sometimes i still think about how the dragon age series was about all sort of ways slavery kept existing and the different shapes it took and how deeply engrained into society this type of exploitment is, culmunating with it's future antagonist being a radical anti-slavery person who talked about all the things he saw being as slavery and that he would see the world be freed of, only for the fourth game to refuse to acknowledge slavery, to call the anti-slavery crusade the character had "a failure so why should he try it again", to have a slaver order around said character who was implied to have been her slave as the good ending, where we were deep into slave societies only to be told slavery was something only extremists were doing, and then when asked about it the devs just went "everyone knows slavery is bad we didn't need to talk about it" making people sound like some sort of perverts for wanting to see slavery be actually acknowledged on screen..... still the stupidity of all time.
AND LIKE IM NOT EVEN A MYTHAL HATER, i love Flemythal in the first three games, she's a manipulative woman who is STILL using people as pawns and if given power over someone, will use it to assert her will, but yknow what? She was cool, her revenge angle was so interesting, she clearly had a bigger plan in mind, and personally i support women's wrong, i wanted to see what her big plan was going to be
Veilguard retconned her revenge into benevolence, now instead of wanting a reckoning that will shake the very heavens, she's like nooo you need to accept the world as it is now :( and they never mention that she is manipulative and has power over people that she can force to do her biding.
THAT'S why we complain, because they tried to defang her and suddenly being a slaver doesn't work with the archetype of motherly benevolence anymore. She is the key to keep the wall up now.
We complain because VG was the one to turn a blind eye on who she was and it was frankly sexist to just make her benevolence instead of vengeance.
When i say "Mythal was a slaver" it's no different from reminding Flemeth abused Morrigan
Unfortunately the one reason it was nice to cheer for her regardless was erased and overcorrected. Why do you accept this.
The thing that keeps killing me about the Veil discourse and the fact Solas was planning on destroying the world by removing the Veil is that, especially after Veilguard, we have the confirmation that inaction would have been worse.
It's made very clear in DAI and Trespasser especially that the Veil is failing. It's becoming thinner in thinner. Each Blight's bloodshed are so terrible that some places have a Veil that never recovered. There are already hole in the veil in DAO for the Warden to try to fix in places where the Veil has been torn into pieces (Soldier's Peak and the Blackmarshes especially). And Arlathan and Sundermont where also regions that were said to have had the Veil permanently sundered because of the terrible horrors that happened then.
Solas acts panicked when he learns the Wardens are trying to kill the last archdemons saying it will make the situation worse, and for years I argued that the archdemons are probably seals that held the Veil in place and if all of them were killed, it will collapse. At the time i thought it was an elaborated plan by the Evanuris - i didn't think there was a bond between them unless it was true the Old Gods were the Forgotten ones, but that by using the Blight from the Fade the Evanuris were trying to affect those seals to thin the Veil and either a Blight will punch a hole in it, or once all the archdemons will be dead they will be freed.
This isn't the conclusion Veilguard took but i still had a point where it mattered the most: The Archdemons' lives were tied to [the Evanuris who's lives were tied to] the Veil and if all of them died [and killed the Evanuris linked to them by doing so while separated from their respective Evanuris, as evidenced by there being only 2 Evanuris left in Veilguard], the Veil would collapse.
When Solas awoke, it was barely ten years after the 5th Blight. He didn't even know until then that the Blight had leaked from the the prison he had made.
Corypheus acted up on the Wardens' mind BEFORE Solas got involved with him. We know that from Legacy since it's when it started for Corypheus (and Solas supposedly awoke a bit before Mark of the Assassin according to the webseries Redemption).
Corypheus was affected by the Blight he got from the Evanuris, and wanted to do anything he could to tear down the Veil to get to the Black City.
If Solas hadn't offered his orb to Corypheus, if he had stayed in slumber even, The Wardens may have killed the two last archdemons in panic. Or, and that even if Solas gave up on his goal in Inquisition, eventually centuries down the line the two last blights would have happened and the Veil would have collapsed.
There is no scenario in which Solas doesn't get involved that doesn't end with "The Veil falls down and the Blight locked in the Fade is unleashed on Thedas".
Solas' plan is specifically to take down the Veil in a way that doesn't unleash the Blight and the Last of the Evanuris. He will try to salvage as much as he can doing so but that's the core of it.
Leaving aside all the others dilemma about the People, about the Spirits, about Slavery, about everything that has motivated Solas on top of it all: IF Solas didn't act, the Veil would have collapsed on its own and the world would have ended in a way worse way.
