thinking about morrigan having kieran is actually so sad for me. because obviously she grows to love him, but in her own words he was "a means to an end." we don't know exactly when that changed. this was a ritual given to her by her mother, she was told to do this by her mother. to become pregnant, to carry a child to term, to raise it for the sole purpose of preserving the soul of an old god. "a means to an end." what does that look like when, even though your mother who tasked you with this is dead, you still choose to go through with it because it's the only way to save the life of your friend or lover? you uphold flemeth's directive. you save the life of someone important to you. all it costs is the loss of self and the loss of body that accompanies pregnancy and motherhood, and you have to do while completely alone. obviously morrigan did want to preserve the old god soul, whether for herself or because flemeth impressed that desire upon her (or some mix of the two), but did she ever want to have a baby? she loves kieran. he became her son. but having a baby when you didn't particularly want one is a huge sacrifice for "a means to an end"
neve’s outfit design is so gorgeous that it feels like heresy to criticise but i must sayyy that i don’t think it quite matches the character. like there is a storytelling disconnect here. neve is a tough detective from a rough part of town who doesn’t like playing nice with nobles, lives alone paycheck to paycheck eating only ye olde takeout, and despite being a mage, isn’t afraid to get into a fistfight. so why exactly does she wear a pristine white coat and this fantastically layered cravat and an ornate golden prosthetic and an aristocratic little hat and 5000% snake detailing radiating Tevinter Pride? i’m not crazy, right, it’s weird?
i can’t find it now so don’t quote me on this maybe i made it up or it was some fanon thing my brain twisted, but i think i even vaguely remember dialogue where i could tell the developers had figured out this was weird because they felt the need to throw in an explanation that a grateful client had given the coat to her. which... okay... but what kind of dock town client could afford that thing? or if it was a rich client, why does she lovingly wear it everyday and make it her whole identity when she doesn’t like those people? and how does she possibly keep it clean and white in her line of work? where is the wear and tear? where is any evidence of someone who is supposedly a “mess”, who chases cases obsessively and doesn’t look after herself? and it does give her an elegance that is followed through in her animations so i guess this is an intentional aspect of the character but i still feel like there’s a missing link for me here in terms of storytelling. like we missed a step. i think the fact that a lot of her aesthetic was originally intended for a totally different character (calpernia) probably plays into this somewhere because like we factually know that a lot of these elements existed in concept art before neve did
i definitely feel like you could create storytelling reasons why neve dresses like this. like there’s an angle where maybe she puts on her elegance and outer coat like armour, it’s a front that says “i know what i’m doing” and the mess is underneath. that would be character storytelling. but then her home outfit is every inch as pristine and artfully constructed as her coat, so it’s like, eh, that doesn’t really work. or maybe you work it into a backstory thing, like, as a powerful mage she had some class mobility opportunities when she was younger, and ultimately she chose the opposite of that life, but the experiences still characterise her tastes somewhat and she has this cherished coat as one last reminder of the life she could’ve lived, which has the side effect of putting some distance and tension between her and the people she’s chosen
i’m throwing rough ideas out here but you see what i mean, like there are ways we can reach this conclusion with this character intentionally, but ultimately it just feels like elegance and cool was placed way above characterisation here. and that nobody had the nerve or initiative to commit visually to the idea of a woman who doesn’t attend to herself. like sure we can have her say that, we can have that be an interesting part of her storyline and romance even, but god forbid she have anything but a slim figure and perfect makeup and fashion for the catwalk and a well-kept aesthetically pleasing office, that would be a Step Too Far. anyway the idea that people from the poorest district of minrathous don’t just fucking run and hide when they see someone strutting along in this goddamn I Love Tevinter And Being Rich coat is so ridiculous to me i can never get over it. it’s beautiful and must absolutely be in the game but like, put it on her venatori nemesis who can now at least be hot while being nothing, and then go back to the drawing board
sophia was an imprisoned rival for the fereldan throne (you can do this to anora!) who was forced to join the grey wardens rather than be executed in order to appease her supporters (you can do this to loghain!) who made an attempt for the throne despite being a grey warden (you can do this to alistair!) and who thus got the grey wardens exiled for 200 years (the entire background for the main plot of the game, the reason for the wardens’ small numbers in ferelden/at ostagar compared to their numbers in orlais, and thus the backdrop to loghain’s mistrust). she’s such an efficient little microcosm of the foundational dragon age theme that your choices will determine the future but you won’t be able to control their impact or how they and you are remembered, and that if that’s true, then what ends justify what means? what risks is your character willing to take, just like sophia’s use of blood magic and her failed gamble with the wardens which is the whole reason you’re in this situation? are they as sure of their goal as sophia was of her lost cause that nobody now even remembers to mourn? and i wish she loomed larger in people’s perceptions of the wardens and ferelden and dragon age in general bc i think she is neat <3
my fav part of origins is the fact that it's a love letter to "the end does not justify the means". the entire game, in almost every quest, this is the constant question that's thrown at us. everyone in the story tells us that they did what they did because it would achieve the best outcome. from uldred's uprising in the circle tower, to zathrian's cursing of the werewolves, to bhelen's coup. loghain himself uses this as justification for the retreat at ostagar - that it was the morally correct decision to abandon the field, because it guaranteed some of the army would survive and could regroup for a new assault on the darkspawn in ostagar. and it's so specific that loghain, as the primary antagonist, loghain is the one arguing that the ends justifies the means because he is either your parallel, or your mirror.
