aravellan

[aravellan]

hot-blooded and cocky

[aravellan]

much less pressing criticism than prev post but it's irritating to me that someone using how many times veilguard uses the word "okay" compared to the other games as an example to show why the writing feels so different tonally has been twisted into "people are REALLY mad about the word okay". i can't tell if people are genuinely just not able to read between the lines to understand this or if they're being obtuse on purpose because they know it's true lol. it's not that the word okay is used too much specifically it's that the first three games changed so much visually and still managed to maintain a cohesive vibe because of the writing, and veilguard dropping that is why so many people were inexplicably going "idk how to define a dragon age game but this doesn't feel like one" on release.

[aravellan]

i've been obsessed with the forgotten ones for YEARS now, ever since alexis kennedy dropped the best writing in the da setting since origins in a random text-based side game and dipped without further explanation. the last court just teed it all up so beautifully, and instead of retconning, da:i expands on it! geldauran's claim teases out more of the logical conclusions of the clues in tlc: these forgotten ones represented dissent against the evanuris, driven by goals and clearly-defined philosophies that could never be made compatible with the aims of arlathan's ruling elite or the state faith they'd created. they complicate solas' revolt by serving as a rival faction on the same side of an insurrection, a faction that apparently had ideological, programmatic, or strategic differences with solas so severe that a one-time ally eventually sealed them away in the void.

and finally, we meet anaris, the first forgotten one we've ever encountered in person... and it turns out he is, as mythal describes him, just a "selfish fool" who wants to bust out of the void by covering the world in demons. no expressed convictions, no cause, no alternate vision for the future of his people, nothing like the hard philosophical stance taken by geldauran in a random codex entry ten years ago. he is simply demonmaxxing. fuck my stupid chungus life

[aravellan]

genuinely curious how the writers and larger dragon age audience would treat thom rainier if instead of being appropriately* repentant and putting himself in prison he blew up a major orlesian government building to instigate a chevalier rebellion or tried to have someone do some necromantic blood magic ritual involving uncertain danger and possible sacrifices to bring the innocent children he ordered killed back to life

[aravellan]

varric, surfacers, and the hissing wastes

on earlier playthroughs, i kind of regarded the hissing wastes as Western Approach II: It’s Nighttime Now, which did not appeal to me at baseline. on revisiting it, i'm realizing how incredibly stupid that was of me, given how massive this area is in challenging both the twin prevailing orthodoxies of what it means to be a dwarf and varric's consistent characterization across two whole games. every element of the area design is intended either to evoke shelley's ozymandias or challenge your beliefs about the setting just by having you look at it. it pulls together all these disparate threads about history, sacrifice, the synthesis of past and present, transformations that retain the essential element of the original, etc., and then it uses these to, if you elect to bring him, give varric a personal crisis about his place in a shared history.

you start receiving clues as to what's coming immediately, solely by looking at the landscape. the architectural flourishes that characterize the deep roads appear across the area, but the statues are above ground -- whoever built them must have seen the sky, such that creating these archetypically dwarven monuments necessitated a permanent separation from larger dwarven society. the statues, too, are themselves surfacers, to the extent statues can be; these stone dwarves, memorialized in full regalia, are also looking up. even before you drag varric around to open a bunch of tombs, the implications of the statues are that they were built by dwarves who defied dwarven custom by leaving for the surface, but maintained enough of their artistic, theological, and funerary traditions to honor their dead in precisely the same ways dwarves always have. this part of the world at one point housed an entirely different sort of dwarf, one orzammar’s propaganda refuses to recognize and stridently insists is impossible.

the monuments that dot the sand are a challenge to the perspective of orzammar's hardcore traditionalists, but the means through which you learn about the statues is a secondary, self-contained challenge. scattered throughout the wastes are a series of journals authored by an archaeologist. the first one details his arrival in the wastes and his purpose there: to study what might be the first documented aboveground thaig. the second entry reveals that this archaeologist, too, is a dwarf.

