Trivia / Skyhold Academy Yearbook

• Genius Bonus:
  • In "Operation: Heart," in The Memory Band, Duke Prosper identifies Tallis as "Agent 3354242." On a telephone keypad, those numbers correspond to the letters spelling the name Felicia - as in Felicia Day, the actress who voiced Tallis in Mark of the Assassin.
  • In the second part of Bright Jewels, Chained City, Nicolas and the detectives think that "Sophia Perennis" is the name of a possible suspect. As it's eventually revealed, this actually means "absolute truth." In the real world, this Latin phrase is one of the core concepts of perennial philosophy.
• Hypothetical Casting: The authors included 'definitive' pictures of the celebrities they envisioned playing the all-human cast. Because everyone is human in the series, they don't look exactly like their video game counterparts, but they kept it as close as possible.
  • Alistair: Ewan McGregor◊
  • Elissa: Rachel Nichols◊
  • Sebastian: Sam Heughan
  • Cullen: Henry Cavill
  • Evvy: Emily Blunt◊
  • Dorian: Santiago Cabrera
  • Varric: Michael Hurst◊ - he even has Varric's earrings!
  • Cassandra: Morena Baccarin
  • Hawke: Anne Hathaway
  • Bull: Jason Momoa
  • Solas: Mark Strong◊
  • Blackwall: Richard Armitage
  • Josephine: Angel Coulby
  • Leliana: Kate Winslet
  • Vivienne: Lupita Nyong'o
  • Michel: Simon Baker
  • Lace: Anna Popplewell◊
  • Felix: Theo James◊
  • Cole: Evan Peters. This crosses into Accidentally-Correct Writing territory, since it was not until after he was picked for the hypothetical casting that the authors discovered that David Gaider had described the character as looking like Evan Peters.
  • The Partners in Crime: Sarah Gilman (Rory), Charles Vandervaart (Jim), and Auli'i Cravalho (Nessa).
  • Krem: Froy Gutierrez ^note The authors really wanted to use a trans actor for the part but were unable to find one who looked like the character
  • Cullen's siblings: Natalie Dormer (Mia), Lucas Till (Branson), and Elisha Cuthbert (Rosalie)
  • Fenris: Jesse Williams◊
  • Bethany: Lily Collins. Doubles as a bit of a Casting Gag, since Lily Collins played Snow White in Mirror Mirror (2012) and there are a number of playful comparisons made between Bethany and that princess.
  • Mahanon: Aiden Turner◊
• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Seen in the chapters of The Memory Band about the school reunion. In Disorienuptials, the authors invited any of their readers who wanted to be students at Skyhold Academy to submit the names they wanted to use, and they were written into the story as being among the returning alumni. Any characters appearing at the reunion who aren't either from Dragon Age canon or already part of the SAY cast are this trope.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Nathaniel Howe is one of the Grey Wardens who appears in the series, although he's not identified by his actual name until one of the later installments. Nathaniel Trevelyan is Evvy's brother. Nathaniel is also Anthony Lavellan's middle name.
  • Evvy shares her name with Evangeline, the Templar from Asunder who befriended Cole. In this series, Cole reveals (in Life is a Roller Coaster) that there was an Evangeline who was kind to him when he was younger; the fact that the two characters have the same name is a large part of why he trusted Evvy so readily when he met her.
    • She also shares her name with Princess Evangeline, the ill-fated infant daughter of Emperor Florian, which provides a visual clue during the trivia contest at the school reunion.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • In a meta sense. The whole thing got started by a discussion about a specific post on Tumblr, but was actually fleshed out into a roleplay due to Lady Norbert losing her job. AuroraBorealia, a former coworker who had moved away, wanted to help her friend stave off her anxiety and depression by doing something completely pointless and silly; it provided much-needed distraction during the final weeks before the store where they had worked together closed for good. The result ended up being a much larger project than either one ever expected.
  • At the convention in Love is a Mystery, there's a scene in which Rory and Jim meet a reader who is a big fan of one of their stories and declares that the setting of the story "is my happy place!" This is actually something that happened to the real authors at their own convention, when they encountered a reader who said that very line about Skyhold Academy itself.
• Series Hiatus: Updates to the series ceased for about six months following the posting of Beauty and the Bloodsucker, due to the winter holidays and also because Lady Norbert moved house. The nonsense resumed in March 2019, though it has been sporadic ever since due to the authors' other projects.
• Spiritual Successor: The observant reader may note a number of similarities between this series and The Lions of Grand Forest, an AU Dragon Age: Inquisition duology by the same authors. Most particularly, they both have an awkward romance between Cullen Rutherford and Evangeline Trevelyan. The resemblance is intentional, with the explanation being that the "Lions" duology was written for publication while Skyhold Academy initially was not. Just for Fun, therefore, the later stories of SAY contain a number of vague references to the other series, with the implication being that The Lady and the Lion is another fanfic written by Rory and Jim.

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