The Cryptographer

1. andraste as non-mage but ideal woman; bethany as mage and aspiring woman

bethany is at least a little bit drawn to andrastianism. she enjoyed listening to leliana's stories in lothering. she goes to the chantry in kirkwall to light a candle for carver. maybe leliana was only ever telling secular stories. maybe she went to the kirkwall chantry out of guilt. i think it does a disservice to her whole deal to say she isn't religious, bc religiousity (read: andrastianism) is compulsory in thedas. v few things abt bethany's whole deal are abt agency in a positive way, at least initially. whether she likes it or not, she's suffused in andrastian patriarchy.

andraste is inescapable as the ideal of womanhood. andraste, as the daughter of an extremely influential alamarri leader, is of noble blood, and i have so much to say abt alamarri culture being superseded by andrastian interpretations of alamarri culture but this is going to be so long already a;sdljf;ldask

andraste also 'overcomes' infertility, and while that's a moral framing i personally find rly abhorrent, we all live in a society. she also 'overcomes' the chronic illness that causes her infertility: second verse, same as the first, etc. there's some shit there re: values surrounding procreation and being able-bodied that i think. are in the mix. even if again this is going to be so long already.

women are mothers, and if they're sick, it's bc you can suffer your way to goodness — sometimes as an ex-slave, and sometimes as a martyr. lol, lmao even.

i think it can be extrapolated that andraste demonstrates a fidelity and patience that are supposed to be venerated/emulated, esp in contrast to her husband, maferath. maferath has a concubine named gilivhan who bears him children long before andraste does, but nowhere in the mythology does there seem to be any cruelty or resentment on andraste's part — she raises gilivhan's three sons as her own after gilivhan's death. so part of womanhood is a sort of default maternal attitude.

i do not think the presence of concubines in this instance points to a thedas-wide acceptance of, say, polyamory or even communal child-rearing. isolde is pissed by the idea that alistair is the result of an extramarital affair and takes it out on alistair. i would argue that while andrastian mores would advise her to be more tolerant of and patience with her husband's other partners or children..........................clearly the chantry is more than capable of taking over the responsibilities of raising alistair while isolde and eamon get back to their marriage and connor.

so we've got andraste as wife and mother, and let's not skip over andraste being The Bride. the ur-bride. faithful to her mortal husband and yet also some other guy's wife. CLEARLY, at least to maferath and his contemporaries, wives being another man's concubine or participating in other relationships is sufficient cause to betray whole causes, much less the wife in question. wife, mother, bride. my take here boils down to the idea that andraste, despite being a mother and married to a mortal man, kind of gets to retain a spiritual virginity.

then you've got andraste as warrior and prophet. women who fight and women who are believed. LOADED!

intriguingly, tho it doesn't seem super emphasized, there is andraste as enslaved — and formerly-enslaved. I'm Every Woman. potential for some v conflicted and guilty feelings on bethany's part there as she ruminates on her lack of freedom and also relative freedom as compared to her brethren in the circles. is it blasphemy to hate her life? idk ask teenage bethany sitting in the lothering chantry listening to sermons abt how magic exists to serve man.

last but not least, there's andraste as sister. andraste as witness to whatever mysterious accident that claims the life of halliserre, the accident that causes her chronic illness that in turn causes infertility. much 2 think abt.

bethany's not a wife and a mother, and she's never been a bride. those are def things that i think she wants to be, bc those are things women are supposed to be. she knows she's of 'noble blood' and demonstrates a genuine interest in rediscovering and reclaiming leandra's history.

bethany is not a warrior, or at least her ability to protect herself and be violent to others is not integrated into her identity — or rather it's been forcibly integrated into her identity in such a way that viewing herself as inherently dangerous or as an unstable weapon in need of constant surveillance is like. idk if i'm articulating this well, but if you're constantly a threat, enacting violence on purpose might not register in the same way as it would for aveline, for example, who can more effectively categorize and maybe compartmentalize her own violence.

