How would you stretch "being born tranquil" into actual DA canon? I've always found that such a wild card thing included in DAL because presumably, you would get something like the templars making a literal newborn baby tranquil.
heh i was hoping someone would ask me about this. this will probably be a bit rambly because i havent tried explaining it in any depth before, so bear with me...
i completely agree that it makes no sense for eiton to literally be born tranquil, because tranquility is a process that is done to someone. but i also dont think he was made tranquil as a baby, nor do i think he was actually tranquil.
the doylist reading here is just that the DAL writers werent thinking too deeply about the lore, but that's not interesting so im gonna take the characters at their word instead.
my interpretation is that eiton was born without a connection to the fade, and i think it's reasonable that other characters would refer to that as tranquility because it's unheard of otherwise. especially considering his father was a templar, it would be an easy connection to make when he had no emotions, no dreams, etc.
while his mother, iselle, was pregnant with him, she helped kill a very powerful pride demon (it might be relevant that she dealt the final blow and/or that she used blood magic to do so). instead of being destroyed, the demon's soul shattered and embedded itself into five other beings. i dont know if it directly embedded itself into eiton, or if it was originally in iselle and moved into him when she died giving birth to him, but the result was the same.
im still trying to work out exactly how the events at the end of the game actually panned out (if there were five shards, that means there wasnt one in the emissary, so why was it leading the horde and directing the other vessels? i havent thought too deeply about it, so i'll have to do that sometime), but once the demon is nearly destroyed and eiton is the only remaining vessel, that part of its soul finally activates and he becomes an abomination. he says that if you kill him, he can bind the demon in the fade.
while this clearly wasnt the devs' intention because it wasnt known lore at the time, it makes sense that his 'tranquility' would be reversed when he was possessed. that could also be kinda reverse-engineered as the reason why an inert demon's soul might make him 'tranquil' in the first place; he was born with a very direct connection to the fade, but it was switched off until the demon actually manifested.
