_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Morrigan, the girl you love to hate but love anyways:
So lets consider Morrigan stock game, mods with new headmorphs, however you present her shes the games femme fatale. The cold glares, the icy personality, the intellect, the I'm definitely better than you attitude (and she is better than you since even in the stock game shes got a custom torso model to make her all runway modelesque while the base female model is quite a bit less feminine and blockier) and I know it....and all that.
Shes the bad girl, and of course everyone immediately fell in love. OMG Morrigan you had my baby...I'll find you and...build a little house with a white picket fence around it for us to raise our strange abomination old god-child together!
In a word, we got trapped by Morrigan's depth of character and her game given looks (thank you Dragon Age Redesigned and or Improved Atmosphere) and her snarky, ****y, but undeniable charm.
Lets look at things logically for a moment, though really there are so many points of failed logic in the progression of the DA:O story that this is just as much our fault as it is the developers...but really its the players that are to blame here.
When you first meet Morrigan shes arrogant to the point of ridiculous, but your inner brain goes "oh this is a hot one" and you pick all the path of least resistance responses, of course there are others who probably picked the paths of more resistance but the story is going to take you to Flemeth's hut one way or another, so it really doesn't matter if your cerebro-phallic connection kicked in on first meeting.
We then meet Flemeth, whos own legend is quite grim in and of itself, but, for some reason Flemeth has seen fit to ward and guard the Grey Warden treaties, for no stated reason other than "Why not" but, there are deeper reasons there, its hardly the job of an entity/person like Flemeth to wander around collecting old documents, she specifically took these treaties and warded them against the day she saw in the future which was to be your arrival on the scene prior to the Blight. So we establish here that Flemeth knew of the coming Blight, Flemeth knew it would be you to defeat it, Flemeth also knew to send Morrigan with you, for her ultimate purpose, which is, truly, the conception of the old god-child between the Grey Warden (or A Grey Warden) and Morrigan.
Now along the way we're given conciliatory gifts, ways to soften Morrigan, humanize her, make her love us, and make her easier to love, but, thats where we all went wrong....Morrigan wasn't meant to be loved. Morrigan coming right out of the gate is doing things that will, in general, annoy and frustrate most players who tend to approach new fantasy RPGs and play more like paladins than anything else, out of general habit. She disapproves of you making the "right" decisions, shes constantly insulting and needling more likeable characters such as Leiliana and Alistair, she sneers at other peoples beliefs openly, treating people that believe differently than she as idiots...she is, in a word, not a very likeable person at all...except of course, shes got that hard to get quality, and the sharp wit which keeps drawing players towards her, regardless of her being designed to be hard to like.
So about halfway through the game or whenever you complete the tower, you come across the Black Grimoire, which leads you to the loyalty quest for Morrigan, which is, tada....please go kill my mother because otherwise she will eventually seek me out and possess me.
Now by this time most of us have dumbly fallen into the trap....though really given the choices of gifts she responds to, if you've ever had to deal with a gold digger you should have taken a warning right there, but I digress, as stated, by this time we have fallen into the trap...we LIKE/LOVE Morrigan..she is our friend, Flemeth is just this old witch who possesses the bodies of nubile, intelligent, powerful young women to extend her own life....that....for some reason never did us any harm, warded the Grey Warden Treaties so they would be intact to give them to you as she forsaw in her visions, ensured we were rescued from overwhelming odds at the Tower of Ishal, healed our rather bad wounds and, set us on the path to stopping the Blight.
Err...now wait a minute, why are we murdering Flemeth? Oh yes, cerebro-phallic overload, Flemeth has done us no wrong, but the inferred history is that she is a monster, Morrigan on the other hand is our friend and demonstrates her rather monsterous personallity on a daily basis and we just giggle, oh that Morrigan shes so hard to please.
So we by default, sentence Flemeth to death in defense of our "friend/love interest" Morrigan, when as we all know, Morrigan has no intent on remaining our friend or love interest at all, she got what she wanted the night before the final battle...and she left.
But is it what she wanted? Or was it something Flemeth wanted, which she realized the power of herself, and was willing to take Flemeth out of the equation to possess it for herself?
We must assume that the Flemeth entity has seen quite a bit into the future, the guarding of the treaties, knowing the fate of Ser Jory, saving the hero and Alistair from the fall of Ostagar, the conception of the child, as Morrigan indicates in conversation the night before the battle, was Flemeths idea and Morrigan's role, all along, as your companion.
