icewalker

I would like to open with this statement: "[t]he ‘post’ in postcolonial theory does not signify the period or era ‘after’ colonialism came to an end, but rather signifies the entire historical period after the beginnings of colonialism” (Mishra, 2015). And it "[signifies] not so much subjectivity 'after' the colonial experience as a subjectivity of oppositionality to imperializing/colonizing (read: subordinating/subjectivizing) discourses and practices" (Loomba, 2002).

Here's a quote from Spivak (Ahmad, 1995),

Postcoloniality - the heritage of imperialism in the rest of the globe - is a deconstructive case. As follows: Those of us from formerly colonised countries are able to communicate with each other and with the metropolis, to exchange and to establish sociality and transnationality, because we have had access to the culture of imperialism. Shall we then assign to that culture, in the words of the ethical philosopher Bernard Williams, a measure of 'moral luck'? I think there can be no question that the answer is 'no'. This impossible 'no' to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and the everyday here and now of 'postcoloniality' is a case of it. Further, the political claims that are most urgent in decolonised space are tacitly recognised as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism, even culturalism … They are thus being reclaimed, indeed claimed as concept metaphors for which no historically adequate referent may be advanced from postcolonial space.

Even though I'm not particularly a fan of how Merrill's story was written in DA2, I think the canon text still offers some insights.

It was during one of the earlier dialogues that we know not only was Merrill "secluded" from the rest of the clan due to being the First since she studied magic while the other learnt the Vir Tanadhal, but she also had a different opinion from her clan when it comes restoring ancient elven history.

Merrill: Perhaps if the clan was more accepting of the ancient ways and not so mired in fear —

As we know, the Dalish are often depicted as distrustful and sceptical because their survival depends on it, especially when it comes to foreign interaction. In this case, Merrill was referring to the eluvian. Since the discovery of that eluvian led to Tamlen's death and the threat of the Blight, the clan had moved away, to Sundermount. And the same attitude remained.

During the Act 2 Feynriel's quest, Night Terrors:

Pride demon: How about it? Would you take what I offered the boy? Scion of the Dalish, saviour of elvenkind? Merrill: Can you do that?

We know from this interaction with the demon that Merrill wanted to save her people and in the same scene conveyed to Hawke that she could not put them above "the fate of her people."

This is where I went "wait a minute" about the writing. Save the Dalish from what? We've heard enough about this narrative that colonised people, Third World Women, marginalised groups need 'saving', and that usually leads to good things (sarcasm) being done to their countries by the West. To make Merrill of all people as a mouthpiece that purports this line of thinking is just iffy to me.

Wrt to the eluvian, there reached a scene where Hawke discovered the mirror in Merrill's home.

Merill: But it's the Keeper's place to remember! Even the dangerous things. We argued...I left. ... Merrill: She's wrong. The mirror could teach us so much about what we once were! ... Merrill: But still, I know it can help my people. I can at least recover this one small part of our heritage. ... Merrill: My people have lost so much. We know almost nothing of the days before Arlathan. This is a piece of our history.

Merrill: Not just our land and freedom, but history, stories, language, music, rituals. Even our gods are gone! ... Merrill: It is a sacrifice, but if the mirror restores even one fragment of the past, it's worth it.

Throughout her personal quest, this sentiment was reiterated again and again. Remembrance and sacrifice. And at the end of it, no matter if Hawke gave her the arulin'holm, the key to the eluvian, or not, the Keeper would die because she had made herself a prison of the demon that was trying to use Merrill and the eluvian as a means to escape.

Merrill: I thought the arulin'holm would fix everything. The mirror would work, and everything would be right again ...

I think this is the part where Merrill realised fixing the eluvian wouldn't fix anything. Her story arc is mixed with personal grief of her friend and collective grief of her people. It's hard to differentiate them from one another, but that is kind of the crux of it, isn't it? Her people had lost so much that when Tamlen and Mahariel (if you play a Dalish origin) saw the blighted eluvian, they did not even recognise it, let alone to be able to discern any danger from the eluvian.

