#limitations of the engine really didn't communicate *why* the dwarves wanted to fight for it so bad...all this rock and...more rock?

[lizzybeeee]

I love the Descent DLC for a lot of reasons, but one of the most memorable parts for me was how they recontextualized the dwarven belief that you would 'fall into the sky!' with the reveal of the Titans.

Thousands upon thousands of years resulted in the phrase losing it’s true meaning, recontextualised to instead refer to the surface of Thedas because they lost the knowledge of what it was talking about. Yet this phrase still endured throughout the ages.

You meet plenty of dwarves in Dragon Age who talk about the importance of reclaiming what they lost -> the Aeducan origin story begins with an expedition to an old thaig, Brosca suffers the caste system that venerates the importance of past ancestors actions, we see characters like Branka commit/allow horrific acts in the pursuit of this...

Even Bartrand, who spent the majority of his life on the surface, felt that pull. Varric has a story about breaking a plate that was brought to the surface with them and how, to Bartrand, that plate was the entire city of Orzammar. So many dwarven characters are reaching for something lost to them...

You walk into the titan (though you don't know this at the time) and you're met with an entire world in there. There's light, fauna, flora, architecture, clouds -> you are in the clouds -> you are in the sky!

The dwarves had an entirely different way of life! How does this all work? Who knows! What is in the booty of a Titan???

And the entire time they've had one small link to the far distant past through the belief that they would ‘fall into the sky’! Which is deeply ironic and tragic in that something so tied to their way of life, under the surface, became synonymous with the surface.

I still remember how excited/awed I was when I realized what that phrase was referring to! You heard it all the time in DAO – even Varric joked about how Bartrand believed it in DA2.

A phrase that was a joke to those on the surface was revealed to be a flicker of memory of what once was. Amazing!

Maybe it was once a small, chiding reminder for dwarven children when walking around in a titan. Maybe it was a joke for the guards/defenders of the titan like the Sha-Brytol? Maybe a dwarf wandered down so far below that they saw all this - making their way back to Orzammar with their account becoming legend. Who knows! But I love it so much <3