I am taking my time with Starfield, and oh by is it ever time-consuming. With four major factions you can join, unique and repeatable side-quests spread across an entire galaxy, more than 1,000 planets and moons to survey, and a New Game Plus-centric system that will switch things up on you across a handful of wildly different versions of Constellation, this game has a lot of staying power for those willing to put in the hours.
Todd Howard has admitted his team drew inspiration from several sci-fi sources to put together its lore. I can easily feel the impact Firefly must have had just from walking around Akila City and Neon, and my excitement for the game ramped up long before its launch when Design Director Emil Pagliarulo listed Cowboy Bebop as one of his muses. But one IP I wasn’t expecting them to dive into—mostly because it’s from the world of high fantasy and not sci-fi—is the hit HBO series Game of Thrones, or, more accurately, the A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin on which the show is based.
That dialogue is going to make a lot more sense in a minute.
Let me explain. All of this hinges around Andreja. She’s both a member of Constellation, the consortium of space explorers that you get thrown into in the game’s opening chapter, and one of its four companions that you’re able to build a friendship or romantic relationship with. It’s this last point that leads to the Game of Thrones connection, but before getting into that, we need to talk about her religion, as well as how religions are handled in Starfield.
The game has three major religions. First is The Enlightened. Not a church in the traditional sense, these folks are mostly atheists who believe in doing charity work for the good of all humanity, kind of like Secular Humanists.
Next up, you’ve got The Sanctum Universum, which seems to be the convergence of all major monotheistic religions that existed back in Earthen times. Its faithful believe there is a creator god out there, and They (yes, their one true god uses gender-neutral pronouns) gave Grav Drive technology to humanity so that true believers could search through space and eventually find Them. Like, literally find Them. Like, they’re just floating around in space waiting for Their friends to show up. Universum followers are generally just friendly folk, though.
This guy especially deserves to become a mainline companion.
But lastly (and this is where Andreja comes in), you have House Va’ruun, a closed-off sect that worships The Great Serpent, a celestial being that will one day return and wipe all non-believers from existence. House Va’ruun stays separate from the United Colonies and the Freesttar Collective, keeping the location of its settlements a secret from the rest of the galaxy. It has its zealots—basically religious terrorists that will fly into the other settled systems and gun down anyone outside the faith—but that doesn’t gel with Andreja, as the first time we meet her, she’s unloading laser bolts right into the head of a downed zealot.
Romancing Andreja can be tricky. Though she seems to love the accepting found family she’s fallen into in Constellation, she holds strong with her faith, and if you’re not a believer in The Great Serpent already, she’s apprehensive about making long-term plans, since you won’t be able to spend eternity together. Ensure her that making the most of your time together is for the best, though, and she’ll eventually come up with a wedding ceremony that can honor her faith despite her commitment to an outsider.
On a far-off moon, she’ll lead you to a natural rock arch, telling you it’s where she was dropped off after she left her home (as even Va’ruun field agents aren’t allowed to know the way back, in order to protect the secrecy). She tells you to dig, and you unearth her wedding gift to you, and her most precious possession: a dagger, partially made from the skull of some sort of dead animal.
She, uhh… she didn’t go to Jared.
There’s a significance to this, as she explains. All Va’ruun carry one of these daggers in their homeland, but once they leave home, they hide them somewhere to prevent them being discovered. Each Va’ruun child is given a pet groat, which seems to be a form of livestock, as their milk is a staple of the Va’ruun diet. Then, when each child comes of age, they slaughter their pet groat and fashion its skull into a dagger, signifying the lesson that all life exists to serve The Great Serpent.
Now, I’m a little off-put by the whole pet-slaughter thing, but immediately, that story sounds a bit too familiar. It only takes me a couple of seconds to remember another group from another fandom that does something pretty similar. And this lovable guy is one of them:
Yep, that’s Grey Worm, commander of The Unsulled, the former slave army bought and liberated by Daenerys Targaryen. But the story connecting these fictional worlds didn’t actually come from the television show, but the books.
In a story too dark for possibly the goriest show in TV history, it’s revealed that, as a way of training him not to feel anything but obedience, each Unsullied child has to go through a lot of conditioning, and man, does it get dark. (Seriously, if you’re squeamish about this kind of thing, turn back here). If you’ve watched the show, you know that every Unsullied has been fully castrated, but that’s tame compared to the rest. If they fail at any physical task, they’re killed. They each have to go to market and buy a slave baby, then murder the innocent child in front of its mother.
Picture unrelated. I just thought you deseved some sort of affirmation for making it this far.
Oh, and on his castration day, each is each given a puppy. He’ll care for the puppy. He’ll feed the puppy. And one year to the day later, he’ll grasp the puppy around the throat and squeeze until it’s dead. If he fails to do so, he’ll become food for the remaining dogs.
Granted, it’s not like that puppy’s bones are fashioned into an Unsullied’s spear or anything, but geez guys, did you both really need to go all pet murderer there? I’m not sure what a groat is—and since the Va’ruun drink its milk, I’m going to go a less disgusting route and assume it’s like a goat—but there was no chance Bethesda was going to put a dog in that situatuion. After all, the devs there basically made Dogmeat unkillable (or at least have an endless string of puppies to rejoin you), and I still haven’t figured out how to get him out of the super mutant factory at the end of the first Fallout without the malfunctioning force fields chopping him to bits.
Could it be coincidence that these two stories line up so closely? I suppose. But the devs’ admittance to borrowing from other source material makes me think this one’s pretty legit. I am going to chalk it up as an homage and not a direct rip-off, but man, I did not see that connection coming.
Starfield
Create your own story in Bethesda’s epic open-world (or open-galaxy) RPG. With factions to join, wars to fight, and over 1000 planets to explore, Starfield is the legendary RPG developer’s most ambitious game yet.
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S
- Released
- September 6, 2023
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda
- Genre(s)
- RPG