I read a reddit post about Veilguard and how disappointing it was for the community. I could tell because I've seen you bash Veilguard over the head a bunch on the tl.
But I'm curious the reddit post mentioned that the writers chose to answer a lot of very important lore questions about the gods and religion
Basically like, "It was the Elves the entire time" they were just puking on humans for thousands of years.
Did they really do that or was it just an exaggeration?
Oh hi!
and yeah that's pretty much what happened.
The really frustrating thing is that to do that they removed the impact of any of the other big players on the lore as well. I think it's why it stands out so much while we already had information that it was where it was heading, because we went from "the Elves are responsible for some things but there's many layers to it" to "the Elves did it. the rest of the world are just victims."
The other frustrating element being that we're initially introduced to the Elves are a very oppressed group in Thedas. The legend says they were walking this world before the humans even arrived, but when the humans arrived, they lost their immortality and contact with the gods and the humans took advantage of the chaos to destroy their culture and make them slaves for thousands of years. Then, once Andraste freed the slaves and granted them lands for them to revive their culture, the religion born from Andraste's actions instead decided that the elves were subclass creatures who had strayed too far away from the Maker, and deserved to be destroyed and forcefully assimilited.
So in modern Thedas the elves basically have 4 different type of fate available that are all putting them in various level of oppression. Those who didn't want to submit became wanderers, known as the Dalish, who are trying to recover their history and still cling to whatever pieces of their culture they managed to recover. In Tevinter, the Slavery Capital, elves are enslaved and used as blood magic folder all the time, and they kidnap elves all around the world to force them to become slaves. In Andrastian countries, they are sub-citizen, living in alienages and being mistreated by the humans, mostly forced to become servants or manual laborer at very low salary. And where the Qun has spread, some elves can decide to join the Qunari, which is a whole can of worm i can't get into in detail but it has still lots of problems.
So we can't divorce the choice of making everything their fault from the fact that this is a heavily oppressed group in universe. In DAO, when a Blight is happening, you can hear NPC say "it has to be the fault of the elves, we should kill them all to punish them." out of pure bigotery.
It also doesn't help Andrastianism really is scared of spirits and demons, and believe in their creation myth that the spirits once walked the earth as created by the Maker, but grew jealous of humanity and therefore started to do horrible things, being twisted into demons, and so the Maker created the Veil to lock them in the Fade so they wouldn't hurt the humans anymore. (it's relevent for later).
DAI already introduced concerning elements. First, that the religion the Dalish remember is based on thousands of years of propaganda by their "gods" who were magelords who enslaved the elves for thousands of years. The markings the Dalish wear proudly? used to be slavemarks. It also introduces that something terrible happened to the Dwarves and the Elven Gods were seen on the scene of the crime, and they may have found a way to weaponize the Blight at the time. And on top of that, the reveal that the elves were in fact Spirits who took a physical form. Moreover we learn that the Veil happened because Solas tried to lock away the Elven Gods and his spell had the unfortunate side effect to just create a Veil between the spirits and the elves. And it's when the humans arrived on the land and took advantage of the chaos of the elves being separated from their nature to attack them.
But DAI had room for nuances still. We had limited information due to a lot of biased records, because prior to DAV we only ever learn history from biased sources: a journal page, a propaganda article, this type of things.
DAV let go of any nuance and any details. The codex all go in the same sense now so you don't really get nuances in opinions on why things were the way they were. We get "treated" to Solas' flashbacks to fully put all the blame on him and on the fact the elves took physical form to start with. And, worse of all, it totally disregards the Modern Situation in Thedas and especially the modern plight of the elves. And disregard the past slavery as well.
