it didn't sing, it didn't dance

the set-up is that in 7:5 storm, the fereldan throne is left without an heir. two ppl had a strong claim to the title: arland theirin and sophia dryden, who were cousins. ultimately arland was chosen as king bc he was young and seemed malleable to the ambitious nobles who wanted to take advantage of him.

but it turns out he wasn't so easily controlled after all. arland is described as a tyrant! avernus says that he pitted the nobles against each other, killed indiscriminately, and had no problem eliminating opposition thru 'fear and poison.'

you can find a letter from bann mathuin wulff that says:

Sophia, Arl Ruahn and his entire family have been slaughtered, even the children. The Ruahn line is no more and the arling belongs to the crown, for now. Arland believed Ruahn was plotting against him. Ruahn criticized the king's spending on Wintersend--that is all. It was an idle word, spoken out of turn. The king goes too far. His brain is filled with madness and he clings to the crown like a drowning man clutches at a straw.  Sophia, I beg you, help us. If nothing is done, more will suffer. Your humble servant, —Wulff.

similarly, several members of the cousland family in the storm age, a family the game wants you to associate with honor and righteousness, formed a conspiracy against arland and allied with the wardens.

Arland also executed many Couslands, including the Teyrn himself, for plotting against him, being allied to Sophia, and to teach the survivors their place.

so you're like okay, case closed, arland was a paranoid and evil ruler who unjustly kicked the wardens out of ferelden bc warden-commander dryden rallied the wardens against a tyrant who killed whole families for the crime of questioning his spending habits — and moreover, she did it explicitly at the behest of the desperate nobility who had to come crawling on their knees to plead for help from the woman they rejected as ruler specifically bc she wasn't biddable enough.

but then you start reading dryden's journals.

21 Eluviesta:  It is done. The nobles have thrown their lot in with Arland--Arland the snot-nosed man-child, Arland who did not walk till he was in his fifth year, Arland who had to be pried off his nursemaid's breast not two years ago. Or so it is whispered. The teyrns and the arls believe him to be a simpleton, and easily led, but I have seen something in the boy's eye, and it terrifies me. 10 Moriolis:  I watched the Summerday processions from a room high in Fort Drakon. The regent has me for treason, when my only guilt is of being true to my country and my heart. My guard's tongue was easily loosened with a gift of a ruby ring, and I am told that the banns are fighting against my sentence. I shall pray, but not hope that it will be anything but the gallows for me. 2 Ferventis:  The draught was like bitter fire, but I survived. Weep for me, for I survived. Would that they had made a clean end for me. I should have died a lady, the greatest of the Drydens, not lived to become this nothing--this monstrous nothing! 19 Matrinalis:  Enough. I shall waste no more time with wretched, womanish lamentation. Death would have been easy, but fate saw fit to spare me and I will seize upon this chance. The Grey Wardens are an army, and the old commander is weak--a wisp of a man. I will inspire the Wardens, and Arland will rue the day he spared my life.

i think it's interesting that sophia frames being sent to the wardens as arland 'spar[ing] her life.'

so now it's not so clear. was sophia deserving but bypassed bc she couldn't be manipulated the way the nobility thought arland could be? or was she kind of ruthless and paranoid herself? a woman who despises weakness who clearly had zero intentions of letting arland's claim to the throne go unchallenged?

her rebellion threw ferelden into chaos. personally i don't think that turning to demonic powers/blood magic is like. The Bombshell the game thinks it is. but the game considers that to be a signifier of a leader willing to feed their subordinates into the machine to get eaten the fuck up. this is in line w everything we know abt the wardens — they're more than accustomed to resorting to things other ppl find distasteful at best.

but this wasn't in service to ending a blight. this was an entirely political gambit. at least one other commander at soldier's peak believed sophia's actions were going to destroy both the fereldan army and the wardens. a lot of wardens felt 'disgraced' by her actions specifically bc they were politically motivated, and those wardens deserted, which feels LOADED for grey wardens.

and then it turns out that we don't actually have the full picture of the aftermath or even what led up to the rebellion (tho wot2 notes that the rebellion was founded by sophia):