We can debate forever about how deadly Solas' plan would have actually been. In Veilguard he says a few thousands of people would have died because he took precaution. I still believe one of the major reasons people would have died are tied to the way Curing Tranquility Also Leave People Who Were Tranquil In a Vulnerable State That Easily Get Them Killed and it would have been the same for people to reconnect so deeply to the Fade (re why Solas asks Cassandra if she thinks it's worth it to still cure the Tranquils and why it mattered).
We can also argue whether this was the only possible thing that could be done.
But like one thing is certain: even if Solas killed absolutely everyone except the elves by collapsing the Veil, it would still be less damage than if the Veil just collapsed on its own. Which would have happened sooner than later. It wasn't an IF. it was an WHEN.
The "Elven God's blood can keep the Veil up and fully repair it" was a full cope out that makes genuinely No Sense (they were NEVER gods to start with, and personally the reason i liked the Archdemons to be the seals more than the Evanuris was bc of what Yavana says in the comics about the dragons being the blood of the world, something much, much bigger than the elves ever were) just to punish Solas anyway.
But the fact people still act like Solas taking down the Veil was him planning the End of the World and It's Bad are just not interrogating themselves on what the Veil is doing.
It was either a controlled apocalypse that will avoid as much damage as possible, or one that will happen at random and will leave no possible chances of salvation.
Just letting the world end by inaction isn't exactly any better than trying to do something.
It's somehow the same logic as Rook and Varric never being blamed for unleashing the final blights. Accidentally triggering the end of the world, or just knowingly letting it happen are fine, but trying to actually do control damage is bad actually.
The Alternative should have been to find another path. One Solas was too prideful, too blind to newer ways, too isolated to have considered himself. One that could remove the Veil without this amount of destruction. Not to reinforce the Veil all together.
And i just think it's unfair to look at Solas plan of destroying the world as the basis to judge he's a bad person without ACKNOWLEDGING what the options actually are. Not even in term to defend Solas, but in term of, do you understand what's at stake????
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!)
In the DA fandom if you remind people Solas was a slave and that we can question the level of free will he had in the slaying of the titans, they'll tell you you're woobifying him and are a misogynist
Because this inherently means we think Solas commited no crime ever and that Mythal is only super bad for girlbossing her way into slaver-dom and that she's responsible for everything :( don't you know fans can't possibly understand Solas still has responsibilities for what he's doing in current days and that we can't possibly see Mythal as a three dimensional character like she has been in the others games she appeared in
makes me think of how Absolution has an entire plot about a slaver who saw his two slaves as family, despite those two wearing slave markings, and his whole motivation in the show is to "reunite with his family" when one of the slave was turned into a walking corpse and the other ran away.
And the whole show he makes it clear that it's love, love as possession, love as "it is his to have",
and yet it STILL manages to approach the fucked up power dynamic and the fact that by default of the slaves being slaves there is no amount of good feelings or love that can justify the treatment that goes into them. because they're slaves and they have no say in this and they are mistreated, made to do bad things, and still are marked as belonging to the slaver with slave markings on their face, one of them not even being allowed to die, despite being killed to cover for his mistakes.
And we also get Hira being willing to throw her ex lover back into slavery to get her anti-venatori&inquisition plan working, using the woman she says she loves to turn her into a slave and be able to get the power needed to get her revenge, even if she mentions she would have freed her later once her plan would be in motion
And then we get Mythal and Solas, after it was clearly established that Solas had Mythal's slave markings on his face that he had to burn himself to remove, after establishing that these markings being made of blood probably imply a level of control
and then the "they were doing it" is meant to be funny, it's meant to be a justification, the fact Solas might have had feelings for Mythal is used against him. That because he first followed Mythal willingly, because Mythal treated him well, because there was love between them, it means Solas has the exact same responsibilities as his slaver.
Absolution managed to take a situation where a slaver loves his slaves and still show the brutality of slavery, of ownership, and rightfully framed him as the fucking worst guy on the show, and showed Hira's betrayal as a betrayal
and we still get Mythal and Solas' relationship being treated as "they were doing it" later.
Like what the fuck happened for two entries in the franchise to be this tone deaf with one another.
An aspect of Trespasser that genuinely fascinated me was Cole's banter line about "worship makes you more. he just wanted to help."
It brought specific ideas in my mind, mainly, how does faith works in a realm that is strengthened by ideas? In the Fade what you think can become a reality, and how does that apply when there is so much propaganda that the "belief" is that "those specific people have powers you can't even imagine"?
In this set up even being a false god is a powerful thing in itself because you just need to manipulate the way people see you to give yourself power. You "make real" what you believe about them, so they make sure to control how the world see them and see their enemies.
