bravely . i think aveline and isabela should primarily be fighting over who gets to do violence and against whom. and what actually counts as violence . instead of what being good at woman is like
like. aveline becomes captain of the guard after having previously been a soldier married to a templar. her Life essentially is defined by sanctioned, culturally noble and respected violence against those perceived as Other, Deserving by the state she serves. child bride to pirate pipeline isabela (who is on the run because she took on her powerful boss to free slaves he would have profited from the sale of) has been the Other against whom it is Acceptable To Commit Violence (but who is not legally or morally permitted to retaliate) her whole life, and i think this has made her incredibly protective of her right to engage in violence of her own. to me this has always kind of been the heart of their conflict— ideas about who is respectable, who is Allowed, who gets to define what that even means. especially with the context that As captain of the guard, aveline quite actively reinforces her institution’s right to enact violence & the Taboo against the disenfranchised returning it; her guardsman sexually assaults an elven girl, and she not only protects him, but literally (accidentally.) starts a war over her right to prosecute the girl’s brothers for killing him in retaliation when She failed to deliver appropriate justice. ISABELA WAS SOLD AS A CHILD BRIDE. it’s such a gimme. that’s like the main thing that differentiates them and the main difference in their interests. literally how is this not the main thing they’re clashing about?
Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive 'essay.' This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.
More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.
Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:
"Under the Qun, your gender is your role."
Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that's conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.
I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.
Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, "What does the Qun believe about men and women?" My first instinct was to ask, "What does the Qun mean by gender?"
This analysis is my attempt to explain why.
My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between "he" and "she." At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.
Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.
The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.
II. Where Language Stores Gender
English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.
"I saw her yesterday."
"He said he would arrive tomorrow."
Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.
This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.
Turkish works differently.
The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:
"I saw them take out the trash."
The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it's required.
It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.
Now consider Czech.
Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.
Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.
Spanish encodes something else.
La vi sacar la basura.
The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun "trash" as grammatically feminine.
None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.
Some require information about the subject.
Some require information about the speaker.
Some require information about inanimate objects.
Some require almost none at all.
Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.
These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.
Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.
Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.
Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.
An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence "I saw..." without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.
III. Gender as Grammar
This brings us to grammatical gender.
One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.
It rarely does.
A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.
The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)...
Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.
A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.
Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language's internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;
"But why is the chair female?"
The answer, of course, is that it isn't.
The chair is not female.
The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex'). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?
What if "man" and "woman" were not 1=1 translations?
What if they were approximations?
What if the game's medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?
Whether that was the writers' intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun's concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.
This is going to be a long read.
IV. The Qun as a System of Classification
The crucial question is not whether Qunari have gender. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what kind of category gender is within Qunlat.
Most discussions assume that Qunari gender categories are equivalent to human concepts of male and female. The games often encourage this reading, especially in the last installment, but the broader structure of the Qun suggests something else.
The most important thing to understand about the Qun is that it is not primarily a moral philosophy. It is a taxonomy.
Everything under the Qun has a place.
Every person has a function.
Soldiers belong to the Antaam. Spies belong to the Ben-Hassrath. Priests belong to the priesthood. Artisans belong to their craft. The Qun is obsessed not with individual self-expression but with correct classification. A person's value comes from occupying the role for which they are best suited.
Once viewed through this lens, the statement "your gender is your role" begins to sound less like a claim about masculinity and femininity and more like a claim about grammar.
The moral legitimacy of the Qun rests on the belief that disorder arises when things occupy the wrong category. A baker pretending to be a soldier is not merely inefficient; they are violating the proper order of society.
This resembles grammar more than it resembles bioessentialism.
Grammar does not ask what a noun “really is.”
It asks how that noun behaves within the system.
Likewise, the Qun appears less concerned with what a person “is” in some metaphysical sense than with how that person functions within the social order.
Under this framework, gender ceases to be primarily anatomical, it turns into a designation of social behavior and purpose.
That is a subtle but enormous shift.
An English speaker hears “warriors are men” and naturally interprets it to mean “people with dicks are warriors.”
But a Qunari speaker might mean something closer to “the social category associated with warfare is translated into Common as ‘man’ because the people who express warrior-like qualities (aka masculinity) in South are referred to as man.”
The distinction sounds small until one realizes that the second statement does not actually define the category by anatomy at all.
Imagine a language with six grammatical genders:
warrior
priest
artisan
teacher
merchant
caretaker
These categories would not describe anatomy. They would describe function.
A person assigned to the "warrior" category would receive the grammatical markers associated with warriors. A person assigned to the "teacher" category would receive its respective markers. Native speakers would not experience this as strange any more than an Italian speaker experiences the gender of a noun as strange. The category would simply be part of the language.
This is the conceptual leap that I believe many players never make, because English encourages us to treat gender as an identity rooted in gender expression. The Qun may instead be treating gender as a functional classification.
V. Rereading Sten
This is why Sten’s infamous line in Origins has always fascinated me.
"You look like a woman. But you are a soldier. One of those things can't be true."
For many players, the line immediately establishes Sten as sexist. The implication seems obvious: women should not fight. That is certainly a possible reading.
But it is not the only one.
Imagine a speaker whose native language organises people according to functional categories rather than biological sex. Now imagine that speaker trying to communicate through a language that lacks those categories and instead forces every distinction into “man” and “woman.”
Suddenly the sentence becomes less straightforward.
To illustrate the difference, imagine someone saying:
"I am a tailor."
"Then why are you commanding an army?"
Under a linguistic (and cultural) reading of the Qun, Sten’s question can be understood similarly.
Notice he starts with "I don't understand. You look like a woman."
This can be a context-seeking question if we go with the assumption that he's not being condescending. He remarks that the Warden looks like someone that should not swing a sword. They are not conforming to the self expression of a sword-swinging role.
"You are a Grey Warden, so it follows that you can't be a woman."
He has not denied the player their role due to their sex, he has denied them their sex due to their role. The role takes precedence. The role is not in dispute. The wording is precise and it is fundamentally very revealing. It doesn't mean a person's sex is an assignment like a profession, it means a person's profession is as predetermined as their sex.
“You identify with category A. Why are you performing the function and expressing the characteristics associated with category B?”
The confusion is categorical. In this sense, it emphasises Qun's strict adherence to roles. Why appear as something you're not? Why express yourself like a priest and fight like a sten? What are you?
The face value interpretation is of course that his assumption that someone can't simultaneously express femininity and also adopt a masculine role is an indicator of how conservative Qun is.
Now contrast this with areal-life experience I've had learning Czech.
In Czech, grammatical gender is not optional, and it cannot easily be avoided without making language itself unnatural or incomplete. Over time, I found myself running into a recurring issue: speakers struggled to consistently apply feminine forms to my name as its phonetic structure was perceived as categorically "masculine-sounding" within their system.
Rather than assigning a gendered grammatical form, people would restructure sentences in ways that bypassed agreement entirely. The result is something comparable to constantly replacing a possessive structure like "Clair’s computer" with the clumsy "computer belonging to Clair" or even "Clair computer" in certain odd cases. It is noticeably strained in everyday use.
