The Blanketfort (crying and throwing up) - The Official Solas Thread [Spoilers]

The whole crux of whether you are considered a believer or not is decided by how you respond to Giselle in the camp before everyone serenades you. Up until then you can keep your options open but at that point you have to commit or be denied certain options from then on. This makes it difficult to role play an elven Inquisitor who believes in both the Dalish pantheon and the Maker and have it reflected in your dialogue.. If you want the believer options, then you have to headcanon the part where you still believe in the elven gods, at least until after you have locked yourself in on the believer path. Thereafter there are not many opportunities to declare for the elven pantheon anyway until after the Temple of Mythal. Then it mostly comes in your conversation with Sera. What puzzled me about that is that so far as I was concerned, the Temple of Mythal simply confirmed that the ancient elves believed in the same gods as me and that they had actually existed, so that much of our lore was true but the way Sera carried on, it seemed I had to regard even the existence of the Temple of Mythal as the work of demons and nothing about it was true. To be honest, at that point to me the elven gods seemed a whole lot more real than the Maker. Solas seemed to have suggested that some of them were arses but that was hardly mind blowing. Learning that Mythal had been murdered was more of a shocker and meeting her/Flemeth even more so but once again at least she was proven to have been real.

I suppose it is worth considering what you would think if you had done Jaws of Hakkon before going to the Temple of Mythal and meeting Flemeth. After all the Avvar acknowledge their gods are spirits that can be summoned into a mortal form to assist their hold. They believe both favoured mortals and spirit gods can be reborn. So then if you go to the Temple of Mythal, I would think you would be more likely to wonder if the elven gods were the same. Then meeting Flemeth would seem like they were. Even after Trespasser I still feel that the Evanuris were more than simply elves elevated to godhood by their peers. Even Solas admits as much. Something about the First of the People made them particularly hard to kill permanently, which did not seem to apply to the other ancient elves.

As for Ameridan's beliefs, I find them a bit hard to reconcile both with what we know about Drakon wiping out all cults that didn't agree with his own (which is monotheistic) and with what the Dalish do about Andraste. They don't deny that Andraste was a human prophet of her god and a friend to the elves; the Canticle of Shartan, which was based on their oral tradition, makes it clear that they felt Shartan was Andraste's equal in the eyes of the Maker, so even if they acknowledged the Maker as a god, Andraste was a mortal the same as Shartan and both died in the fires of the Imperium. Yet Ameridan seemed to have bought into the idea that she was raised to demi-god status on her death. Not even all humans believed that, even in the south (see the beliefs of the Ash Warriors). So it is clear his thinking had been very influenced by Drakon's Chantry rather than the traditional view of his own people. I wonder what Ameridan would have made of the revelation from Solas that the Creators were just ordinary mortals bearing in mind he equates Andraste's elevation to godhood with that of Ghilan'nain.