#religion is awful

[audreyrose7]

I wouldn't be so pissed at Christianity if it wasn't for indoctrination. Religion should be something that you choose and when you're literally a two-year-old sitting in church you can't possibly choose it, you can't possibly understand the gravity of the cult that you have entered. You'll listen to the sermons you'll read your Bible you'll sing the songs you might never question what you're doing or you might only question it 30 years later, either way it's a big deal and you should be able to make it informed choice instead of having your choice taken away when you're a child.

[audreyrose7]

Exactly. It's pretty terrible, and it takes soooo long to unpack, unlearn, deconstruct all of this bs too 😩💜

I truly think the bible has many harmful/unhealthy teachings. People will try to deflect and say only when it’s twisted by abusive people or taught “wrong.” But no, I think it has harmful teachings at its very core. As an example:

When certain emotions are labeled as bad/evil/a flaw or something you just “shouldn’t do” it prevents many people from being able to process emotions healthily. See Ecc 7:9, Ecc 11:10, Col 3:8, Phil 4:6, James 3:16 as a few examples. I went through my life as a christian never really fully processing anything, and I was so emotionally unhealthy. Instead of viewing emotions as neutral signals from my body and sitting with them and letting them move through my body, I would read the thought terminating cliches of “don’t be anxious give it to god” or pray about it and continue to be disconnected from my body. I would feel shame when experiencing normal feelings of jealousy, anger, anxiety and feel like I was spiritually failing. That shame would cause me to continue to suppress those feelings instead of hearing and processing them, and it could cause it to come out in dysfunctional ways. And I see this in hundreds of people who are Christians in my life.

[uncanny-tranny]

Please intentionally attempt to see the magic in everything. Everything is magic, even if you understand the "boring" reasons why things happen. Look at the magic in growing plants, the magic of your muscles flexing and retracting, the magic of your eyes and skull, the magic of a cat's purr.

It's all magic. Understanding the "why" is just understanding what makes things magical, it doesn't change that it's all significant and magic.

[whalehouse1]

Co-worker who knows that I’m a nerd, “What are your plans for the 4th?”

Me, trying my best to figure out how to explain that the Thunder Saga is dropping for Epic, “Uh, well, YouTube is going to have a premiere for something I’m excited about.”

“Oh? What’s premiering?”

Me, literally stumbling over my words, trying to figure out how to explain Epic.

Him, “It’s something nerdy isn’t it?”

Me, “Yeah, so some guy seemingly got a hyper fixation on the Odyssey during Covid and decided to make a musical about it in parts, and the part with one of my favorite Greek monsters is this one.”

Him, confused cause he 100% was not expecting that type of answer, “Well, I hope it’s good.”

[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.

[shiikiyun]

I think something i don't often see in discussions about Futa's character is how, if you really take a second, he's kind of a people pleaser

He isn't so in a way like what Mikoto got going on, he does want to be around people of the same interests as him, and you wouldn't think he'd care about anything but authenticity if you stayed with the way he behaves on milgram. It is only when you think about him -in- those social circles he manages to get into that you can see him tweaking lol

I think the closest to see this that we have in milgram itself is that one interaction with Kotoko in which she attempts to debate how prisons respect human rights. Any other time he expressed his opinion/stance on things he was aggressive and maybe condescending to the rest because they disagreed with him, but the second someone agreed? Whole demeanor changed. Suddenly he didn't have much to say anymore and he just parroted Kotoko's words back at her. Why. If he has such a strong personality and mindset, why was someone validating his point enough to shut down his otherwise very firm attitude?

Futa doesn't go as far as to manufacture his every word for it to cause a positive reaction on others from the get go, but he does seek validation all the same. He braces himself for rejection by being loud and obnoxious and harsh until he sees a positive reaction and then is when he does a complete 180 to keep the other person in that place of validation. He is simultaneously completely bad at it though, but I never said he was good at people pleasing. Which connects back to what i've said before about his inability to fit in. Even when he thinks he's doing it right and he sees himself getting validation by people he cares about (in the case of his crime, by mimicking his friendgroup's method of "bringing justice" by calling out someone online, that same friendgroup following along and reinforcing the idea that he was doing it right), he ultimately fails anyway and loses it all over again.

In the end, he's just extremely socially awkward and anxious. It isn't in his nature to reach anyone else's expectations even if he genuinely wants to, so he'll either do what he can within his parameters (mold himself for his friendgroup of people he deems similar to him) or he'll avoid trying altogether because he knows he'll fail (what we see in milgram!)

It also shows how his yearn for a support system (t2 qna + mu's birthday timeline convo) isn't particularly new from his current circumstances, or why the only person he could think of when asked who he would want to see right now was his mom (who left so long ago he barely remembers her). He has just never truly had people that genuinely cared for him no matter what he tried to do to make himself likeable.

