#that and the lack of dragons

[thejabber-talkey]

I know I'm mad late to the Priory of the Orange tree craze, but I'm about halfway through and I have thoughts. Specifically thoughts on the religion of the western half of the book's world.

I don't super love how religion is handled in terms of overall rhetoric. The religions on a ground level are really well done; they're realistic and believable without being too direct a rip from existing religions. Though, the Saint and the Virtues are more clearly Christianity than the rest of the other religions are anything else. And I think this really effects how the narrative treats that religion in relation to all the others. I find it really cheap and uninteresting when books have two 'opposing' religions where one is obviously wrong and the other is obviously right. That's not how any religion has ever worked, for starters, and it also lacks nuance. You can tell from the get go that the Saint and Virtues are meant to be the bad/wrong religion. Even if Ead wasn't our primary narrator and perspective into Inys culture, the way things are written have an obvious derision for the Saint. Now, I don't hate the idea of a false religion built on lies, but the way it's set up against the vastly superior and narratively favoured woman-led counter religion is just, well, boring. You have the 'bad' religion founded by a man who is a liar, and the good religion founded by a cool woman. The whole, one religion is good and one is bad just lacks any sense of real intrigue, especially when the book flat out tells you which one is bad and which one is good. I would really love for there to be truth in both the Saint's and the Mother's stories, but I can tell that that's not the direction the book is headed and it bums me out, because it makes the religious divide in the west into obvious moralism that plays on what we as readers are apt to agree with. The rest of the world-building bangs, so why cant we have nuance in the two main religions, too?

The narrative and Ead + the rest of the priory are generally unfairly shitty to those who believe in the Saint. Fuck those guys for believing their religious leader, I guess? It's not like they chose to be lied to, and they don't know any other truth, so having all the other characters treating Inys citizens like deliberately ignorant and hateful doesent have the same punch as if they did know their origins. Getting pissed at another culture for not knowing your real history when you deliberately hide it from everyone is petty, esp when you know they've been lied to for the past thousand years. It also makes Ead's perspective vaguely annoying because she has an obvious bias against the Saint and Inys, which isn't inherently wrong because, again, she follows the good/real religion. But it does feel a bit, i dunno, unfair, because Ead knows they don't know their religion is a lie, and she still thinks poorly of them for it. Like, i cannot emphasize how little empathy is spared to these people who do not know their entire religion a lie, they're just treated how we would treat a nation of christian colonizers. Except, the people of Virtudom aren't colonizers and, I cannot stress this enough, do not know that their religion is wrong, as far as they are aware, it is actual history. I can smell from a while away that Ead is going to convince Sabran to convert, and that Sabran in turn is going to forcibly convert her entire queeendom, because she has that power as a monarch. And the book is going to treat this like a 'good ending' and not the massive cultural and life upheaval it actually is.

The whole 'there is only one right sect of this religion, and all others are inherently bad' thing just reeks of christian rhetoric, even though the 'good' religion is supposed to be from a more Arabic leaning culture. It reads a lot like an ex-christian trying to overcompensate for their former religion, whilst still maintaining all of that religious rhetoric about sin and 'true good' and there being only one right way of life and that the people who don't follow this right way are bad and morally inferior by default.

The book is still great (could use more dragons, tbh, I feel like they oversold how many dragons are in this book) I just hate that one specific narrative aspect.

[araneapeixes]

happy dragon age month, i miss my homies so I doodled them in some simple camp clothes (bc im bg3pilled)

[pickled0ctopus]

protective necromancer dealing with her bf's inner demon

[vaguely-concerned]

rook falling asleep on the red couch in the lighthouse dining room while lucanis is making dinner....... they were helping out by keeping him company and peeling and chopping potatoes for a while there but then the potatoes are done and the room is so safe and warm and smells like coffee and good food and lucanis is trying to explain something to spite and his voice is low and soft and good to listen to and rook's eyes only slip closed for a moment. they'll get up to save the world again or whatever in a second just. one moment. while the world is warm and kind. and then they're being shaken gently awake an hour later because it's time to eat and everyone's starting to drift hopefully dinner-wards

[fattylime]

guess who finally made it to inquisition

[ode-to-fury]

I do think a Lucanismancer Rook has to be their own special brand of weird to like... fuck with him like that. To be attracted to a man who unprompted says a cup of coffee tastes 'like a kiss goodbye' no lead up no explanation and then later to accept the fact that he chickens out of kissing you without too much of a fallout about it and then later to accept the fact that they are now An Item based purely on the action of him making them dessert added onto that that he very clearly says 'there is enough for everyone' and somehow understanding that to mean he's scared you won't accept what he made instead of thinking he's brushing you off and then having him say he'll kill gods for you like... two weeks later is... I'm not saying he was written for a very specific type of person but I am saying he's written for a very specific type of person

[fsheryy]

lack of posting can be attributed to these freaks. you know what to do boys

[heylittleriotact]

Emmrich and Rook hold hands a lot when they’re adventuring, partly because they are sweet and very smitten with each other, but largely because Emmrich has observed that it’s prudent to keep her within arms reach whenever there’s water or steep drops around.

