All right, as you should all know by now, I’m a Brosca lover down to my bones. Unfortunately for me, though, and for Brosca (or Aeducan) lovers everywhere, there really aren’t that many of us in the grand scheme of things—which means I’ve rarely if ever seen any sort of in-depth hypothesizing on dwarven culture. Well, if Bioware isn’t going to give me the content I desire, fine, I’ll just be over here, piecing together elaborate headcanons from scraps. I figure the least I can do is share that with everyone else.
So. Casteless tattooing. Discussion of fictional classism, state violence, and dehumanization herein (that’s a terrible word to be stuck with when we’re talking about dwarves, but there’s no good fantasy equivalent, so I make do for the sake of content warnings).
Now, according to lore, all casteless children are marked with a tattoo shortly after their birth. All right, fair enough—we never see a casteless dwarf without the brand. But there are a couple of problems with this.
One is logistics: how do they catch everyone, especially given the long-established fact that the Shaperate doesn’t track casteless lineage? The other is to do with the mechanics of tattooing—the simple fact is that any mark placed on a baby’s face would be faded and stretched long before they reached adulthood. And yet all the casteless we see have the same mark—clear, geometric, and distinctive. So what’s going on there?
Let’s set aside that it’s probably just a case of the game devs not fully thinking the little details through (they had a lot of details to manage, worldbuilding is a tough job, it happens). We’re dealing with a culture that brands an entire subset of its children at birth, a brand that also has to be clear in adulthood—just to make sure everyone knows that its bearer isn’t a real person. There has to be a way to manage that.
Sure is!
Start by giving the parents incentive to volunteer their children—negative incentives, of course, but hey, whatever works. Any child without the brand can be accused of impersonating an upper caste, and punished at will; a parent who enabled that, obviously, would face the same punishment—or worse. Go a step further: send units of the guard in at random to sweep Dust Town and make sure nothing untoward is going on (this would also go a long way to discourage people of other castes from so much as entering Dust Town, further isolating the casteless). Offer a reward, perhaps, for anyone who turns in their neighbours. Encourage the spread of stories that paint branding the babies as “for their own good” (at least an infant won’t remember the pain, after all).
That takes care of the logistical side of things. But what about the tattooing mechanics?
Here’s my theory: whatever mark they give to infants isn’t the same one that all the casteless adults have. It’s something simple, a basic shape that isn’t going to get too distorted by a child’s growing face, something geometric that they can turn into the basics of the distinctive adult marking. Just a solid rectangle, maybe—that’s still plenty obvious. The adult mark doesn’t get placed until later: in the mid to late teens, most likely, after the kids are mostly done growing.
There are a couple of ways that could happen. The first is simple policing: any casteless teenager who’s causing a bit of trouble can get taken in with impunity and have their brand updated. Given the absurd amount of prejudice the casteless face from literally everyone else in Orzammar, it’s entirely reasonable that they could be picked up just for being in the wrong area. That would likely cover a lot of them—but it wouldn’t get them all. How do they get the rest of them?
Remember what I said earlier, about guard units doing random sweeps? Like that, only bigger.
Say, every year, or every two years—a full-blown roundup, digging up everyone in Dust Town, singling out all the teenagers of an appropriate age to forcibly brand them. It would be a production of a full day, maybe more, and the guards would be sent in in force to thoroughly search every house—it would be a good time to make sure no babies or toddlers had slipped through the cracks, too. Hey, you’ve got everyone down here to do the tattooing anyway.
Something like that would have a major effect on casteless culture. It might even come to be seen as a rite of passage. And it ties in with some of my thoughts on another aspect of the casteless brands—the issue of reclaiming. There’s an implication that some factions of casteless society (particularly the Carta, or other criminal elements) have made an effort to reclaim their tattoos: adding decoration, more details, colour. Consider the Shaper who gives you the Thief in the House of Learning quest in Origins—he describes the casteless who stole the tome as having tattoos all over his face, “as if he’s proud of it” (side note: this is a particular punch in the gut if you, like me, are playing as a Brosca with extra facial tattoos).
So picture this: one day without warning all the casteless are woken up and forced out into the square by the city guard—none too gentle and treating them more like animals than people, roughing them up, ransacking their homes in search of anyone hidden. All the older teenagers who don’t yet have an adult brand are corralled; everyone else is dismissed. They get forcibly tattooed, and any who fight are beaten, restrained, and tattooed anyway. At the end of the day, the guard packs up and leaves.
Then the Carta people come out. They’re gentle—they’ve been through it themselves, after all, and they know a soft touch is going to go a lot further than mimicking the guards’ brutality would. “You can accept it,” they say, “and maybe that’ll make your life easier in the long run—or you can change it, make it your own.” They get out their own inks and offer touch-ups, or additions, or different colours. They hand around a healing ointment, to stave off infection. They make promises.
How many furious and humiliated kids would take them up on it? Probably a lot.
Some further considerations—the dwarven association of facial tattooing with the casteless and especially the Carta casts an interesting light on the Legion of the Dead traditions. The Legion seems to have a practice of full face tattooing, and their tattoos appear to be a visible representation of their ritual death—the majority of them seem to imitate the heraldry of the Legion, which is representative of a dwarven skull. I like the idea of their tattooing being part of their initiation, a private ritual for the Legionnaires alone that takes place after the funeral has concluded and the mourners have left. It would certainly be a good way to form a bond with your new martial unit.
But for all that dwarves can win honour by entering the Legion, there’s still a strong criminal association there—it’s rare for anyone to join up except as atonement for a crime. It makes me wonder whether the Carta tattooing traditions developed independently, or if they were derived from the Legionnaires’ traditions. One certainly imagines a substantial segment of the Legion of the Dead is made up of former casteless, and as far as we know the casteless have always been branded.
Either way, what with tattoos so firmly a mark of criminality in dwarven culture, you really have to wonder how a dwarven Warden would react to seeing vallaslin for the first time.
Can you imagine the effect that a Brosca Warden would have on the Casteless? Similar to the effect of a Tabris or a Mahariel on the elves, but much more so IMHO: the elves have their own culture, but the casteless are submerged in a culture that enforces their own worthlessness at every turn. And one of theirs rose up to be a hero. To save the world. To defeat a Blight. To become a Paragon.
Delicious Fish 