So, Iâve decided Iâm always gonna take Lucanis on Hardingâs personal quest, because she says this little line:
âWe will thrive, in spite of you.â
Which reminds me of the Hebrew proverb:
âLiving well is the best revenge.â
And to me? In my mind? As my Rook and Lucanis both embrace her as sheâs having this revelation and in saying that? It feels like Spite was there, too. Giving her the little nudge she needed to power through the bulwark of her grief, as Lace Harding. Not just a Child of the Stone. To live her life as a wholly free Dwarf that no longer requires the presence of the Titans in order to be âenough.â
To become her own person and truly be.
Because itâs hinted/shown in the art book that the Dwarves already existed when the Titans were walking around, but solely served as the caretakers of their giant bodies. Sort of swarming out of them like ants to clean up the hive after a storm.
So, maybe the sundering of the Titans granted them freedom? Free will, even if it came without dreams or magic? Certainly something to think about.
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Watching the scene of Harding where she talks about Isatunoll, does anyone else get the sense that her role was initially written for Dagna?
Let me preface that Lace is lovely and I'm very happy her fans get so much more content and a full romance with her and I hope it's everything you dreamed. But I just get the strong sense that her role was initially planned for Dagna before they ever started writing for Veilguard.
Firstly, as others have commented, Harding was born and raised in Redcliffe, so it comes as quite a surprose that she's a follower of the Stone and concerned by What The Dwarves Have Lost. I mean sure, it doesn't necessarily contradict anything established about her, but it was certainly never set up in any previous games with even a single hint. Dagna was from Orzammar however, and it would have made perfect sense for her to cling onto her culture in some way even if she left her home to pursue her special interest.
Which brings me to dwarves with magic. Up until now, and them introducing Harding as caring about the Stone etc., it wouldn't have made that thematically impactful a narrative for the Scout from the Hinterlands who joined the Inquisition to have an adventure to be connected to Titan magic... I'd have expected her arc more to be about how adventures aren't always fun and you can actually get hurt pretty bad in the big bad world out there or something along those lines maybe. You know who was set up perfectly for it though and would have absolutely lost it if they got magic? Someone obsessed with magic all her life and actually getting to experience it for herself now. At the cost of learning some rough stuff about her culture.
I didnt't really get the sense in DAI that Harding was meant to be more than that plot device to introduce areas at the time they wrote DAI (again, no value attached here, I just don't think they planned for anything more at that point. The devs said themselves they were surprised by how strong the fan reaction was for her). But when they brought back Dagna no matter your choices in DAO and gave her all those mysterious lines about feeling mountain-tall and lyrium and tranquil... I very much did get the sense that they were leaving crumbs for her to come up again in a titan plotline.
(And least importantly, they even seem to have given Harding Dagna's signature absent-minded rambling? DAI Dagna always seemed way more confident and verbally sparring with you than what we've seen so far for Veilguard imo.)
Idk I just feel like maybe this was concepted for Dagna initially but was changed to Harding early on because of the popularity her character got.
Edit: I should maybe make clearer, that I don't think they like rewrote Dagna as Harding at the last minute or anything like that, but that they had planned this in their little mysterious red book at the time of writing Inquisition and leaving hints for the future and changed it when they actually got to writing the companions for Veilguard because of the fan response to Harding and because they didn't want 2 female dwarf companions when one with a romance was already groundbreaking but they needed that companion tie-in to the titans.
I'm sure someone else has pointed this out before but. Given what we know about lyrium and titans from dai and datv, isn't... pretty much all magic technically blood magic?
Can't stop thinking about how we learnt back in DAO that the Temple of Sacred Ashes (which had Mythal's symbol on its floor, during the final battle in DAI, and thus was probably built on the remains of an older temple) was, according to Oghren, sitting atop a massive amount of lyriumânow that we have more information about Mythal's history with the Titans, and what happened to them.
It may have just been mined lyrium or, more interestinglyâwhat if the temple was sitting atop a slain or tranquil Titan all along? Did Mythal build a temple on the corpse of one of her foes? If so, woahâthat's intense.
