Oh, man, Sera. I have so many thoughts about her that I doubt anyone will want to slog through them, but...also I never really laid them all out before and this thread is already the embodiment of overly long character analysis, so whatever, in case anyone's interested here's two and a half thousand words where I explain my view that Sera is one giant, painful missed opportunity, in both a textual and metatextual way.
SO.
Sera is a frustrating character because she is written with brilliant consistency if the intention was to paint her as a deeply damaged and insecure individual, constantly searching for reassurance and lashing out when she doesn't get it. Unfortunately, the decision not to allow you to engage with her in any way is a...curious decision on the part of the writers and I think where a great deal of the dislike and discomfort is coming from.
Not every character in every story needs to change to be interesting or serve a valid narrative purpose. But with Sera, specifically, I believe the story set up the expectation of change and then didn't follow through.
I think there are three ways in which it sets up this expectation:
1) Sera's description of her own motives
Sera joins the Inquisition, at least in part, to "see if it's really real". There are small, but repeated and consistent implications that Sera is searching for greater meaning. This fits with "The Nothing" as her greatest fear. It fits with her aggressive dismissal of anything that complicates her cosmological worldview. Her confidence masks genuine fear. If she doesn't understand it, she mocks and dismisses it, but it's because she's afraid. And on some level she understands that and it's part of why she seeks out the Herald.
But nothing ever comes of it. Her only progression is to dismiss everything that comes up because it'd be too frightening if it were real.
(To be clear, I'm not being proscriptive here - Chantry, Elven Gods, atheism, agnosticism, something else entirely, I don't care, the point is she shows up looking for something, and then refuses to engage with any of it.)
With Vivienne, for instance, we have another character whose metaphysical and religious views do not change throughout the course of the game, and with whom you may very well be bitterly at odds. But Vivienne is never implied to be looking for greater meaning. Her confidence is not an act, she's not here to find out anything, she's here to build her own power and influence, and her personal questline (such as it is - I think she could have done with more) revolves around that.
On the other hand, we might compare her with Oghren. He's another character who largely plays off crude humour, general rudeness, and basically doesn't change from start to finish. But Oghren found the answers he was looking for when he found out what happened to Branka. He stays as mostly lighthearted comic relief because there aren't narrative cues pointing out that there's more to the story. Whether or not it was the right decision, or the most responsible one, the story doesn't treat his heavy drinking as terminal alcoholism. It doesn't give you opportunities to try and broach that topic with him only to get laughed at or yelled at. If it did, people would probably view his character quite differently.
2) Player expectation
This is a tricky one because I don't think that Sera should just agree with the Inquisitor because you're the player character. It bothers me immensely when I feel like characters in RPGs are going against what makes sense for them on a character basis just because you're the protagonist.
So let me be clear that Sera disagreeing - even profoundly and aggressively - with the Inquisitor is not something I have a conceptual problem with.
However, this is an interactive medium, and so, when you combine it with reasonable expectations (such as those detailed above and below) that these themes are going somewhere, the absence can lead to personal frustration or confusion on the part of the player. Or at least, like me, an assumption that you didn't get to see where Sera's character development was heading in that regard because you didn't have high enough approval with her. Which I was honestly fine with - not every character has to get along with every NPC. But I did genuinely assume I'd missed something, and was then confused when I played through with different characters and choices and a different relationship with Sera and found out that no - there was still nothing.
The other issue is that Sera brings this up with the Inquisitor. She solicits responses, then refuses to listen to them, and this happens again and again and there's never a change. Once more, I think it's reasonable for a player to expect that, if something's going to come up repeatedly like this, it will eventually end up going somewhere.
It's certainly a valid artistic decision on the part of the writers, but unless their goal was to evoke frustration, then I think they misjudged.
3) Sera's got problems
Sera's not okay. I touched on it a little further up, but Sera has a boat load of issues that are causing her to behave in a boat load of terrible ways.
We cannot help her.
We can enable her or we can anger her. Those are our only options.
It may be true to life, but it's tragic and sad and frustrating and I go back and forth on whether the narrative deals with it sensitively enough for it to be intentional.
