Found where the music is stored in frosty editor and since I haven't seen a post with it yet, here's Cida singing without any interruptions from Damas's kidnapping.
Raelyn Teague Writes so succinctly put to words my own struggle with Veilguard and really, my struggle at accepting Rook as the protagonist overall. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I did not care for Rook as the lead when I loved all 3 previous Dragon Age protagonists. I knew part of it had to do with the overall writing and story of Veilguard and Rook's seemingly "outside looking in" character.
This video helped me understand why.
I love the breakdown in her video and her overview of what makes a good protagonist in such a simple way - and her creativity around how the character of Rook could have been better written and the story better served for the player. I am also totally into her daring suggestion that Harding would have made more sense as the protagonist!
I never thought I'd play Veilguard a second time, which is sad considering the numerous replays I've done of all previous 3 games. However, before even watching this video I realized how unsatisfied with the game I was and wondered if I could change that by trying a different approach? So here I am now, playing Rook as Lavellan. I decided to do that a week ago and the difference in mindset and my actual investment in the game with this perspective (and making choices my Lavellan from Inquisition would make) has shifted considerably. Playing as Lavellan is far more impactful to me this second playthrough. All of Lavellan's experience colours everything. Her relationship with Bellara is deeper due to their shared heritage, she connects easily with Emmerich due to her understanding of spirits, she understands Davrin and his duty as a grey warden, and of course, she relies heavily on Harding with their shared experiences. Her grief for Varric also felt more real. While some decisions or dialogue does throw me out of "suspending disbelief" for a bit here and there (I'm also using some mods to help), ultimately I am enjoying this way more this second run.
Which makes sense to me now based on the video.
I'm not saying I wanted the protagonist to be the Inquisitor, I'm just saying Rook was undercooked as a protagonist by comparison, and it shows.
Why have I seen two people today refer to Cullen as being a 'princely' romance. My man has been a functional addict for fifteen years and he's in ACTIVE withdrawal when Inquisition begins. He is recovering from the in-universe equivalent of a Percocet addiction and he's not doing well with it. Just because he's sweet and he ducks his head and says I've never met anyone like you doesn't mean he's a flouncy Disney prince. He also THROWS things across the room because he's in pain and yells at his friends and goes quiet and distant in the War Room. He says things like, "I never considered a future before I met you," and he MEANS that shit. Cullen Stanton Rutherford was probably going to Lay Down And Die after the Breach was closed, IF it was ever closed, before he met the Inquisitor. It's strongly implied that that's what he DOES do if you tell him to continue taking Lyrium. You definitely do not have to like his romance and you're allowed to be critical of his character but saying that he's the Princely or Vanilla romance option is discrediting all of the character development he's gone through and is in my opinion just a bad faith interpretation overall.
with regards to Epler pointing out that their decision to wipe Southern Thedas off the map because 'things don't stay fixed'... So your solution is to completely throw away that thing that keeps breaking? Not keep fixing it in the future? Because we know what Blight does. Half of Antiva, damn near all of Anderfels and all of Sea of Ash are sterile deserts where nothing can really grow properly a thousand years later because of the Blight?
That's not repairing things that can't stay fixed. That's just throwing the entire toy away. And what does that communicate to playrs who spent hundreds of hours trying to make a difference?
What is dragon age even about anymore? What is its message? 'Don't bother playing, nothing you'll ever do, matters?'
saw someone saying something like "do you really think veilguard story would be better if you could do evil choices?" and actually yeah. i think if they let us act more like the dreadwolf on the "you are a paralellism to the dreadwolf" game, it would be more significant when the story tells you "you are a bit like him/you are nothing like him" because , thats how you chosed to play it.