Merrill's story arc in DA2 consisted of 1) remembrance and restoration, and 2) the price of that restoration. On the surface, it seems as if Merrill and Solas have the same goal. But they do not.

One had only been out of uthenera for two decades and missed the entire downfall of the elven people while the other was the descendant of the direct results of the Veil, the weakening of the empire, and centuries upon centuries of oppression by humans.

From a point of characterisation, I'd assume Merrill wouldn't think that bringing down the Veil would fix everything, as she'd learnt from the broken eluvian. When it comes to the postcoloniality of it all, Solas had so such baggage. He was, arguably, one of the ancient elven gods that made the elven empire. And even when he woke, he didn't identify with the Dalish because he wasn't the one who had to be born with a loss. He wasn't the one who had to deal with the longue durée of colonisation by humans.

He needn't reclaim or remember anything. Apart from the orb — the repository of his power, which was destroyed in the last battle with Corypheus, so he took Flemeth/Mythal's power at the end instead. Bro had an orb lying around this entire time, while Briala had to girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep her way to the key of the eluvian network in TME, then it was taken away by him just like that in Trespasser.

With that in mind, let's move on to Briala — another woman the fandom pretends to care about only in so far as making her a prop to justify their misogyny disguised as genuine criticism towards Celene.

From DAI transcript:

Briala: Celene is the voice of reason in the empire. But reason is cautious. Reason looks for compromise. Reason doesn’t choose radical change. However sorely it may be needed.

PC: What are you hoping to gain from tonight’s negotiations? Briala: A voice. Simple enough, isn’t it? My people have none. We’ve lived two centuries amid the lowest ranks of society. No one hears us. No one sees us. If the elves of Halamshiral were elevated… if we have an elven noble at court? We’d have recognition, a voice.

PC: How much can a single member of the court do? Briala: It won’t remake the world overnight, if that’s what your asking. Our problem is invisibility. The people in power ignoring us. We’re not actors, we’re scenery.

PC: You won’t change anything. The empress has all the power. You’ll just be a target for bigots. Briala: Even if it ends in my assassination, it will be something no one, human or elven, can ignore.

The fandom constantly loves to conveniently ignore these words that came straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, to justify the choice of killing Celene, and keeping Gaspard, while making Briala work with Gaspard. To each their own, since this is just a game and we can make whatever decisions we want. But don't pretend there's some sort of moral failing from people who don't make the same choices and have no desires to make those choices in their own game.

With that rant out of my system, let's look at one of the aspects of postcoloniality that shows up in Briala's characterisation. We're shown through our dialogue with the elven ambassador in the Winter Palace during Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts that she wants a voice, a representation for the elven people, and she thinks the way to obtain it is through the empress who'd already promised a noble title in TME. She plays the Game with expertise because, to invoke Spivak's words again, it is "a structure which [she] critiques, yet inhabits intimately."

[Postcoloniality], like the proletariat among social classes, its paradoxical mission is to annul its being, the crux of becoming, in the very instant of its attainment. The aim of postcolonial politics is not the production of postcoloniality as being, as a global condition, but its ultimate sublation (a stark contrast to Western ontology), as a sign that the colonizer/colonized binary has itself been overreached. Hitchcock (2003)

In other words, transcendence is immanent, as Kant would say (Kerslake, 2009). In order to transcend, or go beyond the binary oppressive system, one is immersed then emerged from it.

In this aspect, Briala does have some similarities with Solas who was literally made into this world by Mythal while Briala was made by Orlais, the Game, and Celene. I do not doubt that there're parallels between Celene/Briala and Mythal/Solas, but not everyone is the Special Boy with a special toy.