At various points, I explicitly stated that I didn't mind being referred to with masculine forms. From my perspective, this was a simple matter of grammatical convenience rather than identity. Yet many speakers still refused to make the shift. This was not a rejection of my gender identity, had I came out as a man I know that these people would have obliged. They thought of it as insulting to me, that I simply lack the lingual framework to understand the distinction. And to a certain degree they are right. As a non-native speaker, I will never experience grammatical gender in the same intuitive, automatic way that native speakers do. I won't feel like I'm being denied femininity simply because of a suffix even knowing it's meaning.
One particularly revealing example was the naming of my cat. Despite her name ending in -o, which in Czech often aligns with neuter grammatical patterns, speakers around me consistently opted to modify the name with the feminine -a ending in order to maintain alignment with the animal’s biological sex. In doing so, they effectively modified the linguistic category of the name itself, prioritizing grammatical and social coherence over morphological expectation.
What this illustrates is not simply a preference for consistency, but the degree to which grammatical gender is treated as a system that must remain internally stable. Even when exceptions are technically permissible, speakers often adjust surrounding language to preserve categorical alignment. This is not because they are consciously thinking about gender at every moment of speech. It is because the language demands that such distinctions remain continuously operational.
Sten, effectively, struggles with the same concept. He wants to hear that -a. He needs it to process the information he receives from what he sees in opposition to what he hears. He prompts the Warden with the same question; If you're a woman, if you wish to be referred to and seen and understood in the social sense as a woman why do you refer to yourself as a man?
This interpretation also explains why his dialogue sounds awkward in English. He speaks as though he is translating concepts that do not map neatly onto the language available to him. The result resembles the discomfort many language learners experience when dealing with grammatical gender.
“Why is a chair feminine?”
The native speaker shrugs because the question itself misunderstands the category.
Likewise, Sten may be encountering a person whose social designation and observable function do not align according to the framework he expects.
Whether the writers intended this nuance is very unlikely. What matters to me personally is that the early lore allows it.
VI. Translation and Approximation
This brings us to one of the most debated terms in the series: notorious aqun-athlok.
We usually treat it as a direct analogy for “transgender.”
That translation is understandable, but I think it may be misleading.
If gender under the Qun is fundamentally a functional category, then aqun-athlok does not necessarily describe a person changing from one biological sex category to another. It describes a person whose social designation has been reassigned.
A useful comparison is professional rather than anatomical.
Imagine a cashier who demonstrates extraordinary aptitude for masonry. The state formally redesignates them as a mason. Their category changes because their function changes. Their pronouns change.
That does not mean they have become physically different. It means the system now recognizes them under a different classification.
Viewed this way, Iron Bull’s explanation to Krem becomes particularly interesting.
Bull understands Southern culture. He knows that the people around him think in terms of men and women as sex-based identities. So he translates the Qun into concepts they can understand, he does this quite frequently.
He tells Krem that his society assigned him one role and that he fought to attain another. That is the closest Common equivalent available.
This is not a lie. It is fundamentally what a translator does for colloquial speech. When a concept has no exact equivalent, translators choose the closest available approximation. English lacks a ready-made set of social-gender categories detached from sex and/or gender expression, so the dialogue maps them onto the familiar binary of "man" and "woman."
We already accept this process everywhere else in fantasy. When a character says "barbarian," we do not immediately assume there is a Greek language for the onomatopoeic term to be coined. When a character says "god," we don't assume their theology matches Christianity. We translate "Yes" as oui or si respectively from the context clues derived from previous information the question provides.
Under this reading, aqun-athlok becomes less “a transgender person in the Western sense” and more “a person recognised under a category different from the one originally assigned to them by the Qun.”
Before discussing disaster that was Veilguard, I want to make one final distinction.
Throughout this analysis I have deliberately avoided claiming that the Qun "has no gender." That statement would be obviously false.
The Qun has gender.
What I question is whether those genders are equivalent to the ones we instinctively imagine.
Translation being an act of approximation, there are words that simply do not survive intact when carried from one language into another. Each translation captures part of the meaning while leaving another part behind.
We accept this instinctively when discussing vocabulary. Oddly, we abandon that generosity when discussing cultures.
When a Qunari says "man," we assume they must mean exactly what an English speaker means by "man."
Why, though?
If the Qun genuinely organizes society according to principles foreign to Southern Thedas, why would we expect one of its central concepts to map perfectly onto Common?
Perhaps it does. It looks like it. The expression of hypermasculinity is certainly the same.
But perhaps "man" is simply the closest available word. This would hardly be unusual.
Sten's earlier confusion also indicates that a person with female features is not exempt from this category of "man", they are exempt from 'womanhood'.
Every translator eventually reaches a point where perfect accuracy becomes impossible. One must choose between preserving the literal words or preserving the underlying concept.
Bull translates the Qun not merely linguistically, but culturally. He knows when to omit details that would only confuse his audience. He knows when to substitute familiar concepts for alien ones. Above all, he understands that communication is not achieved by literal accuracy but by producing the same understanding in another person's mind.
When Bull explains aqun-athlok to Krem, he is not writing a philosophical treatise. He is explaining his culture to someone who lacks the conceptual vocabulary to understand it directly.
That conversation therefore deserves to be read as a translation rather than a dictionary definition.
VII. Why This Reading Matters
At this point, someone might reasonably ask whether any of this matters if the writers themselves probably intended a more conventional interpretation.
It does to me.
Because the value of a fictional culture is not limited to authorial intent. Sometimes worldbuilding accidentally creates implications richer than the story that contains it.
The Qun was designed to feel alien. Ironically, the most alien aspect of it may be one the games never fully explored: the possibility that its concept of gender is not a biological binary at all, but a system of social grammar.
And if that is true, then the later portrayal of Qunari gender becomes much more complicated.
Because a society that classifies people by function would not necessarily experience gender variance in the same way a society that classifies people by anatomy. A society without binary gender also lacks the conceptual absence of binary gender. This may be difficult to imagine because English constantly defines concepts by opposition. Terms such as "stay-at-home spouse" immediately evoke "wife" precisely because the expected word has been omitted, which makes true gender ambiguity an impossibility.
If this interpretation is accepted, then Taash's story in Veilguard raises a serious internal contradiction: a character who is unquestionably a warrior is nevertheless treated by their mother as though biological sex overrides the very system of role-based classification that earlier Qunari lore appeared to establish.
VIII. The Problem of Taash
Taash is not where my interpretation begins. It is where it begins to break.
Under the framework established throughout the earlier games, there is remarkably little ambiguity regarding Taash's social role.
Taash is a warrior. No one disputes this. Not Taash. Not the player. Not their mother. Not the Qun.
Had Taash been raised entirely under the Qun, they would have been a part of Antaam, the dialogue explicitly states this. Their unique talents would've landed them the role of the warrior.
Within the framework the games have outlined, this should already determine the relevant "gender."
If gender corresponds primarily to social designation, then Taash already belongs to the soldier category. By the internal logic established earlier in the series, Taash is already what Common translates as "a man."
This is precisely where Shathann becomes frustrating.
She is portrayed as someone deeply committed to preserving Qunari customs despite living outside the Qun. Much of her relationship with Taash revolves around those expectations.
Yet she consistently refers to Taash according to biological sex.
That strikes me as profoundly strange.
