I'll just eat my popcorn in the meantime. Is that ok, Mister Elf?
Eat as you like, hope you enjoy it atleast. What I mean is I or anyone got the concept of the joke about it ending in boom, was funny first time then the second and third and all, this is NOT a joke thread but a serious one, that I hope that those who join it will honor this anouncment.
Well, I like Iorverth
I will take this topic to clarify one of my doubts, I read some things here about the Dalish have been slaves in fact, I did not want to look deeper into the matter, but since there was a chance, someone can enlighten me?
Well, I like IorverthI will take this topic to clarify one of my doubts, I read some things here about the Dalish have been slaves in fact, I did not want to look deeper into the matter, but since there was a chance, someone can enlighten me?
Well I will put it in a spoiler tag...
I think you may mean that the dalish brands imply slavery which they did many thousands of years ago.
But now they mean something else, or something like that.
I prefer to think of it as the dalish being wrong: again.
Well I didint doubt they WERENT wrong, a culture lost before thousand years ago will never be 100% right is it 
?
Okay so, well in DAI we see Dwarven Ruins, and Elven Artifacts in there.... Do you think the Elves and The Dwarves had some kind of alliance? During ancient times the Elves and Tevinter have been at war, the Dwarves tried to please Tevinter in ANY way, how did they get this artifacts? Tevinter stole them? Elves ruled this ruins? Was this secret dealings with them? Cuz this ruines were long before the fall of the Dwarven empire... Or werent they?
In Witch Hunt, you can find out that the Elves of the old were given a shelter of sorts by house Cadash. So, yes - there definitely was some sort of an alliance.
However, when other Dwarven houses learned of this - as they were allied with Tevinter, from whom the Elves were given shelter - Cadash Thaig was erased from being.
In Witch Hunt, you can find out that the Elves of the old were given a shelter of sorts by house Cadash. So, yes - there definitely was some sort of an alliance.
However, when other Dwarven houses learned of this - as they were allied with Tevinter, from whom the Elves were given shelter - Cadash Thaig was erased from being.
Yes I know it, but why would the Elves give the dwarves this artifacts?
Edit: I had a stupid question here
Well I didint doubt they WERENT wrong, a culture lost before thousand years ago will never be 100% right is it
I prefer to think of it as the dalish being wrong: again.
Who isn't?
I support elves, because their lore is the most interesting and I loves me some elven trim. Better than supporting Orlesians...
I'm wondering what actually happened between Tevinter and the elves that had the dwarves so worried about their alliance.
Peasant Magic, after all the dwarves can not use magic
By this stage the elves had likely already been defeated. I think it was just them wanting to keep healthy trade relations.I'm wondering what actually happened between Tevinter and the elves that had the dwarves so worried about their alliance.
Defeated by who?
The great Tevinter who sank Arlathan with blood magic turns out they just waltzed in and scavenged whatever they could after the elves destroyed themselves.
It just seems like Tevinter had a lot of hate towards the elves and held a grudge for whatever reason. And I doubt them being kicked out by the elves for fear of losing their immortality is one.
Just because the thread is going in that direction. Like the bazillion ones about Elves before.
Guest_Faerunner_*
Just gonna put this in here before the trolls swarm in and pick this thing apart like a plague of locusts on a blade of grass:
I love elves, regardless of their cultural background. Tevinter slaves, Andrastian city elves, Dalish elves, and now apparently remnants of ancient elves. Love them all. Love their history, love their lore, love their cultureal similarities (city elves and Dalish elves are more similar than they like to admit; community-based, tradition-based, look to elders like the Hahren or Keeper for wisdom and guidance, etc), and love playing as elves because I love seeing Thedas from their perspective.
I think the whole point in DAI is that the whole thing is more complex than we had previously been led to believe. Playing a Dalish was interesting because of their idea that they are recovering their lost culture but it is based on bits and pieces of remembered lore, folk tales and what they have found in ruins over the years. Having virtually having to start from scratch in their new homeland, after years of being slaves of the Imperium, it is hardly surprising that they had an idealised view of their ancestors.
Think of the Celtic revival, lore on druids gained from the writings of Romans, linking them to Stonehenge, even though it dates much earlier, etc. There was this idea for a long time that the Romans were simply using propaganda when they accused the druids of blood sacrifice and their religion was viewed as a sort of back to nature pagan idyll that the Romans had destroyed. Then people started finding evidence that actually the Romans were telling the truth and there was a whole darker side to it all. Seems to me that the history of the elves as told by the Dalish is a bit like that.
