Well, I've played the game a few times over, seen everything there is to see, examined the merits and flaws of each of the characters pretty thoroughly, and discussed it all with a few people whose opinions and tastes are trustworthy. And the verdict is in: Morrigan is to me unworthy of trust.
There are quite a few small aspects about her that don't exactly ingratiate her character to me, of course. Her general attitude is one. She's kind of a bi##.
While she treats the main character pretty decently, more or less, she's unceasingly cold and hostile to everyone else in the party, while they, aside from Alistair,* continue to attempt to be civil to her. While other characters in the game may criticize each other in a light-hearted way or with a constructive purpose in mind, Morrigan's jabs and insults are ever done spitefully. So she's not exactly the most likable and trustworthy person to begin with, not to mention her long term deception.
Still, annoying personalities I can get over, if there's a decent character beneath.
The true problem for me with Morrigan is that her inner character is rather shallow, and far less likable than her bitchy exterior. Fundamentally, Morrigan believes in looking out for number 1, that connections to other people are meaningless farces, that religious belief is foolish, and that the mages who follow the Chantry's laws and allow themselves to be regulated are weak. Now, these are all things that I disagree with myself. But what makes her such a lousy character compared to all the rest of the cast, and what makes me really dislike her, is how she holds and expresses these beliefs.
Morrigan is a raging, senseless hypocrite who cannot extract her head from her ass. She criticizes the mages who live under the shackles that society places on them, even though she has grown up free because her adoptive witch mother, Flemeth, kept her relatively safe and almost totally secluded from the society that would have imprisoned her. She has absolutely no experience of the difficulties a mage faces when they try to escape, and she doesn't care. Even when confronted with the fact that she could have been brought up in this imprisonment and been the same as any other mage, she dismisses the argument without really addressing it, rather than even consider that the situations of other mages and herself could have been reversed. She scorns others for not fighting for the freedom she enjoys when she herself has had little role in attaining and keeping that freedom.
This is more or less how it goes every time Morrigan comes across something she doesn't approve of. She criticizes the people and society of the world around her unflinchingly, while having never had to experience it--by her own admission she knows more or less nothing of civilization, since Flemeth raised her alone in a swamp her whole life that alone make her unworthy to try to change the world fate with an archdemon soul.
But it's more than just ignorance bordering on hypocrisy, here. There's also just complete and utter hypocrisy, too. One of her big things is to criticize the followers of the Chant of Light, the major quasi-Christian-esque religion of this world, for being unthinking followers to laws and beliefs that they're told. The problem here is that, again, by her own admission, most everything she knows of the world (which is, again, not very much) is what Flemeth has taught her. Nearly every opinion she has and holds is formed before she's properly out in the world to experience that which she holds the opinion on. Of all the characters in the game, she's the one whose beliefs have been determined the most by what she's been told, and she also ends up being the character whose views are the most unchangeable. Sten can learn to accept outsiders and embrace at least a precious few aspects of other cultures. Alistair comes to accept his place in the world and has his preconceived hopes about family's acceptance challenged. Oghren comes to recognize that it truly is himself and not circumstance that brings him to his lowly states. Zevran, Shale, Wynne, Leliana, they're all at least open to views other than their own. But Morrigan? On almost every point, the woman who criticizes the Chantry's followers for their blind, unquestioning obedience to the moral codes given to them absolutely refuses to entertain the possibility that what she's been told could be untrue.**
Now I'll give you the fact that Morrigan is not 100% a loathsome hypocrite. She CAN come to appreciate the friendship and/or love that the main character offers her (if the main character is a good fellow/fellowess and gives her gifts and does her a huge favor), and she doesn't deny that she values it. And that much IS fairly touching, I'll give you that. Although it does seem to be a thing so private that only she and the main character can ever know it; in all other ways and situations, Morrigan continues to scorn human connections as worthless. But I'll still admit, that's a highlight to her, and one moment where she does learn that her preconceptions are wrong.
Nonetheless, this one occasion of her appreciating someone going to extreme lengths for her for the sake of friendship does not change her overall character, and that is one of an ignorant, venomous hypocrite. While this may put me at odds with the general gaming community, which seems totally enamored by her,*** I seriously dislike Morrigan, and consider her the low point of the game's cast.
And while it's really neither here nor there, I'd like to point out that her religious criticisms never graduate past the most rudimentary level. Morrigan isn't bringing up any more insightful arguments about the fallacies of faith and organized religion than those you would expect to hear from a teenager testing the waters of religious rebellion.
*** Which I think is largely because she spouts those empty but "edgy" anti-faith arguments here and there, and is a goth chick that shows a lot of skin--proof that Bioware can shamelessly exploit an audience just as well as SquareEnix!
Grant to her the key to world domination was madness for my warden
Retour en haut
