The post you made about Grand Cleric Elthina gave me life.
omg, she’s honestly probably one of the characters I hate the most in the whole franchise tbh.
I’m bitter about the DA2 endgame for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is that she got to die being thought of as an innocent saint. And not just in the game — like, it makes senes that most people in Thedas would see it that way — but it was presented that way to the player, too, which is what gets me.
Granted, I’m a huge Anders fan, so I’m biased as hell, but I so wanted to see him have a straightforward verbal confrontation with her— to confront her about her abuse apologism, about her indifference to suffering (in the Gallows, in Darktown, in the alienage), about her incompetence (allowing the Gallows templars to flagrantly violate Chantry law). It would have revealed to the audience that Elthina is a straight up villain— at least imo she is. She’s the villain you’d least expect— she doesn’t go down to the Gallows and personally brutalize mages, but she’s a powerful spiritual leader whose words enable and excuse that abuse, whose indifference (and, I’d argue, outright callousness) serve as an example to her flock that nothing is amiss. She doesn’t feel for the mages— that’s lip service, and she’s good at it. She’s good at playing neutral while being anything but, and I so wanted her to be called out on that shit, but she wasn’t, not really. (Anders did a few times, but it was always brief and throughout the game he was routinely gaslighted and referred to as “crazy”, as if we weren’t supposed to take anything he said seriously.)
It also would have been huge for Anders’ character development for him to be able to confront her, bc Elthina (imo) represents a lifetime of spiritual abuse Anders has undergone as an Andrastian mage who has been routinely rejected, dehumanized, and demonized by his faith. I wanted him to be able to lay all that out in front of her, for her to have to hear that reality and everything it’s done to him, to see if she could still look him in the face and tell him it was all excusable and justified (which, imo, she totally would excuse it all and continue to pretend to be neutral).
Sigh. My ideal endgame would’ve been so different. I totally believe that Elthina was more of a villain than Meredith was. It’s a shame she wasn’t framed as such— that that whole “grey morality” thing keeps getting pushed on us wrt mage oppression. There’s nothing grey about it, and Elthina is an example of how remaining neutral in the face of oppression isn’t neutrality at all— it amounts to taking the side of the oppressor. I would’ve loved for her (+ the Chantry as an institution) to be explicitly revealed as DA2’s biggest villain.