And Felassan, our beloved tree bark-eating ragebaiter had something to say about that:

“[The eluvians] can work, I think.” Briala held her arms around her. “Halamshiral rioted because of a single nobleman. I can find elves who will help me with my work in every city in Orlais, and more who are too afraid to fight, but will serve as eyes and ears if I can help their children survive the winter.” “That is,” Felassan said, and after a pause, finished, “a unique use of the ancient relics of our people, da’len.” “I think Fen’Harel would have approved,” Briala said, and saw Felassan give a startled laugh. “He might have,” her teacher said, “though I very much doubt it.” The Masked Empire, p. 366-367.

Now, what does all this have anything to do with sublation (aufhebung)? Using the words from Engels (2017),

[n]egation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes. Long ago Spinoza said: Omnis determinatio est negatio — every limitation or determination is at the same time a negation. And further: the kind of negation is here determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular nature of the process. I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation. I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible. How? This depends on the particular nature of each individual case. If I grind a grain of barley, or crush an insect, I have carried out the first part of the action, but have made the second part impossible. Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea.

What is the next thing after destroying the Veil? As Engels put it, "[i]f I grind a grain of barley, or crush an insect, I have carried out the first part of the action, but have made the second part impossible."

To put it plainly, this is just me using fancy words to say that Briala wouldn't be that stupid. How was she going to change the fate of the elves when there is possibly no place for the modern elves, who had long lost their immortality and magic, in a world without the Veil? Let's just say nothing bad would happen if the Veil went down, the elves still wouldn't be the same as they were before.

I know this is a magical world, but at the end of the day, you can't magic away the collective loss and grief, whether historical, material, socio-cultural, physical, psychological experienced by generations after generations. Just like you can't reverse the harms of colonialism in real life.

All of what I've argued above is why I am hesitant or even apprehensive of people interpreting Briala and Merrill as wanting the same as Solas that is, to return to the past, because reclaiming the past is not the same as returning to the past. Because the past "is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present" (Oko-Otu & Chidume, 2021). Postcoloniality "does not represent either the transcendence or the reversal of colonialism, and it sidesteps the language of beginnings and ends" (Prakash, 1996).

Now this is the part where the Bioware bashing session resumes.

I'm not going over the whole Bellara with White Guilt™️ dialogue because I don't want to have those words appear on my screen again, but I'll focus on her thing with the archive spirit.

Nadas Dirthalen is "[a] creature of the Fade, bound to a crystal. Ancient elves used them to store knowledge—and to help them dream" (DATV transcript).

During the conversation at the end of Bellara's personal quest, the players have to make two choices: destroy or keep the archive spirit, and the reasonings behind the choices are very baffling to me:

Bellara: Our people shaped the world. We don't even know a quarter of what they could do. Or did. Bellara: With the Archive, we could be that again. Rook: So you think we should keep it? Bellara: But what about the bad side? The other things we did? Bellara: We stole the dwarves' dreams. Put their gods to sleep. Bellara: And much, much worse. Rook: Good point. Bellara: There's no easy answer. Bellara: Everything they could be again. Our people's future. On my shoulders.

Bro, not the "Good point" lol. Also "our people's future on my shoulder", Great Man Theory blah blah blah.

Seriously, what is this argument that one must not learn about one's ancestors because they've done something bad. I guess the words of Santayana did not reach Thedas or even Texas possibly: "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Okay, that's enough shitposting from me.

If you decide to keep the Archive, then the archive spirit would be posited as the repository of all knowledge that is to know about the elven people, hence establishing an official narrative over elven history.

It prompts the question: who had access to the archive spirit? Certainly not the people "who scrubbed the floors" (The Masked Empire, p. 280) since we were told it was the Archive of Anaris, one of the Forgotten Ones. And the choice of the word — Archive. What gets to go into the archive and what is to be lost in time? These are the questions that arise from the words left unsaid in this dialogue.

It is also a favouring of written history over oral history that rubs me the wrong way. I'd argue that Origins does a better job at depicting knowledge production of The People™️. It is through songs, stories, rituals. Like the lyrics from In Uthenera,

we sing, rejoice we tell the tales we laugh and cry we love one more day

I don't recall us getting any of that in Veilguard, instead Bellara's entire story arc is all about the Archive and Anaris. And don't even get me started on Anaris 🙄.

