Name: the Iron Bull Canon: Dragon Age: Inquisition Canon Point: After Inquisition ends, before Trespasser Age: The game itself doesn’t say but the guy who wrote Bull puts his age at mid to late 30s.
History: Until the age of about twelve his name was a string of numbers - or an informal nickname, Ashkaari - because his culture, the Qun, names its people based on their job title. Once he was placed in the ben-hassrath and got the title of Hissrad, he made a reputation for himself breaking up smuggling and spy rings and capturing dissidents who wanted to escape the Qun’s strict rules and harsh punishments. Then because, he says, ‘they needed someone who could fight and hunt down problems,’ Hissrad was sent to Seheron, an island between Par Vollen - a large island controlled by the Qun - and the land controlled by the neighboring culture of Tevinter.
The fight between the Qun and Tevinter isn’t gentle on Seheron and, though the average Qunari sent to fight there can only deal with it for about two years before they either die or have to go home for their own good, Hissrad fought there for almost ten. After he declared himself unfit for duty and turned himself in to the reeducators they reassigned him to the mainland, away from Par Vollen, to pose as a Qunari dissident - a tal-vashoth - and work as a mercenary to send the Qun information.
A new job required a new role, and to play that role he needed a name to fit - so he chose the Iron Bull, a name that calls attention to the way people outside of Par Vollen tend to think of Qunari, and puts him in control of the way people see him. The mercenary company he started out in, Fisher’s Bleeders, wasn’t run to his satisfaction so he took himself and Fisher’s best men and made a mercenary company of his own, and is well into running it by the time Dragon Age: Inquisition takes place.
It’s about then that some weird stuff goes down involving the Fade, a - as the fandom wiki calls it - ‘metaphysical realm’ tied to their own that holds demons, spirits, and, according to many, the place people’s souls go after they die. The Qun tells Bull to investigate and keep an eye on the force organized to deal with the Fade problem - the Inquisition - and he responds by telling the Inquisitor that he’s a spy almost as soon as he contacts them and (depending on player choice) getting himself recruited. Over the course of the game’s events, depending on player choices, Bull can meet and get friendly with a spirit from the fade - notable for reasons I’ll explain in the personality section - and he can leave the Qun and in doing so wholly embrace the role of Iron Bull, both of which I play him as having done.
Personality: - dedicated to the people around him One of the most important things, to the Iron Bull - in the Qun or out of it - is being a part of a group, and making sure that group is running efficiently. Paying attention to the dynamics of the people around him is something he’s always done ever since he was a child tattling to his caregivers about which other child was about to cause trouble or who was going to need help and it’s a trait that growing up under the Qun only encouraged, with its emphasis on the good of the many and its minimization of the importance of the individual.
Bull’s emotional need to care for others and his practical need to keep each piece of a larger whole healthy, happy, and functioning efficiently are tied together almost too tightly to separate, and his training as a ben-hassrath only made him better at it. He reads from context and body language what people are feeling, decides what they need to be emotionally at their best, and if they’re someone he thinks of - even temporarily - as ‘his’, he will do his best to make sure that he meets that need.
This could potentially backfire, as when he’s particularly emotional - say, after leaving the Qun - he reacts badly to direct expressions of concern and downplays his feelings about it, not hiding his emotions but describing them in a very casual way that’s designed not to give anyone else any room to help. The people around him are the priority, and he is just a tool to serve that need.
- grounded in reality He’s very rooted in the physical, in the logic of the normal world and the way things work there. If he’s on the Inquisitor’s team when they go into the Fade we see one of the few times when he actually grumbles and acts grouchy and prickly, and afterward asks the Inquisitor to help him get over his residual fear of the demon who fought them there. His fear of and distaste for unnatural things, physics that aren’t reliable, the Fade and everything in it, is tied into his fear of uncontrolled power, which ties into his fear of himself and the harm his own strength and skill could do if it were as uncontrolled and unpredictable as magic and demons seem, to him, to be.
When he thinks of the Fade, of strange, unnatural things, he thinks of demons that come from there and mess with people’s minds, take over their bodies, he thinks of the mages whose weird, physics defying powers come from the Fade and whose powers, in the hands of someone unsuited to control them, can do genuinely horrible things. He thinks of this memory of his childhood that Cole, a spirit Bull comes to care for, picks out of Bull’s head: “Lying awake, sheets soaked in sweat, afraid to call the Tamassrans. Shadows make shapes in the dark. If it gets in my head, how do I cut it out? Itching, shaking, tears slide cold down my cheeks. ‘Tama, I'm scared.’"
The Gentry, the abilities they have, and the creatures they control, are definitely going to remind Bull of everything that shouldn’t be, of the kind of unpredictability he can’t really wrap his mind around.