Now while I am sure some spared Flemeth and lied to Morrigan, most killed Flemeth out of reflex. And fell in "love" or became close friends with Morrigan in the process.Morrigan then takes our child or a child, out of the bargain, which becomes essentially the container or avatar of the mind of an old god.
The very same old gods that the Darkspawn spend hundreds of years underground digging and searching for.
So with that in mind, and keeping in mind that a lot of the things we are "told" in DA:O by various characters are, well, not exactly 100% true, we as players, instinctively made choices that were based on Pavlovian reactivity. And in doing so may have, in essence fallen into the trap which brings a whole new kind of threat to Thedas, one that perhaps Flemeth engineered in her own interests, but Morrigan, sensing the plan behind it all, decided to take to take it for herself..and thus, uses the legends of Flemeth's longevity process to incite the player to protect her.
But no, that is not what you are truly doing, you are being used as a pawn, just as you were used as a sperm donor (or manipulated into allowing Alistair to be used as one) to create the recepticle for the Old God, you were used as a pawn between Flemeth and Morrigan to decide who would ultimately control that Old God.
One can only speculate what the intentions would have been, perhaps Flemeth would have merged with the offspring, become a part of the Old God to increase her own power, perhaps Morrigan's intents are no less nefarious...regardless of either, we all set up the premise of DA2 without even batting an eye....woohoo lets do the horizontal boogie with Morrigan! And yes...we all did it, at least once....even lady friends of mine were terribly dissapointed Morrigan was not an option for them as a love interest...so the trap works not only on the cerebro-phallic connection in the minds of men alone, but also holds an attraction for women as well.
And in the end, none of it matters, the whole "I will find you Morrigan" at the gates, should you not take her with you to the Archdemon is immaterial....Morrigan doesn't intend to be found, a house with a picket fence and a child that could command the armies of the darkspawn sitting around making macaroni sculptures while the Grey Warden daddy whiled away his days in pleasant obscurity with his loving witch wife were never her intentions at all.
The child was the intention all along, the child is the reason there will be another threat within the "lifetime" of our Grey Warden (the ones that chose the ritual that is) and the child will be the one unalterable element of the DA2 plotline....regardless of what you did, Morrigan will have had this child. Ultimate Sacrifice wardens get epilogue info on Morrigan that she'd become an influential advisor to the Imperial Court in Orlais.....again a powerful position in the hands of a woman with a secret agenda to possess the mind of an old god and perhaps still able to find a way to achieve such from said position by using the Grey of Orlais to hunt in the deep roads for another buried old god, perhaps even cutting deals with the Architect to achieve such..
So for those of you that live by the words "I will find you Morrigan, I swear it.".....be careful what you wish for, you are most definitely going to get it....its just not going to be the reunion you hoped for.
The Old God-Child represents a new threat, something differerent than the Blights, a Thedas equivalent of an anti-christ figure which could lead and control the darkspawn and gain power in Thedas in ways that an archdemon/old god in the traditional "Blight" scenario never could.
So to me, the immutable plot element of DA2 is the Old God-Child. And the evidence is clear, for all our heroic might, for all the words spoken, we were a tool in the hands of Flemeth and/or Morrigan, to create this scenario.
Just some late past the games release thoughts...that peer into the unknown future where there could, potentially, be a DA2. (that isn't pawned off on Obsidian Entertainment, making it immediately suck lemons).
Anyways...as stated, these are my opinions, they are not required to be right for anyone but me. And this is not designed to say "Morrigan is stupid and people that like her are dumb"....thats hardly the case. Morrigan is a brilliant and vibrant character who has one of the best female VO workers at BioWare playing her part, and it was easy to fall into her web.
And in doing so....doomed Thedas to a dark age unlike any Blight that has ever befallen the world.
Damn you Morrigan. Damn you.
Modifié par SLPr0, 13 avril 2010 - 05:49 .
Retour en haut
And yet my female PCs come to befriend and trust Morrigan. For sure, she is not telling you the whole story, but no matter what you do, you're going to be someone's pawn. Flemeth's or Morrigan's, take your pick. It's like you tell Flemeth when you confront her: "Should I dance to your tune instead?"
