#dav critical

[baejax-the-great]

And that's not even getting into how the game's storyline and themes are outright conservative

[zombolouge]

The thing is, it's not about the Therapy Speak. It's not that everyone who disliked DAV hates healthy communication as a dynamic in fiction. It's not even about only being allowed to be a good guy, really, because most of us did do that anyways (though the option not being there is a loss I grieve even if I never chose it myself, but that's another rant for another day).

It's that DAV does all that stuff at the expense of being believable. At the expense of characters being permitted to have personalities. At the expense of emotions behaving the way emotions actually work for people. At the expense of letting the plot build tension through the stakes we're forced to grapple with.

Half the fics out there take the conflicts between the characters in the previous games and resolve them. I do it myself ALL THE TIME because I like to find a path to resolution through just about any conflict, that's what fascinates me about telling these stories. But the higher the stakes, the harder a conflict is to resolve. You CAN resolve any conflict, you CAN communicate healthily through any emotion, but you can't skip the time it takes to process it all to even be able to communicate it. As someone whose got CPTSD and recovered from many Traumas, I can tell you that the TIME it takes to work through it is not something you can fast track, and the ups and downs of your emotions on that journey can't be skipped. It doesn't matter if you know exactly how to do it, exactly how it's going to feel, or exactly what the end state will be, you CAN'T speedrun it.

DAV has stakes that are astronomical, but nobody treats them that way. Nobody experiences denial - a common psychological reaction to being presented with information that shatters your worldview. Nobody expresses any distrust in the establishments handing out this information - something common among cultures that have at times been at war, even if those wars are "resolved" in the present. Nobody really ever breaks down - something that any person is capable of under extreme circumstances, especially when facing multiple crises of faith that challenge everything they thought they knew about themselves. Nobody blows their lid because they've been repressing the hell out of everything. Nobody grieves for southern Thedas, the entire thing dying off screen and giving you, the player, NO way to engage with it in any way.

Not to mention there are barely any inter-party conflicts, when there should be a lot more. Why is everyone (except Spite) fine with it if Emmrich sacrifices Manfred to become a lich? Why is everyone fine with Illario potentially being set free if he was working with the venatori and Elgar'nan, two sources that have actively attacked everyone in the party? Why doesn't Neve resent Lucanis if Treviso is picked? Why doesn't Harding get pissed off at Nevarra for having a secret society of liches that never helped during the Inquisition's war against the breach and corypheus? Why doesn't Harding feel ANYTHING about Ferelden and the rest of the south? Shouldn't Harding resent the fact that she's stuck in the north while her home dies?

All of these conflicts ARE resolvable, but not easily. And it's not believable that they're never brought up. It's not believable that these characters skip through everything that happens with like, barely a frowny face most of the time. In DAO, Alistair leaves if you don't treat his conflicts with respect. In DA2, your party members try to kill each other if you don't pay attention to their conflicts/emotional needs. In DAI, people can leave or betray you, Cassandra throws a chair at Varric and tries to body him out a window. ALL of these can be resolved but it takes effort, and the characters get to SHOW that they're bothered by them and struggling the way a person would when faced with those emotions.

The problem isn't the therapy speak, or that everyone is loyal and won't leave, or that they aren't mean to each other enough. It's that it's toxic positivity. It's toxic as fuck to imply that anger or grief should be smiled over or else you're giving up, and it's damaging to people to avoid engaging with their own negative emotional responses to extremely negative stimuli. It's pasting optimism over very real, very weighty issues, sweeping it all under the rug, and you keep waiting for the lid to blow off the pressure cooker that creates, but it never does. It never becomes anything that emulates real emotions, which is why the whole damn thing feels hollow. Everything's dying and nobody cares, not even about themselves, and that's NOT healthy communication.

It's bullshit, half-assed storytelling that didn't tell us the actual story, just the vague idea of what it could have been.

[mako-designated-driver]

Warning: Some dav criticism ahead

Why is Tevinter so shallow? It isn't just about the lack of slavery (that, whatever else it is, however it was handled before, has been a pillar of Tevinter identity and inevitably leaves a hole in the narrative by being pratically missing). Why does the magisterium, the caste system, the Antaam invasion outside of Minrathous and the Black Divine play no role at all in its storyline?

Why the atrocities of the Crows (buying children, for example?) never come up during their faction quests?

Why do we hear nothing about the political side of the mortalitasi, how they control Nevarra from the shadows?

Why do we never even hear about Kont-aar even though we are in Rivain? Why there is no counterpoint to the (metaphorically, by qunari standards, mindless and souless) Antaam? Why is the qun completely missing from the game and the qunari reduced to cannon fodder the player has to cut down?

Why are the questions about magic that permeate every previous game absent here, especially when veilguard being set in the north could have given us such a unique viewpoint?