As the Inquisitor - indeed as the protagonist in many RPG games, and particularly BioWare games - we are encouraged to care about and forge relationships with the NPCs. It's not a sign of controlling paternalism or an inability to handle her refusal to blindly agree to want - on some level - to help her. Or at least to get to the root of why you can't and explore it as a tragedy.
Because Sera's definitely got problems.
Other than her self-professed existential issues, they largely revolve around elves and moral hypocrisy.
So I guess I'll lay out why I don't buy the arguments that actually, she's doing okay. Let's talk about Red Jennies first.
The Verechiel March
So a guy gets murdered in part because Sera paints a giant target on his back. The defense commonly offered is that his participation is the scheme is voluntary.
The problem with that defense is that his last moments make it clear he had no idea what he was getting himself into.
I mean, he was murdered by the noble in question. He is culpable for this guy's death.
But, while Little Guy could have been all “viva la revolution!” only to balk at the last minute when he realised he was in deep, Sera's descriptions of the organisation, the way she gathers intel during the Red Jenny war table missions and his genuine fear and confusion in the cut scene, make it far more probable he thought he was passing on a bit of useful gossip in the hopes that someone would make his boss look like a ****** for a few minutes. He probably had no idea what he was passing on was going to be leveraged into a political ploy by one of the most powerful organisations in Thedas, or any idea of the risk that entailed.
It's not consent if you think you're volunteering to toilet paper someone's house, then arrive on the scene to find it on fire and the police waiting for you.
Sera puts together intelligence from a dozen disparate sources to crowbar actionable military intelligence from impossible places. It's incredibly impressive. It also means that she is most definitely making active decisions about how to use this information. She makes choices about what responses are both feasible and proportionate according to her own moral code – decisions that affect the lives of Little People – no matter how much she protests that it all just runs by itself.
She isn't wrong about the catch-22 of a violently oppressive class system. It threatens disobedience with violence, but capitulating to that threat keeps the system in place. That is not a problem with a good solution.
But when she's making that call for the Little Guy who gets murdered, because the Little Guy doesn't understand what he's set in motion, then...
Well, that's the sort of thing Sera can't stand in others, even if they're doing it for a greater cause (i.e. Briala), and I do begin to wonder whether she is suppressing the cognitive dissonance or whether she's genuinely not self-aware enough to realise it.
Regardless, she responds with defensive fury to any implication that she consider her own role in how things unfolded.
When things go wrong, Sera looks around for someone to blame for aiming her at the wrong thing, rather than deciding to be more cautious before she shoots.
Elves
The other unavoidable issue is her internalised racism.
I don't buy that it's as simple as seeing herself as working class more predominantly than seeing herself as elven. That doesn't explain the levels of defensiveness and aggression that seem specifically reserved for elven ideas and characters.
She disapproves of an Elfquisitor saying s/he will lead as a racial example in a way she does not for Dwarf- or Qunquisitor. She disapproves of Briala as the power behind Gaspard's throne, but doesn't disapprove of Gaspard himself even though without Briala's influence he won't be making life better for any Little People and will quite likely continue warmongering (his politics are expansionist). War being a thing that both comes with an extremely high Little Person body count and stops coin from flowing – typically areas of interest for Sera.
She throws out an ultimatum to a Dalish paramour after the Temple of Mythal but doesn't do so if the Inquisitor is of any other race. And while we're on the subject of the Temple, she won't believe anything Abelas says except the part where he explains the elves destroyed themselves long before Tevinter showed up. She calls that the one bit of truth in a pile of demon bait. Because it affirms her worldview.
Sera has deep-seated issues with elves.
Perhaps individual explanations can be offered as to why, in this particular circumstance, Sera was so highly critical of elfy things, but in aggregate it's clearly part of a wider pattern. This was not written by accident.
It's also almost certainly in reaction to her own experiences of racism, both passive and active. It's not healthy but this is how she copes with being part of a marginalised group: by aggressively asserting that it's irrelevant. Once again, Sera's core characteristic is desperation for security and safety (physical, mental, spiritual, philosophical) and lashing out when that is threatened, or when it's implied something needs to change for it to continue.
The Dalish make her feel inferior, the humans make assumptions about her, and the City Elves probably make her feel hopeless. It's clear her problem doesn't just sit with the Dalish (the "stupid tree" in the alienage, for instance - she sees City Elves as just as likely to keep worshipping pointless dead things).
