Wardens Champions Inquisitors OHMY

kristjanson writes a lesbian, and gives you absolutely no opportunity to extend her kindness or empathy: sera is marginalised across several dimensions, both in- and out of-of-universe, as an elf, as neurodivergent, as a lesbian, and her romance is marked by scenes you are intended to read as hysterical, irrational, unreasonable. your reward for being interested in a neurodivergent lesbian is getting shouted at, having a bow pointed at you, don't you regret this? and again, in mass effect - you romanced Black man and he leaves you without a word, he takes up with another woman and starts a family behind your back, what did you expect?

kristjanson's writing is so full of racist, homophobic, bigoted tropes that are levelled against the player and the romance in a way that feels like punishment, like he wants to make sure no-one (no woman) can have a joyful, fulfilling relationship with a marginalised person, like you don't deserve to be successful in these relationships without conditions. and i love a difficult, unconventional, even tragic romance in games, but in contrast to the treatment the other romances get it is notable to me that kristjanson singles out the lesbian and the Black man for treatment that not only punishes the characters involved but leans heavily on stereotypes particular to those groups.

“Me? I’m no one. Lived near Redcliffe all my life. Herded sheep for my neighbor. When the Inquisition came through my village, I helped by telling them everything I knew about the area. Then I signed on. Wanted to see the world before it was swallowed up by… that thing out there.”

anyone can offer you a chance to see the world. adventure, beautiful foreign sights, respect for your skill, status when you go home, community and camaraderie among your fellow fighters. chances that you might never usually get as an ‘ordinary’ person, in this case living in a rural area as a (fantasy) minority. honestly for me the whole “get out there and see the world!” thing specifically evokes the real world evil of like, classic military recruitment rhetoric. it’s all a big adventure! never mind what you’ll be doing and who you’ll be doing it to.

and our first sight of harding is a confident smirk when she kills. (which we’re supposed to feel fine about and maybe think that she’s a #girlboss, because remember the mages and templars are Crazy, so killing them indiscriminately is fine. but let’s imagine dai is a serious game.) she obviously took very easily to violence in the inquisition’s name before she’d met any of the inquisition’s leaders, before the inquisition had a real direction, and before they had a simple-to-justify, no-longer-human enemy like corypheus. if she could be convinced to do all that by the inquisition’s scouts, then why not anyone else offering the same things? why not an inquisition that was actually, you know, an inquisition?

despite leading with wanting to see the world and not even mentioning any kind of moral motivation, harding definitely perceives herself as a good person and i don’t think she would go for anything that didn’t have a veneer of righteousness. she takes pride in the inquisition and what she believes to be its purpose. but any organisation can say they’re doing it for the good and order and stability of the world, right. any organisation can pass you that message through a recruiter who at least sounds like they believe it. and as a scout on the ground you’re so far from the war table that you will never really know why the people directing you are making their decisions. and you opt to kill whoever they tell you to kill anyway. even in some impossibly hypothetical world where those decisions are all just and measured and necessary, can it ever possibly be moral to just hand over your conscience like that? to kill blindly because those are your orders?

i feel like harding’s narrative veers so closely to real world recruitment rhetoric that i don’t just find it uninteresting to be like Yay It All Worked Out :), i find it Bad. this is not heroic when it happens in real life and i don’t think it should be heroic here. i know i’m in the genre where Pure And Honourable Warfare Of Our Innocent Boys And Girls Against Inhuman Monsters or Perhaps The Inherently Evil Foreign Horde of Baddies is virulently everywhere but i think that’s precisely why we should be aware and critical of it and thinking around it not just accepting it as fact you know

Solas and Sera insult Lavellan’s culture and religious beliefs, and rejects the player for trying to talk to them about being elven.

And while Varric isn’t as hostile to Cadash as the others are, it is very clear that he harbours his own insecurities and the game doesn’t let you have any lines at all about it, save in the beginning when you are identified as Carta, and that is it. Save some lines about «real dwarves» in Hissing Wastes.

But it is an internalised coping method for himself so that he doesn't get super attached and burnt just like he did with the da2 gang. I mean. Look no further to how Sera calls him out on this one.

Like it's kinda crazy the roles Varric fulfills in DAI all the way to WARNING LOVE INTERESTS THE INQUISITOR IS A BAD IDEA just like Wynne does in dao. He's literally so damaged and the ghosts of Kirkwall follow him everywhere and he's SO aware of what it means to follow a hero and let yourself care about them and their friends.