A Journal on Dwarven Ruins: The inscriptions on the ruins are all in the old tongue. (Thank you, Grandmother, for teaching this ungrateful brat Old Dwarven.)

it's not uncommon for academics to have some personal connection to their area of expertise. it's a little less standard for an academic to have learned a near-extinct language in childhood from a native speaker they're personally related to. this character, a man you never meet who dies shortly before your arrival (are his journals a different kind of monument to the dead?), is communicating the same idea as the statues and their builders. the archaeologist is no less dwarven for being a surfacer, and as his journals progress, he shows a clear recognition of his earliest-known predecessors.

varric, on the other hand, spends not just this game but also the previous game expressing the belief that there are two binary options for dwarves. you remain underground, stay connected to your culture, honor the stone, and continue to live as your ancestors did for thousands of years, or you go to the surface and lose every spare scrap of that. seeing the sky is a deliberate rejection of everything the sky does not touch. if asked about dwarven custom by non-dwarves like solas, you have grounds to be a bit offended at the implication that you would care.

for as much scorn and resentment as he has towards the traditionalists of orzammar, varric has fully internalized their perspective: that in order to be a "real" dwarf, he can't be the person he is. he wants to reject an inhumane caste system that goes against all of his principles, but he can't do that and be a "real" dwarf. he wants to live on the surface, to make friends who don't share his lineage, to fall in love with and marry a girl from a different caste, but he sees the repressive, classist, tribalistic orthodoxy of subterranean dwarven society as inextricable from dwarven culture broadly. so rather than making peace with the slivers of it that he values, keeping the bits of past and ancestry that he can truly, wholeheartedly honor, he tries to reject all of it. he can't see a middle ground.

Varric: But say I did have that sense, that connection to the Stone. What would it cost me? Varric: Would I lose my friends up here? Would I stop telling stories? Varric: I like who I am. If I want to hear songs, I'll go to the tavern.

and even here in the hissing wastes, when he's encountering a frank challenge to that all-or-nothing, "real"-or-surfacer stance, he mistakes it for a reflection of his own perspective: that there is a binary choice between past and present, and any dwarf who's ever seen the sun must have rejected the past. whoever built the thaig must agree with him, or else they wouldn't have come here. they must be like him.

Varric: "Real" dwarves don't like the surface. "Real" dwarves say leaving the Stone is death. Varric: Whoever built this didn't give two tin shits about tradition.

but that can't be quite true, can it? this isn't just "a city," non-specific, no particular architectural flourishes or population or mode of governance or form of social organization or shared history or majority faith. this is very specifically a thaig. the dwarves who built it were claiming that you can build a thaig aboveground. you can care a lot about tradition in the process of building something that's never existed in quite this way before.

varric doesn't understand this as a refutation of his own perspective until he learns this exodus to the surface was led by a paragon. as soon as he does, he attempts to flee the situation entirely. this is his dialogue with a specficially dwarven inquisitor, because while all iterations of this conversation are illuminating, i think this one is most so:

Varric: Looks like these ruins are dedicated to a Paragon. That accounts for a lot. Inquisitor: I've never met one. Varric: Me either, but come on. Even surface dwarves get dewy-eyed when you talk about them. Varric: We like to think we're different up here, but mention Paragons and––––ugh, let's find this last tomb. This entire conversation is making me think about dwarf shit.

by the time you reach the final tomb, you've learned the whole story of the thaig. fairel, the paragon who brought his people to the surface, died. his sons agreed to rule jointly after him, but instead fell into a fratricidal civil war. one killed the other, and the survivor, consumed with regret, built a beautiful series of tombs for his fallen family. in general, the stone is symbolic of all parents, so the loss of fairel is easily read as the loss of the stone. the conflict between brothers is symbolically dialectical. when the survivor resolves to honor his lost family in the traditional style, this is a commentary on sacrifice and change, one that allows for the retention of the most important pieces of what you used to be. the stone/your lost loved ones aren't right there in front of you the way they used to be, but there's something of them with you. you don't need to throw it away.

the implicit claim being made by this entire area is that past and present, "real" dwarf and surfacer, tradition and progress, none of these are irreconcilable. these theses and their antitheses can be joined into something that retains the essential elements of each. the giant monuments erected in your honor can stare at the sky forever, and you can both remain undiminished. the stone doesn’t stop calling to you when you leave the tunnels and look up. there can be a reconciliation.

varric’s barks are so fraught in this area because he’s chewing on the reality that this is just as possible for him -- he can break from tradition, live on the surface, and be the person he is without rejecting the hope he might ever be a "real" dwarf. from the dwarven archaeologist, emerging from the other side of a similar crisis:

A Journal on Dwarven Ruins: My father said our old family business used to be near an archway that was part of Fairel's Paragon statue. I wish I could have shown him this. He's the one who wanted to believe our ancestors in the Stone were still guiding us. Be nice to think it were true, old man.

even the specific character of the sky in the hissing wastes says something about all this. subterranean dwarven society sees it as this malevolent force, a vast expanse that people who’ve spent their whole lives underground are afraid of falling into, the explicit refutation of the stone that serves as your god and your parent and your home all at once. just a tiny glimpse of the sky can strip away every bit of status and material security you’ve ever accrued, making you a casteless exile. but in the hissing wastes, the sky always looks like it’s just a few hours from dawn. there was a beautiful change coming, and the sky itself is still waiting for it.

