ad astra

the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: i was on committees with the duke of norfolk. and they beheaded me.

the postcard of thomas cromwell i keep on my desk: oh no! you achieved too much fame and status? and now people are misrepresenting you? should we strip your lands and title? have you been beheaded?

Dragon Age: Origins is a Dark Fantasy (specifically, Bioware described it originally as Dark Heroic Fantasy). It has its light-hearted moments, but almost every single main questline is steeped in horror, in injustice, in facing the fact that the world is cruel and full of oppression and injustices. There are glimmers of hope, and we are given the opportunity to right some of these wrongs, but the game is still - at the end of the day - interested in being a Dark Fantasy. This is why the world-building is the way that it is. Our elves aren't like other fantasy elves, they've lost their history and are oppressed by humans. Our mages aren't respected and revered like other fantasy magic users: they're discriminated against and put in glorified prisons. Our dwarves don't have a thriving society overflowing with wealth: they're dying out and are clinging to a caste system that leaves most of the population disenfranchised with no way out. The game does interesting things with all of these world-building points, but all of these choices are in service of the Dark Fantasy genre.

Dragon Age 2, for all its faults, continues this trend. Hawke's story is a tragedy. They lose potentially both their siblings and their mother, and they are ultimately helpless to save Kirkwall. They are surrounded by persecution and oppression that they are exempt from in Act 2 onward due to their privilege as a wealthy human, and there is nothing they can do to utilize that privilege to aid the people around them. The elves still suffer. The mages are tortured and oppressed. Dragon Age 2 very much still lives in Dark Fantasy.

And then Dragon Age: Inquisition rolled around, and it felt...different. Markedly different. Suddenly the game wasn't interested in being Dark Fantasy anymore: it's a power trip. You're the leader of a powerful, militant religious organization and you get to command armies and conquer lands in the name of the Inquisition. The oppression is still there, but the game is much less interested in examining it in a meaningful way. Whereas in Origins your background allowed you new perspectives to the world, Inquisition's various backgrounds changed little other than what people called you. Yes, the Inquisitor can be discriminated against at the Winter Palace and can experience micro-aggression from various NPCs, but that's...it. There's no hard look at the Alienages, no further examining of the caste system in Orzammar, and the mages's struggles are swept aside in favor of "both sides"ing the argument with the Templars. Because in this game, we are now the institutional corruption. But the game can't examine that, not really, because it is no longer interested in being Dark Fantasy. Inquisition is closer to High Fantasy: it's about building your army, about fighting cool dragons, about feeling powerful and heroic and fighting the Evil Wizard Magister. It's about courtly intrigue, about showing up and looking cool, about getting to mess in another country's politics with zero repercussions, because we're the Inquisition. Our villains are no longer pillars of corrupt institutions, but extremist outliers.

And then, ten years later, we get Veilguard, which is not interested in being Dark Fantasy at all. It's all about building your team, about being scrappy heroes against impossible odds (though at least this time we're not forced to be the figurehead of an imperialist religious organization). There are some moments of horror, but the overall tone of the game is not Dark Fantasy. Which is why there is no real engagement with Tevinter's institutional corruption, with its long-held practice of slavery. This is why the game rips the Antaam away from the Qun and pretends like they were the only problematic aspect of it. This is why there's no true examination of how elves are oppressed or of the caste system in Orzammar.

And here is where the issue lies, not just with Veilguard, but with the series as a whole. Because these institutional evils that Origins initially placed before us were never meant to be challenged, not really. The Warden can make things better for their community if they so choose, but the level of influence they can have over the institutions in play is very small. But that's fine, they had an Archdemon to kill. But as the games progress, as we start to move further and further away from the Dark Fantasy genre, we also start to move away from seriously examining the corrupt institutions at play.