[bookwyrminspiration]

i need to be an illegal elven experiment so someone can whisk me away to the lost cities so I can enroll in foxfire and manifest as a polyglot and get placed under Master Cadence Talle and then get expelled. on account of becoming desperately obsessed with her in a supremely fucked up mentor/mentee relationship where I base my entire self-worth and future on her and fall in love with the idea of being loved by her, placing her above all else, devoted to her and nothing else, desperately vying every day for her affection in fervent supplication, listening to her talk of the ogres, helping her manage the towers, while she thinks of me not nearly so intensely and as simply a passionate student, dooming me to a losing battle for her attention and fondness I futily fight regardless until she forgets me without a second thought as soon as I'm gone. who said that

[satyrradio]

ngl it is very disheartening when I see a positive post from a queer Christian, go into the notes, and just see other queer folks shitting on the OP for being a queer Christian. You aren't making the world any better, you're just being an asshole.

[syscultureis]

Plural culture is going to our first pride and protestors triggered out a religious trauma holder and she had to fight so hard to not lecture them on how even if the Bible thought being gay was wrong, Jesus befriended the sinners he didn't shame them and so on and so on

And we're very proud of her for not doing that because we do not have the capacity to deal with anything that could've caused

[solargeist]

What you said about Grian keeping his modesty even after leaving the Watchers.... Hmmmm.... Grian in Hijab.... Yes that's the shit...

i think hijabs are just for women ! i'm unsure what the male equivalent is

But ! The Watchers i write are inspired by Catholicism, his mum is a nun who veils. This is also just for women, but if he wereeee to veil then it'd be something like that--i mean not the full extent of a nun, but there are head scarves that allow hair and neck to be shown

headscarves are very pretty regardless tho <3

[karokawwo]

ik insulting religion is a huge no no but I really find it so scary how christianity can poison people so easily. how people can become so unsympathetic, so hateful, and so stubborn in this awful mentality. but it's alright because all this animosity is in the name of our almighty God, who loves us but despises them, apparently

[audreyrose7]

It's incredibly frustrating to me that Christians have no idea what consent is and it makes sense if you think about everything that they've been taught and the way that the Bible works, I mean nobody ever asks for permission to do anything, women are incredibly subservient to God and to men, so it's like an incredibly foreign concept to them. I mean God didn't ask a teenager for permission to get her pregnant, so why should a Christian ask for permission to hug you? Etc. I understand the thinking of why they don't put any importance on it, it's just an incredibly frustrating concept, I mean a Christian can't even respect your boundaries when it comes to conversation because if they find out you're not a Christian, they'll get an uproar because they have to "save your soul!" Ridiculous

[andromeda3116]

gah now i'm getting On My Shit about the discworld again and like i've said what i want to say about the witches and the watch but there's also small gods like i will never be over small gods i finished it and i was like... has this... has this healed some of my religious trauma?

if you've never read it, the plot is thus: on the disc, gods get their power from belief. therefore, the more believers a god has, the more powerful they are. and so, there is this god -- om -- who has risen in power, who has a country devoted to His worship, which hunts down and slaughters heretics and infidels, to whom people pray multiple times a day and make pilgrimages to His holy city, which has a huge citadel and huge structure of a complex religion devoted to his worship. and, on a whim, He comes down one day to see how things are going.

and discovers that he has no power.

that, in this country of millions who profess to worship Him with all their hearts, there is only one person left who actually believes in Him.

and there's a lot of meat there, and a lot more plot to delve into, but the core theme ends up boiling down to this:

can you forgive your god for how they failed you?

and do they deserve that forgiveness? how can they earn that forgiveness?

because ultimately, the forgiveness that the messianic archetype is embodying is not that of the god's grace, but of the people's -- to forgive their god his absence. to give their god another chance to be their god.

and whether or not you, in the end, can forgive, it gives you the language to realize that this is what you were asking for with your last prayers. whether or not you can ever go back, whether or not there have been other reasons since that have convinced you further, it gives you the language to accept that your god failed you. and it is not your fault.

this book speaks loudest, perhaps, to those of us who left our church with grief, not with anger. with hurt betrayal, not with the fires of defiance.

it didn't change my lack of religious belief, but it helped me conceptualize my feelings about the church, the things that went deeper than intellectual arguments. about that sense of betrayal, that hurt, that twisted-up knot within me that it had built, and it gave me the mirror within which i could see that i had been failed by my beliefs. it wasn't that i hadn't believed enough, it was that my belief had been betrayed by the absence of an answer.

there have been other reasons since then that have cemented my atheism, but small gods made me stop hating the church i used to love, because it made me recognize why i hated it so much and said "you're not wrong, it didn't have to be this way. you were betrayed and you were failed and you can let it go, now."

[atopvisenyashill]

Please tell me more of your thoughts on maegelle, maybe it’s cause I’m new to the Fire and Blood side of the fandom but I’ve never seen anything deeper about her maybe being negative. Especially in regards to her mother/family. I’m quickly becoming Saera girlie and I wonder if Magelle’s role in the church might’ve contributed to her sister’s “”rehabilitation”” being bad enough to have her leave the continent.

