On City Elves, the Problem With Fantastic Racism in Dragon Age

This writing will mainly be focused on the ways in which elves are used as metaphors for racial discrimination in Dragon Age as a video game franchise. Books and other various media related to the franchise will be excluded for the sake of brevity and out of respect for the medium.

Dragon Age, a multimedia empire, with its fourth game in development, is a dark fantasy created by BioWare. The games are set in the fictional world of Thedas and over the course of the series you move from Ferelden to the City of Kirkwall and then the greater continent including Orlais.

The games themselves draw a number of inspirations from the real world. Ferelden is, for all intents and purposes, England. The Maker, the god of the franchise is analogous to the Christian God with Andraste taking a similar role and function to Jesus.

Dragon Age as a franchise has never shied away from the topic of race. It is more than willing to show how horrible people in power can be and how gruesome and monstrous things can be for marginalized groups. But, with that all in mind the games, don’t seem to grasp the weight of some of the narrative decisions.

Origins

In the first Dragon Age, you are able to play as an origin character that is a City Elf but you’re also able to at least learn of what happens to the City Elves throughout your playthrough. Elves in the world of Dragon Age, were slaves, considered to be subhuman after being decimated by the empire of Humans. But far before the plot begins, the Elves rose up and broke their chains. Some fled to the Wilds, and became known as Dalish. Others stayed in community with humans and became known as City Elves. While the Dalish are similar in a number of ways to Wood Elves as seen in many works that separate the category of Elf, City Elves don’t really map onto any prior fantasy racial category. As portrayed in Dragon Age Elves are Elves and the only time times we encounter something dissimilar is when encountering the evil species, the Darkspawn. There are no true Dark Elves in the classic Dungeons and Dragons sense of the term. The closest creature to a dark elf in Dragon Age would be the Darkspawn creature known as Shriek(s) but they’re less elf and more Darkspawn. Darkspawn as a species, are corruptions of other species. For example instead of having Orcs and Goblins as “evil races” All races can be corrupted into Darkspawn. For Humans they become Hurlocks, for Dwarves they become Genlocks, Qunari become Orcs. The element of import about these species however is they’re of a hivemind. They work in unity despite their species of origin. In other universes, there are rivalries between Goblins and Orcs. Dragon Age defies that.

Back on to City Elves though, City Elves are ghettoized elves drawing parallels to any number of oppressed peoples. From Jewish people in Germany or the Romani people or colonized people within any number of Western civilizations. As former slaves, City Elves can be seen as analogous to African Americans and other Indigenous peoples. They are sexualized by their human oppressors and are routinely taken advantage of. They have rights, on paper but those rights are quite often violated to little or no consequence.

Addressing racism was a point of pride for BioWare as per Kotaku, they stated,

“Here’s an example of elves being different in Dragon Age: Elves were enslaved by the humans at one point in Dragon Age, so they hate humans, they despise them. Humans in turn have a lot of disrespect towards elves. […] That’s something that hasn’t really been done before is introducing a lot of racial tension and back story and intrigue behind the scenes that’s sort of totally optional, but it makes the world feel that much richer and real.”

There’s still some semblance of pride within the culture as we can see the Elder of the city elves in Denerim as having enough pride to stand his ground when the Humans come and interrupt a marriage.

Within the plot of Dragon Age: Origins, the player can no matter their racial background explore the various ways that Elves have been oppressed and depending on how you played could seek to alleviate the suffering of the Dalish and City Elves or eliminate the Dalish and ignore the City Elves, even selling some to the slavers of Tevinter.

Allowing the player to explore the various backgrounds and moralities is one of the best elements of Origins, but when one focuses on the Elves, the things that were focused on show that the Elves are quite justified in their behaviors towards Humans, are basically no character aside from the player really cares about the Elves but the Elves. The City Elves can’t relate to the Dalish nor can the Dalish relate to them despite their shared ethnicity.

It’s a moving element of the story that the various groups of Elves have been able to persevere in the face of seemingly perpetual human oppression and clung to their communities despite the hardships they faced.

On Kirkwall (Dragon Age 2)

Elves in Dragon Age 2 become more developed in some areas but not necessarily focal in a lot of ways. Elves in Kirkwall are still oppressed but less so than in Dragon Age: Origins. There are few stories for them as they don’t do anything distinct enough to be distinct in comparison to the backdrop of the Templar-Mage oppression, outside of the case of the kids who escape from Kirkwall to become Qunari.

There is one big difference seen in the City elf companion, Fenris is a slave from Tevinter. He is a wrathful individual, justifiably so. But is vehemently anti-Mage which leaves room for exploration that is unfortunately not explored. He has been harmed by magic, harmed by human mages, and condemns the practice itself. This puts him in conflict with the other elf companion who is Dalish. Merrill, to her credit, is a sweetheart but a bit too stubborn and reckless in chasing her ancestors. But at the same time can she really be blamed for wanting better for her people?

As she sees it, she’s chasing their lost history, something stolen from her people by their bondage and there is a lot of room for discussion of that within the game, but it is left hanging.

The nature of City elves in Dragon Age 2 is that of “Oh this is just a fantasy story and we needed to have something other than humans so here are some dwarves here are some Elves leave us alone”

The narrative is more interested in the Mage – Templar conflict which despite the best efforts of the writers is not very nuanced when one takes a second to think about what is said and done in the lore of the franchise. Mages are a marginalized class, targeted by the church for state oppression. They typically only lash out because of that oppression and nothing the game does to try to muddy that fact does so.

There is a lot of overlap with mages and Elves in the franchise, but because of that, it seems that neither was given proper development.

Inquisition

Dragon Age 3 however chooses a very interesting City elf companion for you named Sera. Sera is an anti-elf City elf. She is mentally colonized. She accepts the Maker. She does not like anything elven in nature. In her own words and actions, she is fully committed to the ideology of her oppressors.

Sera as a character is quite interesting to think about because she’s meant to be a rebel she is Red Jenny. She is a criminal. She serves the underclass, but she has a view of Anti-Authoritarianism not too dissimilar to the talking points of a Twitter anarchist. You would think that somebody who knows that the big wigs and the rich are not necessarily the best Shepherds of people would also have the mindset that maybe others who are similar to me would be sympathetic to our plights but no.

This is the part of the article where it must be stressed that this is fiction and so it must dealt with as fiction but there are parallels to reality that are so overt, so crystaline they can’t go without commentary.

There are unfortunately Black Africans throughout the diaspora who accept the white supremacist framing of Africa as a whole as being a nation without. There is no history of civilization within Africa. There are no Nations. There are no cultures. There is only Darkness.

This false narrative has led to some Africans in the diaspora to have a negative view not just of themselves but of Africa. This mindset has led to Indigenous people having a negative view of self from viewing themselves through the lens of the oppressor which makes Sera such an interesting character to be written into the story she is an elf who knows that she is an elf and despises Elvish things.

Of the characters in the franchise, Sera is the most vehement in opposition to anything “Elfy”. More than any dwarf, any mage, any Qunari. She has an internalized racism that could make Candace Owens blush. And that would be fine as a point if she learned to love her people or was challenged meaningfully on the topic but instead, the writers say, she’s right to be anti-Elf.

It is explicitly stated that city elves don’t like Dalish and many Dalish do not like City elves and the City Elves are vindicated when they say that Dalish elves are crazy because Dragon Age 3 goes out of its way to say “Yeah they’re wrong they don’t know what they’re talking about they’re misguided.”

It’s revealed in DreadWolf, the DLC campaign of DA:I where it’s shown that the elven gods are actually just slavers. That the tattoos the Dalish wore with pride are but marks of slavery by their former captors. It’s a story that outright states, everything, every single thing the Elven people who didn’t surrender to Human domination believed in was a lie.

It is a story that reeks of ideology. It’s a story that reeks of people writing without knowing what they are writing because what they write is a defense of colonization and cultural destruction. It is a defence of the destruction of Elven culture. The Humans are no better than the Darkspawn but they are vindicated in the fact that their God is stronger than all of the others.

Erasure in Veilguard?

The much-maligned Dragon Age Veilguard finds itself abstracted from its history. Far away from allegations of “wokeness” Veilguard is bereft of much of anything of substance with regards to lore or allegory.

By the time of this game, many would argue the rough edges of race have been completely sanded away. The history of the slave empire of Tevinter is of little note. The Veiljumpers seemingly have little to worry about in the former oppressor state. The open racism of Dragon Age: Origins has long been wiped away and its place, an absence. An Elven Rook faces none of the pushback of previous Elven protagonists but an argument can be made as to whether that was a good thing with regards to the story as the main villains are Elven gods.

Doubling down on the flawed story of the Elves being a people of almost perpetual victimhood, having so much of the Elven lore basically erased and replaced with nothing while steadfastly barreling toward the conclusion of their gods actual being villains is a perplexing decision, to say the least, that said there is some glory in perseverance and it’s here that a racial allegory gets a bit harder to square.

Rarely do descendants of slavery get to return violence to their oppressors, and so while Veilguard does choose to remove some of the overt racial animus, it also deals with a bit more of the substance of the oppression and the history of it within the world of Thedas.

In the end, maybe that’s for the best. The franchise has been struggling with race and commitment to the theme of race from the beginning, seemingly running away from saying anything, committing to anything, and appealing to a vague nuance that indicts everyone but doesn’t condemn. History is forgotten or unacknowledged. The people and places are shown but stripped of their meaning.

It’s a game series of contradictions. A story, a narrative, seemingly willing to speak about a very important topic, but too afraid to say anything and many times pivoting to saying regrettably worse things but stripped of their impact because nothing really matters.

Works Cited

Betz, Stephanie. “‘Elf Lives Matter’? The Racial Dynamics of Participatory Politics …” SageJournals, SAGE Publications, 13 July 2021, journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13678779211028866.

Coleman, Jack. “Dragon Age: The Veilguard Forgets the Series’ Lore.” TheGamer, Valnet Publishing Group, 9 Nov. 2024, www.thegamer.com/dragon-age-the-veilguard-forgets-series-lore-qunari-antaam-dalish/.

Coleman, Jack. “Dragon Age: The Veilguard Has Discarded Nuance.” TheGamer, Valnet Publishing Group, 7 Nov. 2024, www.thegamer.com/dragon-age-the-veilguard-discarded-nuance-weak-characters/.

Glasser, AJ. “BioWare Tackles Elf Racism in Dragon Age: Origins.” Kotaku, Kotaku, 27 Mar. 2009, kotaku.com/bioware-tackles-elf-racism-in-dragon-age-origins-5186500.

Moore, Alisa. “‘Hope You’re Not Too Elfy.’” Medium, Medium, 20 Feb. 2019, medium.com/@alisamariemoore/hope-youre-not-too-elfy-74dda3085a4b.

Stalberg, Allison. “How Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Racism towards Elves Simulates Real-Life Hardships.” Game Rant, Valnet Publishing Group, 15 Oct. 2021, gamerant.com/dragon-age-inquisition-racism-elves-real-life-similar-whitewashing-colonization/.

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