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

I detect the stench of identity politics.

That reminds me when Samantha Bee said, "Identity politics is the dismissive term for what we used to call 'civil rights' and 'equality'."

Diversity isn't racism.

Well I got through the hellish breakup scene for my Revas Surana Lavellan. I'm wondering how did your Lavellan respond to the revelation about the vallaslin? I usually go for the sad option, but for my Surana Lavellan, I went with the neutral option because it fits with how she feels about them. The dalish have reclaimed them. Instead of slavery it means she's one of the free elves. One of those who refuse to submit to human rule and be treated like trash by them.

Okay, I'm going to ask because this is bothering me. Where does it say Briala is PoC? I've read TME but I never got the impression that she was. The only description I remember is that her skin is darker than Celene's and Celene is quite pale. My sister and I are white, but she has darker skin than me.

Her elven lover made soft sleeping sounds, and Celene stroked her hair absently. The black curls lightened to gray with the pre-dawn light, then slid to the light brown of cinnamon as the sun brought colour to the room.


Dirt-brown, Celene had called it, when Briala had waited upon her as a girl. Horse-dung brown, an ugly shadow of Celene’s spun-gold locks. Back when they had both been children, before Celene had known the value of having a friend who could be trusted, who wasn’t a competitor in the Game.


She watched Briala’s throat, where her pulse fluttered. Her skin was darker than Celene’s, though she spent most of her days inside and showed no tan lines at the bare skin around her eyes. Briala tried to ignore it, but Celene knew that she was quietly ashamed of it. Not the ears that gave her away as elven even beneath the mask, not the lovely liquid eyes, but her sun-touched skin, dotted with a spray of pretty freckles.


“You could have woken me earlier.”

“Burdens of the empress,” Celene said, and smiled. Her lover’s skin was dark against the creamy white satin of her nightshirt.

There's more than a few reasons why a myriad of people have wondered why Briala is depicted as white in Inquisition when her description is that of a woman of color.

I thought that scene was so ripe for RP and it annoys me that people try to pigeonhole it into "if you remove the vallaslin, you just do it for Solas/you're disconnecting your Lavellan from her clan and heritage". My Lavellan has been questioning her history and with the preoccupation with the past in her Dalish clan for a while. She thinks (perhaps falsely, depending on your POV) that it's what's holding them back and disconnecting them from the world around them. Everything over the course of DAI made her question the elven gods even more, and in the end the vallaslin thing was the last straw. By removing them, she's expressing her determination to stop living so hard in the past and move her and her people into the future.

I personally don't believe that you can "reclaim" something if you never knew what it meant. Reclamation means you knew it was bad but moving forward, you make it your own. If the Dalish knew the truth, they'd be in a position to reclaim the marks. And some would if they knew (which presumably they may later on), and some Lavellans like yours would see it as reclamation too now that they have that knowledge. My Lavellan chose not to, and personally sees them as a symbol of being stuck in the past, though she'd never blame other Dalish for not seeing it that way. So in the end, she became a foil to Solas unintentionally.   Though in the vallaslin scene, it's irritating that the writers forced a reasoning in the lines where you chose to remove them. Because what Lavellan says in the "take them away" line is not how I actually see her feeling. Usually I just ignore it when the game does that, though!

Basically for mine, it had nothing to do with Solas or abandoning her people. This is one of those decisions where it irks me when people make it so black and white. A similar one is the Solas and Cole vs Varric and Cole situation, which I've seen so many people talk trash on. 

Though in a similar vein, I completely get why people are so annoyed the Dalish beliefs are essentially revealed as false while the writers have stated outright that they'll never disprove the Maker. That's one of those built in real-world religious biases that they probably didn't think about when they did it.

Saying that diversity doesn't matter because the people are fictional doesn't help your position in the slightest.

You're familiar with the passages that explicitly read that she's a woman of color but you don't understand why readers of "The Masked Empire" acknowledge her as a woman of color? It's pretty simplistic. It's why a myriad of artists depict her as a woman of color based on her description in "The Masked Empire", and it's the reason why there's a mod to make Briala look like a woman of color - the way she's described in TME.

Well, the hair related passages mean nothing and just say she's a brunette with curly hair. But yeah, the skin ones make it seem like she's darker and not just 'darker white'.

However, I can see where there could be enough doubt to say that you can't completely throw around accusations of whitewashing. The person who wrote her was right there and could have said something about her in-game appearance. We all know Weekes isn't shy about that sort of thing because he was quick to dispel the idea that Briala was not a lesbian on Twitter.

I'm sorry, they do not 'explicitly read that she's a woman of color' to me. All I get from those passages is that she has cinnamon brown hair and darker skin than Celene. I say again, my sister has darker skin than me. I even have a brother that went to Brazil for two years and everyone there thought he was a native because of his skin color. Now, I know details about characters appearance get forgotten between book and game (Fiona, I'm looking at you) so it could have been an honest mistake.

Sorry, this is the last time I will derail the thread. I thought there was more info than what was in the book that I was missing.