#anyway never thought I'd find myself enjoying cory save for a couple of oneliners that go hard af

[nessacousland]

It's so funny to me how Elgar'nan's and Ghilan'nain's "rahhh power" portrayal aptly ends up making the OG evil Tevinter magister Corypheus look so very mortal in comparison. How he'd hate it!

"Betrayed" disciple seeking to usurp the empty throne of his gods out of pure spite is just peak human energy. He raises people to his side who feel similarly wronged by the world as it stands - Calpernia, with her dreams of uplifting Tevinter's slaves and revitalizing this broken empire, and Samson, abandoned and tossed in the gutter by the very faith he once gave everything to defend. He is politicking (Orlais), he's manipulating (the Wardens), he's preaching to his cult about a glorious tomorrow, scrounging through the remains of the Elvhenan for scraps and imitating their greatest achievements (the archdemon) - and utterly fails to realize that he's just retracing the same path that doomed him in the first place. Because, after everything, this blighted existence of his has to mean something. The Black City will be golden. It was supposed to be golden!

Meanwhile, the Evanuris go looking for the biggest "bullies" around (thanks, Veilguard, for that stunning characterization) and from there, it's one brutal show of force after another. Their goal? Godhood. Their motivation? Godhood.

For all his ambition, next to these two, copycat Corypheus couldn't appear more human if he tried. Because embarrassingly enough for the entire mythos surrounding the ancestral Tevinter Imperium - and a big win for the Chant of Light - a human beholding the proverbial seat of the Maker will return as fallible and cringe as the rest of us, and die crying out for a god he knows is false.

It's just a shame that this final epic fail of his came at the cost of any sense of dignity or respect that the narrative affords to the elven people and their mythos. Human faith, erroneous as it is, is a tragedy full of pathos, even at its worst hubris. Elven faith is an empty lie waiting to be disproven and beaten into the dirt by Video Game Protagonist™.