If anyone should instinctively categorize people according to the logic of the Qun, it should be Shathann.
Instead, she appears to do the opposite.
She acknowledges Taash as a warrior.
She never argues they lack the temperament for combat. She never insists they belong in another profession. She wants to encourage them to learn more about their own culture but it is not portrayed as pushing them to scholarly duty due to their physical characteristics. She is even suspicious of the notion of them adopting said Qunari customs.
Yet she continues to categorise them through anatomy.
Ironically, the character presented as enforcing the Qun becomes the one behaving least like the earlier games suggested a Qunari should.
The narrative frames this as a mother attempting to impose biological gender upon her child. If anyone should instinctively think in terms of Qunari categories, it is Shathann. And yet her language appears to prioritize anatomy over function.
Ironically, this places her in the opposite position one might expect. She is simultaneously using categories that the Qun itself would never have privileged in the first place, and is punished by the narrative for it. Portrayed as a close minded boomer that needs to listen to their child.
IX. A Quest for the Binary
This realisation led me to what I consider the greatest failure in Taash's story.
The game presents their travel to Minrathous as part of a search for language capable of expressing who they are. That is debilitating. Not because I disagree with the story being told, but because I believe it accidentally tells another story at the same time. A story about the writers and audience.
The story presents this as liberation from rigid expectations.
But under the linguistic framework I have proposed, something almost paradoxical happens.
Taash does not leave the Qun-based teachings to escape an anatomical gender binary.
They leave it to discover one.
Within the Qun, social designation would already provide the relevant category. "Man" and "woman," understood as identities rooted in biological sex, would not occupy the same conceptual space they do in Southern Thedas.
It is only through sustained contact with the South that Taash encounters a society where anatomy itself becomes the organizing principle.
Only then does the language become available to reject it.
Viewed this way, Taash's story ceases to be one of escaping the Qun's categories. It becomes the story of someone moving between two incompatible systems of classification.
The Qun is one of the most genuinely alien cultures in fantasy precisely because it organises society according to principles that often feel deeply unintuitive to modern readers.
Its understanding of personhood is collectivist rather than individual, its ethics are teleological rather than rights-based, its conception of freedom is almost the inverse of liberal philosophy.
Why should its understanding of gender resemble ours?
Why should it use the same conceptual categories at all?
Reducing Qunari gender to a direct analogue of contemporary Western discourse makes the culture easier to understand. And I'm afraid it is the philosophy the writers understand.
X. Conclusion
Ultimately, I am less interested in arguing that this interpretation is canon than I am in arguing that it is possible.
Language is never a neutral vehicle for ideas.
When I first encountered the Qun, this was simply how I understood it.
Coming from a language without gendered pronouns, I naturally interpreted the Qun's statements about gender through linguistics rather than through biology. Only through time, after discussing the series with English speaking fans, did I realize that most people had reached a very different conclusion.
Eventually, I did too.
I learned to read the Qun the way the games increasingly encouraged me to. I had to perform the very act of translation this long-ass post has been describing. I replaced my own conceptual framework with another.
That experience is precisely why I find this topic immensely gripping.
Language does not merely give us words. It gives us habits of interpretation. The assumptions we bring into fiction are often invisible until we encounter someone whose language encourages different assumptions. Whether my interpretation reflects the writers' intentions is ultimately irrelevant.
I am pretty sure it doesn't.
Still it's very compelling what their worldbuilding accidentally made possible.
In the end, one of the most interesting questions Dragon Age could have asked remains unanswered;
What does gender variance look like in a society that never organized gender around biological sex in the first place?
What does it mean to be genderqueer in a culture whose "genders" are functions rather than identities?
And what happens when such a culture encounters another whose language insists upon distinctions the first never needed to make?
Because if the Qun really was conceived as an alien civilization, then perhaps its greatest unrealised potential lays not in reversing familiar gender roles, but in imagining a society whose very concept of gender belongs to an entirely different universe.
That, to me, would have been far stranger. And far more worthy of the Qun.
The thing I love to chew on most about Lucanis as a character is his contradictions, the places where he breaks expectation both in-universe and as a certain character type. There’s a lot of both/and in the nuances of his character and the surrounding circumstances that draw them out are interesting! A lot of the time, I’ll see a post that will take off proclaiming he is x but not y and never z and it’s usually facets of his character that I would actually argue are all present in him at different times, drawn out by different circumstances, not unlike most people.
To me, he is both confident in areas he has experience with and shy and a little awkward in areas he doesn’t. He doesn’t believe himself to be as socially agile as someone like Illario and, while we see him navigate social situations competently, he is never really shown to be intentionally artificially charming. His lines during the coffee date, for instance, are as earnest as they are flirtatious. He’s revealing something of himself there and it’s being received well. Rook’s into it, Rook’s interested in him, despite silver-tongued Illario being right there.
His flirting with them in the pantry before the almost kiss is specific to Rook, specific to the circumstances they’re in, as well as the conversation they’re having in that moment. It isn’t a line to drop on just anyone, for all it is flirtatious, and you can easily see how similar qualities in Neve would draw him to her, too. That isn’t the mark of a smooth operator, but someone who’s expressing interest and telling them he’s been paying attention to them by calling back to these things.
But when it comes to speaking on his actual feelings, he loses the swagger with which he initially approached, he doesn’t (by his own estimation) really know what he’s doing and can only offer up a very genuine and earnest attempt at expressing them the only way he knows how to openly care for people while also expressing his doubt about meeting expectations at the same time. Any suaveness he has is present only when the confidence is which is sweet to watch build, but not at all a factory default built in for all situations. It’s fine to let him fumble romantically, actually, to be out of his depth—because he is when it comes to Rook or Neve—and to end up with his foot in his mouth.
Which is present in banters, especially with Neve, if you would listen. He’s not navigating all of those conversations adeptly and it’s as fun to listen to him be put on the back foot as it is to hear some of the wilder things that come out of his mouth.
It goes beyond just the romances and companion relationships too, of course. He does do a degree of preparation and planning for his contracts. He’s clearly someone who takes a lot of pride in his work, the way he operates outside of his job (the lists, the logging of his activities, even meal planning), the degree with which he is concerned about his performance, all feed into that belief for me. It raises the stakes for the circumstances that push him to throw all of it out in the moment, when he cares about something more than just finishing the job, and it's what those things are that speak to his character.
He never expresses an intention to free Effe and the other slaves from the system as a whole, for instance, but he frees them from Forfex only after realizing the degree of cruelty to which they're being treated. He didn’t help the servant escape their abusive employer, but he let them go because he believed it was justified. He refused to kill the fourteen year old because he thought it too young to receive permanent consequences, but he was almost certainly robbed of that kind of choice himself. He’s very concerned with making sure his targets are the right ones.
