^Totally agree!
it fits far too well to brush off as coincidence. Or it could be coincidence. Without a firm basis, all we have is conjecture. But, it is fun to fiddle with strings and see what music one ends up with! Don't get me wrong! That the twins were rarely seen apart implies they could be one in the same, to be sure. I still think that might be the case. However, I advise remaining open to all possibilities at this point... while drawing on in-game established lore and less so real world lore. There's much too much chaos to be derived from the real world if we open that gate without more concrete in-game reasoning.
<snip>
Ah!! No, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that any of these connections should be taken as law- only that that particular piece fits in-game lore well enough to believe the allusion was intentional. Everything we post is open for debate- I was just referring to how firm the relationship felt to me. There's always a risk of perceiving unintended connections when we draw parallels between our world and the DA universe, but in some cases (like this one) they're bolstered by the fact that they don't stand alone: they add additional support for established lore, suggest potential context, or prime us to pick up on some of the more subtle in-game clues.
Crackpot example!
I'd spoiler this whole thing, but the tags won't cooperate. =w= If insanity doesn't float your boat, feel free to skip~
The Dalish myth of Elgar'nan's birth describes the Sun bowing his head to the Earth, and that Elgar'nan came forth where the two met. Consider how that description parallels the birth of our own moon: a massive collision between primordial Earth and another planetoid. As a basic theory, this would suggest a link between Elgar'nan and the moon that might explain the connection we find in game- and as a bonus, would make his now-empty egg literally one of Thedas' moons. (Giving us a plausible reason why the two don't have a cataclysmic affect on the planet's orbit and tides, despite being much closer / larger than our own. Hollow shells = far less mass.) It also primes us to consider the possibility that meteor impacts correlate to impregnation of the Earth for future theorycraft.
The same tale goes on to describe the Sun burning the first creation to ashes- obliterating all life on the planet and being cast down by Elgar'nan in vengeance- and again, we have a potential real-life parallel in our own Earth's Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
So we have a second meteoric impact as the Sun is cast down to Earth, which -in respect to the potential impregnation parallel touched on earlier- gives us a possible origin for the Stone. And though the connection feels tenuous at first, this theory has a reasonable amount of in-game support. The Nexus golem claims "The Stone lives beneath Orlais", and Dalish legends attribute the volcanic Nahashin marshes to the heat of the Sun's imprisonment. (Bonus crackpot theory: the combination of the two suggests the unborn Stone has the potential to be the first primordial Dark Ritual, a prison for the Sun's OGS.) We also have the enormous impact crater that seems to underlie the Tirishan forest and ancient signs of intense heat / geothermal activity in the surrounding area. It's difficult to eyeball the size of the theoretical impact, but taking Ferelden/Orlais as a north-south inversion of Europe and the scale that would give us, it seems to be considerably larger than our planet's own Chicxulub crater. The devastation from such an impact would have been immense, and if we turn back to real-world mythologies, we have reason to suspect that it may have been fatal for the primordial entity Earth.
The parallel here is the Shinto myth describing the birth of Kagutsuchi. In the Japanese tale, the two world-creating deities (Izanami and Izanagi) have several children, forming the islands that become Japan- but the birth of their last- the fire God Kagutsuchi (whose name derives from ancient Japanese for "shining force", a plausible parallel for the Sun) burns Izanami and kills her. In some versions, the father Izanagi immediately kills the child, cutting him into eight pieces that become volcanoes where they touch the earth, while the blood that drips from his sword becomes the water goddess Mizuhame. In others, Izanami gives birth to Mizuhame in her death throes, instructing her to pacify Kagutsuchi if he should become violent- a relatively straightforward parallel for the Dalish description of Mythal's origin and purpose.
That said, the parallels between the game universe and our own are never direct, and the historic truth is likely to have as loose a resemblance to the Dalish tale as the real-world myth above. It does, however, raise the possibility that the Dalish entity "Earth" is (or was) a living entity and primes us to recognize other in-game breadcrumbs that might be intended to lead us to that conclusion.
First, we have the macro-micro parallels between geological structures and biological tissues. One of the most obvious parallels is lyrium. Blood and neural systems are collapsed into one in the Dragon Age universe, and the "blood of the Earth" is no exception. The crystalline structures we find in game don't resemble veins of mineral nearly as closely as they do circulatory veins and the branching dendrites of neurons.
This is apparent in lyrium's effect as well- most obviously in its relationship to dwarves, both in the electromagnetic charge that seems to link them to the Stone's hive mind (the neural aspect) and in their role as blood-based immune system for the fetal Stone (maternal antibodies inherited from the Earth). This has all been chewed through before, so skipping to keep this from turning into a thesis-length manifesto. >w<;
Other geological structures we find in game are also suspicious from a macro/microscopic standpoint. Basalt formations seem to mirror muscle:
The cracked, blackened earth we find in the crevice of the Abyssal Rift (prime suspect for the mythological abyss the Sun was thrown into) resembles layers of dermis and third-degree burn damage, a point underscored by the unique characteristics of the surrounding land we find in the fade rift that opens near Adamant:
The distinctive pattern on the left is hard not to recognize as collagen banding, a red flag for skin... or more likely in this context, scar tissue.
These fade structures also have surface features that are distinctly not-geological in nature:
Keratin claws or horns? My grasp of biological microstructures fails me on this one. Definitely not stone, though.
Anyway! This is getting way too long for the point being made, which was just that real-world parallels can lead us to interesting in-game speculation. Is this likely to be an accurate picture of Gaider's world? Good lord, no. It's 75% supposition and guesswork, pulled together in some cases by the thinnest of threads. But it does give us somewhere to start in terms of evaluating evidence or counter-evidence against a standing theory, which gets us that much closer to understanding the big picture. ^w^
Retour en haut
You've let Weekes gain too much influence over you.
And then as I'm reading your theories, you pick up on things that went over my head, and I use them for other theories. And the conflicts between all the theories and the discussions about them usually further understanding.
