Taint, or basic humanity?
therealdragonnerd (who is fabulous by the way, go appreciate her thoughts as she has a ton of them to peruse) just put up an interesting thought concerning Justice and whether or not it’s the Taint that makes him the bastard he is credited as in DA2 (my choice of words on that, not hers). Not having played Jaws of Hakkon or even DAI (damn core-heavy programming!) I can’t really judge about the elven gods versus the Taint. But I have tooled around Awakening and DA2 and I’m going to venture the answer that Justice’s transformation into Vengeance has nothing to do with the Taint and everything to do with the mire that is humanity.
See, if you spend a lot of time raising his approval and talking to him and doing the personal quests concerning Kristoff’s wife and mementos, he says something very telling. When talking about the widow, he mentions being able to see Kristoff’s memories, and eventually wends around to admitting ‘feeling envious of their love’. As the embodiment of a virtue, this is entirely foreign to him (he says as much), but the longer he’s in a human host (even a deceased one) the MORE he experiences emotions as we do.
First comes the envy, of the depth of feelings and the things shared between Kristoff and his wife.
Then longing (or desire) to return to the Fade and shed the complications of physical form. I would say there’s a big difference between his in-Fade desire to save the people trapped there and the longing to get out of the physical and back into the familiar
[I might be getting the order of this wrong because it’s been a minute since I’ve played, but I remember his dialogues about these feelings]
Anger was always present in Justice though; his responses at the witch’s gates in the Fade indicate a tendency toward very proactive anger-like response to perceived injustices (I’m not saying the witch didn’t have her ass-kicking coming, I’m talking about things like when he declares pet ownership to be slavery and therefore not right). His merging with Anders didn’t so much MAKE him angry as give him more things to be angry (and warped) about. Anders, bless his little tortured soul, has a lot of very ugly memories of the Circle; even the bright spots of cats and Karl are tainted by their endings. And you know what happens when you sit and stew over wrongdoings; it gets monstrous in your head.
DA2 is where his lust comes in; a lot of people tend to forget that lust isn’t just about gettin’ that sex. Justice/Anders isn’t JUST about undoing the Circle to make the plight of Mages easier, he/they are actively out to punish the whole system setup from Templar to Chantry. That’s why his target isn’t the barracks or the Gallows; Anders might say that it was to remove the option of compromise but that’s horseshit (if you ask me). The Revered Mother was a mediator, but ultimately just another support of the system that perpetuates fear and distrust and power imbalances between mages and Templars; she had to be punished and made example of, and I think that’s a big indicator of the lusts that Justice/Vengeance is experiencing.
That’s four of the major sins right there without really reaching for example (I don’t think anyway). I would also accuse Justice/Vengeance of pride, given the ‘you either totally agree with me or get bent’ mentality (either you recognize he’s right or you are a peon unworthy of education cuz you’re just totes too stupid to “get” it) but that’s debatable and I know my justification comes down to how I take his/Anders’ dialogue. Greed and sloth are the only two deadlies that I can’t really think of examples he would meet if we follow the initial statement that “no scholar could tell where Justice ends and I [Anders] begin”.
Of course, that statement gets undone between Anders’ borderline pro-slavery-so-long-as-it-gets-rid-of-Fenris banters and his romance dialogue where “Justice disapproves of you” bits, which I still don’t know if that was meant to be heavy-handed foreshadowing or just inconsistencies in writing. Somebody who knows better than I could answer that (and frankly I hope you do because I’d really like to know!)
Anyway, my point is I don’t think it’s the Taint that affects Justice, or even Anders’ deep-seated (and frankly totally warranted rage) that turned him; it’s the very experience of being alive that broke the virtue.