Any enjoyment he derives from killing people seems inextricably linked with his own code of ethics. A code that is both different from most other people’s, even including his own colleagues among the Crows, and is at odds with being in it for the money. In itself, a contradiction, when we know him to be expensive to hire. I do often wonder how much that cost helped vet contracts that would have pressed on those same ethics even harder.
lmaooooo that post really got me thinking. because tranquility is the most compelling argument against the circles, dai completely skips over them and paints circle mages as the ones abusing the tranquil which is just… so fucking insane
the first tranquil mage you meet is in redcliffe and he’ll tell you that the tevinter mages have kicked out the tranquil and asks to go with the inquisition because they can be useful. which makes no sense because literally in the same part of the game you can find a bunch of tranquil skulls in a shed, because the venatori have been killing the tranquil. you get commentary from EVERYONE about how the circle mages abandoned the tranquil. you talk to minaeve in haven and she implies that the mages somehow didn’t see the tranquil as people and that’s a fault of the mages themselves.
like… who made the rite of tranquility? who lobotomised them in the first fucking place and then USED THEM to handle lyrium to make money for the circle??? who displays tranquil mages all around the circle to remind mages of what will happen to them if they disobey?? WHO USES THE RITE OF TRANQUILITY AS A PUNITIVE MEASURE AGAINST MAGES??? the chantry and the templars themselves level the tranquil as a threat and use them as things but somehow it’s the circle mages’ fault that the tranquil were killed off??? whose fault is it that the mages fear and are uncomfortable with the tranquil?? who DESIGNED it that way??? whose purpose does it serve???
and it’s literally the stupidest thing anyway. how did tranquil mages END UP in fucking redcliffe in the first place IF THEY WEREN’T WITH THE MAGE REBELLION??? like??? hello??? tranquil mages HAD FRIENDS in the circle. they had LOVERS in the circle. they were people before the chantry ripped everything away from them and there’s evidence that MAGES ACTUALLY WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY TO BRING THEM OUT OF THE CIRCLE TOO
there’s NO commentary or dialogue or even shock about avexis being made tranquil in dai even tho cassandra is RIGHT THERE and PERSONALLY KNEW avexis. you can make mage prisoners tranquil as a mage inquisitor which is SO fucked up because it’s literally the most horrible thing that could happen to a mage? EVERY SINGLE MAGE, irrespective of personal political beliefs about the circle, fears tranquility??? the only time a mage doesn’t fear it is when they genuinely think the templars will otherwise kill them??? wouldn’t it make more sense for a templar spec inquisitor or an andrastian inquisitor specifically to have that option?? why make it so MAGE inquisitors can do it, like they didn’t grow up with the threat hanging over their heads the entire time they were in the circle AS CHILDREN??
cass’ quest where you find out they always knew how to reverse it and simply … didn’t, essentially permanently lobotomising millions of mages for a thousand years, is less impactful when you don’t understand how horrific tranquility is. finding out they’ve essentially abused the rite to abuse mages and then telling cassandra that actually no, the seekers dont deserve to be rebuilt, the chantry deserves to crumble, generates disapproval! she DISAPPROVES of you disapproving of their abuse of power! and you can’t do ANYTHING about it afterwards! cass just decides to keep it a secret until they can find out more about it… when? how will you find out more if no one else knows the reversal exists? there’s NOTHING about helping the tranquil even as a throwaway line in the epilogue slides! there’s no tranquil walking around discussing it, making note that cassandra approached them or anything like that at all!
there’s just NO real exploration in dai of what the tranquil are – why the rite of tranquility is used (other than the “claims” of it being to “help save mages” who otherwise can’t control their magic), what function the tranquil have in the circle (there’s literally an economic motivation for the chantry and the templars to keep making mages tranquil bc tranquil mages can manipulate lyrium for enchantments), and there’s NO conflicting opinions on the necessity of the rite in the first place and NO REAL TRANQUIL VOICES. the one person who DID have the rite of tranquility used against them punitively in kirkwall ends up working for one of the antagonists!
considering people went into dai for the first time and didn’t have the bg knowledge of tranquility from dao and da2, it’s just so deliberate. the problem, suddenly, isn’t that tranquil mages are made by the chantry and the templars, it’s not even that the rite is used punitively irrespective of whether it should exist or be used at all. the problem, dai argues, is that mages treat tranquil mages badly. that without the circle, the tranquil mages are killed and abused bc they’re vulnerable. as tho tranquil mages are just naturally occurring in nature and not a horrific abuse resulting from the circle in the first place.
#Thing is you have to remember each game is told from the perspective of those around the main character. A human mage would know for sure ab#but a Dalish might have heard about it but not know much and those they speak to only have their perspective to share
like… yeah, that’s kind of my point. as the PC, who may not know about the rite of tranquility whether that’s the result of the PC’s in-game bg (dalish, qunari, dwarven) or because it’s the player’s first DA game, it’s insane that NO ONE ELSE AROUND YOU has any insight to offer. almost unanimously, they all agree that the deaths of the tranquil at the hands of the venatori are the mage rebellion’s fault. that they like. abandoned the tranquil during the rebellion. at no point does anyone consider it the fault of the templars, who made mages tranquil using the rite and then left them to die when the circles fell despite their apparent “duty” being to take care of mages, or the fault of the chantry, which uses the tranquil to essentially fund their military arm and also uses the potential of the rite as a threat to keep mages in line thereby alienating them from their own mage peers.
NO ONE disagrees with this opinion, not vivienne, a circle mage who is pro-circle (she believes in reforming the circle but insists on their necessity because mages need a place to study) but templar critical (she thinks templars have their uses and if she’s made divine, she tightens chantry control over the templars which is certainly. A Method. A Choice. but i think it speaks to her views about the “freedoms” and liberties she believes the chantry allows templars over mages, and her shifting that power imbalance using the chantry’s control over templars), and not solas, who is pro-mage and anti-circle. not cassandra who will get angry that the templars shirked their “duty” in COTJ and is touted to be templar/seeker critical, and who even says they should’ve investigated what was going on kirkwall properly. everyone has an opinion on it, but it’s just the same opinion expressed in different words. there aren’t any differing perspectives on it. that’s gotta be deliberate; they (the nebulous out-of-narrative they, the devs or the writers or bioware itself) want you to think a certain way about mages, and the mage rebellion, and so they basically killed off the tranquil and still somehow made it the southern mages’ fault.
you can speak to fiona in skyhold, but not about the tranquil mages. you can speak to leliana, the left hand of the divine who absolutely knows what tranquility is, and she has nothing to say about the tranquil mages. you can speak to cullen but all he’s got to say is that meredith (and only meredith, apparently, because no one else ever abused the rite? because the rite isn’t an abuse in the first place?) would basically use the rite for any small infractions. you can speak to helisma, a tranquil mage, and she says nothing about the tranquil mages. helisma and avexis both display a vague discomfort at the idea of not being tranquil anymore, because it would cause them distress that they were made tranquil in the first place, and that’s just the end of that, then.
the cure to tranquility is just swept under the rug, because it doesn’t fit the overall theme driving inquisition which is to paint a “grey morality” aspect to the templar v mage “debate”. hard for the issue to be “grey” when one side has literally been lobotomising the other for a thousand years, a procedure which could have been immediately reversible but specifically WASN’T to allow a method of exerting control over this minority, without shedding blood (as ameridan points out), and so that the order (seekers, templars, maybe even the chantry itself? it’s never clear where the money from the circle goes, but it’s clear it’s not to the circle itself) could make money off of tranquil mages handling lyrium to make enchantments.