“We had to choose between letting the companions talk to each other in the Lighthouse and the dialogue wheels”
You should have chosen the dialogue wheels. The lighthouse is literally just party banter it’s not even Lighthouse Specific.
not to mention how freaky and weird it is for us to learn everything about out "love interests and friends" via eavesdropping? why won't they tell ME about their life? why do i have to be a weirdo and stand around listening to them talk to other people? why do i have to stalk my friends/partner to know them??
damn. just realized that there is a repeated visual motif of solas bent over in physical agony representing the crushing weight of his guilt and shame throughout his murals
which is later reflected during the culmination of that same cycle of regret, with the same exact body language, even grasping at his chest or head in the same way as his depiction in the murals
and then i remembered the full meaning of "solas"
and in the end, bolstered by the inquisitor's words, he does
hey. do you ever think about how the reason we all love this moment so much is probably because not only does solas look the most like his old self compared to his inquisition model, but the lighting and framing of the scene is nearly identical to crestwood. it finally comes full circle and ends with reunion rather than separation.
Why Fenris could Never Cameo in Dragon Age: The Veilguard
In the run up to Dragon age: The Veilguard, I was almost certain that Fenris would be our main legacy character from previous games. Not only has he been central in the comics released between DAI and DATV, he is an escaped Tevinter slave who's plot revolved around magisters, magic and the structural prejudices surrounding elves in Thedas. Not only that, but he's canonically in Tevinter killing slavers currently so he's geographically in the right place for us to meet him.
About halfway through the game though, it was clear to me: Fenris could never cameo in The Veilguard. Because he'd break it.
How the Veilguard treats Thedas is...odd to me, to say the least. I will be writing another post about how much I adored the expanded big lore in this game (the titans, ancient elves were spirits, where the blight came from etc.) and yet while these large lore expansions worked for me, the actual culture of modern Thedas is entirely softened, its sharp edges filed down until it's a sanitised fantasy world devoid of what made the franchise so vibrant and compelling in the first place.
So let's start with Fenris and slavery. In all three games, the reality of slavery is pushing at the corners of the world. In DAO Loghain allows Tevinter Magisters to enslave elves in order to raise money for his war effort. In DA2 Fenris is fighting to be free from slavers who will not leave him be, let alone the reminders that the city was built by slaves which are everywhere. In DAI one of the two possible mini-bosses is Calpurnia who was a slave, and characters such as Gatt and Dorian both show us how much slavery is tied into Tevinters culture and success.
But DATV the first game actually set in Tevinter where we get to see the famed Minrathous...it's like the game purposefully wants to avoid the issue. I can feel it tilting the camera away to not allow me to see. Slavery is mentioned, but never talked about in depth or as a specifically ELVEN problem in Tevinter. This might have been done to be less problematic, it feels ignored.
We are in DOCK TOWN. We are at the DOCKS. You would think that slaves from all over Thedas who are being smuggled and bought by various groups would be everywhere. You would think that the injustice in dock town would be partly built on the back of ships we've seen in the comics crammed with elves in chains. This is the world Dragon age set up for us. And yet...nothing. zilch. A tiny easily skippable side quest where we free a couple of venatori slaves, but only one of whom is an elf.
None of our Tevinter characters seem to have been influenced by their culture even a little bit when it comes to how they view elves; there is no moment when Neve fucks up and says something prejudiced, no moment when Bellara or Davrin are distrustful of her for being a Tevinter mage.
The same goes for Zevran; a character who epitomised the issues with the crows. The crows have consistently been characterised as very morally dubious assassins who kill for the highest bidder and who buy children on the slave market and torture them as they grow in order to assure that they reach maturity able to withstand torture without giving away a client's name. Zevran is very explicit about the fact that if you fail a contract your life is forefit.
Nobody responds particularly to you if you're an elf. Nobody trusts rook less for it in Tevinter. Nobody treats Rook any differently. Even DAI had better mechanics for this; with nobles in Orlais less likely to trust you as an elf.
Considering one of the main plot points of this game and what makes Solas sympathetic is the fact that he was fighting against the slavery of ancient elves...you'd think the game might want to mirror that in modern Thedas. It might want to show us how characters fighting to end slavery in Tevinter are similar to Solas and how the society Solas fought against was similar to the one that characters we love such as Fenris have fought against in modern Thedas. Maybe we'd want to explore how in a world of slavery like this, how could the answer NOT be to tear it all down? Maybe we should have that option at the end of the game so it really can chose whether we agree with Solas and his plans or not.
