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an alternative to the Vallaslin scene:

I think I'd prefer if Solas attempted to remove Lavellan's vallaslin and finds that he simply is unable to.

Because the Dalish are different, they're not slaves, and removing a Dalish's rite of adulthood is not granting them their freedom. Maybe it's because the ink formula changed over the eons. Maybe the rite is just inherently different.

This not only narratively validifies the Dalish in who they are now, but also drives home the point to Solas that the world is completely different. He's not freeing Lavellan, he's shackling himself.

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Also for the record

The line about “Templars suffering” comes up often in Inquisition. And I think it’s actually an underrated issue in pro mage circles. Templars are in fact suffering. Often they are recruited from the most vulnerable: orphans and cast offs and poor boys looking to move up in the world. They’re forced to develop a lyrium addiction to keep them in line. They’re often brainwashed by the Chantry as much as many mages are. Seekers are made Tranquil without their knowledge or consent (albeit they are cured).

The issue is that it’s actually not a contradiction to say that Templars are oppressors and yet still suffer under systemic oppression. It’s the same thing as acknowledging that patriarchy hurts men as well as woman.

The issue is that literally everything Templars suffer is a direct result of anti-mage prejudice. They are recruited and brainwashed at a young age because the Chantry knows this will make them perfect weapons who are less likely to empathize with their charges, as they’ve been taught from childhood to treat them like walking bombs. They are forced to develop lyrium addictions because the Chantry knows it needs magic to stop magic, and yet is too afraid of magic itself to let them have full control of their abilities (or help them recover in the event that they want to leave). As for Templar deaths at the hands of mages, again, if you don’t lock people prone to demon possession in a high stress environment where they are forced to encounter at least one demon, chances are good nobody is getting demon possessed, and no one is getting murdered by an abomination.

Take a look at non-circle mages. Morrigan has not only never become an abomination, the only Templars she has killed are ones who came with the intent to take her and her mother from their home: their deaths could have been avoided completely if they’d just left them alone. Dalish mages have developed cures for their abominations all on their own. More often than not all Templars do is stir up trouble with them. Solas dips in and out of the fade all he wants, has long lasting friendships with spirits, and yet surprisingly the absence of Templars has not resulted in any mass murder sprees on his part.

Meanwhile, harrowing OFTEN results in the creation of abominations. The incident at Kinloch Hold took place entirely under Templar supervision. And most (if not all) of the demonic activity happening in Kirkwall was the direct result of mages feeling hopeless or backed into a corner by the threat of Templar violence. Templars died, yes, but they should never have been sent in this manner in the first place.

Templar suffering is a Chantry created problem. If people like Cassandra and Cullen really do want to protect Templars, then they of all people should be advocating for a HEAVILY reformed circle, if not their abolishment altogether. In a world where the Chantry doesn’t fear magic, there is no need to keep Templars on a lyrium leash. There is no need to allow abusive employers (and yes, while the abuse Templars suffered under Meredith is minimal compared to mage suffering, it is still present and it still resulted in death) to rise to the top because “well, their methods are effective at least!”. Demonic possession would drop down to next to nothing if they stopped forcing mages to face demons under threat of death if they take too long, and if they felt less likely in general like they were prisoners.

In short, if you want to stop Templar suffering, you have to create a system that doesn’t require suffering. Of anyone.

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God fucking christ anora and loghain's relationship makes me nauseous (positive). She is his only child. He would give her the world if she asked, but she won't, because she's perfectly capable of getting it herself. He knows that. He wants to protect her from the burden of making bad decisions as a ruler by making them in her stead himself. "She sounds like a terror" -> "it's the peculiar joy of parents to be terrorized by their children". They know each other better than anyone else alive. The only time her mask of composure shatters is when she sees her father about to be executed. He's fully ready to die as a warden because he trusts her ability to "turn [his death] to her political advantage". She wants nothing more than for him to live. Once he realizes ferelden can be saved without him he fully thinks her life would be better off without him and his mistakes looming over her. She rejects all her future suitors because "all of them fall far short of the bar she measures them against: that of her father". He knows she loves him despite the mistakes he's committed and would forgive him no matter what. He wishes she wouldn't.

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i also think it's just worth examining how much more grace bioware gives to their White Blonde Men in their narratives. cullen and vivienne have similar positions regarding circle reform. but where vivienne is treated like an opportunist that's just interested in consolidating power for herself, cullen is always treated like a victim of circumstance. and it isn't just him. alistair has SO MUCH to say about mages, 90% of which is very clearly not sympathetic, yet the game makes every effort to contextualize it in such a way that it's easy to handwave as good intentions with unfortunate prejudices, rather than something that deserves a more critical examination. which isn't necessarily Bad. it's not like alistair's opinion on mages plays any significant role in the narrative, nor is it treated as a real issue for his relationships. but compared to sten? to fenris? like bioware very much has a pattern of putting a lot more work in making their white characters more immediately relatable while letting characters that fall outside of that scope suffer the burden of having to Earn any kind of audience sympathy

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one of my favorite zevran headcanons is that he breaks into vigil’s keep every time he visits just so he can tell the warden where the defenses need bolstering. 