We will probably find that Minrathous was built on top of the wreckage of Arlathan; hence the Dalish thinking they sank it into the ground because it is a muddled memory of the truth. There seems some magical signature to the capital city and in Asunder it is mentioned how it appears to be built upon the ruin of something earlier.
I find it wonderfully ironic that Abelas tells a Lavellan "You are not of my People" in much the same way as many Dalish regard the City elves. What will be interesting is how the Dalish are portrayed in the future as reacting to this information, if it is passed on by the Inquisitor. My Dalish feels it important he attends the next gathering of the clans to fill them in. It will then be up to them if they accept his word or not. However, he would like them to let go of the past so they can move forward and build a better future for themselves. Of course, if the Inquisitor is not Dalish, the information may not even reach them and they are less likely to accept it even if they do get to hear of it.
I imagine that Abelas and his fellow sentinals will have a part to play in future games. That there was an ancient group still surviving did not come as a complete surprise since the World of Thedas had hinted that there were groups of elves that fled to the furthest corners of Thedas to escape Tevinter, and thus it was likely that they remained closer to what once was. It would appear that ancient elves were bald, something to watch out for in the future.
Just because the thread is going in that direction. Like the bazillion ones about Elves before.
But what he said is....
The more I play DAI the more I think that the creators and the old gods are the same... At least some of them... In almost every ocularum I find it is said thodsians "speculate" that it is the same symbol of Mythal etc...
(...)I prefer to think of it as the dalish being wrong: again.
I don't think they are actually wrong in this one case - they just have no information. I might be wrong, but I think they don't really know whether the tattoos actually existed in Arlathan or are an invention that only appeared in Dales and then were popularized among the clans as a sort of declaration tattooed on their faces. They are wrong in many thing, but one can't be wrong about something he has no real opinion on 
In this context it's actually Solas that's wrong in this case since Dalish tattoo their faces for their modern reasons rather than "because ancient elves did that", which makes ancient meaning of similar tattoos completely irrelevant.
Although, as for Dalish being slaves - we have reasons to suspect that most modern elves (if not all of them) are, indeed, descendants of Arlathan lower classes and slaves. First of all, if Arlathan was anything like any other empire ever, the slaves/commoners greatly outnumbered the nobility. And then
On the other hand, we could look at whole elven history and ask ourselves - to what extent is it simplified?
We have Brecilen ruins, out of Tevinter reach until right before Andraste's Exalted March. Ruins that seem to prove that elves and humans lived alongside each other. Was this part of Elvhenan? Or maybe they were some outcasts on the fringes of elven civilization? Or perhaps they were the remnants that Tevinter didn't actually get to?
In elven history we had a pretty unified vision of the race:
1. Elvhenan gets unified
2. Elvhenan falls and surviving elves become Tevinter slaves
3. Tevinter falls to Andraste, some elves remain in Tevinter but most move to Dales
4. Dales fall, most elves get sent to Alienages across the human lands and forcibly converted, the rest become nomads
This is pretty clean, but that seems fishy. Basically:
1. Do we really assume they lived happily as one great empire? That seems like a bit of a simplification, history - including Thedas invented history - implies that unification on such a grand scale never is complete (though we also have dwarven empire)... Basically, this raises an eyebrow, but I could take that. Then things get more complicated, however:
2. Tevinter never in its entire history managed to subjugate all of Thedas. At the height of their expansion they sorta controlled Ferelden Valley and they had no control over Chasind lands. We encounter elven ruins in part of the world that got under Tevinter control much, much later or never. There must've been some elves that remained free - I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually the reason why any elven lore actually got resurrected in Dales at all. After all, a couple hundred years of slavery is a lot, especially with elven culture explicitly banned. Also, even in lands controlled by Tevinter - one would think that perhaps some proto-dalish refugees hiding in forests could form, the land was likely much more wild then. And it' s plenty wild.
