Well, historically, in and out of universe, humans ARE power hungry pricks, so…
Look, the problem isn’t the act itself. It’s the portrayal - Inquisition takes potshots throughout at the Dalish, at people who have had their history and heritage and culture and lands torn away from them, insulting them, rewriting the preestablished lore to prop up other stories, and effectively blaming them for their own oppression, and it never offers an opposing view. It gives a one-sided argument and allows no dissent. It more or less praises people who say that the Dalish should give it all up and start over fresh (maybe possibly with this shiny already-dominant religion right next door, if they could just get over the whole ‘attempted cultural extermination’ thing?).
They’re saying that the elves ‘brought the Exalted March on the Dales’ on themselves in the Tomb of the Emerald Knights. Cassandra will say that the elves refusing to go to Orlais’s aid during the Second Blight ‘began’ the animosity that destroyed the Dales. Neither of these are at all about how the Chantry and the humans played a part in this animosity starting, it’s putting all of the blame on the Dalish. The very religion that the majority of humans in the game follow says that the Maker is the only true god, and his word must be sung from all corners of the world, silencing anyone else. And no one really talks about the skewed kind of history this results in.
Meanwhile… Well, how, exactly, has BioWare done anything to debunk the Maker? If anything, they set it up so that the very religion itself does everything in its power to justify anything that implies there is no Maker as evidence there IS a Maker - I mean, ‘the less he does, the more he’s proven’ is pretty much a core tenant of Andrastrianism.
I don’t think the elves should somehow only be shown in a positive light. The problem is that they’re getting all the negativity on this, being only shown as misguided at best, while humans and their beliefs aren’t receiving the same critique and criticisms within the game’s own universe. Again, it’s the narrative, the writing of the games, being set up to basically tear down the Dalish and not letting anyone speak up in their defense. I can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s not that I want the elves to be perfect. It’s that I want the same effort that’s being put in towards saying that they’re wrong, they’re misguided, that they need to give up and change, to be put towards saying the same about humans. And dwarves, and Qunari. At least if you’re poking holes in all of the races’ beliefs, you’re not basically saying ‘these guys are so silly to not be believing in this true way of thinking.’
Also, it’s really sketchy that the race that is so easily paralleled with dozens of real life minority groups, given humanity’s own physical world history of imperialism, (off the top of my head, I can see parallels to Native American tribes and any given refugee crisis with regards to the Dalish) are the ones who are being painted as somehow NEEDING to give up or change their beliefs.
