#to make sure they were okay?

[introspectivememories]

was it casual when i sat in your lap in public? was it casual when i said "recently my heart is crying because you're leaving"? was it casual when we decided how your last name would fit with mine? ("yuki tsunoda-gasly" / "no tsunoda, only gasly" / "yuki gasly?") was it casual when we sang adele's "someone like you" together at your going away party? was it casual when i knew it was you just by touching your ass? was it casual when i knew it was you by smell alone? was it casual when "will you miss me?" / "for 2-3 minutes maybe" / "i'll take that. even if it's just 2-3 minutes, i'll take that"? was it casual when that bus was completely empty and we still sat right next to each other, all the way in the back? was it casual when i picked you up multiple times so you could dunk a basketball? was it casual when i begged to come over to your house multiple time and then you finally let me and we cooked fried rice together? was it casual when we played christmas twister together and i said "your big eggplant is touching my ass"? was it casual when we were pressed up against each other on a scooter going two miles per hour? was it casual when-

[egophiliac]

Hi it's just to let you know that the official romanization of Revaan's name is Raverne ! Also they have romanized Baul's name to Baur !

Twst coming back at us again with the least expected romanization! thank you everybody (oh god my inbox) (no it's great, I literally asked for this and the reactions have been INCREDIBLE, thank you all!)

I do like Raverne though, I think it's got a nice fancy sound to it! (I had kinda suspected it was going to be an R instead of an L, so the fact that it's SO close to Laverne except for that is hilarious to me personally.) and Dragoneye Duke is honestly probably the best translation for his title, I wasn't envying the localizers that one. :') Baur instead of Baul I was NOT expecting, but in retrospect I think his name's supposed to be a reference to the Bauru crocodile, so that actually makes way more sense!

someone else also said Meleanor has become Maleanor, which is the REALLY weird one to me, because I was so surprised it was written as Mel instead of Mal in the first place?! oh god no I can't decide which one I like better. 😭 (I wonder if they might change it to Mal...they have made romanization changes before) (like I remember House of Distraction being corrected to House of Destruction in Playful Land) (I did check and she's still Mel for now, but I dunno, they might Mal her up and some point and save me from having to make a decision about which one to use) (HECK I CAN'T DECIDE)

uhhhh thank you for letting me ramble about anime names, let's just say MONOGRAMMED SWEATERS FOR EVERYONE

[danwhobrowses]

Sometimes love is planning on having a cosy cottage when the dust has settled, sometimes love is kissing the person you want to be with before a big battle and seeing where things go from there, and sometimes love is swiping a bag of shrooms from a cow man and letting the other know that you'd do any and every crazy thing they want with them

and all of them are valid

[blindtaleteller]

I cover this a few times in my fics, because.. no: it would not be that easy. ESPECIALLY where this happened on a universal scale, to societies and species of all levels and sorts, because let's think about that taking that whole universe that we've seen, plus the ones we haven't into account.. AND not forget that, the snap didn't just take half of people in a group .. it randomly took half the population of a whole planet and applied that everywhere.

Regardless of age, gender, occupation, or anything else.

(One major on screen example of this is Clint's family: of the five people on screen including the very youngest at three years old, only Clint himself survives the snap.)

So what happens when half of the government PLUS important people like energy management, and eco management disappear and cannot be replaced?

It's very unlikely that there were no repercussions there, leading to burst dams, whole sections across the world without power and or water, and even fewer people to upkeep what could be recovered, after. AND all of this while tattered, swiss cheese governments on ALL levels are trying to recover a semblance of sanity and control to get things at least back to moderately normal.

Now.. that's just talking about Earth, who is comparatively pretty far behind the rest of their galaxy and universe in the MCU. Take that a little further out? And shit gets really crazy. We're talking space stations that suddenly lose their upkeep crews in order to continue to breath in it (and the people snapped back into space and into those of them shut down; pretty likely just to die) geothermal plants, terraforming, and pretty much any sort of tech level that requires even their maint bots if that's a thing, to have personnel take care of them in order to do their jobs, and again: upkeep that environment to livable standards.