It's also clear that her attitude that Elves are "professional victims" is based on flawed logic. Objectively, all elves, City and Dalish, are likely to live in abject poverty and be at risk of horrendous institutional violence. It is not "professional victimhood" to talk about this. In broad terms, Sera obviously does not believe that it is either, because her entire existence as a Red Jenny is based around repeatedly, and loudly, talking about the factual institutional oppression levelled against cooks and footmen. So why does that change when it's elves all of a sudden?
Because elves make her feel bad. Elves make her feel judged for not being elfy enough so she mocks being elfy until it goes away.
There's probably also some victim blaming going on. Sometimes victim blaming happens because it's a way for other potential victims to feel safer. If the crime was avoidable (shouldn't have gone out that late, shouldn't have trusted them, shouldn't have been wearing that, shouldn't have said that), then you can know better. You can be safe. If it was unavoidable, then you're not safe. Then the problem is institutional and the scale is enormous and frightening.
If elves just need to stop whining, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fix their problems with a little fun and mayhem, because that's what she did, Sera's worldview is safer.
Personal vs Global
She's happy to engage in victim blaming when it comes to the elves, but uses that same accusation as a shield to deflect any criticism when it comes to the Verechiel incident. She is wildly inconsistent with her attitudes (because her attitude is rooted in the personal and the emotionally subjective) and enormously absolutist when it comes to morality (she has to be absolutist because so much of the justification and legitimacy for her behaviour comes from these big picture moral statements, like the underpinnings of Red Jenny. Big People vs Little People, she's clearly the hero, they're clearly the villains, all simple, no problem).
She's essentially trying to use big, unchanging global truths to support whatever emotional reality she is living in that particular moment.
Like almost everything about Sera it comes back to that part of her that is a seriously damaged kid.
So her foster mother lies to her about cookies, tells her that the baker hates elves so she'll keep away and not find out they were store-bought. Sera retaliates against the baker and finds out it was all a lie. We'll never know if Lady Emmald was a manipulative jerk trying to short-cut her way to an obedient, humblebrag, charity adoption, or if she took Sera in against social convention, told a white lie out of loneliness, and didn't realise it was so much more than a white lie to Sera because subconscious, systemic racism isn't something that you can escape just because you love someone. There's no way we can know which version is the truth because Sera's incapable of being objective about it. She just knows that she was hurt by someone who was supposed to care for her. And as a little girl, who can blame her? She was in no way equipped to deal with the complex intersections of racial paternalism and parental love and how in a fair world, one would cancel out the other, but hey, great, that's not always how it works...
No one in that story necessarily hates elves, but being an elf was the problem and why the lie worked, why she got tricked, so for Sera - it's easier if she just isn't one. (Hello Sera's Elf Issues).
Sera hurts the wrong person, and gets angry with the person who aimed her rather than deciding to check her facts next time or care about anyone's motives. (Hello Sera's Moral Issues.)
Lady Emmald lied to her, and the betrayal means she's got to be the bad, wrong person. No nuance. That makes the baker the hero. The poor Little Person who was lied about to suit someone else's purpose. Whether he was a saint who donated food to starving elf orphans or the type of guy who wouldn't refuse an elf service but would totally refer to them as "knife-ears" and keep a sharper eye on his goods when they're in the shop, is irrelevant. He's the hero now, he's the good guy, because that global truth has to be real in order to support the subjective, painful, emotional reality of Sera's betrayal by her foster-mother. (Hello Sera's Personal vs Global Issues.)
All her issues are wrapped up in that story. And within the context of that story, it's painful and tragic and totally understandable. She was a child and she was lied to and it tied into sociopolitical issues she had no way of being able to deal with.
Now she's an adult and she's still firing on those cylinders and, well, it's still tragic and painful, but it's also not gonna change unless she does something about it, or at least lets someone else help.
Or at least was in a game where the game let us help.
A lot of hurt kids react to that lack of safety and stability by trying to take control in any way they can, even to the extent of attempting to bully those around them into compliance.
That's Sera, I think.
She's a hurt kid who turned into a bully in order to try and feel safe.
But all the game will let me do is enable her terrible, genuinely hurtful behaviour, or abandon her.
) That distinction I thought was interesting and didn't see the point of it until I ran into Sera's character.
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