#*be culturally respectful tho*

[recreationalfanfics]

How the RoR Gods are in canon: We would never date a mortal, they're so beneath us!

Fanfic Writers: *insert John Cena Meme* ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT??

[aq2003]

the thing that gets me the most about culture warrior weebs going "the anime designs for the greek gods are so much better than the woke leftist designs in hades" is that they are simultaneously the ones actively getting mad at hermes being east asian in the game. like they want to fetishize asian aesthetics so bad bc they cant let go of their oversexualized anime waifus but the minute an asian person actually gets depicted they lose their fucking minds

[vigilskept]

gnashing my teeth thinking about how veilguard talks about the gods only as a joke when they could've gone somewhere truly crazy.... you're so right.

Yeah... you get it. It's just such a missed opportunity!

I don't even mind the jokey tone they use a lot of the time, because we all joke about things we struggle to understand/cope with.

Except Veilguard refuses to let you even try to broach the subject beyond that surface level. In fact, when it does let you engage with it at all, it manages to make things even less nuanced!

I'm just going to talk about Bellara's quest here since it's the most directly linked with the elven gods, and it's already a lot. Fundamentally, her companion quest is asking us two things:

Should elves be blamed for the actions of the Evanuris?

Should they preserve any of their past at all?

The first one is absurd to even begin with. It's not even a good or interesting take on the (very christian!) question: "Are we responsible for the sins of our ancestors?"

The Evanuris are not the ancestors of modern elves. Dalish religion implies that modern elves descend from those who the rebels never freed from slavery to the Evanuris.

This setup is already awful without looking at any of the parallels Bioware has (intentionally) drawn between the elves of Thedas and Jewish/Indigenous people. I have to put the rest of this under the cut because I genuinely don't think it can be shortened without making it sound flippant. In the context of the coding of the elves, the theological/social implications of all of this are so much worse.

TLDR: the indigenous/jewish coding of the elves makes bioware's treatment of elven religion in veilguard thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. they did not have to write themselves into this corner. there was a way of handling this lore reveal without the implication of elven religion (again, jewish/indigenous coded) being obsolete

So, the religion of the Dalish was part of their enslavement. It's the belief they were forced into by the cruel gods they are still devoted to. That's already pretty bad. How could it get worse, you might wonder?

Whether Bioware deviated from their initial inspirations for the elves or not, the implications for these lore reveals in light of those parallels are particularly cruel. Those two core questions in Bellara's quest? Yeah. Those have both been levied against the oppressed groups that Bioware chose to draw inspiration from. Both historically and presently. To justify atrocities against them.

And to be clear, Bioware does not deviate from or subvert the usual indigeous and jewish-coding of the elves in their writing here. If anything, they end up actively endorsing a very significant element of antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiment.

Indigenous-Coding

Advocates of colonisation have always justified it by arguing they were 'saving' groups of people who were stuck in the past. They had been ‘left in the dark’ through ignorance of Christianity. In the more secular sense, this was framed as Europeans having journeyed through history to reach enlightenment, while the rest of the world was still in an ‘uncivilized’ state.

Christianity and progress had to be brought to these people to save their souls and bring them into the future with everyone else. Their Gods? There were only two possible ways to frame those. Either they were not real at all, or they were evil. Either way, they were obsolete.

In the Americas, these arguments were still used when corralling indigenous children into residential schools or tearing them from communities through the adoption system. Governments pushed the idea that they had to be forced to assimilate because they were 'backward' in their practices and beliefs.

In the settler-colonial state Canada, where Bioware is based, it's still common enough to hear people justify all of this as having been done "for their own good." Even those who admit that the ways colonization was perpetuated were cruel will still try to defend it by telling you, "it was bad, but their ancestors weren't saints either."

Sounding painfully familiar yet? A little uncomfortable in the context of Bellara's questline?

Jewish-Coding

Since the dawn of Christian Church, Jewish people have had a very fraught place in Christian theology. Christianity claims that that the coming of the messiah in the person of Jesus Christ makes the religion of Judaism obsolete. Christians believed the obvious answer to this problem was that Jewish people should convert.

