Also another gripe I have with Awakenings is the blatant lack of interest the narrative has in Mother. The Architect is a LITERAL Magister Sidereal. He comes across as pretty reasonable in his goals and motivations to undo the Taint for darkspawn, and he seems to exist as a person who's aware of what the world was like pre!Andraste! He's stupidly old. Even through the game underutilizes the potential of the Architect, by basically not allowing players to interact with him at all, he's given a lot of narrative weight. Most players pick him when it comes to the final choice.
But I wish the Mother was equally as interesting, and that the choice felt like a legitimate one. In Awakenings, the Mother has no goal and she's not especially interested in convincing the player to do anything—she wants the Wardens to die and the Architect die and everybody to become Tainted, because she's CRAAAAZYYYY and prefers the music of the Calling, and prefers the oblivion of non-existence. And I think this comes from the 2005 edgelord thinking that clearly originally conceived of the broodmother. While I think the broodmother can be read in DA:O as a vile, twisted reflection of the misogynistic practise of noble hunting that plagues Orzammar, and thus Hespith's fate, while more grotesque in visuals, is ultimately not so different from what she might have undergone in Orzammar itself—I think that's completely an accidental reading, you know? It's one that we as feminist thinkers impose onto the game. Even the Dark Ritual, which is peak body horror, coercion and pregnancy terrors, is just as callously treated as a way to 'reward' male players and Alistair, instead of Morrigan's plight being given narrative weight. It's not something the game is going out of its way to actually explore, and Mother proves that the themes around childbirth, body horror and violation, were kind of stumbled into by accident. Hespith craves death, because being raped and violated is too awful to live with. The Mother craves death, because being shaped into an object of reproduction is too awful to live with, and she'd rather not have personhood while fulfilling her function. It is a fundamentally misogynistic view to posit that post!rape and motherhood, one is fundamentally tainted and cannot live as a full human.
That being said, the bones around reproductive horror are there, and could be used to be something more deliberate and interesting! What does it mean for Mother to wake up after this horrific change has been imposed upon her? How might her opposition of the Architect be part of her fighting to come to terms with her new existence by accepting it? Finding reasons to continue on, justify why it was necessary or acceptable, because the alternative is terrifying? I think you can still do something interesting with Mother being an awakened broodmother that prefers being a darkspawn! And I think you can do this while assigning the darkspawn personhood, instead of saying that they wish to return to the oblivion of being slaves to the archdemon's Calling. Because, why would darkspawn who were born darkspawn, want to be anything else? Sure, the darkspawn who were turned, who have vague memories of being a human or a dwarf or a Qunari might wish to return back, but why would genlocks and hurlocks who were born that way desire to be something else? Why would the Mother's children be benefited by the Architect's plan? I think there's a lot that can be done with this split, when we engage with darkspawn as people with cultures/hierarchies!
Another tack you could take to make Mother more interesting is to enhance the concept of the Calling—if it is more than the forbidden siren's song—we can make Mother's argument slightly more compelling for the Wardens! I think there's a way for the Mother to essentially argue that connection to the Calling of the Old Gods is the same as being connected to the Fade? That what the Architect proposes to do to darkspawn is akin to Tranquility? That without access to the Old God's song, without access to this wellspring of creativity and artwork, darkspawn are made lesser? Of course, this would require the Calling to be more than it is, and for darkspawn to have something more of an artistic culture among themselves, but I don't think that'd be hard to do (see my previous post about this).
I also think that, at its core, Dragon Age is a game about faith— the consequences of faith, what happens when faith falters or is challenged, the atrocities justified in the name of faith. And at the core of the argument here is the question of faith, is it not? The Architect was once the Magister Sidereal, High Priest to Urthemiel. Urthemiel whispered to him and told him to open the Black City, and as a result, The Architect lost millennia to the Calling, and is transformed into a darkspawn—an outcome, he's clearly not pleased by. Fundamentally, I think the Architect's core tension should be that he has lost faith in the Old Gods' plan, and that the Mother still has faith! She should be accusing him of blasphemy (and of course, indulging in blasphemous thoughts and moments of doubt herself, yet ultimately doubling down).
Darkspawn personhood!!! It matters to me!!