Aveline: You show admirable restraint, Bethany. Bethany: For a mage, you mean. Aveline: I could also say, "for a Hawke," but yes, for a mage. Bethany: You have a sword. Why aren't you killing someone right now? Aveline: Fair point, but I can put my sword down. Bethany: Believe me, I have tried.

bethany would love to be able to put down her sword, but since she can't, she just does her best to pretend it's not there. kind of. that said, this battle cry: 'what are you, afraid? i'm not hiding anymore!' i think reveals a lot abt how she feels abt fear and when she's allowed to not be afraid.

bethany might feel like a prophet (and it wouldn't allay that feeling, i think, to be someone who does more observing than participating), but if she's a prophet, she's a cassandra, a cassandra who feels like smth is coming for her and once it does, if she gets taken by the templars, she's relieved it finally just happened.

in the circle, bethany becomes a teacher and at least one of her younger apprentices rly bonds w her. when immersed in an explicitly andrastian environment, she conforms, not unhappily, to the ideal of an andrastian woman as much as any mage can, by taking on a position that allows her to be maternal.

bethany and freedom is p fraught, kind of its own essay, but since this is going to be a monster already, let's focus on:

2. bethany as sister

that's like her whole identity to whole hawke family: baby sister. she has to be protected, she has to be curtailed, she has to be hidden. leandra says she never cried as a child — is this bc, as is true for many girls, she understood from an early age that her emotions created the need for attention and energy that she might have experienced as equal parts smothering and exposing? is it bc from a v early age, malcolm impressed upon her the importance of her keeping her emotions in check, bc they put both her and her family in danger of demons or templar attention? what abt the pressures that come from being raised in a family that seems to have struggled w money at least periodically?

like what's the difference between being a mage and being a girl for someone living in a body where they are one and the same? how do you separate your gender from your mage-gender? i think bethany shows signs of trying to a 'normal' woman in that she's demure, polite, pacifying, etc. those things are inevitably filtered thru her identity as an apostate mage, but if she performs them well enough, then maybe she can be mistaken for a well-behaved woman first, before she's a well-behaved mage, right?

babies who are 'easy' don't cry. children who are well-behaved are quiet. bethany is always the baby sister. like she just wants to be 'good,' whatever that means. a good woman is a good wife is a good mother is a good warrior (presumably a warrior who can put down their sword as well as wield it; read: discipline) is a good sister. i am being deliberately delicate abt the enslavement aspect bc yes, if you are enslaved, you are designated 'good' if you are quiet, obedient, competent — but not too competent. andraste did free herself. mages aren't supposed to do that. one must imagine sisyphus happy and dry heaving, etc.

she would have been praised consistently for her control, and she is, in the game, even by someone like fenris, praised in absentia for her self-control, phrased as a lack of weakness. do we think bethany was seen as mature for her age. do we think the neighbors told leandra and malcolm how lucky they were to have such a helpful and sweet little girl who stayed out of the way. even her childhood friend peaches chooses not to turn bethany into the templars bc she seemed, AND I FUCKING QUOTE, 'too nice to be magic.'

the big moment in her life when she stands her ground against a bully is the incident that precipitated the family's move to lothering. do we think she learned any unfortunate lessons abt what happens to mage girls who fight back. do we think we can infer that no amount of staying quiet and nice protected bethany from the kid who bullied her so badly she threw him across the field w her magic. do we think it's a coincidence that this bully was a boy.

when she fails! as a sister! her family suffers. it is never just abt bethany's wellbeing, tho clearly she's internalized that 'other ppl' are the ones 'taking the risks' on her behalf, as if she is not herself at risk. she doesn't get to feel her own feelings abt her life. she is the vessel for everyone else's anxiety and grief, and she doesn't even get to fucking cry.

she is, in this way, way closer to halliserre than andraste. does she think of herself as andraste-adjacent? does she have enough exposure, even, to andrastian texts on halliserre to identify w her? would she, too, love to die in a mysterious accident that unburdens her family from the burden of caring for her, one that leaves her unblemished and tragic but free from the obligation to be good? i think that's what she means when she says she tried to put her sword down, yeah.

