is there anything more poignant and agonizing and emblematic of leliana's arc over the entire series than the ending line of the trespasser epilogue slide for her if she was killed during the sacred ashes quest.
Those who investigated found both the rookery and Leliana's chambers vacant, with only a single message as explanation: "The lyrium sang thought into being. Now time is stale, and the melody is called elsewhere. Until I am needed, I am free."
am pondering leliana's whole deal and bards more generally bc i want to get more specific abt them and tbh like. i am a zevran guy. i am keeping the crow wiki pages open. i feel fairly confident talking abt the crows and zevran's experience w them, and since leliana and zevran both agree that they've lived similar lives, that's gonna be my way in.
Leliana: We have many things in common, Zevran.
Zevran: Other than our purity and beauty?
Leliana: We both spent many years in places other than Ferelden. You are an assassin and I, a bard.
Zevran: Then you were called upon to kill.
Leliana: Often. I didn't like it, but I did it anyway.
Zevran: You didn't like it? You didn't like the thrill of the hunt?
Leliana: I suppose... I did like that. The hunt... not the killing.
Zevran: The killing just signals the end of the hunt. Without it, the chase goes on. You killed your marks cleanly, I hope?
Leliana: Whenever possible.
Zevran: Good, when the prey is caught, it deserves a good death, a clean death. Perhaps you are right; we have much in common.
leliana initiates the comparison. zevran tries to joke abt it. leliana stays grounded and makes him talk to her seriously. i rly love banters and the only thing that is sometimes frustrating (but mostly fun) is that we don't get to hear the lead up to a given dialogue. i don't know what prompted leliana to say this, but she does seem fairly set on commiserating w zevran a little bit abt how having a non-fereldan perspective makes them outsiders, but mostly how being trained killers isolates them. no one else in the party can completely understand her experience — even surrounded by professional killers, they are not surrounded by professional killers who seduced their victims regularly before murdering them, much less someone like wynne, who i would say mainly murders as a side hustle.
leliana i think does demonstrate some discomfort w her time as a bard when asked abt the sexual element in particular.
Alistair: You know, I've heard about the Orlesian bards.
Leliana: Who hasn't? They are quite famous, after all.
Alistair: The stories I heard were a little... racier. It had to do with how a bard assassinated her target. How they were... lulled into complacency.
Leliana: If those stories were true, who would ever agree to entertain a bard in their court?
Alistair: Oh, I don't know, there's a certain allure to danger, isn't there? And besides, you couldn't all be assassins, could you? I'd take my chances. If the stories were true, that is.
Leliana: We had rules about that sort of thing. Strict rules.
Alistair: Such as? You're not going to tell me, are you?
Leliana: Let's just say I had plenty of reasons to join the Chantry, shall we? And leave it at that.
alistair approaches both leliana and zevran in similar ways when he wants to talk abt the part of their job that involved sex, but while above, leliana implies she needed to join the chantry to repent/escape and explicitly shuts the conversation down, zevran makes a joke abt it and distracts alistair out of rly asking anything personal.
Alistair: The stories we hear down here about the Crows... they're not true, are they? They all sound a little far-fetched.
Zevran: I cannot say. What have you heard? In Antiva, we hear that Ferelden men cannot sleep without a dog in their bed. Is that true?
Alistair: A dog? No, of course not. We value our dogs, it's part of our history.
Zevran: Oh. Perhaps it was simply a reference to your Ferelden women, then?
Alistair: *Laughs* Well, now that you mention it...
Zevran: But those stories you heard? All true.
Alistair: Really. Even the ones that talk about how you all... you know... get paid to...
Zevran: Especially those ones.
Alistair: Wow. I am totally in the wrong order.
these are both successful strategies — alistair doesn't push any further in those dialogues (tho sometimes he follows up later). alistair clearly trusts leliana much more, tho. during his little gossip session w the warden, he's concerned abt whether she's lost it wrt her vision, whereas it takes him a long, long time to stop poking zevran abt any future plans to finish his contract.
he knows what to make of zevran: that guy is on thin ice. leliana 'looks so sad' when she thinks no one is paying attention, alistair notes. there's no question she's sincere, it just may be that she's simply too sweet and naive to have left the chantry.
this is abt more than alistair's gut feelings: leliana keeps her identity a secret, and zevran announces his immediately, undeniably, and violently. he starts off w a self-imposed deficit.
