#anti celene

[gloriousonemahanon]

Oh, no no no Bioware. Are you really trying to tell me that Celene immediately choosing to commit genocide against thousands of her own citizens because her cousin is a cunt was 'a tragic necessity', but Anders destroying a Chantry with twenty or so people inside after years of trying peaceable and nondestructive routes and options while said Chantry ignored the horrendous and public abuses inflicted upon the mages was 'monstrous and unforgivable'??

[shiobookmark]

I just reread the Masked Empire and was struck again by the idiocy of Celene. For all she tells us that she’s a masterful player of The Game, most of the evidence in the story is to the contrary. The first big gambit we see is her diffusing hostilities by asking her Champion to duel Bann Teagan with feathers, thereby ensuring that while honor is satisfied no one is hurt and their alliance with Ferelden holds. But lets analyse that a little. For one, Bann Teagan could have taken the duel as yet another insult. Gaspard openly derides Ferelden royalty as little more than bandits and idiots (and I don’t understand how that doesn’t make him the aggressor who insulted Teagan’s honour first but... Orlais thinks itself above everyone I suppose.)

and then Celene interrupts to suggest that Teagan demand a duel before Gaspard can, leaving her to decide the choice of weapon. She choses feathers, and the only feathers on hand are Chevalier crests. Teagan could have easily taken this as further mockery, but thankfully realises that she’s an ally and allows himself to be made fun of to diffuse tension. Notice Celene left no room for Ferelden pride. She relied on Teagan realising that the Chevaliers were being mocked first, and playing along.

For another, Celene congratulates herself for knowing her fickle courtiers will delight in the spectacle but utterly fails to consider how the nobles (ie. The people who actually give her material support) will see it. Chevaliers are revered in Orlais. They’re all nobles prancing around with a code of honour and license to do whatever they like to peasantry, pretending they’re clever and honourable people. It’s a pretty easy critique of the ‘code of chivalry’ romanticised in a lot of fiction - they have the appears of honourable knights, but the peasants suffer for it.

And they hate being made fun of and will fight to the death to defend their honour. Celene should know this. Yet she mocks them anyway and is then surprised when a number of the nobles, who have relatives who are Chevaliers if they are not Chevaliers themselves, turn around and support Gaspard. This shows how little she actually understands what motivates people. And then there’s the genocide against the elves of Halamshiral. Gaspard creates a play insinuating that she is too distracted by her Elven lover to rule the country and Celene, thin-skinned as she is, decides to prove him wrong. And she knows he wants her to react with violence. She knows he’s forcing her hand. But she considers doing so to be ruining his plans. When all she’s doing is proving that she is exactly as short-sighted and dim-witted as people think her to be. So not only is Celene a vile, murderous and self-obsessed ruler. She’s also stupid and easily manipulated. Gaspard insults her, so she does the opposite of what she’s accused of, thereby playing straight into his hands. There will be no elven university students or traders when she’s burned them all to death, she undoes all her work she claims to care about.* Gaspard later says that when someone flinches, it teaches him where to hit them. And Celene flinched, and praised herself for flinching. So in the future all her rivals have to do is insult her in the right way, and she’ll do exactly what they want just to prove them wrong. And it’s a shame none of this made it into Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts because it is vital information when picking a ruler. Celene has only successfully ruled Orlais because she had Briala by her side, propping her up and telling her how to win people’s hearts. Briala understands people, Celene does not. Celene is an ineffectual ruler who fancies herself clever and misses the forest for the trees, focusing on clever pageantry over actual tactics. Briala is cunning and plays the Game masterfully, if ruthlessly, while caring about elves and servants. Her weakness is Celene and she can be encouraged to continue abandoning her. Gaspard is a glorified thug who is clever and cunning, but ultimately understands military tactics more than he does The Game. He’ll outmanouvre someone on the field but won’t really stand up against politics. It’s noted that when his military gambit fails, Orlais descends into chaos almost immediately and under his rule the whole thing would collapse. He loves war and little else. Given this, Briala is the best choice for Orlais because she understands a little of both Gaspard and Celene’s worlds while actually trying to make things better. The Dalish clan Virnehn used and betrayed her, but she didn’t let that stop her trying to help them as well. I question how well she could control Gaspard long-term, given he’s better than Celene, but since we’re not given the option to have Briala control Celene and I also question the wisdom of putting her in close contact with her abuser...