It's very likely that a LOT of people died because of that huge gap in time between snaps: snapped back into a flooded valley their house in now at the bottom of when an already understaffed dam site malfunctioned for instance.

A lava field, dead space where a space station used to be, but was powered down and pulled elsewhere because there weren't enough people to run it (if they were THAT lucky even, there are worse scenarios possible too like everyone in it but two or three being snapped and unable to escape or get them help before they die.)

Ultimately, I don't think the current writers thought much about these basic everyday life things, and just how much chaos all of it hitting at once would have really caused.

Either that or, they try not to, for convenience sake.. which is.. honestly and in complete agreement with the post above: lazy and I'm also going to add pretty ignorant of the reality of how even the moderately modern society we live in functions.

It honestly makes me wonder what fantasy world they themselves live in sometimes, if not just how unprofessional a writer can be to ignore this stuff..

.....but then again, this is the same company that keeps giving Waldron & his carbon copy follow ups a job, without checking their work appropriately fits the franchise, or whatever title and title characters they're working on, either.

Fic snippets below the cut...

 OVERHAUL: Chapter 2 (Quill and Clayton bring this up discussing their relationship, and Thor a bit all at once)

  Slow nod, because yes. Yes he did. " We get the fanfare every time we head back that way; yeah. Only been back like.. twice, though. Neither one a us really got great memories as our last there: if you know what I mean. We made up for it a bit, but.. we lost folks in between, and since the.. y'know. Vanishing, snap.. blip. Whatever the hell you wanna call it. Some of them.. aren't coming back. "

     " Mm. And some, came back to die. " was a point Peter tried not to think about too much. But had been a thing.

        Five years, give or take with half the population gone the entire universe over? Himself, Clayton, and others included? Some of them; really important people who ran things like dams, and geothermal control stations, and atmospheric emitters, and hell.. terraforming modules. Left unchecked, or unattended; or just plain forgotten in the chaos between?

     Yeah. Some people had been snapped back into literally unlivable conditions. Middle of a burst open volcano. A flooded valley. A space station with no air, was the most common kind of living grave they'd come across; being spacers. They'd stopped taking clean up and salvage jobs after the very first one of those had proven to be just that. Body collection and delivery of an orbital station that had been snapped to a portion of it's crew: too few to upkeep and too few to run their lower tech craft back down to the surface. " ..yeah. "

Simon Says (Safety) - (Carol Danvers points some of these things out point blank to Tony in the universe I have where Loki snagged the glove when T'Challa dropped it, and snapped instead of him: only to KO afterwards and use the stones to fix some of it after as an extra kick of spite in Thanos' direction)

       If Tony had any idea what to say, it had been blown completely out of his reach with that string, or rather with what it meant. Clint wanted confirmation. " Hold up.. " caught those blue eyes on Clint again, and he noticed, thought; maybe if they shut out the lights again; they might be a lot dimmer than they had been before Carol had come in.  " ...you're saying you've actually been doing this. In your sleep? "

   " I haven't been asleep. As I said.. Strange would understand the logistics. Astral projection allows for a much sharper point or nine to focus on. The remainder of how though, is simple enough? And I am surprised at your reaction.. " adjusting his position a little took visible effort. " ..as it shouldn't surprise you lot of all and any; that the stones can affect the entire universe from well: anywhere in it. Not after what they did at the least with that first conjoined use here. "

          And didn't that just land an extra kick to the head; because: that was a damned good point. A world away; his own family had been snapped out of existence. Which had been bad enough. But he knew, maybe better than most knew it: that had happened everywhere. Danvers looked.. unsure, of what to make of him now; if she wasn't before. But Clint could give her this: she was fast to suck up a breath, square her shoulders and snap out like a real trooper without need for much more: " I'd ask if you were being genuine but; I've seen some of the things you've done. So. " and get a disbelieving are you serious stare at the side of her face when she asked " What about Kree space? If we take knowing the area and people into this; I can hop the border and start helping planets there. Mark the ones I might need your help to better, for you when I run into them..? "

