I had a whole long post written elsewhere on this topic, but hereâs the excerpt of the relevant bits:
âWe Kill A Lot Of People In This Game, Like, Seriously A Lot, Guys
âOrigins had a statistics counter which, among other things, listed the number of kills by your character. By the end of my game, my Wardenâs kill count was somewhere above 1800, which honestly was on the low end of what it could be considering that I skipped much of the optional content. DA2 doesnât have a similar counter, that I know of, but I would imagine that Hawkeâs death toll by the end of the game was somewhat similar. Heck, thereâs that banter between Varric and Anders in Act III where Varric pegs Andersâ death count to date as âtwo-hundred and fifty-four by my last count. Plus about five hundred men, a few dozen giant spiders, and at least two demons.â Thatâs at least 750 dead human beings that neither we nor the other characters are even asked to consider giving two shits about, and considering that Anders is 1) in a healing/supporting role for much of the game and 2) not always in the party, itâs almost a certainty that all of the other companionsâ death tolls would outstrip his, let alone Hawkeâs.
âUnlike the Warden, Hawke doesnât even have the excuse of mostly fighting and killing darkspawn. Most of those ~2000 kills were other human beings, many of whom were no better or worse people than Hawke himself. Thereâs those townsmen in the Chantry in Act II that Petrice tricks into attacking you, who were guilty of nothing more than listening to their priest. Thereâs Merrillâs whole entire clan, if you choose the wrong dialogue options. Thereâs a whole horde of smugglers and mercenaries who are doing the exact same thing that Hawke did at the gameâs prologue for the exact same reason: because theirs is a harsh society where they must struggle to survive, and survival often means killing.
âOne hundred people died when the Chantry went up. We can be fairly secure in that number, since itâs reported independently by Varric and by Sebastian in DAI, both of whom were eyewitnesses, neither of whom have any reason to protect Anders nor to lie. Iâm pretty sure that my Warden chopped her way through at least that many dwarven citizens in the âA Paragon Of Her Kindâ questline alone, most of whom had done nothing more wrong than to support a different political faction from me. The Warden can choose to firebomb Amaranthine, killing all the surviving civilians inside, in the aim of protecting vigilâs keep. My point is, we the player have killed a lot of people through the 60+ hours of game time by the time we reached this point; the game expects and requires us to accept that killing is an appropriate, often unavoidable method of solving conflicts and advancing your goals. Why, in the eleventh hour, are we suddenly supposed to stop accepting that? Why do we now, after all the people weâve killed, regard death as a senseless horror? What makes what Anders did any different than what Hawke did, or the Warden did? Why is only his crime, alone, considered unforgivable?â
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