#between belief

[hmslusitania]

For work reasons I had to find a particular picture I took while playing Gotham Knights recently and...

Fun fact! The news that Tim is bi came out like... a WEEK? before complete lock.

So they scrambled to put in EVERY. LITTLE. TIDBIT. they could.

Including Dick supporting his bi brother with a mug.

I knew the timing was close but I didn’t realise it was that close!

Also that mug is hands down one of my fave details in the game — that and all the pictures of everyone’s friends around the Belfry. Particularly the one of Tim and Kon

[cairafea]

they're matching costumes.

[hymnsofheresy]

what are your thoughts on your religion stealing every single one of its holidays from pagans? xo

That in order to relieve themselves of guilt and discomfort, white people create and believe narratives that deprive their European ancestors of any autonomy whatsoever. Casting their ancestors as victims of the church rather than active participants.

[fant-asm4]

rewatching orym’s visit with the wildmother and i’ve just gotta say that some of y’all really let your personal christian trauma get in the way of a beautiful, heartbreaking, terrifying scene

[ventique18]

🦇: "You know, your grandmother disapproves of you visiting your lover's private quarters before marriage."

🐉, scoffing: "That boomer."

🦇, gasping: "Where did you learn that term? I cannot believe you, Malleus. I did not raise you to be like this."

🦇: "I did not raise you to use the wrong term in a sentence. Because your grandmother is not a boomer,"

🦇: "She's a fossil L-M-A-O."

🐉: "Is she?"

🐉: "She's probably older than the very first dinosaur. Do you reckon she was there to witness how the world's crust was formed?"

🦇: "Maybe she could confirm through first-hand experience if the Big Bang theory's real, don't you think?"

Ah, the joys of pouring wine and late night conversations.

[kyouka-supremacy]

It is essentially hilarious to think that Atsushi, the guy who has been raised in church, would then fall for a person who not only is a man but also is someone who lowkey giving demon vibes

And who is canonly atheist as far as The Heartless Cur goes! I really like exploring the religious inclinations within sskk. It's enjoyable to think about Atsushi's complicated relationship with religion: it's very reasonable, and likely to be true, that he wouldn't be a religious person, that as soon as he got out he'd be fed up with religion as it had been drilled in him at the orphanage. At the same time, I like to think of an Atsushi who keeps being religious, who is now able to explore religion by himself and at his own terms, to decide for himself. For how he is, I wouldn't exclude that he would interpret the Agency saving him as a sign sent from God, as a second chance at life God gave him. And I also simply find it consistent for sskk to be opposites, so if Akutagawa is a non believer, then there's a chance Atsushi is.

When it comes to Akutagawa, though– I'm not kidding when I say Atsushi would be his religion. He doesn't believe in God but he's certain he must know what heaven feels like from when Atsushi kisses him, stuff of that kind.

[hindahoney]

Every now and then I run into someone on here claiming to be a convert and they absolutely did not even try to unlearn previous antisemitic beliefs.

[cedric-k-rossignol]

The dates of cedric's parents😭😭😭does this mean undertaker isn't cedric???? I fucking hate clockworks it's not even funny

Yeah... I have to admit, based off this, the death date of Cedric's parent is an issue. It really does look like 10/18 December, 1839.. The '8' in the year is pretty fuzzy - I think it could plausibly be a 6, but probably not a 3.

BUT UM... EVEN WEIRDER... THE BIRTH DATE. THE 24TH OF MAY IS QUEEN VICTORIA'S FUCKING BIRTHDAY.

