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rewatching the first emmrich memorial gardens outing when they stop in front of the tableau of the dead and he says "orlesians, fabulous artists but no eye for the long run", my man just throwing the subtlest shade at his ex

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Emmrich saying "Slow. Deep." in that tone send tweet

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Listen.

I love y'all, but some of you need to understand: the writers are not being shitty. The writing is not bad. The lore is not being ignored.

You're upset because your headcanons are not being followed.

Something Tolkien fans are constantly encouraged to do is "go back to the source material." This sounds basic, but Lord of the Rings alone is a massive book - if someone broke into my apartment, I stand a more than reasonable chance of beating them down with either of my illustrated hardcover copies. By the time you get through reading it, it's easy to forget small details in the main body of the work, much less the introductions and the appendices, and that's BEFORE you try absorbing everything in Lost Tales, or The Silmarillion, etc, etc.

Now imagine you come to Veilguard, and maybe you've been playing Inquistion because it feeds directly into the game. Maybe you played Origins, 2 and Inquisition in a white heat. Great! But those games include a lot of choices, and SO MUCH CODEX material. It's almost impossible to retain all of that knowledge all at once in your head, especially in games where you can miss shades of meaning due to the dialogue choices you make - and I often see people who claim they tend to make the same choices every time.

The reason we Tolkien fans are told to go back to the source material is that it's so easy to slip into assumptions. A great example is: do you actually know what Rangers are? Or do you think of them in D&D terms?

Dragon Age is a story that mimics the unreliability of History, where one characters's perspective and story may not be the same as another's, and neither are necessarily wrong or right - they're simply parts of a whole. And it's wild to watch y'all bend over backwards to defend your headcanons instead of accepting that maybe a character was wrong, or misinformed, or unreliable, or has a limited perspective.

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Someone was being a fucking hater on my explicitly positive DATV post AGAIN (u all know I can see your tags right. They get delivered to me express mail style) so here’s an essay about how I thought the Grey Warden plotline was great:

First, it was extremely lore-consistent. I don’t know how to tell people this, but the Grey Wardens simply are sort of shady— it’s part of their charm. In DAO alone we found out they:

- kill anyone who refuses the joining

- are definitely using a blood magic ritual to induct people

- tried to usurp the throne of Fereldan

In DA2 they:

-Forced Malcolm Hawke to perform a blood magic ritual against his will to contain Corypheus, by threatening to kill his family

- Built a giant prison in the mountains they didn’t tell anyone about and that someone could wander into and not be able to escape

- the entire Corypheus thing. They didn’t even tell the other Wardens like what he was or how dangerous he was.

DAI:

- the demon army thing was pretty bad

And that’s not even mentioning any stuff from the books or comics or shows! That’s just stuff in the games!

So they’re shady. It’s okay! They’re my little woobie guys, idc if they’re sort of shady!

But the plot in DATV is about all of those previously established issues coming back to bite them in the fucking ass, as they should! Knock knock, it’s the consequences of your actions, baby! The chickens are home to roost

(Which is just good storytelling. Like if you set up a bunch of issues and then never pay them off or anything that’s bad.)

Destroying Weisshaupt was inspired! Firstly bc Davrin is Weisshaupt, metaphorically (bulwark against the darkness, etc, I already made a post) so it serves his character arc. But also because it strips away the pageantry and the grandeur from them; no more castle for you! No more myth!

Davrin explicitly tells you that the First Warden is a traditionalist; he represents the historical attitudes of the Wardens. They do not accept help, they do not give up their secrets, they are standing alone against the dark. And it doesn’t work! He’s fucking wrong (and very punch-able). Being secretive and isolationist is a mistake that costs them nearly everything.

But also, and I’m not sure how many people experienced this on the first go-around, the game does ultimately come down on the side of the Wardens always trying to do the right thing. You CAN talk the First Warden down, because in the end he’s a Warden, and he might be stubborn and curmudgeonly and miserable but he CARES about the world. He came to do good. He admits he was wrong and he helps you. Because the heart of the Wardens is about selfless service to other people. In Death, Sacrifice.

Stripping away Weisshaupt and the glory and pageantry leaves the Wardens at their most vulnerable and forces them to return to their fundamental principles: helping people. That’s what Lavendel is about. Helping individual people and preserving every life possible even if it doesn’t feel that glamorous or heroic. Lavendel isn’t a significant place; it doesn’t matter, but it matters so much.

And then, the Cauldron.

First off, do not at me about Last Flight. I don’t think people should have to read external materials to play this game and understand it. If the information is vital it should be presented to the player in the text.

The Cauldron is the repository of the Wardens’ secrets; it’s where the keep the bones of the Archdemons, the secret to the Joining, ancient and dangerous weapons, as well as the bodies of the griffons, which represents their most shameful errors. Isseya is the avatar of the Wardens’ mistakes; she’s been hurt by what they made her do, and her pain was never acknowledged by them. They buried her story and her suffering like they bury everything they don’t want to deal with and are ashamed of. They left the bones of the griffons, whose deaths they directly caused, to rot because they were too sad to acknowledge them.