*To be clear Celene visibly does not care about elves. She cares about being perceived as a wise and benevolent ruler who people serve unquestioningly and loyally out of gratitude for not being oppressed as much as they might be. imho she’s pretty clearly written to criticise white saviour type characters by showing them as the self-absorbed idiots they really are. I enjoy Celene’s character very much and wish we could see more of her. But I enjoy her specifically because we’re shown the stark contrast between how she perceives herself and what she truly is. (Briala is my favourite and she deserves the world. Solas made a big mistake.)

[lavenderizes]

briala. i am rotating her in my mind and giving her unlimited political power

[yetanotherlesbianonthiswebsite]

Halamshiral in 9:39

Zoomed in quadrants and some explanation below!

My three year old computer and tumblrs weird servers are both currently fighting who is gonna give up first. Fun. Anyhow, I am not a digital artist by any measure, I can’t meaningfully contribute to the DA fandom by drawing characters. But I work as a cartographer (albeit that this is the first map I have ever created in English), so I can still do some visual representations. Just not of characters, but of cities and landscapes, and I must admit my Adobe Illustrator skills are more than rusty. And yeah, I have been procrastinating fifty hours of work by doing something quite similar to my actual job. Anyhow, Halamshiral! I did a post some weeks back about what we know about Halamshiral canonically and compiling some headcanons, especially about occupied Halamshiral in the Dragon Age. Based on that, I just got to work. While working, I created some new headcanons, so here they are:

- Halamshiral’s walls are round, allowing the elven community back when elves ran Halamshiral to create houses based on who needed easier access to the communal spaces that Orlais turned into the High Quarter. This is also why some of the larger streets in the slums are curved, as they are remnants of the cityscape of the Dalish Kingdom.

- The dozen most important noble families have all palace-like estates in Halamshiral (see marker <A>)

- Despite it being filled with workshops dedicated to butchering, tanning, dyeing and fume-creating processes in alchemical production, the butcher district is in name simply reduced to that

- Both the Sunburst and the Imperial Throne have massive estates in Halamshiral that are empty most of the time

- The High Quarter has such a low population because it is an average - during the year, it is around a couple hundred, whereas it peaks at three thousand when the Winter Palace is in session. The High Quarter is mostly dormant during the year, save for the handfull of local aristocrats

- Therefore, most of the buildings in the High Quarter are empty and there are squatters that are afraid of weekly inspections by the city guard

- I do believe there is a working communal fire fighting collective among the elves of Halamshiral, they just couldn’t be active during Celene’s genocide. A normal fire in the slums is devastating, but can be controlled. At marker (7), you can see the emergency housing and quickly assembled shacks and tents that try to alleviate the aftermath of a recent fire

- Halamshiral has had several natural springs before the Orlesian invasion. To spite the Chevaliers and city guard regularly destroying larger patches of green in the slums, the elven community had build a block around the last of the springs in the slums, and has risen up against Orlais in the Blessed Age when a local aristocrat wanted to destroy this space. Afterwards, Orlais has largely ignored that community space. Known as the Heart of Halamshiral, it is the center of cultural activity in the elven slums, a place where freshwater is available to all, and a public bath in one of the ponds supplied by the spring

- Some of the earth beneath Halamshiral has strong boulders not easily broken. When a new street is created in the slums, it is often easier to go around the rocky ground than invest the energy to break them, which is the reason for the smaller streets being so wave-y at times

- Denerim is three to five times smaller than this Halamshiral I have drawn and has brothels, so I thought that there might be a red lantern square in the slums