It runs on a parallel with Merrill's storyline wrt the eluvian and demon. Bioware seems unable to write a story about reclamation without putting a "price" or "sacrifice" as a prerequisite, and that learning about the past is somehow always "dangerous":

Keeper Marethari: The eluvian is a trap. It cost us Tamlen. It led you to blood magic. Will you let it twist you away from who you really are?

Bellara: [Cyrian and I wanted to] get back what made us who we were. What was stolen from us. But now? Cyrian's gone. Because of what that thing knew. What it told him. And maybe it should be gone too.

Even Briala exhibits similar sentiment regarding the "cost" of it all:

Briala: I’m an elf, Inquisitor. That should tell you everything you need to know about my life. I’m good at what I do. That’s all that matters. I will help my people no matter the cost.

On the surface it feels like both Keeper Marethari and Bellara were responding out of trauma, which is more than fair that Bioware explored that. But why put it as though a collective gain (i.e., knowledge of the past) has to come with a personal loss (i.e., their loved ones)?

Dalish girl wants to know about her ancestors? Well, the people in your current life must die first and you wouldn't even learn anything about the historical artifact you had obtained through strenuous process, worst of all, getting or not getting the key to said historical artifact does nothing narrative wise about the fate of your Keeper, and you are traumatised regardless.

Another Dalish girl wants to know about her ancestors? Well, your brother must die, not once, but twice, for a cheap twist at the end of your quest to the lair of the evil god that was trying to make a comeback, and you wouldn't even get to decide to destroy or keep the historical artifact you had obtained through strenuous process, instead someone called a chess piece would do that for you.

The conclusion: Dalish girls can't have nice things. Actually, the elf girlies just can't have nice things (see: Briala and the eluvians).

The fact is that Bioware has always felt the need to "balance" the narrative (e.g., templar/mage), this constant need to have this bifurcation, binary, dichotomy permeates the entire school of Western philosophy and society at large. And binaries are rarely just two sides of the same coins.

As Derrida argued, binary such as male/female, civilised/uncivilised, light/dark "reflects a hierarchical logic, where the first term is typically seen as superior, pure, or original, while the second is derivative, impure, or marginal" (Chaudhary, 2025). Time and time again, in real life, we are shown "how these binaries support systems of exclusion and oppression."

Bioware claims to champion players' agency, yet every step of the way it tries to run interference with the narrative by "tipping the scale" so to speak. Wrt Merrill or Bellara, Bioware were not actually trying to tell a story of reclamation despite them using the language of it. Much like most of Veilguard, it uses the semantics and the aesthetics of progressivism, but nothing beyond that.

For a story that centres around themes such as the People™️rebelling against evil empire and don't you forget "people living in an empire despite that empire" (Weekes, 2025), Veilguard is awful at showcasing their side of the story. Instead, they focus on Solas, and on the flip side, Elgar'nan. It is this individualisation, this "Great Man Theory" that can be condensed in this particular dialogue between Elgar'nan and Solas while Rook and co. were helping the kidnapped Dalish escape during the Blood of Arlathan quest:

Elgar'nan: Your whining comes from envy, Fen Harel, but it does not have to be so. Elgar'nan: There is a place for you at my side in a new, glorious empire. Solas: But it will not have eluvians, will it? June built them, and now he is dead. Solas: Our great cities came from Sylaise. Our deepest mysteries from Dirthamen. Elgar'nan: I will restore it all. Their achievements will not be lost. Solas: You were a bully who ruled over what others had built, and now the others are gone. Solas: Who do you have left? Ghilan'nain? You cannot rebuild a world by stitching together monsters.

No, June did not build the eluvians, Sylaise did not build the cities, Dirthamen was not the keeper of all the secret history of the elvhen. The elvhen people built it. To reiterate, who scrubbed the fucking floors?