      " You cannot seriously, be talking about this? " from Tony, and she wasn't the only one giving Tony a look for it. Because Clint got it; he did, even before it came out of her mouth. " This isn't about the easy displacement Earth has as a major lashback, Stark. Just because Thanos is gone, doesn't mean the damage he left behind is. Or that people aren't still dying as a result! Some of them literally brought back just to die! Why? Because the place they were snapped out at is toxic now, today; or on fire if not under a burst volcano that used to be under control of the indigenous. Or under water. Or even worse; especially if they lived in space itself. Our world? Is just one of literally countless worlds affected. And frankly: we got it easy. "

           Which did shut Tony up, well before she got through the second sentence. The last, had him sitting back down and staring at Loki like .. well. Exactly what he was; something they didn't know. Something they thought they had beaded and didn't. Danvers looked and sounded a lot like she had made up her mind though....

thinking about the MCU this morning and how cool some of their concepts are and how they fucking waste them

the one on my mind today is The Snap, which is an existentially horrifying concept. some guy with infinite power snaps his fingers and half the population of the world vanishes, which is terrible in itself, but then five years later some other folks undo it, but the undo isn't retroactive, the snapped people are gone for five years and then reappear where they left from!!!

and disney are cowards, because they handwaved it to "oh but no one was hurt <3" instead of embracing the absolute horror of it all and letting us bathe in the darkness of it

a pilot who gets snapped out of existence mid-flight, and then reappears in the exact spot he left from. to him the plane would just have vanished from around him.

half a passenger jet's worth of people!!! just disappearing!! and then reappearing halfway across america, raining down upon the city the plane happened to be over

someone halfway through sex with their partner turning to dust and then five years later reappearing in the exact same place, but there partner isn't there anymore, instead they're on top of a stranger who moved into their apartment

entire buildings demolished between The Snap and the undoing, people coming back to the top floor just to find there's no floor anymore

parents reappearing to find their children five years older.

children reappearing to find they're now the youngest sibling.

people vanishing while driving cars and the fucking carnage that would come from that

surgeons vanishing mid-surgery and then reappearing without knowing they ever vanished to continue surgery on the wrong patient

pregnant people disappearing mid-birth. does the baby vanish too? what if the baby disappeared mid-birth? Where does that come back to?

did half the pregnancies vanish from the pregnant people who were left? did those come back? i promise some of those pregnant people were beyond relieved to be without that pregnancy, and some of them even had their lives saved by it

pregnant people snapping out of existence, then coming back to find their partner's moved on, married again, had kids again, and they're still pregnant

someone in an accident or drowning or something and they're about to be saved or rescued when they snap out of existence. they come back and their savior's not there anymore

someone about to fire a gun in self-defense coming back to find they shot an innocent instead

half a military coming back to a war that's already finished and starting it again

the simple horror of finding that five years of everyone else's lives have passed without you and you're still the same as you were

and these are just off the top of my head? I had more while I was brushing my teeth but I forgot some. Imagine the depth of personal and horrifying stories you could tell with all of these things.

but no, instead:

Thanos activated the completed gauntlet and initiated the Snap, causing a universal genocide which eliminated fifty percent of all life, randomly disintegrating individuals into dust.