So now we learn the spirits became elves because they envied humans (? humans were never supposed to be this far before in the timeline. The artbook says it was because they were envious of the dwarves, which make more sense. but the moment they make it about humans, it just validates the Andrastian belief on the spirits). They stole the blood of the Titans to make their bodies, which made the Titans upset and start the war. (DAI had a situation of a spirit taking a physical form out of pure force of will, by virtue of becoming more complex than just the emotion he was embodying. So for decades we had reasons to believe that the Spirits became Elves in a form of evolution. But now instead their existence relies on stealing and destroying a culture.) They basically commited a genocide against the dwarves, cut them from their magic by making the Titans tranquil (aka cutting away their spirits), and the process of cutting those dreams *created* the Blight. Solas is directly blamed because he created the tool to tranquilize the Titans under the order of the goddess Mythal, and then the Elven Gods just took advantage of it and weaponized the Blight.
Add to it concerning details. For example, Solas rebelled because the Gods were enslaving his people to start with. the Elves were the first victim of the gods, per all logic. Not per VG's logic. We get people blaming Solas for even rebelling because he didn't trust Mythal would bring progressive change while being a slaver herself. (and VG goes out of its way to ignore an elephant in the room left in DAI that Solas used to be her slave. It's never mentioned now and they textually say that Solas has equal responsibilities for the things Mythal pushed him to do with never a mention on how he used to be her slave.). Neve slams Solas for not trusting Mythal who was actually doing progressive changee. Lucanis slams him for how he couldn't say no to Mythal about the genocide. Varric mocks Solas that he tried to rebel against slavery but he failed so maybe he shouldn't do anything anymore "for the good of others".
So in that case, the only thing that remains is that the original sin was for the elves to even take physical form. Where things could have been more complex about just evolution bringing two groups to clash, became textually about the Spirits/Elves becoming too greedy and bad.
it doesn't help that VG goes out of its way to undo the work the previous games, especially DAI, had done to humanize the spirits/demons. While the previous games were telling you to consider them people, VG is constantly framing spirits as bad and the Veil having to stay up to separate the good people from "a sea of demons", now considered to be the only threat of the Veil coming down. So when the game which refuses to acknowledge spirits' rights and humanity tells you "the elves were spirits and they took a body by stealing the blood of a natural creature", the implication is that the elves' greed is at fault for everything happening to start with.
Worse is the refusal of acknowledging the plight of modern elves. While Solas didn't like the Dalish very much for the way they revived all the propaganda Solas had been fighting against in the way back, Solas still had a goal in DAI to free people from any type of slavery, and especially "his people": the elves being mistreated across Thedas and the spirits being treated like subhuman and separated from the world.
Not anymore. Now Solas is only doing all of this because he believes he has a responsibility toward Mythal, and because he's "trying to fix his mistake" and "yearns for the good old days and wants to revive the old world for nostalgia". Which ignores completely the fight for the modern elves' survival.
Worse! Bellara, a Dalish elf, upon learning the truth, will suddenly confond herself in apologies to Harding, a dwarf, for what the Elven Gods did to her people, and then she says "maybe people are right to not trust us." This is one of the only mention of modern elves' issues in the game and it's to say "well they're descendant of evil elves so maybe it's all deserved". Ignoring that the elves were initially victims of the magelords to start with, and disregarding centuries of horrible oppressions, including slavery (as we spend our time in Tevinter, with Bellara being a huge fan of a human mage in Tevinter).
And it doesn't help that there is no mention of the various degree of oppression the elves go through. The Dalish basically disappeared offscreen and rejected their religions because "everyone knows our gods were evil but Solas was worse" they say while still wearing the slave markings they appropriated back on their face. Now they're replaced by Veil Jumper who also accepts people from any background, and they're just historians now. No mention of their struggle as a nomadic group who always had to be on the run because humans would purge their clans when they had the occasions. City Elves? No mention of them. Slavery? everyone knows slavery is bad so the devs decided to not talk about it because they had nothing else to say on the topic. The Qun is ignored.
So the elves are no longer defined by their modern struggles, but they are defined for the crimes that their leaders caused, and they have to take responsibilities for it, despite originally being slaves, and having been in the worst situation ever since.