#and there should have been more about the tranquil in the game considering the bombshell you find out#i think they might be paid off in the next game though
considering mark darrah’s statements about da4 moving to a more epic-style high fantasy, and away from what they called low, dark fantasy, i actually really, really doubt it. in-game, by now, they’ve had the venatori kill off most, if not all, the tranquil mages (there were tests to try and figure out how to get their skulls to work for the ocularum. i don’t think they got it in 3 tries…). they’ve effectively buried the cure to the rite of tranquility. they’ve done their level best to quell the entire mage v templar issue they built up for over two games by “settling” the dispute in a single arbitrary choice (IHW or COTJ), thereby leaving the unchosen party to die or be enslaved or made into like eldritch monsters to kill on sight. i think they’re moving on from mages v templars because it was undermining their supposed grey morality stance on clear issues of systemic oppression. i don’t expect it to come up at all.
Because Tumblr keeps deleting my posts without giving me a damn warning, the only way I have to recover them is to keep their links, so here is an extensive list of content I want to protect in my already butchered tumblr. It will be updated progressively. It’s easily found in the side column of my blog.
Update: because the limit restrictions in posts [less than 200 links per post] I had to break this list in several bits.
Most of the Dragon Age franchise holds a continuous in-universe debate on the Circle of Magi’s existence in Southern Thedas; whether it should even exist, and if so, how it should exist. A key argument point are the many abuses mages suffer behind its walls. However, among the long list of abuses, the sexual violence is sometimes overlooked or understated.
When referring to sexual violence in the Circle, the first example that usually comes to mind is Ser Otto Alrik of the Gallows in Dragon Age II (DA2). Anders’s Act 2 companion quest, “Dissent”, is about Alrik’s “Tranquil Solution” to use the Rite of Tranquility on every mage in Kirkwall. In his letter to Divine Justinia, he proposes the following:
“The Tranquil Solution is our answer. All mages at the age of majority must be made Tranquil. They'll coexist peacefully, retain their usefulness—a perfect strategy! It's simply the best way to ensure mages obey the laws of men and Maker.”
Notice how Alrik puts an emphasis on “age of majority” and “retain their usefulness”? This would be sketchy on its own, but there is more evidence that Alrik is a rapist.
Confronting Alrik in “Dissent”, the player discovers him about to recapture a feeling young mage girl. She begs not to be made tranquil, saying she’ll do anything to avoid it. Alrik responds by saying “That's right. Once you're Tranquil, you'll do anything I ask.” The implication given his leer is that he is planning on raping her, something he already does to others. A Tranquil woman named Helena and her former lover, a mage named Jaken, have the following ambient dialogue in the Gallows:
Jaken: I've been searching for you everywhere. You weren't in your rooms, the libraries...
Helena: We have no scheduled appointments at this time, apprentice.
Jaken: No! Helena, it's me. Don't you remember me?
Helena: Of course. YOu are Apprentice Jaken. We were once involved in an illicit relationship.
Jaken: Illicit? I love you!
Helena: I am Ser Alrik's now. He is the only one who can command me.
The Tranquil are not always regarded as real people, even by their fellow mages. This is, of course, not true – just because they lack full mental capacity and are a vulnerable population does not make them less deserving of personhood. But the fact that they lack the capacity to properly consent is what so easily leads to them being abused as they are. If the Chantry actually cared about the wellbeing of the Tranquil, there would be proper protections for them put in place, to avoid people like Alrik getting away with his blatant crimes.
It is not just the Tranquil who suffer from sexual violence, though. Any mage is fair game for the templars. Alain, a mage first encountered in the DA2 quest “Act of Mercy”, can later be found in the Gallows. If Ser Karras survives the quest, Alain can be overheard saying, “Ser Karras said if I tell anyone he's been in my chambers, he'll make me Tranquil.” But even if Ser Karras does not survive, during the quest “Best Served Cold” when Alain is encountered again, he will uncomfortably say, “You don't know what it’s like. We're locked in our cells all day, no light, no air. The templars... ask things of us.” Alain is still being raped, just by someone else.
It is worth noting that Ser Alrik and Ser Karras are no random grunts, either. They are both Knight-Lieutenants, meaning the only two people of higher rank are Cullen and Meredith. They have been rewarded, granted even more control for their horrid actions. Other templars are supposed to obey them without question, or the Knight-Lieutenants have the power to strip them of their knighthood.
While the Gallows has the most examples, by virtue of being a central part of the plot in DA2, sexual violence is by no means exclusive to Kirkwall’s Circle.
In Dragon Age: Origins, during the mage origin, you can overhear an apprentice mage’s ambient dialogue: "Gerda told me the templars watch us while we bathe. I hope that's not true." And while voyeurism is certainly not as severe as rape, that is canonically confirmed by Anders to have happened in the Ferelden Circle as well, in a banter with Sebastian:
Sebastian: Did something happen to you in the Circle? I understand there were problems in Ferelden...
Anders: Are you saying a mage can only be unhappy in the Circle if demons were involved?
Anders: No, it's not about Uldred. It's not about being beaten or raped by a templar— that does happen, but I've been fortunate.
In the novel Dragon Age: Asunder, Cole watches two mages of the Val Royeaux Circle have a conversation about the infamous “ghost of the spire” (namely, himself). During this conversation, one mage suggests it may have been a templar the girl saw. Her response:
"You think I don't know every templar in the tower by now? Some of them far better than I'd like." She touched the bruise on her cheek, and the elven boy scowled but said nothing.
Saying that she knows templars “far better than she’d like” implies that she has had suffered from non-consensual intimacy – aggressively, given she was wounded.
The fantasy of a sexually available mage even bleeds out into the common person. In the DA2 quest “Repentance”, accompanying Sebastian to investigate the Harimann family involves witnessing Ruxton Harimann carrying out a sexual roleplay with an elven woman in which he says, “Now, you be the naughty apprentice, and I’ll be the templar torturer…” No shame on consensual roleplay, that’s not my point. My point is that this specific scenario did not come from nowhere; it is perpetuated by the Circle.
This is why I believe it is only fair to call the sexual violence mages suffer from to be a systemic issue, part of the entire structural Circle of Magi. These are not individual errors, but rather a built in part of how the Circles are set up. The Chantry giving the Templar Order complete control over the mages as they do easily creates an environment where abuse can flourish, including sexual violence. This cannot be fixed without changing the underlying system of the Circle itself.
---
SOURCES:
Dragon Age: Asunder
Codex entry: Templar Letter (DA2)
Codex entry: Ser Alrik's Letter (DA2)
Dialogue: Ambient remark from apprentice mage (DAO)
Dialogue: Ambient remark from Alain (DA2)
Dialogue: Party banter between Anders and Sebastian (DA2)
Dialogue: Obtaining the quest “Dissent” from Anders (DA2)
Dialogue: Alain during the quest “Best Served Cold” (DA2)
Dialogue: Ruxton during the quest “Repentance” (DA2)
A list of consequences your choices in DAO, DA2 and DA:I could/should have had for Veilguard:
- having Kieran with Morrigan leads to Solas being significantly more powerful (Urthemiel's soul absorbed through Flemythal)
- making Gaspard Emperor of Orlais leads to an orlesian/fereldan allied war against Tevinter (because he chummies up with Alistair and/or Anora), weakening the Imperium significantly.
