#dragon age meta

[anneapocalypse]

If Dragon Age II is about being doomed by the narrative, Dragon Age: Inquisition is about being devoured by the narrative. From the very beginning the Inquisitor is slowly being devoured by their mark. Being devoured by this organization they did not ask to join and are not allowed to leave. Begin devoured by the titles they can't reject and the story that swells around them, out of their control. Uncovering the tragic story of the first Inquisitor who tried to appease the same monster, and was devoured by it anyway--his nation, his culture, his very name and identity. And then watching the Inquisition, grown too large to be safe, begin to devour itself while Orlais watches it hungrily and Ferelden (remembering what it means to be devoured) asks how to put down the beast before it eats them all. The Inquisitor now fighting physically not to be devoured, trying to free themselves from the monster's teeth without losing more than an arm. Do they succeed?

[miraculan-draws]

Dwarves in inquisition having a 25 percent magic resistance is retroactively so fun. Like Hawke knows he can graze Varric with a fireball and he'll be fine. Oghren, actively on fire but can't see it past his helmet like "Anybody else warm? It's toasty in here." Sigrun laughs when she gets shocked. She will actively hold onto a charged lightning surface and laugh.

Also though, I bet this makes it really hard to heal them, it'd probably take more than one mage to do it.

[duriens]

so we all agree that kirkwall is both horrifying and fascinating and i wish they'd delved more into its bloody history beyond the snippets we get from the codexes of the band of three. like hello?? three seekers of truth - among which a dalish mage - scurrying about the sewers and lower passages of the city, discovering that kirkwall was designed as some sort of magical symbol, has grooves in the sewers allowing the flood of blood downward for blood magic purposes, and last but not least realizing that its circle of magi had a much higher number of failed harrowings & episodes of blood magic hysteria than basically any other circle in existence??? you cant leave me hanging like that. why was the veil so thin there even before tevinter came? why were they weakening it further?? what was tevinter doing with all those disappeared slaves every year and the huge blood magic ritual involving thousands of slaves and the city itself being a magic symbol??? did the band ever find out if the Forbidden Ones are the same Forgotten Ones of dalish lore??? why was xebenkeck called 'forgotten one'??? hello????? what the fuck is up in kirkwall??????

[laurelsofhighever]

A list of potential cures for the Calling, that we know about, that BioWare has apparently forgotten

Andraste's grace: it's not specified whether the flower the kennelmaster has you pick in the Korcari Wilds is Andraste's grace or if the game just needed a one-off asset and decided to reuse one they already had. However, in the dark future in DAI, Leliana is found to have unusual tolerance for the taint, and in DAO she talks about her mother pressing her laundry with dried Andraste's grace flowers, so it makes you wonder. Anyway, the flower stops Barkspawn becoming a ghoul and seems to make them immune to the taint from that point on.

Maric's longsword: he finds it in the Deep Roads and is suprised it isn't covered in the same Blight-rot as everything else - until, that is, he touches the sword to a patch of it and sees it wither away. Whether it's the dragonbone the sword is made of or the runes on the blade is difficult to say, though if it was just the dragonbone then it would make sense for that to be a more well-known property of the material (and would have been an interesting reason for why dragons were hunted to extinction). If Alistair carries it with him, doesit slow the progession of the taint through his body? Does he know its effects, and give it to the HoF to help keep them safer on their journey to find a permanent cure?

That obsidian dagger Duncan finds in The Calling: the dagger belonged to First Enchanter Remille - who also gave the expedition members brooches that accelerated the spread of the taint. iirc the both the dagger and the brooches are made by the Architect with Blight magic, which means the darkspawn magisters have more knowledge of how the Blight works than the Chantry attributes to them.

Whatever the fuck is going on with Avernus: he hasn't managed to cure himself yet, but he's managed to make it to 200 and the Warden can let him continue his experiments if they don't kill him - and he'd be a really useful resource if the Warden later wanted to send him other potential cures for testing.