When many did not, they were labeled as ignorant, obstinate, stuck in the past. They were so focused on their history that they couldn't see the truth which had been revealed in the present. There’s a significant legacy of this idea in Christian artwork with depictions of Synagoga blindfolded next to the clear eyed Ecclesia. You still hear echoes of this sentiment in antisemitic language today.

As for the nature of the Jewish God... there is some deviation here. For some Christians, He is God the Father, and He is good. For others — and this idea has been around from early Christianity till now — He is the Creator of the material world, but He is evil.

There are innumerable variations of Christian gnosticism that probably wouldn't be productive to get into on a Dragon Age Blog. What I need to underline here though, is that the idea of the Old Testament God as the devil/the demiurge/fundamentally evil, has been used to justify atrocity towards Jewish people for over a thousand years.

Should elves be blamed then? For the sundering of the Titans? For the Veil? For the Blight? For the evils of this world, created by their Gods?

Implications for Veilguard

Not only is religion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard often devoid of nuance or ignored outright, when the game does engage with it at all, it does so in a way that quite literally draws on these incredibly harmful antisemitic and anti-indigenous sentiments that have been (and still are) used to perpetuate real harm.

To be clear, I don't think the writing here intends to endorse the idea that elves should be blamed for any of what's going on. Bellara's anxieties are being projected onto her people as a whole while she grapples with what this all means for her, I get that. In fact, you could be generous and read some of this as a critique of this particular kind of anti-indigenous/jewish bigotry.

However, I don't think that absolves the writers of any of the implications they've created by confirming that the elven pantheon did exist and was canonically evil.

Elements of Dalish/elven culture might be preserved after all this, but the conclusion the game railroads you into is that their religion is obsolete. Just like Judaism. Just like the many Indigenous religions around the world. Except in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s no longer just the bigotry of outsiders claiming that to be the case. It’s now the objective truth of the setting.

Going forward, the elves of Thedas can keep their culture, but they can’t practice their religion. If they continued to practice, they would be framed the way the Venatori are: evil and stuck in the past. This really can’t be overstated: this is the exact rhetoric that has justified centuries of violence and oppression of Jewish and Indigenous people. This rhetoric is still around and still weaponized.

It’s so cruel to create an in world ‘lineage’ that draws so heavily from their cultures and histories, then validate the rhetoric that has been used to hurt them. At best, it’s thoughtless. But as a company based in a settler-colonial state, this is something they should’ve put thought into, given that they chose to code their elves and Jewish and Indigenous. That was their responsibility, actually.

What gets me about all this is that they actually didn't need to force that conclusion at all. They could have kept the Evanuris as cruel tyrants without demonising the Creators and their worship at the same time.

The Evanuris weren't always Gods. They weren't even always rulers.

In Trespasser, when asked how they became Gods, Solas tells Lavellan that they did so slowly. That it started with a war. That fear bred a desire for simplicity. For right and wrong. For chains of command. That generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods.

Veilguard confirms all of this. The addition it makes is that before all this, the first elves were spirits who made their bodies out of the Titans. This all occurred over the course of thousands of years.

None of this needs to be retconned in order to allow for a respectful yet nuanced portrayal of religion!

TLDR pt2: bioware, u could’ve avoided literally ALL of this by making the evanuris part of a priestly class who seized power after the war with the titans. it wouldn’t even have undermined ur lore! u could’ve kept dalish religion alive! u could’ve implied complex political dynamics for your ancient elves without even having to write it! why didn’t you even try?

Trying to Fix This Mess

Say the elves took their bodies from the Titans and settled the lands of Thedas. Say the Titans even allowed this for a time. The dwarves were made from their own bodies after all.

Yet the elves didn't have the same connection with the Titans as the dwarves did. They had no stone-sense, so they couldn't understand the Titans' song.

Generations down the line, some of them took too much from the Titans. More than they were willing to give. That was when the Titans lashed out, making the earth tremble so that all the elves had built crumbled beneath them.

