Ghilan'nain

Femininity and Gendered Violence

As I work on Nomaris Mahariel, I have a few thoughts on the elven story of Ghilan'nain. (Note: I am purely looking at the story we are presented with in the codex of Origins and the Dalish legends. I'm a little bit miffed at Bioware for how they chose to handle the elven gods and so I will not be discussing the discoveries of Inquisition).

One day, Ghilan'nain came across a hunter she did not know. At his feet lay a hawk, shot through the heart by an arrow. Ghilan'nain was filled with rage, for the hawk is an animal much beloved of Andruil. Ghilan'nain called upon the goddess to curse him, so that he could never again hunt and kill a living creature. Ghilan'nain's curse took hold, and the hunter found that he was unable to hunt. Ashamed, the hunter swore he would find Ghilan'nain and repay her for what she had done to him. He blinded her first, and then bound her as one would bind a kill fresh from the hunt. But because he was cursed, the hunter could not kill her. Instead he left her for dead in the forest. And Ghilan'nain prayed to the gods for help. Andruil sent her hares to Ghilan'nain and they chewed through the ropes that bound her, but Ghilan'nain was still wounded and blind, and could not find her way home. So Andruil turned her into a beautiful white deer—the first halla. —From Codex entry: Ghilan'nain: Mother of the Halla

(via the DA wiki)

One thing that stuck out to me in this tale is the overwhelming prevalence of gendered violence. While the tale itself draws on similarities to the ancient Greek tale of Artemis (see the myth of Actaeon), the difference is that the male aggressor is not the one punished by the divine woman.

Instead, Ghilan'nain, in her adoration for Andruil, is beaten, blinded, and punished for her devotion to her goddess. It is assumed that the hunter wandered free doomed to fail in his hunts, but we don't know for sure how his story ends. With Ghilan'nain, it is given to us plainly. For her devotion she was transformed into the first of the Halla and granted godhood, or, "she rose to a godly rank". The implicit message here, of course, is that devotion can, in some cases, bring about favor in the form of godhood.

But that's not the only implicit message here. There's a lot of statements made within the Dragon Age setting that women are equal to men, but when you play the games and interact with the books, it's easy to tell that it's not really the case. Sexism and misogyny run rampant from the start--just take a look at the dialogue options in Origins.

(Original Sin in the Andrastian faith is Envy, not lust or desire or a womanly fault, so I do think that is a parallel worth pointing out too, even if not part of the Dalish beliefs).

Ghilan'nain is Othered by her devotion; her body is perhaps unwillingly transformed into that of the first Halla, and from that she is called the "Mother of Halla"; the elves call upon her for guidance when they cannot find her way home. She's depicted in the ancient statue in the Mahariel origin as a woman with hares at her side and the moon beneath her right foot (thus feminizing the moon).

There's not really a main overarching point that I want to emphasize other than the one I hope you're picking up on. Ghilan'nain is a story about feminine horror; the brutality of Man, the woman's body being punished and changed for his sin, and the forced motherhood that comes of it. I don't think it's a surprise that her vallas'lin has a uterine shape to it.

(Mithra, a hunter of Zathrian's clan)

I'm not really looking for a whole lot of discourse, just sharing some of the thoughts I've had as I prepare my Mahariel warden, Nomaris. He's trans and I've had a lot of thoughts about him regarding his upbringing and what might have drawn him to this vallas'lin in particular.

do you have vivenne as divine? i prefer leliana because i know her better. i never got cassandra for it but i think she would be a good choice as well. they all have strengths and weaknesses but i never really see people who have vivenne

on my first playthrough i did get leliana, if only because of how the nomination part actually works in the game to literally fudge the numbers so youre more likely to get leliana, then cassandra, then vivenne. but since then i always aim for vivenne.

