here lies the abyss

the setup for the sebastian and hawke dynamic is just so delightful to me like there’s sebastian wrestling with whether or not taking revenge was the right thing and if he should follow on that path or turn back to the chantry and meanwhile you are not an uninvolved party you are literally the mercenary he hired to do the murder of the mercenaries (who were themselves paid to kill his family! you’re the same!), you were the unflinching blade in his hands here, and yet he has no moral judgement on you or in fact anything but admiration really. sebastian ur perspective on violence and when it’s okay will always bewilder and enthrall me

i feel like da2 cullen is interesting because you don't know whether he's complicit or incompetent or whether it even matters which one he is. can you really be second in command and agree with alrik that more mages should be made tranquil while not knowing the reason he seems to focus on giving the brand to pretty young women? can you stand in the gallows all day and not hear people talk about beatings and templars visiting their rooms at night? can you oversee all these people and honestly say you had no idea what they were doing? he's second in command, maybe meredith could control him a little but he wasn't entirely powerless. and then dai refusing to engage with da2's themes of sexual abuse is kind of understandable since it's a less heavy game but it makes it feels extremely weird and bad when it paints him as your cute bumbling commander who works too hard and feels a little bad about his past vague discomfort with magic.

rule of thumb: everything in dai is a scrapped da2 dlc. anything that is not is bioware copying skyrim. and anything that is not either of those is from dnd again

the prologue? exalted march dlc. horses? skyrim. champions of the just? exalted march dlc. what pride had wrought/the final piece? exalted march dlc. the mage/templar conflict? skyrim. here lies the abyss? dude that's literally just a thematic rehash of legacy. sera? exalted march dlc. the red templars? exalted march dlc. solas? dnd.