And what if the firstborn among the elves had taken up priesthood to guide the younger ones. They were closer to spirits than the elves that were born into this world, and so the younger ones looked to them for guidance. Maybe they were the ones who were trusted to reach out to the more powerful of the spirits who chosen stay in the Fade, their old kin who preferred to keep their distance from the physical world to preserve the essence of what they were. The spirits of Justice, of Benevolence, of Craft. Those who the elven people paid homage to, and trusted to preserve them in turn.

So when everything seemed to fall apart, the elves turned to their Keepers, their priests, and asked of them what they ought to do. How could they make the earth stop shaking? What would they have to do to be at peace again?

Whatever the spirits themselves may have responded, many of the Keepers (among them the Evanuris) took up arms and chose war. They saw it could be won so they fought, sundering Titans from their dreams and stilling the land.

And yet there was no peace.

Some Keepers sought to hold on to their power as generals, and wanted to wage war on new shores to keep it. Some Keepers thought they had already gone too far, claiming they had acted without the guidance of the spirits who hadn't wanted war.

These Keepers could've caused chaos and endless bloodshed, so the Evanuris formed their alliance to suppress the others. Likely, they thought they were doing so for the benefit of all the elven people. More war meant more death, and it was needless now that the land was still. And even if what they did to the Titans was wrong, it was done and they could not fix it. Better to silence those who meant to stir up fear among the people.

The Evanuris fought until they were the last faction left, naming the few holdouts the Forgotten Ones. They were praised for bringing peace to Elvhenan, and trusting in their guidance their people crowned them as rulers.

Yet some dissent always remained. None of them were infallible. They were no longer spirits, they hadn't been for thousands of years. They were now more accustomed to command than to priesthood after all that war. They had drawn on the power they had stolen from the Titans to gain the advantage over their enemies, and the corruption of the Blight was starting creep in, ever-so-slowly.

Maybe some of the people, unhappy with their rule, started to voice the thought that was expressed by their rival Keepers once more: that the Evanuris had grown distant from the spirits. That Elgar'nan didn't serve Justice anymore. That Mythal had strayed from Benevolence.

So Evanuris took the mantle of godhood for themselves. It was only for peace and stability.

It would be too dangerous if anyone could claim they were deviating from the will of the spirits, so they would claim they were those great spirits. Elgar'nan was Justice, Mythal was Benevolence. They would use their rule only for the benefit of the people, not abuse their power.

And there you go. None of what I've written above can't be neatly incorporated into the existing lore of Veilguard. It leaves the elves of Thedas precisely where they started in Dragon Age: Origins. Distant from their ancient Gods, trying to pick up the pieces of their forgotten past.

[gavalaa]

7/? Of my Genshin redesign, Barbara Pegg! You can find the rest on my account <3

-

I dropped the nun theme and made her a devout follower of the church who is a bard and idol, who expresses her love for mondstat through creative freedom and music. She’s a community leader and sets up a lot of social projects and loves to write music. I hope you like the design! I love how it came out!! <3

[moghedien]

Act 2 of BG3 is just about half-elves antagonizing each other and making it your problem

[akkivee]

kuko n saru in the same room .what will happen

while kuukou has the ability to mesh with anyone, i still imagine his interactions with saru would go just about as well as terra trying to get saru to do anything lmao

but who knows???? maybe saru’s extreme end tsundere-ness will unlock the evil side of kuukou’s people reading skills and is about to play saru like a fiddle to be his friend LOL

[boxwinebaddie]

smhhhh not me makin my thottopic satanicmanicpanic pixiescreamboy girlypoppunk ( ily marj ) crimson dawn super band an entire fake religion, or rather…

a sacreligion ;) xx <3

[constantvariations]

Started listening to A Court of Thorns and Roses out of morbid curiosity. Currently just under 4 hours in, and I have some Thoughts

Knowing that this is something of a Beauty and the Beast retelling, I find Feyre's family dynamics odd. Returning to them is her entire goal in Prythian, yet she doesn't even like any of them, which is why Maas had to shoehorn in that dumb vow Feyre made to her dying mother - whom she also didn't like all that much - at the age of eight. Her goal rings so hollow that I roll my eyes every time I hear about it or that stupid promise

