Can you talk more about Harding just happening to be lucky that she joined a morally good group? Like the more I listen to Inquisition and Veilguard dialogue with her in them, I can’t help but think you’re onto something.
“Me? I’m no one. Lived near Redcliffe all my life. Herded sheep for my neighbor. When the Inquisition came through my village, I helped by telling them everything I knew about the area. Then I signed on. Wanted to see the world before it was swallowed up by… that thing out there.”
anyone can offer you a chance to see the world. adventure, beautiful foreign sights, respect for your skill, status when you go home, community and camaraderie among your fellow fighters. chances that you might never usually get as an ‘ordinary’ person, in this case living in a rural area as a (fantasy) minority. honestly for me the whole “get out there and see the world!” thing specifically evokes the real world evil of like, classic military recruitment rhetoric. it’s all a big adventure! never mind what you’ll be doing and who you’ll be doing it to.
and our first sight of harding is a confident smirk when she kills. (which we’re supposed to feel fine about and maybe think that she’s a #girlboss, because remember the mages and templars are Crazy, so killing them indiscriminately is fine. but let’s imagine dai is a serious game.) she obviously took very easily to violence in the inquisition’s name before she’d met any of the inquisition’s leaders, before the inquisition had a real direction, and before they had a simple-to-justify, no-longer-human enemy like corypheus. if she could be convinced to do all that by the inquisition’s scouts, then why not anyone else offering the same things? why not an inquisition that was actually, you know, an inquisition?
despite leading with wanting to see the world and not even mentioning any kind of moral motivation, harding definitely perceives herself as a good person and i don’t think she would go for anything that didn’t have a veneer of righteousness. she takes pride in the inquisition and what she believes to be its purpose. but any organisation can say they’re doing it for the good and order and stability of the world, right. any organisation can pass you that message through a recruiter who at least sounds like they believe it. and as a scout on the ground you’re so far from the war table that you will never really know why the people directing you are making their decisions. and you opt to kill whoever they tell you to kill anyway. even in some impossibly hypothetical world where those decisions are all just and measured and necessary, can it ever possibly be moral to just hand over your conscience like that? to kill blindly because those are your orders?
i feel like harding’s narrative veers so closely to real world recruitment rhetoric that i don’t just find it uninteresting to be like Yay It All Worked Out :), i find it Bad. this is not heroic when it happens in real life and i don’t think it should be heroic here. i know i’m in the genre where Pure And Honourable Warfare Of Our Innocent Boys And Girls Against Inhuman Monsters or Perhaps The Inherently Evil Foreign Horde of Baddies is virulently everywhere but i think that’s precisely why we should be aware and critical of it and thinking around it not just accepting it as fact you know
and harding would be a better character for this setting if we engaged with the blood on her hands. she is essentially a killer, it’s the first defining thing we see her do! she doesn’t have to be stuffed into a “cute wholesome moral compass we don’t have to take seriously” box just because the writers can’t even imagine a dwarf being taken seriously let alone a dwarf woman
