#erran vs dragon age

[lesbiansforboromir]

Anyway um. The general narrative position of Orzammar in Veilguard makes me want to throw up blood <3

And like the argument can of course be made that it is being percieved through a very biased lense, Kal-Sharok has held this grudge for nearly a thousand years now and therefore obviously are going to percieve themselves as the more morally pure culture in comparison. And Lace is a surface dwarf who really knows nothing about Orzammar except for the discrimination she has encountered when interacting with it. Okay, sure, Dragon Age has always somewhat awkwardly attempted to be an entirely unreliable-lore tale, nothing can be taken without a grain of salt etc etc.

So I suppose my main grief and agony is more with the DECISION to make these people the only ones who get to say anything about Orzammar in this, the final reveal of the true crushing extent of the Dwarven tragedy!!!! I have spent literal decades within the understanding that Orzammar is living on borrowed time, like pretty much every codex entry written by a dwarf about themselves mentions the 'long struggle' that will eventually be lost, the darkspawn will someday claim Orzammar too and with nothing of the Deep Roads left to conquer they will finally surge to the surface and begin the endless blight. Orzammar was made the unwilling blockade for the surface against the darkspawn.

And now we find out?? That the thing that was going to be the death of them, that has been eating away at the dwarven people for millenia, the cause of a thousand thousand horrors and griefs and terrible choices and screams in the lonely dark- That was the very thing they were begging to protect them!!! Stone protect me, Stone keep me, Stone's blessings to you, she encircles us and we must protect her here where darkness meet's light- but they were not protecting her!! And she wants them all to be consumed by the tide of her righteous retribution, for forgetting her, for using her, for building their civilisation upon the wreckage of her and leaving her trapped and alone in a purgatory between life and death, between existence and absence, cut off from they who made her whole and yet they thrive and she is left behind.

But they didn't know! They don't remember! All the dwarves have been doing for generation upon generation is unconsciously trying to clumsily recreate that lost soulful feeling of being part of a cohesive whole, Solas literally calls them 'the severed arm of a once mighty hero, lying in a pool of blood' (biting him biting him biting him b-) but the point is they were also traumatised by the loss and have spent ages and ages just trying to figure out how to exist without like... THEIR CONTEXT!! Their dreams!! Like Dwarves ARE STILL part of the Titans, evidenced by the fact that when the Titans lost their dreams so did all the dwarves, even those born post the calamity, they just are disjointed, disassociated!!!

... But Orzammar is just a stupid, hidebound, oppressive, politically-putrified, 'immoral' city of people whose perspective on all this is ergo completely superfluous, uninteresting and unimportant. And Kal-Sharok (who are just sooo morally pure they're making all the GOOD choices and don't have any prejudice in them at all and their own tragedies only drove them towards good things so I guess it was good Orzammar cut them off after all???) Well they apparently already know most of it anyway and they're ready to move on and grow and learn and it's all just so neat and clean and no dwarf who venerates and loves the Stone has any catastrophic or ugly feelings about this whatsoever! Orzammar APPARENTLY doesn't even care so yaaay how cool wow that's so cool an entire culture just doesn't care about their religion and it's origin? They just don't care? Haha! They just don't care! They're probably even suppressing it for evil oppressive reasons, completely ignoring the fact that even the Casteless have a relationship to the stone, wow! That's so compelling haha! I hate it when societies have to actually struggle with something or when religion is important to people, booo imagine... imagine......

[lesbiansforboromir]

Do not mistake my silence for apathy btw I am going through Homer's odyssey of emotions about the dwarf titan reveal and Harding's questline but currently those thoughts are all just so raw as to be unspeakable, I am still experiencing it as a literal personal crushing revelation, I am a dwarf of Orzammar my name is Ves Aeducan and after honouring and loving the Stone for my whole life, she who encompasses us where darkness meets light, even after leaving my city behind and becoming tainted with the very blight destroying that city and corrupting my beloved stone (something I have for two decades now assumed means I can never return to the Stone in death for I would only corrupt Her) NOW after all this time I have come to find out that the Stone I love and feel in my very body... she birthed the blight... it is her malice that I am tainted with, her bitter scream of agony and rage at what was done to her that drives the relentless black contagion trying to consume the world and my people specifically. She has been in comfortless pain for millenia and yet we who claimed to love her forgot the crime, forgot her grief, forgot her suffering and instead carved her flesh away to sell to the highest bidder. And it is no wonder the blight only troubles the surface when directed by other hands, that darkspawn far favour clawing at dwarven gates! The Evanuris may have broken her and the humans may have used her but we are her traitors, we who were once closer than children to her, more a part of her than not, who joined her in one glorious melody of being until that melody was viciously ripped away. And Ves Aeducan who is also me is still staring at her tainted hands and thinking deep in her soul 'she should do it, she should destroy us all, I want to let it happen, it is her right, I want to be crucified on her altar, put the sins on my body because living with this is too much to bear' AND I FINISHED THE GAME WEEKS AGO.