- giving Briala any kind of power supports Solas indirectly. (For elvhen glory™)
- disbanding the Inquisition lowers the Inquisitor's influence and reach, but they can act much faster. And Inquisitor in Chantry service has more power, but much less freedom with it.
- different support for the Inquisitor depending on their choice of ally or conscript/recruit mages or Templars
- Zevran alive and as leader of the Crows (in Antiva City) could mean infighting between houses or a different approach to certain missions, because of 'the purge'.
- Leliana as Divine might try to find an accord with the Imperial Chantry. Maybe.
- Hawke in Weisshaupt?
- Hawke sibling in Weisshaupt?
- Fenris in Minrathous (one way or the other)
- The Hero of Ferelden finds a cure for the Blight if still alive
- depending on who rules Orzammar key dwarf based mission follow different paths, because either you get in or you don't.
- being at least friends with Dorian in inquisition grants a boost in Shadow Dragon trust and influence
we could have still had solas creating the veil and all of that without turning the evanuris into a racist shitshow
like imagine the blight is something from the void rather than the titans. it originates there, it is not evil - it is trying to terraform. the void is an absence, and in this absence is notably an absence of pain, suffering, war. imagine the blight corruption begins in the evanuris by promising everlasting peace, and in the midst of the war with the titans, the evanuris fall victim to this whisper
imagine instead of slave markings, the vallaslin were shows of religious devotion. they continue to show which god you serve which temple you worship at, but as the blight corruption spreads, the evanuris begin to infuse the vallaslin ink with blight in order to spread it further
the evanuris were not evil. they were trying to protect their people, though it was misguided and corrupted due to the alien nature of this disease creeping from a place where no life should be.
perhaps the titans needed to be """sundered""" or whatever because the blight had spread to them as well. perhaps to protect the masses of people alive, the veil was necessary to stop the unstoppable creep of the blight, to stop the spread or at least slow it.
The dragon thralls of the evanuris were a safety feature to ensure that they would survive and leaving them outside of the veil was to help make sure that the veil would hold up against the blight lapping at its walls. you could still have them whisper to the tevinter magisters, as they are still trying to do what they think is right.
imagine also that in the thousands of years following, nature on Thedas has evolved its own solution to the Blight. the corruption has been around long enough for a natural remedy to evolve alongside it - Andraste's Grace is the answer in some way.
imagine instead of trying to tear down the Veil, Solas is looking for a way to reinforce it. as the last two Evanuris are all that is left, he needs new blood to sustain it. to hold the blight back. to buy time to find a way to defeat it.
or perhaps Solas had been corrupted as well and he doesn't know it. He is trying to tear it down because it is whispering to him and he doesn't realize it. at least to give him some kind of reason that makes sense if the blight is just waiting to pour out into the world behind the veil
idk i just. there were ways to do things without being. nasty. and you wouldnt even need to change much of what we had.
Heya! Sorry In advance if this sounds like the rambling of an insane man I’m running on 2 hours of sleep rn lol.
I was wondering about a character I’ve seen you and a couple others describe as a non-white character: Alistair Theirin from dragon age origins. Personally I’ve always thought he seemed pretty obviously white (There’s a scene where he describes the food he makes as ‘textureless grey mush” ….nobody is doing that like white ppl), so I was wondering what flagged him as non-white for you? I was also wondering if you’d be able to run a poll for me since this is a new blog (old blog got nuked :/) and you have a large fan base of people who this would be relevant to, maybe something like this?:
Do you consider Alistair (DAO) to be White?
Yes because of his in game context
Yes because of his character design
No because of his in game context
No because of his character design
All good if not, have a great day and know that I love your blog :D
I will not be running a poll for that, as the last time the words poll and Dragon Age were together on this page, I had to deal with the most overtly stupid level of gaslighting and racism I have ever experienced.
What I WILL do is leave this here for the cool dragon age people to explain their reasoning.
Hi 👋 I've been protesting the whitewashing of Alistair since this blog's creation in 2014. So I'm very familiar with people arguing things like "how can you whitewash a white character". Because fandom has a short term memory, I guess.
When Dragon Age: Origins (the first game) came out in 2009, Alistair was designed with light brown skin - specifically 4 out of 6 on their scale of the limited tints used in that game. (For comparison, Zevran has the darkest skin tint available.)
When Dragon Age II came out in 2011, Alistair was designed with tanned skin - specifically 6 out of 12.
When Dragon Age: Inquisition came out in 2014, Alistair was designed with the palest skin you can imagine, and blonde hair - specifically 0 out of 11. ZERO! He was so unrecognizable that fans at the time speculated who the hell he even was when BioWare promoted the game with screenshots and video clips including him. Because they did not clock him as Alistair.
This is all Alistair throughout the game series (I use this image a lot because the progressive change is so clear):
(His nose shape changes too, though it's not as noticeable from the front view.)
There are canonically confirmed characters of colour with about the same skin tone as Alistair in DAO. Why is that good enough for them, but not for him? Oops, those characters get whitewashed too. Because the DA fandom is racist as hell.
Some fans are so desperate to argue that the above change isn't that bad by doing things like showing edited screenshots of DAO, or claiming it's all just DAO's poor lighting, (note that the above image is of his head model outside of the game's lighting,) or claiming that he's just really tan. And it pisses me off, because what exactly do they get out of that argument? Why are they so desperate to cling to the idea that Alistair, their prince charming, cannot possibly be a brown man?
Meanwhile, the Dragon Age franchise as a whole is incredibly white. And even the characters that are unmistakably people of colour get ignored and/or whitewashed to death and back. So yes, I am passionate about defending Alistair as being brown. Especially because Alistair is specifically mixed, like me.
Now, I myself am whitepassing because I take after my white mother, but I have many family members who are sure as hell not. And I know exactly what it's like to have other kids ask questions like "is that your real dad" when getting picked up from school. Or learning that it's safe to get stopped by the RCMP with my mother driving the car but not my father. Or being ridiculed by white family members for never being white enough for their standards. So, when I read in the Dragon Age novel, The Calling, how Alistair's mother chose to give him up instead of raising him herself because she was terrified of how he would be treated as a mixed-race prince born out of wedlock, yeah, I got it. It was incredibly sad, but I got where she was coming from, as a character. What makes it even more sad is that Alistair was subsequently placed in the care of a white man who neglected him - specifically, the brother of King Maric's dead wife. This is again, something that a lot of mixed people can relate to. I think that kind of context is more important than him joking about how he's a shitty cook. (Again, he was raised by a negligent white man in Ferelden, of course he's never gotten to experience culinary delights.)
I've talked about the "ambiguous brown" trope found in Dragon Age before - being fantasy not an excuse for BioWare not to put in the effort when crafting their characters of colour to be more respectful and authentic racialized representation. Yes, the franchise has certainly improved over the years, but it still always feels like two steps forward, one step back. That said, it is no stronger an excuse for some fans to try and claim that just because BioWare pulled this trope, somehow any brown character is now invalidated and Actually White™. More whitewashing is not the answer. Effort is the answer - which is something that makes blogs like @creatingblackcharacters so valuable, actually!
Redemption comes from counter acting the wrong action that requires the redemption.