i guess it depends on the kind of person you are when taking a step back and seeing the strengths and weaknesses. vivienne is consistently, narratively, portrayed in game as likely going to betray you - down to the malificent style clothing, being so cold and poised, and speaking from a position of... empowerment, i guess? like “oh she got to be so powerful as a mage because of xyz and shes always so much better” like in no way does the game truly try to actually make you trust her, and unless you do her companion quest, which most people end up not doing, you finally get some effort for them to like. humanise her. or soften her. they literally set her up to fail, never mind giving you absolutely no backstory, and for (most) people, their introductory conversation with her when playing a dalish mage, was her almost snubbing you lmao like. of course people were put off? what are they supposed to like? was bioware just banking on people liking her because shes a strong black woman? yes because they love ticking off their little diversity boxes with no effort and banking on people eating that shit up

but i like her the best for divine because one) putting a mage on the absolute seat of power in the south is a big fuck you to the chantry, two) she is intimately familiar with being on the other side of barely tolerated and knows how it works and three) she’s the only one who makes a point of bringing up education.

like fuck the church. absolutely. they can try to twist it all the way through dai as being so good and on your side, but they also had two previous games (never mind all the additional external media) literally setting the chantry up as one of the over arching evils. i mean, exalted marches? for fucks sake. leliana... i have my grievances with her character and how she’s biowares favourite for da, but she went from doing her own thing, to “finding peace” and spending the larger part of the first game professing pro-church mantra, and then becoming the left hand of the divine, to the point it “hardens” her and you have to “soften” her to get her better ending as divine. like she’s all about that bloodshed and shutting down riots aggressively, or assassinations. not to say people in positions of power dont do that, but she just does a complete overhaul and kind of wipes her hands of it? like she thinks she knows what it’s like, and sees the idea of tearing down towers and whatnot as the best solution. and cassandra is the more extreme version of keeping the towers in check, personally, and rebuilding the seekers and blah blah, chantry on steroids. which i always kind of questioned because she does sort of loosen up as the story progresses but i guess the fuck not! consistent writing? bioware doesnt know her.

vivienne knows it will take time. like not everything has time, but with her overseeing the chantry, she’s in control. she makes the calls. people who played the game and didn’t mesh with her character don’t want her there, because even the ENDING sabotages her character. at no point does bioware try to make you like vivienne. like they give you an option to mess with her bloody companion quest, like more personally than others imo. but yeah. vivienne keeps the towers, because education is important instead of throwing a bunch of scared shitless, more than likely abandoned, mages into the wild to teach themselves. with how the chantry fucked over mages, they are consistently said to “not know how to survive” outside the circle. also if theyre outside, and people still hold onto their beliefs, so like, poor crop? blame the mage. like the game doesnt tell you vivenne reduces the templar presence at the towers. they almost mimic the rivaini tower (which, btw, gets marched on for being “too free” prior to all this). like it just goes “oh and fiona gets her knickers in a knot and establishes a free college” well okay first of all fiona, whatever. second of all, in a way its just MORE education. maybe not watched over, but it’s freely accessible and exists. vivienne is the only one who acknowledges that the chantry is so deeply rooted in literally everything in the south of thedas (but especially orlais), that to get rid of it, she’s gonna need to keep digging. slowly but surely. and we can make real life comparisons sure, but at the end of the day, bioware buried vivienne so fucking hard to this day people still hate her, and purposely sabotage her, because of a few choice character designs and ‘oh she didnt immediately love my character? she’s the worst person’.

and that’s not even going at the racism either.

1/4 So I’m halfway through TME and just a few things I’ve noticed.I disagree with your interpretation of Celene slightly in that I don’t think she’s all that intelligent, but is rather an average person only convinced of her own cleverness so much it blinds her to the manipulation of others. I mean Gaspard’s manipulation is staggeringly obvious. Really her success is entirely due to Briala (and wow, they really whitewashed the heck out of her huh? C’mon Bioware, model sheets are a thing.)

2/4 I didn’t read Michel’s arc as being framed in a positive light? The framing shifts depending on which character we’re following. We’ll sympathise with Michel when it’s his POV and Briala’s when it’s hers. It’s a subtle shift of writing that I quite like. So I see his treatment of his own heritage as an indictment of his moral character, but one the reader is supposed to see for themselves.