The Snap had devastating universal repercussions. On Earth, the Snap led to a five-year period in which the world fell into societal collapse and many countries abandoned their national borders. In 2023, the victims of the Snap were resurrected by the Avengers, after they went back in time to alternate timelines to acquire their own set of Infinity Stones.

and

The Snap was remembered as a historical event. Although the Blip eventually brought back all living beings who perished, their sudden return was unsettling to most of the survivors, who had moved on with their lives without thinking they would ever return. Their return also caused confusion surrounding their identity documents, because those who returned remained the same age they had been before vanishing, despite the five year lapse. For example, the students of Midtown who returned had to repeat the entire school year the following term, despite having already completed midterms, much to their frustration. In 2024, a documentary film about the event, entitled The Snap, was released.

and

However, the Blip was not without repercussions. As a result of the five years between the Snap and the Blip, many of the previous victims were displaced from their homes. The mass displacement of so many people was so acute it caused the United Nations to create the Global Repatriation Council, a supranational organization which was given a mandate to help the returned people get housing and several forms of social security. In the United States of America, the National Blip Support Hotline was founded for Americans victims of the Snap. In New York City, the Salvation Army sought donations to provide housing for displaced persons, with volunteer May Parker using Spider-Man to draw attention to the fundraising campaign. In San Francisco, a dating service exclusively designed to pair up victims of the Snap known as Blip Sync was launched.

Meanwhile, restored students like Peter Parker, Ned Leeds, Michelle Jones, Flash Thompson, Betty Brant, and Jason Ionello found themselves five years behind their 2018 classmates due to not having aged the five years. Since many of Midtown's previously snapped students had failed to go through the entire school year and take finals, they were told that they had to restart all over again, notably with Parker's class having to retake junior year during the remnants of the 2023-2024 school year.

It just makes me groan softly that they had this amazing, creative and downright unique narrative device to play with, and the level of consequences they decided to go with was, "People are homeless and for some reason the Government actually cares about this" (as if) and "Some high school students have to re-take their classes."

anyway i watched this video the other day

which summed up a lot of my boredom with the MCU in general. There's a lot of excellent ideas and concepts within the MCU banner, but they're so attached to status quo and no actual change to the world can ever happen (probably because it has to stay "relatable"? It's suffering from what a lot of shows suffered from when they needed to be syndicated back in the day: you have to be able to watch one episode (movie, in this case, or entire show) at random and still understand what you're watching, even if you've never seen another one ever, as well as it needing to stay "present day" instead of becoming unrecognizable from the world people paying for the tickets or Disney+ live in). You can't solve racism in the MCU because racism still exists in our world, you can't solve world hunger or homelessness, because those things still exist here. It would make the world unrecognizable.

Having actual consequences for the Blip or whatever it's called would require letting the world change, and would make new viewers have to have a primer on how that world got to where it is now, and there's no way Disney are going to risk isolating even 2% of their viewer base, because then they might not make *checks figures* $546.3 million off the next movie. It might be $500 million instead. Shocking.

Frankly, I think adding a pre-movie/show section that gives a rundown of what's happened so far could be pretty cool. They could make it a bit with a reoccurring actor playing a news guy or something, with smatterings of the news of what's happened for the last x amount of years. You could make it comedic, add commentary to the universe, have the guy vanish for the whole period of the blip, replaced by someone else, then come back later and be frazzled and unsure what he's doing because they just expected him to go back to work. There's so much you could do, and if they wanted they could easily make it a bit that people looked forward to and enjoyed due to the comedy and narrative aspects of it.

But instead they just said, "Oh no, it's fine. No one dies from knock-on effects of the Snap or the return. It's all fine, don't think too hard about it. The gauntlet compensated for that," and that's fine, it works, but it's disappointing to me. I would love to see more consequence.

Then again, I'd always like to see more consequence in my MCU, and I never really do [insert my AOS rant here]. So I'm used to it by now. I'm also massively behind on all the movies and that's likely one of the reasons why.

(If you like my thoughts, I have a Substack I'm hoping to put stuff on soon.)