This goal has another annoying layer to it. Escape takes up pretty much all of Feyre's inner monologue, yet the audience knows the story won't let it happen. Can't have a BatB if the Belle manages to flee before the romance has had time to grow. This makes the story drag something awful. There were times I stopped the audio because her plans left me groaning in frustration. If I never hear the word "treaty" ever again, it'll be too soon

And the way she avoids Tamlin at every opportunity is just wild. Even if he's the embodiment of everything gone wrong in her life, why would Feyre pass up a tour of the estate? Why not take the opportunity to study "the enemy" up close? Why go patrolling with the guy who blantantly and repeatedly states how much he wants her dead for what she did instead of the guy who is preventing everyone from doing that? Some of this can be chalked up to her being young, insecure, and untrained in social skills like her sisters, but it's so contrived at times

Considering how Feyre literally skinned his best friend, thus preventing any sort of dignified funeral service, Tamlin's incredibly tame, especially in comparison to the og Disney!Beast. He doesn't yell at her, doesn't threaten, doesn't make demands outside of, "please stop doing things that will get you killed." First impressions aside, Tamlin reads as more socially awkward and irritable than a beast with a dangerous temperment. I find his lameness quite charming, even if Feyre doesn't

It's odd that I'm so far in the book yet the only real interaction between our supposed love interests is the night that Tamlin fought the bog(?). I think this changed something for Tamlin, but Feyre remains unchanged towards him. She's incredibly stubborn, a trait I both have and admire, but her unwillingness to look beyond Tamlin's claws despite how courteous he is to his friend's killer is becoming ridiculous and dragging the plot. Just let him teach you to read already!

Another thing that's ridiculous is Feyre and her bad habit of knowing something is off yet doing a dumb thing anyway. With the wolf, she explicitly says that a creature of that size must be a fairy and kills it because of that only to backtrack and say it's not a fairy. This could be excused for adrenalin/first time killing a sentient being panic brain, but it happens again when her "father" comes to fairy town to rescue her. Feyre inwardly questions how he got to Prythian on a busted knee and some other logistical discrepancies but is willing to follow him into the woods despite these thoughts. She has absolutely zero survival instincts in fairy land. It's like she's trying to die in the dumbest way possible

I can already tell this is going to worm into my brain like RWBY and the MCU. I have a fondness for stories of great potential and even greater squandering. The characters are fun if ill used, and I'm curious about the world along with all the things I've been spoiled about

[the-acid-pear]

see the thing that gets me about the human centipede is that you're either a normie going to watch a movie and getting scared over nothing of you're a freak whos going like WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN?! and like both can backfire bc i cannot stress enough The Human Centipede is such a stupidly tame movie there's barely any blood at all but thing is what makes me be SO insane about it it's that Heiter's actor May He Rest In Peace just put his WHOLE PUSSY into playing him making it such a fucking enjoyable and hilarious movie.

Like you cannot go watch the human centipede first sequence expecting to be scared bc you'll get bored in the first 40 minutes of doomed yuri but you gotta embrace the sheer campiness of it. Nobody cares about the campiness bro. He makes chicken sounds. He makes horrible silly chicken noises. Are you listening to me.

[aroyams]

help now i'm thinking about kaoru mentoring tsumugi and anzu in the ways of managing idols, and them following her around like little ducklings 🥺🥺

[ablednt]

Granted I have the overall geographical and cultural knowledge of a 4th grader but from what I can tell the nuclear family model really does seem to be a white colonial invention

Different cultures have different approaches but I mainly hear about either large family units where multiple generations support each other and raise their children and grandchildren together or an "it takes a village" approach where children are raised somewhat communally

And I can't really speak on it much or claim that these families were free of abuse or that children aren't often an oppressed group basically everywhere I know of but the way ownership of your children is so engrained into white society is so bizarre

Like once you notice it you can't unnotice it even the most loving well meaning parents don't know what to do about it because everyone is so isolated from their own families and their own communities so you wind up with 1-2 parents who have full legal ownership of their child and are raised in a culture where you don't have personhood until you're 18 and all attempts at self actualization before them are seen as clueless rebellion. Like our culture is so divorced from the concept that a parent is someone who is helping mentor and care for their child so they can thrive as a fellow human being and it's actually so alarming

And ik this problem isn't unique to white and colonized people but it's honestly really soothing to hear about how other cultures approach and view parenting and community as a whole and to internalize it doesn't have to be this way

[jewishregulus]

YOUR USERNAME !!!!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️

YESSSS black family just objectively a jewish ass family to me . saw so many ppl saying they loveeee the catholic aesthetic on them but they just haven’t see the cuntiness of judaica passed down generations . also explains the family wreath ig

[akkivee]

finished my second round of curry and i had to re-rank them!!!!