Okay so the thing here is that she does to Alysanne what Jaehaerys does to Alyssa, which is force/cajole their mother into taking back and living with a man who has publicly humiliated her and made incredibly clear he has no respect for her, but we only really whack Jaehaerys for this. The first quarrel is more personally egregious to me because it's only Alysanne who must bite her tongue here and not Jaehaerys - she is not asking for anything extreme here! Her daughter committed the heinous crime of fucking before marriage, it's been like three years, and three of their daughters have subsequently died, but he hasn't calmed down at all about Saera. Alysanne even tries to compromise by just asking to fly to Lys to visit her and he forbids her from seeing her own fucking daughter. That's an insane level of abuse. And what does Maegelle do? Well she tells her parents that they need to keep up appearances and be seen in public together. Reminds me a lot of show alicent's "you may slap him about as you like at home but out in public we must be united" comment - essentially, Maegelle is telling Alysanne she has to cope with being barred from seeing her daughter and grieving her losses properly to keep up appearances. I mean fuck, maybe Alysanne genuinely wanted a divorce from Jaehaerys. Maybe at that point she was so distraught she wanted Jaehaerys to take a lover, and replace her, and leave her the hell alone so she could be with Gael or otherwise just go to Lys anyways. But Maegelle puts a stop to all of this by invoking Rhaenys' wedding and how they need to look united. Ghastly behavior.

BUT THEN. Less than two years later, Aemon dies and Jaehaerys names Baelon heir. And look, Alysanne is 100% right to be pissed the fuck off at Jaehaerys for naming Baelon - from our several comments about Rhaenys being called "our future queen", the fact that Aemon and Jocelyn never have any other kids, I think the fact that Rhaenys has a dragon as well, all of that makes very clear that everyone is sort of expecting Rhaenys to carry on the Targaryen line in some form or another. Beyond that, Jaehaerys knows damn well that Alysanne has historically been touchy about this - see her comments about little Daenerys. Jaehaerys, with this move, makes it clear that he had never planned for Rhaenys to be queen at all and was misleading everyone. This one is on par with Rogar's nonsense imo because it's so public and everyone knows how Alysanne feels about the succession. He doesn't talk it over with her after she's lost a son btw, he just announces it and takes everyone by surprise.

AND THEN ONCE AGAIN. HERE COMES MAEGELLE. "mom just get over it." And again, what does Jaehaerys give up here? Nothing. He's either sending Maegelle or he's just straight up leaving Alysanne alone and assuming she'll come back to him? It's just nasty. She's losing the ability to walk, to ride her dragon, to remember people's names, she's barred from seeing Saera, she's got a daughter the age of her grandchildren because Jaehaerys forced her to have another child, and she's not even allowed to just spend her last years on Dragonstone being left to age with what dignity she has left. No, she has to be at court, she has to be by her husband's side, because That's Her Place. It's just as smug, just as cruel as Jaehaerys forcing Alyssa to Rogar's side - and the cruelty, in my opinion, is the point here. "You made your bed now lie in it" type behavior, towards a woman who has just been publicly disrespected, who is grieving her dead children.

So anyways, do I believe Maegelle was just as viciously cruel to Saera and that's part of why Saera ran away? I can absolutely believe that yes. I think we see that a lot with Septas to be honest - women who get a thrill out of torturing other women who don't conform properly. Mordane actively eggs on the gap between Arya and Sansa until it becomes a gaping chasm, Moelle and Unella are happy to take orders that involve them sexually humiliating Margaery, her cousins, and Cersei and take a sort of sick glee out of doing it, so I don't think it's exactly far off to say Maegelle had a cruel streak in her that came out when it came to the women in her family not conforming properly. I think we can also take into account George's general distate for religion and Catholocism specifically and the way the Septas work as nuns, and the way nuns were like, insane at various catholic schools. I think there's an interesting play here right - that Jaehaerys can look a mother who put her own life on the line to make him king and hand her right back to the husband who hates her to die having his kids, because he's being vindictive and cruel about her having the audacity to remarry without his permission, and Maegelle looking the mother who has ruled capably and given her the space to be what she wanted to be, and hand her right back to the husband who clearly has no respect for her whatsoever, because she's cruel and believes a woman is not allowed to have differing opinions from the man who currently owns her. It doesn't matter what Alyssa or Alysanne personally did for the two of them; they're women, and they have no right to disagree with the men around them.

[chieana]

It's true, true art is dead, MCR shot it in the chest then in the head

[neetdogboy]

hey nerds I updated my website again

specifically I finally made my Paul Hill/John Pruitt shrine

190 images. I had to paste those links BY HAND man

In total it works out to be one image or gif every 2 minutes of this 8 hour show.

enjoy

Plus some pictures of him smiling and also that one where he’s soggy looking.