Dragons: they have an ability to isolate the Blight in their bodies by forming crystaline cysts around the initial infection to stop it spreading. Useful if it can be more widely applied. Also, it's implied that Maric's reaver blood, which Calenhad gained by mixing his blood with a dragon's, is what somehow cured Fiona of the taint, kinda like a reverse STI, BUT in the Deep Roads they went through an area where the walls were coated in a pale, chalky substance suspiciously devoid of Blight-rot and she touched it, so I'm a bit suspicious of that.

Blood magic: makes sense since the taint is a problem that starts with infected blood. There are two major instances in DA canon where blood magic has been used to purge the taint from an object or being (both by elves btw). The first is Isseya using it to draw the taint out of a clutch of unhatched griffon eggs, which she says is only possible because the taint hasn't yet taken over the hatchlings' bodies to the same extent that it had with the adult griffons. The second instance is Merrill purging the Blighted eluvian in DA2. It's insane that Anders - who is a reluctant Warden and who possibly knows the HoF seeks a cure - isn't more excited about this. She literally removed the Blight from a fully tainted object. Since Isseya proved the same can be done with living tissue, it's probably the closest we've come to an actual cure, but since it also took years there's no telling if it could be a practicaly solution for all Wardens

[wesslesprout]

Wynne being named after Langwynne in Bannorn and Anders from the Anderfells has me emotional in a certain sort of way because these mages are taken away so young, given a name of a place they can never remember, a home they never had and its almost cruel mocking that their identity is taken from them and then given back as their most identifiable feature.

[sapphodera]

Surprise surprise the Circle is bad but isn’t it so incredibly fucked up that the Tranquil don’t go back to their families. Like the whole point mages get locked up in the tower is so they can’t hurt anyone with their magic, right? But if you’re Tranquil you can’t even like…punch someone. They can only make enchantments, so the Circle uses them as slave labor bc they’re no way they’re paying them. All the Tranquil we see in the games (afaik) are literally slaves of the Circle or someone else, none of them are just chilling in with their parents in Redcliffe or anything. Does the circle even tell their families what happened to them? Imagine your kid gets taken away from you and twenty years later you find out they were lobotomized and and used as a slave and no one let you have them back, despite the fact they were taken away for “your own protection.”

Gaider said they’re “free to leave” but if you’re stripped of all emotion, how can you ever desire to stay or leave anywhere? Why would the Chantry be comfortable using them for labor? Why wouldn’t the Chantry just automatically give them back? Especially since Karl literally proves that the Tranquil can’t control themselves and their actions are not their own!

[vaguely-concerned]

I'm playing through Dragon Age 2 again and I just can't get over how... idk how to say it exactly, but the way you feel, in every moment of this game, how much Varric loves Hawke. It feels entwined with everything, it breathes through every part of the narrative, it blooms diegetigally through the integration of story and gameplay, makes you a co-conspirator in that love in a way maybe only a video game could.

It's in the way I don't think this story is a defense of Hawke only -- or even primarily -- directed at Cassandra, but at Hawke themselves. Beneath everything else going on there's the quiet, utterly unshakable refutation of Hawke's worst fears: Did you think you mattered, Hawke? Did you think anything you ever did mattered? . . . You're a failure, and your family died knowing it. Rising through the story as Varric tells it there's a fiercely tender voice saying: Yes, you did matter. In tragedy or in triumph, for better or for worse, in love or in hate, you always mattered. The ultimate tragedy of Hawke is always right there in the open before the story even starts letting you in on telling it; they couldn't fix anything. They couldn't stop the downward spiral Kirkwall was set on -- the real truth is that no one person ever could. And yet the point of DA2 is that it matters that they tried, and it matters that there were people who loved and were loved along the way, however badly it all failed in the end. Hawke is the Bioware protagonist who succeeds the least, and they're the character who matters the most, to me. (This is also why the Absolution reveal did not shake me in the least haha, my love for Hawke has nothing at all to do with whether they succeeded or failed at anything.)