Little is known of what followed Arland's rule, as a civil war for the throne occurred soon after his death. The war lasted a decade and wiped away most records of his reign.

does this mean arland was a kid in over his head and sophia was a comically evil snake who saw an opportunity and took it? i don't think that's the answer either tbh i think that the truth is both a) somewhere in a vast and ambiguous middle and b) impossible to know.

but we have a pseudo-idea of how the dryden family's reputation suffered as a result of her rebellion, bc they had to book it out of the country. everyone involved the rebellion was crushed. all lands and holdings that had belonged to the drydens were seized by the crown, and even as late as 9:43 dragon in trespasser, teagan as ambassador of ferelden brings up the rebellion as an example of why ferelden in particular is right to be concerned abt the inquisition's presence in ferelden, citing the inquisition capturing caer bronach and using it as a base specifically.

what he says is:

'invading under pretext of restoring order is exactly what the grey wardens did to us centuries ago and we exiled them!'

his position is the accepted ferelden position amongst its nobility.

i rly like this theory that the guerrins took arland's side during the rebellion, and maybe given that teagan's sister was ferelden's queen until she died, he feels like the guerrin-theirin alliance needs to be emphasized regardless of which way the guerrins went — sophia might have been part of a branch of the theirin family, but she didn't use the name. teagan has a line and he's sticking to it! i prefer to think he's just as politically motivated as anybody else at the exalted council.

but i think it's also worth noting that teagan's opinion is the opinion of ferelden's populace, tho the citation for this being how the ppl of ferelden feel abt the rebellion is teagan's dialogue in trespasser lol

Most modern Fereldans believe that Sophia Dryden's rebellion was a Grey Warden invasion under the pretext of restoring order and that their exile was deserved. The Grey Warden Order retained a villainous reputation in Ferelden for 200 years, until King Maric Theirin permitted the Wardens back into his nation.

but tbh.............................i don't think it's all that weird that regular fereldans would consider the rebellion to have been reason enough to distrust the wardens as an institution. i just don't think that it precludes ppl from thinking that arland was a bad king, too.

for one thing, the succession crisis was essentially a bunch of nobles squabbling over who would rule. the drydens are a branch of the theirin family; arland is presumably part of the main theirin line, bc he uses the name. the theirin family, in spite of all this, remained the ruling family of ferelden from calenhad on w the major exception of when ferelden was occupied by orlais.

for another, sophia dryden never relinquished her claim to the throne even after she was imprisoned and sent to the wardens — her journal entry deciding to take control of the wardens and make arland 'rue the day he spared [her] life' was before, if the reports are true and unexaggerated, arland went full tyrant, certainly long before bann wulff's plea for help.

she then leveraged her noble connections to shore up warden power in ferelden, including 'rapidly increas[ing] their numbers', and then used the warden army NOT to protect ferelden against the blight (which is why soldier's peak was built in the first place) but to pursue her own political goals. teagan bringing up caer bronach as his line in the sand makes sense in this context.

and it doesn't help, i think, that there had been rumors swirling around abt what exactly the wardens were up to in soldier's peak even before arland and sophia go head to head.

a fun tangent is the antiva connection here, which is minimal but deeply meaningful to meeee:

Toben Dryden, Sophia's brother and guardian of her young son, had no choice but to flee Ferelden. Toben bought passage to Antiva on a merchant vessel and traveled under the name Derocher. Once in Antiva, Toben set about building a new, quiet life for himself and his nephew. He started a small business and eventually made a name for himself as a trader.

and of course this also introduces the element of sophia's son, who would have inherited the throne after her had she succeeded in becoming queen.

winding this down by saying that the imminent fereldan succession crisis part 2: electric boogaloo is right around the corner given that by 9:41 there's still no heir to the fereldan throne as far as i can tell and tbh wouldn't someone have mentioned it in trespasser if somebody had either had a baby or named their successor?? maybe the drydens have successfully played the long game and levi and his brother mikhael and whatever potential children they might have had between awakening and trespasser as living descendants of the theirin line are abt to get v v important.