But it was wrong to walk away, it was wrong to bury it. Isseya makes sure that they can never do that again, that they have to own what they did and take responsibility. By discovering who she is and by restoring her personhood to her, by reminding her of her love which drove her to her anguish in the first place, Davrin saves her and he saves the griffons. He doesn’t do it using violence, because another sin of the Wardens is just assuming that they can kill their way out of their problems, which the game disproves by revealing the origin of the Blight. You can kill as many darkspawn as you want, you will never fix it! The Titans’ dreams do not need to be slain, they need to be healed.

Isseya is in so much pain because of her incredible love for both the griffons and the Wardens, and because of her guilt. Look what she builds! An alternate Weisshaupt, a distorted reflection of her home. She entreats both Davrin and Assan to join her, because she doesn’t think she’s trying to destroy anything. She’s trying to save them! She wants them to come home. “I am their mother,” she says, and she’s right. She saved them, then, and she ends up saving them now! Because she made Davrin and the other Wardens look, unflinchingly, at what they had done, it will never happen again. She was going about it wrong during the game, but she was ALWAYS trying to save them.

Davrin, Antoine and Evka represent the Wardens’ commitment to being different. They let Flynn undergo the Joining without becoming a Warden, they reveal secrets to non-Warden Rook, they offer to help the Viper without asking for anything in return. They ask for help and offer it freely. If the Wardens are going to persist into a world without Archdemons, they HAVE to change. They can’t be what they were anymore. The game is asking what a Warden is when they have to be more than their oath, when they have to live. It’s a great exploration of and expansion on previously established lore.

Anyway, my advice if you hated the plot and the game and the characters is to a) make your own post b) don’t bother me about it, because I have the time and I will be loudly positive in response!

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something interesting about rook that kind of sets them apart from all the other protagonists is that i... don’t think they’d be that well known? even after the fact?

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I allowed Treviso to get blighted solely to see less of Rayan fucking Ivenci and I'm not even ashamed to admit it.

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Bellara, opening the door: Hey, Professor! I need to ask you–

Emmrich, sitting flustered on the couch with ruffled hair: How may I assist you…?

Bellara:

Bellara: Is Rook hiding behind the couch?

Rook, muffled: No…

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malcolm 'I would commit blood magic before I'd become an absent father' hawke really out there answering the question no one had ever dared to ask before... what if the ghost haunting the narrative was a dilf

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"I'm a mage and idk why he's trying to show me magic in this scene, but okay pookie" - comment I've seen at least 3 or 4 variations of.

He's not "trying to show you magic." He's a particular kind of necromancer known as a corpse whisperer. He tells you this within several minutes of meeting you, and that it's rare even among the Mourn Watch, who are an elite group of necromancer already.

Emmrich isn't just a necromancer, he's a Fade expert (that's what he was hired for by the Veilguard, not his necromancy), an alchemist, and it could probably be argued he'd do a passable job teaching philosophy and history as well.

He's showing you HIS magic. He's inviting you to witness the things he finds wonderous, hoping that you do as well. This isn't him condescending to you, he's helping you glimpse something most people can't and hoping it intrigues you, since it's intrinsically part of him, and he cannot hope to have a relationship with someone without them at least accepting it.

(Also casually revealing that he's capable of Talking You Through It but that's a post for ANOTHER TIME)

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Being in the dragon age fandom for like 12+ years is like

Dragon Age 2 release week: this game fucking sucks, they ruined the lore and the companions are cringe

Dragon Age 2, 5 years after release: this game is fantastic albeit rushed, the companions are my favorite

Inquisition release week: this game fucking sucks, they ruined the lore with these new implications

Inquisition, 5 years after release: this game is fantastic, I love the lore implications

Veilguard release week: this game fucking sucks--

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davrin didn't know what a wisp was two weeks ago and emmrich hasnt seen a live animal in 5 years but that doesn't stop either of them from being unflinchingly up in each other's business.

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My take is that Solas is the Maker only in the sense that he is behind a lot of the events that the Chantry ascribes to the Maker: creating the Blight (kind of), creating the Black City, forming the Veil.

Then there's the paralells between Lavellan and Andraste (a young woman from a culture that's considered backwater rises to lead a holy war against magisters, convinces a god to give this world another chance and ends up joining him in "heaven").

I still think that the Maker as the Chantry describes Him - an omnipotent omniscient abrahamic-like god - might be a thing in the setting. The Chant says that spirits were the Maker's firstborn, but that He turned away from them after they disappointed him by being envious of amd hostile toward the younger races, which is mightily reminiscent of how the first generation of elves envied the mortals and crafted bodies for themselves.

Genuine question: where is everyone getting the "Solas is the Maker" thing? I've only completed one playthrough so maybe I missed it somewhere, but that's not the interpretation I walked away with at all

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Hot take but I think talking down the First Warden is actually more badass than punching him out.

I just love the scene so much. Rook has like one minute to get the Wardens on their side before all goes to hell.

And they use them to hit Glastrum with a sherlock scan so good they deduce that he is A) near his Calling, B) hearing the gods scream into his brain and C) not beyond being reasoned with in under like 10 seconds.

I'll take the approval hit from everyone but the certified icon Emmrich Volkarin any day just to see this play out.

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Emmrich and the kids

There's a follow-up with Harding on Emm reading a book she knows and it's gold.

Bonus banter with fellow dad Davrin