Pretty much this. You can have Loghain executed for practicing slavery. But you will be the only one that did it for that reason. Everyone else in Ferelden will simply assume you killed him for treason and war crimes, while they pretty much ignore the slavery issue because they don't really care about it.
I felt like pointing out the indifference with which that bit of news is received in the Landsmeet myself, going off another tangent (warning, may be TL;DR for you or overly verbose):
Althix wrote...
Mind you - slavery could be evaluated as a crime(and it is i guess, in given setting), but is it worthy of death? Side note from old Legioneer - if city elves allow other to treat them as cattle, they deserve to be treated as cattle (you may not take this point of view as valid argument.)
Given the overall treatment Denerim's elvhenan and by extension city elves in general receive, the outrage, in-game (what little there is) at the deal Loghain struck - about which he confesses being less than comfortable with in public when it is brought up in the Landsmeet - does seem more than a little hypocritical, to be had.
As the city elf-origin shows, it is not initially Howe that did with the Denerim alienage as he willed at the elven inhabitants' expense: conditions in general are simply bad and can be seen as a result of deliberate discrimination against elvhenan, shutting them into their ghetto, out of sight, out of mind. That the arl prior to Howe, Urien, apparently turned a blind eye to what his son was quite openly up to does not make things any better. It is pointed out in-game how Orlais is even worse about how its urban population of elves is housed - still, that does not make the situation elves in the capital of Ferelden have to put up with "good" by any means. A situation that likely is meant to be representative of city elves' general lot in life among humans, as second- to third-tier citizens.*
As such, it is quite clearly shown that Denerim's elvhenan population enjoy few to no rights, with little to no prospect for improvement - doesn't sound too different from the status of "slave", does it?
Medieval law was invoked at one point already. The fascinating thing about the European medieval era is that it did continue using the Roman term servi/servants or "slaves" to denote certain serfs - which itself is derived from the Latin term, to be had! -, in some regions a long time after the Imperium Romanum had collapsed. More common in the early periods, yet servi can be found in documents' terminology from today's south of England as late as the 9th or 10th century, for instance. The system of serfdom that developed across Europe was also handled differently depending on the region; in some of those regions, the amount of obligations towards their liege some serfs had to meet for little to no obligation of their liege-lord in return could pretty much be described as "slavery".
That DA took its inspiration from this actual era is a rather open secret, I'd think, its variety of how serfdom and the feudal system in general was realized included and mirrored, at times, with Orlais as the most extreme example of this given the rights that its chevaliers are allowed to enjoy. One thing both got in common, at any rate, is that a concept of what we, in RL, understand as basic human rights does not exist.
So, to sum up, Fereldan and by extension Thedosian society is quite comfortable segregating its elven citizens into ghettoes which pretty much predetermines their permanent state as impoverished outcasts of society, with little chance to improve that. Yet when slavery enters the picture, a grand scandal ensues.
To us players, "slavery" certainly is a charged term, yet even in actual history it took a long time for this practice to be discarded and condemned, despite its paradoxies, and for it to take the meaning it generally has today. Given Thedas's setting, I would argue that this meaning cannot be applied wholesale to it without ignoring the fact that Thedas is at a different stage altogether of development in technical, political and social terms.
*PS: This does not take 'stair's improving the situation for the Denerim alienage into account in case he is crowned, I realize. It is just the one case, however, rather than a general, nations-wide change of attitude towards and treatment of city elves, where the impression simply is that it is deeply ingrained into Thedosian human kingdoms, as I suggested.
PPS:
Riverdaleswithflash wrote...Though I think Alistair brings her around if they're married, which is part of the reason I like that ending so much. International Competence meets PR Wonderboy.
From a meta-perspective, I suppose that can't really be argued. I can appreciate, though, that speaking from an RP-perspective, this positive outcome is not readily obvious, as with other such epilogue-states.
Retour en haut
), and possibly clan members.