Edit: Actually, the death year could conceivably be 1819... Which is even weirder (Queen Victoria's birth year)

[starry-bi-sky]

honestly thank GOD danny does not have his powers available to him in WTNS because if he used them as Nightingale he would be terrorizing Gotham's nightlife with them. like nothing would change he'd still be emergency backup (by his own choice) but his psychological torment just went up by 20 degrees.

creepy ghost children are already a pretty big staple in horror games and movies, tons of scary games where the antagonist is a scary dead child. well!!! now that scary dead child is Nightingale! and you have his Bat! It's like I always say: 'nightingales should be heard and not seen'

(as reference to the fact that according to the british museum, nightingales are elusive and private creatures and tend to be heard more than they are seen)

imagine being a goon that successfully trapped the Bat and then some indeterminable minutes later you hear a gentle rapping at the window like a branch tapping the glass and you turn and there's just two glowing green eyes in the window. The eyes are shorter than you, you blink or yell or cry out and then suddenly the small shadowy figure is gone.

you hear a nearby window creak and groan, you turn and a window nearby is propped open just a sliver. its not the window you saw the eyes from, the sliver is too small for any human to come in. there are footsteps, soft and teeny, circling around you. you keep seeing a small figure darting around through the reflections of the window. the lights are flickering, something is whooshing up above you.

imagine seeing a black silhouette with only green eyes climbing in from the window -- except, you only see it in the reflection of a window and when you look behind you, where the figure should reliably be coming in from, there is nothing there. the window isn't even open. or worse, maybe it is. but just a crack.

Danny isn't there to dawdle, but in the time its going to take for him to release/recover his Bat, he is going to make it your problem. and your fresh new night terror and ten years paid therapy!

[bogkeep]

tbh my thesis on the astronomical clock in prague might just become a redo of a tenth grade thesis i did about the history of clocks. like the question i want to answer is "why does this clock fascinate us so much" and i think the surface level answer is that it looks cool as hell and is in a touristy part of a touristy town - but on the deeper level it's like. well it's one of the oldest mechanical clocks in the world that's still ticking, and it barely looks like the clocks we have now. it's like pshaw of course i can read a clock, you just look at the dial and the hands, right? and then this clock is like. unreadable because the upper dial shows no less than four kinds of time: babylonian time (twelve hours of day + twelve hours of night, but the length of the hours varies depending on the place and time of year), bohemian or italian time (24 hours that start at sunset, good for seeing how many hours of daylight there's left), old germanic time i think it was called (that's just like what we use now except it doesn't account for daylight savings!), and sidereal time (uhhh is this the zodiac circle thing?????? i should know this)

because the thing about how we count time is, WHY do we count time the way we do? why Twelve hours specifically. what matters more, exact measurements of time units, or following the ebb and flow of daylight? has the way the shaped clocks shaped our lives?? MUCH TO THINK ABOUT. or at least i think about it when i see a clock like the orloj.

[mamawasatesttube]

Between Tim and Kon who makes the first move?

honestly for me it varies! i slightly tend towards it being tim, but not always. but in a very specific way, i.e. it's a very gradual melt right on into a relationship, and tim is the one who goes hey. wait a minute. this feels like A Relationship.

at first, saying it'd be tim is probably surprising, since tim has a history of NOT making the first move across his comics - we don't actually see how he and ari get together, but steph chases after him and repeatedly states her interest in him before they ever get together; tim is the one who asks zoanne out, but only after she kisses him and then runs away. then tam once again is the one to ask him if he's interested in her (and, i mean, if you count lynx ii, she's always the one initiating things getting physical and making out with him, but they also literally never talk about it, so i don't entirely really count her as a serious tim love interest).

on the other hand, while kon of course has been a flirt since he was decanted from his tube, a lot of it was very performative and he's only actually ever been in three relationships, two of which were instances of abuse and grooming. given how introspective he gets after his resurrection, and how much less sure of himself he is in general, i tend to believe this is where he starts actually unpacking all his relationship trauma and internalized homophobia. i think actually accepting that he is gay and not actually interested in women is a very jarring thing for him, and accepting that he was groomed and abused is also very difficult, and it takes him a while.

because of that, i think he ends up a) confused about what romance actually feels like, and b) very tentative about dating for a while. he wants deep connection - he was genuinely in love with knockout, and he thought she loved him too; he thought tana would be part of his life forever, and his devotion to cassie was notable even before they actually dated. but deep connections are hard to make with people you don't know well, and by the time he's around 19-20 i think he's kind of struggling with the idea that he's not gonna get what he's looking for in casual relationships, but also the idea of being in Gay Love with one of his best friends is terrifying, because he's not good at identifying what being in love feels like, so he kinda talks himself out of it. "this is comfortable and easy so it must not be romance, this is just really good friendship, because romance feels like walking a tightrope. right? haha. right??" and all that.