- The market square in the High Quarter is fucking huge simply because I say so and the Orlesian nobility would probably support such extravagance

- An old dark oak tree in the forerunner of the modern imperial palace in Val Royeaux was a favorite place of Empress Jeaneve Drakon I. The nobility all wanted to gain saplings of that tree to imitate the imperial court, so the price and demand for these saplings skyrocketet. Over the centuries, descendants of that tree have been meticulously cultivated into the Arbres Impérials, a tree that stops growing at a certain size, and wood from these trees makes for some of the costliest wooden furniture in all of Orlais. To celebrate the centennial of the Exalted March on the Dales, Emperor Etienne Valmont I had all trees in the High Quarter replaced with these trees

- There is no headcanon reason for the houses in the human part of the slums to look wonky, I just don’t have the energy to replace them right now

- It is set in 9:39 because someone in 9:40 decided that the only possible reaction to being called gay by your cousin was commiting genocide. I will modify this map to demonstrate the extent of Celene’s genocide at some point, I should just stop procrastinating stuff at this point, so that’s a future project

Process

Honestly, it took me around forty hours for very little progress in hand-drawing every building, so I used some scripts and copious amounts of scatter brushes, this is the reason why buildings often overlap wierdly and finished most of it in roughly twelve hours. The rest is my standard cartography procedure mixed with a bit of not giving too much shit about some formal rules because this isn’t a professional map for professional purposes.

Why did you do this

A third hyperfocus, a third procrastination, a third wanting a working sketch of Halamshiral for my Orlesian Revolution/Second Dalish Kingdom arc in my fanfiction The Ridge of Thedas to properly understand the military implications and limitations of an uprising in Halamshiral (which, in stark contrast to TME, will be sucessful, due to Dalish military leadership)

Anything else

If you find that any aspect of this depiction hurtful, tell me and I’ll change it. There is so much real-world violence present in this fandom and I will do my best not to participate in it.

I want to dedicate this map to my amazing partner @dalishious​. I cannot physically gift you Halamshiral, light of the sun, but I can dedicate this depiction of it to you

[mywitchcultblr]

It's pretty clear that whenever they want to villainize a mage character they just have them do 'horrible' things and then compare them to Anders, like they did with Adrian from Asunder. Like does it even count as murder when Pharamond practically begged her to kill him as he didn't want to be made Tranquil? Like wtf is wrong with Bioware?

Bioware is like trying to be progressive with their narrative but failed at every turn because they can't help themselves. The narrative consistency of showing who is the bad guy (templar, chantry, etc) was pretty consistent in DAO, become more inconsistent in DAII (with the way they handled Anders) but the line is still pretty clear... Down the line it's become even more and more worrying to the point sometimes you question: "Are they... Are they supporting oppression??"

When a mage/elves or any other minority 'did horrible things' they'll be punished so bad and villanized.

But when non-mage did it like Celene who murdered 3000 thousand elves?? Ohh she got option to be with her elven ex-gf again whom she emotionally abused for years uwu so romantic yassh queen lesbian power UWU

I hate it.

I wonder what the fuck is going on in bioware HQ? What caused this morally questionable direction, the inconsistency and everything that is wrong??

What???

[immawraffle]

Empress Celene: *is assassinated*

Inquisitor Lavellan:

[dalishious]

It’s very irritating having to debate what Celene did was genocide or not. “Celene did genocide on the halamshiral elves” “But was it technically genocide, hmm?” Proceed to face palm.

What Celene did literally falls under the United Nations’ definition of genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

- Killing members of the group; - Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; - Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; - Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; - Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Celene in her own words numbered the death toll at “a few thousand”.

Celene committed genocide.

[bitchesofostwick]

me: i think it’s important that we criticize characters thoughtfully and that we don’t tread into character bashing territory and that we always tag our char crit because it’s the nice thing to do

also me: eamon and celene can fucking choke