It's kinda hard too tho when you have the Carver/Bethany deep roads situation.Which is lore friendly, but then you have Hawke bathing in darkspawn blood. At least in DAI the blood splatter on people is not as bad as DAO/DA2.
Yeah, I hate it when the writers follow their lore in one scene and then break it over and over again in others. After fighting all those Darkspawn in Descent my guys had blood splatters all over their mouths and eyes. It was then I realized that the Maker's name is Plot.
Yeah, I hate it when the writers follow their lore in one scene and then break it over and over again in others. After fighting all those Darkspawn in Descent my guys had blood splatters all over their mouths and eyes. It was then I realized that the Maker's name is Plot.
I'm pretty sure the Maker's name is David Gaider
Bioware always make experts look like complete fools in their games, because they need big reveals that only the character knows etc etc. The Grey Wardens not knowing much about Darkspawn is just one example.
Mordin in ME2 claims he and his crack team of genius scientists spents months evaluating in meticulous detail, all the possible permutations of what could happen after a Genophage cure or if they allowed the Krogan to develop a resistance naturally, He was confident that every scenario led to a resumption of hostilties, because the Krogan haven't developed culturally, and have been nursing a grudge over the affair. But in ME3, we find out he had no idea that female shamans existed, or that Krogan females were more reasonable, diplomatic types, which throws all his previous evaluations in the trash.
Liara is held up as a Prothean expert - *the* Prothean expert. Yet for 3 games, we don't ever get to speak to her about them, And in ME3 we find out why - when she talks to Javik, she asks what Prothean culture was like, because she has no idea and has gotten all of what she did surmise wrong. She's also spent 100 years researching the Prothean extinction and turned up nothing, yet later on it seems everyone knows what happened to them or at least heard rumors to that effect.
Thane is one of the most feared and respected assassins in the galaxy. Ever alert and with a personal motivation to take down the Shadow Broker, the Broker even admits it was a very smart move to bring him along... before knocking him out in one punch for the whole fight.
Being an expert in Bioware games is as simple as saying you are and hoping that nobody will correct you. Very few experts actually back up their reputations with their knowledge and actions. The truth is as many will have said, that experts know only as much as is convenient for the plot to have them know. And it works both ways too - at other times, characters and factions will have knowledge and skills they couldn't possibly have (your own character is frequently guilty of this in all Bioware's games, being great at everything, unless the plot requires them not to be, and even when they have previously been shown to actually possess such skills).
When games and stories of all kinds are written by multiple writers, you will get this sort of thing. Some people never read the other writer's work, some read a little or just the material on the game they are working on, some simply do not like or are interested in certain characters and plot ideas, so do not engage with them as fully as earlier writers did etc etc etc.
Basically, its a wonder that things like this work at all over time, as writers come and go. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You can't expect all the writers to have read and memorized all the lore, especially as the games rack up and the lore increases each time.
Honestly Solas's attitude towards the warden's pisses me off. It's so hypocritical that he has a problem with the lengths the wardens go to, when he himself is willing to destroy the world to achieve his goals. Whenever he talks about the wardens, I kind of just want to slap him.
Yeah, I agree. And considering his strong reaction after that quest, and knowing what I know about him now, it makes me think they were on to something there with their plans. Proactively hunting down those "Old Gods" sounds like a thumbs up to me.
I'm pretty sure the Maker's name is David Gaider
Can't really come up with anything witty, you got me there.
Yeah, I hate it when the writers follow their lore in one scene and then break it over and over again in others. After fighting all those Darkspawn in Descent my guys had blood splatters all over their mouths and eyes. It was then I realized that the Maker's name is Plot.
And yet Descent gives a perfect example of someone successfully fighting darkspawn for years and not be a Warden. How, he does it by keeping his mouth closed while fighting.
And yet Descent gives a perfect example of someone successfully fighting darkspawn for years and not be a Warden. How, he does it by keeping his mouth closed while fighting.
Apparently something as simple as a cloth over your mouth is too complex an idea for the people of Thedas.
How do you know the Grey Wardens don't know about the origins of the Taint or Red Lyrium?
In the games so far we haven't come into contact with the Grey Warden leaders, the closest we get is Clarel who dies shortly after we meet. There's nothing to suggest the GW don't know these things. The secrets of the Blight could be passed down from First Warden to First Warden.
How do you know the Grey Wardens don't know about the origins of the Taint or Red Lyrium?
In the games so far we haven't come into contact with the Grey Warden leaders, the closest we get is Clarel who dies shortly after we meet. There's nothing to suggest the GW don't know these things. The secrets of the Blight could be passed down from First Warden to First Warden.
This also actually makes a lot of sense. Given all the secrecy and the fact that the Wardens seem to work and impart knowledge on a strictly need-to-know basis, It might just be that the HQ at Weisshaupt has troves of secret knowledge not just about the taint and its origin but maybe even about other stuff that we don't even know of as yet. Maybe having the whole knowledge about the taint would still provide no other more optimal way to deal with the Blights than what the Wardens are doing which is why they haven't made the knowledge public.