and then moreover, i think tim really sits on the fact that he's bisexual for a long time. not because he's trying to hide it, but because he's just so intensely private about things that bother him, and he's got some jack drake shaped Internalized Issues in his head to work through about what it means to be transmasc and to like men (i.e. a voice that sounds suspiciously like a conservative dad putting in one single ounce of effort re: understanding queer relationships is in the back of his head going "but you'd be the girl in the relationship if you dated a man, right?" and tim has to take several deep breaths and figure out how to unpack that before he's ready to even think about admitting out loud that he's interested in guys too, even to himself, let alone to anyone else).

so for a hot second kon's just out there going "i like men but it doesn't matter because i'm never going to fall in love with someone that really truly wants me and loves me as deeply as i'd love them, and i'd be miserable about that except that i'm just pretty satisfied being bffs with tim :) i feel at ease when he's around and he makes me laugh and i just like being near him and watching him work on gadgets or listening to him ramble about cars or letting him sleep on my shoulder. i know it's not romantic because i feel so safe and comfortable, but i'm happy with it, whatever it is. and if i think he's hot, well, that's just because he is hot. everyone knows that!" guy who pretty much is already tim's boyfriend but he hasn't noticed that yet because they're both kind of stupid and also insanely devoted to each other in the same way, so they both go "yeah this seems normal for us" and kon really doesn't question it that hard.

meanwhile tim is the guy to whom labels and boxes matter a lot more, so he's the one who sits back one day and goes, wait. oh my god. i'm in love with kon. and then he has to steeple his index fingers and interlace the others and press his hands to his face in deep, deep thought. he's in love with kon, and realizing that makes a lot about his life suddenly make a lot of sense, because seriously - a hundred clone attempts, changing robin to be red and black, making out with cassie because he missed kon so much - okay, okay, yeah, he sees it now, okay, so maybe he's been in love with kon for years at this point and never actually realized it, that's fine, this is fine, he's FINE, he's NOT freaking out or overthinking--

anyways. after freaking out and overthinking and brooding on a rooftop for four to seven business days (not all at once, of course, but he gets his hours in), he finally goes to kon and jabs his finger into his chest and goes "Hey. Are we dating?"

and kon stares at him for a second with a loading circle spinning over his head. claps his hand over his mouth. inhales sharply like a dying fish. claps his other hand over the first hand. starts floating a few inches off the ground in pure agitation.

"Oh my god, Tim," he says, his eyes as wide as dinner plates and his voice an octave higher than usual. "Are we dating?!"

"I think so," Tim says, and narrows his eyes. "I mean, if we're not, maybe we should be. Pizza and a movie tonight?"

and kon clearly goes through A Whole Process in his head (working through the "wait, dating is comfy and chill and happy and easy?!" crisis in real time), but ultimately goes "okay!!! yeah!! okay!!! let's do that!!! wow!!!!" because, hey. he would love to hold hands with tim while watching the sunset and eating hipster san francisco pizza.

and that's how they end up sitting on the floor by the coffee table in the titans tower common room, eating pizza, and poring over a calendar + their text message history to try and figure out when, exactly, their anniversary is. ("okay, so when we went on that picnic in april, was that a date?" "i think so. alright, so it has to be before april, but after valentine's, because you made a joke about being single here, see? so we're looking at somewhere in march. "okay, but we did do 'palentine's' together, so does that really count??" "fuck, you're right, that totally was a date too. uh...")

[heyimkana]

So S/O, knowing how exhausted and stressed Jinwoo gets after work, feels she wants to make him more happy in bed? How? She watches and reads porn just to study up new techniques but has to request the Shadows watching her to leave the room every time. Jinwoo gets way more suspicious and when he confronts her, she gives him a mind blowing, breathtaking, heavenly night with the “techniques” she’s acquired. Jinwoo probably still puts Shadows to watch her every move still.