And, more importantly:

Why am I supposed to believe that no dalish elves would worship the gods they have already been worshipping their whole lives? That they wouldn't follow out of naivety, out of misplaced hope for a better future, out of fear, seeking to placate them?

Why am I supposed to believe that the gods would not even try to seek the dalish, when we are told by the previous games about the dalish hunters of legend, about how they are a mighty force to be reckoned with when united? Why do they only show up at the Blood of Arlathan quest, to play damsel in distress?

Why am I supposed to believe that no elves from the alienages would want to join the gods, because of every reason mentioned above, or out of spite or disdain for an uncaring world?

And yes, I know everyone learned the gods were evil off-screen. Why was it off-screen?

Also, where are the agents of Fen'Harel? Where are the people that vanished by the end of Trespasser?

Obviously, you can't expand on all of this in a single game, but why is all of it absent?

Why is bioware so afraid to engage with the world they created?

[thatwavephenomenon]

No but the 'team meeting' after the fall of Weisshaupt was so. unorganic or unnatural. 'What a crushing defeat, maybe we should focus on our mental health now to do better next time.' Like hello??? This is not your job of which you had to take a step back from because your boss is an asshole?? You are all at war against two gods who keep Resident Eviling the world?????? I mean it's not such an awful idea but it's executed rather poorly. Like the game was this close to display a message saying 'You have just finished one of the main quest. You should focus on the companion's quests next.'

[hallabun]

veilguard, the all inclusive game that removed the option to turn down sex in all of their romances even though that option existed as far back as dragon age origins.

[da2supremacy]

I bring a sort of "The watering down of the acknowledgement of oppression in Thedas actually started in Inquisition" that I think a lot of people for whom DAI is their first game aren't going to like.

The problem is, and always has been, that the alleged research the writers did for DA2 means that each of those white writers had to come to a specific crossroads: As a white person in the imperial core you have to either accept that no matter when or how you arrived here you are and will always be complicit in the racist and imperialist dynamics in this world and you have to make a constant and consistent effort not to perpetuate that injustice. You will fail sometimes and you have to accept that you failed and then be better with what you've learned. You are going to have to do that over and over. You have never finished becoming Not Racist or One of the Good Ones and to be frank that shouldn't be the goalpost. The goalpost should be being good to the people you share the planet with. It is a forever effort.

Or you rationalize and double down on your current beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance. Sometimes this will include a certain amount of willingness to advocate for incremental change but often this will come with the side effect of not actually understanding how to make that incremental change happen bc it will inevitably involve examining biases that you are simply unwilling to examine. Trick Weekes wanted to solve the racism and slavery in Tevinter but they did not want to even bother looking at it and therefore their "solution" was tone deaf nonsense.

I think a vast majority of the Dragon Age writers fall into the latter category. So as the games shifted from portraying a realistic, nuanced universe with many differing perspectives based on the environment the characters were cooked in to showing universal truths and "solving" things that the story fell ultimately flat. Dragon Age and it's writers were never going to give you a satisfactory picture of what Tevinter could look like after slavery because I don't think they're capable of conceptualizing a world that doesn't rely on exploitation in some fashion. That world has never existed and they don't have the imagination for it.

Though I do think that the original crew could have given us a very interesting and nuanced picture of what slavery in Tevinter looked like as long as it never tried to actually touch abolition. And tbh I don't think it needed too. The strongest elements of the first two games were that the world was a crapsack one in which things didn't really get better but the world was worth saving anyway. The Warden's boons are ultimately taken away from them unless they're Cousland in the epilogue slides. There is no way for Hawke to save Kirkwall. The forces of the world are too strong for just one hero to truly change things. Even the inquisitor to some extent isn't able to actually change much despite all the world altering decisions they get to make. IIRC the original ending of the saga was always meant to be the absolute destruction of the world (probably via the Veil falling whether Solas did it or not because the Veil falling apart has been a consistent theme throughout all of the three games before VG)

And like, I think that kind of downer ending would be fine, actually. I have spent ten years complaining that Inquisition didn't make me sad enough and DAV didn't really make me sad at all. I wanted to be uncomfortable. That's what got me into the series in the first place. Trick Weekes ultimately delivered what they meant to, shallow and feel good, but that was not the Dragon Age that I wanted.

This game was a set up for confronting some of the most uncomfortable aspects the setting gave to us and then completely failed to deliver on this promise. And they MEANT too. It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't deadlines. It was that they did not want to write that game.

[detectiveneve]

you remember when lucanis’ ‘mage killer’ title dropped and everyone got all heated discoursing over whether to preemptively hate him because they thought he hated mages when he was just killing rich powerful mages in tevinter and then it literally did not matter at all because the political and social power of magic is nonexistent in veilguard. that’s exactly the issue

[mohntilyet]

actually sorry dav reads like a game that was written by people who think da2 is about found family. in every other game my ending feels earned and my choices are my own and then veilguard asks the bold question what if we could bring the hr mandatory team bonding experience into a video game?