In light of some recent conversation, it has occurred to me (upon suggestion from the lovely @seracadash) that I could be the change I wanted to see in the world and just. Ya know. Actually post my opinions on the internet. Note: this is an opinion and one possible interpretation of the text, not me saying it's definitive.
I think the Dark Ritual is an awful situation for everyone involved. There's really no "good" part of the situation - even the fact that it might save your life is more of a coercive force than it is an upside - and the people who get the worst of it are the actual participants, of course. Fandom has often talked about how sad it is for an unromanced Alistair to have to potentially give up his virginity in exchange for his or his friend's life. But what I haven't seen, I think ever, is a discussion of the fact that an unromanced Morrigan is also pretty likely to never have had sex before, either.
The closest I've seen to someone touching that topic with a ten foot pole are these two posts. But I wanna get more specific. Because we, as a fandom, tend to assume - based on how sexually forward Morrigan bluffs, and I do personally think it's a bluff - that she's a pretty sexually experienced person. But there's just... almost no evidence for that in the text, in my personal opinion.
Let's dig into that.
I recently combed the wiki while talking to a friend about this. And while the DA:O wiki is surprisingly exhaustive I have, personally, gotten a Morrigan line that wasn't on there, so I'd believe there's something I'm missing. If anybody happens to find some, please share.
Here is what I found:
^ this is. The ONLY dialogue in the entire game where Morrigan outright claims experience of sex, per the wiki.
In my opinion, the comment at The Pearl is directly related to these banters with Alistair and Leliana, which suggests the "experience" Morrigan is talking about isn't sex she had, but instead sex her mother had that she, unfortunately, witnessed or had described back to her.
Apart from that, here's the only companion dialogue that implies she might maybe know some stuff about sex, which… you can take or leave as being experience-based knowledge:
Notably, the second Leliana one is cut dialogue, but we'll take it into consideration cuz why not.
To me, this reads as her being mean to Leliana and trying to make herself Being Sexual as opposed to Being Romantic her "winning quality" in the weird catfight Gaider and Chee had to get in there for ??? reasons. There's some Madonna/Whore stuff going on in there that, frankly, deserves its own post. (And, as the link shows, has been extensively in its Andraste and the Witch tag set. Go look at its posts, the posts are fantastic.)
But the point here is that the above dialogue doesn't necessarily imply Morrigan has ever actually had sex before the Warden. It implies that she thinks having sex with someone is a means of controlling or manipulating them. Which. Given what the last chunk just said about her mother's use for sex, can you blame her for arriving at that conclusion?
I don't think it's news to the fandom that Morrigan is incredibly sheltered, or that her mother severely narrowed the lens through which she views the world. I don't think it's even necessarily news that she doesn't show a lot of comfort with sex initially! But I do think it's a severely under discussed angle of the Dark Ritual that that might well be Morrigan's very first experience with sex.
Can you imagine? You're leaving home for the first time that isn't just a "trip into town" to people watch, and you leave home knowing you Have To get pregnant because your mother - your abusive, sexually creepy mother - told you that you Have To in order to preserve something you care about deeply (old magics) because she raised you to care about that. You spend months to a year traveling with, potentially, one man capable of rendering you pregnant and he's naive in ways you weren't afforded the luxury to be and he Hates You or at least is cruel to you frequently. Eventually, you have to ask this guy's boss to arrange sex with him so that you can have a baby he actively doesn't want with the flimsy excuse that it might save his life. And his boss might be his wife, depending on how this all went down, and you're also facing down having sex for the very first time.
Horrible. Devastating. We talk a lot in this fandom about men who've been forced to become weapons against their will, but can we spare five minutes for Morrigan? Sheltered, certainly not clueless but definitely dubiously willing if she's doing it with Alistair, honestly unprepared Morrigan?
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