- order over chaos This is one of the traits that comes in large part from his upbringing. A good way to talk about it is to talk about the way he thinks about dragons, and about fighting in general. After fighting and killing a dragon with Bull the Inquisitor can talk to him about it, and he says the Qun calls dragons ataashi, which means ‘the glorious ones’. If the Inquisitor expresses regret over killing something Qunari think so highly of he says, “Dragons are the embodiment of raw power. But it’s all uncontrolled, savage… So they need to be destroyed. Taming the wild. Order out of chaos.” This is shortly after saying he was so impressed and excited by the dragon and the way it fought that he’s probably going to jerk off to the memory of fighting it later, though, so it’s safe to say the Iron Bull isn’t opposed to a little chaos, under the right circumstances.
In fact he relishes chaos, throws himself into battle, drinks stuff so strong that it feels like it kills the nerves in a person's throat when they drink it and brags with Blackwall about how many different pieces he’s chopped his enemies into. He tells Sera, “Finding someone who needs killing and just taking them apart… Brutally, skillfully, so their last living thought is realizing that I’m stronger and smarter than they are? Yeah, I like that a lot.” The ‘someone who needs killing’ is an important detail there, especially considering how he clarifies to Sera a moment later: “I didn’t say it was healthy. Look, I can either press those feelings down until I snap and hurt someone I care about… Or we can go find some bad guys who need to die.” The Iron Bull is all about chaos and power and combining the two, but only as long as it serves a purpose he can live with, as long as he knows that he’s the one who’s in control.
- a teensy bit manipulative He tends to shape himself around what people or situations need him to be. There’s definitely a limit to this - we never see him step very far outside the cheerful, vibrant persona of ‘mercenary leader Iron Bull’ - but he’s clearly very aware of how people see him, how they think about him, and adapts to that depending on what he thinks needs to happen. When Vivienne gets onto him for using her name and insists he call her by a formal title he corrects himself by calling her ma’am, and continues to call her by that title for the rest of the game, has friendly but subservient conversations with her where he takes orders from her, and generally interacts with her very differently from how he interacts with anyone else.
He tells the Inquisitor right away that he’s spying on them and still gains their trust so well that years after the events of the game, if Bull never leaves the Qun, it takes the Inquisitor completely by surprise when he betrays them to side with the instigators of a Qunari plot. That wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t just him deciding to tell the Inquisitor about the spy thing and then happening to gain their trust. It was calculated. Naming himself the Iron Bull says he knows very well how people see him, and he knows how to use that. It’s like he tells Cole at one point: “Ben-Hassrath, Kid. We can use anything.”
If the Inquisitor starts a sexual relationship with Bull he’ll even outright say it: “Ben-hassrath training, remember? Grew up learning to manipulate people. When it’s a hostile target, you give them what they want. But when it’s someone you care about, you give them what they need.” Manipulation isn’t necessarily a negative thing, to the Iron Bull. It’s a tool. It’s even part of the name the Qun gave him. When he meets up with another Qunari, Gatt, the Inquisitor asks why Gatt is calling him Hissrad and he says, “My title was ‘Hissrad,’ because I was assigned to secret work. You can translate it as ‘Keeper of Illusions,’ or-” and Gatt interrupts and says, “Liar. It means liar.”
Bull doesn’t like not being in control of the way it’s introduced to the Inquisitor - he looks irritated and replies to Gatt with, “Well, you don’t have to say it like that,” but he doesn’t actually argue.
Where and how did your character enter the Hedge? Since I’m setting this after the game I’m just making this up, but I’m thinking maybe the Chargers - Bull’s mercenary company - got drawn into fighting in a populated area somehow. Spending so long in Seheron made him dislike that kind of thing, urban combat, so things might get messy enough that he could get drawn away from his team, and he might be twitchy enough about it that if he thinks a noncombatant is in trouble because of the fighting - especially a child - he could be drawn through some kind of maze of back alleys looking for whoever he thinks shouldn’t be in the line of fire.
Skillsets: - Very strong - Very experienced with combat - Notices, remembers, and makes sense of little details which he uses to read people’s emotional state, and do things like ferret out spies and notice abnormal changes in guard rotations - His fighting style involves fighting more fiercely the more he’s hurt. It’s compared to the reaver skill which in the world of Dragon Age might be tied to magic, but he says he’s not a reaver and just stumbled on a similar style of combat designed to intimidate his enemies, so it’s an inherent thing. Wounds might eventually stop him but before they do, they won’t usually slow him down. - Management/leadership experience, at least with smallish to medium sized groups of people.
Inventory: Just what he’s wearing - A leather pauldron, a huge leather belt-like thing, pants, shoes, his eye patch. (He would usually have an axe and an ankle brace, but I decided it would be more fun if those got taken away for having too much iron in them.)
