#Jewish elves

[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.

[glamfellens]

sorry 4 always complaining but i am so over "the gods arent real" reveals . why are u so opposed to faith and the belief in something u cant comprehend fully but still devote urself to anyway. is that not a form of love. yawn.

[mageknife]

Drunk and trying to explain dragon age lore to my fiancé and got to the point of “if i start talking about the dwarves or the tranquil i’ll just get mad”

[extravagantliar]

also with everything we now know about the golus and how the cutting happened - it is real that some dwarves do not claim Andraste. They see her but she has no weight on their people

[kissingagrumpygiant]

Everyday you have to sit and wonder. Does the author of I Come To You With Nothing know they've changed the trajectory of so many lives

[magical-girl-coral]

I've been trying to write Judaism into DnD, and my original plan was to have Faeurn's first Jewish prophet pick one member from each race to adopt as his child to make that world's version of the twelve tribes of Israel. So I have him adopt three different half elves (High, forest, drow), a halfing, a half-orc, a gnome, a dwarf, a dragonborn, a human, a tiefling, and a Tabaxi but now I am stuck cause I ran out of races and I can't do any lizard ones for obvious reasons.

Help?

[revindicatedbyhistory-moved]

Why do both shadowrun and dragon age have elves as fantasy jews where does that cone from

[brekkie-e]

To the person who just tagged my Mythal post with why Merril should have been the expert, not Morrigan at the Tempal of Mythal who said it was like "having a Jewish person explain Islam."

It really really isn't. It's like a professor of anthropology who has spent no time living in the culture of their "expertise" lecturing a member of said culture on their own history. Not to mention the fact that all her knowledge on elvhen history and lore is genuinely stolen, not unlike the deeds of actual "historical researchers" from universities. Her knowledge on elvhen lore is not from being raised by Mythal- by and large- it is from literally stealing from a Dalish clan.

I sincerely disagree with bringing up actual in world religions, especially those two given the state of world events, to this. However, if thats the argument presented- Judaism and Islam are both Abrahamic religions. Neither party can give an entire and accurate explanation of the other's religion- but there is generally a basic understanding of certain concepts. But further removed from that, you're still discussing two people who are active members of said cultures. A better example of this in game would be Solas and a Dalish Inquisitor or Merril. Two members of their own very specific culture who's experiences may have similarities, but they are still seperated by their beliefs at the end of the day.

Morrigan is outside of the culture and the history and the religion- speaking on it with an authority she has not earned but stolen. It's really just. Not similar to two irl members of a religion/community arguing about their different beliefs. They're not her beliefs, they're her hyperfixation.

Not that at the end of the day I disagree with the sentiment to have Merril in Inquisition, especially at the temple. I love the idea of Solas, Merril, and Morrigan in that mission the weirdest combination of bickering possible. Merril being frustrated with both of them for talking down to the Dalish. Solas being annoyed at Merril for being wrong, but also getting defensive and mad at Morrigan for focusing on the Dalish being wrong over the wrong thing. Morrigan and Merril being mad Solas is spouting facts but not citing his sources. Solas and Merril both being exhausted by a human explaining elf stuff to them. It had potential. But they couldnt even fit the Dalish Inquisitor in to the scene so there definitely not finding room for Merril.

[xx-skullheartz-xx]

this is probably silly but why is dril on my dash isnt he openly an antisemite

[awwfullybigadventure]

My sister-in-law also showed me this, this is important to watch regardless how much like or dislike HP books, this is just important things to know and to think deeper.

hey do you think you could expand a bit on separating the art from the artist? clearly you’ve done it with jk rowling but what are your thoughts on it as a general idea?

okay, but you’re not going to like the answer.

here’s the truth: you can’t separate the art from the artist. not entirely. HP Lovecraft was an incredibly talented, but much more incredibly racist man. It would nice to say you don’t agree with his views but you can enjoy his works without that leaking in but…. well, I’m afraid that would be misunderstanding his books entirely.

Consider, for a second, that Lovecraft’s works were horror stories about extradimensional alien monsters having mutant children with humans, they were about invasions from distant monsters, they were about the purity of quaint European towns being tainted. Consider how this may have all been inflicted by the fact that he just simply despised anybody who wasn’t white. Consider how is opinions on “mixing the races” might fight into this; consider why being unable to maintain the “purity” of white Europe was the scariest thing of all to him.

This extends to Rowling too.

I would love to say we can just acknowledge that she is an awful, racist, antisemitic, transphobic person and then say “but at least her books are good,” because, well, they are, aren’t they? I would say so, for sure. But to suggest that one can separate her from them is…. ridiculous.

Consider why an antisemitic woman wrote about a species of goblins who live among us, but who for the most part keep to themselvesand are maybe a little bit oppressed by the institution, but also hold all the cards, all the money, run the banks.

