#also apologies if this doesn't quite answer your question or is rambly/doesnt make sense. i've been drunk/sick/in pain/dissociating for

[sangfielle]

would love your take on the saarebas as a part of DA canon (until recently i guess lmao) because they're a piece of qunari worldbuilding that i am oddly besotted with, but they also feel to me like another one of those details added to make qunari seem more "barbaric", which was then given some cursory nuance to try and make it not look as uniquely bad (for example, you can draw a comparison between the abuses circle mages suffer in kirkwall and the plight of saarebas, but the visual language of one group being confined to barracks and the other being chained and collared like animals is still going to have someone engaging with the work associating some very fraught traits to an arvaarad that they then wouldn't to a templar). i don't really know how to work with them in a fanon context for my own enjoyment that doesn't feel like uncritically leaning into the most racist parts of how the qun is presented, but deleting them the way DATV did feels worse. what do you think?

also you made a post abt them all being Government-Assigned Nonbinary that gelled with my interpretation of them lol

i sat with this for a little while, because i wanted to have something better to say than "i basically agree with you about all of this", but the problem is that i basically just agree with you and there's not that much you can say about saarebas that you can derive from the actual text of the games. they're categorically denied depth and we're refused any insight into qunari society and, like, the non-antaam qunari mind (sten and the da2 arishok, specifically, i guess -- inquisition doesn't want you to consider iron bull qunari so i won't, tallis is semi-useful as an insight into the position viddathari are forced into when speaking to those outside the qun but that's it [just in da2, i thought about revisiting redemption in case it would provide any insight but i feel pretty confident every character in that show is one-note without re-watching it], i guess you can have that one conversation with ketojan before it* kills itself?) (tevinter nights would have been a great place to put a story from the perspective of a saarebas but that didn't happen, so whatever).

i don't know how much help i can be of in terms of "how do i engage with this in a non-racist (etc) fashion", because i think the answer might be that you can't? i think that for basically everything surrounding the qunari, it's very difficult to not play into the bigoted stuff baked into them without doing a ground-up rewrite of the entire society. you're right that totally ignoring the bigoted writing and just hoping that works like vg does isn't really a solution either though. my suggestion would be to just go into whatever you're doing aware of the politics of the depiction of the saarebas and be mindful to not act like their treatment is uniquely barbaric relative to circles. if the thing you're doing isn't solely focused on qunari, spend some time looking at andrastian treatment of mages and make a point of comparison? if you're writing, make an effort to treat any saarebas and arvaarad as, like, people with interiority in the same fashion as you would templars and mages? if you're an artist, uh. it is much harder to get away from the imagery. i don't actually know what to tell you about that.

that's very basic advice but i don't have much specific rewrite advice besides "probably be mindful of and utilize the fact that in-universe it's implied that ketojan's treatment was extreme and not the typical way saarebas are handled (the specific visual language of the stitched lips are supposed to be a second-to-last resort handling method, not typical practice. i will say that i really deeply dislike the stitching scars that people love to put on their tal-vashoth mage ocs. that's probably more personal preference and me being anal about minor lore notes, but it feels to me like it leans into the idea that qunari treatment of mages is worse and more damaging than andrastian methods, especially when people don't really treat tranquility with the same weight despite that being... worse, probably). iirc saarebas (redemption) was treated notably harshly throughout its* life in the qun but didn't bear any specific visual markers besides the collars that would imply that it was held on a particularly tight leash. again, didn't rewatch redemption for this and it's a pretty vauge memory in my head, so i'm less sure about saarebas (da:r) than i am about ketojan and hissera (and i admittedly don't know jack shit about saarath, but there's very little to know, it seems like?). hissera and saarath have the stitches, but i'm pretty sure that's because they wanted to maintain a visual continuity with the saarebas more than anything else, because hissera isn't noted as being a mage that needs to have a close eye kept on it*, on account of... it's allowed to travel around thedas by itself under its own supervision. so i guess that's another thing worth keeping in mind, that a few saarebas are trusted to just be by themselves and do whatever, like wynne is with the circles? actually probably the most straightforward comparison in terms of level of treatment of the typical saarebas would be to fereldan circle mages specifically. if you want something to use as a yardstick for their treatment (similarly to andrastian circle mages, though the chantry will less readily admit it than the qun, is that the primary role of a mage is being a tool of war). also worth being aware of the fact that unlike thedosian cultures, saarebas are specifically noted as being revered in the qun to some extent. people don't... hate them, probably. the qun is too much about anti-individualism and living as a part of a whole for that to be the mindset about people who are occupying a very restrictive role

*i mean, you saw my post about it. i feel like the -bas suffix denotes a set of pronouns and a gendered role.