Isera hopes

i have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings about city elves and since there are a lot of gaps in the worldbuilding regarding city elves i find it fun to fill those gaps with Ideas of my own. bc the world is my playground and i like to Play.

i'm gonna put a few different headcanons down in subsections here. this is v much a brain dump so it might be a little disorganized.

the vhenadahl

the vhenadahl is the heart of any alienage. as the tree of the people, many community traditions center around the tree. the hahren and their family are in charge of managing care for the tree, including coordinating community projects (taking down dead limbs, decorating, cleaning up after a storm or a purge, etc.). around da2 bioware added an aesthetical choice to put physical decoration on the vhenadahl in kirkwall's alienage (what looks like painted designs). these need to be maintained regularly, as the paint fades.

vallaslin

city elves don't have dalish vallaslin based on the evanuris, but tattoos are very important to many city elves. sometimes it's because they have family or community traditions similar to the dalish practice of vallaslin. they don't replicate the same ritual for bloodwriting as the dalish, and often regular tattooing methods are used instead.

religion

city elves are mostly converted to andrastianism, but many continue to perform rituals and traditions tied to worship of the evanuris and other old elvhen practices. the evanuris take a backseat to andraste and the maker, and there is some folk-based elevation of shartan, but the evanuris are still present in the same way some folk saints and other concepts are "sainted" in central american catholicism (think santa muerte, etc.).

stories

"Ah," he replied, a smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth. "So not lost, but hidden. All the better to keep human treasure-seekers from picking over some of these ruins, no?"

Lucanis had not had much experience dealing with such things. His occupation didn't concern itself with artifacts unless they became an obstacle, or were valued enough to be retrieved for a client. He didn't ever come near elvhen ruins like the ones in Arlathan forest until he'd begun his contract for Rook. As a human, having such exposure to the subject was alien and fascinating in equal measure. Of course, he could have done without having the blighted gods to deal with at the same time.

He paused a moment in thought. "Although," he went on, "you seem to accept some humans among your ranks. How does that happen?"

Her own experience with all this was fairly recent. Tidbits when she was with the Inquisition, most of it when the Veil Jumpers were formed - before all that, she had to never ask about being an elf at all, unless she wanted to be punished for it in Halamshiral. But now, it was as if Isera was making up for the time wasted, hyperfocusing completely on learning and discovering more and more. It was her life. That and creating things with what she learned, too.

"Well. Not all humans are disrespectful towards us, you see." She offered Lucanis a grin. "And a bunch of people just love history, and unearthing ancient things, and learning more about the roots of magic, and some people are even finding stuff that hints at maybe elvhen history explaining things unkown about human history. So they're welcome to stick around if they'll help."

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Sentinels were a pain, but not impossible targets. Lacking organs, their vital weak-points were their unarmored joints. The necrotic poisons on his weapons would have no effect, but he could still do some real damage disrupting the magic keeping the things together. It was all a matter of avoiding those massive axes for long enough to break them down, really.

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elves are not allowed to own weapons in denerim to begin with. so this means that they went to SIGNIFICANT effort to keep this thing at all.

it survived hundreds of years from the dales collapsing to the present day thedas, with the name and story attached, despite the various displacements and woes the elves went through in between then.

the fact that it's named after fen'harel, and yet has this positive connotation of defending a home rather than betraying allies, is huge actually! like that's wild. not only did the city elves remember fen'harel at all As A Concept despite their forced conversion to andrastianism, they ended up with a very different view of it than the dalish.

i would argue that given how the city elves are always struggling under corrupt and brutal nobility, they might have retained a stronger cultural memory of the arlathan rebellion as a positive thing in their stories. and the dalish clans are technically descended from dales nobility too, so that would also have an effect on their ideology?

FURTHERMORE. if we assume there were multiple felassan-style immortal elves running around, with varying loyalties and agendas, then... i am once more on my "the dalish Historical Misinformation Nightmare has been fomented intentionally by immortal elf agents to keep them worshiping the evanuris" ted talk.

which also explains why the city elves didn't get affected by that! bc... the type of immortal elf who would be an evanuris partisan, would also see the city elves as hopeless and not even worth the trouble to influence.