[sleepyskeleton-0]

What if- what if Wind’s trauma doesn’t register with him until he’s older. What if as a teenager he thinks he’s super cool for going on adventures and fighting and stuff but then the trauma slams into him when he’s older. One day he’ll realise just how fucked up his life was and all the things he disregarded or made a joke about before come back to haunt him. What if…

[itslilacokay]

a what if

paralleling this

[casscainmainly]

There's something so beautiful about Cass' belief in people. Not only is it consistently rewarded, but it's often the very thing that allows people to change:

Batgirl (2000) #36 / Detective Comics #972

Her belief isn't enough for her, but it's enough for so many others.

[geraskierfanficprompts]

Prompt 136

Contrary to popular belief, Jaskier was the one who said no to riding a horse. Jaskier willingly walks alongside Geralt and Roach. Because Jaskier is afraid of riding horses. Don't get him wrong! He loves horses! Just not being on them as they run 48 kilometers per hour. When Jaskier sprains his ankle walking, however, Geralt decides enough is enough and it's time to teach him how to ride and help him face his fear. Jaskier sits in front of Geralt on top of Roach as Geralt teaches him how to ride, and every time Jaskier gets too nervous, Geralt will hear his heartbeat tick up, and he'll hug him, or praise him, and Jaskier will calm again. Jaskier's been getting better. To the point that Geralt can now just walk alongside Roach and Jaskier, hand resting on Jaskier's leg or back. Geralt decides to surprise Jaskier with his own horse! Geralt finds something sturdy and gentle, but also pretty, knowing his bard will love to comb and braid the horse, and will want to show it off. It's a white horse, which certainly won't stay white on the road, but then again, Jaskier will most likely delight in cleaning the horse and admiring it's sheen when it's washed. Geralt presents Jaskier with his horse, and Jaskier is overjoyed. Sobbing with happiness, hugging and kissing the horse, and Geralt has never been more in love with his bard. The first time Jaskier rides his own horse, they go at a very gentle slow pace, as the horse seems unsure about being ridden. Jaskier cajoles and consoles it through it all, and soon enough they're riding at steady paces, both Jaskier and his horse now feeling safe and brave enough to go at a normal pace, sometimes even a bit faster. Geralt is happy. Until one day, big white wings materialize on the sides of Jaskier's horse, and the damn thing takes off with Jaskier still on it. Shit.

[skitskatdacat63]

Who's your bias? Mine's Vettel!

[scribz-ag24]

sth sth dusknoir clinging beyond expectation to grovyle. cant believe thats a line in the game

[dismas-n-dismay]

There’s something so poetic and heartbreaking about Mary not wanting to hurt her mother. It’s not out of pity or wanting to ease the strain of the divorce it’s just purely a daughter’s love for her mother who’s always been there. Her mother who has never tried to make Mary feel outcasted or othered or unloved.

Even when Mary KNOWS that something is wrong in her bones, she cannot force herself to do anything but trail after her mother and try and make her proud even if what she’s doing could get her hurt. She loves her mom. And it sucks that the last she saw of her was her mother trying to kill her.

Mary, you will always be famous, my little dart frog

[konigsblog]

ghost putting a gun to the back of your head while you suck him off.

[sysig]

Recently had a silly Handplates dream where Papyrus was trying to snoop around Gaster and Alphys’ lab, but didn’t know who Alphys was and so was trying to pass it off as his own lab lol (Patreon)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

+3 friendship with Jin Ling: He actively tries to dissuade you from further embroiling yourself in the homosexual allegations.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[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.

[archivewriter1ont]

Cadet Batch Quotes

Kix: *giving all the Cadet Batch a checkup* Would you space monkeys hold still?! You’re gonna break my sphygmomanometer!

Cadet Wrecker: *chokes* Your WHAT?

Cadets Crosshair and Hunter: *dissolve into giggles*

Cadet Tech: *condescendingly* It should not be so funny... it is a real word.

Cadet Wrecker: You say it then!

Cadet Tech: Sphygmomanometer.

The Other Three: *falling down laughing*

Kix: Oh for crying out loud.

Echo: Can we check if their giggle boxes are connected or something?

Jesse: Wait, we have GIGGLE BOXES??!!

Rex: *facepalms*