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Not to mention, while she has claimed the title of leading the "last loyal mages" she canonically was not a member of ANY fraternity within the college of magi (a deliberate choice on her part) - not Loyalist, not Aequitarian, not Libertarian... not even Lucrosian (whose agenda she probably did align with the most, at least at some point).

It's an unfortunately unanswered question, that of "WHO exactly is Vivienne claiming?"

Because the fraternities were super important to the organization and loyalties of the magi... and if we take the novels into account, it was a fraternity-based vote that ultimately set the Circle on the path of formal "united" rebellion post White Spire.

the loyalist mages having zero presence in dai is kind of funny to me because vivienne is like yes :) of course you have our support :) the last loyal mages in thedas will do anything to help restore order :) and then because there are no other loyalist mages it ends up being just vivienne joining the party and now you have the leader of an entire faction of people doing random shit like racing horses and fighting dragons. vivi. vivi the other the mages. vivi where are they.

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I mean, yes and no. You could make an argument for it explaining everything, but those were events dating back to before the Kingdom of Ferelden even existed (Divine Age = 2:00s, Towers = 3:00s).

There are some hints in DAO that the original timeline was more condensed (possibly only 400 - 500 years after the First Blight). If that was the case, it was very clearly scrapped later on, with just a handful of minor oddities remaining in the released game. But also if that was the case, the story of Flemeth & the Couslands and Howes does become much more immediate and maybe it was meant to be a bit of backstory shedding light on Howe.

Given everything else* we learn about the Couslands, Howe, and the history of Ferelden, however, I don't think its actually relevant or very revelatory. It could very easily be the kind of thing that Howe & sympathizers might point to when trying to defend themselves, though, lol.

(I'm also not actually positive that all those details in the screenshot are in DAO, tbh, [Edit: reread OP and it does say "one codex entry", so that's probably a misremembering on my part] and have a suspicion much of it was added in the official lorebooks. Not gonna go crawling the wiki's sources right now, though. Bann Conobar and the Highever & Flemeth bit is in DAO, of course. Morrigan story time <3)

*Everything Else being:

Teyrnir of Highever clearly gaining in power & size so that by the time of Calenhad's conquests it (& the Couslands) stand out as Very Important Victories. Amaranthine does not.

Amaranthine's prominence & power under the Orlesian occupation (aka "never been better", it was effectively the Orlesian seat of power/capital, iirc).

Besides Rendon Howe being a shitty, power-hungry asshole, there are some MUCH more immediate obvious social/political sore points. The most detail is in WoT v.2, tho' I believe there are references to parts of it in-game.

Those much more immediate sore points are what happened when the rebellion won. Bryce Cousland returned to Highever at the very close of the war - the first Cousland to do so after almost 70 years of exile. As WoT v.2 adds:

Many of the freeholders along the Amaranthine border came to swear fealty to the new teyrn instead of their arl, adding further complications [to the allegiance-swearing ceremony].

and meanwhile, next door in Amaranthine

Most of Amaranthine's freeholders were ambivalent about their new arl [Rendon] - his father had been a traitor to the Crown, and his late uncle [the arl before Rendon] had been much beloved - and many delayed swearing fealty to Rendon or gave their allegiance to Highever. ... None of the banns or freeholders attended Howe's wedding to a half-Orlesian noble...

How much of this was added after DAO was finalized or how much was already in the writers' bibles but just didn't make it into the game, I don't know. It could very much be a later addition to flesh out Howe's betrayal - the character we meet in game strikes me very much as the kind of man who would fester in silent jealousy & resentment of his friend for years, even without the additional political pain of having lost freeholders & banns to him.

Certainly more convincing than the idea of a 600-year-old one-sided rivalry, or whatever else could be inferred from the Elstan story.

one codex entry explaining that the entire howe beef with the couslands is extremely personally connected to flemeth and then it’s to my knowledge never discussed again. i love you dragon age origins

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this is why the semitransparent "the story of da2 is ultimately dampened without a mage hawke protag" viewpoint a lot of this website seems to have (whether like. conscious or not.) bothers me a lot because non-mage hawkes have this insane powerful narrative foil in meredith that ive never seen executed so. subtly and effectively in the series as it was here

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For Ferelden

Not much more is there to say, I love this guy. If you share the sentiment you might like to get a print of him at Targi Fantastyki or my store ✨

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Dragon age ● Characters

↳ Wynne, Senior Enchanter

“But why should you fear death if you are happy with the life you have led, if you can look back on everything and say, ‘Yes, I am content. It is enough.”

