been rereading your masked empire posts and it feels so weird to me that briala says that city elves think the dalish are out there helping them, and that learning the dalish are actually not doing that is framed as such a blow to her ideals. it's just. at that point it's been 700 years after the fall of dales. that's such a long time period for me. at this point either "the dalish are working towards our shared liberation in secret out there" is a fairy tale that briala has somehow decided is true against everything else. or the dalish do periodically contact and help out the city elves (often enough that it stays in the living memory) and briala is just taking out her anger on the safest target. too bad the narrative is framing her as being the most correctest. idk i'm replaying dai and i got to mihris yesterday and i remembered how the masked empire treated her and fbfhdbdjs (i deflate like a balloon pricked with a needle)
the weird part is that... i think every previous dalish clan we've seen in the games HAS been helping a little bit? even if it's just by taking in city elves who fled the city for whatever reason.
and then, logically speaking... what else are they supposed to do? they live in tiny scattered groups that try to avoid human areas entirely, the alienages are much larger and surrounded by dense populations of humans. they don't have the numbers to do anything.
(now, imagine if the dalish had some sort of.... fast travel network... subtly embedded into major cities... MAYBE THEN, they could've helped, but we will never know...)
anyway the masked empire does deflate me like a balloon as well, bc it unfortunately made me like briala less when i remembered she's the same person from the book, fhdsgfhdskg. she really comes off as SO spiteful. either she has these completely unrealistic expectations that the dalish will somehow be fairy tale saviours despite all the odds stacked against them, or she's just orlesian nobility pilled and is like "some of those elves can die, and that's a sacrifice i'm willing to make! bc i don't personally know them 😌"
which could be an interesting personality trait either way! if they let the dalish actually have a counterpoint to it! lean into the intra ethnic strife or whatever, the tension between briala as An Elf vs as someone who's been enmeshed in orlesian power plays for years and is losing touch with her morality. but i don't think the author registered it at all, they genuinely just wrote that in as a sort of unironic triumphant speech, when it sounds completely unhinged if you as the reader had any sympathy for mihris or the other dalish 😭
