Jedi Master of Orion wrote...
Isabella does murder a lot of people, but theres never anything like killing a bunch of innocent victims of the slave trade anywhere in the game so yes I do think it's too brutal. Most of the people she does kill in game are slavers and Qunari and criminals and so forth.
But my main point is that when she does grow and change, she still doesn't speak honestly about this like she does with everything else.
The ability of the game to delve into the companions is limited. Isabela doesn't do much more than drink at the bar if you don't keep her in your party. What quests you do get are all involved with her duping Hawke into helping her kill people she's indebted to or finding the Tome without letting anyone know what she's looking for or why. With Hawke, she's generally killing the people Hawke is killing. (And I'm going to ignore the inherent problem of how much killing video game protagonists do for the purposes of this conversation.) She has less agency simply due to the fact that she's an NPC. Personally, I came to the conclusion that a woman who clawed her way to being called a pirate queen and scourge of the coasts did a lot of truly awful things to get there. To me, knowing that she did in fact murder a bunch of slaves while trying to save her own neck fits in perfectly with the character I observed in the game. She even tries to convince herself the slaves are better off dead than slaves.
Just because someone has started making an effort to be less of a callous murderer, doesn't mean they're going to completely change who they are. With time, Isabela can become a little bit less selfish, but that still doesn't change the fact that she's a survivor. She's always been someone who puts her own survival first. That changes a bit by the end of Those Who Speak; she actually risks her own chance to escape by trying to release her crew, but she's had a lot of time to
develop from the person who dumped slaves overboard to avoid the gallows. That still doesn't mean she's going to open up about every horrible things she's done. She doesn't dwell on it and has no reason to bring it up to Hawke.
(At this point I'll just skip going into how problematic the idea that it's okay to go about killing Qunari, criminal, etc is. Video games are designed to force the player into combat, so we sort of ignore how sociopathic or kleptomaniacal the player character is.)
Jedi Master of Orion wrote...
No my point was why would Castillion care to hide the fact that she'd be transporting slaves from her if she showed no concern for their welfare?
I think I'm misconstruing what you mean when you say "showed no concern for their welfare." I'm reading that as "she didn't seem to care about their well-being," which
isn't something pirates would care about. I'm going to assume that you actually mean "she didn't care about being a slaver before."
Who knows? Maybe she actually told the Felicisima Armada she didn't want to carry slaves anymore but owed incredibly high dues. Maybe he thought it would be funny. Maybe he didn't want her to panic and dump the cargo at the first sign of trouble, since she'd done so before. (Though she says she tried different ways of getting the ship to outrun the Orlesians before deciding on mass murder.) Or maybe she was working for him, and he didn't feel it was any of her business what he was having her do. We don't really get a good idea of what motivates Castillon to trick her, so all we can do is conjecture.
Jedi Master of Orion wrote...
Yes I know she knew the Qunari stayed in Kirkwall because of her but she isn't the only factor in the Qunari attack. She might not even be the biggest one. The incident with Sheamus especially is something that was caused by too many different specific people and factors to blame Isabella. I don't think it makes sense for her to continue to lie about this for her own benefit once she grows to the point where she stops selfishly trying to screw people over.
She's not the only factor, but she's knowingly the primary reason they're there. The fact that Kirkwall is a horrible place full of horrible people certainly helps the Arishok come to the conclusion that conversion or death are the best options.
But if Isabela had enlisted Hawke's help and been honest before the Arishok was prepared to burn Kirkwall to the ground, that whole mess might have been avoided. There's a good chance she
doesn't come back, in which case she's the same self-serving survivalist she started out as.
As for continuing to lie about her past? She's not actually lying. She never once tells Hawke, "Well, good thing I brought back that book; that was just the worst thing I ever did." She doesn't claim to be a good person, and she makes no apologies for the fact that she's a pirate who's done awful things. She does give some indication that she might regret things in her past, but she doesn't lie about the fact that she's done things she bloody well
should regret. Is she ommitting a lot of information? Sure. But she's not exactly trying to convince anyone she's a saint.
Jedi Master of Orion wrote...
So if her whole character arc is dishonest,then hasn't entire experience of knowing Isabella in DA 2 been a lie? If that's the implcation of the reveal (which I doubt), then I think any player has a right to find the idea of destroying an important character in ancilliary comics objectionable.
Not necessarily. I don't feel her character arc is quite about redemption, especially if Hawke never makes the effort to change her. That's another possibility, after all. There is some degree of getting her to be less selfish, but she's not redeemed by the end of it. At the same time, you have to go through the game knowing Isabela's not always honest and has the potential to be selfish, even if she's trying to be good.
For that matter, the idea that the comics 'destroy' Isabela is a subjective one. The comics didn't show me anything I was terribly shocked by, at least in Isabela's case. Pirates are not good people. The comics illustrate more in depth what that can mean.
Jedi Master of Orion wrote...
If you tell Sten you think what he did was horrible in Lothering, he tells you he agrees. He's clearly
bothered by the deaths of those families as well. But for the third time now, my point was simply that said event is still cruicial to understanding Sten's character, regardless of what he feels more guilty for. If you remove any hint of his failure/murder of those families from the game itself (yet keep it in canon), he becomes incomplete DAO and impossible to understand fully.
Plus from an out of character perspective I don't think it's fair to the player or the character to include such an important part of his backstory.
I've never ever been saying that Isabella is "nice." But there's a wide gulf between "not nice" and "monster." Dragon Age 2 never made me think she crossed it, the comics did.
Agreeing that slaughtering an entire family is bad is different than being bothered by it. The former is an objective assessment, and the latter is more subjective. Which does help the player understand that Sten has an incredibly foreign perspective on things, yes. He's still a very different person than Isabela, though. Sten's all about honor and duty, so yes, he's more inclined to honestly share his failings than a self-serving, known liar. As he was written, yes, knowing that he slaughtered that family (and had an alien perspective on why that was bad) helped understand him, but knowing that he placed more value on duty, honor, and the sword that signified who he was to his people provided a greater understanding. (Also, I'm often unsure of how people are using the word 'canon.' Whatever the writers put into the game or lore is canon, so if they changed Sten's character development, it would by default be canon. Nor am I entirely sure what you're trying to say with that second paragraph there.)
As to the last point, I'm sorry you feel that way? I always assumed that if Isabela was willing to admit to killing her husband (who admittedly was also not a nice person) and being a pirate with incredibly loose morality, then she'd probably done some awful things before stealing an artifact that had the potential to start a war. I suppose the writers in DA2 did a good job of making her charming enough that players could ignore the implications of what she'd probably done to get where she was.
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