I know the Dragon Age Fandom loves to play Oppression Musical Chairs with the mages and the templars, and the city elves and the dalish elves, and argue about which group is the most oppressed. And sometimes someone will even throw in the intersectionality world to show that…
I don’t think it’s that no one talks about it; I think it’s that there’s no debate. For whatever reason, Bioware hasn’t tried as hard to muddy the waters re the casteless dwarves’ oppression, the way it has done re the mages and the elves. (And the Templars, since lately they seem to want to explore the fact that all Templars are addicts, though that’s not really the same kind of thing as being born into an oppressed group.) But the casteless? Nah, they’ve pretty much been consistent on how much their lives suck from jump.
My son and I had a long (long long) drive recently and we discussed where we thought the next two Dragon Age games would go, storywise. The obvious one is the Qunari invasion, which we think will be the last game (but maybe not) and then the other game we think will be the dwarves. There’s so much left unexplored about the dwarves, the deep roads, the darkspawn (and that brings in the Wardens) and whatnot that I suspect that will be the area for the other story.
The dwarves have always been a mixed bag, and even if you like them, (and I’ll admit, they’re not my favorite) there’s plenty of screwed up shit in their culture. Of course, you’d be hard pressed to name any DA culture that isn’t really screwed up- right now the Avares are the only ones I can kind of respect, so take it as you will.













