#thing in the center with the world’s hottest great hall. there’s a FORGE there’s a keep there’s a guest wing there’s a tabern there’s

[came-out-of-the-coffin-desisted]

writing dragon age fanfiction is so so so so hard for me because every time i spot another historical inaccuracy that’s like “i don’t care that it’s fantasy they have the same level of technology this is WRONG” i have to have a moment of like. “kaed NO ONE ELSE will EVER care about this. you watch ‘ranking period dramas on corset accuracy both in construction and writing’ videos on youtube for entertainment normal people simply do not give a FUCK about medieval castle layouts!”

and yet this cycle continues, because the dragon age devs so so so so clearly DID research but they did BAD research and it HAUNTS me. like WHYYYYY is there only one courtyard that isn’t even really a courtyard in castle cousland WHY is the “main hall” huge with no furniture while the great hall “dining room” is tiny as fuck and in a horrible to access spot WHY are there no ovens in the kitchens where the FUCK do they bake the breaaaad!! like ok fine cool servants get beds in thedas i’ll bite. that fucks hard, actually! but WHY are there more servant rooms than rooms for visiting nobles do you honestly think anybody in the middle ages fucking had servant rooms???? they slept on the FLOOR in the GREAT HALL! and WHY is there a fucking library and a ‘treasury’ (which what the fuck is THAT there should be a DON-JON in there you locked your valuables in the TOWER at the TOP, not in ONE room centrally located on the first floor with TWO guards!!) like i KNOW it was for level design i KNOW it was but oh my fucking g-d it’s gonna KILL ME to write out creeping through corridors when there WERE NO CORRIDORS! like look at this. look at this.

castle cousland: stupid, awful design, honestly they kinda asked to be coup’ed with their garbage unsurvivable castle that supposedly nobody sieges regularly even though it’s literally a death trap. there is ONE main exit, no way to trap your enemies, and only one official guard post that i can see. fuck awful.

harlech castle in wales: it took 115 years for someone to successfully take this castle, and it’s withstood COUNTLESS sieges, you can go visit it right the hell now if you go to wales (not at all getting into the evilness of the english building castles in wales, that’s not the point i’m trying to make.) see how the outside makes it so that even if your enemies breach the walls, to actually reach anyone important they have to survive the volleys of arrows from the ramparts? and then presumably kill everyone ON the ramparts, or the minute you go to open a door or try to drag someone out, you’re going to get shot full of arrows. that’s after breaching TWO heavy doors (which would require a battering ram both times) which would wake up the entire castle LONG before they got anywhere NEAR the heir to the castle’s wife and child.

and before somebody says “oh well kaed maybe you just don’t know your castle building periods very well” think again. i know my castle building periods. that style above is concentric (harlech castle’s initial construction was finished in 1289 and was one of the first finished castles in england in this style,) which came after the keep and bailey style, which came after the motte-and-bailey style, which came after the burh (which arguably WASN’T a castle but whatever,) etc. there are no fortified castles in english history that look like castle cousland, because it’s fucking indefensible. now, this does lead to the question of “oh, well, what is the timeline for the game, maybe there’s something you missed!” so let’s examine the time period of origins:

at the very, very latest, origins could be based off of the BEGINNING of the british “wars of the roses” (the civil wars between the various members of the house plantagenet) which began in the 1450s— this is personally what /i/ think origins is based off of, for a couple reasons. 1) trevelyan was a real person— g.m. trevelyan was a british historian who wrote about the wars of the roses, and in one instance there’s a quote of his the devs almost verbatim used for the design of the free marches: “the Wars of the Roses were to a large extent a quarrel between Welsh Marcher Lords, who were also great English nobles, closely related to the English throne…” they ixnayed the part about the marcher lords being ferelden nobles, i imagine because it was too complicated, but trevelyan? marcher lords? a close relationship with this country? (i.e. like somewhere that might take in their refugees after a catastrophe?) cmon. 2) because ferelden is fucking huge and the histories are kinda weird, because they aren’t 1 for 1, i’m gonna say that we have to use the norman conquest of england as our unification date. in other contexts i wouldn’t try to argue this, but in this one, i’m saying 1066 is the unification date of the anglo-saxon kingdoms into england. calenhad gives us a hard unification date for ferelden— the first landsmeet was in 5:42 exalted, ergo origins is 388 years later. the wars of the roses started in 1455, 389 years after the norman conquest ended. 3) the wars of the roses happened because of a succession crisis— admittedly, these two succession crises are very, very different, but there are definitely parallels between loghain and henry vi and alistair and edward iv. henry vi was crowned at a young age (loghain largely ruled for maric at various points in his life, starting when he was very young,) and was very ineffectual— he suffered from an unknown mental illness which made him extremely unstable and unable to rule for large periods of time. loghain, on the other hand, ruled when the /theirins/ weren’t stable, so you argue he had the opposite— meanwhile, his policies WEREN’T sustainable, whatever you might think of him. loghain is too shaped by his own experiences to be a truly good leader, and by the time his rule/anora’s rule is threatened by cailan, he’s sacrificed enough of his principles that he’s willing to commit atrocities (notably, margaret of anjou ruled during the worst parts of her husband’s mental instability, which again could apply to loghain OR anora, as they ruled fairly jointly after a certain point.) edward iv was the son of richard of york, who was eligible for the throne at a very young age (18 to alistair’s 19) because his father was dead. he was coaxed and led into battle by his cousin, the earl of warwick (also known as the kingmaker— sound like a protagonist you might know?) that’s about where the similarities end, but that’s largely because alistair is a grey warden— if he weren’t, he’d probably be able to have kids and end the question of succession. but he can’t, which, assuming the devs eventually remember, WILL lead to another civil war. hence why i say this is at the BEGINNING of the wars of the roses.

another option that could be argued but makes much less sense and i have no evidence for is that alistair has similarities to edward ii (second son who only became king because his brother died, married a more powerful woman to consolidate power, not very good at ruling, no offense to alistair,) but that still puts origins at like 1307-1327. in either case, they would have been using concentric castles— and given what time period castle cousland was originally built in, it would have been built as a motte-and-bailey, which would NOT have lasted four hundred years. so the castle had to have been rebuilt, and bryce cousland would have had to update that rebuilt castle, because no one lived in it during the orlesian occupation. so where the hell does this winding, weird multi-level design come from?

i GUESS— and this is SO charitable— they could have designed castle cousland based off of a country house design from the mid 1500s, but none of them look like that, either. they’re exclusively rectangular, for one thing, and one of the huge bragging rights of owning one was that they weren’t fortified— they came into fashion during a period of relative stability under the tudor rule, when it was considered guache and maybe even treasonous to build a fortified castle. ferelden is NOWHERE NEAR a period of stability, if anything at the end of origins they’re entering their greatest period of INstability, given what happens in inquisition, and that no matter who ends up on the throne, there’s no way for them to have children. so there’s NO way this castle is a country house, or inspired by one.

leaving us with the final conclusion that a) the game devs definitely did do research into the time period because i can fairly directly trace a line between the event i think inspired origins and the plot, but they didn’t do enough research to figure out what the everloving fuck the BUILDINGS looked like. so these castles make no fucking sense and can’t possibly be called historically accurate even with the fantasy defense, and b) i care WAAAY too much about this for somebody who isn’t even a medieval historian. my area of expertise is the paleolithic, i have no clue why this bugs me so bad i spent four fucking hours writing this post.