Thom Rainier led an assassination mission during a civil war that killed one noble family before he fled Orlais. After fleeing Orlais he was recruited to be a Grey Warden and when his mentor was killed, he took his name and went around Ferelden and the Free marches fighting Darkspawn and rescuing people. We meet him training farmers to fight Bandits that are harrassing them.
Rainier is redeemed before we even realize he's done something that requires redemption.
Cullen was directly and indirectly involved in the abuse, tranquilization, and murder of dozens of mages in Kirkwall. He is second in command to Knight Commander Meredith and believes in her convictions that all mages are weapons. He plainly says to Hawkes face (possibly a mage themselves) that Mages are not people. He goes along with on and off screen crimes against mages and doesn't change until Meredith makes a move to kill Hawke in the finale, regardless of Hawke's choice on who to support.
In Inquisition, he vehemently argues against recruiting the mages to seal the breach, contradicting the Inquisitor and other advisors at every positive mention of the mages in Haven. He claims to not be a member of the Templar order but pushes to recruit them despite the Lord Seeker telling you to fuck off in Val Royeaux.
He tells the Inquisitor about how templars become addicted to Lyrium and his character arc is fully revolving around his own relationship to taking lyrium for his templar abilities. His "good" ending is helping other templars break their lyrium addiction.
This is not redemption. He does not counteract his behavior from kirkwall. He does not aim to save mages from the abuses he and other templars inflicted on them. He wants the Inquisitor to leave them to their fate with Alexius. At no point does he aim to change how templars operate, just that they won't fall into addiction to a substance they willingly consume for power.
by unpopular demand. from here. my official list of which dai characters should Not like cullen like that
varric's opinion should depend on whether hawke was pro-mage or pro-templar. pro-mage hawke's varric should also refuse to say anything negative about cullen until you have high approval, because he is also a prisoner here and what is he, an idiot?
cole should say, out loud, with his mouth, that he has compassion for cullen and understands his fears and etc. but any time theyre in a room together cole should immediately get, like, Spirit Freakout Weird, and then they need to be separated. because cole can't cope with the impressions hes getting of mages being kidnapped and harrowed and made tranquil and killed.
sera should hate him outright. are you kidding. her whole bit is she's anti-authoritarian and sets herself Against people who wield institutional power & who have the power and inclination to commit to actions with disproportionate effects on the marginalised and the vulnerable. and cullen's career trajectory has been templar -> knight captain in city where templars more or less run the show -> (acting) knight commander, same city -> commander of religious army. she should be Loud and Insensitive about it
vivienne should not be able to forget that he was knight captain in kirkwall during the escalation of violence against mages culminating in the chantry explosion and (botched?) annulment. she's a mage who created for herself through luck and skill and daring an incredibly precarious position of influence, she knows the templars probably resent her enormously; she's the leader of the loyalist mages; and how can she look at him without thinking of what he's been part of, and wondering what it will take for him to turn on her? and conversely, cullen might not be part of the templar order anymore, but he absolutely believes that the templars should, in some form, exist— he's spent two games as a Zealot. he should have feelings about basically the most politically prominent mage in the south making moves towards becoming divine. feelings about mages in "real" politics, not just circle politics. can anybody hear me. also vivienne should not ever say this out loud u should only be able to tell by comparing how she speaks to him with how she speaks to characters she feels actively warm to but in a vacuum it's not obvious and she should only be willing to tell You w/ high approval
dorian is a tevinter altus. he is a necromancer. per the orlesian chantry hes basically already a blood mage even though by his definition he is Not. cullen should hate him on principle — a product of a nation in which mages aren't just free but (supposedly universally) revered, in which mages keep slaves and practice blood magic, The Big Scary That The Orlesian Circles Rely On As Evidence Of What Happens When You Let Mages Be People. and conversely— dorian comes from tevinter! to him, a templar is the dog of the wealthy ruling class! and to be honest southern templars are not better, they just serve different masters... and he of all people should feel that a templar's ~power over mages~ is basically just a cultural construct. like. we have seen that when mages Genuinely fight back, templars start dropping immediately. nobody is more well-positioned to know this and disdain southern templars' skills and power than dorian, who did not grow up with the culturally ingrained fear and awe of them that southern circle mages did. THEY SHOULD GET INTO IT. and he should take many opportunities to say it also
Before I even read the actual contents of Rhiannon Bevan’s interview with David Gaider, I just knew there would be some bullshit. I’m too familiar with his brand of white liberalism by now not to expect it. And yet, somehow, it still caught me off guard to hear this part in particular:
Despite all of this, Gaider doesn’t regret having the mage and templar conflict put forward. “You can make lots of arguments as to how well we supported either side of that argument; however, we knew going in that there was an argument to be made about the mages and templars, freedom versus security,” he says. “I know people wanted to keep tying this to real-world arguments, but real people don't walk around and explode.
“It feels dehumanizing to do it, but in some ways, the argument had more in common with gun control than the right to self-determination of the mages,” he continues.
As I said, I am familiar with this kind of disavowing from Gaider – he’s done the same thing many times before. The man loves to take credit when someone praises his work for nuance, but then retract everything the moment someone else questions anything about it. He has incredibly thin skin and only wants fans to count whatever is most convenient for him to say in the present. I don’t need a crystal ball to predict that if ever asked again, he’ll find another new way of denying anything of sociopolitical substance in the Dragon Age franchise he’s been a part of.
This particular example though, the claim that the Mage-Templar conflict is a metaphor for gun control? This is his flimsiest attempt to derail the actual messages pulled from the text yet. The interview speaks of Dragon Age II (DA2) specifically, so I will stick to confine my own sources against his statement to the game as well. Even still, it is easy enough to show just how pathetic a claim gun control is as metaphor, and worse yet, to insinuate that fans are simply delusional to see real-world arguments at work. If Gaider did not want the Mage-Templar conflict to be tied to real-world arguments, perhaps he should have, as the lead writer of DA2, kept the team from including observably robust real-world parallels.
Freedom vs. Security
Part of Gaider’s claim is that the Mage-Templar conflict is about “freedom versus security”. The immediate problem with this statement is that he is neglecting to include the context of, freedom for who and security for who? When people talk about freedom vs. security in real life, it is usually in reference to things like government surveillance and police presence. In such cases, there is an important difference in context that separates these real arguments and whatever the hell Gaider thinks he’s saying: the people in question are the same. In real life, it is the same group of people suffering from lack of freedom in favour their own so-called security. In Dragon Age, it is the mages that suffer from lack of freedom, for the sake of other people’s so-called security. This means it is not actually an argument of freedom vs. security—it is an argument of freedom vs. oppression. One group (non-mages) is solely benefiting in security through the oppression of another group (mages).
Some may attempt to justify it by saying that the Circles are in place to protect mages from outsiders, too. My rebuttal is quite simple: who teaches the average person to hate and fear mages in the first place? The very same Chantry that seeks to maintain control over their arsenal of mages! Of course they want to “protect” mages and non-mages from each other; it is a way of keeping the mages isolated and biddable.
Arguments in favour of security are of course, very often and easily used as a front for arguments in favour of oppression, don’t get me wrong. This is especially commonplace when colonial governments claim they are here to help, because they know better. But let us not help misconstrue these two connections further by contributing the problem, acting like they are actually the same thing.
