My favourite crusty mage 😌
Look I love Anders so much it was only a matter of time until I drew him once I had Fenris down!
My commissions are open!
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The one thing I have a lot of personal, PERSONAL beef with about the entire Solas/Elvhen vs. City Elves/Dalish thing is simple: a lot of people in this fandom keep ignoring that this is one huge allegory for generational trauma and colonialism. Including Solas.
Maybe it hits home harder with me, especially because the real world inspirations the writers admit to using are Natives. And boy, I see the bones that make up the Dalish are absolutely Native-coded.
Constantly hunted? Constantly looked down upon for trying to keep to their traditions, even if the memories aren't as complete as they once were? Their very positive views on magic and the spiritual that run counter to common belief? Their religion is outlawed by the DA equivalent of the Christian church? The illegal verses of the Chant speaking about Chartan? The facial tattoos, the traveling camps, their attention to raising wild breeds of painted horses (the famed Dalish All-Bred in DA:I), the harts, following the migrations of the halla?
And then factor in the City Elf vs. Dalish experience. It reflects a lot of the same issues we have now. "City Indians" vs. "Rez Indians." The arguments about blood-quantum parallel a lot with the "elf-blooded" shit in DA. They don't have the ears, but they were raised like an elf! It reminds me of a very small dialogue in The Masked Empire between Fiona and Michel de Chevin, where Fiona immediately clocked him as half-elf because he never treated her poorly or called her slurs and subconsciously ducked his head slightly in doorways like he expected to bump his head in an alienage shack. Michel clings to his Chevalier code desperately, because if anyone found out he was half-elf, he'd be tossed back into the Alienages. It's peak "You're mixed but you can pass as white" coding in my eyes.
So then Solas rolls up, shitting on all the existing elves, calling them "children" and decrying them as idiots clinging to barely-remembered bits of history.... Good God, you ass. Like, I get it. I'm sure if one of my ancestors appeared before me and saw what has become of our people, they'd be horrified. But idk, there is also pride to be had in resisting and enduring and outlasting every government's attempt to erase what they see as a subpar culture.
When he asks "Did I judge the Dalish too harshly?" I always wanna just reach through the screen and go "YEAH ACTUALLY"
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