What Varric is saying, in the only way he seems to be able to say the really real things -- through stories -- is so simple and so fundamental. You were here, and I loved you. There's the emotional heart of it, at the end of it all, that love and grief and recognition. It's so dizzyingly intimate. There's so much distancing, layers upon layers of obfuscation, to be able to say it. It drives me insane!!!! It makes me feel the same way that 'Poem' by Langston Hughes does:

I loved my friend.  He went away from me.  There's nothing more to say.  The poem ends,  Soft as it began,— I loved my friend. 

He loved his friend. They went away from him. What more is there to say. (Many, many, many things, when you're a compulsive liar and storyteller, but hey sometimes you have to deploy a whole armada of lies to tell one simple truth, I understand, I'm a writer too lol)

[transprincecaspian]

Sebastian Vael is actually a very nuanced and complex character if you chew on him for more than five fucking seconds especially when considering his rakish behavior the family pressures and survivor’s guilt all culminating under the religious manipulation of the chantry in this essay I will—

[illusivesoul]

Something I hadn't considered until now is how brutal the mission to kill Jarvia and most of the Carta in Orzammar is for Brosca. I'll never forget the emotional gut punch that was having to fight and kill Leske, who is probably only true friend Brosca has ever had in all their life (I remember desperately searching if there was a dialogue option or something to let him live but there is none), but I also just thought that Brosca must have known most, if not all of those Carta members that we fight through the mission.

And knowing how the casteless are pretty much cut off from the rest of Orzammar's society and most are forced into a life of crime, Brosca must have known and possibly have been friends or at least care for for a lot of the Carta members, and also possibly have worked with them often under orders from Beraht and Jarvia.

Then after becoming a Warden, returning to Orzammar and under orders from either Harrowmont or Bhlen, they have to go to their old home in Dust Town and kill Jarvia (who was alledgely planning to use her growing power in Orzammar to force the Assembly to recognize the rights of the casteless), Leske and pretty much everyone else they knew during their many years growing up and while being a part of the Carta.

Just another bit of tragedy for Brosca's story.

[fade-into-dawn]

thinking about how "fenris" as the character's name was actually a condescending nickname given to him by danarius after losing his memories in the lyrium experiements. how it could have forever marked him as danarius's "little wolf." as a pet. as property.

but since he has no memories of his old life, the name "leto," revealed to be 'his name' by a sister he has no memories of, means nothing to him.

so what does he have?

about a decade of hawke and co. calling him fenris. they know him as fenris their friend, their comrade in arms, possibly their lover (in the case of hawke and/or isabela). he is not the little wolf of his cruel master anymore, but just

Fenris.

[anneapocalypse]

I just can't help feeling that Solas taking Lavellan's vallaslin and then leaving them is so cruel. I know he doesn't mean to be cruel. I know he doesn't even mean to do it like that; he wants to share the truth about himself, and he just can't, and it's that realization that pushes him to end the relationship, because of how close he comes to telling everything to this person he loves. I know that he loves Lavellan and wants to share just one piece of the truth, even if he can't share all of it.

He sees right away how much the revelation about the origins of the blood writing has hurt Lavellan. And if Lavellan pushes back on the idea of removing them, he drops it immediately. He never forces the issue.

But it's still such a sudden decision for Lavellan to make, after such a painful revelation. And what if they do end up regretting it? What's going to happen if they return to their clan, or try to make contact with another if Clan Lavellan has been lost? How will they begin to explain this to their fellow Dalish elves (keeping in mind that they don't yet know who Solas is)?

"I met a lone elven apostate, and it turns out he's a Dreamer, and he told me that one of our most sacred traditions is actually a mark of slavery. And I believed him. And I let him remove my vallaslin."

I think the decision might be easier for Lavellan whose clan is still alive and well, if they know they still have a home and a family to return to. For a Lavellan who has lost everything, their home, their family and friends, who has probably had to fight to maintain their identity and their beliefs in the Inquisition even if they've also made friends and found community--the choice is heartwrenching.

In taking the vallaslin, Solas takes from Lavellan the most obvious sign of Dalish identity, community, culture, and tradition. And then he breaks up with them. Lavellan can't even say "I've lost everything but at least I have you."

