Dragon Age: Dear Bioware ...
Nov. 14th, 2009 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andraste... thank you so very much for creating the creepiest video game sequence I have ever played. And I say that as a gamer who coped pretty well with the severed heads puzzle in Zork: Nemesis.
It's not the boss itself, but the realisation that the reason that there aren't many female Grey Wardens is that exposing women to the taint carries a deadly risk of turning then into Broodmothers. Bad enough my character thinking she was going to start becoming a ghoul in thirty years. Now she knows she might end up being raped, forced to drink darkspawn blood, horribly mutated, impregnated and fed on people and darkspawn so she can spend the rest of her existence laying Hurlock eggs.
And yet, from a roleplaying perspective, this did not make me sorry that she ended up in her current position. Assuming my PC survives this quest (I don't know how the game ends and don't want to know) she's planning to go on a Grey Warden recruitment drive for women. By telling them in graphic, gory detail exactly where baby darkspawn come from. It's not as if the darkspawn won't kidnap innocent female civilians to get their Broodmothers anyway if there are no female Grey Wardens to be had. Since only women are subject to the worst tortures the darkspawn inflict, it seems to me that they have every right to take the risk of fighting back.
I don't know that I'll ever be able to do a play through where I side with Branka. What she wants to do with the anvil of the void is wrong but comprehensible, but letting the women she brought with her be tainted? I cannot imagine roleplaying a character who wouldn't want to lop her head off for that.
And I am never going to be able to look at another darkspawn again without thinking of its mother.
I guess that they weren't kidding about the whole 'dark fantasy' thing.
It's not the boss itself, but the realisation that the reason that there aren't many female Grey Wardens is that exposing women to the taint carries a deadly risk of turning then into Broodmothers. Bad enough my character thinking she was going to start becoming a ghoul in thirty years. Now she knows she might end up being raped, forced to drink darkspawn blood, horribly mutated, impregnated and fed on people and darkspawn so she can spend the rest of her existence laying Hurlock eggs.
And yet, from a roleplaying perspective, this did not make me sorry that she ended up in her current position. Assuming my PC survives this quest (I don't know how the game ends and don't want to know) she's planning to go on a Grey Warden recruitment drive for women. By telling them in graphic, gory detail exactly where baby darkspawn come from. It's not as if the darkspawn won't kidnap innocent female civilians to get their Broodmothers anyway if there are no female Grey Wardens to be had. Since only women are subject to the worst tortures the darkspawn inflict, it seems to me that they have every right to take the risk of fighting back.
I don't know that I'll ever be able to do a play through where I side with Branka. What she wants to do with the anvil of the void is wrong but comprehensible, but letting the women she brought with her be tainted? I cannot imagine roleplaying a character who wouldn't want to lop her head off for that.
And I am never going to be able to look at another darkspawn again without thinking of its mother.
I guess that they weren't kidding about the whole 'dark fantasy' thing.