I mean ATM who do we actually have criticizing the Wardens in the first place for their methods? Solas? The dude who feels the best way to fix the mess he's made is to destroy the whole world and rebuild the old one on top of its remains? I don't think he's a very reliable judge on how to best fix or solve anything, let alone stopping a Blight.
It's all speculation at this point of course, but the Wardens knowing everything is just as likely as them being ignorant.
The Red Lyrium is just a retconned plot device though, so its unfair to blame the Wardens. Varric mentions that not even the Merchant Guild Dwarfs in Orzammar know anything about it or had ever seen it. And their entire business is Lyrium. They wrote the book on the stuff - with Lyrium! Its just a more visually interesting and expressive way of showing blight infestation. It was far more interesting when is was simply one idol with an implied pseudo sentience about it. Having it suddenly be everywhere makes all the people who should technically have known about it, look incompetant.
Any organization or set of characters that aren't directed tied to your character and your inner circle of friends will always be made out to look clueless and incompetant. Its how it goes in these games. And people are more than happy to go right along with this. Look at how everyone turned on Bann Teagan - they used to love that guy!
Continuity has never been Bioware's strong point, which is hilarious considering the whole 'Your choices have consequences' line they are always pushing.
How is red lyrium a retconned plot device?
I see posters saying "retcon" in situations that are not retcons... I'm starting to think people forgot what "retcon" means.
Edit: People don't know a lot of stuff, how old is that Merchant's Guild, anyway? The dwarves forgot about the Titans, too.
Edit2: Also, just because a character "seems" to change, that is not an issue with continuity. Teagan is no different, we are just seeing a different part of him, the big Fereldan patriot side.
Just like the sequel to "To Kill A Mockingbird" did not retcon or change Scout's dad, he was always like that.
- Loghain MacTir
Red Lyrium is never even hinted to exist in such quantities before this game, and not even the people most knowledgable about Lyrium and Blights have ever heard of it. It is a tool that the narrative uses to corrupt the whole Templar Order, and demonstrates a variety of properties that it didn't possess before.Meredith was merely near Red Lyrium and not drinking it, yet she was driven crazy and paranoid, turning against her own in the end. Same with Bartrand, he was merely around the stuff and it drove him utterly insane killing his own staff.
The Red Templars meanwhile do not turn on each other, nor do they go beserk. They are still able to think rationally, work together cohesively, write letters on a variety of topics etc, and this is despite having much greater exposure to the lyrium. Samson is basically fine mentally, even at the end, and is more or less the same person he always was. Despite the fact he has been sleeping with the stuff all around him, eating, drinking and wearing it. So even if you wanted to push the whole cosmic horror 'Invasion of the body snatchers', living entity inside them that knows its own and is 'wearing' the Templars like a skin etc angle, Samson has none of that.
Its just a crutch to explain why the Templars are overnight, now 'evil'. Outside of the In Hushed Whispers story, and Varric having 'I HATE RED LYRIUM!!!!!" being one of his 2 character traits in this game (the other being endless references to Hard in Hightown), Red Lyrium barely matters at all in a narrative sense, even though the spread of such a substance would be of far more immediate danger than anything Corypheus is supposedly up to. The idea that anybody would take a guy seriously if his stated plan was to go to Heaven and 'Be; God, is laughable.
I have nothing inherently against such a plot device (indeed, I think the Red Templars are a much stronger narrative concept than the barely developed at all Venatori). The idea of some malign intelligence infecting people and growing inside them and corrupting them is interestingly disgusting. But its the fact that the Red Lyrium just comes out of thin air, and then they hit us with 'Its the Blight in lyrium' despite the Blight beind everywhere in the Deep Roads, and the Lyrium there isn't corrupted. Surely some Grey Wardens or Dwarfs would have seen it over the centuries? And they *all* decided to suppress the information, so not even rumors existed?
And it leads to the very problem we have been discussing - that if you pull this kind of stunt, it leaves people who by the established lore should have known something, looking like complete and utter fools at best, self aggrandizing frauds at worst.
That still doesn't make it a retcon. There was no previously established FACT that was changed.
Normal lyrium can make people go crazy, as was seen in Origins. Lyrium has to be refined to be used properly. The same is true with Red Lyrium, Merideth had raw red lyrium, and the Red Templars had refined red lyrium. The Inquisition also used refined red lyrium for its corrupting runes.
It's the blight that allowed others to be controlled and lyrium can addle the minds of Templars, together the red Templars could easily be manipulated.
No one in game is a complete expert on stuff in the world of Thedas. We, as players, have vastly superior knowledge compared to most of the inhabitants of Thedas.
Facts are also not given to the players, just the information believed by those in-universe, which keeps mystery and surprises in the plot.
There are many things not known, even very ancient things that were once known before but no longer.
merchant's guild and Templars don't know everything on lyrium. People are still experimenting with the stuff, like Fenris' tattoos.
How about the fact that nobody has ever seen it or even mentioned it before?! Not by the Dwarfs who live in the Deep Roads, by the Grey Wardens who *are* in fact the experts on Darkspawn (unless you think someone should go around and stop everyone from saying that, since everyone thinks they are).not the Tevinter Imperium with their thousands of years of magical study and obvious interest in Lyrium, since it and Blood are the source of their supremacy?