The dwarves are no longer connected to the Titans, for sure, and the Blight has destroyed their land, and they have a fucked up society that is probably the result of trying to reproduce what it felt like to be connected to a Titan. The remaining citystate of the Dwarves though is still deep in tradition, standing strong and proud, and have deep connection with Tevinter as well. Will we talk about modern dwarves? No. No we won't. Even when we finally discover Kal Sharok which is supposed to have unique problems as dwarves go, we don't actually talk about all of this. It's entirely about Harding's feelings on the genocide that happened 8k years ago. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing per se, but it ignores completely the modern concerns of this world.
And so in the end it results on the fact the Elves Are To Be Blamed is the core fo the narrative. The dev says that in Tevinter they didn't want to show slavery and wanted to show the normal people who were just here buying bread, that it's what you have in Empires and it's why you shouldn't destroy evil Empire but strive to vote the evil out (Tevinter was never a democracy but whatever.) but in the same breath, The Elves, who were enslaved by the Elven Gods, now are responsible for what the Elven Gods did, and maybe it means humans are right to mistreat them.
Bellara's arc even amount to a choice about an archive she had found about the history of her people (though heavily biased for Anaris, whole case of worm not worth talking about but picture me boiling with rage at this mention), and the dilema for her is that "this history is dangerous actually so maybe we should destroy it". The implicit thematic here being that the elves' history is to throw away. That the struggle of the Dalish to reconnect to their history is inherently pointless because don't you see? the elves were evil and so they need to create a new future.
And it neglects the fact a lot of the Modern Elven Culture is not just based on trying to retrieve informations from when they were an Empire, but also trying to revive the time of the Dales, when they were granted freedom to rebuild before the Andrastian culture destroyed them again. The culture of the Dales is in itself maybe even more important than the old Empire days. It's never mentioned in game. Actually since their Empire days are bad they should never look back into the past. Not even the time of the Dales.
So the game goes out of its way to frame the Elves as responsible for everything while removing any of the things that could have added nuance (that the elves were oppressed, that they didn't have a choice, that they tried to fight against it anyway), and ignoring the modern plight because "well you see their past is bad so :/"
So what i think everyone says by saying "the elves are blamed for everything" is that, yeah, ok, it was set up in previous games that the Elves may have been responsible for a lot of things. But the previous games were more nuanced as it was. It wasn't just Solas And His Series of Blunder With The Evil Elves Who Shouldn't Have Existed.
But Veilguard was terrified to talk about the modern politics of thedas that weren't absolving Tevinter from its horrible way. So we don't actually get to address how these reveals would impact modern thedas, the modern fight, the modern plight.
Instead we just get Bellara's white guilt of "maybe people are right to not trust us."
And meanwhile the crimes of the others are not acknowledged. Tevinter gets the grace of "some people are just living here buying bread" and there will be no mention of how they scavanged and destroyed the elves. Hell, the biggest sin of Tevinter, which is to have unleashed the Blights into the world after Solas had locked them away, is now blamed on the elves because the elven gods were whispering to the mage lords to come and unleash it, instead of it being pure hubris on their part. So Tevinter especially gets absolved from its sins because the elves take responsibilities for them now.
So if you go by VG content only, everything is the fault of the elves and the modern elves have to pay the price. Oops.
And the conclusion of the game is to keep the Veil up so the nasty spirits don't get into our world (because the whole focus is about not letting "demons" in the world of normal people) without ever addressing that Solas' goal was also the freedom of his people (Solas having giving up on hiis group of rebel fighter because "actually he realized he wasnt a good leader and didn't want that" and then spend the ending locked away so he can himself fuel the Veil that keeps his people separated), and instead Slavery is stopped thanks to a Vote (a storyline you may miss completely if you didn't save the Tevinter City in the first big decision of the game, and will only learn about in a slide in the epilogue then. Again Tevinter is not a democracy what are we even doing, and the fact we have to rely on two ex-slave owners for it is just so. dlkhfdlkfjdklffdlk.). And i'm sure no one will ever be mean to the elves anywhere else now that the last two blights literally destroyed the entire south and made Tevinter the hub of diplomacy, while they were conducted by two elven gods, which everyone knows about this time :) "the elves deserved a win!" the devs said.