Consider why a racist woman would write about a species of slaves who loved being enslaved, who enjoyed working for no pay, and cleaning up after humans, with the only small caveat of that they didn’t want to be beaten. Imagine that only the most radical of their species wanted to be free, and he still spent the rest of his life working for no pay and helping out a little white boy and his friends wherever he could. Consider why the only person in the story who thought they should be free, that they should have rights, was treated as an overzealous joke, who was acting against the wishes of those slaves who really LOVE being enslaved. Consider that Rowling went on to say that she kind of considers that girl to be black, now.

Consider why JK Rowling, an open and proud transphobe, wrote Rita Skeeter as having a large square jaw, thick “manly” hands, and dressing incredibly gaudily with the most obvious fake nails and fake teeth and fake hair and fake everything. Consider why a woman who tweets about how trans women are “foxes pretending to be hens to get in the hen house” might write this Rita Skeeter to then illegally transform her body in order to spy on children.

Harry Potter is full of Rowling’s bigotry, start to finish. Not even tangentially, like, “oh the goblins are bad, Rita Skeeter is bad, the house elves are bad, but most of it’s good!” because the deeper you dig and the longer you think the more you realise the entire story is based on her prejudices.

Harry Potter pretends to be an aracial story about found family, but if that were true, why are Harry’s distant ancestors important to who he is today even in the seventh book? Why does Harry have to live with his cousin and aunt and uncle? Because magic inherently prefers blood ties. Whilst Rowling was writing a story that seemed to say, “your heritage is not that important and doesn’t make you better than others” she was still writing a story about a boy who got all of his money through his bloodline, who was protected by living with his bloodline, no matter how evil, who was uniquely able to stop Voldemort because his bloodline passed down the invisibility cloak for generations and generations. Any step Harry takes he is compared to his perfect parents who were exactly like him — he looks just like his father, but he has his mother’s eyes, you know! — consider WHY a woman who is racist might’ve written a story like this. A story that on its surface, condemns a blood caste, but still in every step it takes, validates the idea that blood is thicker than water, and your geneological origin is what makes you special.

You can enjoy Harry Pottwr, of course you can. There are fantastic parts. I love a small group of teenagers deciding to become anarchies rebels and train to fight against fascism in secret. I love the murder mystery plots, I love how the series tells kids that it’s a good thing to be brave, and a good thing to fight injustice, and a good thing to challenge the government. But I cannot separate it from its author because it is such a product of its author. All of the structures of the world, the way things work in the universe, and drenched in Rowling’s beliefs, her bigotries. Of course they are: she made them.

Again. This doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy it. But I think we are past the day where we can pretend that disavowing a bigoted author is enough, and that that somehow separates the text from its bigotry. I think we are past the day where we can pretend that Harry Potter isn’t a deeply, inherently bigoted piece of media. Even the bits we love. I think we are beyond the day where we can truthfully pretend to separate it from her, because she is present through all of it. We MUST recognise its flaws. We MUST admit that she is in every part of it.

[gloomygloworm]

I open Dragon Age: The Veilguard

I play the game, and I think to myself ‘weird I thought this was a choices and politics game ft metaphors from real history like slavery’ 

My friends go “you’re right that’s what it’s supposed to be but this game is lacking those things”

I go “oh bummer that sucks, I like moral quandaries.”

I see a post that publicly wonders why people are upset that one of the main metaphors (slavery) is missing from the game.

I respond saying yeah its weird that people are complaining that a Big Metaphor is missing from the Big Metaphor Game

I get asked what part of the game matches the Main Metaphor, and I respond with “well, the elves are second class citizens.” I am doing research specifically on the elves. I read in the wiki, with sources, that yeah, no, I’m right, the Church said “if you kiss an elf that’s basically the same thing as kissing a dog.” Elves don’t have rights in most of the countries that the other games are in. One of these places in the North is the Big Metaphor Place where they looooove the Big Metaphor and using the Big Metaphor, but I get called weird for wondering why it’s mostly absent from the game.

I open my blinds and find out that National Holocaust Remembrance Day is no longer a federal holiday. I also find out that my government is trying to "deport" the native citizens of said country. I go back online and find a thread from 2009 where one of the writers explicitly states “Yeah the Dalish started as a metaphor for the Roma but evolved into more like the Native Americans, and the Andrastean Elves are like the Jewish during Nazi Occupied Germany.”

I say “oh okay so Tevinter is like Nazi Occupied Germany. Yeah it’s weird that they’ve kind of sanitized this place and I can’t find the evidence of this anywhere.”

Someone calls me weird again and tells me to read the Codex. Someone else mentions the very beginning of the game, where you see shackles on the ground and there is mention of an elf who is freeing slaves, none of which I witness. I wonder if the slaves are in the room with me. 

