Video Game Lore - Tumblr Posts
100% this, and something I often bring up in conversations about Dragon Age lore, and is honestly one of the things I love about it. We aren't told hard facts learned recently by unbiased and trustworthy sources. We're given in-world (and often quite old) documents instead, or speculation by other scholars (as viewed through their biased lens), and are left to puzzle things out on our own. To draw our own conclusions as best we can with the incomplete (and quite probably inaccurate, in places) information we've been given.
And we see with one of the rare times we're given actual answers in the Jaws of Hakkon DLC just how inaccurate that information can be just due to the passage of time, the mutation of story, and (unfortunately likely) even intentional revision of history. Because we actually see elements of former Inquisitor Ameridan's memories, in his own voice (or that of his companions). Actual primary sources! And then even get to speak with him briefly in person!
I think this unreliable history we're given in fragments and biased or contradictory third-hand accounts makes for great storytelling. There's a reason I read every piece of the Codex I pick up in a Dragon Age game, while I've barely cracked open the Mass Effect Codex, which comes across as a modern-style encyclopedia. The Dragon Age Codex—the games' lore—has a lot more character from a writing standpoint. It makes the world feel lived in, and it reflects the real world so (unfortunately) well.
And it means, like with Ameridan, the rare moments we're given where an answer is actually clearly presented, it feels big.
One of the craziest things about Dragon Age (and this might help those of you who don’t go here kind of understand what people are yelling about in the coming months) is its lore. But I don’t mean that in the way you’re probably thinking.
I mean, quite literally, the way it presents its lore to you. In picking up notes and books as you go along and sifting through the codex, the game effectively asks you to act as an anthropologist. You’re met with a host of primary and secondary sources, some many hundreds of years apart from one another, written by anyone from the highest Chantry scholar to John Farmer, and you’re meant to constantly be questioning every piece of information you’re given. What biases are present in what I’m reading? What is fact and what is complete fabrication and what is, potentially, a slightly twisted version of a fact? How does one source potentially contradict another? The lore is one giant mystery-puzzle that you get to piece together across three games, and what conclusions you draw are going to be entirely different from someone else’s, and so on.
And yet, the series still does something even cooler than any of that. You realize, at a certain point, that this idea you have been engaging with on a meta-level — this idea that history is biased and fallible, that it’s written by colonizers and conquerers, genocidal racists and religious zealots, that the ability to control historical narrative is the prize you win for spilling the most blood — that idea is one of, if not perhaps THE most important, overarching theme of the series. The way that we remember history — what we remember and what we don’t, and why — and the impact that has on people on a sociological, political, cultural and psychological level, on both a macro and micro scale. It’s the entire thesis of the series’ main villain’s whole motivation.
And there’s gonna be a lot of people that don’t care about all that but me personally it makes me want to gnaw on a cinder block and scratch at my walls
Religious practices mirror Beliefs.
Religious Beliefs stem from ideals that are beneficial to the culture of the religion.
The ideals that once were vital to survival now become represented in a practice in honour/ remembrance
This is why The Herald in Vault Hunters is very well designed, as it combines the once practical objectives of Looting, Fighting Hordes, Mobility into a practice of Honouring the Vault Gods through Combat.
Therefore, good Job making a fake religion Vault Hunters team.