Karsciyin wrote...
In most circumstances, I would agree with you. (I'm typically a mage-supporter after all.) One should not bow to one's enemy for his convenience. However, one is not 'entrapping' you into doing anything, your choices are always your own. Sinking to base levels is how wars start.
However, I believe the reasons blood magic are forbidden is what they involve: the use of an innocents blood, the mind-control of others, the summoning of spirits. Not all mages do this, but enough do. Not all nuclear missles have been fired, but it is still a cause for concern when countries start building them.
What makes mages the most dangerous is demonic possession - and the abomination slaughtering or enslaving mortals for power, amusement, avarice... before the templars can put them down. Though templars have become corrupt and power-hungry, treating mages like convicted criminals, their original pupose is protect mages for each other, and themselves, as well as protected townsfolk from mage gone awry.
DAO's posessed!Conor murdered all his castle staff, then resurrected them, and sent this undead army to murder his townsfolk too. Original Conor is HIGHLY unlikely to have done that. Intentions are irrelevant - once the demon is there, it has control.
Dealing with demons for blood magic IS exposing yourself to demonic influence. This is why it makes the templars nervous. Consider this: why would demons make deals with people they didn't think they could control? Why should they exert effort to give someone who treats them with disdain something for nothing? All blood mages seen thus are either power-hungry (eg: Uldred) or foolish (eg: Jowan). And then there are those that think they are smart enough to prevent it. Consider Merrill - without the keeper stopping it, the entirity of Thedas would have been at the mercy of a mighty corporeal demon! Yet Merrill was adamant she was in control the entire time, she knew what she was doing, her blood magic was harmless.
To bring back to topic (before this turns into another templar-vs-mage), Orsino is a very poor example of this. In the mage ending, he performs this ritual unneccessarily, for the sake of extra power the mages are winning. In the templar ending, he has killed the other students to fuel this power, thus 'saving lives' isn't exactly his goal - it's revenge. It's violence.
And if he wins? What then? Does he write his memoirs with his half-dozen hands and start an orchestral band? Or does he begat more voilence by stamping on anything or anyone who opposing him, innocents (like citizens) and mage-sympathisers (like Thrask or, more indirectly, Isabela) caught in the crosshairs of massive upheaval?
Orsino also has been an intellectual correspondent with Quentin (who zombie'd your mother), trading information regarding this ritual. Thus, even before extreme duress, Orsino has been participating in blood magic. Provable in an indirect fashion, his transformation showing likely in a direct fashion also.
Though the ending still looks foolish with Orsino suddenly turning upon Hawke, with this information I wouldn't be surprised that this were an inevitability, even without Meredith's involvement. Something would eventually push him to consider this an acceptable act. Mages like this are why the real men and women in the circle, that just want to live normally, are still kept under lock and key. (Guys stop making everyone else look bad!)
A few things:
A. Regarding connor: he never used blood-magic.
The Connor situation came about because he was not educated about the temptations of demons and about how to resist them. Jowan, despite the fact that I have some sympathy for him, was probably not qualified to teach anyone. Essentialy, what the Chantry is saying is "you are going to do it our way, or not at all, and Damn the consequences ". And so a misguided mother was left with Jowan as the only option for a teacher for her son.
B. Regarding blood-magic in general.
Blood-Magic users are easy to villify, because since age zero we are taught that "heroes" or "super-heroes" look in a certain way, and have certain powers, while "villains" or "super-villains" have their own seperate look and arsenal of powers. Naturally, blood-magic, is a villain's weapon because it's rather disgusting and disturbing for most people, and because of the lack of white lights and heavenly choirs...
In some ways it is similar to the "good-knight-versus-evil-witch" trope which was invented probably in order to make early religious atrocities easier to swallow.
C. "Blood-Magic" Vs. "Death-magic", and mind-control.
Canon DA makes no real distinction between the use of the caster's own blood for magic, to the slaughter of countless of innocents to fuel magic, or the domination of minds for nefarious purposes.
It simply hand-waves it all into a neat pile called "blood-magic", with the use of scary words like "evil", "demons", "corruption", etc.
Some people are going to use blood-magic in those ways - I agree. But pretending that most sane people will inevitably fall from using their own blood to slaughtering slaves, is as one-dimensional as it is outrageous.
D. I got the feeling, that Orsino's crimes and his rather surprising... transformation at the end *no matter what you chose*, were ham-fistedly inserted into the plot, because otherwise people would have had an harder time justifying and identifying with the templars, what's with their atitude of "kill them all and let the maker sort them out".
This is in contrast to Meredith's insanity, which was simply a complication and not the the only or worse case of Templar abuse and cruelty in DA2.
Modifié par TheRedVipress, 23 novembre 2013 - 02:21 .
Retour en haut
