#mage freedom

In Dragon Age 2 Anders writes a manifesto, and in Dragon Age: Inquisition we can find a part of it on the Storm Coast. As I have never found the full text of the manifesto, I took the liberty to write it myself.

Chapter 29: Choice (Reprise)

Theresa and her forces enact their plan to rescue the captured mages.

“Quiet down!” a guard shouted, making me jump. I’d been so focused on the mages I hadn’t noticed his proximity. The boy’s bravery quickly evaporated, and he ducked his head. But I, who’d spent too many years cowering beneath steel-edged scrutiny, stared him down. A mistake. I didn’t match the cowed and beaten expressions surrounding me. The guard stepped closer, studying me through the narrow visor of his helm. Shit, I thought. Shit, shit, shit, shit. Too late, I averted my gaze and tried to look meek. I both heard and felt his approach until his looming frame filled my vision. A hand roughly took hold of my chin to lift my face. Panic and revulsion swelled in me like a cresting wave, and it took every ounce of my willpower not to violently shove him away. I held myself still, enduring the violation of his hand on me. My shudder was involuntary, and soon became shivering, my entire body so tightly wound that it began to vibrate. My breathing caught up with my pulse. My vision swam. Hatred seethed beneath the surface as I tried not to wonder what cruelties that hand had inflicted. How many of my peers’ lives stained it. Which verses of the Chant he’d recited to justify them. My palm ignited, threatening to betray me. Behind me, Solas gripped my hand in his, trying to cover it. But the guard had seen, realization slowly dawning. Time slowed to a crawl, as if I was trapped in one of Alexius’ time rifts, as the Templar drew in breath to shout. I had failed. I’d given us away, and now all of these mages would be sacrificed. And I along with them. But before he could voice the warning on his tongue, a shrieking cry filled the night air. I looked up, following the sound to a winged shadow streaking across the sky. A hawk in flight. Taeris’ hawk. Our signal. “Now!” Solas shouted.

And they can’t condone the act, even when they recognize that Anders “had a good reason”. Arguments are generally “I agree with the purpose but not with the action”, “blowing up a palace is too extreme”, “by doing that, Anders turned into Meredith”, “he’s as bad as the Templars”. 

It could be argued that there is no in-game validation for hundreds of people dying. That only a bunch of Chantry-folk exploded with the building - we’re talking about 20 to 30 casualties here - and that the bomb was limited to the building and collateral damage wasn’t excessive. 

It could also be argued that Anders had no choice. He tried for six years to peacefully petition for mage rights, he wrote his manifesto, he smuggled fugitives out of the Gallows and sheltered them in the clinic. He healed the poor and the sick in Darktown.  After six years, the whole province was under Templar dictatorship, and Meredith had already requested Annulment directly to Orlais. It’s not like Anders could have done anything else. 

But let’s get real, and admit that it's understandable that the "grand" gesture of blowing up a building leaves people “conflicted”, prompting them to shook their heads in disbelief, and blame Anders of being “the real bad guy”. Why? But because that’s exactly how the game is trying to sell it. 

There's some narrative there. Just look at how that building explodes. Two big columns of light converging, ominous music. The camera zooming on the terrified people inside, helpless as the world around them becomes a burning blast of white/red destructive magic. 

It’s horrifying to watch, especially because it takes after a very dark chapter of real world history, and the first-run players witness it wide eyed, shocked as they couldn’t fathom such a sheer amount of destruction falling onto the city they learned to love through three Acts of Dragon Age 2. But let’s also consider the fact that for those three Acts, what the player does is pretty much kill people. There are a few missions where the foes are only monsters - such as those on Sundermount and the Bone Pit - but for the most part, Hawke and their merry band of misfits spend their time together slaughtering men and women, old and young, named or unnamed.

Some could say that these people “attacked first”, but that’s surely not always the case: in a lot of instances it’s people minding their own business, and Hawke barging in to put an end to it, for a reason or another. In some others, the player decides that a person/group of people can’t simply walk away, therefore they kill them or prompt a companion to do it.

During the first time skip, the player can also decide to have Hawke work as a mercenary, and they do so for an entire year. A mercenary by definition - as also seen with the first mission - kills people for money.

 Moreover, there are a lot of routes the player can take that allow pretty bad stuff to happen.

Some examples: If Hawke sides with the Templars, they get to butcher a group of mages and their families, as they were about to flee Kirkwall.  If the player allows Ser Karras’ group to get to the Starkhaven apostates in Act 1, some mages get murdered and Karras rapes Alain.  The player can also have Feynriel turn into an Abomination if so they wish, which prompts Arianni to kill herself, and leads to a ton of awful things happening in Kirkwall. Not to mention that if you say the wrong thing to the Dalish hunters after Marethari’s death, you end up wiping out the Sabrae clan in its entirety. And that you can literally sell a person into slavery - not a random person, one of your companions. 

 Hawke definitely kills a lot of people during the game. Innocents or not, involved or not, for one reason or another, petty or serious, for money and glory or for a good cause. Varric makes a rough count at some point in Act 2, and by then it's already around 250 deaths, speaking only of those Varric witnessed firsthand.

