tries to open the laptop for this only for no power ok cool thanks

I'm gonna preface this by it's absolutely going to be a rambly mess in here

OKAY COOL. FIRST. cw for rated M for mature game content. hawke and co all goes through some shit

so! hawke! is incredibly customizable despite having next to no change in dialogue and therefore i had a terrible time (not really)

switches over to a keyboard

my hawke was fem/rogue with a dual weapon + assassination specialty

which, i never got to use alas

with a perfect 100% friendship run only because trying to keep track of the specifics involved was Not Happening and haha, oops i already had doofed up with bethany and carver

(carver lives if you're a mage / bethany lives if you're rogue/warrior)

so the basics of da2 if you are unfamiliar is you play Hawke, the oldest of a trio of siblings trying to escape the blight currently taking over their part of the world. the blight being demons coming from underground to basically kill everything in their path including the land itself and infecting anything it comes in contact with

so being refugees they run all the way to moms childhood city- where they find out that uncle has squandered all the money left to the kids and he's living in the slums/a shack. and to get into the city they end up making a deal with awful people and have to work off that debt which is you know. great! wonderful!

gamlen is a wonderful person!

anyways. so once that's over, varric makes his appearance he and his bro is putting together an exploration team to enter the deep roads- an underground tunnel system created by the dwarves of old that apparently is full of riches if you can survive that long etc

long story short, bro ends up betraying them bc he goes kooky, they almost end up stuck forever, but what would you know they find the treasures And! escape. yay! (carver, on the other hand, if you bring him with you ends up getting infected by darkspawn)

throws him off a cliff (fond)

so with the money they bring back, hawke pays off legit everyone, buys back the family home, moves everyone back in (except for you gamlen you stay in your shack) and wowee! we've moved up in the world. she's rubbing elbows with hightown folk now

blah blah blah things happen. mom gets a secret admirer! how cute!

NO. he wants her for body parts!!

so we end up running up and down kirkwall looking for mom only to find she's become an sewn up zombie worthy of dr ficklestein. luckily we kick the guys ass, she gets to tell us she's proud of hawke and dies in her arms! yaaaay

for those keeping track without having played da2: bethany dies before we get to kirkwall, carver is darkspawn infected/gone with the gray wardens forever, and mom has been zombie murdered

so as of now the only family she has left is ser snuffles

and then the city gets taken over! because isabella! ilu isa but wowee this was bad! more tldr isa stole a relic from a supercult, they can't leave without it, so instead of normal behavior they're just gonna take over kirkwall and convert everyone to the qun instead! yay!!

this is a gross simplification but shh i'm doing this from memory

anyway, hawke ends up fighting their leader to the death and if you didn't get the memory of that, he's like a 7ft tiefling sized dude wielding an axe bigger than hawke. rogue hawke has two dinky daggers. THIS FIGHT GOES AMAZING. also known as scream around the pillars as arishok chases your ass across the entire palace

anyways, hawke wins by sheer spite, and the qunari depart! wowee!! the city names her champion of kirkwall and she immediately goes oh no

blah blah blah more stuff happens the mages and the templars continue butting heads and it's all going terribly. that's a whole plot point i mostly glossed over only bc it's a hot mess of a mess

also rogue hawke being mostly on the outskirts of this doesn't pay as much attention imo. she cares but it's not a this effects me type of care, y'know?

tldr mages live in cages circles because they're ~omg dangerous~ and they're either wonderful places of study or absolute prisons. 99% of the time they're prisons. templars are their guards to keep them in check and they're as caring as cops are to anyone Different

most templars are also being used but that's an entirely different can of worms DAI deals with more than me

you are not allowed to leave the circle. ever. if you do, you're a dangerous apostate who needs to be taken out even if you're harming legit no one. there's a whole underground mage railroad happening to protect these guys. anders does what he can but he's only one guy and a possessed one at that and unsurprisingly that boy needs help

seriously, anders goes through so much shit to get where he is and i think we would have just been so much better of if we got him out of kirkwall and about 99 more cats to take care of

and maybe an exorcism.

ANYWAYS. rubs my face. so the heads of both templars and mages decide they want to butt heads, things go terribly, anders kills the pope, and it turns out the templar head has been having the evil kyber crystals whisper in her ear and make her go crazy, and the mage head uses blood magic so we end up beating up both of them

this is rooooughly where hawke goes oh n because she Does support the mages! she wants them to have the freedom of choice! and things just went very Very poorly for all the mages in kirkwall so it's legit time to run and regroup far away from the templar headquarters

luckily, hawke ends up in scawwy instead and i got to blame anders for doing More! Shit! when her back was turned.