I took dragged Solas into the Decent DLC and oh God I am sure Solas was sweating fucking buckets as Valta was explaining about the Titans and THAT RANDOM EVENT* that disturbed the Titan back in King Garels time, like of course I am dragging that egg into this DLC after finishing Veilguard, I thrive on his angst....
*It was the Veil getting placed and separating both worlds this of course, was also Solas fault
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Completed the entire Regrets Of The Dread Wolf sidequest a while ago, and like you know in retrospect I suppose I should have thought it a bit suspicious that the only 2 categories of people who "don't have dreams" in Thedas are Tranquil mages, and Dwarves.
And yet finding out that this is, in fact, actually what happened to the Titans is still kind of a huge shock
DA:I: Pondering on the Titans and Pillars of the Earth
So, Iâm in DA-Hell again... Â And why the hell shouldnât I be? The characters and quests are better written than most fantasy novels these days.
Now, the Titans are an almost new addition to Thedasâ vast lore shrouded in mysteries and half-truths.
The Descent had us entering one. And yet Iâd like to think that at this point, we probably know more about the Evanuris than the Titans.
Oh, Iâm sure Solas knows something. At the beginning of The Descent he says that dwarves donât dream but their designs must be inspired by something. That is a very subtle hint for someone whose friend basically opened hunting season for Titans.
There isnât really anything to grasp here other than, maybes, kind-ofs and sort-ofs.
So, Iâll have to just go and piece things together with the help of mythology
Letâs start.
Pillars of the Earth, What they do and Where to find them
The Titans are also known as âPillars of the Earthâ.
Please, correct me if Iâm wrong here but in our worldâs myth and legend the âPillars of the Earthâ were pillars that prevented the sky from crashing down. Usually they were 4 personified entities for each direction. Â In Greek Mythology, for example, they are referred to as the Cosmic Pillars and are actually Titans. But you can basically find these kinds of âgodsâ everywhere around the Mediterranean Sea and the Norse Mythology.
So, I told you that these Pillars hold up the sky and prevent it from crashing down.
It was revealed that Skyhold was Solasâ stronghold and that back then the place was called âTarasyl'an Te'lasâ or roughly translated, "the place where the sky was held back."
My theory is that back then âSkyâ and âFadeâ were interchangeable. I know that the Dalish call the Fade âBeyondâ but think about it. I mean, you need a border for there to be âsomething elseâ.
What I want to say is without the Veil the Fade wouldnât have to be named. Â It wouldâve just have been the âthing up there,â or âthe thing above the Horizonâ which a Human who had never seen this phenomenon before would translate as âHeavenâ or âSky.â
To bring this back to the Titans: If we assume that this is where they got the inspiration for the Titans then maybe they functioned as a kind of Veil-Prototype. Not really banishing the Fade but filtering it. They let the good things in and the bad things stay out, like a Dreamcatcher of sorts. Maybe they even regulated the flow of Magic into Thedas in one way or the other and the power hungry Evanuris discovered that killing them and drinking their blood made them more sensitive and powerful.
Or maybe the Titans arenât the gentle Giants I imagine them to be. I mean, the Evanuris were bag of dicks... These are certainly interesting thought experiments.
But I still havenât figured out where the Dwarves fit into all of this.
Please, feel free to add things you think are missing or just tell me if Iâm way off and tell me your theory.
 A little something else to consider...
Now that Iâm writing this and googled all the stuff about Pillars, I realize that the Biblical âPillars of the Earthâ are actually underground. So, they hold the foundations of the earth to prevent it from submerging into the water. Yeah, Iâm disappointed too; I really wanted them to stop the earth from falling down into the fiery pits of hell with its gurgling lava seas.
Jokes aside, I found this pretty interesting, since it gives way to a completely new theory as to what the Titans are.
But imagine, if the Titans were actually below ground holding the earth up, preventing the Darkspawn from entering the Overworld. But then the Evanuris killed the majority of them, leaving the rest too exhausted to hold the earth up, hence why they laid themselves to sleep. So, the Darkspawn were closer to the Overworld and could enter it without problem. That would mean the  Evanuris were indirectly responsible for the first Blight. This still doesnât explain why they come in waves (Blights), though...