Which is what made the idea of the Forgotten Ones so fascinating in my opinion. Because these were "gods" who have not left a trace in history, most likely due to propaganda, which by default, should strip them of their powers. Yet even there they are still remembered as threatening enemies. This is why I gravitated to the idea of the Forgotten Ones being something Others Than Spirits, especially since according to legends they got their powers from the Void. I wondered if the Forgotten Ones were the Old God Dragons, or even the Titans themselves, removed from history yet capable to have a source of power away from "belief" itself.
And it adds also to Fen'Harel's pariah-hood because he was demonized by the Evanuris in that time as well. Just like a spirit will adapt if you believe it to be something else, like a spirit will become a demon if you believe it's a demon, in a world of belief, how is "being treated like a monster" affecting your personhood? and your power?
By default Solas should have been weaker in the age of the Elves because the belief is that he's dangerous and not worth believing in. In opposition, he should become more powerful in modern times where the modern Dalish elves believe him to be such a powerful trickster figure that he could lock away the Gods and haunts the Fade for thousands of years. How does the changing beliefs on Solas change the way he perceives himself, when it gives you power, when it makes you more?
Which adds to the whole reinforcing "they're not Gods, i'm not a God" that is set up in Trespasser again. It's trying to go against a popular belief, both for the sake of the truth and for the sake of weakening his enemies, and keeping him in check. As long as people believe, this imbalance will remain.
Which obviously ties in to the thematic of Inquisition in general, where we saw that even outside the fade, belief gives power to idea. The Inquisitor becomes a Godlike figure in part because people are spreading their stories to appear as one. Not to mention that the Fade itself reacts to the Inquisitor's stories and powers, as seen with the Avvar and the fact the spirits all want to meet the Inquisitor.
And it's why the set up over discovering the Evanuris were tyrant was interesting as well because the current beliefs in the Gods is different from the past. Their cruelty has been downplayed and they're remembered much more kindly. How is this shift in belief affecting the way those powers manifest themselves?
Maybe it was too much to hope for DAVG to explore that more in depth. In the end, faith and belief were entirely dropped from the narrative. The Evanuris are called Gods through and through, and now even the Dalish are like "everyone knows they're evil". There is no actual thoughts going on on how this belief can shape out how they are in the game. Solas is stripped even more of his power. Anaris is weaker than his peers but it's unclear why and the worship is barely mentioned with him.
The one time you can eventually read it if you squint is the way Elgar'nan asks the Venatori to worship him -- an acknowledgement perhaps that the worship, the belief, is what makes him powerful. But considering he kills them all later and that idea isn't brought up again, he just sounds like any regular tyrant who asks for worship, not because it's a source of power, but just because of vanity.
"tyranny rarely gets willing followers" from Emmrich also therefore adds to this loss of "Belief is Power" undertone because the idea of belief is no longer taken into consideration as to how the Evanuris became Gods. Emmrich is our Fade expert yet will never mention the power of Belief in a realm made of Ideas.
Idk i'm just beating the dead horse at this point and maybe it's proof DA was never in any shape ready to follow this concept, and there are more glaring issues with DAVG than just "they didn't follow up on a cool idea subtext", but i'm thinking about it as of now.
It's also something I had in mind reading sunlight-shunlight's post about "Elgar'nan should have pretended to be the Maker". Imo it's something that follows up on "belief is power". Not only it would make his scheming easier, but it would also just take the faith into something and gets this power onto himself. Th Chantry spreading the Chant so the Maker is known in every corner, this colonialism ideal, would have been turned around by showing that this was a hubris thing to do, because now Elgar'nan can give himself the power of the belief that has been spread through colonialism. "when the Chant will be known in every corner of Thedas he will come back", and it's the cautionary tale of belief and faith being twisted over on their head.
It would make more sense, in a world where belief = power, that Elgar'nan would want to be the most well known God of Thedas, and not claim to be 1) An Elven God when you don't even seek out the elves, where the elves already know he's bad news, in which case you have very low amount of belief power, 2) Lusican, an Old God that is only worshipped in secret in Tevinter. Why would he content himself to be a forgotten god? Where is the power of that?
I don't know perhaps i really am harping so much on something that only existed in a throw away line. But i did live 10 years in a cooler world where I thought this was a plotline worth exploring.
I didn't expect DAVG to just. Not have any questionment about faith in belief at all in it. You'd expect a game that is trying to make the point of tyranny=bad to use the way belief and propaganda helps further this belief and gives the tyranny its power. But alas.