[aravellan]

Why is Rook so uncurious?

I've seen people complain that Veilguard changes Solas' motivations. And that's sort of true, but really it doesn't so much change them as just try really hard not to look at them. All of the things we were shown in previous games about the ongoing and serious harm done by the Veil still remain completely true, it's just that Rook is never allowed to ask or think about any of this stuff. Which is frustrating because it significantly weakens Rook's character: they end up coming off as determinedly ignorant and uncurious.

Take the information we're given about why taking down the Veil is bad - which seems entirely limited to Varric's claim that it would 'drown the world in demons.' Rook is constantly parroting this line, treating Varric as the ultimate authority on the matter. But this claim makes very little sense, because it surely cannot be the case that Solas wants to create a world filled with nothing but demons. From Inquisition we know he's greatly distressed every time a spirit becomes a demon, so that can't possibly be the outcome that he's expecting.

Of course, Solas could be wrong; he's certainly been wrong about many things before and he's not thinking very clearly. But even so, why on earth would we take Varric's word over Solas' here? Solas is an ancient and knowledgeable mage, the only person around who lived before the Veil, and he literally made the Veil. Whereas Varric is not a mage, has never studied magic or spirits, and is canonically frightened of the Fade and spirits: in the Lighthouse he mentions several times that he finds this 'Fade shit' weird. How could he possibly be in a position to know better than Solas about what would happen if the Veil came down?

Maybe I as a player can just accept that because Varric is The Narrator he must be right about all this. But Rook doesn't know that Varric is The Narrator. So it just feels like Rook is either incredibly ignorant or so devoted to Varric that their ability to think for themself has completely shut down. It's such an odd, anti-intellectual, anti-expert framing: don't do research or talk to anyone who has knowledge on the matter, just accept unquestioningly what your friend says.

Equally frustrating is the absence of any critical thinking about Solas' reasons for doing what he's doing. The only thing Varric and Harding tell Rook about this is that Solas is doing it because the ancient world was beautiful, but what does that mean? And is it really plausible that Solas is doing all this just because of aesthetics?

Rook hears Solas say 'The Veil is a wound on the world,' and never once thinks to ask - what did he mean by that? A wound is something that causes harm, that causes pain. What is the Veil harming? What pain is it responsible for? (From previous games we know the answer, of course. It's harming spirits, mages, and perhaps elves. But Rook never bothers to ask Solas, or to ask anyone else, or even to try to think about for themself about it.).

There's a moment right at the very end, where Solas is finally permitted to mention that he's doing this partly for the spirits. But in a perfect encapsulation of their whole dynamic, Rook immediately interrupts him. Doesn't even let him finish his sentence. Rook is so completely confident that they know best for the spirits and that this person who literally was once a spirit couldn't possibly have any insight into the matter.

At the beginning of the game Varric comments that he chose the name 'Rook' because Rook tends to think in straight lines. Which struck me as odd at the time, because 'thinks in straight lines' sounds like Varric is saying Rook isn't very smart. I thought I must have misinterpreted it, because why on earth would you choose to impose as a requirement on all players that their pc must lack critical thinking? But looking back I can see that's kinda exactly what they did, which - maybe they thought it would be more relatable? Still, if you're going to impose a fixed personality on the main character of a game, it's baffling to me that you would pick 'absence of critical thinking' as one of their main features.

[aravellan]

ok fine ill say it. i think anthropomorphizing the titans by giving them faces did their story a disservice. and frankly was kind of stupid. the titans in the descent are so otherwordly. they are unlike anything we have ever seen in all of thedas. their tragedy and solas + mythal's cruelty towards them was far more powerful when their sentience and "humanity" was unrecognizable. mythal calls them "monsters" but modern thedas sees spirits the same way. solas spends inquisition arguing for the same humanity and value of spirits lives that he denied the titans and the dwarves when he tranquilized them. we as the players should have been asked to extend our empathy to these beings even if we could not recognize ourselves in them or else find ourselves reflected in solas and mythal's cruelty instead.

[aravellan]

And So is the Golden City blackened With each step you take in my Hall. Marvel at perfection, for it is fleeting. You have brought Sin to Heaven And doom upon all the world. —Threnodies 8.13

[aravellan]

this whole idea in both the fandom and the games themselves that being a people attached to their past & a lost civilization is a failing whereas a celebration of the present is something to strive for wrt elven & dwarven culture is something that reads as fundamentally western & liberal to me.

