students at FH. Which was kind of weird because Ben is about 15 years younger than her in her actual timeline.
- . . . this Tahiri is not from the same timeline as any of them.
- Has a lot of UST with Is really close to Jaina, the solo_sword version from Fandom as well as her own.
- She's pretty much an honorary member of the Skywalker-Solo family.
- Once went on an infiltration mission with Wraith Squadron, which meant spending a lot of time being COMPLETELY DRIVEN UP THE WALL by an older version of gavegoodface.
- Was orphaned at the age of 2 and raised by the Sand People of Tatooine, so speaks fluent Tusken.
- Is half Yuuzhan Vong thanks to fun with kidnap, torture, and brainwashing (literally -- they implanted Vong braincells in her). But also speaks fluent Yuuzhan Vong, and may occasionally talk to you from that culture's perspective.
- She's kind of a tiny cultural katamari that way.
- Which is why she'll be teaching a class about this with atreideslioness.
There's also Kennedy (brat_inslayage), who is the only one of mine (!!!) not on island and thus not appearing in this infopost.
And finally, me. The person who seems to have acquired an entire set of girls who spent a lot of their childhoods socially isolated in some way or another and are all prone to babbling. What. How does this happen.
Name: Shanie
Place: Los Angeles
- Is a nerd about languages, Les Misérables, soccer, Olympic recurve archery, and a few other things.
- Is a really, really rambly nerd about these things.
- Is very sorry in advance should you ask about them.
- Misses Thrilling Adventure Hour so, so much. *sobs*
- Has severe social anxiety and is always convinced pinging you would be bugging you.
- Despite having been in this game since about Day Three.
- Is always up for a chat via email or what have you, though!
- Fell down this BioWare hole back in January and hasn't hit the bottom yet.
- Is all about the canons that bring ALL THE SADS and so probably shouldn't be surprised about aforementioned fall down the hole. And yet.
- Will never stop blaming seeks_truth for this.