This dialogue shows that either: 1) the writers don't understand Solas as a character fundamentally, or 2) that Solas is never one of the people, he's always on the other side despite his opposition to them.

Also, this entire quest positing the Dalish as some collective "damsel in distress" waiting to be rescued is just ... idk, distasteful to me. Again, for a story that centres around The People™️, Bioware sure loves giving spotlights to something else that is somehow always antithetical to The People™️.

Another thing that grinds my gear is the flattening of Dalish and City Elves in Veilguard.

Rook: The vallaslin are sacred for the elves. I didn’t grow up Dalish, but they’re not the only ones who have a claim on being elven. My tattoos represent who I am, and I’ll wear that for all the world to see.

Aside from the game making up elf!Rook's background on behalf of the player, this is one of the few instances where the existence of City Elf is acknowledged, only for it to not come up in the rest of the game. There's also absolutely no interaction between elf!Rook and Bellara and Davrin regarding their lived experiences and how different or similar that might be since we don't even know anything about Bellara and Davrin's clan.

Another instance might be Lorelei, the shopkeeper of the Shadow Dragons, whereby she acknowledged being from Ferelden during the interaction with Harding. The common ground here was nationality, not necessarily centring around ethnicity, but the player could infer, especially if they'd played Origins, that Lorelei was one of the City Elves that was kidnapped to Tevinter during the Blight.

Then there was nothing. We're constantly hopping around Antiva, Nevarra, Rivain, and Tevinter, absolutely no mention of how each elven community might differ from one another and what is their respective experience under the human-dominated nations. The general "race-blind" approach ultimately leads to a flattening of diversity. I dgaf if you have all dwarves, elves, humans, and qunaris or even spirits in the same faction, when you can't be bothered to show me beyond just the appearance of diversity. By the way, this is a burgeoning problem since Inquisition as in the narratives treating non-human players like an after-thought, but Veilguard was particularly egregious when it comes to this "race blindness."

Borrowing from Radhakrishnan (2003), "a) heterogeneity or even hybridity is written into the postcolonial experience, and b) that there is a relationship of historical continuity, however problematic, between colonialism and nationalism, and nationalism and its significant Other, the diaspora."

In conclusion, to hearken back to the beginning of this post in a concise way, postcoloniality is deconstructive, not destructive. Bioware's own writing does in some ways contribute to the baffling takes I see in the fandom. I do acknowledge that people can interpret characters however they want, and at the same time, I am aware that not everyone has the same experience in life and that might make us see things differently. Last note before I end, when it comes to interpreting texts, the things unsaid are just as important as the things said in a piece of art.

Thanks for reading until the end 🤍

P.S. Please refrain from tagging The Egghead when reblogging even though he's featured in this post. He's special enough already, he doesn't need the spotlight on his already shiny head.

References

Ahmad, A. (1995). The politics of literary postcoloniality. Race & class, 36(3), 1-20. [link]

Chaudhary, V. K. (2025). Deconstruction of Binary Oppositions in Derrida’s Literary Philosophy. ldealistic Journal of Advanced Research in Progressive Spectrums (IJARPS) eISSN–2583-6986, 4(02), 159-169. [link]

Engels, F. (2017). Anti-dühring. Boitempo Editorial. [link]

Hitchcock, P. (2003). The genre of postcoloniality. New Literary History, 34(2), 299-330. [link]

Kerslake, C. (2009, January). Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence. In After 68’Conference. [link]

Loomba, A. (2002). Colonialism/postcolonialism. Routledge. [link]

Mishra, V. (2015). Postcolonialism 2010–2014. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50(3), 369-390. [link]

Oko-Otu, C. N., & Chidume, C. G. (2021). Objectivity and the great man theory in historiography. Cogito, 13(3), 124-138. [link]

Prakash, G. (1996). Who's afraid of postcoloniality?. Social text, (49), 187-203. [link]