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somebodys-nuisance · 20 days

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Hey, Our Life Fans, who wants a Baxter End-Game Fic Idea?

Okay, hi, so, Baxter and his love for ballroom dancing means so much to me. Dancing has always been a big part of my life, and when I played through Baxter's DLC I was just floored by how much we had in common with our interests. I love finding stories that I can really relate to in that way. I was a bit disappointed I wasn't able to really lean into the idea my character was into dance, even before Baxter's DLC, and I had always wanted to make a version of the story that could be more focused on the dancing element, while also being Baxter End-Game (cuz I love Cove, but I LOVE Baxter.)

So, the idea goes a little something like this:

Jamie Last becomes obsessed with ballroom dancing (and dancing in general) when her older sister Elizabeth joined the non-member junior golfing league when she's a child. It'a a program that rents The Cypress' space, but you don't need to be a member to join, and it's relatively affordable. Jamie peeks in and catches a ballroom dancing class and is like WHAT IS THAT GET ME IN THERE and moms see what they can do. Turns out they'd need to become members (I'm pretty sure they are in the actual game but SHHHHHH, it's a fic, and I'm trying to make a STATEMENT here about what I know about ballroom dancing) and the class prices on TOP of the membership price are just astronomical. They absolutely can't afford it. Poor Jamie's sad and doesn't understand (she's like, 6,) so moms sign her up for general dance classes at the local studio. Not ballroom, her first dance love, but close.

Cut to the beginning of the game timeline-wise, and Jamie's performing in her dance recital. She's absolutely in love with dancing and is VERY talented. Anyway, after the recital, in the lobby, Jamie's awkwardly approached by a strange man who shoves 20 bucks in her face and asks her to be his son's dance partner. She's like uhhhhh, stranger.... danger? And she runs away before he can fully explain himself. Runs back into the theater, comes across boy with green hair and glasses. Get to talking, finds out he's the dude's son. Son kinda sorta explains his dad teaches dance and he used to co-own a studio back where they came from, and boy's been dancing since he can remember. But, boy seems kinda sad about it. Through a combination of Cove's explanation and Cliff eventually approaching moms and being less weird and awkward (love Cliff,) Jamie finds out he's a former ballroom dancing competitor turned teacher. Used to own a studio with his wife, they're not together anymore, and she's kept the studio. So, he has to start from scratch over here in Sunset Bird and form his own studio. He tried to inquire with The Cypress to use their studios to teach the classes, and the owners told him absolutely not, and shooed him off. But, the teacher, Mr. Suarez, told him if he could prove he's a skillful teacher, he could put in a good word and get him in. So, he's going to use his only student, his son, and find him a partner. He says Jamie was the best dancer he saw today, so he wants her to be Cove's new partner.

And, Jamie's like, um, YES? Cove seems shockingly sad about it initially, but Cove and Jamie hit it off almost immediately. Jamie picks up ballroom real quickly, and they enter a competition against some of Mr. Suarez's students, including his own son, Derek. Jamie and Cove SWEEP and are FANTASTIC, and not only does Gregorio allow Cliff to use the space, but they eventually become business partners, running ballroom dancing classes that are specifically affordable and accessible to the average person, as well as being a bit more daring, fun, and modern in their styles compared to the traditional Cypress classes.

Meanwhile, the underdogs from Cliff and Gregorio's classes go up against the hoity-toity rich kids that can afford the members-only classes, and Jamie and Cove begin to cross paths with certain partners consistently, like an especially captivating and elegant pair with a boy with grayish hair...

Story follows the basic plotline of the game from there! Cove and Jamie are only close, close, nearly inseparable friends in this one, with Derek being the only other possible love interest. It's essentially your classic competitors to intriguing acquaintances to friends to lovers to exes to enemies to begruding acquaintances to friends to lovers with lots of dancing, both ballroom and otherwise. We'd get more into Baxter's background, his parents, and Golden Grove in general, and the story would HIGHLY DEVIATE from Step 4 to allow room to fully center dance in some form. Also, YES. Every one of Jamie's friends are involved in ballroom in some way, shape, or form except for her immediate family in this au. Everybody's dancin'.

Would anybody be interested in something like this? My ADHD means it will almost definitely not happen, but figured I'd throw my ideas out into the horizon since I haven't been able to get it out of my head for literal MONTHS. Whaddaya think?

#olba #our life #our life beginnings & always #baxter ward #baxter ward x mc

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wyrdsistersofthedas · 7 years

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I look in wonder at your skills with Thedas' map. I have a problem I wish I had an answer to: How does Redcliffe village work? We get different maps for it in DAO and in DAI (supposed eastern part) and they don't seem to fit together. I can also not make heads or tails of Redcliff's supposed location on the world map (like with position of rivers/lake) in relation to the mini map in, say DAI. Nothing seems to add up. Could you help me make sense of this? Maybe maps need some turning or sth.?

*blush* Thank you so much for your kind words! It is a labor of love…that occasionally causes me to want to tear my hair out. ;) Redcliffe is one of those places that makes not only my scalp to itch, but my eye twitch. (So at least we are in good company.)