zevran is taken by the crows when he's seven. marjolaine first notices leliana when leliana is sixteen and over an undetermined period of time v deliberately grooms leliana into becoming a bard — to the point that a lot of the time, leliana didn't realize what she was being taught. i'm putting leliana's bard career coming to an abrupt halt no later than age 26, so that leaves marjolaine a decade to do all this, and at some point during all that, leliana did come to understand that she was being trained to be a bard and did bard things as a bard.
at the same time, marjolaine only comes to view leliana as a threat she needs to remove a little before leliana's song, which takes place somewhere between 9:24/25-9:27/28. annoyingly, this is maybe a lore discrepancy that can be watsonioned in any number of ways but based on what leliana says in origins, to me, the more likely candidate is 9:27/28. whatever the case, what leliana says is that she spent 'most of [her] adult life' as a bard.
in a lot of ways, leliana and zevran are right to recognize each other as similar. but there are also p stark differences that i find interesting, the first being the age at which they were recruited and the manner in which they were trained.
this is not an exploration of 'who had it worse.' idk that i rly know what bard training entails — not the procedural torture zevran is put thru, sure, but leliana's song makes it clear that a captured bard risks rape and torture.
what i find MOST interesting is that zevran is put into a trio and a single master takes over training for that trio; up until that point, zevran was part of a larger cohort presumably taught by a range of ppl. leliana, in contrast, is deliberately sought out by marjolaine, and marjolaine is her strongest connection to being a bard from day one right up until marjolaine betrays her.
but leliana is in a trio, too — her, tug, and sketch. if leliana has a 'taliesen figure', it could be sketch, someone she seems to connect to most from that time in her life who did not then reappear in her life later (like josephine). tug can't be the 'rinna' bc leliana and sketch didn't conspire to kill him, but they do share grief over his murder.
but then, maybe sketch is the 'rinna' bc he expresses p staunch disapproval of marjolaine (he says that templars should be hunting ppl like her down instead of apostates) in leliana's song, which leliana tries to ignore. he has good reason. it's made p clear that sketch is degrees more vulnerable as an apostate elf than leliana and he knows it. he asks leliana to leave w him. even when tug agrees that the bard life isn't agreeing w him either, leliana refuses bc she has to talk to marjolaine first.
there's a world where rinna might object to the version of her that zevran describes to the warden. similarly, sketch doesn't appreciate leliana's 'embellishment of the past.' in leliana's letter to him when she's w the inquisition, over a decade later, she notes, 'we all left as one, we who did not belong' but then almost immediately she calls him leaving 'turn[ing his] back on everything.' she castigates him for losing his 'purpose' but then she assures him that she's not judging him.
leliana does still think fondly of her time as a bard, even if that fondness is complicated, mainly by marjolaine. i think the same can be said for zevran in the sense that he's still committed to being an assassin, but he also disavows the crows as an institution, or at least, the last time we see him in the series, he's still killing crows as an outsider. there are the epilogue slides that say he goes back to lead the crows, and he's 'never sure if that was victory or defeat'.
me personally, i think that's a retcon bc of his da2 cameo and bc in inquisition, he is still going after the crows if he wasn't romanced — unlike the other companions, zevran's entry in wot2 is a report written by a crow abt his backstory rather than like. an 'objective historian's' perspective on zevran. i think this is bc they didn't know how else to keep it ambiguous and w the context of dai, that entry can still be read as zevran fighting the crows instead of trying to take them over. anyway.
leliana remarks that some ppl would say that there is a 'bard order', but she thinks that's wrong. even tho marjolaine is analogous to a crow master (leliana explicitly calls her 'master'), negotiating and arranging jobs on her leliana's behalf, leliana never interacted w an institution.
she understands the bard life as a sort of pool of people from which wealthy patrons purchase services. this seems p likely, as josephine and other antivan nobles studying abroad can join up like it's a sexy, scandalous club (w fatal consequences). it makes me wonder abt how patrons handle the aftermath of smth like josephine's murder of her peer. does this not create a diplomatic nightmare? anyway. the answer is prob 'a lot of the players come from influential families.'
unlike the crows, the bards are not a nationalist project. this, to me, explains why leliana, tho she was born in orlais, still feels v comfortable identifying as fereldan, whereas zevran unquestionably considers himself Intensely Antivan. you can leave the bard life. you aren't supposed to be able to leave the crows. both vocations seem to open you up to class mobility and are made up of a wide variety of ppl, from royal bastards and nobles to the orphaned children of servants and sex workers.
