#and elves from each culture think the others are weirdos whose way of thinking makes no sense

[squirrelno2]

I've been Officially Enabled thanks @what-point-is-there have a dragon age weirdo

the one, the only, the original blorbo whose fault it is that i got super into dragon age, Evura Tabris! I've made a lot of wardens (and finished the game for almost none of them shhh) but Evura is the one I would consider my "canon".

She's the kind of person where all the looting you do in rpgs is canon, because she sees no point in wasting things just because the person who had them before is dead (i mean. she's also a thief. living, dead, she'll take from anybody if she thinks they can afford to be taken from), but she's also generally very kind. So long as you don't give her a reason to kill you, like, you know, the city elf origin story where you get kidnapped by a noble on your wedding day and have to fight your way out. She kind of slaughtered everyone there, because everyone seemed to treat this behaviour as perfectly normal. when I say she's kind, I don't mean she particularly cares about killing or not killing people, I mean she gives to beggars and frees people in prison. To some people, this may seem contradictory but to Evura if there are different rules for the powerful and everyone else when it comes to laws, there should be different rules for how she treats them, too.

This also extends to her level of trust in people. Authority figures, especially humans, earn a range of reactions from mild distaste to (again) outright murder, depending on whether they earn it. Duncan received a wary respect because he was polite and respectful with elves in her alienage in spite of being human; Alistair got a wary trust out of necessity and his own self-effacing personality. She places much more and quicker trust in people like Morrigan and Sten, because those are people very clearly and visibly on the outside of society. Even when Evura doesn't trust a person, or thinks they're making a series of stupid decisions, she tends to build fondness for them rapidly so long as they don't do anything too shady. Every new person who doesn't treat her like shit for being an elf is someone she can ply with endless questions about their life and culture, and the world beyond the alienage she grew up in; that genuine interest in other people's lives combined with her stubborn insistence on everyone getting along "so help me or I will stab you" mean most people who work with her end up at least with a begrudging respect for her. More often, they're charmed by her whether they want to be or not (except of course for those authority figures she doesn't like. they pretty uniformly despise her and she likes it that way.)

She ends up romancing Alistair - I almost went for Leliana, but Leliana says some things about elves that fall under the "well-meaning but super gross" category and Evura was immediately turned off forever. They're still friends, but Evura was not about to spend her newly shortened life trying to romance someone who was going to need to Work Through Some Things about her. She didn't expect to care for Alistair beyond work buddies at all, seeing in him mostly a hapless human with a sense of humour that complemented her own, but the way he treated her as he realised/admitted his own affections made her feel like she could let down her walls. They came to rely on each other a lot, and Alistair is the only person in the group who Evura tells her stories to, instead of just asking for his.

The other person she's closest to (in a group full of misfits that she is absolutely enamoured of, let's be clear) is Zevran, who functions in her life as a brother figure. They're both elves who want more of a connection to Dalish culture than they have, in their own ways, and they feel comfortable joking around together and knowing that the other would listen if they ever felt the need to open up (this does mean. they very rarely open up to each other. somehow they still know more about each other than anybody else? it's all in bits and pieces and jokes.)

also Evura definitely talks Alistair into doing the ritual with Morrigan so they both survive, does not want Alistair to be king (because he doesn't, and no matter how much she'd prefer him in charge to someone she barely knows who betrayed her she also knows Anora is capable, and what Alistair wants is more important to her anyway), and her entire thing when she goes chasing after Morrigan is "hey we could just help you raise that kid!" - she is so pissed to hear that Alistair got to meet Keiran in Inquisition without her. She spends the rest of her life trying to figure out ways to cheat the Blight in her and Alistair in between making politically controversial choices that piss off the leadership of the Wardens because she does not at all believe they should stay apart from regular politics. She saved the damn world and you can bet she will leverage that to fight for elf rights and mage rights and anti-slavery work and so on and so forth. All causes are Evura's causes and she'll kick your ass if you tell her to ignore injustice no matter how many times you've been to Weisshaupt

[fangirl-erdariel]

Don't pay any attention to me, I'm just rambling, but so frequently in fantasy stuff, if you have immortal (or live-for-thousands-of-years, which really given the usual timescale of any single book is functionally the same thing) elves, their societies and cultures are reclusive, isolationist, having very limited if any contact with shorter-lived species, their realms unchanging islands in the stormy seas of the ever-changing outside world, often seeming almost frozen in time or outside time, their cultures valuing tradition and things remaining the same way for a long time very highly, and their attitude toward change is one of grief and loss

And I'm not saying that's wrong. It's a choice you can make, and as bascially any worldbuilding choice, it's not inherently good or bad, interesting or boring, but rather how it works depends on the execution, and on the context of how it fits in with the story's themes and with rest of the setting's worldbuilding. (Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for example, works quite well with elves who are grieved to see the world change, because that bittersweetness of change, it being at once a necessary thing that can bring new and beautiful stuff into the world, and a grief because change also means loss and sometimes things that were and that you loved dearly can never be again, that theme and idea runs through the story overall, and the way it shows in the elves in the story is just one of the many things where the idea manifests in some form.) It can be done well, and when it's done well, I enjoy it as much as the next person

But I can't help but wonder - why is it that I don't recall ever seeing in fantasy an elven culture going exactly the opposite direction? Like, when you think about it, at least to me it makes really just as much sense as the typical. Elves who from the dawn of time have seen everything change around them, themselves being among the slowest to change, and who revel in the constant transitionality of the world, who marvel at how quickly the seasons pass and find joy in each red-colored leaf every single autumn. Who enjoy and celebrate change, and from a young age learn to cheerfully let things go because there's always some other, new thing to embrace.

Perhaps they even take it to such an extent that other species in the setting find it a bit awkward/weird/off-putting, because, say, humans for example don't see change quite so well even just because things change less during the average human lifetime (while there are some elves who are old enough to have watched hills erode and rivers change courses just due to the effects of the natural elements), and who also are much more inclined to try and hang on to the old and are quite happy to live lives were things don't change radically and they can expect the next day to bring pretty much the same things as the previous one did.

Like, am I really the only one who thinks that'd also be fun? Why have I never seen that done?