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[Das Tentakel]

Lilaeth wrote...

Am1_vf wrote...

Spaghetti_Ninja wrote...

That's one of the things that annoy me about the Chantry. We see little actual bigotry, aside from the mage-hating and the sexist discrimination against men regarding priesthood. Yet it's obviously based on medival Christianity, complete with the martyred saviour figure, church structure and a pope.

I mean, come on. Every real-life religion with more than a couple million followers has SOME laws against partaking in worldly pleasures, ranging from sex out of wedlock to drinking alcohol or eating specific types of meat. That's how religions work, they tell you how to live your life. The Chantry is way too modern for a medival world like Thedas, still stuck in the age of feudalism with kings, nobles and peasants.

Well, I hear there was a time when people could marry just with two witnesses and some sort of contract (it could even be a painting signed by the artist, the couple and the two witnesses). It was somewhere near the end of the middle ages that the Church decided they wanted to be in every important moment of everyone's life.

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Way back after WWI, one of my great aunts was married like that - she and her fiancee 'stood up' in front of witnesses and affirmed their commitment to live together as man and wife.  And they had a wedding certificate stating that this was how they were married.  It might even still be legal where I live, I'm not sure.  I suspect same sex couples could do this in Thedas.  Apart from the inheritance thing, no-one seems too bothered about other peoples' sex lives.  If only our world was the same!

Sounds like they had their marriage registered without a church ceremony (a 'marriage civil'), but it's still a marriage in a legal sense. In the Netherlands such marriages are the only legally binding form of marriage (so if you want to have a church marriage, you first have to have a 'civilian marriage').
In principle, secular marriages like this were pretty common in medieval Europe, but the Church got increasingly meddlesome in this respect. I recently read a case about a 15th century Dutch nobleman who married his mistress this way, but got threatened with excommunication for this. The nobleman quickly caved in and begged to be allowed a church marriage to legalise his union. And so it was done (although presumably such marriages were still common among ordinary folk as well).

[ElitePinecone]

I think it's... unhelpful... to draw direct links between Thedas/the Chantry and real-world history or organisations, particularly when the developers have been happy to disregard "reality" to create their world in a certain way. Many places and scenarios in the fictional setting have real-world analogues, but I don't see any reason why that means beliefs and norms should be even remotely similar.

As in, looking to European history (or any history) as a proxy for what to expect from the DA setting is nonsensical, because at the end of the day everything is completely up to the discretion of the writers, including the fictional cultures and value systems of their imaginary peoples and nations.

That doesn't mean many of the conditions in Thedas aren't identifiably the same if not identical to some vaguely medieval-ish Europe (like political marriages, although that was and still is common in many parts of the world) but criticising the Chantry for not being more like a real-world religious organisation strikes me as really odd. How can you say something is unrealistic in a completely created setting where the authors literally have total power over the universe and its narrative?

A better analysis is to discuss something like same-sex marriage from what we already know about the cultures of the universe (I guess, the lore and internal logic), but the final determinant of the question can only ever be in the hands of the devs.

[Das Tentakel]

ElitePinecone wrote...

I think it's... unhelpful... to draw direct links between Thedas/the Chantry and real-world history or organisations, particularly when the developers have been happy to disregard "reality" to create their world in a certain way. Many places and scenarios in the fictional setting have real-world analogues, but I don't see any reason why that means beliefs and norms should be even remotely similar.

As in, looking to European history (or any history) as a proxy for what to expect from the DA setting is nonsensical, because at the end of the day everything is completely up to the discretion of the writers, including the fictional cultures and value systems of their imaginary peoples and nations.

That doesn't mean many of the conditions in Thedas aren't identifiably the same if not identical to some vaguely medieval-ish Europe (like political marriages, although that was and still is common in many parts of the world) but criticising the Chantry for not being more like a real-world religious organisation strikes me as really odd. How can you say something is unrealistic in a completely created setting where the authors literally have total power over the universe and its narrative?

A better analysis is to discuss something like same-sex marriage from what we already know about the cultures of the universe (I guess, the lore and internal logic), but the final determinant of the question can only ever be in the hands of the devs.

The point I take from comments like Spaghetti Ninja’s and others is not so much that people ‘wrongly’ assume Thedas should be more like medieval Europe, but that it’s perhaps not such a good idea to base your fantasy setting too recognisably on a (well-known) real place.
The main argument in favour of doing that is familiarity and accessibility; people often already have a general idea how things look and work (even if their conception is rather superficial and / or wrong). That’s also part of the reason why so many fantasy settings are pseudo-medieval European rather than East Asian, Middle Eastern or Precolumbian – those times and places are simply less familiar.
The flipside is that Thedas is, to many people, perhaps too recognisably ‘Europe’ and the same kind of assumptions that supposedly make it familiar and accessible lead to a disconnect, a dissonance, between ‘how it is presented’ and ‘how (some) players imagine it should be’.
Medieval Europe is simply too familiar to just borrow its skin, spray-paint it and assume one can treat it like a ‘tabula rasa’, fill it with content of one’s choosing, and not expect numerous people to go ‘now, hey, wait a minute…’.
This is particularly true for the non-magical, non-fantastic elements in a setting (the fantastical elements themselves get a free pass, it is fantasy, after all).

[Tarek]

wow I wish I lived in thedas