At the heart of this choice is the ‘danger of magic’ and the evil of ‘Blood magic’. And, after playing the game through completely, I still don’t know what blood magic is and why those NPCs with the highest Intelligence scores find it so appealing. One thing for sure is that no magic was as dangerous as my greatsword and I would have been equally offended had I been imprisoned and put to death because I had the capacity to do harm.
In Origins, blood mages had the power to control the actions of others and so it made sense that this was illegal but in DA2 it seemed to be connected with the summoning of demons and who but a psychopath would do that? If all that was involved in Blood magic was cutting your hand, sucking life from corpses and using life instead of mana then who cares?
So the choice is between Meredith and her Templars and Orsino and his mages. So, let’s look at them.
Meredith is the archetype of hate and tyranny who uses an ‘ends justifies the means’ kind of mantra to enforce her evil. I don’t know if it was deliberate to make her look like Nurse Ratchet from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ but she sure acted like her. She hates the Qunari and supported Sister Patrice, an underling who committed murder and was the poster girl for villainy and this, in part, lead to the Qunari uprising and the death of the Viscount. Without any discussion about who should be the next Viscount or the obvious point that the commander of the Templars had as much right to rule the city as the head of the Merchant’s Guild she adopted the role of Tyrant.
You can’t reason with her. And this has got nothing to do with the Lyrium relic that she has acquired from Bertrand. It is a simple choice. Do you support the wholesale murder of the thousands of innocents born with a particular genetic tendency? What sort of game poses this as if it were an equal choice? What truly disgusted me was the way the writers tried to make this choice viable. Magic is dangerous… Not really… I’m dangerous. Rogues and assassins with stealth are dangerous and I have yet to find a sword that heals. I killed thousands of NPCs of all types and yet not once was I ever given the opportunity to make this point. Meredith's arguments aren't new. Hitler and the Spanish Inquisition posed similar arguments but that hardly recommends them.
And the offence continues. To make the assertion that those children born with magical abilities be put to death or lobotomised and their humanity ignored as somewhat reasonable, the argument posed is that magic is dangerous and it is easier to kill them all to be sure… (It reminds me of “torture and non-targeted assassination” is okay if it’s used by the “good guys.”) And this offensive assertion is re-enforced by having Orsino, supposedly the most intelligent NPC in the game, turn himself into a demon that attacks his own allies. Dangerous? Or really stupid and totally unrealistic?
It gets worse. Had the “Templar/Circle” model from Origins been adopted things may have been different. I would have supported the mages and the good Templars to oust Meredith and the blood mages but had that been the model I would have gone to the Circle soon after Bethany had been taken and request she accompany me with both the Templar’s and the Circle’s blessing as occurred in Origins. But that wasn’t the choice. The Choice was to support Meredith and murder my own sister and a boy who ran away to get laid or insist on decency and justice.
Everything else like couldn’t you find an artist who could draw ears or “do you call that romance?” or where was the option to let Anders down gently and get friendship for doing it and why did Isabella hold onto that useless Qunari relic and where was the ability that would allow me to kick Fenris’s dead body around the courtyard for an hour for turning on me because I wouldn’t help him support his bigotry and a lunatic to murder my own sister… All this is trivial when juxtaposed to the obscenity that any “champion” would murder innocents out of fear.
Modifié par djwolf, 12 juin 2013 - 11:11 .
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