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sera they could never make me hate you 😭😭😭

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100%. Like OP says, you could very easily do a heroic or epic fantasy story about fighting the Blight! Tonally, it would probably not be quite as zombie apocalypse as DAO is, but hey, not impossible I guess. I'm replaying DAO right now, and there's a few other things that stand out to me, as part of making it dark fantasy, rather than heroic, but rather than write an enormous essay, I want to touch on one very specific thing DAO does, that is maybe forgotten or not experienced the same by people who have played the later games:

The opening cinematic. The one that begins, with no music, with only a blowing wind and the distant crackle of fire, on this screen:

DAO, from this cinematic onwards, introduces us to a world that is very explicitly post-apocalyptic, dominated by a religion marked not by redemptive hope or ultimate triumph of light, but by despair: God has abandoned the world twice-over and the follies & failures of mortals have ruined the world. You have brought Sin to Heaven, and doom upon all the world. (Duncan's narration, following this, begins with "The Chantry teaches us that it is the hubris of men which brought the darkspawn into our world.". This sets a very particular tone, and colours the whole story, regardless of how "lore accurate" or "true" that is!)

The Chantry and the religion are omnipresent in DAO, as is the weight of history (and the Chantry's involvement). Fereldens referencing the Orlesian occupation, elves referencing elven slavery and their lost kingdom(s). It isn't unrelenting, of course, there are moments of beauty and hope and the awe of the fantastical, hints of things larger than life, but its very grounded in a way that the later games are not.

As I mentioned above, genre-wise DAO pulls a lot from zombie horror, and a mixing of horror with fantasy pretty much guarantees some flavour of 'dark' fantasy, I think. And thematically, it leans heavily on the ideas in that opening quote: perfection is fleeting, mortal folly brings doom, people are not inherently good but instead flawed in some deep way (blackening the Golden City with each step taken).

And then all the big obstacles we face, those OP listed above and more, reinforce that: it's people being petty and flawed and fucked up, making choices that are selfish or lazy or greedy. Even the most archetypically "heroic" character - King Cailan - gets shadowed. (Most obviously in Return to Ostagar, but there are hints of him being actually less-than-perfect in ways that are 'realistic problems' not 'endearing character traits' in the rest of the game, too.)

Broadly speaking, I think we can say that "heroic" fantasy broadly says "people are ultimately good, and good ultimately triumphs over evil". Dark fantasy, I think, says instead "people are all flawed, every victory has a price, and success is bought & paid for in blood - never guaranteed".

“DAO was so dark. Broodmothers and the city elf origin!”

Begging dragon age fans to recognize that sexual violence isn’t the only or even biggest thing that made DAO dark fantasy.

For me, what makes it dark isn’t the darkspawn and the impending world-ending doom of the Blight (they could have made a more uplifting epic fantasy about fighting an unambiguously bad thing). It’s the never ending series of bullshit you encounter trying to assemble an army to fight it. Gruesome magic and political scheming. Loghain isn’t a one-dimensional power hungry antagonist and you have the option to recruit him because he’s useful.

It’s that you’re faced with a series of moral dilemmas that make you question how far your Grey Warden will go to stop the Blight. In war, victory.

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Ways to Disable a Mage in DA

Here are the canon ways and my HCs. Steal, modify, or ignore as you wish.

Magical restraints

A room with wards

These are standard issue in Circle basements, but rare elsewhere as they're complicated and expensive. The huge advantage is that once a mage is in one, there is no way to use magic.

Tranquility

Only used by the Circle, but an effective way to cut a mage off from the Fade and thus, from magic.

Templars

Very effective, but restricted to Templars.

Shackles (warded)

Still pretty expensive toys and manufactured by the Chantry so not generally available. A chantry might have a pair or two hanging around for emergencies.

Physical Restraints

Shackles (regular)

Gaider writes in Asunder that shackles effectively restrain Rhys. I'm not buying that completely. They limit movement, but I think a dextrous mage could eventually work some spells since their hands are free.

Binding

Completely wrapping the fingers and hands in fabric or leather strips to render them immobile, usually paired with shackles. This is a good one and pretty damn effective. Big issue is if you've got a prisoner you don't want to feed and help to the bathroom, this gets awkward.

Removal of hands

Whelp, that does it.

Chemical Restraints

Fantasy Oxaliplatin

Inspired by my chemo, this would be a potion that hampers fine motor skills and makes hands numb to a degree. It messes with the ability to cast spells. It's not fool proof as a determined mage might be able to come up with a way to cast even hampered by the potion, so it's generally paired with the next potion. Together they make a good option if you want to confine a mage, but don't want to be stuck handfeeding them.

This one, if used over a longer length of time, can have longlasting or chronic effects. Fine motor controls are buggered, numbness and clumsiness last, and neuropathy can set in making it pretty painful. With a great spirit healer there's still hope of fixing it though.

