Dragon Age: The Ferelden Scrolls #3 - Iron Bull's Nipples*

And Elfnonymous too

Feature by Alec Meer Co-founder

Published on Nov. 25, 2014

Continuing my Dragon Age: Inquisition diary. Earlier chapters here, and once again there are spoilers of a sort.

I haven't been super-impressed by my battlechums to date. Whenever I talk to Cassandra I feel as though she's forever on the cusp of admonishing me for being late with my homework. Disco-chested sex dwarf Varric walks the walk (and you can tell by the way he uses his walk, he's anyone's man) but I couldn't say he's talking the talk just yet. Egg-faced spirit-botherer Solas just makes me feel weird, and not in a climbing the rope at gym class way.

I'm pretty relieved to have recruited two new battlechums. They're far more entertaining. And, er, maybe they are a bit more on the climbing the rope at gym class spectrum.

After a vaguely irritating quest involving searching for red handkerchiefs in Orlais, Elfnonymous joined the party. Manic, irreverent Sera belongs to The Friends of Red Jenny, a guerilla protest group whose anti-nobility activities comprise the lethal and the mischievous.

Her stated aim is to be Robin Hood (though I had her learn how to use daggers and stealth, seeing as Varric was already doing the ranged rogue thing for us), but so far she seems very much in it for the lolz. Stealing people's trousers, for instance. She gave them to me to sell afterwards, but I'm disappointed to report that the traders would only offer me 16 Dragon-groats for them.

Sera's a laugh. She doesn't take much of anything seriously, which is a breath of fresh air amid all the hand-wringing about Templars vs Mages, the big green holes in the sky and whether I've been sent by a god or am the anti-Christ. She steals kills from the rest of the party, and laughs about it when they complain. She has already deemed me "well fit." Oh, and she's got a cool fringe. Do I fancy her a bit? Maaaaaaaaaaybe, but right now I'm fixated on someone else's body.

Mercenary boss/self-confessed spy The Iron Bull is Qunari like I am, though he did say that I don't count because I wasn't raised under under the same religion. We do get into it about the religious stuff a bit, which is a conversation for another time, and a whole lot of other topics about our race, this land and his past too. I talk to Bull more than I do anyone else, but what I'm really doing whenever I chat to him is checking out his nipples.

The Iron Bull's body is fascinating. He's both muscley and fat; sometimes he looks like horned Adonis, sometimes he looks like Obelix wearing a Goth hat. How big must the collarbone necessary to support shoulders quite that broad be? Are those pecs or moobs? Or is it just that the torso's normal size but the head tiny? And should the nipples be quite that far south?

Despite being Qunari, I don't have much of an idea what a topless male Qunari is supposed to look like. For some strange reason my mental image of warrior men going on massive fantasy adventures always looks like a hybrid of Tyler Durden and He-Man. The Iron Bull very much does not fit this image, and I find him infinitely more fascinating because of it. He's both grotesque and magnificent. He's clearly raw power, but I badly want to know just how far out that belly will flop if he ever takes off that girdle. I'm not unconvinced that I'll find out before too long.

It's the nipples I keep going back to, though. The pecs are like fatty paving slaps, sure, but those are some pretty damn big nipples too. They're wider than his chin. They's so low-slung. Almost an udder. What is the story of the nipples, and of the vast, almost tectonic chest-squares on which they sit? Why are they so mesmeric despite looking kind of awful?

If there's one thing I like even more than The Iron Bull's nipples, it's how he says goodbye: