millenniumfae:

Let’s talk about elves and how they supposedly stand for oppressed people of color.

Let’s talk about how both Solas and Sera were originally brown in early concept art. Let’s talk about how Dorian, Josephine, Cassandra, and Vivienne, all privileged humans of nobility, are POC. 

Use this image to compare elves and humans together by facial features only. Focus especially on the bottom left two:

Elves are not of color. Elves are WHITE PEOPLE. In all three games, elves are white. The ancient elves were white, an elven demigod is white, city elves are white, the Dalish are white, the elven sentinels of the Temple of Mythal are white. It makes these weird situations where Solas, a white man, gets to tell Dorian, an asian man, real shit about oppression and basically tell him to check his racial privilege. 

Solas: If you wish to make amends for past transgressions, free the slaves of all races who live in Tevinter today.
Dorian: I… don’t know that I can do that.
Solas: Then how sorry are you?

It didn’t have to be like this. Solas could have been that brown MOC with coarse dark hair molded into dreadlocks. But no, instead we get a bald white man with blue eyes.

(Screencap by amagicrobot)

When you see Solas stand next to actual POC, the whole allegory shatters. If you’re someone who empathizes with Vivienne and/or Dorian because they look like you, then Solas coming in and lecturing them about racism is just wrong. Situations where elves face racism are downplayed by the way they’re portrayed with “porcelain skin, blonde/white hair like moonlight, large blue/green/violet eyes”.

Elves fit carefully within white supremacist ideals of beauty and intelligence. Inquisitor Lavellan is a player character who deals with racism as part of the story, but she’s popularized as a white woman, especially if in a romance with Solas. If she isn’t white, she’d be the only non-white elf in the entire game.

I don’t know. Just … popularize the image of a brown-skinned, coarse-haired, broad nosed, monolid WOC as Lavellan. I’m sick of seeing beautiful white girls as elves. I’m sick of seeing white Lavellan and white Solas. I just, I hate it.

Damnit Solas, we could have had more.

(art by SiN82, but then they immediately put up a redhead white woman as a romanced Lavellan so ugh)