i don't want to put this person on blast bc i don't rly have much interest in debating Actual Christianity, but ig the thing i was most def not trying to convey in my post abt andraste was that andrastianism is somehow not the setting's catholicism/christianity. it is. just bc andraste doesn't accomplish 'jesus if joan of arc' to me doesn't mean that andrastianism isn't explicitly the catholic church. sorry.

like i think in terms of christian allegory, the faith part of it is undercooked. i don't know enough abt rituals. i don't know enough abt different sects. this gives me a ton of freedom creatively when i want to play in this sandbox, sure, but i am dissatisfied w the in-game execution bc i know this stuff can be so, so, so much more fascinating when you dig into it.

but like. sometimes in rly unintentionally horrible ways but overall i think in v deliberate ways, andrastianism is 100% meant to invoke the catholic church. it's just that the elements most central to andrastianism that are carried over from the catholic church and christianity more broadly aren't the tenets of the faith itself but rather imperialism, violent hegemony, proselytization, and yeah, aesthetic, etc. andrastianism doesn't have to be messianic for it to be The Christian Institution, In This Case The Catholic Church, bc 'exalted marches' are crusades. that's an oversimplification but do you get what i mean. am i crazy. templars. city elves were inspired by jewish quarters/ghettos. that's the history of the catholic church, too.

like. when i say i think you can't write off andrastianism as a creation of ppl w no connection to or understanding of catholicism, what i mean is that when you talk abt the writers as 'white western liberals' or more specifically 'white canadian settlers': who do you think those initial white canadian settlers were. catholicism is the largest religious denomination in canada. the game w fantasy french imperialism inextricable from fantasy catholicism (the branch of andrastianism players encounter the most is named THE ORLESIAN CHANTRY) was written by ppl who live in a country colonized by the french empire to such a degree that french is one of its official national languages...................that's not an accident??????? they named their third game 'inquisition' and said 'you can play as the good guys.'

for all that i am DEEPLY disappointed by the politics of the games, ig what makes it more disappointing is not that they weren't thinking abt these things but that they were. andraste doesn't have to be a one-to-one jesus or even a one-to-one joan of arc for andrastianism to fulfill the role of fantasy christianity bc the point is less the faith and more the impact on the rest of the setting.

if the writers were trying to truly model andraste off of a joan of arc figure, she would have a) been much younger and b) would not have been a wife and mother. nvm the gender nonconformity lmao. my issue w how andraste is framed is that she's a cross between virgin martyrs and the virgin mary, and i believe this is bc when creating a fantasy catholicism for the setting, it was important to the worldbuilding that andraste be a mother and a wife. whether i agree w that worldbuilding is sort of beside the point. that honestly is the most protestant thing abt andrastianism to me bc one of the bigger shifts in ideology that happens in the reformation is virginity goes from being a venerated state in and of itself and a Goal to chaste (read: faithful) marriage being the state that women need to be working towards, and virginity is downsized to being the necessary phase a woman must go thru to get to marriage.

andraste is a failed joan of arc, bc the load bearing pillars of joan of arc's whole deal are: virginity and youth (yes she's a soldier; do you know how she talked abt the sex workers who typically trailed after armies?). she made a point of calling herself jeanne la pucelle (joan the maid) or la pucelle (the maiden), and she's known as the maid of orléans. so andraste has some of the aesthetics of joan of arc, but she does not adhere to the traits that joan herself felt were vital to her identity.

andraste is ultimately a jesus figure narratively! but like joan, the parallels are superficial. extremely funny that the canticle that depicts her death is called 'the canticle of apotheosis' which implies that upon andraste's death, she becomes divine. but quite frankly nothing in the text actually indicates that and i would say it's more analogous to an assumption (if not The assumption, but more ppl than mary were taken up to heaven in that fashion). what gets me is that even in the canticle of apotheosis, the trembling vints are asking, 'is she truly the servant of a god?' and neither andraste nor her followers nor idk the maker correct them.

she isn't the divine made mortal. she isn't a child of a deity. her name is in the faith bc she founds the faith! but unlike jesus, she didn't know from childhood on what her purpose would be (tho i think she killed halliserre by accident infancy gospels of thomas-style). she is a convert of a sort. her myth presupposes a true faith that she can both convert to and found. but she does, in terms of a figurehead, fill the role of jesus by being put to death.