Some of you REALLY need to work on your media comprehension, because you are giving the early Bioware/Dragon Age writers a ton of moral credit they have not earned and absolutely do not deserve.
Dragon Age Origins (and to a very large degree Dragon Age 2) does not like marginalized people or think they deserve full societal rights. You... understand that, right? You didn't miss that?
Every overarching theme and smaller scale connected conflict about marginalization is based around the idea that marginalized people are ontologically dangerous. The core conflict of the early games is between whether on the one hand marginalized people deserve to not be constrained and abused. Versus if it is dangerous to remove those systems of constraint, because marginalized people are ("of course" "obviously") dangerous.
That's the central conflict at the heart of the first two Dragon Age games. Like it or not. Reclaim it by recontextualizing it or not.
Every bit of those early games is dripping with a straight white man's lens on identity politics. They know what they're doing, they meant to say that, and they designed it that way on purpose because it reflected their actual worldview. At every turn, they completely fail to have anything true or useful or meaningful to say about the structures of power as it connects to identity. Because they can never move beyond entertaining the idea that having certain people exist as permanent second class citizens is somehow "natural," rational, or morally good. That's clearly what they truly believed! Which is why it plays out this way, over and over and over and over again, in every plotline of these early games!
If you are any sort of marginalized person unironically, simplistically holding up DAO or DA2 up as useful lenses on societal truth, you need to get better at media literacy. Right fucking now. These games are not your friend, and they're not promoting tolerant or even baseline humanizing treatment of you. That doesn't mean there's nothing good about them, or that you can't find your own meaning within them in spite of the writers' intent, or that you can't like them. I like them. I find Dragon Age 2, specifically, very meaningful. Almost entirely in spite of the writers' intent. Not because of it.
But for your own safety we have all got to get better at recognizing when we're putting some writer and/or piece of art on a pedestal. When those pieces/people can't even be bothered to see us (or others) as fully fucking human
Your Journey Ends: A Parting Retrospective on Dragon Age (Part Five)
V. There Can Be No Peace
In keeping with the alliterative naming scheme we devised for Origins with “death vs defiance”, I’d like to propose that Dragon Age II’s core thematic tension is between freedom and futility. Numerous characters and groups strive to secure better futures for themselves, often risking their lives for the promise of freedom. Yet time and again, these efforts are met with failure. Very few of Dragon Age II’s stories have happy endings. Whereas Origins usually gave the player ideal ways to resolve quests (expelling Connor’s demon with the help of the Circle, breaking the werewolf curse, etc.) and gave opportunities for each of its major characters to come out on top in the end, DA2, by contrast, drags its characters further down the more they struggle. Whether undone through their own faults or plagued by misfortune, characters in Dragon Age II, despite their earnest efforts to achieve freedom and sanctuary, often end their journeys worse off than when they started.
Take perhaps the most deeply flawed individual in the game, Anders. He wants nothing more than to ensure the freedom of mages. In the Kirkwall Circle of Magi (charmingly called the “Gallows”), mages are subject to stringent restrictions, coercion, and violence. As alluded to earlier, it’s described more like a concentration camp than a cloistered academy. Anders’s desire to help the spirit of Justice from Origins’s “Awakening” expansion leads him to adopt the spirit as its new host. But his enmity at the injustice suffered by mages warps the spirit into one of Vengeance, recursively fueling Anders’s righteous anger. No matter what he tries, though, the situation in Kirkwall never gets any better – templar abuses run rampant, and mages succumb to despair and possession by demons. In desperation, Anders resorts to terrorism, bombing the city’s Chantry and killing the moderate Grand Cleric Elthina. His expressed goal is one of accelerationism – by removing the centrist negotiators of compromise through such a brazenly violent act, the templars will aim to punish all mages for his crime, thus forcing them to stand up and defend their lives. In his quest to liberate his fellow sufferers, Anders drags them into a revolution that will only condemn them to more fear, suspicion, and scorn. If that doesn’t seem self-sabotaging enough, Anders can strangely be persuaded by a rival Hawke to battle on behalf of the templars and atone by forcefully quelling the rebellion he started. In either case, Anders’s struggle for mage freedom arguably makes things worse.
Merrill similarly wants to restore the elven people to their former glory, freeing them from the indignity they endure as a migratory, stateless society. In trying to repair an Eluvian – a relic from the ancient elven empire – Merrill deals with a powerful demon. In an attempt to protect Merrill from the demon’s trickery and eventual possession, her clan leader allows herself to be possessed, forcing Merrill to kill her. Depending on player choice, she might also be forced to slaughter the rest of her clan, who turn hostile upon discovering what has transpired. Regardless, Merrill loses her status, her mentor, and her home to her well-intentioned ambitions.
