what did ivar choose to do with loghain?
i went ahead with my plan to have alistair do the duel (in which case alistair immediately kills him)
i considered sparing loghain a lot while i was playing ivar, because ivar too was recruited at his lowest point in order to find redemption with the grey wardens. he then recruited sten on those same grounds. so shouldnât he do the same for loghain? but i feel like... i feel like the point of ivar is that when it comes down to it, when it gets complicated, heâs not the warden that duncan was. heâs not capable of those hard grey warden choices and bold moves. he makes compromises, he takes easier options, he lets things slide for the people he personally cares about. i tend to limit him and not let him pull off anything extraordinary, kind of in opposition to my usual tendency to overpower my ocs a bit and make them extremely socially and politically capable of getting the Best Ending. i think ivar is more endearing and easier to empathise with because he never gets a clear uncontested win, he just kind of scrapes by. the point is that heâs not cut out for this; the accident of his birth simply gave him advantages in becoming an exemplary fighter & a reasonably charismatic speaker. otherwiseâpersonally, intellectually, morallyâhe is not special. Just Some Guy
it felt more accurate to his character to follow the common course of the story and let alistair go ahead than it did to make this big dramatic move and win over the antagonist and sacrifice a friend for a principle. ivarâs choices shouldnât be grand or surprising like that, they should be fairly âstandardâ and mostly okay but also lose a little on all sides. so he lets loghain die and thus keeps alistair happy, but now discomfort quietly seeps into their relationship bc would alistair have passed the same judgement on ivar as he did on loghain if theyâd met under different circumstances. he makes anora queen like she wanted, but she has to stand up and take it over her fatherâs dead body. it was a really haunting moment because in my head i had fleshed out bhelenâs death and how ivar had to numbly express faith in a newly crowned harrowmont with his little brotherâs savaged body right there on the floor and his blood on his hands, and i got this sense of deja vu watching anora basically play out the scene i had imagined. the way they have the blood spray over her face. he connected to her so much there and will never have the right to say it because he let it go that way. it certainly didnât feel victorious. which is the intended ivar feeling i guess!