(anders, somewhere in the wilds of the free marches, sneezes)

so now we reach the fun part of this. hawke in game!

hawke was legit just vibing this whole game i'm ngl. coming off from the sheer amount of nonsense she just had to deal with there was absolutely a sense of taking the back seat and not being deep in the thick of things

the few times she did kind've poke in and go whatcha up to she realized she was way in over her head with all the more modern nonsense and curses floating around and quickly went NEVERMIND. HAVE FUN

so she in way hunkered down and went okay. cabin fam. keep these guys in one piece as long as possible and just deal with each day as it comes because god only know what crazy shit is going to happen now

which went fine until iwa died and she went >:[

squints at the sky that was also aqua week, yeah? help my shit roll crimes

SHE DIDN'T ACTUALLY MEAN TO... YOU KNOW.... GET WHACKED THAT HARD.... given her arishok experience she was like okay, i got this and then realized no she doesn't got this

thanks alfyn for remembering she was there otherwise given how things were going, she would have just remained there all night

lmao

w3 was my bad, i forgot about the rule so hawke got to bleed. but also it was ic for her to say and then oops about it so it worked out fine! even if i was going NOOO I'M SORRY MY PEANUT BRAIN the entire time

looks at my hands w4 was karlach?? again, my shit roll luck

she was hoping to at least be a decent distraction and she just made a decent flying object instead help me

squints at the sky my memory is blanking on w5. w6 was post cyoa?

anyway, my poor hawke decided she wanted to fly without wings. it's fine

her sense of needing to Protecc just was in overdrive the entire time given her experiences with failing people/them dying because of her stupid

of course half of them didn't need her protecc so she sooort've imprinted onto camille because here was someone who simply needed A Friend and you know what, she's good at that. she's a very good friend!

she's dealt with people who's gone through worst and gone through better and really all they all needed was someone to believe in them and just... Be There so she did! and she fell a little in doki because camille, despite all her crazy, was still going one foot in front of the reluctant other and wow was that a relatable mess

however!! at the same time, daan was a well dressed disaster man, and she was horribly fond of this unimpressed stinky bastard who made faces at her shit but nevertheless let her be. she kept wanting to press his buttons to see how he'd react and was trying so hard to get something out of him other than a very tired :[

then daan and camille execution happened and hawke went 'ah' and tucked both of those dokis inside where they belong until she dies

jazz hands the secret mess no one knew about except me, kabby, and the mods

anyway. where am i uuuuuuuuuuuuh cyoa! wowee that mess fucked her up

going with gale and aqua was a great time! our rolls were so bad it was funny

camille being her illusion person absolutely gave her a lot of WELL THIS IS FINE emotions and getting almost murdered by her was definitely on the scale of this may as well happen

it's one of the reasons hawke couldn't kill her in the end and simply crawled away from that fight. camille's been through enough shit and she'd already died once, hawke didn't and couldn't have a second one by her hands on her concious

conscious

uuuuuh and then our waterbottle died! and hawke was so guilty that out of the three copies, hers had been the real deal and oops! she turned into a cursed spirit because of it

all hawke does is fail at protecting people! she's amazing at what she does!

and then p2 of cyoa ended up with anders getting mcmurdered and she was like wow!!! all i do is get people murdered!!! this is great!

so she withdrew a bit but i don't think anyone really noticed since most of her cr at that point was mostly dead and going through their own wheel of trauma

the deda coming back and haunting us for a day helped by like, 2% at least knowing that at least in this one instance, it wasn't her fault anyone died and they're all hale despite being on the other side of the fade

tossing dick cookies at daan for camille's sake helped another 30 ngl

gale and alfyn getting partner deaths dropped that immediately back down though because uuuuuuuh that was traumatic and given how our head of templar dies by turning into a statue she was Very Much Not Okay

so by the time we reach finals week is was definitely a case of nothing in life matter! (miserable)

part of the sea monster nonsense was in fact seeing if she could just go out in a bang instead of having to deal with needing to either murder or getting murdered during the week. (she was not scheduled to die by sea monster though. whomp)

luckily she and anis had a good last minute talk and letting go of all the shit that happened and going peacefully was honestly the best thing for her

THEN SHE GETS TO THE GY AND IT'S LIKE THE WHOLE PLACE IS ON FIRE AND THEY'RE LIKE WHEEEEE and hawke is just so tired help me

reasons i didn't get to deda pcs besides just being irl dead: hawke just found a corner to curl up in and went no thank u tell me when it's time to go

scratches my head i think i missed a few things but otherwise, tldr hawke had a terrible time, her guilt complex got a work out, and she's horrifically traumatized about people around her dying. yay!

OH PARTNERS. yeah so since ichiban died and she never found who, she went I'm not going to make anyone be stuck with my bullshit and never bothered again

she only got to have a partner for about uuuuuuh five minutes with lavi before he killed her which was in hindsight v funny

she proved her own point but in the reverse 🥲