Every time I see gifs or videos of that scene, of Solas gently saying, "Ar lasa mala revas," literally I give you your freedom, it just breaks my heart, because I know he means it. I know he wants to give them that.

But what kind of freedom is it? And at what cost?

[miraculan-draws]

If dragon age doctors/healer's are usually mages then I think dentists are usually dwarves. If you have a tooth you need pulled or drilled or capped you go to a dude whos got a magnifying glass and a lyrium and gold grill in his mouth. He has a concerning array of tools but he'll get you fixed up right.

[bleeding-star-heart]

The more I think about DA:2 's ending and read people's thoughts on it here, the more it changes. I've come to the conclusion that while the Watsonian explanation for what Anders does is okay, I cannot say the same of the Doylist explanation. For those who don't understand what that means, a couple definitions. Watsonian: the in-story justification for why something happens or is. Ex. Luke's aunt and uncle are murdered in A New Hope because the Empire was looking for Luke. Doylist: The author's purpose for having something happen or be in a story. Ex. Luke's aunt and uncle die to move the plot forward and help make sure he leaves Tattoine. In other words: the in-universe reason for the Chantry being blown up is clear, but the writers' reasons aren't. Therefore, we are not discussing Anders's motivation. There's plenty of meta for that if you're curious. Instead, we are discussing the writers' motivation for writing it the way they did. One could simply say, 'they needed a conflict for the finale', and have done with it. But that only explains the most bare-bone plot-related reasons. It says nothing about how that plot point relates to the overall message, or how the writers intended Anders to be viewed by the audience. Specifically, I doubt that the writers meant us to view Anders positively. If that was their intention, they would not have written Anders murdering Elthina in a way that involved massive collateral damage and the death of innocents. Those things don't tend to generate goodwill. It's possible they wanted Anders to be viewed as a villain, but in that case, why doesn't DA2 end with an Anders boss fight? No, I suspect that the writers' intention were in the same situation as Marvel movies with politically progressive villains. Namely, the ones the audience ends up agreeing with to the point they're in danger of losing their status as villains. Only, instead of it being a single character, the writers had this problem with the concept of mage rights as a whole. Namely, modern people are generally against depriving people of their freedoms/rights. They're especially against doing so because of something the person can't control or doing it to a whole group because only some members of that group are bad. Therefore, most players will probably agree with Anders that the Circles are indeed bad. Especially players from real-life marginalized groups. It's the same deal as X-Men, except that X-Men understands and ANTICIPATES that the audience is on the side of the X-Men. DA:2, on the other hand...not so much. So, I suspect Anders blowing up the Chantry was the writers doing what Marvel writers often do: make the left-wing villain inexplicably do something nasty in order to have them retain their villain status. Or, in this case, have the most prominent activist do something bad so that the mage rights cause looks equal to the Templar point of view. And, like in the case of Marvel, it doesn't really work. Anders blowing up the Chantry doesn't make the Templars look right. As a matter of fact, the in-universe explanation explicitly relies upon the fact that it doesn't! And that is why I cannot say the writers' reason to write Anders do what he does makes sense. Mainly because I don't believe the writers had a reason. In other words, I believe Anders was done dirty by the finale.

[laurelsofhighever]

Lothering is such a fascinating place. It’s the arse-end of nowhere. It’s the last bastion of civilisation beforethe Wilds. Chasind aren’t welcome. Everyone from the headwoman to the templars possibly have Chasind ancestry. It has a tiny chantry but a whole contingent of templars. It has one pub. It has a library that multiple people think holds the key to ancient lost knowledge. It’s so out of the way that both Leliana and Malcolm Hawke think it’s a good place to avoid notice. It has no defences. People won’t leave for anywhere safer. It’s lost before you even set foot in it.

[ladyofc]

The real reason Lavellan loves Solas isn't for the fact of being an Elvhen God or because he's basically an Elvhen Prince.

It's because he's silly!