[aravellan]

They made Solas dumb in Veilguard, and that's worse than making him more villainous. I would have preferred him do the shittiest things imaginable over what they did to him. At least then, it would have been interesting.

[aravellan]

have you guys seen mark darrahs latest video about the toxicity around veilguard? his whole point is that as much as you are entitled to be upset and tell higher ups about it, you shouldnt be cruel to devs because you dont know what happened during development and he made an example which was... interesting lmao 💀

[aravellan]

hey I paid GDL to read solas's letter from veilguard because I'm a solavellan disaster !! I hope it brings you the joy it brought me in these trying times. If you need it in a certain fileformat just message me, it's on tiktok under the same name

only tell people where it came from so they come talk to me about solavellan, which is all I want to talk about forever, ty ty

[aravellan]

Dragon Age: Inquisition | Spring In Thedas (Exalted Plains)

requested by @thewitchersims 💞

[aravellan]

i feel like all of my pondering and analyzing and criticizing veilguard over the past few months has actually truly given me a better understanding of what dragon age meant to me, what about it specifically was so meaningful, and why, as a result, veilguard felt so wrong. it took a while for me to figure it out. about three full months of relentless essay writing, actually. but i think if you had asked me a few years ago what the core of my love for dragon age was, whatever answer i gave would not have truly gotten to the root of it, because i think i had to experience the disappointment of veilguard to fully understand why i love dragon age. and ive realized that core is that i loved how the previous dragon age entries demand so much of the player, and deliberately prompt introspection and critical, often political, thought.

dragon age games have historically forced the player to be self-reflective and introspective about their worldview and beliefs. solas is obviously a fantastic example, as he was deliberately written to be a reflection of the player in order to prompt them to reflect on how they treat people, how our expectations of people influence their behavior, and how people are pushed to extremes and turned into monsters or saved by love and kindness. how do people become monsters? what drives them to blow up buildings or start rebellions or destroy the world as you know it? are they right or wrong? does it even matter? how did you contribute to this? are you innocent? it puts these insane, politically and morally charged situations in your face and forces you to confront them. slavery, a refugee crisis, poverty, class disparities, racism, foreign occupation, the list goes on, and you are not given the option to look away or be a bystander. you have to ACT. you have to choose, you have to make judgements, you have to take responsibility and explore your role in this world as someone with the capacity to act upon it, to make your will a reality, to fail, to make mistakes. i honestly can't think of any other video game that does this to the same extent? nor any media at all because the act of being IN the world as one of it's people through the act of role-playing is essential to how it provokes this experience in the player. its ballsy. they deliberately try to make you uncomfortable. these games are full of liars, deceivers, betrayers. the games themselves lie to you. its character try to deceive you. did you catch it? or were you fooled? what else might you be fooled by? who else might be lying to you? in the game? in real life? and then you get to play it again knowing the end, and what the game prompts changes with your new knowledge. now it asks, do you forgive them? what makes someone worthy of forgiveness? where do you draw the line? what do you think?

i dont think i realized until recently how impactful this was for me considering how i first got into dragon age at 16 years old. i dont think i had experienced anything up to that point that would put a situation like judging a war criminal who ordered the deaths of children or another war criminal who just left me to die and orchestrated a near-coup or a traumatized terrorist who just blew up a church right in my face, and said MAKE A DECISION. and i didnt know it at the time, but looking back i can see how valuable it was for me at that age to have what was effectively an avenue of exploration and self-expression of all of these moral and political issues that i was grappling with as a young adult. i played inquisition for the first time just months before i voted in my first presidential primary. i already had a political consciousness at this point, but it was nonetheless new and vulnerable and still blossoming into something more concrete. inquisition, then, almost provided a sort of political, moral and personal sandbox for me from ages 16-20 to better help me understand myself in relation to the world. the RPG-ness allowed me to put myself into these situations - like the mage-templar war and its metaphor for mass incarceration and police brutality - while i was also simultaneously grappling with and trying to understand these issues in real life. having dragon age to help me further unpack my own beliefs and conception of these issues was undeniably impactful. it provided a space, through a narrative i enjoyed and cared about, to make choices and judgement calls and better understand who i was, and what felt right to me. it asked, "what do you think?"