Fenris, having freed himself from slavery, nevertheless finds himself hounded by the envoys of his former master seeking to reclaim him. He winds up spending over half a decade in Kirkwall, lying in wait inside his master’s former mansion, awaiting the chance to kill him. He feels, perhaps correctly, that he will never be free so long as his master lives, and thereby shackles himself to that man’s fate. Upon finally confronting and dispatching his abuser, Fenris learns from his estranged sister that he had previously bartered for the freedom of her and her mother. That freedom, however, was “no boon.” Despite all that Fenris sacrificed for himself and his family, they’re all left feeling hollow in the end.
Sebastian Vael, an exiled nobleman turned Chantry acolyte, inevitably fails his goal to live a peaceful, pious life. He is unable to convince Grand Cleric Elthina to abandon her post, knowing that seditious mages want her dead. As such, she is killed by Anders, and Sebastian commits himself to avenging her, even if that means reclaiming his old title as the prince of Starkhaven.
Even among the antagonists, trial and suffering do not mete out justice or relief. The theft of the Tome of Koslun forces the Arishok and his qunari army to remain in Kirkwall for years, where they’re subject to discrimination, violence, and an unending showcase of the city’s (perceived) uncivilized depravity. As his patience wears thin, the Arishok becomes further trapped by his situation – unable to leave without the Tome (which had been stolen once more by Isabela), and unable to bear witness to Kirkwall’s systemic injustice any longer, his only recourse is to launch an insurrection to seize control of the city. The occupation hardly lasts long, and depending on player choices, the Arishok either winds up dead or departs with the Tome and captive Isabela… only for her to escape yet again with the artifact. Despite everything the qunari suffered in their confinement to Kirkwall, their efforts are ultimately fruitless.
Yet nobody epitomizes failure quite like the main character, Hawke. They flee with their family to Kirkwall to seek refuge from the Blight and begin a better life, only to lose one of their siblings on the way there. Once they reach the city, they discover that their family estate has been sold off, and they’re forced to sell themselves into indentured servitude to earn passage through the gates. The rest of the first act sees them preparing for an expedition to the Deep Roads to hopefully strike it rich, thereby securing safety and freedom for either themselves or their mage sister, Bethany. The plan goes awry, as their remaining sibling either dies of Blight poisoning in the Deep Roads, is saved but inducted into the Grey Wardens, or is discovered by the templars anyway. While Hawke does earn their fortune, it brings them neither peace nor safety. Their efforts to locate a serial killer end in failure (or possibly executing the wrong man). The killer courts their widowed mother, then butchers her as part of a twisted ritual to recreate his own dead lover. Instead of living in their Hightown mansion with three of their family members, Hawke is now all alone.
Things get worse when Hawke finds themselves as a pawn between parties trying to stoke fear and hatred against the qunari, provoking a crisis. Even if Hawke tries to recover the Tome of Koslun for the Arishok, they lose it Isabela, igniting the insurrection. Nevertheless, Hawke saves the city and is declared its champion. The peace doesn’t last, as Meredith’s tyranny and Anders’s terrorism reignite the flames of conflict three years later. Kirkwall once again erupts into chaos, and Hawke is powerless to stop it, despite their best efforts. They may even be partially responsible, should they unwittingly assist Anders. Meredith’s own paranoia turns out to be magnified by the red lyrium idol that Hawke and company brought back from the earlier Deep Roads expedition, further implicating them in events. War threatens to devour all of Thedas at the end of Dragon Age II, with Hawke powerlessly positioned at the center of events – and according to some, the center of blame.
“You want my advice? Did you hear what happened to Kirkwall? My advice nearly tore that city apart.”
Failure defines Hawke’s journey. In essence, they tread the inverse of the Warden’s hero’s journey. The Warden stops a war, (potentially) kills Flemeth, and puts an end to a Blighted threat. Hawke unintentionally starts a new war, resurrects Flemeth, and unleashes a new Blighted threat in the form of Corypheus – a failure which precipitates the conflict of Inquisition. I dare say there’s few RPG protagonists that fail quite as hard and quite as consistently as Hawke, and I think that’s novel. It’s borderline innovative to take the standard RPG power fantasy and turn it on its head like that, showcasing a story where a supposed grand hero struggles against external forces, only to fail over and over again. Hawke isn’t some Horatio Alger rags-to-riches caricature, whose diligence and virtue are rewarded. Rather, they’re the bitter Nathanael West-style counterpart – a humanized mockery of an RPG hero. I’ve come to appreciate Dragon Age II more when viewing it through this lens. It’s a tragedy – one where the hero puts up a valiant effort against fate, but fate keeps winning.