OOOOOH OMGOMGOMG OKAY LISTEN LISTENNNN

S/O learning secret sex techniques is great amazing chef's kiss but you know what would wreck him?

when she takes control without warning.

like in my head jinwoo is all about staying in control and he clearly loves to dominate his partner in bed cause he's used to be in command but there's just something that hits him differently every time she makes the first move. like if he was reading a book on a sunday morning and his wife suddenly climbed up on his lap, straddled him, grinding her hips against him as she devoured his mouth? best believe he'd be thinking about it for days.

but what unravels him the most is when they're making love and he's fucking her missionary and then she wraps her arms around his neck, pulls him down, wraps her legs tighter around his waist, and whispers praises in his ear like

"jin... god, baby, you make me feel so good..."

"i love the way you touch me... the way you kiss me... the way you're fucking me..."

"i love the way you taste in my mouth..."

"you make me feel so full, so satisfied... i love you so much..."

"don't go, jin... stay with me just like this... keep fucking me all day, all night... i want it. i want you. i'll never stop wanting you."

jinwoo would tremble bro—that man would be shaking and it would take him everything not to cum right there and then. he can handle dirty talks but when she speaks praises—honesty—he's gone.

and if she whispers something like "put a baby in me again" oh.

say goodbye to the bed, you're gonna need to buy a new one.

[disgruntledwyvern]

James and cyprians relationship truly does fascinate me. They hate eachother for such valid reasons, James was directly involved in cyprian’s brothers death and the death’s of the rest of the stewards. And cyprian is a representation of the people that drove James out for something he couldn’t control and tried to kill him. They’re also both just. Complete dicks.

And then in dark heir we get that scene by the river. Where James is clearly trying to reach out to cyprian and grappling with his own conflicting feelings about the stewards. Where he directly says that he didn’t enjoy seeing cyprian kneel to the Devil like he’d made Marcus kneel. The entire exchange really hammers in that these are two teenagers raised in what amounts to a hardcore cult, but who had very different experiences of leaving that environment. James’s treatment and the way it shattered everything he’d known all his life and left him to figure it out, and the way he clearly built the stewards back up in his head after the fact, vs cyprian never questioning it or having any reason to stop believing in the steward ideals or the things he was taught. Both of them have the mentality of extremely isolated children in their own ways, kids think in black and white and now with the stewards gone they’re both being forced to confront that things are gray. But cyprian clearly isn’t ready for that yet, and he certainly can’t accept that from James yet because James is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people cyprian cared about including the torture and murder of his brother. So the exchange ends up being a conversation of their conflicting viewpoints where they can’t yet really make any real progress.

It’s tragic because they’re the only two people left alive with the experience of being raised with the stewards from birth, of never really having a choice about it, but they both have different experiences that are so at odds that they can’t actually find solace in that shared situation.

[toastytrusty]

anyone wanna talk about how irving had 23 stab wounds in him after hickey killed him. 23 stab wounds, as in the same number of stab wounds in the corpse of julius caesar. the coup staged by cassius, who was fueled by malice and ambition, and led by brutus, who was fueled by a righteous hope for a better rome. how hickey watched the carnivale fire, and found he was the only one who could save the men dying inside. the attempt from command to bring joy to the men Literally burnt down in front of him. he lost all faith in their ability and decided himself a saviour. how he's fueled in equal parts, within his delusioned mind, by righteousness and ambition. he wants the men to survive—if only to validate his own attempts to save them—but he also wants the status of leading them. something about fitzjames describing himself in his story as "caesar crossing the rubicon." something about carnivale being emblematic of the great fire of rome. something about fitzjames watching his carnival burn down while dressed as a roman emperor. something about the great fire of rome happening under nero, not julius caesar. something about hickey wearing fitzjames' boots after looting his corpse. something about hubris and spectacle and trying to be someone you're not

[churchsideblog]

if i had a normal person's worth of energy you would all be doomed to suffer me posting long meandering essays titled things like "analyzing cult classic nintendo DS game ghost trick: phantom detective (2010) through a mormon lens." fortunately for you however i am the most sleepytired ever so instead i'm resigned to just rotating the characters in my mind forever

[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.