The Siege of Skyhold

I wish there had been a Suicide Mission equivalent in Inquisition.

After the loss of Samson/Calpurnia, Corypheus knows you’re coming for him. He’s lost his general, his vessel, and he’s out of time. He sends everything he’s got left against Skyhold, knowing it probably wont kill you but it’s definitely going to hurt. 

So, the remains of the Red Templars, Venatori and rift demons are bearing down on Skyhold. Did you close every rift in every area? Congrats, significantly less demons to fight. Did you complete the Emprise quests? Less Red Templars. Dorian’s table quests? The Hissing Wastes/Western Approach? Less Venatori. 

SO now we’ve got our force size, lets look at who survives. Yep, survives, because I hope you bothered to do your companion quests. Did you do  Bull, Cole and Sera’s? Because they just fired a trebuchet at the tavern. Did you bother picking all those herbs and searching for the logging points to get the keep upgrades? If you didn’t, expect heavy casualties. Oh, did you convince Dennet to come to Skyhold, btw? Cos if you didn’t I hope you like your default horse; Dennet was the only one who could keep all your new mounts safe  Hey remember those FRIGGING ANNOYING requisitions officers? Did you do -this requisition-,  -this requisition- and  -this requisition-? Ohhhh good, because if you hadn’t you would have lost your merchants, because your forces wernt strong enough to keep the demons off them. 

Everyone meets in the courtyard and you’ve got to take charge. Which of your friends are you sending to the front lines with your troops? Bull? Good choice! He’s used to leading, and has either the chargers or a load of Qunari already listening to him. Cole, you say… oookay probably a bad choice. Why not send Cole to the prison to protect the civilian staff? Or Vivienne, or Sera? Actually maybe it’d be better to send Viv up to the battlements to shield the troops. Oh, good thing you did Bull’s loyalty mission, a demon was about to rip him in half when the Chargers/Qunari swooped in. Man, that would have been bad if you hadn’t! 

Wait.. you did NO loyalty missions, NO upgrades, NO requisitions, NO rifts???? Ok, enjoy the last fight against Cory with just Cass, Varric and Solas, because those are the only people left. Viv survived, because of COURSE she did, but since she wasn’t loyal she left, she doesn’t believe in you after that sorry performance. Everyone else is dead. And each had a death cut scene you had to watch.

THAT is what I expected when they gave me an upgrade-able castle and many companion quests.

THAT is what I wanted from “Lead Them or Fall”.

Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, Wynne, and lets discuss this without the limitations of three dialogue options to choose from.

There has NEVER been a case in history where oppressors were shown the error of their ways by the oppressed ‘showing them they can be trusted.’ Because there is nothing that is ever good enough in their eyes. And you’d think the fact that the Chantry will never allow freedom would be a red flag??? That you need to fear your survival at all???

Why YES, I remember the Circle. I remember a warden mage, an apostate, a warden warrior and their fucking dog having to step in to do the job the templars are supposedly meant and trained for, but opted instead to just kill everyone. Fucking pinnacle of an example there, Wynne.

And really? “Give the templars an excuse?” THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR MASS MURDER OF INNOCENTS.

To quote Briala in The Masked Empire, “Freedom is not given. It is won.” Trying to be as perfect an underling as possible will never amount to anything, because it will never be good enough. There is nothing you can do to convince oppressors to just grant equality to people they see as beneath them. That’s kind of the whole damn problem. You cannot expect change to come without confronting the problem.

Finally, this conversation is important to note, because I occasionally see people say that the mages never wanted to rebel until Anders blew up the Chantry, when that just isn’t true. The Libertarians are the second largest group of mages. That is a really big portion. Enough so that in 9:31 they have enough power to petition separating from the Chantry the first time, as detailed by Wynne right here. They try again in 9:37. Then finally in 9:39, the rebellion began. So, let’s not pretend that there was no large force against the Circles before Anders blew up the Chantry. Fiona was working her ass off for years, before Anders even took his Harrowing.

I think it’s also important to note, though, that what’s underlying Wynne’s sentiments here is fear.

She doesn’t say ‘I think the brightest future we can have is by working peaceably with the chantry’. She says ‘our only hope for survival is to show them we can be trusted’. And this comes from a lifetime of internalizing that people are justified in fearing mages (because of course, that’s what Circle mages - and even those outside the Circle - are always told), and believing that it’s this fear that needs to be defeated. If only they weren’t afraid of us, many mages think, then everything would get better. If only Bad Mages would stop giving people reasons to hate us, then we could show them that we’re not all like that; we could earn our freedom and livelihoods by defeating fear.

