#bc they cannot survive without the latest updates of hard in hightown

[sunlight-shunlight]

as always i was thinking about it (thedas art history) and

i think actually the whole chantry situation would be significantly influenced by the fact that they have control over all the tranquil? and the tranquil are... literate, unpaid, tireless, detail-oriented labourers, who will never get bored or cranky or want to quit. so they would actually be like the backbone of how southern thedas makes any kind of printed material, in scriptoriums attached to the circles or whatever?

which is also really convenient for the chantry. since then they have a chokehold on what gets disseminated. any independent groups that make manuscripts or print material would be less efficient, since by necessity, they would need to... pay their scribes and give them days off, and occasionally have them goof up a page and waste time.

and this raises really interesting questions about stuff like the book of shartan and the heretical chant verses being spread around - can people quietly bribe a chantry official to get them to assign a tranquil to copy it out under the table? is there part-time scribe work going on in alienages to keep these texts circulating? do mages (also literate and have access to materials) themselves manage to do this type of thing covertly, or do they have enough loyalty from the tranquil that the tranquil would be willing to lie about it and help them make some contraband?

anyway, THIS is how the popularity of varric's serialized novels, spurring the development of the printing press, and therefore more secular decentralized sources of media, could create a Chantry Reformation Chaos Era, when the chantry loses its grip on information and archives-