i keep thinking about the dalish and city elves beef in dragon age bc like.
it is actually SO pointed that merrill spends... 7 years staring at a mirror, before even considering helping the alienage! and will call feynriel a slur! like LITERALLY staring at her own reflection, rather than at the people outside, bc she wants to Preserve Culture, but doesn't value the actual living people of that culture in the way most of them practice it.
sera's anti-dalish and anti-city elf beef could be really interesting too, bc she essentially watched the blight + the rampaging nobility + slavers all tear through the alienage one after the other, and then thought "ugh, the dalish didn't help, the city elves' traditions didn't help. clearly all useless. rip to them but i'm different! i'm normal". and then she gets adopted by a rich human noble who probably gave her some chantry based education along with feeding and housing her, so... this gets fully entrenched. and she's convinced that the elves' problem is that they aren't assimilating enough and the non-andrastians are giving all of them a bad name for no reason.
and actually, i would go with: she's capable of passing as a human. bc she's tall, and picked up enough mannerisms and etiquette from her adoptive mother that she can mimic human nobles for a bit, and this helps her infiltrate places. but her writer didn't think too hard about it, so somehow she's distinctive and obviously fereldan but getting orlesian servants to do crimes with her, is afraid of new situations or ideas, and isn't very good at winning people over in arguments. and this somehow still works as a red jenny. fhdsfjfhjdf. the writer simply hates anarchists i fear...
AND. briala's anti-dalish thing of "ugh why didn't they simply come save us?" and willingness to immediately kill and betray clan virnehn, could be a reflection of how at heart, she is orlesian. and orlesians generally have this idea of dalish as being either highly dangerous killers, or as romanticized figures who are just frolicking in the woods and have no troubles in life. and neither of these are accurate. and so she takes out her frustration on the dalish when they don't live up to her standards, rather than recognizing they're just as precarious as the city elves, and have the same enemies.
anyway this was all accidental and goes nowhere. bc the writers are so extremely white and have trouble with "immigrants exist" let alone any more nuanced conflicts 😭
















