#i dont rlly care to confirm or deny an absolute moral stance of my own on this bc like who cares this is abt Storytelling

[vigilskeep]

Why & how did minerva come to betray alistair? What was her thinking behind it?

oh i mean in the sense that she spares loghain at the landsmeet! i guess it’s up for debate if that is a betrayal and minerva would certainly argue it wasn’t (no matter any second thoughts she will not admit to having). but alistair takes it as a betrayal and it uhhh serves as one narratively if that makes any sense. betrayal is a heavily repeated theme in dao esp w mage origin included, so i’m having all that kind of build up to this choice. to briefly summarise a complicated moment, minerva jumps at the chance to spare loghain because she’s characteristically very concerned with reputation/how all this will go down in history. she hates what the guy has done, but for her, that’s beside the point. she’s too pragmatic to truly see the purpose of revenge and has absolutely no desire to be remembered as the elven mage who killed the hero of river dane. she’s been worried about that the whole time with the civil war and suddenly there’s this shining opportunity to, idk, have her cake and eat it too! great! an excellent compromise to bring ferelden together! she could never have refused

alistair’s refusal to accept the decision completely takes her by surprise. she’s good with people but she often misses motivations going on under the surface, and she had no real idea how set he was on revenge. even if she had understood that, she’s never failed to persuade him of anything before. he’s literally here to take a crown and wife he never wanted because she convinced him both were the right thing to do. of course she knew he would hate to see loghain spared, but she never even imagined there were possible circumstances under which he would go as far as to abandon her to end the blight alone, let alone that it would be for this. she feels pretty betrayed herself, i suppose that’s a matter of perspective. from her side, the fact is that the world is under threat, ferelden is under threat, and he walks. and he thinks she’s the one who betrayed the honour and purpose of the grey wardens?

ironically his response couldn’t be better designed to lock her decision in. minerva chronically can’t take criticism, which goes double for being in front of the whole landsmeet, and the ‘grey warden honour’ argument infuriates her when he knows full well what kind of magic she’s had to turn to. what’s him having to spare one man’s life compared to what she’s had to sacrifice already? the grey wardens don’t fight for honour, they fight to win, no matter the moral scruples, no matter the recruits they have to take! this is what duncan would have done! and minerva’s never had even the remotest possibility of justice being done to anyone who’s hurt her or the people she cared about, so frankly alistair can just cope, like everybody else! to be honest having him turn on her like that in public pulls up a fair bit of the resentment for alistair’s templar background she’d long since made the effort to bury. unfair or not, to her ears, to her defensiveness, in his idealistic perspective on the wardens she can’t help but hear a templar’s commitment to self-righteousness, and she’s no longer the kind of person who can back down when faced with that. this really has nothing to do with alistair’s objections but with the life she’s lived if he goes against her she’s incapable of not seeing it as suddenly templar v mage and reacting accordingly. she’s very defensive of the decision and wouldn’t be capable of admitting fault later, not outside of the privacy of her own head