So I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Inquisition a lot lately. It has made me reflect on not only how good this series has been, but how unafraid of cool plotlines, or subjects that would, otherwise, be avoided, or had a big deal made of them.
I remember back in High School being horrifically bored with the reading material that was being assigned. I complained to a teacher, asking why we couldn’t read fantasy fiction, or science fiction. She claimed that those stories (with “those” pronounced like someone talking about a particularly loathsome form of dung beetle) were just escapism, while the novels we read in her class were ABOUT something.
I got pissed, and launched into a rant. This was more than a decade ago, so I can’t remember it word for word, but the general gist was that science fiction and fantasy are often ABOUT quite a bit more than any of the more “respectable” novels, because by taking us outside of our world, they can talk about real world subjects without putting readers on the defensive. The lessons are real, it is only the modus operandi that are imaginary.
My speech earned me a standing ovation from the classroom, a detention from my teacher, and a lifelong dedication to fantasy and science fiction literature, a dedication that has paid off as the Nerd stranglehold on pop culture has manifested over the last decade or so. But I never really thought about it in terms of the video games I played.
The Dragon Age series is a Bioware product. Bioware are masters of video game storytelling in that they use well trod ground to tell huge swathes of story in a single brushstroke. If you’ve read Tolkien, Jordan, Martin, Feist, etc, then you feel right at home in the Dragon Age world of Thedas, with old tropes making you feel like you’re walking in a world where things just are the way they are, almost non-fantastic fantasy. And that opens you up to the real thrust of their storytelling: the assumptions they encourage you to make end up making the lessons you eventually take away all the sharper. (Some spoilers ahead for Dragon Age: Origins, Awakening, 2, and then some VERY light Inquisition stuff.)
Such lessons were a tad light on the ground in the first game. Dragon Age: Origins, had to live up to its name, establish the world, building the boundaries of the sandbox. It still had its little moments, though, like when you realize that the EVIL GENERAL who BETRAYED YOU… actually did so with good reason, and was only DOOMING THE WORLD because of information he didn’t have… information intentionally kept from him (and you) by the “heroic” Grey Wardens.
Whoo.
Then came Dragon Age 2. Still a beautifully rendered fantasy experience, a story told by Varric, the Dwarf, to a Seeker trying to ascertain what exactly had happened. But this time, the fantasy setting and combat is window dressing around the story of a small group of… let’s call them friends… that form around a single strong personality, Hawke. And here are some of the tales that get told, when divorced from the fantasy distractions.
A tale of refugees, struggling to survive in a town that is disdainful at best at hateful at worst of immigrants.
A tale of a runaway slave, who was broken and raped and used, and is very distrustful of anyone who reminds him of his slaver.
A tale of a sweet young girl desperately doing research to help her people, and hated because of that research.
A tale of a tough cop just trying to do the right thing in a city that refuses to allow her to make such distinctions.
A tale of a violent stalker, and the grief of the family of one of his victims.
A tale of the horrible things good people can do when pushed to total desperation.
And the tale of a total, complete, jerk.
I’m talking, here, about Anders. Anders is a party member that you meet in Dragon Age: Awakenings. At the time he is simply a mage who refuses to go along with the “natural order,” that being mages submitting to Templar control. He is set up as a fairly dashing hero to begin with, joining your original Player Character as a Grey Warden and helping to save the world, even if you get the impression that he might jet at any time.
When he joins your new PC in Dragon Age 2, he has done precisely that… left the Grey Wardens to pursue “freedom for the mages.” He’s also hosting a spirit in his body, a condition known as abomination, which everyone knows is evil, though he insists this is a good spirit. Here, in brief, is a list of what he gets up to over the course of the game: He emotionally manipulates you into helping his plot, and will start romancing you, even unbidden, at the drop of a hat. (Seriously, comics were made about how hard it can be to NOT sleep with Anders if you are trying to keep your party members happy.) When the runaway slave complains about the mages who enslaved him, Anders cannot help but bust out that “not all mages are like that.” (#notallmages) and belittles him for telling his story instead of just getting over it. He tries to “help” some mages but ends up threatening, and nearly killing them, when they protest just how horrible he is. He uses his friendship to leverage you into aiding with a plot that ends up killing almost a hundred people and starts a battle that kills hundreds, leading to war that spreads all over the world. And why? “Because things had to change.”
And the first time I played? I stood by him. Because in Bioware games, that is what you do. You stand by your party members, and through your support they see the error of their ways and help make things better. But he never did. He manipulated me, was horrible to my other party members, got lots of people killed and in the end stood by his own rightness and rights. We knew he was an abomination, but we stood by him… without even knowing why, as he constantly hurt, and finally killed, people.
It wasn’t even until Inquisition, when yet another PC was trying to end the war Anders had begun when I realized that Varric, the storyteller of the second game, still despised Anders, and hoped he was gone forever. That was when it struck me. I hadn’t made Anders better. If anything, I enabled him to be worse. And why? Because I thought that was how the game was played. A scathing commentary on how we support horrible people all the time for our own deluded reasons, even when given every reason to see that they are horrible.
All delivered in a video game franchise published by EA games, a fantasy series with the word “Dragon” in the title. I won’t spoil too much of what is happening in Inquistion, but it is probably worth noting that in it we are heavily addressing questions of faith, a gay son dealing with disapproving parents, fear used as control, transgender, Race relations…
Done in a medium that shifts the terms and situations just enough that you go in with as little bias as possible, defenses down, ready to kill dragons and get cool loot. But through this, imaginations are triggered, sympathies developed through story-telling, and an idea that once would have been completely OTHER seems a bit more familiar, because we lived it with a character we like.
Not bad for “just a game.”
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