[undeadoracle]

There's something I can't quite put my finger on about sebastian and his relationship to gender. how all of his conversations with the women companions are thoughtful and respectful even when they clash on the subject matter, but his conversations with the men companions are mostly just him getting mocked or berated. how every single figure of significance in his personal quest is a woman: Mrs Harriman, flora, elthina, even leliana. The chantry is a matriarchal environment where men aren't allowed to rise past a certain rank or perform certain jobs, and he seems completely unbothered by that.

he canonically used to spend a lot of time in brothels, but never mentions having any male friends. part of the trauma of his upbringing is that being born a boy made him irrelevant and unwanted at home. he's the only romanceable companion with no desire for men. Isabela asks if he used to be a woman, and varric accuses him of being a crossdresser. he's not interested in learning to use a sword; he wants to learn how to cook. the only time he ever speaks with any fondness for any man is his grandfather. i'm not really saying he's trans coded, i don't get that vibe from him, but the fraught relationship he has with manhood + his clear preference for the company of women over other men is . . . something.

[thereweredragonshere]

I feel like Hiccup would try to pet a bear. His thought process is “Well I trained a night fury, I can become friends with a bear!” Meanwhile Astrid is yelling at him not to go near the bear.

If not friend why friend shaped

[tenojan-in-tevinter]

Honestly there's no one I'd rather be on a forced saving-the-world road trip with than the origins gang. Sorry kotor companions sorry bg3 companions but no one does it like the origins gang. They are a family they are insane they are not to be fucked with they never would have been friends if they were given a choice in the matter. The perfect road trip squad.

They consist of the best dog in thedas, the worlds most royal himbo, a demi-god shapeshifting witch, a bisexual assassin nun, a bisexual assassin orphan, a powerful spell-slinging grandma living on borrowed time (who is bffs with a spirit), a giant spy man who doesn't know how to function by himself, the worlds grossest dwarf, and a giant statue that has a life goal to kill all birds.

[mischiefmagpie]

Veilguard doesn't feel like a Dragon Age game for a multitude of reasons:

It doesn't allow you to butt heads with your companions over *anything*. It doesn't allow you to even converse with your companions outside of scripted scenes — you can't just approach them and open a dialogue wheel until they want to talk to Rook; you'll just get one-liners Rook can't respond to and passive NPC-exclusive interactions that Rook happens to overhear.

It doesn't allow you to ask about/discuss the world, culture, organizations, or its history (i.e. any previous installments, or your character's selected backstory). It never references any game outside of Inquisition, and barely references Inquisition despite being a direct sequel to it. None of your previous games decisions are imported or considered. There isn't even a proper "canon" they present, the past is just a void.

There's no small side stories, barely any ambient/passing npc talk, nor many side quests, (let alone complex or fulfilling ones just filler for large scale plot), there are companion Loyalty Quests that all converge to the main story that ends in a Suicide Mission.

Veilguard doesn't feel like a Dragon Age game, because it plays like a Mass Effect game.

[albaharu]

the kirkwall gang

[notebooks-and-laptops]

"the romances were bad" is kinda true, but I think it's MORE true to say that the game didn't distract enough from the fact that the romances didn't have a lot of content. I've seen plenty of games where the romances havent had a huge amount of special scenes or content; some of the BG3 romances comes to mind, as does DA2. However, I never feel that in those games that the lack of content is glaring because you are ROLEPLAYING and making loads of little decisions that are adding up to a full on character that's personal to YOU. One of my favourite Hawkes romanced Sebastian who has so little content, but I really ran with her character and got to make loads of in character decisions and that naturally spurned a lot of headcanons around the romance that I didn't feel the need to play out in game neccessarily. Hell, Solas kinda falls into this category. You're developing an angry character or a sad character or having fights with character and picking if you do. I think the reason people were disappointed with the Veilguard romances (more than just the fact they were hyped up and didn't live up to the inquisition standard) is that they're basically the only decision you get to make in this game until the very end, and it doesn't actually add a lot. So when people critique them I think it's less 'theyre bad' and more 'i got to make three decisions in this entire game and the romance was one of them and it didn't add much to my playthrough which is otherwise pretty mid and has few distinct ways I can build my character/make my character react to things'

[rainypityparade]

[soothedcerberus]

Stumbled out of bed to draw this because i had visions of a pastel plush dragon 🧸🦋