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inachinashop) wrote2020-10-03 01:21 pm
Name: xiilnek
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Character Information
Name: the Iron Bull
Canon: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Canon Point: After Inquisition ends, before Trespasser
Age: The game itself doesn’t say but the guy who wrote Bull puts his age at mid to late 30s.
History:
Until the age of about twelve his name was a string of numbers - or an informal nickname, Ashkaari - because his culture, the Qun, names its people based on their job title. Once he was placed in the ben-hassrath and got the title of Hissrad, he made a reputation for himself breaking up smuggling and spy rings and capturing dissidents who wanted to escape the Qun’s strict rules and harsh punishments. Then because, he says, ‘they needed someone who could fight and hunt down problems,’ Hissrad was sent to Seheron, an island between Par Vollen - a large island controlled by the Qun - and the land controlled by the neighboring culture of Tevinter.
The fight between the Qun and Tevinter isn’t gentle on Seheron and, though the average Qunari sent to fight there can only deal with it for about two years before they either die or have to go home for their own good, Hissrad fought there for almost ten. After he declared himself unfit for duty and turned himself in to the reeducators they reassigned him to the mainland, away from Par Vollen, to pose as a Qunari dissident - a tal-vashoth - and work as a mercenary to send the Qun information.
A new job required a new role, and to play that role he needed a name to fit - so he chose the Iron Bull, a name that calls attention to the way people outside of Par Vollen tend to think of Qunari, and puts him in control of the way people see him. The mercenary company he started out in, Fisher’s Bleeders, wasn’t run to his satisfaction so he took himself and Fisher’s best men and made a mercenary company of his own, and is well into running it by the time Dragon Age: Inquisition takes place.
It’s about then that some weird stuff goes down involving the Fade, a - as the fandom wiki calls it - ‘metaphysical realm’ tied to their own that holds demons, spirits, and, according to many, the place people’s souls go after they die. The Qun tells Bull to investigate and keep an eye on the force organized to deal with the Fade problem - the Inquisition - and he responds by telling the Inquisitor that he’s a spy almost as soon as he contacts them and (depending on player choice) getting himself recruited. Over the course of the game’s events, depending on player choices, Bull can meet and get friendly with a spirit from the fade - notable for reasons I’ll explain in the personality section - and he can leave the Qun and in doing so wholly embrace the role of Iron Bull, both of which I play him as having done.
Personality:
- dedicated to the people around him
One of the most important things, to the Iron Bull - in the Qun or out of it - is being a part of a group, and making sure that group is running efficiently. Paying attention to the dynamics of the people around him is something he’s always done ever since he was a child tattling to his caregivers about which other child was about to cause trouble or who was going to need help and it’s a trait that growing up under the Qun only encouraged, with its emphasis on the good of the many and its minimization of the importance of the individual.
Bull’s emotional need to care for others and his practical need to keep each piece of a larger whole healthy, happy, and functioning efficiently are tied together almost too tightly to separate, and his training as a ben-hassrath only made him better at it. He reads from context and body language what people are feeling, decides what they need to be emotionally at their best, and if they’re someone he thinks of - even temporarily - as ‘his’, he will do his best to make sure that he meets that need.
This could potentially backfire, as when he’s particularly emotional - say, after leaving the Qun - he reacts badly to direct expressions of concern and downplays his feelings about it, not hiding his emotions but describing them in a very casual way that’s designed not to give anyone else any room to help. The people around him are the priority, and he is just a tool to serve that need.
- grounded in reality
He’s very rooted in the physical, in the logic of the normal world and the way things work there. If he’s on the Inquisitor’s team when they go into the Fade we see one of the few times when he actually grumbles and acts grouchy and prickly, and afterward asks the Inquisitor to help him get over his residual fear of the demon who fought them there. His fear of and distaste for unnatural things, physics that aren’t reliable, the Fade and everything in it, is tied into his fear of uncontrolled power, which ties into his fear of himself and the harm his own strength and skill could do if it were as uncontrolled and unpredictable as magic and demons seem, to him, to be.
When he thinks of the Fade, of strange, unnatural things, he thinks of demons that come from there and mess with people’s minds, take over their bodies, he thinks of the mages whose weird, physics defying powers come from the Fade and whose powers, in the hands of someone unsuited to control them, can do genuinely horrible things. He thinks of this memory of his childhood that Cole, a spirit Bull comes to care for, picks out of Bull’s head: “Lying awake, sheets soaked in sweat, afraid to call the Tamassrans. Shadows make shapes in the dark. If it gets in my head, how do I cut it out? Itching, shaking, tears slide cold down my cheeks. ‘Tama, I'm scared.’"
The Gentry, the abilities they have, and the creatures they control, are definitely going to remind Bull of everything that shouldn’t be, of the kind of unpredictability he can’t really wrap his mind around.
