So the templar quest title bothers me, but the mage one doesn't tbh. The mage title isn't about the mages, but the venatori and freeing the mages imo. yea there are problems with how bioware treats mages in this quest, but overall, I think they do a fairly good job of portraying them as victims and with alexius as the villain. unlike the templar quest where you work with templars, the mages are p nonexistent in their quest. tl;dr I feel like the title refers to the venatori, not the mages.
The mage quest title mainly bothers me when juxtaposed with the templar quest title. If the templar quest title had negative connotations, the mage quest title wouldn’t bother me as much, but instead, the templar quest title pushes that “not all templars” POV that bothers me so much.
And then, the mage quest is generally like “wow look at all the trouble these mages cause” – Alexius and the Venatori are clearly highlighted as the primary villains and the title likely refers to them (esp since that part of the Chant is specifically talking about ancient magisters, even though the Chantry has since generalized it to all mages). But the rebel mages still get portrayed in a negative light, even as victims – it really bothered me that they didn’t get any agency, especially how Fiona was handled. Too many people came away with the idea of “wow the mages were stupid and sold themselves into slavery” with a complete lack of understanding or compassion for all of the complex things going on in that quest and in the background (e.g. I remember awhile back getting anons like that, here and here, and apparently that was a similar line of thought on the Bioware forums). And the mages end up getting blamed for pretty much everything that went wrong in Redcliffe, and for the war in general, esp given the language used for them in comparison to the templars (e.g. the rebel mages being said to have “gone mad with power” while the templars in the Hinterlands are simply referred to as “no longer following orders”).
And we get almost no context or emphasis on how important Fiona has been to the plot since before DA:O – everything from her background with the Wardens, her being Alistair’s mother, her being the Grand Enchanter of the Circle and head of the Libertarian fraternity and how she worked for years for Circle independence (long before Anders even thought that was a viable option, let alone came to the conclusion that it was the only option).
But yeah, I had a ton of problems with ‘In Hushed Whispers,’ grandenchanterfiona wrote a cool thing here about how the quest should’ve looked, and damn, I wish we had gotten something like that instead. But as for the quest title itself, that’s honestly the least of my problems with the quest – the title mainly bothers me when juxtaposed with the templar quest title, since the templar quest title has comparatively more positive connotations. I mean, the templars in the game do villainous shit as much as the Venatori do, so why portray them in a more positive light?
I mean I’ll admit I’m also biased since I just bristle at the suggestion that the Templar Order should ever be described as ‘blessed peacekeepers, champions of the just’ – it makes sense for characters in-universe to believe that since they live in a society governed by Chantry doctrine, but on a meta level, in terms of what the writers chose to name the quests, I was just like “ughhhh, they’re pushing more of this Good Templars crap”, haha. The Order isn’t just a barrel full of peacekeepers and champions of justice with a handful of bad apples, it’s pretty much all rotten all the way down to the foundations, and the occasional not-as-bad-as-the-rest templar doesn’t change that and I get so frustrated at the games for pretending that it does. The comparison between the mage quest and templar quest titles really just reminded me of that trend, which also shows in the whole “the mages have gone mad with power and the templars are no longer following orders” thing – like, by itself it might not be as damning, but since it’s an ongoing thing, every instance in that pattern ends up annoying me, haha.
