I doubt a single Abomination would be grounds for an Annulment. Failure to contain an Abomination might quickly escalate though, to warrant the Annulment. A demonic infestation can grow rapidly, as we saw in Ferelden.Ieldra2 wrote...
It's a different way to look at it. It changes the moral basis of the argument and allows for the fact that it doesn't need a single mage guilty of anything for a Circle to be compromised. All it needs is one mage being emotionally unstable enough to lose control to a demon. If that demon is powerful enough, it can force others to become possessed as well etc. etc..eluvianix wrote...
How exactly is the bolded different than executing the innocent along with the guilty?TK514 wrote...
Let me just preface this post with the statement that I am not a proponent of indiscriminate execution. Execution of any stripe should be a last option when all others have been exhausted.
But I think people are looking at the ROA as executing the innocent along with the guilty, when what it is actually doing is purging the healthy along with the infected. Demonic possession can very easily be compared to an extremely hardy and virulent disease with no reliable cures, and no cures at all for large populations. On top of that, there's no reliable way to detect possession if the demon chooses not to be overt. Gregoire was actually taking a huge risk by trusting Irving in Ferelden.
The only other option is to completely seal the Circle, effectively forever since demons can possess corpses, and eradicate anything that tries to leave, dooming everyone within to death by deprivation at the very best. Which, as pointed out, doesn't exactly stop the spread of possession.
So the choices on dealing with a compromised Circle are ultimately all bad. Go in immediately and kill the infection early, unfortunately getting the uninflected along with the demons, or wait until everyone has already been tortured to death or possession and kill them all later.
I'm not saying that putting a bunch of bait in one spot and hoping nothing bites is the best way to prevent a large scale outbreak, but it, in theory, makes such outbreaks easier to control than random abominations in the wild, and only puts Mages and Templars at risk, rather than the general populace.
Perhaps this would be an acceptable setup if abomination outbreaks of non-Circle mages were comparably frequent. But they aren't. In fact, in Tevinter, while there are still Circles, there are mages walking the streets freely and while we hear of a lot of events in Tevinter, abomination outbreaks appear to be so rare that we don't hear of any. I stand by what I wrote in my mage manifesto: political expediency, shrouding things in religious metaphor and the ban on blood magic conspire to make Circle mages more vulnerable to possession than they'd need to be.
Abominaions happen in Tevinter. Fenris talks about having faced powerful Abominations (plural), so obviously they are not as rare as some would like them to be. Most probably Tevinter has no interrest in publicing any case of Abomination outbreak at all, or they just don't care, since it would be seen as a weakness being purged. Tevinter doesn't care for weakness. And still, most mages in Tevinter are also confiend to the Circles, so the rate of Abomination outbreaks otside of the Circle shouldn't be all that much bigger than in the rest of Thedas.
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