I mean, think about it. He killed Mythal. He killed Felassan. Clearly he is not above killing even the people he loves best, the very last remnants of the world he's supposedly in this to save at that, if their survival might get in the way of his plans! You can talk about how much he cares for high approval Quiz, or even how much he loves Lavellan in a Sol@vellan (censored to keep it out of the tags) worldstate, but love demonstrably would not stop him if he determined Quiz to be a threat! He does not love them more than Mythal (he really, really doesn't love them more than he loves Mythal, Christ on a bike the amount of shit he does for Mythal and then refuses to accept her culpability for the fallout of is insane), he does not love them more than Felassan, he does not have more reason to spare them when they say they're going to stop him (whether peacefully or by force) than he did those two, but he still does even if he hates them. Now Solas doesn't like killing (he just has no concept of what counts as actual necessity or willingness to stop when he's going to kill most of Thedas), so it makes sense he wouldn't want them dead if he could avoid it, but if he saw them as a threat he would not spare Quiz where he didn't spare Mythal or Felassan. He's not going to spare a Quiz he hates who's vowing to stop him at all costs where he killed the last remnants of the world he wants to save... unless of course he doesn't think they actually can stop him.

“Whatever happens, I wouldn’t trade the years we’ve had together for anything. I love you.”

in both DA2 and ME, the dialogue options you choose always come with defined expectations. the top is your paragon/helpful option, the bottom is the renegade/aggressive option and the middle is either a neutral ground (ME) or your best attempt to make light of what's going on (DA2). picking the top option, you know that your character is going to act diplomatic and/or sympathetic, and you know that you are going to be straight-forward/aggressive/a jerk with the bottom one (context does matter for these too ofc, but that's the general idea). the paraphrases in these games aren't always perfect, but their system allows you to both define the protagonist's typical behaviour and switch out of the usual pattern when you feel like the situation demands for it. isn't it lovely to have a paragon Shepard snap once in a while? to have a purple Hawke take something uncharacteristically seriously? even if the game isn't rigged to acknowledge the shift in personality, you as the player know what you are doing and what it means for your character.

and Veilguard options, well, they are Not Like That. you no longer have easy reliance on top = I'm trying to be nice, bottom = I'm not trying to be nice to assist with your attempts at roleplaying. both the top/affable option and the bottom/stoic option developed a wider range of meaning (not necessarily a bad thing) that also comes with reduced clarity due to the paraphrases not being able to convey the full intent of their respective dialogue options (kind of a bad thing imo). sarcastic option is back by popular demand, but isn't even always the funniest thing you can say in a given conversation. aggressive and sad options will make occasional cameos allowing your Rook to unlock extra emotional range for a minute, but it's not always clear how they compare to choosing the affable or stoic ones.

this creates frequent situations where the paraphrases, emotion icons or positions of dialogue choices do not yield sufficient insight into what Rook is actually going to say. that, in turn, can make it feel like you are both incapable of roleplaying Rook the way you see them, and that Rook doesn't have anything meaningful to say in most conversations. everything feels samey because you are barely aware both of the option you are choosing, and what connotations other options could come with.

Good thing you asked because I've actually thought about it before 😎

I can't imagine a lot of Qunari would find it comfortable to sleep on their side (just about 90% of horn types would get in the way of that) or their backs (unless you lucked out to have fully straight horns like the Iron Bull). So, my favourite interpretation and the one that makes the most sense To Me is that they sleep face down.

Par Vollen would likely have accommodations to make it comfortable, using something similar to the pillows for sleeping face down we have in our modern era. They have this hole you can stick your face into, and I believe those pillows could be further adjusted for an individual's horn type. Or, since DAVG explained to us that horns regrow, maybe the most "tricky" horn types would be regularly trimmed for the user's convenience to make sleeping easier (I also headcanon horns to be kind of like nails where you don't really feel that much when they get cut down, so it'd be a painless procedure).

Qunari outside Par Vollen probably wouldn't have easy access to those pillows, if at all. Also very fun for me to think about Qunari characters growing up away not just from Par Vollen, but any Tal Vashoth or any familiar with the Qunari way of life and being completely unaware something like that even exists and having to just power through the discomfort because they don't know any alternatives ٩(✿＾◡＾)۶

(thinking mostly about Qunari Rook de Rivas and Mercars here)

Another thing worth considering is the headrests that were historically used instead of pillows in certain cultures. I'm the most familiar with the Japanese culture by way of my degree, so I'm thinkinng about Takamukra/Hakomakura in particular, but afaik similar headrests were used in Egypt as well, and I'm sure other places, too.

The purposes of such pillows was to allow sleeping without disturbing hairstyles that took a long time to put together. I'm not sure how explicitly comfortable those would be, but they would get the job done for the horn types that don't curl down towards the sides of the face (like these).

Something like that!!

A very nice read, with some parts of it I enjoyed below!