(in DAO people talk about killing the elves over the SUSPICION of them being involved in the Blights but the moment two Elven Gods unleash a double blight and destroy the whole world i'm sure people will be super chill and won't blame the elves for this. A win!)
Proculus bloodline is funny because his journal entries mention that he's the youngest brother with two older sisters and that he never married. The game really wanted to say that he's gay btw
Him being gay is just text. How many more near-apocalypses caused by gay yearning must this world suffer.
But that's funny. I'll confess, I haven't checked all the journal entries yet.
You know reading your PowerPoint for this year always makes me laugh because Cygames has a Yukata design for Rackam right here if they want to use it
It's so funny to me like this art is picturing an event that we never got know about like wow Cygames this seems like such a fun time between crewmates care share with the class LMAO
WAIT YEAH YOU'RE SO RIGHT. GOD. he's right there!!! they trapped him in the background CG dimension .... and the yukata is green.............
Curious what you think about the anni event, you saw my thoughts about it. How did it land for you?
I thought it was okay. It had its good moments and some interesting revelations. Some ups and downs, but a good popcorn event - turn off your brain and be entertained.
It's leagues better than Romance of the Divine Generals in any case, but I'll admit that, going by that metric, the bar is brushing up underneath the floor boards in hell.
If it were a regular event, it would've been perfectly fine.
....Unfortunately, it wasn't trying to be just a regular event.
Some more nuance under the cut:
Everyone said it was rushed and I completely agree with that. Nothing new here.
Moreso, it felt like the three parts were written by three separate writers who went over the outline together beforehand, but then communicated very little afterwards. It felt disjointed.
This has been a common issue with anni events in recent memory, where it feels like they're written as their little three-chapter story instead of one cohesive event.
I feel like that is one of its main issues.
Another is that they were trying to do too much.
The Lilit-story felt way too squished in, like they really were trying to be done with the Astrals after this aptly named event that makes them sound like a footnote. And because we were obligated to drag the entire new MSQ squad plus the Luminaries around, nobody really got a lot of screen time.
Nobody suffers more from that than Proculus himself.
His motivation could be interesting, really, but it falls flat since we don't know anything about Apep. Now, I think there's potential here. I love the angle of "I am doing everything out of love for you, yet in the time it took me to pursue my revenge, I have forgotten your voice and face". That's great, that's amazing, it's very poignant. But they could have focused on that more.
Imagine a scene of Proculus sitting underneath a tree, next to Apep, recalling a conversation the two of them shared over 500 years ago, but you only hear Proculus' half of it. Apep's voice is muffled, or cut out entirely, his face still that blank portrait. Proculus remains unbothered though, happily talking about his day, things they'd done, anything to sell that relationship, invest us in the dynamic, yet as he's chatting away, all he's met with is unyielding silence. The moment turns eerie. At some point, Proculus starts thinking, revealing that this is a memory, a happy place, something he tries to return to to remind himself of what he's doing all this for in the first place. But he becomes gradually more distressed when he realizes that he can't remember Apep's face at all. Let him catch some glimpses of Danchou's smile instead, be distraught by that. Give the guy some internality, y'know.
What else, the Overseers. I like them fine, Mikaboshi got such a glow-up especially, but they're essentially the Diviners 2.0. A group of powerful people who started out opposing us but then were won over by the end of the event and are now on friendly terms with Danchou and the crew.
...Can't wait for swimsuit Mikaboshi this summer, because seasonals is where the money's at.
Also
Nobody cared for Ahhazu, it's so funny.
I also don't fully understand how they can create copies of people who have died (did Byleistr's soul leave Estalucia? He mentioned his wife would get jealous if he stayed in the Sky Realm for too long) or are alive (are Lucilius and Bubs aware of their brief stint in Proculus' body? Were those just mere copies with the same memories but they won't feed back to the originals? America, explain).
Bringing back Lucilius, Beelzebub and Astaroth was a bad move. None of them got to shine this way. They should have focused on just one, namely Astaroth, because he's hot and Magus is completely justified in everything she's doing and -
Seriously though, it felt like empty fanservice. Here's your annual angelbait, now begone.
