dgcatanisiri:

Please please please PLEASE let Dragon Age 4 treat the elves better. Like, I’m already bracing myself to have to deal with the ‘choice’ of deciding between Dalish elves who believe in the belief system they have been raised in, and are thus following Solas in his quest to basically destroy the world, against Dalish elves who are giving up on their history, and I DESPERATELY don’t want to deal with this choice. This is not a choice that should happen.

And I don’t just say that as a fan of the Dalish. I say it as someone very much aware that the Dalish are based on real life groups like Native Americans and Romani, to name a few. Any group of people who have been forced out of the lands they called home, displaced from those places by outsiders, they see parallels to the Dalish. And I see it as disgusting to tell these very real people ‘well, you need to just give up everything that makes you different, and then you’re acceptable.’ So I refuse to accept that this is a good path for fictional counterparts.

What I want to see is that there are Dalish who resist Solas. Who figure him as the Dread Wolf, as Fen’Harel. And they adamantly refuse to help him. They will not renounce their beliefs – ‘okay, maybe the Evanuris were dicks, but we don’t believe in them as people, we view them as figures of our myths, and will not accept any living being who claims to be divinity in the mortal realm.’ But they will absolutely stand against Solas, even to the point of saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and allying with Chantry forces. We know the elves did that once, marching with Andraste. Hell, put the choice of Divine to good use and have Divine Leliana’s efforts to restore the Canticle of Shartan make the Dalish more willing to assist the human nations.

Because frankly, there’s not really a good reason for Solas, for Fen’Harel, the betrayer, to be listened to by the Dalish. If he has elves on his side, he should be lying to them, and exposing him as the Dread Wolf should make the elves turn on him. I mean, Fen’Harel betrayed the Dalish gods, and their own lore says he hates the Dalish. And yet the Viddasala is openly calling him an agent of Fen’Harel. Even if you want to say that this is only among the Qunari, not the elves, how do you really think this title isn’t making the rounds among the elven people he has gathered? There’s no lore compliant reason for this.

So if there are elves on Solas’s side, they should be elves who are being lied to, who are disillusioned in the Dalish’s quest for restoring their history. Primarily city elves who have little to no idea who ‘Fen’Harel’ is and buy in to his promises of a return of elven glory, without understanding what he really means. Not the core of the Dalish people. And these forces SHOULD turn on him when they learn he intends not to restore the modern elves to glory but to go back to Arlathan and burn this world down.

But the way that Inquisition shat on the Dalish, tearing them down without a single voice of prominence speaking in their favor, retconning their own history to make them look worse in order to prop up other elements (the ‘three mages to a clan’ bit flies explicitly in the face of previous games, like when Lanaya says that she competed against many other candidates to become the Keeper’s First, and the fact that Merrill was given to the Sabrae clan, rather than just handed a pack and sent off alone into the world, all of this done to prop up the templars in a ‘well, what other option is there to protect against dangerous magic’ fashion), how every game barring Awakening has the opportunity to wipe out a full clan of Dalish, the fact that a human, Morrigan, is clearly implied by the narrative to be the ‘better’ choice to take on the knowledge of the Well of Sorrows, the well of ancient elven knowledge, and that her mother is the holder of an ancient elven spirit… It does not give me hope that the Dalish, that the elves will be treated with respect in the next Dragon Age game.

I want to see the Dalish be given a chance to be shown positively, in a light that says ‘we deserve to be respected as we are.’ I’m just very nervous about it, because BioWare hasn’t exactly offered them that opportunity to date, in fact going about it in the opposite way completely.