- order over chaos
This is one of the traits that comes in large part from his upbringing. A good way to talk about it is to talk about the way he thinks about dragons, and about fighting in general. After fighting and killing a dragon with Bull the Inquisitor can talk to him about it, and he says the Qun calls dragons ataashi, which means ‘the glorious ones’. If the Inquisitor expresses regret over killing something Qunari think so highly of he says, “Dragons are the embodiment of raw power. But it’s all uncontrolled, savage… So they need to be destroyed. Taming the wild. Order out of chaos.” This is shortly after saying he was so impressed and excited by the dragon and the way it fought that he’s probably going to jerk off to the memory of fighting it later, though, so it’s safe to say the Iron Bull isn’t opposed to a little chaos, under the right circumstances.
In fact he relishes chaos, throws himself into battle, drinks stuff so strong that it feels like it kills the nerves in a person's throat when they drink it and brags with Blackwall about how many different pieces he’s chopped his enemies into. He tells Sera, “Finding someone who needs killing and just taking them apart… Brutally, skillfully, so their last living thought is realizing that I’m stronger and smarter than they are? Yeah, I like that a lot.” The ‘someone who needs killing’ is an important detail there, especially considering how he clarifies to Sera a moment later: “I didn’t say it was healthy. Look, I can either press those feelings down until I snap and hurt someone I care about… Or we can go find some bad guys who need to die.” The Iron Bull is all about chaos and power and combining the two, but only as long as it serves a purpose he can live with, as long as he knows that he’s the one who’s in control.
- a teensy bit manipulative
He tends to shape himself around what people or situations need him to be. There’s definitely a limit to this - we never see him step very far outside the cheerful, vibrant persona of ‘mercenary leader Iron Bull’ - but he’s clearly very aware of how people see him, how they think about him, and adapts to that depending on what he thinks needs to happen. When Vivienne gets onto him for using her name and insists he call her by a formal title he corrects himself by calling her ma’am, and continues to call her by that title for the rest of the game, has friendly but subservient conversations with her where he takes orders from her, and generally interacts with her very differently from how he interacts with anyone else.
He tells the Inquisitor right away that he’s spying on them and still gains their trust so well that years after the events of the game, if Bull never leaves the Qun, it takes the Inquisitor completely by surprise when he betrays them to side with the instigators of a Qunari plot. That wasn’t a coincidence, it wasn’t just him deciding to tell the Inquisitor about the spy thing and then happening to gain their trust. It was calculated. Naming himself the Iron Bull says he knows very well how people see him, and he knows how to use that. It’s like he tells Cole at one point: “Ben-Hassrath, Kid. We can use anything.”
If the Inquisitor starts a sexual relationship with Bull he’ll even outright say it: “Ben-hassrath training, remember? Grew up learning to manipulate people. When it’s a hostile target, you give them what they want. But when it’s someone you care about, you give them what they need.” Manipulation isn’t necessarily a negative thing, to the Iron Bull. It’s a tool. It’s even part of the name the Qun gave him. When he meets up with another Qunari, Gatt, the Inquisitor asks why Gatt is calling him Hissrad and he says, “My title was ‘Hissrad,’ because I was assigned to secret work. You can translate it as ‘Keeper of Illusions,’ or-” and Gatt interrupts and says, “Liar. It means liar.”
Bull doesn’t like not being in control of the way it’s introduced to the Inquisitor - he looks irritated and replies to Gatt with, “Well, you don’t have to say it like that,” but he doesn’t actually argue.
Where and how did your character enter the Hedge?
Since I’m setting this after the game I’m just making this up, but I’m thinking maybe the Chargers - Bull’s mercenary company - got drawn into fighting in a populated area somehow. Spending so long in Seheron made him dislike that kind of thing, urban combat, so things might get messy enough that he could get drawn away from his team, and he might be twitchy enough about it that if he thinks a noncombatant is in trouble because of the fighting - especially a child - he could be drawn through some kind of maze of back alleys looking for whoever he thinks shouldn’t be in the line of fire.
Skillsets:
- Very strong
- Very experienced with combat
- Notices, remembers, and makes sense of little details which he uses to read people’s emotional state, and do things like ferret out spies and notice abnormal changes in guard rotations
- His fighting style involves fighting more fiercely the more he’s hurt. It’s compared to the reaver skill which in the world of Dragon Age might be tied to magic, but he says he’s not a reaver and just stumbled on a similar style of combat designed to intimidate his enemies, so it’s an inherent thing. Wounds might eventually stop him but before they do, they won’t usually slow him down.
- Management/leadership experience, at least with smallish to medium sized groups of people.
Inventory:
Just what he’s wearing - A leather pauldron, a huge leather belt-like thing, pants, shoes, his eye patch. (He would usually have an axe and an ankle brace, but I decided it would be more fun if those got taken away for having too much iron in them.)
Sample:
Here