fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3531 ]

[ SECRET POST #3531 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3531 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 47 secrets from Secret Submission Post #505.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I don't understand this secret but I'm curious. It sounds like the player character in Dragon Age Inquisition is a kind of messiah figure and the dialogue options punish you for being critical of it?

I don't necessarily agree with the secret (I'm not sure the dialogue options are as punishing as OP seems to think) but this is actually a pretty accurate summary of the game, yeah.

To be fair, dialogue options in Bioware tend to be "politely agree," "rudely disagree," and "dodge the subject." (See also: turning down Anders when he flirts with you.) It's to be expected that other people aren't happy when you're rude about their religion. Still, my character's religion didn't get much respect either. (I read spoilers after I quit playing, and the character I romanced breaks up with you if you won't budge on believing in your religion. Also, the DLC reveals the elven religion was false all along.)

By chance, you were the sole survival of an attack that blew up most of the church, and people wrongly think fantasy Jesus personally saved you. A lot of the flavor text and worldbuilding deals with historical truth versus popular history, and it loops back into the main plot as the things people want to believe about you take on a life of their own. I really wasn't happy with the way the game kept dividing the world into the few who can accept the truth and the many who need to faithfully follow--it reminded me too much of Ayn Rand's belief in the few who run the world and the many who simply leech off them.

ayrt

oooooh god you are scaring me away from this franchise. I particularly hate that kind of thinking as well. I've also come across it from Sci Fi writers that probably wouldn't consider themselves objectivists. The main characters who all have the same politics and beliefs and communication style, and everyone else who just needs to be controlled.

It's worse when the game encourages you to roleplay and feel like you have a choice in the story. I really got into mass effect for a while and I had a few moments of total horror at what my character was saying/doing.

and I'm currently playing The Witcher and while it's less roleplaying I still have so many questions about who they hired to write this crap.

OP could have romanced another female character who is 100% supportive and even learns their language a bit. Different characters have different personalities and approaches, and DA has much more variety than ME. TW is just laughable in that regard, no variety at all.

Slightly OT, but I wonder what you'd think of Pillars of Eternity. Its message, hammered in repeatedly, is existentialist--every person must decide for themselves what the right thing to do is, and letting other people decide your morality for you will only lead to bad things. I felt like it stacked the deck too much, constantly setting you up against antagonists motivated by religion, but I respect the gall it took to write some of the plot twists in a mainstream game. (Also, it's the only game I've ever played that talks tastefully about abortion.)

The first and second games are extremely critical of the majority religion and all its crimes (including genocide), I really recommend them. The second game in particular violently pits major belief systems against each other and shows all the harm to the common people caught in between, including your own party. It's grim, but it's definitely not "all hail the one true ideology, leave your critical thinking at the door". Possibly because in the first two games, you aren't an exalted figurehead of a massive military/religious organization, you're just some random who's hard to kill. Third game drew focus away from the common perspective and towards an elevated one where it was much harder to lambaste assholes with too much power over the many when you are that asshole with too much power over the many.

And then turns things around and has you lambasted for being that asshole, which was kind of cool.

Like, the game knows that the Inquisition is a dangerous organization that could be very easily turned into a tool of oppression. It points that out repeatedly, in both blatant and subtle ways.

I really liked that it got to that point, though it still felt like the narrative tone leaned way too hard in favor of the Inquisition even when that happened. Like when portraying a favored character from previous games as a shrewish, ungrateful tool instead of a sympathetic voice of reason rightfully concerned for his nation's autonomy. That was weirdly unnecessary.

I swear, it felt like they wrote his part for Isolde, and whoever was doing editorial realized too late that she was probably dead in a huge chunk of games, so they had to quick-sub someone else without enough time to go back and rewrite.

I actually wouldn't be surprised, it would have fit better and been hysterical instead of horrifying to see Isolde aged so ungracefully.

Oh my god, thank you, it was SO FUCKING WEIRD how Bann Teagan turned out in Inquisition. Like... the fuck? The actual fuck?

The game opens with a war in progress between mages and templars (in context, templars are warriors who are trained to hunt, fight and guard mages). The Divine - the pope-analogue of DA's pseudo-Christian religion - called a summit to try end the war, but said summit gets destroyed and a rip in reality is torn open letting demons pour into the physical world from the Fade (spirit world).

The Player Character is the only person who survives the disaster, and gets lauded as the "Herald of Andraste" (Andraste being a cross between Joan of Arc, Jesus Christ and Mother Mary). They get pushed into leading the Inquisition, a religious-military organization that ostensibly belongs to the CHantry (the aforementioned pseudo-Christian religion).

I would also add that it doesn't help that the expert on Elven history that ends up part of the team - Solas - is also critical of Dalish beliefs, but he is critical because the Elven gods were far meaner than the Dalish believe them to be.

Wow, interesting worldbuilding... I have an earlier dragon age game sitting on my computer that I've never gotten around to playing, this thread is making me pretty curious about it.

If it's Origins you have, I heartily encourage you to go ahead and play it - it's a great game, and you would get a solid grounding in the world-building, especially if you read through some of the codexes you collect along the way.

I have not actually ever got around to playing DA2, but I have heard a lot of people really think it's nowhere near as good, but it does go into establishing a fair bit of why the Mage/Templar War happened, given that one of the big themes in the game is how the templars abuse and mistreat mages. (Mage are dangerous in DA - they are at risk of being possessed by demons.) Also the Big Bad of Inquisition is the Boss battle of a DA2 DLC adventure.

As a point of disagreement, Origins is conventionally grimdark in a way Inquisition very much isn't. I hated Origins, so I wasn't interested in Inquisition until I read a rant about how Dragon Age had been "sanitized" and turned into "generic high fantasy" because Inquisition cut out all the rape and added more black people.

I guess the grimdark was new to me because I don't really play a lot of games, and the three significant RPGs in my past prior to DA were not grimdark (well FF7 was a little bit that way, but not much).

They really took a lot of inspiration from ASoIaF in Origins so that's one of the main reasons for the grimdark things there.

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[ SECRET POST #3531 ]

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