#even if it's not evenly distributed knowledge and there might still be holdouts doing some weird stuff

[sunlight-shunlight]

ok so, bianca davri invented some automatic farming devices, as well as a spinning wheel! good for her. so. i'm nominating that she could have invented a printing press too!

which would even make sense to explain why varric's novels are such notoriously beloved hits, bc while also being entertaining, they were some of the first to be published, and presumably set the precedent for what serialized, mass-printed, non-chantry approved literature even looks like in southern thedas...

and i think varric being the pioneer of this makes sense!! bc everyone keeps going ''UGH his books are so TRASHY!!'' but the excerpts shown are... fine? and his first book even seemed like it was genuinely earnest, and he was working out some Feelings about being a dwarven criminal and having a shitty brother. so the bad reputation would make sense if it was a chantry policy to smear his writing a bit, bc they don't like that it's popular and not very Maker Honouring™.

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-