3. Elves lived (as slaves, generally speaking) through the whole Tevinter empire. And then they are made free and some distant homeland is created. They pack up and they go to seek theiir happiness in new lands... But why? Why would all of them want to move? We're told that some of the elves turned back to Tevinter or stayed there, but if the journey proved too hard, why would they want to go back? And the "don't feel the urge to go there" kind - why would it be only in Tevinter? We're talking about people who recently got freed and are viewed as allies of the martyr-prophet whose cult just gains momentum. What's more - we're talking about people who, some of them at least, actually fought for said prophet. It seems only natural that many of them actually embraced the new faith and didn't necessarily feel the urge to go and create the new elven homeland. It seems only natural that there actually existed a big population of proto city elves long before the Dales fell. On a side note - I must say I feel really bad for those elves as they are the ones that got screwed the most by history, when Chantry decided that the elves are evil demon-worshipers, struck Shartan out of the Chant and proceeded to stuff former Dalish citizens into alienages across the world, those elves that were actually living in human lands and likely worshipping the Maker already got royally f*cked as a ricochet. And it's not really all that impossible that they were the first to end up corralled in alienages and consisted a majority of their populations initially. After all, what's easier, find any elves you already have, stuff them behind some wall and say "oh, look, we have an Alienage" or actually go transporting elves fron Dales, half a continent away?
4. I already touched on this, but from what we know it seems that a lot of elves live in Dales now, Halamshiral is a mostly elven city too. Also, while we're supposedly told that Dales was all about worship of their ancient gods, I frankly find it unlikely that there were no worshippers of the Maker that got either killed in retaliation by their neighbors (when you have an Exalted March inbound you're not likely to look favorably on those that worship the same god the invaders do) or later disappeared when the general population was more or less converted. However, my thoughts are that, in general, it is overestimated how many elves were actually shipped away from the Dales. Also, we know that elves serve as farmhands - this would imply that elves actually live in the country too, not only in Alienages, in cities. I personally believe that while we hear of the "city elves" the majority should really be called "village elves" or something along those lines. After all, there seems to be much more work for additional hands in the country rather than in the city...
Of course, some if not most or all the things I'm writing here are a result of a dangerous attempt at bringing common sense to a fantasy setting. Something that, I believe, I've read called along the lines of intellectual self-pleasing. Still, since I like creating worlds and attempts at making sense out of a setting (a habit I picked up due to my interest in p&p RPG)... I decided I could share my thoughts before the thread gets closed down due to flame 
Defeated by who?
The great Tevinter who sank Arlathan with blood magic turns out they just waltzed in and scavenged whatever they could after the elves destroyed themselves.
It just seems like Tevinter had a lot of hate towards the elves and held a grudge for whatever reason. And I doubt them being kicked out by the elves for fear of losing their immortality is one.
Guest_Faerunner_*
I think the whole point in DAI is that the whole thing is more complex than we had previously been led to believe. Playing a Dalish was interesting because of their idea that they are recovering their lost culture but it is based on bits and pieces of remembered lore, folk tales and what they have found in ruins over the years. Having virtually having to start from scratch in their new homeland, after years of being slaves of the Imperium, it is hardly surprising that they had an idealised view of their ancestors.
Except that this is no great surprise since the Dalish as a culture fully admit they don't remember much about their past, history and ancient culture, and only really have stories and legends to go off of until they find out more. Remember Merrill in DA2? Remember Lanaya in DAO? Lore and folkstories are also part of one's culture, so recovering those is still part of recovering their culture. For example, stories of the Elvhen pantheon are still elven stories rather than, say, Tevinter or Andrastian stories.
Yeah, there are some Dalish smartasses that confuse lore with fact and stories with history, and those who think they know all the answers and their view of the past is Truth, but there are people like that in every culture, let's not kid ourselves. (Just look at Andrastians and Qunari; their entire religious text teaches that they know The Truth, and everyone in the world must be like them or live in blind ignorance as heathens or "things.") You also could argue that the Dalish as a culture believe they know more about ancient elven history, lore, and culture than city elves... except that's not really hard to think since city elves' knowledge of their history and lore has eroded to near non-existence after centuries of living under humans' thumbs. (Most alienages don't even remember why they keep a vhenadahl, or what Arlathan means.)
For how many times the game tried to throw it in my face "The Dalish were WRONG!" and tried to make my character feel bad about it, I was like, "COOL! The stories were based on a seed of truth after all! Also, guys, settle down. We all knew the Dalish didn't know the answer already, so learning the historical details didn't 100% match the story details is no surprise."
Decided to try and recreate my Mahariel. Well, one anyway. This is Anessen. The other one I have to create is Lysa, and then there's Darrien Tabris and my Surana (whose name I can never remember. Was a guy, but I'm leaning towards making my Surana a woman in my headcanon of DAO events. Same role I envisioned but a woman).
Also here's a pic of Marisa Lavellan
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