I love the hell out of Orsino. I know the game wants me to think of him as partially culpable – that is, that yes, he has a point about the treatment of mages in Kirkwall, but on the other hand he’s corresponding with blood mages and rabble rousing in the streets. I think I’m supposed to admire his goals but tsk at his methods. I’m not even a little bit inclined to disapprove of him.
On the other hand, in The Last Straw Anders will accuse Orsino of ‘bowing to [their] Templar jailors’. Rhetorical exaggeration aside, it isn’t that I disagree with the point Anders makes there. Orsino’s level of resistance would never have liberated the mages, and there is no reason why these people should be satisfied with anything less than their freedom.
I’m just … sympathetic to the position in which Orsino found himself. The Circle is an insidious trap, even for the people attempting to resist it.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that the two biggest names of the mage uprising – Anders, who struck the first blow, and Fiona, who led the mages to freedom – are both ‘failed’ Grey Wardens.
Being a Grey Warden is generally a gift for a mage, and those who manage to make a life for themselves there are unlikely to look back to the Circle. It offers not only respect and freedom, but a cause they can embrace, and that is likely to absorb their attention and their energy. I’m sure the same would be true for elven mages who successfully join a Dalish clan: they have their new people to look after, a shot at being Keeper and an entire culture in which to immerse themselves.
Apostates on the other hand, mages who simply flee the Circle in the hope of living their lives in peace, never really cease to be prisoners. They must spend their whole lives looking over their shoulders, and trying to avoid notice. You can see the stress of that in the Hawke family, both in the snippets of information we get about Malcolm, and in the fear and self-loathing that Bethany has inherited.
Whatever their other differences, Anders and Fiona share this: they got their start as Wardens, and then had the reality of life as a mage forced back upon them. Fiona was cast out of the Wardens and sent back to the Circle. Anders escaped that fate – but only just, and could hardly escape the realisation that the Chantry would never let him be. Both had a taste of a world where mages could be comrades or commanding officers, where they could expect, outside of their duty, to live their lives as they saw fit. And then they were reminded of exactly how life is for every other mage in southern Thedas. They’ve got the big-picture dream in front of them – something to reach and hope for, outside Circle walls. It’s no bloody wonder they ended up going to war.
Orsino, though, never got his shot at the outside – either as a Warden or an apostate. He’s a Circle mage trying to fight his war from the inside.
The story we get about Orsino in World of Thedas II largely concerns his best friend, Maud, who killed herself because she couldn’t bear life in the Circle. There are countless more in the Gallows just like her – and Anders will confirm in dialogue that the same is true elsewhere. Things may be worse in Kirkwall, because being the worst is what Kirkwall is for, but it is common everywhere for Circle mages to die young, and by their own hands.
Orsino became First Enchanter in direct response to this. His goal, from day one, has been to keep these people alive by any means necessary. Of course, he’s aware that they are in large part dying because their lives are intolerable. His strategy is not to submit and appease the Templars wherever possible. He is trying to better his people’s lot: ‘he wanted to give them something of a life so that death would not be preferable’.
We’re meant to understand that he has had some success at this, although his biography doesn’t say what those successes were. I suspect that the fact that mages are allowed out even as far as the Gallows courtyard in Acts 1 and 2 is all his doing.
But the problem here is quite evident: by Act 3 they are no longer permitted to do even that. There are more reasons to rebel every day, but the cost of doing so will defeat Orsino’s very purpose: the rebellion will no doubt ultimately save the lives of countless mages, but most of the ones in the Kirkwall Circle, the ones to whom Orsino has dedicated his life, are doomed.
There are children in the Circle. Emile was taken at six – and while that seems to be younger than average, we don’t even know that that’s the youngest possible. There may be five or four year olds in the Circle right now. There are elderly people in the Circle: people who can’t move as fast as they used to, or endure as much.
Even the mages in the prime of their lives are going to be almost entirely non-combatants. We see that, here, in Orsino’s introduction. In theory a group of mages ought to be formidable. People are always going on about the ‘options’ mages have in a fight that others do not. But these mages have all been cut down by Qunari swords. They may know how to call down lightning, but they don’t know how to fight.
Orsino knows these people, and he mourns every death. They are all abductees, cut off from the world and with only each other to rely on. He has volunteered to be a father figure to some of the most traumatised people in Thedas. I can understand why he finds the thought of leading them to war unbearable.
Orsino is losing this battle by inches. He wants to give these people their lives, but he can’t. He can’t get them even the most basic rights or freedoms. He can’t prevent the Templars from beating or raping them. He can’t prevent them from making them Tranquil, or outright murdering them.
He ends by telling Meredith he’ll do anything to stop the Rite of Annulment – he’ll help her search for her imagined blood mages. That wouldn’t help, of course. Even if she agreed, it would only delay her until she found another excuse. But I can see how he got to that point, and how his goals narrowed from giving the Kirkwall mages purpose and hope to keeping them breathing just one day longer.
You can’t save a Circle. That’s the tragedy of it. There’s no way to be inside, and still win. You have to bring the whole system down, and be willing to bear the horrific losses that come with doing that. And how can you do that, when you’ve made yourself the protector of this handful of people who are, through no fault of their own, effectively on the front lines of mage survival?
His introduction, here, weeping over the bodies of his people? That’s every day of his life. Some die at the hands of the Qunari, some at the hands of the Templars, others are killed by demons, plenty kill themselves. They’re all dying, and there’s nothing he can do about it. In the end, it’s their deaths that have to have meaning, as the Kirkwall Annulment and its handful of survivors become the start of the rebellion. Their lives? No chance there.
I love Orsino, and his whole damn life is one of the saddest things in Thedas.
