why are these ostensibly powerful people all either grandmotherly saintly idealistic victims or petty schemers cowering in shock unable to even act within the story? why can they never be taken seriously as a threat? why are a generation of grand clerics completely wiped out at the beginning as an excuse to not have to deal with them in a game, deemed of no real interest to the writers or player, with not one of them except the divine mentioned by name or having any effect on the world by their absence? why are the surviving clerics completely powerless as soon as the male-dominated military side of their organisation abandons them? why is the only chantry mother that we see oppose us struck across the face by a man only to immediately vanish from the story, defeated? why is the chantry’s role constantly described as a maternal one to “comfort the masses”, sanding off the goals of their religion, their political muscle, their imperialist ambitions, and more? well, a lot of reasons, e.g. that dai is unwilling to seriously interrogate its christianity parallel and somehow this religion game was written exclusively by people deeply uninterested in writing religion, but i think at least one other reason is a complete and utter failure of imagination to portray a matriarchal institution and its female leaders with the complexity, brutality, and power that the chantry should possess. it’s annoying and, worse, it’s boring
i think celene being completely helpless, always assassinated if the player doesn’t intervene on her behalf, her crimes brushed off, her conflict with briala reduced to a lovers’ tiff, is probably also symptomatic of this. dai is always trying to be like look, women in power, aren’t we soooo progressive!! and never ever actually backing it up in the writing
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