Adding Fenris to this game would entirely break the game because Fenris refuses to allow you to look away from this horror. He is a sympathetic character who had to learn to trust mages again because of course he didn't trust them. Of course he didn't. Fenris wouldn't allow the camera to shift focus because he's literally covered in the lyrium scars that show how slaves are used as experiments in Tevinter. Fenris WOULD question Neve on how she feels about elves and slaves. Fenris WOULD have things to say about Lucanis and the crows (let alone the fact Lucanis is an abomonation). So he could never be in this game; he'd drop a bomb on it's carefully constructed blinders to the very society its supposed to be set in.
And yet, in DATV, the crows are presented as...a found family of misfits and orphans? The politician who opposes the crows having absolute power in Antiva is framed as a comically evil idiot who doesn't understand that the crows are ontologically good. Yet...they're NOT. Crows in this game act more like a secret rebel group than an assassin organisation. We see no crow taking contracts with the VERY RICH venatori magisters despite being hired killers. We see crows just refuse to kill people despite having a contract because 'its crueler to leave them alive'. The crows don't feel like the crows here, they feel like a softened version of a cool assassin group who are cool because they wear black and purple.
Our pirate group are also sanitised; the Lords of Fortune are good pirates who only steal treasure that's not culturally significant. Theyve clearly read the modern critiques of the British Museum and have decided to explicitly stop anyone levelling similar critiques at them. There is no faction of the Lords of Fortune who aren't like this, no internal arguments about it. Everyone just. Agrees. And is able to accurately tell what a cultural artifact is vs. what treasure that you can have yourself is. Rather than showing us why a pirate stealing cultural artifacts might be bad (like in da2 where such a situation literally causes a coup and a war) it just tells us it's bad. But also pirates are cool so we still want them in our world.
This issue seaps into Thedas and drains it of any of the interesting complexity and ability to SAY anything that this franchise had before this game. It becomes a game about telling and not showing rather than the other way around. The games have ALWAYS asked questions about oppressive structural systems and their interplay with society, religion and culture and how these things can affect even the most well meaning character. Dragon age at its best IS a game about society and how society functions both for and against it's characters and what happens to societies built on cruelty and indifference. The best bad guys dragon age has given us are those who are bad because they embody these systems or have been shaped by them. Our main characters have had to wrestle with questions surrounding how to exist in these systems, fight against them, learn and grow.
Yet every group you come across in DATV is sanitised and cleaned up to the point of being as non problematic as humanly possible. None of our cast of characters have to wrestle with where they came from or the world that shaped them. None of them have to confront their own biases. They start the game perfectly non-problematic and end it that way too.
And this just...isn't what Dragon Age has been in the past. It isn't why I love the franchise. The whole game just felt, in a way, hollow. And this was a CHOICE and it is why the legacy characters are few and far between. Too many dragon age characters are just too...angry and complex for this game. You can feel them pulling their punches on this one. I have to imagine they did this because they didn't want to be criticised or have too much controversy? But I think it honestly goes far too much in the other direction and just makes it bland.
I can't imagine what I say here will be unique, but it is the basis for a LOT of my other thoughts on this game so I wanted to get it out of the way first. The softened Thedas and characters make this game by far the weakest in the franchise.
OKAY here’s something fun i got from my eight little talons reread. it refers to two cities in antiva as where teia and viago came from/potentially are usually based. which lines up with my thought that de riva is probably not technically from treviso it’s just the city where the occupation is being contested
teia says she rarely gets a chance to let her horse loose in rialto and, at the end of the story, asks viago if he’s going straight “home” to salle
since the villa where lucanis & illario grew up is there, i’m guessing treviso is the dellamorte stronghold. (the cantori diamond’s presence in treviso suggests the strong links between cantori and dellamorte that are already supported by teia having known caterina well since she was young.)
and we know from zevran that house arainai is based in antiva city itself, which makes sense because they were first talon until relatively recently
i don’t think the houses are, like, restricted to these places but viago mentions a certain area being “neutral ground” where every house is allowed to take contracts, in a way that implies that’s not usually the case in most parts of antiva. so the regions do matter
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