Augmenting this, Dragon Age II does a pretty excellent job creating an oppressive atmosphere for Kirkwall. The player can feel the weight of its bloody history, and how its past atrocities ripple across time to beget new ones. From the beginning, refugees are funneled into the city through the Gallows prison, which contains massive statues of weeping slaves from the days of the Tevinter Imperium. Impoverished citizens take up residency in former slave mines, now colloquially known as “Darktown.” There’s even a nearby quarry named the “Bone Pit” after all the slaves that perished there. Hidden codex entries even imply that Kirkwall and surrounding regions are designed to fuel a massive blood magic dynamo, self-perpetuating pain and anguish. DA2 makes the player feel small and inconsequential, simply unable to stand against the weight of this history and the mounting agony of today. At best, players score Pyrrhic victories.
Crafting an RPG around the idea of being specifically disempowering is a risky maneuver, and one that Dragon Age II can be applauded for attempting, to an extent. Because of the aforementioned faults with the game, I don’t think the risks necessarily paid off – or at the very least, the bold changes were judged very harshly on account of their imperfections. The game tailors its quest design and narrative structure around this pattern, communicating the hopeless futility to the player in a way beyond words – by taking the player’s choices, efforts, and agency and throwing them in the trash.
Though I can see more in it now, I initially left Dragon Age II frustrated and full of venom. Its attempts to convey these meanings didn’t gel with me, and by the time I rolled credits, I wanted nothing more to do with the series. I was sure that whatever came next, I simply wouldn’t care.
I had no idea how wrong I was.
Full article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/03/29/your-journey-ends-a-parting-retrospective-on-dragon-age/
Recently I was explaining Dragon Age Discourse to my partner as I do when I get worked up about something. Anything I was talking about my issues with how Qunari were done in DA2 because I feel like this where a lot of biggest problems with how they are portrayed first manifested.
And I was talking about the "Shepherding Wolves" quest to him and he was like "Wait so the quest is all about a religious zelot trying to frame a diffrent religion as being violent and brutish and she is in the wrong for doing so... but they don't make any of that bad stuff she told you about the qunari just exaggerated lies she is using to prop her cause?" And I was just sitting there like... yeah that is weird huh?
(though why he thinks I'm on Meredith's side when I was openly yelling at her in the courtyard at the beginning of the act AND told her I wasn't her ally in front of a bunch of Templars and got threatened for it I still don't know)
then Grace becomes a Pride abomination... and all of Thrasks "good" Templars and the neutral mages just attack Hawke anyway?
like even if you're trying to say "they really can't live in peace!" (and blame it on the mages while you're at it between Thrask vs Grace and Samson talking about wanting to help but the mages crossing lines by raising dead) this is just a really stupid way of writing it.
yes yes I love dragon age 2 it is my comfort game and my fave of the series but I at least think we are all grown enough to admit that the game's flaws are its flaws and there are things about it structurally that still wouldn't have worked well if they had more than 18 months to do it.
and and considering how much of veilguard's discourse leaves no grace for the fact that it's a game built on the ashes of a live service game (the very same Joplin that u all want btw) maybe we shouldn't....leave...a lot of grace anymore for da2 lmao. Idk about you but the repeatable environments is in fact a problem in this game and the fact that there's fandom wide accepted headcanon/excuse of varric running out of areas to describe to cassandra instead of a real flaw that turns off a lot of people from enjoying the game is annoying.
I was gonna write this last night but now that I finished bellara's quest it can apply to this too
something I like about veilguard is that it genuinely does feel like a found family. I know everyone says da2 was the found family but I disagree - one of my biggest gripes was that despite the game spanning 7 years, everyone stays static and stagnant. I love the companions, but when only like 3 of them genuinely get along and never develop relationships it's not a found family, those are coworkers lmao
while I'd like the pacing to be better wrt to ppl's developing relationships in veilguard, I LOVE that they can work stuff out, get together, get through misunderstandings (taash and emmrich for example, they're not best friends but they had a chance to talk it out). I know people find this corny, but I don't. it's refreshing in contrast to spending 7 years with people who never change
and because it does feel like a found family, I just really like the idea of there being that ACTUAL and genuine support for bellara, and my Rook, who never had anyone in her life beforehand
people told me there was a tinge of hope in this game and I'm seeing that, and I love that. it's not everyone's cup of tea, but for me, it's mine and I'm taking big sips
It baffles me sometimes how ridiculous the fight with the deserters in the DA2 prologue is. Not only is it unnecessary, but either Hawke or Bethany will immediately bust out spells. In the /Gallows/. Realistically, it should end with a game over as a horde of Templars descend on the apostate. Sometimes I feel like the game was afraid not to have a fight every 15 minutes.