Someone else mentions that this is the first time we see Tevinter without any biases, mentioning two characters, Dorian and Fenris.

My friends, horrified, tell me Fenris is an ex-slave (who can be given BACK to his slave owner) and Dorian’s family are Slave Owners. I think to myself huh that’s kind of a weird thing to say considering the biases are “I was a slave” and “Yeah my family owns slaves but that’s kinda bad huh” cause that’s the same exact concept. 

I say “well elves don’t have rights, that sucks, but I wish we got to see more of their day to day. I hear about these alienages that in other games we’ve been able to see, it’s weird there isn’t one in the very poor part of the Capital of the Big Metaphor Place, where there would be a high number of these people.”

Someone says “why do you want to see them suffering? That’s weird.”

I say “yeah but there’s beauty in adversity and I didn’t write the game, I want to see this big tree the alienages supposedly have as a sort of last hope for the city elves to cling to their lost culture.” 

Someone calls me weird.

I open my blinds and politicians and big public figures are giving Nazi salutes in public rallies. 

I boot up Veilguard.

I boot up Origins and get called a slur within the first five minutes of the game. 

I picked a circle elven mage, but I use youtube to look up the city elf origin and go “oh holy fuck wow they just put it right out there huh? That’s the world state, now I know.”

Someone tells me that I should play the game because I would enjoy being sexually assaulted and violated.

I literally don’t have a response to that in any comprehensive way because that is a wild thing to say to a stranger. It is, in fact, two subjects I have intimate knowledge of as a victim of both domestic abuse and sexual assault. 

Someone tells me to just read the Codex.

Someone tells me to just read the Diary of Anne Frank.

I buy the art book for Veilguard and see that some of the major players they nixed were ex-slaves. I look at Reva and I say “oh hey cool concept” 

Someone calls me an idiot online and I laugh while closing my blinds, because purity culture is once more making a comeback and if I licked a single rock in Arlathan all I’d taste was bleach.

[mythalism]

i think whats so interesting about the severe fumble of the dragon age elves is how i get the feeling that the devs underestimated how many people identify so strongly with them, even outside of the cultures they are most often cited as analogous to. you dont have to be indigenous or jewish to see yourself or your family or your people in their struggle. anyone who has ever experienced racism, xenophobia, religious persecution, or any sort of social and economic discrimination can find themselves reflected in the elves of thedas. anyone who has experienced poverty. anyone who has ever experienced the threat of sexual violence. perhaps not all of the experience would resonate but some aspect of it would. and even if they weren't so universally relatable, they should have been treated better for the way they do so clearly mimic real world experiences of genocide, racism and discrimination and the implications of veilguard's message to just "forget the past and move on" is frankly disgusting when viewed as an answer to the same questions faced daily by the real world cultures they reflect, and yesterday's anon showed that brilliantly.

but im also fascinated by the thought process behind how they just got so readily written off as an irrelevant monolith. it feels like they thought it would make no difference for players to lose this major point of connection to the world. epler's comment about how the "elves had their time to shine" haunts my nightmares. where are they getting these ideas from like genuinely? i dont understand where this conception of the players being sick of elves comes from. sick of solas, sure. even ancient elves. this is a widely expressed sentiment all over the internet and i don't blame people for it. but modern elves? city elves and enslaved elves and new dalish clans? are people actually saying this somewhere? or did they just conflate people being sick of how over-exposed solas and ancient elves were with being tired of elves as a people? did they think that requests for more dwarf and qunari lore meant people wanted the elves to be narratively absent? and did they really try to remedy that with giving titan/harding a throwaway line about how the elves have "thrived" while they suffered? and not actually really giving the dwarves or qunari anything substantial anyway? or did they fear criticism for writing them "wrong" and decided it was better to barely write them at all? did they think the players just wouldn't care? did they think at all?

[0alix0]

Overusage of Lore

a lot of people tend to say that bioware put little to no lore into Veilguard, and i might be on a minority on this to me it's way too much and way too shallow

The entire game feels like writers just scream at you "Look at all the magical thing we have!! So we have Titans! And Evanuris! And Illuminati Those Across the See! And-- are you listening? You better listen cuz there are more! We have Shadow Dragons! We have Griffons! We--"

OMG calm down it's not a fucking Warcraft

the best thing in DA was the way it beautifully showed real life issues through the lens of medieval fantasy world.

The dalish weren't so fascinating because they had an entire language made for them and pretty tattoos. They were fascinating because they were enslaved, fought for freedom, then got their land taken away YET STILL continued to fight for survival, for their cultural identity, their children and their children's children, for freedom. Literally combination of native american's and jewish history. Because despite having one goal they all had different approach and opinion about other of their kin: city elves (those disconnected from their culture) and half-elves ("can they be considered elves?" "should they be allowed to be a part of dalish?").