3. how much of it is being a mage, and how much of it is being a woman

ig we can get into the weeds of suffering as worship and suffering as nonnegotiable here, but that feels too thorny to actually approach in a way that works. idk man. i do think 'mage' as a gender category positions 'mage' as a failed person in a way that feels analogous to a lot of misogyny/types of misogyny. what i'm going to skirt around here is that she mentions alrik, who is a rapist who (shoutout @recents) specifically targets mages w the threat of being made tranquil and also just straight up targets tranquil mages, period.

but while i agree that this can kind of be muddied by the gender dynamics between alrik and ella during dissent...................................i am also cognizant of the fact that a circle-route bethany mentions alrik by name in her letter and that ella is one of bethany's students, the one bethany mentions in that same letter as having gotten rly attached to bethany. that is a connection that has rly horrible implications. how much bethany can protect ella is directly contradicted by how much she can protect herself.

bethany is a failed woman bc she's a failed person as a result of being a mage. i think she still tries to 'good girl/woman' herself into being a person, or at least to cancel out her mageness. but as the dialogue w aveline shows, she rly resents it when other ppl compliment her on being a 'good' (read: unthreatening) mage.

but tbh i don't think bethany rly gets to decide for herself what's going on w all that until after the end of da2. the sheer amount of sexualization she experiences even from ppl who ostensibly respect and love her is like. she simply doesn't ask for any of it (except maybe w isabela and sebastian, and wrt latter don't piss me off). but i do think that varric rly takes the cake for me in terms of benevolent sexism.

Varric: So... Milady Sunshine, what's your first act as a noblewoman going to be? Bethany: *giggles* A noblewoman with no fortune and no title? Looking for work, probably. Varric: Practicality is for peasants, my lady. You need to do something frivolous to celebrate your birthright. Bethany: Such as...? Varric: Come up to the Hightown Market and complain bitterly that there's no Orlesian silk that matches your eyes. Bethany: But what if something does match my eyes? What will I do, then? Varric: Insist that they're blatantly copying you, and demand royalties. A good noble always has a complaint ready, Sunshine.

this is one of the most egregious examples of somebody interacting w bethany and completely failing to retain any knowledge of her personality or wants or needs or like. anything. i get that she's giggling. i get that it's all in good fun. i get that the joke is that bethany would never behave this way, and the comedy lies in the distance between the imagined noble lady and bethany. i get that.

however what varric is failing to acknowledge here is the elephant that's in every room ever: bethany is a mage. she doesn't get to complain. she doesn't get to be frivolous. she doesn't get to call attention to herself, period. varric is unintentionally underlining how much being a mage impacts bethany's womanhood, even a newly privileged womanhood.

and yeah, bethany enjoys this bc she enjoys imagining herself as normal. she enjoys the fantasy that she gets to be the type of woman who throws a fit over silk. but even varric's nickname for bethany — sunshine — implies a life of being visible that bethany has not lived and won't get to live until after da2 best case scenario, at least within the framework of freedom that varric has. being alive and visible as a mage means either her whole world becoming the circle or the wardens.

like she's barred from most womanhood. she wants pretty dresses, and she wants princes to call her beautiful, and she wants to be a daughter the way leandra was a daughter.

she wants to be uncomplicated! she wants to not be a problem! she doesn't want to need protection! but while all of those things are abt not being a mage, i think she'd be fine with being protected by a chivalrous prince — there is a fantasy there, for sure. a fantasy that requires her womanhood being prioritized over her being a mage.

milady sunshine. blech. nevertheless, while i think varric misunderstands her utterly, he does at least misunderstand her in the way she prefers to be misunderstood. varric can construct a fantasy-bit where bethany gets to just be a woman. but it is, ultimately, a fantasy.

andraste is wife-mother-bride-warrior-prophet-victim-saint. bethany doesn't have 'aspects' except in the realm of story; bethany fumbles personhood across the board thru absolutely no fault of her own.

i think that's why she gets squeezed into boxes that don't rly suit her. there's so much unwieldy stuff going on that it's easiest to slot her into a role that coincidentally!!!!!!! doesn't have agency. baby sister. crucially, she's not sexually agentive, she's vulnerable to corruption and in need of an older sibling or guardian to make sure the baby doesn't get into trouble, and this is an established enough dynamic that she will self-police. andraste as statue and icon, babyyyyy. emotionless, motionless, and emblematic of whatever you want to project onto her.