Except, the fear of mages (not magic - mages) in Southern Thedas is something the chantry encourages. It’s basically hard-coded into their take on Andrastrianism, and is one of the cornerstones of their politics. Fear of mages is what helps rally people against Tevinter, and it’s what ensures parents turn their mage children over to the Circle, and supply the chantry with free labourers and the nobility with exclusive access to the best healers and long-range combatants in the world. It’s what provides the chantry with any templar recruits who aren’t conscripted from the orphanages. There is no recourse for assuaging that ‘fear’, because the people who keep perpetuating it are engaged in a calculated form of propaganda, and have no interest in ending it. They benefit from it. They actively encourage it, so it’s not a genuine misunderstanding by any stretch of the imagination.

Wynne’s approach is exactly what the chantry wants. Mages working quietly to try and gain more autonomy, which they will never be granted because the condition of that autonomy is ‘well you can have it when you prove you can be trusted with it’. And then, invariably, some mage does something bad (because even if mages never had a reason to be desperate or take drastic actions, you’re always going to have asshole mages - there are assholes in every group in the world), and this becomes the excuse to tighten the leash and put off all those pesky issues of freedom and individual rights. This whole conversation demonstrates the problem, really - Wynne brings up Kinloch Hold as an example of why the Chantry might currently hesitate to let mages govern themselves. What she doesn’t seem to realize is that there is always going to be something. Some Circle with troubles, some rebellious mages with issues, some maleficarum stirring up nonsense, or hell, even just Tevinter continuing to exist, will provide the Chantry with the means to go ‘mmm, I dunno, you guys don’t seem like perfect saints to me yet - best we keep on imprisoning you, executing you, and cutting out parts of your essential beings to turn you into obedient labourers whenever we feel like it. But, oh, of course, just as soon as you achieve a level of monolithic virtue that literally no group of people has ever achieved before, you’ll be free to go. I’m sure it’ll happen for you any day now.’

It’s hard to blame Wynne for wanting to believe it could work out, though. Just like it’s hard to blame Vivienne for hating the war. Violent conflict is… well, violent. And it’s very hard to instigate a revolution when you know that, by the same stroke, you’re definitely consigning vulnerable and innocent people to die in the fallout. The Tranquil, the little apprentices, the elderly, ill, or disabled mages, the ones who aren’t good at fighting or casting big spells or surviving exposure to the elements - these are the people who will be cut down, who will suffer once the situation turns to full-blown rebellion.

I think it’s really telling that Wynne and Vivienne are both people who express a lot of distress at the suffering of, like, mage children, or Tranquil. Viv gets very upset over the Tranquil skulls issue in DA:I, and when we meet Wynne, she’s doing her level best to protect the apprentices from the abominations roaming the halls. Circles are communities. The same mages who have to decide whether or not to go to war are the ones who teach the young apprentices, who grew up with Senior Enchanter Marvin who’s faulty hip means he’d never be able to run in a crisis, who knew Tranquil Gwen back when she was an eight-year-old girl who cried from homesickness and missed her mother’s hugs.

The templars have much less dilemma. For example, someone like Cullen would never have to worry that going to war with the mages would mean bringing along his sister’s children, and watching them struggle or go hungry or be cut down by enemy swords. It makes it hard for me to be at all angry with Wynne, or any other mage like her - they want to find a peaceful resolution.

It’s just, they can’t, because the chantry is not a peaceful organization. And that’s heartbreaking. It’s sincerely awful that there’s really no recourse for the people who genuinely don’t want to hurt anyone, to obtain the basic rights they need to avoid being killed or violated on a regular basis.

On Spirit-Demon Conversion

So we’ve been told in the games a few times that demons are generally considered ‘spirits gone wrong’, due to various causes, by those knowledgeable enough to know, and that there is a conversion process that turns benevolent spirits into their less friendly counterparts

This does fly directly in the face of both the Andrastian (where spirits represent virtures, and demons represent sins, and both are independent of each other) and the Dalish (where there is no distinction made between the two) viewpoints, and I do consider both of these perspectives to be incorrect. It’s not surprising that they’re incorrect, given that knowing the ins and outs of another society is virtually impossible when you don’t actually go to that society, but I think it’s worth noting that both of these ideas about spirits and demons are wrong

Why do I say that? Because the few people who actually have the authority and experience to speak to these matters both express viewpoints that disagree with the common religious ones. As such, there are basically two people throughout the games I personally trust to actually know what they’re talking about, because they are two of the few who actually could

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I agree that Solas and Justice aren’t contradictory, and I like this idea, but I tend to look at it as something more simple and direct.