leliana seems to expect a level of romantic exclusivity w marjolaine and is taken aback to see her flirting w a fereldan AND an officer (who will later be revealed to be harwen raleigh) — when marjolaine tries to reassure her it's only a part of the game, leliana acknowledges that the game is 'more than combat' and that she knows 'how pleasant it can be.' but she's nonetheless rattled enough that marjolaine can use it to manipulate her.
zevran's big reveal is of course that he is culpable for rinna's murder and that he came to ferelden to die. in a way, leliana has a comparable arc in that her old self dies and she decides to live her life completely differently in ferelden, but here, most significantly, is where their arcs rly diverge.
both zevran and leliana are shocked to realize they realize that they are utterly expendable regardless of how much work and effort they've poured into being a crow and a bard, respectively. i think tbh the reason why leliana doesn't experience the suicidal spiral zevran does is bc she's immediately given a new purpose by revered mother dorothea. 'why should i care what happens?' leliana asks her, but when she gets no reply, she still decides to follow dorothea's orders, even when dorothea is at that point just a stranger's voice.
by the end of the dlc, leliana flat out says it: 'all things change . . . when they find purpose.'
it is.............................so fucking much that in saying this, she is implying that she is a 'thing.'
and in inquisition, leliana tells the inquisitor: 'i am paying [dorothea] back for literally saving me when was i at my lowest — justinia gave me purpose' (emphasis mine).
crucial to me that dorothea lowkey hits on leliana when they finally meet in person. 'you would look good in braids, you know?' it doesn't have to be read that way but given leliana's whole deal. well. anyway dorothea tells her that leliana is 'never powerless when others are in need.' she also admits that she herself was a victim of marjolaine's who was seduced by her. when leliana accuses dorothea of causing the impending diplomatic shitshow that is the impetus for the dlc, dorothea says yes........kind of. dorothea takes some responsibility, but she tells leliana that leliana has to take responsibility, too.
what dorothea then does, without outright saying it, is tell leliana that if leliana wants absolution, she can achieve it by doing as dorothea says — dorothea and the chantry will save leliana. when leliana talks to sketch, right after he tells leliana how tug died trying to protect him, he expresses despair that they can't fix this. leliana agrees, but she does think they can still 'set it right.'
'i'm not sure i know what that means,' sketch tells her.
'as long as we try,' leliana replies.
but when talking to silas, who was betrayed by raleigh, he tells her, 'if i can end this, i hope to serve the chantry. they will already know my good intentions.' when he poses the question of what's next to leliana, she's clearly uncomfortable and much less confident.
AND THEN, when she talks to bonny lem, she can express p plainly that she's appalled that he went right back to his criminal life after being betrayed by marjolaine. in this conversation w bonny lem, she can emphasize that she felt there was some code of honor w the bards — and bonny lem is like lmao lol even are you joking. leliana's experiencing existential whiplash.
zevran thought that the crows should know what he and taliesen did, as he, too, was under the impression that he and taliesen had broken a rule of crow honor by not only killing rinna, but killing rinna bc of bad information. instead, after taliesen convinces him to stay quiet, zevran learns that the crows were fine w it bc both he and rinna were 'nothing.' that's the core of his disillusionment: 'i felt empty. i felt as if i was nothing. i felt as if she had been nothing.'
after the pre-marjolaine confrontation ambush, leliana will admit to the warden that she still kept a piece of her story a secret. 'what happened to me,' she says, 'maybe it will affect us, maybe not, but you should know.' the secret is that marjolaine betrayed her, that she didn't end up in the chantry bc of a literal storm the way she put it before but a metaphorical one. she tells the warden that, 'ferelden protected [her] person, but the maker saved my soul.'
later, after the marjolaine encounter, the warden can suggest that maybe leliana always knew who marjolaine was but couldn't admit it. leliana says no, that's not right!!! it's this conversation where leliana spirals abt how not to be marjolaine. she tells the warden that she was 'a different person' in the chantry, but now? leaving the chantry leaves her vulnerable to being 'ruined.' she feels the proof of this process of ruination beginning is that she enjoyed killing marjolaine (if she kills marjolaine), but more generally, she loves life on the road w the warden and all the hunting and murdering they do.
leliana is terrified of being marjolaine. it is significant to me, then, that both, 'i'm not marjolaine. don't worry' AND 'i can only hope to one day be as special as she was to you' will initiate leliana's romance at that point.
