Dragon Age News Thread

I hate to tell you this man, but you talk to any Bioware fans lately?

Hey, some of us are happy!

(Of course, I am lucky enough to love every Doctor and to be looking forward to Thirteen.)

Vic @commissions open! ✨ @bloodwrit
So my Mom wants to cosplay Flemeth, and I already cosplay Morrigan. Wouldn't we be perf? (my mom's pic just got published in an offshoot magazine for vogue Italia, I love her) #DragonAge


[HASH]DAT

It's not black and white. The value of internal consistency is a function of how important audience reasoning is to the narrative. For example, if you are writing a locked room murder mystery and part of the intended fun of the read is for the audience to try to figure out whodunnit, your validated, non-red herring clues better be pretty damn internally consistent, or expect valid criticism. In fact, the best way to identify a red herring clue is to show that it is internally inconsistent with known facts.

On the other hand, if you are writing Ulysses, the importance of audience reasoning is vanishingly low.

"Audience reasoning" is kind of broad, though. For example, any kind of theorizing about unexplained lore could fall under audience reasoning. Which is why I'm so put out by the profligate use of unreliable narrators in DA lore, particularly for Codexes. It's basically pointless to try to reason from any lore in the game as to what might have really happened in history. And yes, I know that is oh so realistic, but as to the point of the original tweet, fuck realism. That's not all that important to begin with. I get all the realism that I need irl.

Making shit more realistic, even in-universe is ALWAYS the damn answer.

Yeah, guess I should put my ass back in the ME boards where it belongs.

Bit of a side-note - I do find it amusing that in order for some things to be viewed as 'realistic' they may have to pander to widely held misconceptions or anachronisms.

"Realism" in fiction is an interesting thing to think about. I personally like the integration of not-necessarily-reliable information sources in a world like Thedas, because to me, that's part of the story of the world. How different people and different cultures have varying levels of understanding and motivation for re-telling those stories, etc. But I can also see how that would be annoying to people who really like to steep themselves in the lore, and don't want to be misled, or feel like changes are a lazy ret-con rather than a revelation.

I like the method of looking at the world through a keyhole. Explain just enough relevant information to be a part of the world, that your point-of-view character should know, to set up your tent poles, and then add in more bits as you need them. When you have a universe like this one that lasts years and has new entries frequently and multiple writers, it means that the people writing it are going to get new ideas and learn and grow as people and, yes, even change their mind. If you've set every little detail down in a giant bible from the start, there's little room to add and change. Obviously, key points are best to remain consistent (unless our understanding of those changing IS the plot). Heck, even Tolkien, king of worldbuilding, revised The Hobbit before releasing LotR because he fleshed out ideas about the ring and Gollum, and had changed the kind of storytelling he wanted to do as his kids grew older.

It's hard, and you're not going to please everyone. And you have to be careful. Remember, trying to spell out too much is how we got midi-chlorians. *Shudder.*

Or, to use an example frequently mentioned in this very thread, immortal aliens from the planet Zeist.

There can be only Solas.

I prefer the term "consistency" to "realism", because realism means "like reality", and fantastic stories often aren't in some significant ways. Within a broader doctrine of consistency, there is the principle that not everything must be told or shown, but what is shown should be consistent. There is also, obviously, space for differing perceptions by in-world characters, but if the story tells or shows us something, rather than characters in the story, it should remain consistent over time and between different places.

Two examples:

The bad example:

In the mage origin story of DAI, Jowan famously uses blood magic - by cutting himself - to defend himself and his love against some templars. The in-world inhabitants of the Circle view this as a horrible crime and a sacrilege, but as the player you're more likely to see this differently: Jowan broke the rules and that's bad, but there's nothing especially horrible about cutting yourself to cast some spell, especially considering he was threatened by a handful of heavily-armored and -armed knights. This scene fundamentally shapes a mage player's perception of blood magic: Jowan's action came across as self-defense and was clearly, recogizably, scripted to evoke some sympathy. Clearly, you thought, Thedas has some hard and unforgiving rules about blood magic, and that's how the world is, but they're actually not very rational and at least partly rooted in superstition. Whether Jowan was justified breaking the rules and trying to escape, that might remain controversial, but the blood magic was likely a non-issue in the minds of players. 

However, this discrepancy is never explored later. As of DA2 the story acts as if blood magic is automatically horrible, as if it was always about human sacrifice, with not even an option for the *player* to express a differring opinion, to the point of making Hawke, a character we have played, having a strict and unchangeable opinion about it in DAI (to say nothing about being able to play a blood mage in DA2 - gameplay/story segregation is a form of inconsistency if the gameplay elements concerned are rooted in the world's lore). Various other DA-related media then go out of their way to justify this stance, but for people who played a mage in DAO this comes across as a wilful "evilization" of an element that should maybe be controversial but not universally despised, and I, for once, always saw the new material as artificial, serving the writers' changed intentions against the weight of early material.

The good example:

This is about Game of Thrones (or rather, A Song of Ice and Fire, the original source material). About 15 years ago (after Storm of Swords had came out), I had an online discussion about whether or not the gods and supernatural entities of Westeros existed - namely the Lord of Light and the Children of the Forest, who were connected with real events that undeniably happened by fiat of the story rather than character's beliefs, as opposed to the Seven, who weren't. Remember this was long before the TV series, which has been going significantly beyond the book material. My opponent claimed that since these events happened and the story told them as real, the gods must exist, but my position was that they actually never appeared as actors in the story, all that the story actually showed was belief in them. Obviously, different opinions about the source of the various resurrection/reanimation effects existed and would exist among readers, even should the characters be unambiguous in-world, but the story itself never expressed a preference. Whether you thought Melisandre's magic was her god's magic or simply magic, that didn't matter and you could leave the question open to be resolved later, or even not at all.

So, when it turned out that at least the Children of the Forest were real in the TV series, there was no perceived inconsistency to the earlier written material, because the story never suggested that they weren't real. And should it turn out that Melisandre's god does not exist, there would likewise be no inconsistency with the earlier material. Meanwhile, DAO actually did suggest that blood magic wasn't automatically horrible.