Also why wasn't Magus allowed to be around? The guy is her whole reason for living. This could have been so interesting, to catch a glimpse of her beloved, only to have him taken from her again and have her crushed, before renewing her conviction to bring him back, because she's seen that it's possible. Salvation has been dangled right in front of her.
But I guess we didn't have time for more characters. We barely had time for the ones we got.
This event has not convinced me to care about Fylkis and the MSQ so far has failed to as well. I wish them the best of luck in their future attempts.
Shitori and Irotis are both there for five dialogue boxes. Good for them, but
Everything could have benefitted from a good trim, or more room to breathe. Maybe we shouldn't have squeezed Lilit in this event about some guy trying to restart the War.
For the record, I like Lilit. But she too suffered from the rushed pacing. Unfortunately, this is the part I spent a lot of time thinking about, because I have a disease that makes me ponder things and now you and I get to suffer for it.
I've said it before, but they were clearly playing all the hits here.
After all, we have this cinematic parallel:
It felt so obvious that they were trying to recapture the magic. Same with the way we spared Proculus in the end and extended our hand in friendship evoked the ending of and you where we spared Orologia and saved them. It feels like they're scrambling to hit the same notes that have worked before, which in turn makes them seem deeply insecure in their work and its ability to stand on its own. Some callsbacks and fanservice are fine, but this event bogged itself down with it, like it was trying to tie beloved things into the new MSQ arc to justify its existence.
Perhaps this is on me for assuming, but in the early(/earlier) days of Granblue, I figured that, as Vyrn was a vessel of the Sky God, Lyria was a vestige of the Astral God, and this intersection of Sky and Star is what created the Singularity. I'm not sure if anyone ever said this out loud or if I just made that up, but it made perfect sense to me. Even now, Lyria has astral power at her disposal, after all.
But now Lyria is a souped-up primal with a piece of the heretoforth unknown Blue Will in her core, which is totally a thing, you guys, it's like fate itself and we use it to control primal beasts, somehow? Never mind how Lilit got it. I can buy it letting her look into the future, hell, I can see how proximity to such a power would make someone a Singularity, who bends fate to their will, but everything else feels strange.
Also, why did Astralia send a clone of hers to watch over the laboratory? I feel like we glossed over the Astral God sending a clone to the Sky Realm way too quickly here. That alone should have led to all-out war between the gods.
Clearly, it's because Lyria is important and Astralia wanted her for something, that's why Bahamut deigned to annoint an Apostle specifically to steal her from under his ex's nose, neither ever truly got over the divorce, but the Astralia clone mostly felt like a contrivance to let Lilit survive the fatal blow and (somehow) revive 500 years later (and bring Proculus with her, for some reason). It would have made more sense for her experiments involving the Blue Will to have led to such a thing than a random god clone.
Anyway, Lilit!
So she woke up from dead and decided to eat her daughter's powers to spare her from an eternity of loneliness. Would that have killed Lyria? Or just let her age? Die in a few years of natural causes? Kind of messed up, but that would have been more interesting than just "I love you like my own child". Very unusual for an Astral, as Byleistr mentioned Astrals can't have children until they turn their backs on everything, so this is something reserved for utter renegades. Lilit's profile mentions she herself was surprised by how deeply she grew to care for Lyria (it also mentions that she was Lucilius's match in smarts, but way more outgoing and had plenty of friends, unlike his emo ass, which was funny) (sure is sad we never got to hear that in the event though, with all the other Astral Overseers only talking about how she's weird and you need to be careful when dealing with her). It's nice that she cared about Lyria so much, but it felt like that, too just happened. And only her Journal mentions how strange that was to her, yet she unquestioningly sacrifices her life for this child, twice. A bit more nuance would have been fun.
Sure is a good thing Lyria and her powers weren't actually that important to the story, otherwise this would have been a real bummer. But again, the Lilit-story felt tacked on.
The thing that bothers me the most though, as I showed before, the Lyria/Lilit goodbye is clearly meant to mirror the Sandalphon/Lucifer one, as the younger one leaves the nest and its comforts and goes outside to adventure and their caretaker is both sad and proud to see them go, go where they can't follow.