how this is different from zevran is the particulars of his backstory are kept p scarce in the game. details like who his master was are in the supplementary material. his exodus is ultimately not prompted by what the crows did to him. it's a factor, yes, but the breaking point is that he betrayed rinna and the crows betrayed her.
both leliana and zevran will tell you stories, but leliana mainly tells you legends — she and zevran share a romantic streak. but in spite of that, zevran's stories are mainly abt him fucking up. this is absolutely to frame himself as Super Not A Threat and Just A Little Guy to the warden even when he doesn't seem to understand the full implications of the stories he's telling — but i think it's notable that he's sort of going over these instances of when being a crow made him feel like a clown. a total schmuck. a failure. like smth went wrong and what he thought went wrong at the time is not what he thinks went wrong now. he's telling someone else and seeing how they react. it's undeniable that zevran's arc is centered around guilt.
and like. that is ultimately the difference, and it's fascinating to me that zevran and leliana see a mirror in each other and acknowledge it . . . but zevran's arc is abt trying to accept that he was a perpetrator, and leliana's arc is abt trying to accept that she was a victim.
and i think there is stuff there to mine in terms of zevran's role in the series largely fading away bc he's presumably splitting his time between terrorizing the crows and being w the warden if romanced. but leliana goes from marjolaine to dorothea who then becomes divine justinia. leliana helps found the inquisition — she'll be reunited w the warden eventually if romanced but she is, to put it mildly, married to her job.
and even after everything, leliana still talks abt her time as a bard as smth she's nostalgic over, bc for her, it wasn't abt what she did as a bard that made her leave, it's what happened to her. it is not at all a contradiction for her to remember the times spent as a bard with tug and sketch as 'some of the happiest and more carefree in her life.' that she feels this way and also eventually comes to realize that, '[bards spend their lives] creating nothing of worth' — well, this is an incredibly painful paradox to try to reconcile or just hold, but maybe that's the entire point of leliana to me.
she still conforms to patterns of behavior that align herself w institutions like the chantry, bc the chantry and the maker and andraste forgave her, or at least she needs to believe that. and i think you can make a solid case that she still doesn't actually know what her identity is outside of the institution is serving, and we don't see her figure it out.
during her personal quest in inquisition, upon discovering that justinia wanted to 'release' her (and in the fade, spirit-justinia kind of straight up says she 'failed' leliana), leliana says, 'a thousand lies, a thousand deaths. her commands, but my conscience that bore the consequences.' even when acknowledging the consequences for others, leliana views her role as left hand of the divine as her being used as a weapon, not someone w agency making choices. a thing.
and your inquisitor has no option to say anything other than some variation of, 'you need to move on. it is what it is.'
in dao, if leliana is romanced, the warden can note, 'you miss [marjolaine].' and leliana will respond, 'i do, and probably always will. i will just . . . move on.'
looking at the version where she's softened, back at skyhold leliana can say hey you know what actually there's always a choice! and then she can say, 'i am more than what justinia made me' (emphasis mine). and then she decides to stay w the inquisition, bc she can't 'give up her post.' without the inquisitor there to stop her from killing natalie, she would have felt that natalie's death was a good thing.
the inquisitor can ask her if she resents justinia for what she did. leliana replies w no irony: 'how can i when there is so much between us? when she gave her life for peace? no, i believe her intentions were pure. most intentions are.'
just like silas in leliana's song: 'i hope to serve the chantry. they will already know my good intentions.'
fwiw, in wot2, she's quoted as saying, '[marjolaine] and i are separated by years and death, but her hold on me is unrelenting. [..] marjolaine made me in her image.'
the inquisitor can ask if talking it thru has helped leliana at all.
'yes, actually,' leliana replies. 'giving the thought a voice forces me to admit what justinia did to me. i have to stay true to who i really am, before a spymaster, left hand, or bard. i almost lost myself.'
and for me the tragedy is that the series has leliana live out zevran's return to the crows — unsure if she's won or lost, wavering until the next person steps in to tell her who she is. when she didn't know who she was without marjolaine, dorothea told her who she was. when she left the chantry, the warden told her who she was. when she left the warden, dorothea-justinia told her who she was again.
i don't think we're seeing her break that cycle in inquisition. granted, that's my interpretation! but i just don't see a woman gaining agency so much as finding the next role to subsume her, whether that's her becoming divine or her, to quote the wiki, 'grooming her successors' as the inquisition's spymaster.