to be more specific, my favourite thing about origins is that you, as the player character, are faced with the exact same choice. you will always resolve the circle tower uprising. you will always resolve the issue between the dalish and the werewolves. you will always settle the secession crisis in orzammar. you will always fight the archdemon and win over it. but how? what are your means? will you murder a child to spare redcliffe? will you slaughter cornered circle mages trapped in a tower with no escape? will you kill innocent werewolves who had nothing to do with a tragedy that happened hundreds of years ago? will you support a king that has his own family's blood on his hands because he wants change or a king that's more committed to culture & tradition over justice?
does it matter? to you? to anyone? why does it matter, if you're going to get to the same place in the story at the end?
and the story tells you. again and again. it matters. it matters because the ends do not justify the means. to roughly quote ursula k le guin, it matters because there is no end - you start the awakening dlc as your own warden if you survived, or as an orlesian warden if not. so, all you have left is the means.
it's very clumsy in a lot of places, and there's obvious issues if you look at each case in closer detail (e.g. the ideas around social justice re: dalish elves & mages), but overall, this is the kind of story that makes origins so special to me tbh. it really holds up a mirror to this kind of cold, utilitarian morality that's so often rewarded in "dark" fantasy genres. like idk it's very good to me.
I am absolutely obsessed with Viago's triumphant arrival in Fire and Ice because you just know he's spent a month high on poison fumes in his lab trying to concoct something which can and will kill a dragon, ballista delivery included, and I just have this mental image of Teia in a lacy nightgown and a plague-doctor gasmask trying to get her man to come to bed bc goddamnit Vi, you haven't slept in a week.
we’re introduced to emmrich’s perspective on necromancy—i.e. the hope that it isn’t just a spirit, dead souls do in some way partially return—as one perspective, as a possibility or theory. emmrich himself introduces the topic as “the eternal question” to which there’s no solid answer. so it still permits other characters, and the audience if they so choose, to believe the more standard dragon age lore that necromancy and walking corpses are merely spirits, no souls involved. it’s therefore not lore-breaking. emmrich’s perspective is also one we’ve seen people consider before, for example in dai when discussing with cassandra and leliana whether the divine justinia spirit in the fade was in some way “really her”. so far so good! my problem, however, is that i do believe the more standard dragon age lore on the subject and have never seen anything to change that opinion. because emmrich’s story and abilities are presented basically as if his perspective were true, so i have to deal with the implications all by myself. what’s in that skull? NOT johanna hezenkoss! who’s answering those interrogations and corpse whispers? NOT the people who used to be in those bodies! who’s in there if emmrich becomes a lich? well i go back and forth on this one because the nature of the procedure is murky but there’s a very real possibility in my mind that it’s not emmrich!
anyway if i was a murderer in nevarra how hard do you think it would be to train spirits or make a deal with them to mimic the deceased and be like I SAW MY MURDERER... IT WAS THAT ONE GUY HARKER VIGILSKEEP FINDS REALLY ANNOYING... and emmrich would present that to people as legitimate evidence. i just think there’s a lot you could get away with here.
I still can't get over lucanis at the end of the wigmaker job -- having limped his way down the docks, nursing several broken ribs, dripping rivers of blood (some of it his own. most of it not) onto the floorboards before the innkeeper's horrified and irate eyes, having just Faced the Horrors frfr and cut a bloody swath through a party of tevinter high society as if setting out to contemptuously prove poe's red death a mere piddling amateur, in his fucking batman-ass black leather overcoat getup, presumably woozy with blood loss and fading adrenaline -- just standing there sadly like '🥺is my cousin here'
"i know merrill was fond of mahariel, but it's been a year. that's not healthy"
"brooding over the loss of mahariel is the least disturbing thing she's done."