3/4 Reading all this makes me wonder if it’s possible to create a fantasy race without drawing parallels to real world minorities? Or to at least make them so slight as to avoid terrible stumbling blocks? Because it’s a concept I’d like to explore in my own writing, but no matter how much research I do I *am* still part of an oppressing group, though being queer and female I do have a slight inkling of what oppression is like even if I live in a very safe environment.

4/4 Do you think fantastic racism is a trope that should be left on the cutting room floor?/ Only answer if you’re comfortable btw! I don’t want to overstep. (PS. Briala and Felassan are both amazing and Solas has a LOT of explaining/justification to do considering I'm aware of what happens toward the end. What the heck, man. Petty, much?)

Re: Celene - Wait until you finish the book. There is in fact something revealed that Celene does that is straight up a super-villain conniving plan. But I definitely agree that everything good she’s actually accomplished should be credited to Briala, not her. Felassan even says as much LOL.

Re: Michel - just wait until you finish the book, but personally I had zero sympathy for Michel from the start and that only turned into more dislike as the story goes on. Fuck Michel de Chevin, he’s honestly one of the most insulting characters in the franchise IMO.

Re: Parallels - Sure, it’s possible. But just as I’m about to say below, I don’t think that having fantasy races with IRL parallels is inherently bad. It all depends on how it is done. I also personally very much dislike when it’s only minorities who are the alien/fantasy/supernatural/etc creatures, because that can get super dehumanizing. This is something so simple to avoid just by having more diversity across the board.

Re: The Fantastic Racism Trope - I think that this trope does have a place in fantasy; the problem is not the trope inherently, but how it’s done. What is the point of using the trope? Are you using metaphors to comment on real life problems, and if so, what is it that you’re trying to say, and how are you saying it? Or did you just include it in your world building for angst, or simply because you can’t imagine a world without racism? If you’re creating a whole fantasy world that you have complete control over, don’t put it there if there’s no place for it in your story. Or fuck, you could have your characters talk about how there used to be prejudices that over many ages has mostly died out. Point is, racism does not have to be there. Especially if this fantasy world has history that differs from ours. Like, has there been colonialism? Segregation? Etc.Same goes for things like homophobia. 

How did they ruin elven lore? I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about the games as other people

I didn’t call this blog ‘Elf Salt’ for nothing

-cracks knuckles-

I have a number of issues with how bioware handled elves in Dragon Age and they all interject to create this terrible mess of a mishandled race allegory that should never have happened. The frustrating thing for me is that most of the fandom is content to kinda just skip past these discussions but as someone who is first nations it actually hits real close to home for me.

Anyways...

Elves in dragon age are very clearly ‘inspired by’ if not completely based on racial experiences and history of Jewish, Roma and Indigenous peoples. (I can only speak to first nations knowledge so its what I will discuss the most).  Historically in Thedas the Elves lived across most of the land and were more or less the dominant race (I’ll get back to that later...). After a massive war they were nearly completed wiped out and enslaved by the Tevinter nation that defeated them. Elven culture was absolutely wiped from Thedas, language and history was completely lost, their cities and holy lands were either destroyed completely or overtaken by the people who know enslaved them.

Their experience as slaves has them widely stripped of any of their culture, their language, they are not permitted to learn how to read and are considered more akin to animals than to other humanoid races (sound familiar to American history?). In other parts of Thedas slavery had ended but elves were only permitted to live on designated chunks of land such as The Dales (does that sound familiar? Hm?) until the human authority decided they shouldn’t be allowed to have it anymore since they didn’t follow their christian-inspired religion, thus swooping in to wipe them out again and remove land promised to them.

In modern Thedas, Elves are still kept as slaves in Tevinter and are kept under such tight authority and law in other kingdoms that they are not much better off. In Denerim it is illegal for elves to own weapons. Elves are stuck living in alienages (which resemble both ghettos AND reservations) where there is no work, they are routinely abused/harassed/raped/murdered by humans (and have literally no legal standing to defend themselves as its illegal for an elf to assault a human whereas there are no laws protecting them) and the alienage is routinely locked up so the city guards can completely wipe out the elves living there. 

