@the-sound-of-her-wings said: "I'll bite. I will admit to not being well versed in dragon age lore, but do not all elves stem from the ancient elves? Even if they are not the same in modern Thedas, they have the same ancestry. Moreover, Dalish history is told orally. Can one not assume that the original meaning was distorted overtime? A mark of ownership becomes a mark of dedication.
"I don't fundamentally disagree with the notion that it's cultural appropriation. But to me it seems more like cultural integration and/or a lost people trying to reconnect with their ancestors. They do what they can with what they know, and I don't exactly blame them for not knowing since the world their ancestors came from was obliterated."
This particular argument - of cultural appropriation - stems largely in response to the Sola/vellan stans crowd. In their eyes, the vallaslin is a reclamation largely and specifically because it reminds them of Romani and Jewish cultures. I get why - the elves have lost everything, live nomadically, are disgraced and hounded by humans, and desperately keep to their cultural history as well as they can in response to what they've lost. But their history is not the same as those of our world, and their past is not as well known to them as it is to those marginalized groups in our world, and their cultural beliefs are not the same.
In fact, modern elves hold strongly to the conviction of staying true to their history. Even the Dragon Age Wiki's very first sentence proclaims the Dalish to be "nomadic elves that seek to recover, inherit and preserve the knowledge and sacred treasures of the two fallen elven kingdoms, the Dales and Elvhenan." (Please remember how, in Dragon Age: Inquisition, the aravel there learned of their culpability in the start of the war in the Dales and embraced it wholeheartedly. This is a crucial part of their culture.) There was no attempt at 'reclaiming' the vallaslin! They truly believed the vallaslin stood for proof of adulthood and adoration of the god of their choice. None of which is true.
Yet, when Solas informs Lavellan of the truth of the vallaslin, most of the Sola/vellan crowd start yammering about "cultural reappropriation" and "reclamation," simply because they've mixed real marginalized groups with a fictional fantasy race. Instead of making an argument on Thedas lore to explain why they would keep the vallaslin - about how it means something to their Dalish elf specifically, or how they'd become an outcast to their clan, or how they want to change its meaning to something better and start to reclaim it - they talk about how they already have changed its meaning. Which they haven't. Because they never knew its true meaning in the first place.
You cannot reclaim something without at the very least knowing you're doing so.
Add in the fact that, by the time you learn the truth of the vallaslin, you also learn that Ancient Elves still exist in this world and have their own opinions of the Dalish (who are actually known to be descended from the elves of the Dales, so though they of course stem from the Ancient Elves, we don't know how much their culture changed from the fall of Arlathan to the fall of the Dales, two time periods already separated by over a thousand years - though we do know that the Dalish all stem from the slaves of the Imperium who rose up with Shartan, so incredible cultural changes had already taken place). The idea that the Dalish are simply descended from the Ancient Elves and thus have every right to their cultural symbols gets really murky when you realize they are using said symbols while the Ancient Elves, who do not recognize them as the same as them, are still alive to witness it.
Though I dislike bringing real life into a debate about a fantasy world, let me just say this for comparison's sake: just because I have Cherokee blood in me does not make me a native. Being descended from a group does not necessarily lend you equal authority or control on their culture or their traditions. Just because they're both groups of elves does not mean they are the same. Not every human belongs to the same culture, nor does every human have the right to that culture's symbols. The Dalish do not own the Ancient Elves' culture simply because they can trace their ancestry back two millennia and eventually point to the Ancient Elves.
When a Dalish Inquisitor is told outright that they are not recognized as Ancient Elves, when that Dalish Inquisitor holds their peoples' belief that reclaiming historical truths is in fact the greatest of noble deeds, when the oath of the Dales says, specifically, "We are the Dalish: keepers of the lost lore, walkers of the lonely path. We are the last of the Elvhenan, and never again shall we submit,” and yet you choose to keep the slave markings on your Dalish's face because you think they're exactly like real human cultures and don't have any lore to their names - well, that's when you enter fanon, and while you may enjoy the ride and are free to do so, you're ignoring integral parts of the Dalish, the Ancient Elves, and the world of Thedas, and I have no interest in doing the same.
baratheonpilled
titsay