The city elf origin wasn't so memorable because every npc had a backstory with a length of bible. It was memorable because it was the most obvious analogy on racial oppression, segregation, colonialism and fetishism in the entire franchise. Because it had the guts to actually show in details the horrors of these things.

Broodmothers weren't so horrifying because it's a female mixture of jubba hutt and a fucking pudge from dota with a detailed explanation their anatomy. They were horrifying because they were paralleling a very real misogyny, mistreatment, the way how women in some countries are seen as nothing but a walking uteruses, where the only thing they're good for is to give birth

AND bioware doubled it while doing the same thing with Orzammar, cast system & Rica!

The Circles weren't so interesting because we've got dozens of pages in WoT explaining their hierarchy/fraternities. No, they were interesting because it was literally a bunch of medieval GULAGs with a function of a mental hospital, it showed what mistreatments happen there, the abuse, child abduction and enforcement of religion.... And from the side of templars it was a discussion about professional deformation, addictions and the way high ranking people abuse those to control their underlings.

..... And you know, if we were back in origins, griffons, for example, would've probably been used as a parallel on irl eco terrorism. it might've been about how Wardens despite their good nature unintentionally bonded the general association of the entire animal species to their order and abused this connection to the point when the species was beyond preservation!

and btw, then that decision in davrin's quest would actually had any meaning, instead of throwing wardens into mud (again) and turning isseya into a villain for no fkn reason.

lore is only good as long as it's used for purpose, when it has things to discuss, not just exist

i don't fucking care about titans/evanuris/and other shit because they're just a 30 pages long article in codex and WoT trying to explain magic and write DA timeline almost to a fucking mesozoic era. it's BORING. Get me emotionally invested, then i'll care

[mundanewarden]

Brining Julian's post back to complain about the Evanuris again

The Elven cultures in Dragon Age are based off of Indigenous groups of Turtle Island, Romani Cultures, and Jewish cultures. They stated this directly.

One of the most prevalent antisemitic conspiracy theories - to the point that a lot of people joke about it without recognizing its harmful history - is that Jewish people are secretly ruling the world and pulling all the strings behind governments and tragedies

So what did bioware do with their God-monarchs of the culture they based in part on Jewish people?

Have them secretly be responsible for all the worlds horrors and puppeteering the horrible slave owning government!

Thanks Bioware (: We sure Needed That (: [sarcasm]

thinking again about how fucked up it is that bioware revealed that the evanuris aren't actually gods but rather murderers and slavers - but they said they're not gonna confirm anything about whether the maker exists.

the chantry gets so much slack in-game imo as a parallel to the catholic church, especially when you compare it to how the other religions/spiritual beliefs are portrayed.

you get so many companions and sympathetic npcs who follow the chant and believe in the maker and aside from the templars as an institution and a cleric or two they're basically made out to be good when they're... colonizing, forcing assimilation, and demonizing other groups.

outside of velanna and merrill there aren't really any proud dalish characters, solas and abelas make a point of distancing themselves from a dalish pc.

sten is the only qunari companion who continues to follow the qun regardless of player choices.

the avvar are portrayed as basically wild, uncivilized barbarians.

it just seems like most if not all the chantry-aligned characters either have their faith confirmed or held up as the best option despite its flaws. the tone is so often like, "yes the chantry committed genocide but look! mother gisele is helping both the refugee mages and the church-appointed supersoldiers hunting them down and executing them. it's equality! not everyone in the chantry is a bad person!"

[dalishious]

"But Busche said there was no asexuality in The Veilguard before, so Kirby must be lying!"

Busche did not write Lucanis, Kirby did

Busche specifically said was that they were not going to tell any "asexual stories", which is still true

Kirby most recently said after someone asked about it that she "intended Lucanis to be panromantic and demisexual", which does not inherently contradict her previously using the word bisexual to describe him; real people can use multiple labels to describe themselves after all (points at myself) let alone fictional characters who probably had to meet the needs of studio pressures we don't know about

THAT ALL SAID, I think it's kinda funny tbh how people are only just now like "how could the devs say something different than what was said before?" Like. Am I the only one who remembers the "elves are like Indigenous, Jewish, and Romani people" pipeline to "elves have nothing in common with any real minorities" bullshit? Because it is a BioWare dev classic move to say whatever they think is most convenient at the time they say it.

(Anyway my personal approach is this: If I think it makes sense and I like it, I'll adapt it into my tailored Thedas experience. Otherwise, I'll probably just ignore it.)

[canisvesperus]

Fandom mfs when it’s time to use Jewish trauma as a token in discourse about imaginary elves and robots and aliens etc: 😡🤬

Fandom mfs when Jews are targets of antisemitic violence in real life: 🙉🙈