Problem is, we don't know Lilit.
We didn't spend much time with Lucifer, either, but we saw some of him, we know how deeply he cared, the other Primarchs speak highly of him, even Belial, during his breakdown, talked about his sacrifices.
Point is, Lucifer was important to more than one person. He had an influence that could be felt, an actual legacy to live up to.
And his shadow loomed large. The first WMTSB event only happened because of him, he was the driving force and motivation behind Sandalphon's episode. That's powerful. That sells the emotional attachment. Yet we caught glimpses of the past, of how far back they go. Lucifer and Sandalphon shared a relationship and it was messy, but it was true. It resonated with a lot of people and even now, as Sandalphon grieves all that he's lost, we grieve it with him, because we are sold on the emotional depth.
Lilit, we learned of her existence three weeks ago. Lyria never spent a lot of time wondering about where she came from or wanting a mother, she was mostly fine. When she found out about Lilit, she wanted to learn more, sure, but no rush.
It's nice that she found her answers, but this could have been an event of its own. She could have had so many complicated feelings about this, but due to the lack of time and focus it came down to "Oh my god, I have a mom, so cool! :) She's doing bad things and I have to stop her, but she loves me". We could have done something more with that. We could have gone from agonizing over having a mother, what that's even like, to "could my creator be a bad person if she's doing bad things? Do I even want to meet her? I should stop her though, she's my creator. My mother, if you will" and then just. More time. Give them more time. Give us more time. Let the situation breathe. Let us feel things and let us feel them for a while.
We could have easily done the Proculus thing in one anni event and saved Lilit for one of her own, because again, it didn't feel like it influenced the story all that much. Sideline the MSQ gang (Seox literally bowed out of a situation saying he's "not good at it", that's bad, why is he here and wasting our time then, give it to Darydara or whomever and move on) and focus on the Luminaries since we have them here.
There's a lot of seeds of good stuff here, but none of it was given the time and care to truly flower.
Lecia got completely sidetracked in an event that was marketed as being about her and all she got to do in the third act was sprout shounen protagonist lines about the ideals of truth and justice. I've seen people suggest that Proculus should have been her ancestor instead, but I think Lecia should have reeled much more from the thought that the Luminary Knights ever served the Astrals and were instruments in oppressing the skies - something considered pretty evil in the Sky Realm of the present day, to force her to think about how the definition of justice and right changes over time.
At least we got DILF Walfrid out of it.
Maybe we can speculate about the potential Proculus-Seofon connection in a fate episode when the guy inevitably becomes playable. This is a joke, Cygames, don't do it.
I gotta love Europa continuing the trend of implying the MC wearing outfits that we have no idea what they look like in game. Yes Reinhardtzar, I bet our sweater is really comfortable just like I'm sure that fancy winter dress looks really good on us,Europa.
Aw, man.
I'd love to see those outfits.
But there's something fun about Danchou existing in this world, alongside their comrades, wearing weather-appropriate and/ or fancy gear that the player is not seeing. You're not entitled to their cozy moments of downtime. You squandered that when you attempted that Hexa solo.
I had a lot fun writing it, I was inspired by you saying that Feower was the hater when it came to Djeeta/Seofon and then I realized their is no hater more embarrassing than yourself and then the brainworms got to me and I just started writing.
I just imagine Djeeta having to tell Seofon afterwards that yes Gran doesn't feel the same way as I do about you. And yes, we argued for several hours about our love lives and the choices we made regarding it.
Of course! It was really fun!
I'm elated that my throwaway comment inspired you so much. <3
You're absolutely right, too. Considering Djeeta may occasionally look at Seofon when he's being especially annoying and think to herself "Oh man, guess I'm stuck with this idiot (affectionate, but gritting her teeth)", you know she's going to be self-conscious when someone so much like herself is bringing up the same question she occasionally asks herself.
I also like how she asked Gran if he was a romantic rival, you could feel her relief when she learned that he's not.
I'd love to read a follow-up about Djeeta telling Seofon about that exchange!