"Don't let him scold you too much. Vi was worried about you."
crow goes hunting by ted hughes // 1 // crow’s first lesson by ted hughes // 2 // the lacuna by barbara kingsolver // 3 // domestication syndrome by dhole b // i am a dog. i have blood all over my teeth. by sciencedfiction // crow’s theology by ted hughes // 4 // how to be a dog by andrew kane // the scream by ted hughes // unknown // for your own good by leah horlick
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.
As someone who is acepec, the whole demi Lucanis debacle just doesn't sit right with me. He has so many dialogues that just cut off suddenly, scenes that feel like they're missing (that missive in Act 2 where he talks about dealing with Spite once and for all that just became a completely different scene with Zara??) All the concept art for the romance that was never explored. The massive difference in relationship progression between Rookanis and Nevecanis in terms of both emotional and physical intimacy.
Lucanis' romance is so clearly incomplete even in a game where the romance arcs are sparse on the whole. His character without the romance feels incomplete as well - we get two or so big moments of characterisation and everything else is just the same scene about coffee repeated as infinitum.
I have no issue with a character being awkward and inexperienced, wanting to take things slow, not recognising flirtation or romantic cues, wanting to figure out their complicated situation before jumping into something. I am that person! It took 6 months after my partner and I acknowledged we had feelings for each other for us to start dating because I was not in the right place mentally to do so. Both of us are demi. Both of us have had very few previous experiences with romantic relationships. But that doesn't preclude a person from understanding or wanting emotional intimacy.
The Lucanis situation does not come across as 'he just doesn't have sexual attraction to Rook yet', it's just complete shutdown of conversation on all fronts (something he does not do with Neve, btw.) I too find flirting scary from people I don't know and agonised over it before my partner and I were together. This is not how he's written. His expressions do not reflect shock or awkwardness when Rook flirts, nor does his tone when he responds. Do you know when he does do this? With Neve right at the start of their banter. And he overcomes that shyness quickly. He just does not acknowledge Rook speaking at all the same way any video game character does when their conversation tree is bugged, the game decided to cut some response dialogue and just transitioned directly into the neutral follow-up line. He isn't rejecting emotional intimacy because of Spite and the Ossuary prison because during the ambient dialogue it's clear he's sharing that emotional intimacy with Neve waaaaay before Rook helps him.
I just want more of his writing. Where is he and his character in this story? He's so incredibly inaccessible to us. And I know people will say that characters do not have to be emotionally available to the player (which is true! A great example of this working well is Vivienne, who is warm but not directly open if befriended.) But that should then be a consistent character trait, and it's clearly not. In fact, Lucanis is incredibly declarative about his feelings for Rook romanced or not once you hit Act 3, he's just completely missing in Act 2. Which to me is a flaw in the game's structure. And that 'missing-ness' is being read as demisexuality instead of 'hey this character's writing is actually incomplete and needs restructuring and additional scenes.' Those additional scenes could very much be as awkward and non-romantic in tone as you please, but we needed more of them. Have Lucanis visit Treviso more often to do things other than drink coffee. Have him visit other locations as well! Teach Rook how to cook a local dish, the gondola fight we saw in the concept art. Deciding after the game's poor reception that a character who is clearly only 3/4s of a character, who is lacking in so much characterisation, is the demi character? That feels bad man. Demi characters should be written with just as much care and attention, should get to express themselves in as wide a variety of circumstances, show us more of themselves and how they interact with the world. The reality is that Lucanis has the weakest romance arc in the game, and posthumously attributing that to demisexuality feels like an indictment of acespec people's ability to read the room and express emotional intimacy rather than a true attempt at representing us.
Just as Cullen's heterosexuality and preference for elves and humans is in fact a game development constraint rather than a character writing decision, and Solas' heterosexuality was a result of running out of dev time to record voice lines and re-rig cutscenes, I think we should be able to acknowledge that this version of Lucanis is not a good representation of his character in multiple ways. And that is due primarily to the development cycle rather than writerly intention.
We've had beautiful slowburn romances that were also deeply affected by character trauma throughout the Bioware series. Lucanis' is (in its present state) not one of them. Leliana, Cullen, even Alistair. I think using demisexuality or even slowburn as an 'excuse' for Lucanis' incomplete character isn't a useful way to think about his writing.
Note: This post is purely about quality of writing wrt emotional intimacy. I have zero issue with virgin Lucanis and think that fits his wider writing. I also don't wish Lucanis to be someone he's not - Zevran or Davrin or some other flirty/dommy archetype. I just don't like the casual conflation of awkwardness and inexperience with asexuality. These things do go together but also I don't think we should use demisexuality as a bandaid for poor writing because it reflects poorly on our understanding of ourselves and the community.
i love that Neve canonically throws hands. like she’s a literal mage there’s no reason for her to be doing all that but she will get right up close and physically fight enemies in this game. woman of the year
