What kind of accent do you understand being a sucker for then?
Ooooh.
If we're talking German accents, probably
bayrisch. I'm originally from the part of Bavaria that doesn't actually speak Bavarian, but I know it pretty well all the same. But honestly, pretty much anything that's not boring-ass
Hochdeutsch is hot.
Schnauze is dead sexy even though it's not similar to
bayrisch at all.
If we're talking English accents, definitely a Southern American drawl. Soft and slow. Mmmm...
But the real reason that most people consider accents to have certain traits is because they associate those traits with the
kinds of people who speak them. Prestige accents are prestigious because they're spoken by prestigious people, not because of the phonological characteristics of the voice itself. For a lot of people, posh southern English accents imply something upper-class and suave. (And for a lot of Americans, basically all British accents are like that, even Welsh.) For me, anything that sounds Poxbridge is something to academically loathe; I also associate posh English with the kind of xenophobic conservatives that hate women, Germans, and lesbians and would rather they were in the kitchen, dead, and bisexual respectively. The feeling's mutual.
Conversely, I mentioned
Schnauze, which is a way of referring to the Berliner dialect and Berliners in general; it means something like "sass", and the sort of sass (or rudeness, depending on your attitude) a German expects from a Berliner is kind of like the sort of behavior an American expects from a New Yorker, with the exact same caveats about how representative those stereotypes actually are. A lot of people consider New Yorkers and Berliners to be ridiculous and obnoxious, but I think "sassy" and "sexy" are very closely related things, and I had a thing for about a year with a woman from Spandau who was a lot like that: rude, but in a "can you take it?" kind of way.
The Dalish hunt. Just not halla. They trade with humans occasionally, but the stuff in the Dalish camp is meant for the clans use, not for trading and thus the hoops. Also: Magical. Animals. And religion. And MAGIC IN GENERAL. But whatever. Have fun.
Edit: Also: Codex is canon. Your points work in the real world but are invalid in Thedas because it's written that way.
Yes, they do hunt. So do the Sami. Herding animals is for groups that can't subsist on local game alone, so they get something that can travel and give its own regularly-available food (or another product, to sell
for food) to bring along. Otherwise, the herding is much more trouble than it could possibly be worth. These groups aren't balancing on the knife's edge of survival, but they aren't too far away from it either, and they can't afford to faff about with nonsense like magical draft deer that aren't good for anything else. They also probably can't afford to faff about with things like aravels in the first place, but that's another story.
The point about trading is that if they're not using the halla for things that other people would actually want, and they're not eating the halla or using halla-hide leather, being magical draft animals is not enough of a reason for an actual nomadic or transhumant group to drag the halla along. Real nomads trade with non-nomads in order to get the stuff that nomads can't make themselves, like extra food or crafted goods or what have you, and the things that they trade are products created from their herds: sheep's wool, for instance, or various kinds of hides, or furs, or milk and cheese. If the Dalish regard their halla as inviolate they're Doing It Wrong, but even if they didn't they'd still be Doing It Wrong because they have serious problems trading with humans or other settled people. (They would rather preach at a non-Dalish visitor than trade with her, which is THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING. That is what you do if you don't need the money. THEY NEED THE MONEY. THEY ARE NOMADS.) Trading with other clans is pointless because all those other clans would
have the exact same stuff and
need the exact same stuff.
And yeah, I know that it's a fantasy game in a world with magic. Sure. But magic doesn't actually explain this stuff, and if it is used to explain stuff that clearly has nothing to do with magic, then that is bad storytelling. Importantly, the writers themselves never actually explain this stuff by saying "magic"! They say that halla are used for these things in the Codex and through conversations, but they don't explain
how or
why. ("Magic" makes sense when it's used for
things that are clearly magical! I don't go around complaining about people throwing fireballs because that would never happen in the real world. That is clearly explained with the Veil, the Fade, and mana: even if that's not a realistic explanation, it follows basic fantasy tropes and it's in the fundamental rules of the
Dragon Age universe.) They don't say "well normally the Dalish would starve and die but fortunately they have magical bread to sustain them and their massive pointless herds of deer". You are correct that the game is fairly unambiguous: the Dalish do appear to live this way. I don't deny that at all. I am pointing out that it is stupid, implausible, and unrealistic.