There are Dalish elves who attempt to recobble together their culture and history, traveling nomadically with the constant danger of humans deciding to try and attack them (this includes templars, city guards and country folk btw). They contend with constant fearmongering that they are doing evil and malicious things for their traditional religion as well as stereotypes of them being thieves (sound familiar???)   

So here is the thing, up to this point, this is just world flavor and world building. There are critics who find the inclusion of these stereotypes and the ways in which they are represented to be an issue in and of itself. I don’t disgree but its not my actual issue. I think fantasy settings can be an eye-opening and cathartic practice, it can give people who don’t experience those racial themes or hardships a chance to roleplay and maybe understand it a little bit more. As someone who is first nations I find getting to play a Dalish elf in Origins and taking people to task for their balant racism and save the world to be incredibly satisfying. 

The issue is.... once you created a fantasy world where this sort of racism exists you need to be EXTREMELY careful with how you use it. And while I think the writers of this series are talented and did the best they could with the limitations of ‘video game’ I think there were some GRAVE errors, particularily in Inquisition and Trespasser that completely ruined any goodwill they had. 

In Inquisition it felt as if they wanted to try and retcon the race issues they had established, or else had completely forgotten that those race issues were based on real-life issues. The two elf companions you get are, frankly, extremely anti-elf. You have Sera who has tons of internalized racism, which in itself is a really interesting concept to explore, except there is no character arc or closure for this. If you romance her as a Dalish elf you never have a chance to bring her around to stop hating on her race and culture, instead she insists you give up your racial identiy and heritage. Solas... oh gods where do I even begin? To keep it short, Solas’ entire point in the plot seems to be to completely undermine and ridicule elves and all the world building the game devs made. He refers to Dalish as ‘children’ and even mocks city elves, both of which are just coping with racial injustices/slavery/genocide over a couple hundred year history. 

If you play Inquisition as any race other than an Elf you will be presented a picture of elves as nothing more than stupid, misguided, shameful people that take what they have for granted and want ‘more’. Which... let me tell you... as a person who is first nations... that is insanely close to what racist pricks think of us today. Painting indigenous religion as ‘savage’ or ‘primiative’ and infantilizing those who follow it, shutting down people who are trying to find some justice for generations of abuse and trauma all while lifting up characters who are willing to throw their fellows under the bus....... its a narrative that is present in modern day real life race issues. This is all presented as Fact with no solution, no exploration, just ‘how things are’. And I think that’s extremely misguided of the writers, and I wonder when they forgot that these themes were based on real life.

Finally, we get to the cherry on top - Trespasser. Before this game we had humans being widely dismissive of elven religion, but in a way where it was clear that they were just ignorant of a religion outside of their own. In this game they decided to take the history of the elves, their culture and religion and completely tear it apart.

It’s revealed that the Gods elves worship are actually not gods but were just Really Powerful Mages. It turns out the facial tattoos (which is totally a reference to indigenous tattoo practices my dudes) that were devotional to these gods were in fact just slave markings because elves enslaved their own race, and Tevinter had never actually taken them down in war - the elves just destroyed themselves.

I shouldn’t have to describe why taking the most oppressed race in the world of Thedas and undoing their culture/religion and history is a shitty move. I shouldn’t have to, especially with the context of the CLEAR real-world parallels. But everyone seems to miss out on how disgusting this really is.

From my own experience, I have heard this shit about my own heritage and people. I have heard white people say that the injustices first nations people faced ‘wasn’t so bad’ because they were ‘already’ killing and enslaving each other. I have read books written by white ‘researchers’ from only a hundred years ago trying to imply the wrong meanings on sacred tattoos and culture. I have heard these arguments to defend colonialism and genocide. 

If you don’t have these real-life experiences, or you decided to play as something other than a dalish elf who might give a shit about their entire history/culture/family/beliefs/identity you will not notice this. It’ll just be an interesting ‘twist’ and I hate it. I hate that dismantling the ONE THING this systematically oppressed, enslaved and genocided culture had to cling onto has been used for a cheap ‘twist’.

