I want to find, rather than write, good, objective meta about how Leliana throughout the games deals with a serious identity issue, because she is hyper-aware of how her abuser shaped her into a killer when she was just a teenager, and of how she enjoyed it, and she hates it.
And then she escaped her abuser and she thought she had been saved by the Maker and by Dorothea, but then in da2 you learn that Dorothea had asked her to become a bard again, to start killing and manipulating again in the name of their cause… and she BELIEVED that cause for real, but regardless of what anyone feels or thinks, regardless of good intentions or not, of she was being used. Even if she wanted to, even if she called it anything else but, she knows, and we know, and Dorothea knows, and that’s why Dorothea leaves behind that box ‘freeing’ Leliana/her conscience.
“A thousand lies, a thousand deaths. Her commands, but my conscience that bore the consequences…
All this time Justinia carried the fear that she was using me, just like I’d been used in the past. But Marjolaine’s games were trifles. Justinia gambled with the fate of nations. She needed me. No one else could have done what I did. She knows that.”
By the beginning of DA:Inquisition, Leliana is in the middle of a big crisis, but that crisis has actually been simmering ever since DA:Origins. Leliana is amazingly talented, competent and smart, and utterly lost in her search for an identity separated from what she thinks her abuser shaped her into.
I’ve seen meta before saying that a good cause is just a “bonus” to her when it comes to living the life of a spy/bard, and… tbh the truth is that a good cause is as important to her as playing the game is, because she feels like she’s a monster without that. If she has a righteous cause to put the abilities she both revels in and loathes to use, then she can deal. She says “I’ve been many things - bard, sister, left hand - and always because someone needed something from me” , and that IS true, regardless of good intentions - but it is also true Leliana herself needed something from them: a purpose, a sense of belonging. She has been trying to fill all these roles, waiting for the one that will be right for her, and she only finds one by the end of DA:Inquisition. A softened Leliana will say
“I realize I am all of these things, and yet defined by none”
And if you don’t ‘soften’ her, she comes to terms with being some sort of monster, but one that is necessary:
“The Inquisition needs me, just as the Divine did, to do what no one else dares”
“Death and deception are my trade, it’s what I am. It’s what I always will be.”
This is what she has been struggling with for so long… that’s who she has always thought she was, in the back of her mind. And by the end of Inquisition, she either accepts that ‘monstruousness’ - that talent for maniplation and murder - BECAUSE it serves a just purpose (to do what no one else dares), or her sense of morality wins over any mixture of self-loathing and bloodlust she still harbors and she decides to erase that side of her. In both cases, her ‘cause’ is either more, or at least as important as, her need/desire to be a bard. It is by no means a ‘bonus’, it never was - otherwise, would she have truly fallen out with Marjolaine after finding out she was selling Orlesian secrets out?
Leliana’s identity issues go so deep that If you soften her, she literally talks of “rebirth”, and says she is more than what Justinia (and Majorlaine and the Inquisitor) made her into… and… and that’s wonderful… sob… I love Leliana ashdnfjmksda ……