I mean think about it, this aloof apostate comes into your life at a time when you have a weird mark in your hand and the things he talks about are now normalized with a breech in the sky. He jokes (albeit sarcastic) but he sets his coat tails on fire! He gets easily flustered by Lavellan and by spirit (sex) related questions! He fumbles his lies so badly it's laughable!

When there's multiple paths, he takes the one of most resistance! not because he's dumb, it's because hes so smart hes stupid!

He's Lavellan's court jester!

Imagine Solas making Lavellan laugh again after 8 years apart, seeing them smile and giggle. A sound that could make all the Dread Wolf's worries disappear for just a moment...

[justcallmecappy]

Exploring the missed potential of Anders' character

Anders was an interesting character with a backstory and a set of characteristics that would have been amazing if explored further, but I believe his character's potential was tragically squandered by bad narrative choices and poor writing.

Here's a list of how I think his narrative potential hadn't been fully explored:

His name really isn't "Anders" -- it was a name given to him when he arrived at the circle at age 12 and was so traumatized he refused to speak, not even to say his name. BioWare has never revealed Anders' birth name. We also know that he has Anderfels heritage on his father's side, who migrated to Ferelden as a boy. It could have been revealed, through his birth name, that he has some connection to an Anderfels-related plotline: he could be related to the First Warden, or his family could have prominence or influence in the Grey Wardens of Weisshaupt.

Anders is a mage, a Grey Warden, and a host to a Spirit of Justice. This combination of spirit healing (already a rare branch of magic), Blight magic, and a connection to a Spirit of the Fade has never occurred before in known canon. Anders being connected to the mages, the Circle, the Grey Wardens, the darkspawn, and Fade Spirits means that there is a whole world of possibilities to explore with that combination, so many things you could do with his character.

Leveraging off Anders' connection with Justice, a potential key to finding the cure for the Calling could have involved possession by a Fade Spirit. (We already know Fade Spirits are essential to curing Tranquility -- perhaps there's more we could do with that.)

Anders could potentially be a companion to both the Hero of Ferelden and the Champion of Kirkwall, depending on your World State. If your HoF didn't die during the Archdemon battle and continued to Amaranthine, Anders (together with Justice) is the only NPC companion who has traveled with both the HoF and Hawke, and is also a potential love interest to Hawke. (Zevran and Isabela also are NPCs acquainted with both the HoF and Hawke, but only Anders has been a party companion for both.)

Anders could potentially be the only known Grey Warden to have met both the Architect and Corypheus.

Anders could have potentially have battled demons in the Fade three times: his Harrrowing, the Blackmarsh sequence in DA Awakening, and the "Night Terrors" Feynriel rescue mission in DA2. Considering these experiences, plus the fact he has his own in-built Spirit GPS in the form of Justice to help him navigate the Fade, Anders has the highest potential to be the one to rescue Hawke/Stroud/Loghain/Alistair from the Fade (if left there in DAI and has the potential to be rescued).

Anders may have political connections to the throne of Ferelden, if Alistair was made King, and was present at and endorsed Anders' conscription into the Wardens.

If your Warden was Mahariel, Anders would have a common connection with Merrill. If your Warden was Amell, Anders could have an extra connection to Hawke, having known their relative. A Warden Amell or Surana could also have an added layer of their relationship with Anders, having grown up in the same Circle together. (Anders just has a lot of connections to famous people and an extensive network that would have made everyone on LinkedIn jealous, is what I'm sayin 😆)

Anders being a prominent figure in the mage rebellion could also have been explored further -- especially in relations to Fiona, who was coincidentally another mage advocating for mage freedom and with a connection to the Grey Wardens and Alistair.

I just think it's tragic that Anders had so much potential -- arguably one of the characters with the most potential in the overall plot -- and yet BioWare squandered all that potential to push their brand of "grey morality".

The narrative and writing could have framed Anders as a heroic character -- it would have been so easy, the chances were right there -- which would have opened up the chance to explore the potential of his character further in subsequent works, but instead in DAI, BioWare doubled down on slandering his character to drive the point home that he was a villain, and closing off further exploration of his character post DA2.