All of this gets a free morality pass from the game.

Sure, sometimes other NPCs judge you for your actions, but there’s no single occasion where the game presents Hawke’s choices as unforgivable, ominous or inhuman. There’s no single occasion where the game shows a cutscene of “helpless innocents” dying at Hawke’s hand, which stays forever burned into the player’s mind.

Then Anders blows up the Chantry.

He blows up the symbol of centuries’ worth of abuse and oppression, which has the whole Kirkwall province under Templar dictatorship, which never once in game has done anything remotely useful for the poor and the sick of Darktown. Which spawned and empowered people like Petrice, which allowed Templars like Ser Alrik to rise in the ranks, which orchestrated the murder of the Viscount’s heir and provoked the Qunari enough to have them almost destroy Kirkwall.

Anders blows up the Chantry, Elthina dies alongside a bunch of chantry-folk, and the game gives you THAT scene. That terrible, horrifying scene which screams “WRONG”, yelling that it doesn’t matter what mages have suffered and are still suffering, it doesn’t matter that they’re all about to die because Meredith already called Annulment, nothing matters anymore: this is just unacceptable.

Forget about everything else Anders did in those six years. Forget about the clinic, the manifesto, the friendship or love he shares with Hawke. Anders is unforgivable now, the game itself is telling you he’s a monster. That he went too far. “He put a bomb into a building full of innocent people”. In a world such as Thedas, “innocent people” dying for a reason or another is a daily occurrence.  Mages dying on a whim of their Templar captors is a daily occurrence. Mages ripped away from their families as children, locked up, abused, raped, beaten, lobotomized.

And they’re innocent too. All the victims of Chantry brutality are innocent to some degree, but all of this too is completely wiped out by that short cutscene.

The Chantry explodes, Elthina and her subordinates die, and people blame Anders for rebelling instead of blaming the Chantry for everything else.  Even if Anders tried peacefully for six years. Even if he was one single man against that colossal institution of oppression and abuse of every race and culture, which brainwashed almost an entire continent into mindlessly following their “divine law”. The game yells that “killing innocent people” is wrong.

I yell that no Chantry-folk in Kirkwall was innocent.

Even if I put the bloody, murderous history of the Chantry aside, if one allows law enforcements to rape and kill, one is not innocent. Elthina and her cronies were the most complicit of them all.

 It’s 2019. Stop blaming the victims of abuse, and stop buying into BioWare’s narrative of “innocent people dying”, purposely intended to villainize and shame the one person who dared to stand up against systemic oppression, giving a voice to all the mages whose cries were snuffed out.

It is lore-established that countless innocent people died because of the Chantry - in the seventeen Rights of Annulment pulled in Thedosian history, in the Exalted Marches, in the systemic erasure of Dalish and Chasind culture. That innocent people die every day of starvation in the alienages and in the city slums, and in the Circles when Templars decide to kill or lobotomize them.

 Innocent people don’t live in a luxurious palace in the most opulent part of the city, so coated in gold that it could buy the whole Free Marches.

Innocent people don’t have an army of brainwashed zealots to enforce their laws, kept on a leash by drug addiction.

Innocent people don’t preach and empower centuries of abuse perpetrated upon others, whose only fault is being born different.

It’s a pity, Sweeney thinks, that Irving won’t let the girl go.

Normally he can’t be bothered to concern himself overmuch with the apprentices. And it’s certainly not that he’s fond of any of them. Best not to get too attached while they’re still unHarrowed. He’s seen too many not come out the other end of that, at least not as--well, that’s really about the same as not coming out at all in the end, isn’t it? So he does not care for the apprentices. But the ones who laugh at the things he mutters that he shouldn’t say out loud at all, instead of staring at him in abject horror and searching around for a lurking templar--well, it’s not fondness, he assures himself, but maybe there’s just a little soft spot for those few. Neria Surana, whose shameless cackle is sure to draw templars if there weren’t any around before. Anders, who occasionally forgets to make sure the mischief in his eyes is hiding all that rage underneath; who reminds him of himself, except he thinks sometimes that that boy still has a shot at letting his bitterness turn him into something other than a crotchety old senior enchanter who will never leave this hold. And little Solona Amell, who tries so hard to hide all her delighted giggling. If she catches it in time before it bursts out, she makes a noise like a little piglet. He’d forgotten he even knew what piglets sounded like, in some other life before armored men dragged him off of his family’s farm. Every time she makes that noise, he remembers just for a moment what he thought he’d forgotten entirely. What life outside the Circle was like.

Still, it’s not any attachment that makes him watch the Amell girl in her lessons with Irving more often than he should. Not that there’s much to see. The two spend half of every lesson enacting the same parody of education that is playing out now, as they have ever since the day he watched her magic snap back on her when self-doubt and uncertainty broke the lightning spell she’d been weaving, the day when he finally took it upon himself to tell little Solona Amell what Irving himself would not—that she was allowed to tell the First Enchanter, “No.” That she couldn’t stay between all things forever—she would have to say, “No,” to something eventually, whether it was Irving or the fear and shame that held her back.

Sweeney had known that day what her decision was, had seen it in her eyes.