Does none of that matter?! You still just wave it away with a 'well, people probably just didn't mention it because reasons'?! It makes all these people look corrupt and stupid purely for the purposes of this story, and is as cheap a narrative cop out as you can get.
In Dragon Age 2, the Red Lyrium idol has a sort of malign sentience that preyed on and exacerbated people's emotional flaws and heigtened them to a frenzy, insinuating itself as the solution to their problems. With Bartrand it spoke to his greed, with Meredith to her paranoia, and to Varric in Act 3, his sense of failure to protect and represent his family. In each case, the person believes the red lyrium is the key to solving their problems and needs to keep it close and protect it, Yet in DA:I, its just the red juice that Cory uses to corrupt the Templars and that's that.
In 'In Hushed Whispers' the 2 party members with you and Dorian are left for months in cells next to the stuff, and all it does is give them a 'This is the voice of the Mysterons' accent. When you and Dorian suggest you are going to go beat ALexius and stop all this Red Lyrium profiliferation, they are like 'Okay, cool - let's roll!' Given that Varric had previously been influenced by just a sliver of the stuff, and after only having handled the idol once years ago, huge chunks of the stuff don't illicit anything like as strong a reaction here.
It bears no narrative consistency with DA2 *whatsoever*.
And the whole Blight in the Lyrium as the reason Corypheus can control them, because he can control Blight? That doesn't seem to you to be a very convenient storytelling crutch to quickly explain why they are suddenly all loyal to him? And for that matter, why does he not use this power to control actual darkspawn, given that Legacy established that he could do just that? Its because they didn't want to use the Darkspawn again, and this was a new visual way to use the Blight. But it *is* a retcon, and as blatant a one as you could possibly ask for!
When a villain rips out a cannister of his 'Special stuff what lets me control the Good Guys' juice, and the story claims its always been there and its pure good fortune on the villain's part that it can do exactly what he needs it to do, then what more needs to be said? As is the fact that his regeneration using the Blight is much better than the Archdemon's similar ability, given that he can supplant mortal souls. And apparently destroy those souls, instead of being destroyed by them as the Archdemon was. Because.... he has a very strong soul perhaps?
Its all just 'The Villain can do whatever because he's the villain and sod what was written before - the players will believe what we tell them to believe'.Not to mention the fact that for the Templars angle to function, they had to bring in Samson and make him complicit in all this, despite the fact that Hawke can have straightened him out, and gotten the Order to reinstate him. Because even in the depths of his withdrawl, he still tried to help people, refused to commit evil acts for Grace's rebels, and helped fight Meredith, so he *knows* what horrors the Red Lyrium does to a body.
But no, yet another decision thrown on the scrap heap, because Bioware didn't agree with it, despite it being them who offered the choice in the first place. Like Leliana coming back because the narrative apparently couldn't do without her... except as it turns out, she basically does nothing and wasn't needed after all. Bioware are the retcon kings - this is hardly new territory for them!
Nobody has seen the other side of the world that Thedas is in, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. Not saying something is around does not mean that something doesn't exist. It isn't an established fact, thus it isn't a retcon.
Only Solas, Flemythal and Flemeth's daughters have ever hinted of a world that didn't have the Veil... is it a retcon to say that once there wasn't a Veil now when Origins never mentioned it?
Wardens are experts on darkspawn, as much as someone is an expert on anything, but they don't know everything. Cory and his kind are not known to all Wardens, since the Architect was first thought to be a new kind of darkspawn, rather than one of the first.
Cory could "persuade" and influence nearby darkspawn, but not an army of them, and he couldn't give them directions to carry out far away from him. This is similar to the Architect, who could command darkspawn, but needed Disciples to carry out orders. Cory didn't bother, maybe because he doesn't know how to make Disciples. For a long time, the Architect didn't know how to make Disciples either and had to experiment. Cory is an ancient magister who was one of the top mages at the height of the Tevinter Imperium, who was able to pierce the Veil, but still doesn't know everything about the blight even though he is made of the stuff now.
However, Cory is an expert on blood magic and demon summoning, so he was able to combine his knowledge on such things to mind control Wardens. He was not mind controlling Red Templars or Venatori, but he could control them in the sense that he could manipulate them with the Calling and whatever song he is able to channel as shown in Legacy.
There is a lot of speculation that could be made and information brought out of nowhere, but that does not make it a retcon.
There is no established fact that is being changed. There is no retcon. One can call it poor writing if they want, or lame literary conventions, but there is no retcon in Dragon Age.
So many things are left vague and ambiguous so they can throw in new ideas and conventions while avoiding a retcon. A retcon requires previously established fact to be altered or changed.
Any organization or set of characters that aren't directed tied to your character and your inner circle of friends will always be made out to look clueless and incompetant. Its how it goes in these games. And people are more than happy to go right along with this. Look at how everyone turned on Bann Teagan - they used to love that guy!
This,Marshal post are always a pleasure and this will become my new profile feed.
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