Will they do something interesting with it in the next game? I don’t know, maybe. But kicking down and making elves be the sacrifice for something so identity-destroying is just... its bad. It was a bad choice. You know they wouldn’t do that with Andrastianism, they wouldn’t come out and be like ‘Oh the Maker was actually just some guy who enslaved humans for his own benefit’, and you know why. 

The issue is taking ‘inspiration’ for your fantasy world racial pain and then tossing it aside for shallow twists. Yes, its a fantasy video game, but as someone who IS affected by these REAL-WORLD ISSUES I felt completely betrayed and gutted by my fave escape telling me that my in-game equivalent was a fucking dumbass for believing in the culture of their heritage.

examples of Anders’ fantasy racism towards Native/Jewish/Romani-coded elves (look no one said Bioware was good at their analogies, but unlike the claim that mages are mentally ill, it’s actually Word of God from writers that the elves are supposed to represent people of color.):

his dismissal of Fenris’ former enslavement, such as calling it “one bad experience” and saying he must be “jealous” because slavery isnt bad enough to make him have bad opinions towards mages but jealousy is. these are only a couple examples, there are more.

literally wanting to sell Fenris into slavery.

supporting Tevinter in general, saying they have the right idea

his dehumanization of Fenris, calling him a wild dog, a maniac, etc., again these are just off the top of my head.

“whyyyy don’t elves help meeeee if they know what its like to be oppressed”

in Awakening, insists that elves don’t get locked up for being who they are so they don’t have it as bad as mages, despite the fact that elves are de facto required to live in alienages, the alienage lockdown which occurred earlier that same year (which doesnt seem to be that uncommon of an event considering they have those big doors for a reason and im pretty sure there’s references to alienages having curfews somewhere?) and, y'know, Slavery.

it’s canonical btw that elf mages get treated worse than human mages in the circles, and despite that, there are lines from elf npcs in the circle in ferelden (where anders lived for a long time) that the circle is better than the alienage. (granted the ferelden circle is supposed to be one of the better ones, but the denerim alienage is also supposed to be one of the better ones.)

Orsino has canonically done Loads Of Shit to better the position of mages, he has worked for and protected the mages of his circle his entire life, he has done way more work for “”“mage rights”“”“ in his life than anders ever did, it was just the slow, unshowy kind that actually benefited the people he was trying to help rather than getting them all martyred against their will. (and btw im saying this as someone who literally does not care about the mage rights thing and has no strong feelings about Orsino, its just a canon fact) despite this, anders dismissed him completely and accused him of being a toady for the templars, showing him zero respect

Anders decided to blow up the chantry, intending it to get the entire circle killed, rather than consider listening to and helping Orsino instead

yknow, the person who had actual experience inside the gallows

more subtle things that add up

being very demanding, acting like he has a right to Fenris’ time, history, etc, constantly pushing him to justify his trauma, asking why his master didn’t kill him, why he didn’t kill himself, etc

condescension and lack of respect towards merrill, acting like he has moral high ground or superiority to her

fetishization and lack of respect towards velanna in awakening

"all dalish women are crazy”

granted he’s disrespectful to everyone (or at least... human women as well) but he’s particularly entitled, rude and disrespectful to every. single. elf he’s ever known. it becomes a pattern, even if all the more blatant shit up there wasn’t a thing.

and towards dwarves Oghren was… ick… but i know there’s at least one banter where Varric starts telling a short joke about dwarves and Anders interrupts with the punchline. in case you didnt know, people can generally tell racial jokes about their own race, but it’s not the same if someone who isn’t that race delivers the punchline. 

im tired and this is all just off the top of my head. but could you make an argument that this is all ignorance? not a good one. i wouldnt believe it, but you could make the argument for your own interpretation of the character, not to push it on others. 

i think a question people should ask themselves though is why anders gets the benefit of the doubt, why we're supposed to ask ourselves to consider it instead of taking his actions at face value? why am i supposed to care so much about this white dude and his super special point of view that he definitely has reasonable reasons for? i dont.