#dalish elf origin

[sinsofsinister]

ᴍɪʜɴʏʟᴀ 'ɴʏʟᴀ' 'ᴍᴀʜᴀʀɪᴇʟ • ᴅᴀʟɪsʜ ᴇʟғ • ɢʀᴇʏ ᴡᴀʀᴅᴇɴ ʙᴇʀsᴇʀᴋᴇʀ

[calico-callista]

I have nothing to say in my defence-

[homiest88]

Ho boy haven’t posted anything in Tumblr for two weeks mostly due to College. So here is a a Dragon Age fact for you did you know if you choose the Dalish Elf Origin you’re actually a descendant of an Emerald Knight. The name Mahariel is actually the name of the Emerald Knight who founded Clan Sabrae as Dalish Clans are named after noble houses from the Dales and Emerald Knights would found these clans with their descendants keeping their last name.

[hotdogcabbagesausage]

i’ve got zero self control because i can’t stop thinking about tamlen and now i’ve started two different fanfictions concerning him

[spellandblade]

Varathorn, master craftsman in the Dalish Camp in the Brecilian Forest, speaking of Warden Mahariel’s father.

[mynqzo]

valarin the totally not blood mage

[feeshies]

Ariane and Finn redraw

[pumpkincalico]

I figured why not give loghain some warden friends while he's serving in fantasy france, so meet Farris and Ra'dell! the only two brave enough to want to pester and invade his precious personal space (they're their commander's worst nightmare)

[dragonagecinema]

With only 16 days left until Dragon Age The Veilguard, let's go through history.

Have you played them all?

[bloodycyrano]

I love the idea of my (Female) warden calling Kieran her son if she ever got to meet him.

"Out of the way, Alistair. I have to see my son and his beautiful mother."

And Alistair just sitting there like.. "YOUR son? I don't remember you being the one in bed with a witch"

"You slept with Morrigan, Morrigan did the magic, I killed the archdemon. It was a group effort, I claim a third of the child, and now I get to teach it dalish swear words."

[fenharel-is-so-swell]

While I’m on my ✨Race in Thedas✨ rant let me just explain why the blending of Dalish and City Elves bothers me personally.

As I said previously, I’m mixed. I’m specifically black in the ‘descendants of enslaved people’ way. I grew up in a predominantly white area but finished out highschool in a diverse school with a high number of first gen African immigrants.

(I promise this is pertinent) My relationship with race has always been complex. I benefit from a proximity to whiteness due to being mixed, but I of course still experienced rampant racism and an identity crisis.

In elementary school we had to do a yearly genealogy project. In some ways, mine was easier than the few other black kids in my class. While their families were nearly untraceable past 2-3 generations, I could just focus my effort on my mother’s side. Though, I faced ridicule because OBVIOUSLY I wasn’t white, so obviously I couldn’t be German. While I may have shared DNA, I felt much less experientially connected to the ‘family tree’ I did my reports on because their lives could look nothing like mine. They walked through world without the color of their skin first. So, of course the next year when a culture week came up and we were encouraged to wear clothing representative of our heritage I went the other way—I asked my dad to buy me a dashiki. I still I faced ridicule and still it felt foreign. I had no cultural ties to the patterns, my family never wore them, I’d never heard of the foods we looked up that were mainstays on the Ivory Coast. I may have shared DNA, I may have shared racial trauma, but my culture was different. I was black I wasn’t African.

Playing dragon age origins as a City elf I saw myself for the first time. I saw a woman divorced from her original culture, ripped from her roots by an imperial force but still incredibly steeped in a rich world created by survival and painstaking effort to hold onto oral tradition and what blended history the alienages could. I saw my grandmother singing gospel on the weekends, the church ladies in their outfits, the greens, the pecan pie, the stories of struggle the community shared, the village it took to raise all my cousins and get our older family and friends through chemo and childloss and hard financial times. In hearing about different alienages I saw the distinct cultural differences between Harlem, Oakland, Birmingham, Houston, Atlanta.

Playing as a Dalish elf I saw a facet of the African-Immigrant experience I came to know in high school from my friends who immigrated. I saw the culture more closely connected to the various countries they came from, but still scared by the vestiges of imperialism and colonialism. They were all unique, just as Dalish clans are. My Nigerian friends ate different food, had different rules, wore different clothes, had different cultural practices than my Kenyan or Nigerian friends. I had a couple of North African friends from Morrocco and Egypt that still felt grounded in the history of Africa but were so different. I saw the physical differences in them like I saw them in further DA entires in the Dalish from Antiva or elves from Tevinter.

(And better yet to see this dichotomy in culture I didn’t have to face more trauma porn on black bodies)

As I continued digging into elven cultures in southern Thedas I saw even more complexities of the diaspora that matched my experience. They way both city and Dalish elves looked down upon each other one for ‘assimilation’ and being ‘weak’. The other for holding on to ‘strange’ cultural practices and being ‘primitive’.

Growing up at a crossroads of many racial and cultural experiences I relished in the nuance, the way both cultures were painted as a people just trying to survive and hold onto themselves. A people distinct and resilient, a people not too unlike from each other and while aloof still marginally less wary in solidarity. They were both full of individuals that interacted so vibrantly with the world and life they lived in.

Flattening that in Veilguard initially devastated me, then enraged me. That’s not just poor writing, that’s borderline racist. It indicates that the differences don’t matter, the pain, the struggle, the culture, the history none of it matters because ‘an elf is just an elf’ at the end of the day. And that’s fucking gross.

[phier]

Had a lot of fun sorting out my collection of brushes. I've been trying to put the joy of the process above my expectations for the finished piece an it's really fulfilling!

[calico-callista]

It ends how it starts: an Eluvian.

[homiest88]

My top 4 origin stories in Dragon Age Origins

1. Dalish Elf

2. Magi Origin

3. City Elf

4. Human Noble

[too-many-lavellans]

Emyr Tabris

Alienage Conscript, Veteran of the Blight Champion Berserker