🥇: 💙 mtc’s curry was actually immaculate like vee on that first round was so wrong it’s criminal lmao. it was rich, it was a little sweet and the slight spice was mild enough for me lmao. still sad the apple flavour never showed thru tho, but i think the sweetness of the curry came from those apples

🥈: ❤️ bb’s curry is still very good!!!! this second round tho had significantly less pieces of meat and veggies so i was kinda disappointed lol. but still a curry i would love to eat again!!!!

🥉: 🧡 FINE I ADMIT THE RICE CASSEROLE CURRY IS PEAK KUDOS FOR NOT BEING TRADITIONAL JP CURRY OR WHATEVER

🏅: 💜 i hate the spice but i love the flavour 😭

🏅: 💛 still felt a little disappointed by this curry lol i’m not entirely sure why either 😭😭😭

🏅: 🩶 as much as i was enjoying myself, my brain finally went ‘nah but that after kick is weird 😕’ towards the end there so i can’t further justify it lol

[alkeneater]

me when i draw mouthwashing characters only for aesthetic reasons (i really enjoy their appearance) and deep inside i know that this fandom is evil and will eat me alive for this

never cared less about this game or fandom, but yeah the characters look sick and i kinda enjoy drawing them sometimes

especially jimmy... yeah,,, my fav character to draw.... he looks so handsome,,,,, and he's kinda well-written too.....😳

but i'm not gonna post anything here bc half of the fandom still believes that liking a character equals defending their bad actions and being a bad person yourself 😕 at least my based friends can look at my sketches and not judge me

bro everybody's talking about media literacy but they explode at the thought of somebody liking a villain (even a well written one).... bru you were probably simpin for jeff the killer when u were 12.... why i'm not allowed to like a fictional character that is an interesting but wicked person..... it's not like i'm supporting crimes, i'm just admiring the story and designs,,,,,

fandom culture is so cooked oh my fucking god, every time i join a fandom it feels like walking through the minefield because for some reason ur not allowed to ship/like some characters/have an opinion/etc because some random people said so (they just like to brag about how morally correct they are) 🙄

why can't people just create a comfort zone for themselves and interact with the things they like and like-minded people

like i'm here in the clone high fandom and i do not share the same opinions with everyone, i don't like some pairings and despise some characters, but i'm not acting like everyone who like these things are bad people and should kys.... (yeah, i hate topher for example, but i know that his fans are cool as hell, and if you kin him that doesn't mean that you're a bad person-- so why can't people in the mw fandom think the same about jimmy ermmm)

yeah sorry that was kinda long but that's all i wanted to say ig

[jasdiary]

Disney Heroine Outfit Ask Game!

Can work for writing or art

🍎 - Snow White

👠 - Cinderella (Animated)

💍 - Cinderella (Live-Action)

💤 - Aurora

🧜‍♀️ - Ariel

🌹 - Belle

⏳ - Jasmine (Animated)

⌛️ - Jasmine (Live-Action)

🐉 - Mulan

🐸 - Tiana

☀️ - Rapunzel

🏹 - Merida

❄️ - Elsa

⛄️ - Anna

🧚🏻‍♀️ - Tinkerbell

✨ - Wendy Darling

💪 - Megara

🔎 - Jane Porter

🍰 - Alice Liddell

🌷 - Giselle (Animated)

💐 - Giselle (Live-Action)

[captain-of-silvenar]

Saw the teaser for the next ESO DLC and I'm gonna go rabid. I'm hyperfocusing now. I'm leaving my worldly possessions to run free in the jungle and be one with nature.

I just hope they do Bosmer justice in this DLC, or at least follow their damn lore for once please. Make Bosmers enjoy being Bosmer for once.