Nothing about the geographical lore of Redcliffe makes any sense. For example, the codex entry used both in Origins and Inquisition is full of nonsensical statements. For example:

“King Calenhad Theirin once famously declared, “The fate of Redcliffe is the fate of all Ferelden.” Certainly, the castle is the first and last defense for the sole land route into Ferelden, and the country has never fallen to any force that did not first capture Redcliffe.”

Um…what? Redcliffe is on the sole land route into Ferelden? Redcliffe is even near the sole land route into Ferelden. It may be closer to Orzammar and Gherlen’s Pass than West Hill or Highever, but you could definitely reach Denerim without having to travel close to Redcliffe.

Now, you could definitely argue that it would be really, really bad idea to leave Redcliffe untouched if you planned to occupy Ferelden. By the time an invader reached Denerim, Redcliffe could muster an army and use the southern arm of the Imperial Highway to aid Denerim or attack from behind. So if this was the only incongruous information, I could deal with it, but then there are these nuggets:

“The castle, which despite being three times captured is popularly described as “unassailable,” also guards one of the largest and most prosperous towns in Ferelden. Redcliffe village is well situated near the mountain pass to Orzammar and the Orlesian border, and so serves as a center of foreign trade. For these reasons, Redcliffe is accounted an arling despite the smallness of the domain.”

Again, huh? Don’t you mean the reverse? Redcliffe is a village of about 200 people, but the arling itself is quite large. Honnleath is part of the Arling of Redcliffe, and presumably parts of the Hinterlands are also included under its protection. So it isn’t exactly small.

And whatever the scale of the map you use to calculate how far it is from Redcliffe to Orzammar, it is strange to say that Redcliffe is “near” the pass that leads to Orzammar and Orlais beyond. It is at least 150-200 miles to travel between Orzammar and Redcliffe. There are several other Ferelden towns and arlings (Kinloch Hold, Wutherford, West Hill Bannorn, Waking Sea Bannorn) that should be better situated to profit from international trade than Redcliffe. But it gets better:

“The inhabitants of Redcliffe village are primarily fishermen or merchants who ship dwarven goods through the pass from Orlais to Denerim. When the entire village smells of smoked fish on certain late autumn mornings, the merchants in their finery do their utmost to pretend otherwise.”

–From In Pursuit of Knowledge: The Travels of A Chantry Scholar, by Brother Genitivi.

Sigh. Why would you take dwarven goods all the way south to Redcliffe if you plan to ship them to Denerim? That tacks on hundreds of miles to your journey! Just take the North Road!

None of that makes any sense…unless you look at where Redcliffe was in The Stolen Throne.

If Redcliffe were located where it was placed on this map, then the codex entry about it would make complete sense. It would be a much smaller land area, but the position of the town would make it a far more likely trade center and “first and last line of defense” for Ferelden.

There are even signs that this location almost made it into later maps.

In spite of the fact that moving Redcliffe messes with the lore about the village, it appears on the southern shore of Lake Calenhad on every other map that Bioware has published.

So why did the developers move it? Most likely it was game mechanics, or rather, button mechanics. If Redcliffe had remained where it started out, it would have made the button placement on the Origins map rather awkward. It is so close to Haven that players might have confused the two.

(There is a similar problem with where the Temple of Sacred Ashes should be. It should be very close to the edge of the game play map in the mountains to the west of the town, but in game it appears an equivalent of 35-65 miles south of Haven so it won’t be so close to the edge and it won’t obscure any writing.)

And most casual game players wouldn’t think there was anything strange about Redcliffe being so far from Orlais and Orzammar. In fact I was really glad it was so close to Lothering the first time I played Origins. Only when you are really examining the geography of Ferelden does its placement become questionable. Am I 100% sure this is the reason? Not at all, but the map sure is more balanced with Redcliffe at the bottom of the lake and easier to read, all of which is desirable in game play.

And then there’s the problem of DAI’s map. Sigh. So….I replayed a large part of the Hinterlands and did a bunch of math for this post. And I now have a bit of a problem with my own map.

I am pretty good with spacial relationships and so I used a lot of landmarks and large scale measurements to place various locations on the map I shared. That works well when adding towns, temples, landmarks, etc from the various published maps, but it doesn’t work so well for the highly detailed area maps in Inquisition.

I confess that I should have done a bit more math when I started to add Inquisition zones to my map. If I had I would realized that this small neon green dot you see above is the equivalent of about 5 square miles, depending on which map scale you use. I went with the smaller 1” = 50 miles scale. That dot is 1/16” x 1/16”. That means there is more than enough space for the whole Hinterlands map, which is about 2-3 square miles, to fit into that tiny green square. Wow.

(BTW, I went out to the interwebs to see if others people had come up with a similar area number, and found an estimate that all of the areas in the game put together (minus DLC) is about 45 square miles. They probably went with the larger 1” = 70 miles. That would make Thedas about the size of Western Europe, I think.)

So the reason it is difficult to figure out the DAI landmarks on the Thedas map is that the map is far too small for such minute detail. I’m going to have to ponder what to do now that I know the true scale we are dealing with and update my map accordingly.

Thanks for the ask! It made me do math, and we’ll get a better map at the end as a result. :)

-MM

#dragon age #dragon age lore #dragon age meta #dragon age geography #thedas #mapping thedas #thedas map #dragon age map #dragon age inquisition #ferelden #redcliffe #hinterlands #reference #wend the wyrds a wondering #morta's musings

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