Okay....*snipping a bit for sanity's sake*
In Exile wrote...
That's just a debate over the failed methods of the Chantry - we can all agree that how the templars behave is immoral. But that does not address whether or not the core approach - separating mage children from their families for the purpose of training for their inescapable life as mages is right or wrong.
I'm not sure I follow. I don't think anyone is arguing that mage children shouldn't be required to receive training. Some of us have suggested having the Circles re-envisioned as boarding schools rather than prison camps. But that's just one suggestion. And it's more than just a debate over the failed methods of the Chantry. Both the Chantry and the Templars have been shown to not just be a flawed system--right idea, badly implemented--but corrupt from the top down. At least that's the position I take.
It isn't as though I have a ready solution in hand as if I were in charge of a real-world organization that need to be re-organized from the bottom up, lol. But since, yes, mages are inherently dangerous because of their innate power, whether because of the potential to accidentally set the barn on fire, or because demons are lurking in wait, I don't deny that training is necessary. But that doesn't necessarily have to translate into a situation where mages are required by law to be forcibly taken away by their parents.
But the issue is, again, much more complicated than that. The core issue here is the imbalance of power. A mage is just something greater than a non-mage. There is nothing that changes that reality.
The Circle as it exists is oppressive; but it exists not to opress mages but to counter-balance their power in some way. I agree with you that there must and does exist a better way, but there can't be any compromise until we find a way to offer non-mages security in a reasonable fashion.
It's not that mages should inordinately bear this burden; but we have to recognize the basic reality of imbalance in Thedas before addressing freedom and just treatment of mages and non-mages alike.
Referring to the Circle's existence, that's highly debateable. It becomes, at least in part, a chicken-or-the-egg question. You also have questions of what the actual purpose for creating the Circle was, versus the official reason, and quite beyond that, the
actual purpose that a Circle is used for
now, as opposed to what it's
intended purpose was when it was
created. There's plenty of real-world corrupt systems that have a stated/ostensible purpose existing right alongside their actual purpose, or perhaps more aptly put, the practical resulting purpose the flies in the face of the claimed purpose. And of course there's the opposite: an institution created initally for an undeniably malign intention, that over a vast stretch of time morphed into something benign, or at least null.
But the only answer to that debate is that it
doesn't matter: What does matter is that the Circle does not work. Not in its present incarnation.
So.
To go more in depth, I think it is reasonable to state that mages do carry enough potential for risk to warrant a mandatory system of training. But the situation in Thedas is such that for a millenium, the Chantry has used that position to justify its stranglehold on the citizenry's popular understanding of mages. The looming threat of the Tevinter Imperium has been used, such that the general assumption seems to be that unless the Chantry forces the mage minority into subjugation, the majority will be forced into slavery by a new magocracy. The problem here is that, while that is certainly a potential outcome, it need not be viewed as the inevitable result. And there is definitely an argument to be made that it is precisely the Chantry's insistence on subjugating mages and treating them as guilty until proven innocent is the very environment that is guaranteed to lead to mages revolting and seizing power. Getting well away from the question of who is to blame for whose action, it's a simple matter of cause and effect. And hell, we see that played out quite well, as I addressed in another post to someone else. You could argue that Elthina's refusal to take action in the face of ongoing, egregious abuse, is what led to Anders snapping and blowing her up. Again, it's not a question of blame, but cause and effect. Treat a given population of people like x long enough, and eventually they will prove you right: it is a textbook example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are real-world examples of what happens to a people when discrimination against them is not only part of the cultural assumption of the dominant group, but built into that society's structure in its legal system. The nearest and worst example that comes to my mind is the practice of not only forcing Native peoples onto reservations, but then making it legal to steal their children away and lock them into boarding schools for the purpose of indoctrinating them into the dominant culture's way of thinking. The result is to make contempt for one's very existence into a generational problem handed down from parent to child as surely as mental illness or alcoholism. And you see exactly that in at least one example in the Ferelden Circle, with Keili (sp?) in the Broken Tower quest: a mage who has fully internalized the Chantry's teaching that magic is a curse from the Maker.
Having an entire population of people convinced that their existence is a curse is a well-documented recipe for disaster. The Chantry is just begging for a mage to lose their mind one day and go on a killing spree.
One thing that's being ignored would be whether the parents actually want the child in this environment. A Maker-fearing Chantry follower might feel cursed and may well be tempted to kill the child to hide their shame. As much as templars commit abuses, they have some lattitude to do so partly because there are people who believe treating mages in this way is justified.
The issue is more complicated that just an oppressed minority.
That feeds into what I said above. The systemic method of preaching that magic is evil and mages are cursed causes problems on so many levels. I don't know whether this is ever expressed in game, but there's no getting around the fact that this is an environment guaranteed to produce parents who fear and hate magic so much that they'll kill their child the day they discover his or her propensity for magic. That is inevitable; some parents will just be so terrified of magic as a result of what they've been told all their lives, they'll do it. And they'll feel like they were fully justified. Some may even believe they're doing the Maker's will. And there will be at least some people among their peers who won't be horrified by the deed. Again, since the Chantry doesn't exactly expressly state that it's okay to kill your mage-child, despite all the things it does say, the question becomes, was that parent just unbalanced and misinterpreted the Chantry's intention? Or was that the inevitable result of the Chantry's actual teaching, intentional or not? Cause and effect...
