sorry to jump in on your tags here…
#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.
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