I really hope someone can add to these little thought experiments and make it a real theory with hand and feet.
Thank you for reading this rather long and dry theory text. I really appreciate it. Iâm sorry for any Mistakes I made. English isnât my first language. I hope that it somewhat understandable.
So this is just a small pet-theory of mine, but I feel super convinced itâs true. Maybe this is even an obvious given, but Iâve not seen it talked about anywhere so far:
At first I was pretty annoyed at giants suddenly being a thing in Thedas in DAI, like all the weird new animals are bad enough but a new humanoid race?? Also, "Haha, giants are super stupidâ - like, what an original take on the trope /s... except then I realised just HOWÂ âstupidâ they were. This is not just your random GoT Wun Wun. And then I found some very intriguing bits of information in the codex entries.Â
In the âGiantâ codex:
â[...] never did I see any sense in its eye, and never did it appear to plan beyond its immediate surroundings. But I remain intrigued, for they have hands, and that means the potential to raise them in praise. â
and to a lesser extent this part:
â Food is seemingly their only motivator, and I have observed them eating meat, grains, leavesânearly anything digestible, with no care or joy for taste or texture. â
So they literally just eat to keep on existing and generally just do stuff to exist, without even the emotions or intelligence any animal would display? I found this hella sus... Like does this not remind you very much of something?
obviously the Tranquil kinda seem to react similarly to the world, but even more importantly,
we hear dwarves talked about this way in ancient times
So, the giants seem to behave like other humanoid races when disconnected from their raceâs source of magic (and thereby also emotions). Interesting...
Then I played Jaws of Hakkon and they basically spelled it out for us TWICE in the codex entry â Tale of Hryngnar, Ice-Troll â:
â Dead to dreams as dwarves below us â
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I screm
My theory is that the giants are essentially a type of big dwarf that didnât get the Mythal treatment. They are âmindless, soullessâ as the dwarves were.Â
Thatâs why they are humanoid and have hands, because they used to have a function as part of the titansâ hiveminds. Probably as extra tough fighters or for extra heavy labour or whatever. They are really kind of compareable to the ogresâ position as part of the darkspawn (and btw it would have made so much more sense for ogres to come from giants, but thatâs just my personal opinion...) They probably did raise their hands in worship, along with the dwarves, for the Titans or the Stone or whatever it was back then.Â
We know that in ancient times, to the outside world (the elves), the dwarves connected to titans seemed mindless, like they had no will of their own. It seems like this wasnât actually true, based on Valtaâs experiences, and it was more like a hive-mind situation probably. In any case, the dwarves seem to really only have become âmindlessâ after their connection to the titans, their actual minds, was severed. Solas, in dialogue with Varric (which btw has some other really interesting lore hints that I'm thinking a LOT about) says, in his usual culturally sensitive way:
âDwarves are the severed arm of a once mighty hero, lying in a pool of blood. Undirected. Whatever skill of arms it had, gone forever. Although it might twitch to give the appearance of life, it will never dream.â
And there is this codex entry, that imo strongly implies that Mythal somehow gave the dwarves some form of individual souls and intelligence.Â
âI am empty, filled with nothing(?),
Mythal gives you dreams.
It fills you, within you(?),
Making our leaders proud.
My little stones,
Never yours the sun.
Forever, forever. â
I canât currently remember if there were other codex entries about Mythal and dwarves, but I feel like maybe there were? Obviously the dwarves canât dream in their current form (which the games are very good at forgetting), but they do have individuality, especially the surface dwarves.
That theory is already floating around, so I wonât go into detail because that would definitely be over the top for this post... (I think what exactly Mythal and Solas were doing with the dwarves will be a major lore reveal in DA:D, but they definitely seem to believe to have acted in the dwarves best interest. Solas is actually surprised not to find more trickster figures in dwarven lore. But thatâs itâs own whole thing.)
ANWAYS! TL;DR: My theory is that giants are mindless because they used to be connected to the titans, same as the dwarves, but didnât have individual souls bestowed upon them by Mythal and Solas like the dwarves. So they are just these empty giant husks walking and existing about the place in the form we see them.Â