But yes, it is more complicated than just being a matter of an oppressed minority. That doesn't change the fact that there's a right and a wrong way to deal with the problem of mages, and the Chantry's method is, I think indisputably, the wrong way.
And where would this money come from? What if the mage opts for tranquility (I believe Owain did this). Why do you think the person who would go home is a child, and not an adult? Do you think there shouldn't be something as the Harrowing?
That was just a random thought that occurred to me as I was writing, so I thought it might bear mention. I'm not an accountant within the world of Thedas, please remember, I may take the time to philosophize about the interesting problems that the game raises, but I'm hardly going to analyze the situation so completely as to be able to write up a point by point thesis paper on how to fix all the problems. But I do think it's worth pointing out that the Circles have to get money from somewhere, to pay for the feeding and clothing and boarding of their charges, and everything else. And, well, any nation gets its money for services and institutions in the usual fashion: taxes. Anyway, presently, the Circle's income comes from the Tranquil and the magi shops.
As for mages opting for Tranquility, well. What about it? I have never suggested that I'm against a mage freely choosing that option. Although I do think that one problem of being Tranquil is that it's choosing the unknown. A feeling, emotional person can rationally understand what that Rite will do, but they can't experience it temporarily to decide if it's something they would want to live with, and once it's done, there's no going back. That facet of the Rite makes me uncomfortable; but, that said, I still believe that a person has the right to make that choice for themselves.
Re: child versus adult. I wasn't trying to suggest the person who would go home would (still) be a child. I was still using it in the context of parents losing their children. Sorry for not clarifying that. As for the Harrowing, I'm not sure. I can see the point of the test, as it certainly would be important to make certain a mage has the strength and training to withstand demonic assault. But I don't like the set up behind forcing a person into the choice of facing a demon or undergoing Tranquility, and I
really don't like the idea of mages being unprepared for the Harrowing when it happens: the Mage Origin in DA:O suggests that mages aren't told when they are going to go through that ordeal, but are dragged out of bed without warning in the dead of night. The gist seems to be that the templars believe it's best to see if a mage can withstand an assault while at their least prepared. I can appreciate that reasoning, but still it strikes me as barbaric and inhumane.
Now, to expound on things a little further. What I think might be workable is to have the templars exist as a sort of secular, special police force primarily intended for protecting a populace from rogue mages. It would need to be independent of the Chantry, first, and its teachings certainly should not be a closely guarded secret, which is just another point that makes me think the Chantry is not so benign in its stated purpose as we're led to believe. And Alistair showed us in Origins that lyrium is by no means necessary for templar abilities. (Completely aside, I've never understood this. If templars are NOT mages, and they don't derive their abilities from lyrium, then where the hell does it come from?!) I'm not sure about phylacteries. On the face of it, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea of taking mages' blood, because of the potential implications. But there of course does need to be a way to track mages who are either insane to the point of being dangerous, or just flat out criminal. A mage registry? Again, that thought makes me uncomfortable, but I can see the merit to having one. And of course schools. Rather than having a single Circle in a nation, as with Ferelden, why not several? In every locale with a significant population, have a school for mages. Let the kids interact with their friends, family, and neighbors, for cripe's sake. Don't segregate them away as if they're lepers, which just reinforces for the popular imagination that they're evil. Having children being able to stay in their home villages, and grow up amongst their fellows, would go along way toward fostering that child's sense of belonging and not fostering a sense of Other within themselves that could lead to that child growing up to become a criminal who saw themselves as superior to non-mages, and also do much for fostering a belief in the community that mages are not some Other to be feared and reviled.
That is not to say that no mages would ever turn into criminals or lose themeselves to demonic possession. And this is where you'd need that standing templar force, no different from any local guard population except in who it is trained to hunt. Yes, you're still going to have times when mages go nuts, or embrace criminality. Yes, sometimes, those mages are going to overwhelm a number of templars and kill a number of people before they're contained or killed. But you have that in any situation. Having a police force doesn't mean that criminals cease to exist, and it doesn't mean that sometimes, criminals leave a massive amount of pain and death in their wake before they're stopped. I'm aware that mages up the ante on that potential quite a bit, but as has been pointed out by others, the right of people to be reasonably secure doesn't trump mages' right to freedom, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about mages, or mutants, or government-created super-soldiers, or just ordinary ***holes: there is no means of ensuring absolute security with no chance of danger or harm whatsoever. The existing system of the Chantry-controlled Circles proves this, both in the situation you see in Kirkwall, and in Ferelden during Uldred's revolt. Even under the absolute best circumstances, sometimes crap will just happen. You can respond to that by finding a way to determine mage children as birth and having a legal requirement to drown them upon discovery...which even still won't work because all it takes is one mother who is damned well not going to kill her child...or you can just come up with a workable system to protect the general population without calling for the imprisonment of mages for simply existing, and accept that it's going to work most of the time, but not always and forever.
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