veilguard lacks this. completely. and lets be clear that the previous games did not always do a perfect job. many of these depictions are messy and harmful and problematic, but they at least, by extension of their own existence in a narrative that forces you to THINK and JUDGE and DECIDE, give me the space and opportunity to judge them as messy, as problematic, as harmful. i can confidently say that i think da2 is too sympathetic to the templars as an organization because the fact that da2 presents me with so many narrative conflicts regarding the templar organization allows me to not just make in-game decisions and play as a staunch advocate for mage freedom and circle abolition, but to form opinions on the game itself by extension. i can confidently say that i believe the qunari's portrayal is islamophobic because the game has prompted me so many times; what do i think about the qunari? what do i think about the oppression of the elves? what do i think about dorian being a seemingly good person but defending the practice of slavery? who should rule orzammar; the progressive asshole or the conservative traditionalist? do i forgive loghain? do i forgive anders? do i forgive solas? this in-world critical thinking about issues in thedas leads to meta critical thinking. further questions naturally follow -> what message did the writers intend to send through anders? how can i notice the echoes of how this story came into fruition in the shadow of 9/11? what do solas's endings tell me about the writers view of retributive punishment? how is bioware's portrayal of the dalish, as inspired by indigenous north americans, reflective of deep-seated anti-indigenous canadian sentiment? why did the writers stop prompting these hard questions at all in veilguard? did they only like it when it was about characters, not when it led to critical thinking about them and the company as a whole? through these processes of in-world interrogation, i am inevitably invited to analyze the effectiveness of their narrative portrayals and the writing itself. perhaps this is why dragon age is so famous for its discourse lol.

ive said before that im not sure that veilguard could ever have been as impactful for me as the previous games, partly because when you are 16 everything is more impactful because your brain is an eager sponge, unless it did something that really resonated with me as an adult. but what it should have been, at the very least, is something that could have been as impactful and formative on a current 16 year old that sees a gif on tumblr and decides to check out the game, as inquisition was to me 10 years ago. and im sure there are teenagers and younger adults out there playing this game and loving it and loving the characters and the world and thinking its great, good fun. thats great. however it fundamentally cannot have the same profound, developmentally catalytic experience it had on me because it simply does not challenge the player. it does not prompt them to question their own beliefs and the power structures within their lives. it does not prompt them to reflect on the political narratives they may have been fed all their lives. it does not confront them with the sorts of topics that get books on banned lists in florida and force them to bear witness, to think deeper, to feel guilt or horror at the outcome of your own poorly-made decision, to make moral judgements, to make mistakes, and to live with the consequences.

i think i now understand why veilguard was so disappointing to me and ultimately would be a failure in my eyes no matter if i enjoyed the combat or the exploration or whatever other shiny coat of paint sits atop it. veilguard does not ask much of you. it does not prompt any sort of introspection or interrogation of your presently held beliefs. it does not demand anything from the player except to dodge at the right moment. this is a fundamental, core departure from what made me fall in love with dragon age in the first place. if you love dragon age because you want "fantasy escapism" and fun characters to smooch, then i am happy for you. but i would remind you that can find fantasy escapism all over the steam library - farming sims, cozy games, a witch looking for her cat in the alps, etc. what you cannot find are games that are willing and brave enough to challenge and provoke the player into a better, more thorough understanding of themselves in relation to our world and it's many, complex and daunting political and moral issues. to have lost such a thing, when media like this has become so few and far between, and during a time when we need it more than ever, is a devastating loss.

[aravellan]

They're drunk and mean.

[aravellan]

FINAL FANTASY XIV SHADOWBRINGERS + ENDWALKER SPOILERS

DRAGON AGE INQUISITION + VEILGUARD SPOILERS

SPOILERS

Do not interact with this post or watch it if you do not want to be spoiled for Final Fantasy 14 and Dragon Age.

I made a video compiling similarities between Solas DragonAge and Emet-Selch FinalFantasy because idk I just wanted to see the video proof with my own eyes. I was trying to figure out why one of them (Emet) had a much more satisfying plot and character ending to me, and what could be changed about Solas' story to make it more satisfying to me. And anyway, I stopped adding examples not because I ran out of even more similar lines, but because the video was going to be far longer than tumblr accepts as a video upload. I had not really gotten to the point of finding examples in Endwalker, this is mostly Shadowbringers and Inquisition. So I was only like halfway done. There is so much more than this. I didn't even get into the monster transformations or their very beautiful and noble best friends or their estrangement and reconciliation with a mother goddess who caused them great pain or the part where they both play emotionally intelligent therapist to their very irritated enemies or the romances or....

[aravellan]

Me: Maybe I've been too harsh to John Epler.

*enter these (thankfully, cut!) lines by Anaris, written by Epler*:

Me: Nevermind...

(huge thanks to @corseque for uploading the Veilguard script!)