Some mind dulling potion

Pair bad hands with something that hinders thought to a certain degree and you've got a fairly effective way to render a mage magicless for a time.

Big guns potion

This would be a hallucinogen of some sort that just scrambles thoughts to an extreme degree, making it hard to order and organize in any sensible way. This gets used on powerful and/or experienced mages. It will often still be used with binding and shackles though because if somehow a mage manages to put two thoughts together and construct a spell, it's gonna be wild. I HC that this one can have long lasting effects, like possible psychotic breaks in the future, so it's not extremely common unless the mage in question isn't expected to make it out of their jam or their captors just don't give a shit.

More thoughts and additions are welcome!

[crosscut-drifter]

Ways to Disable a Mage in DA

Here are the canon ways and my HCs. Steal, modify, or ignore as you wish.

Magical restraints

A room with wards

These are standard issue in Circle basements, but rare elsewhere as they're complicated and expensive. The huge advantage is that once a mage is in one, there is no way to use magic.

Tranquility

Only used by the Circle, but an effective way to cut a mage off from the Fade and thus, from magic.

Templars

Very effective, but restricted to Templars.

Shackles (warded)

Still pretty expensive toys and manufactured by the Chantry so not generally available. A chantry might have a pair or two hanging around for emergencies.

Physical Restraints

Shackles (regular)

Gaider writes in Asunder that shackles effectively restrain Rhys. I'm not buying that completely. They limit movement, but I think a dextrous mage could eventually work some spells since their hands are free.

Binding

Completely wrapping the fingers and hands in fabric or leather strips to render them immobile, usually paired with shackles. This is a good one and pretty damn effective. Big issue is if you've got a prisoner you don't want to feed and help to the bathroom, this gets awkward.

Removal of hands

Whelp, that does it.

Chemical Restraints

Fantasy Oxaliplatin

Inspired by my chemo, this would be a potion that hampers fine motor skills and makes hands numb to a degree. It messes with the ability to cast spells. It's not fool proof as a determined mage might be able to come up with a way to cast even hampered by the potion, so it's generally paired with the next potion. Together they make a good option if you want to confine a mage, but don't want to be stuck handfeeding them.

This one, if used over a longer length of time, can have longlasting or chronic effects. Fine motor controls are buggered, numbness and clumsiness last, and neuropathy can set in making it pretty painful. With a great spirit healer there's still hope of fixing it though.

Some mind dulling potion

Pair bad hands with something that hinders thought to a certain degree and you've got a fairly effective way to render a mage magicless for a time.

Big guns potion

This would be a hallucinogen of some sort that just scrambles thoughts to an extreme degree, making it hard to order and organize in any sensible way. This gets used on powerful and/or experienced mages. It will often still be used with binding and shackles though because if somehow a mage manages to put two thoughts together and construct a spell, it's gonna be wild. I HC that this one can have long lasting effects, like possible psychotic breaks in the future, so it's not extremely common unless the mage in question isn't expected to make it out of their jam or their captors just don't give a shit.

More thoughts and additions are welcome!

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the most compelling part about bethany's character arc i think is the fact that she's like. never allowed to have a Choice in her life. like people bitch and moan about how bethany is too boring because she's so nice and agreeable and its like i want to slam a brick into their head because thats the POINT THATS HER CHARACTER ARC. if you're not playing a mage hawke bethany knows that everything that happens in your family is implicitly her fault. you're constantly moving and living in poverty because she cant be seen by templars. hawke and carver are basically enlisted by their father as bethanys own personal bodyguards and taught to throw their lives away for hers and carver NEVER made this part of their childhoods a secret he's very vocally bitter over how everything in their family revolves around bethany. like imagine being in her shoes, she feels like her entire life is a burden to the people she loves most of course she doesn't ever rock the boat because why ADD to their suffering. she has no agency, no control. her personality is completely informed by her circumstances she CAN'T afford to be selfish because every single thing she does has the potential to ruin her entire families livelihood.

which is why i'm super against the notion that warden bethany is her "bad" ending because "look at her she's so miserable and angry 😧 she's much happier in the circle omg." like erm. hm. perhaps. she only appears happier in the circle because it is yet another circumstance she has no control over and every wrong move she makes could result in a fate worse than death? perhaps. it's actually. good. and healthy. that as a warden she's finally showing her true unfiltered emotions and freeing herself from the mask of false optimism she used to protect her family because shes no longer a passive prisoner to her own life. the way bethany finally blossoms into herself as a warden is actually beautiful it just Takes A Second to get there because she doesn't get to fully process her anger until act 3.

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Dragon age 2 is really like "the mage-templar conflict is highly nuanced and there is no telling who is truly correct. Anyway this is where we store our mages. It's an island with a fortress called The Gallows and it's an old slave prison."