BioWare's writers write their game as though they do not know or do not care about a fair amount of basic history and anthropology, from their descriptions of warfare to, as here, their depiction of something like a nomadic pastoralist society.
Some things are more or less believable: kings and kingdoms tend to follow understandable lines of behavior compared to historical rulers, for instance. But other things are incredibly slipshod in ways that can't be explained by the setting.
Now, it's not fair to expect the writers to create
academically believable societies. And I don't. I don't think that the
Dragon Age games' overall quality is significantly compromised by these things at all. They're some of my favorite games ever. I'm willing to pass over an awful lot of silliness in favor of the Rule of Cool, or its closely related counterpart the Rule of Funny. But in some cases, the specific nature of the way the written setting and the very-different real world interact can annoy me in an unusual way.
Simply put, the Dalish act in a way that would get any real person killed. I like
Dragon Age's elves better than any other race in the games, but I think the
Dalish specifically are a bunch of obnoxious twits. It has nothing to do with their religion, either, and even the holier-than-thou attitude is only part of it. The very way that they live, combined with the way that they act around everybody who isn't Dalish, would get a Bedouin or Sami or Kazakh very dead. They have a tremendous die-hard fan club for being the hippies with the Original Gods and Original Magic, who were So Badly Wronged by the evil humans that they will never forgive and never forget, who fail to realize that some of the very things that they like most about the Dalish - i.e. their suspicion, if not hostility, toward outsiders - would be some of the very things that would make the Dalish a very short-lived experiment in the world of real nomadic peoples. Real nomads, like the Zunghar Mongols or the Lakota Sioux, might skirmish with settled peoples one month, then be trading with the same settled peoples the next, because they couldn't afford to be super picky with survival at stake.
Many Dalish fans have pointed out that it's possible to get basically every Dalish clan in the games and books killed off: teaming up with the werewolves, not taking responsibility for Merrill, trying to use Imshael to open up the eluvians, and so on. They contend that this is an example of the writers being anti-Dalish. I think the opposite: the writers are far too lenient with the Dalish, because they give most clans an opportunity to
survive. Massacring the clans is distasteful, and I rarely play characters that do it, but the clans should be dying off or disbanding
with or without player input because of their absolutely moronic approach to the basic facts of nomadic life. If they are not doing that because of a gift from the gods, then that
is writer favoritism.
These problems are not intrinsic to the Dalish being Dalish, either! It's possible to construct a mystical relationship between elf and halla without making the halla into some bizarrely inviolate wonder-deer. Nobody suggests that many of the aboriginal Americans of the Great Plains didn't have a special relationship with buffalo and horses. They just knew what each animal was good for, and what it wasn't, and structured the relationship around getting the most out of each. Same with their suspicion of/hostility toward many outsiders: believe me, you can still act like a holier-than-thou pr*ck while still selling somebody something. It's actually pretty easy. Many people in modern retail have mastered it.
I don't even think that the Dalish would lose much from spending more time on plains rather than in the woods; the ones in Dirthavaren kind of did that, and it seemed to go over well enough. And had
Dragon Age II been able to change up its areas a bit more (perhaps with the Sabrae clan being in different maps each Act instead of at one campsite for six straight years!) there'd be a lot less to complain about in terms of "these are nomads who actually need to move around, they don't just do it for kicks and giggles".
Anyway. That was longer than I planned. Point is, the Dalish are stupid and they don't need to be, and I think that that is a Bad Thing.
Judging from the golden halla chase in the Exalted Plains, which is tantamount to herding cats, I had to wonder how the Dalish didn't all just let their elfy elks guide them off a cliff. Like, this thing is your clan's Garmin? Creators help you.
Tee hee, elfy elks. Nice.
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