Real-World Arguments
There are only two conclusions I can draw from Gaider saying that it is just the fans “wanting” to see real-world arguments, within the Mage-Templar conflict: Either he has forgotten the contents of a game he was the lead writer for, or he is desperate for fans to forget ourselves. Because you do not have to dig to find the real-world arguments already laying on the surface.
What is the Mage Underground, if not a real-world metaphor for escaping enslavement?
The Mage Underground is a network of people helping mages escape the Gallows into freedom. The quest introducing this faction is literally called “The Underground Railroad” – a clear reference to the real life Underground Railroad; the network that assisted Black people escape enslavement in the United States. As the real life railroad was mostly led by free and enslaved Black people with the help of abolitionists, the mage’s railroad is mostly led by mages with the help of sympathetic non-mages.
The Gallows itself was a former gateway for enslaved people when controlled by the Tevinter Imperium, and the Chantry even chose to keep the statues meant to intimidate the slaves. Cullen himself will draw a parallel to Kirkwall’s history of slavery and the current mages held captive in the Gallows. “The image of the poor, chained apprentice is a powerful one. And one the mages are more than willing to exploit,” he says, while the camera hovers over said statues.
What is the Tranquil Solution, if not a real-world metaphor for the “Final Solution”?
In the quest “Dissent”, Anders shares with Hawke that a templar named Ser Alrik has penned what he refers to as “The Tranquil Solution” – a plan to turn every mage Tranquil. “The Tranquil Solution” is a clear reference to “The Final Solution”; a euphemism used by Nazis to mean the genocidal murder of Jewish people. While Tranquility is not outright murder, the plan of turning every single mage Tranquil would qualify as an act of genocide as well. The definition of genocide does, after all, include causing serious bodily or mental harm with intent to destroy a whole group of people. The Tranquil are mages who are not just stripped of magic, but of all emotion and partial mental capacity. They are depicted as helpless servants to the Chantry. They are routinely raped and abused by Templars like Alrik, who outright alludes to this himself, saying when he makes a mage girl Tranquil, she will be forced to do whatever he wants.
Further complementing this allegory are the “Templar Death Squads” in the quest “A Noble Agenda”.
These death squads, described as hand-picked zealots to “purge mage-sympathizers”, are likely referencing the Einsatzgruppen; the Nazi Death Squads that held an integral role in the “Final Solution”.
What is forced sedation, if not a real-world metaphor for involuntary treatment?
During the quest “Best Served Cold,” Hawke has the opportunity to convince Cullen to be merciful on those who were part of the conspiracy to oust Meredith as Knight-Commander. Later, Cullen says that the mages have been “confined to their quarters and sedated”. Essentially, they are treated like detained patients against their will.
My own brother has been a victim of involuntary treatment, where he was kept in a psych ward for two months and drugged so heavily he was walking into walls. It is a very real contemporary occurrence just as much as in the past, especially for racialized populations who are diagnosed with “dangerous” conditions—bipolar disorder, in my brother’s case.
Just how conditions like bipolar disorder for example, are often misunderstood as walking around with a bomb inside, mages in Dragon Age are treated like they are an inherent hazard to everyone around them. Arguments in favour of imprisoning mages, or even outright murdering them all, most frequently come down to seeing them as weapons rather than people. When Cullen himself says this, it is unquestionably presented as a cruel, dehumanizing, immoral position to take. Being able to use magic does not make a person less of a person, just like having a disability does not make a person less of a person! No matter the scale of how impacting disabilities are, or magic is.
Gun Control
I wish I could tell Gaider that if he has to start a sentence with, “it feels dehumanising to do it,” perhaps the rest of that sentence should stop. Perhaps instead you should question why you actually believe it is ever a solid argument to dehumanize a person. Mages are not real, but their real-world parallels are. BioWare went out of its way to draw those parallels; the writers, including Gaider, made active choices to illustrate everything above and more. To be clear, I am not saying they shouldn’t have—I believe these choices add a distinct flavour to the world-building of Dragon Age that separates it from many other fantasy settings. And while the writing does not always land well, at least an attempt was made to say something impactful. I will always favour that over choosing to take the easy-way out by scrubbing your work of anything that could be interpretable as day I say, politically progressive.
Measures to prevent gun violence usually involve firearms laws to limit misuse. These laws are of course incapable of being 100% iron-clad, because there will always be outliers to any situation. However, it is proven to overall limit the amount of gun violence in countries with strict firearms laws compared to, well, the United States. (The US gun homicide rate is 26 times that of other high-income countries.)
What firearms laws do not do, is require anyone with a gun to be abducted from their family and locked up in a prison for the rest of their life. That is what the Chantry does to mages in Dragon Age, and they do not even have a choice in the matter. Mages are not guns. Mages are people who just happen to have magic, and it does not even take magic to cause mass harm, as proven time and again across the franchise and even specifically just in DA2. For example, in the quest “Blackpowder Courtesy” an angry elf is able to kill off an entire area of Lowtown with stolen Qunari poison.
The only characters who want to compare the Mage-Templar conflict to something like gun control, are the characters who are part of the actual problem of mage self-determination; the ones like Cullen who advocate against treating mages as people. By trying to say that this line of thinking is valid, Gaider is only showing that he has a complete lack of understanding of what makes the argument so villainous. He just sounds like certain fans of a show like The Boys, who unironically idolize fascist characters like Homelander. (Sidenote: I have never personally seen The Boys. I am just familiar with the main villain and how real-life fascists sympathize with him through internet osmosis.)
In a roleplaying sense, there is of course nothing wrong with having a characters side with the Templar Order. I am not advocating for treating roleplaying decisions as if they represent real life morals. However, this is a specific case where Gaider is not speaking in terms of in-universe; he is genuinely saying that the argument against mages is a virtuous one. Except it’s not! It is so unmistakeably not.
“You have a sword. Why aren't you killing someone right now?”
—Bethany Hawke
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SOURCES:
Codex entry: Kirkwall - The Gallows
Quest: “The Underground Railroad”
Quest: “Dissent”
Quest: “A Noble Agenda”
Quest: “Blackpowder Courtesy”
Dialogue: Cullen during and after completing the quest “Enemies Among Us”
Dialogue: Cullen after completing the quest “Best Served Cold”
Every single time I finish the DA2 quest "A New Path" I'm struck by how much of a dumbass Keeper Marethari is. Every single time. I know the intention was to preach "oh, look how Merrill's blood magic has ruined everything" but like. Last time I fucking checked Merrill is not responsible for Marethari's actions?
Maybe if the Keeper had supported Merrill in the first place, instead of casting her away and then trying to coax her back into the clan that she was, at the same time, spreading lies to about how Merrill is dangerous and thus further socially isolating her... Maybe if the Keeper didn't treat Merrill like a baby who can't make her own decisions and just doesn't know any better whenever they disagree... Maybe if the Keeper didn't choose to become possessed because she didn't trust Merrill's ability to handle her own shit... Maybe then, things would be different!
Every single death that the story tries to blame Merrill for - Pol, Marethari, potentially the entire clan - is just other people being stupid and not trusting her. Despite the fact that through the entire game, Merrill harms zero (0) people using blood magic.
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