Geekdom of Hearts

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.

"I'm ready."

How to get away with murder: Moomin style.

“Protect what matters with everything you have, or you’ll have nothing, and deserve it.”

Fenris | Aveline | Varric