Every time I go through DA:I, I spend more and more time thinking about the world-building surrounding Blackwall, about the society they set him into, and particularly about Orlais and âthe gameâ and what a young man from the Freemarches with a traumatic past was running away from, and running into. As a side character, the amount of material you get is sparse but nearly every line that comes out of his mouth in the dialogue between him & your inquisitor seems to have a purpose. Chee didnât waste much ink.
I donât think Blackwall was completely naive in his youth, but I donât know if he really understood, as a foreigner, just precisely what he was getting wrapped up in when he joined the Orlesian military, in terms of the cynical and merciless politics of the court that he was suddenly an instrument of. There was no way he was ever going to be able to keep his hands clean, the question was always what crimes he was going to end up committing, not whether or not he would, short of leaving Orlais altogether. Itâs not a society that readily spares innocence.
Itâs easy to view Blackwallâs sins in a vacuum, as purely a series of shitty and disastrous decisions that a single individual made, and thatâs not without justification - he wasnât a child and he knew he was leading his men into an ambush that would end in death for a noble, even if he had no idea that said nobleâs family would be present - but I think it saps the situation of a lot of its narrative power (and a lot of nuance) to ignore what actually led someone who, on a fundamental level, is actually a fairly sensitive and empathetic individual, to harden himself to the point he could lead men under his command to commit murder and then run for it afterward. Itâs such a stark contrast to the quiet, thoughtful, and subtly pious personality youâre presented with in the game dialogue, you really do have to wonder just what the hell happened to him in Orlais to lead him to such an act of cruelty, because I donât think his basic personality was ever really that different from what you see - more that heâd learned to cut off parts of himself.
âCriminals are made, not bornâ he tells the recruits in the first scene you see him in. He kneels down to look at one of the bandits after the skirmish, shaking his head in regret. Does he see himself in these âsorry bastardsâ? I think itâs very likely.Â
The character and his entire story are at least in part a commentary on society & justice, I think. Not that crimes should go unpunished, but that larger injustices in society shouldnât be ignored any more than the individual. If you pardon him, he spends his time in prisons ministering to those he finds there, trying to show them that they may not be able to change the past, but they can still do better in the future - he spends his time finding those discarded by society and, in a small way, trying to salvage that wreckage.
I know not everyone is going to find Blackwall an interesting story or even remotely sympathetic as a character, even in this context, but I think it should at least be considered before judging the merit of the character & what his story was trying to say.