Trying desperately not to play the mage origin again and yet

I love this game, I love it so much. It’s like eating warm apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream with cinnamon and a cup of hot cider. It’s perfect.

In retrospect Greaigor was pretty okay for a templar

Also I can’t be mad at jowan because 1) the chantry is awful and 2) blood magic rules

Also it’s occurring to me that the demon who took over Connor may also be the one jowan dealt with to get access to blood magic, since his desire to escape with lily was so strong..

Quick question Irvine why are there prison cells with skeletons in the basement of the circle tower

Duncan: excellent, a reason to use extrajudicial authority to get a powerful mage

Cailan: hello! I am blond and clad in gold armor and I am bored by strategy! This is obviously going to go great!
Loghain: I can’t believe your dad died for this

I absolutely do not need to do the quest Signs of the Chasind

It gives you some cool armor but it’s 100% not necessary

and yet

I forgot how early you meet flemeth

Loghain is here and he’s doing his best

Knowing Flemeth’s identity, it one hundred percent makes sense that she wanted to keep the grey wardens alive to stop the blight. But how much did she know about the blight? Does she know about the lyrium and the titans? Aaaaaaaa

I named my dog Frog, if I’m playing a mage I figure they haven’t interacted with very many animals (besides the giant spiders in the store room)

A thing to know about dragon age origins is that absolutely every adult female character has huge gazoongas

Alistair: my mother wasn’t very interesting
Me, holding my copy of The Calling and frothing at the mouth: your Mother is an ELF and a MAGE and was a GREY WARDEN and heard the CALLING and then got BETTER and is LEADING the mages in redcliffe you foolish man

She also knew a grey warden who loved his dog so much

A lot of the determinant lines if you’re anything other than a male non-mage human are very much “oh wow you are an elf/dwarf/mage” but then if you’re a female character it shifts over to “wow, I didn’t know women could be grey wardens!” which is less fun.

When I first played this game years ago I was very happy to have that house called out but playing it in 2020 I definitely wince at a lot of it.

Similar example is that in mass effect and KOTOR if you play as a lady there are nearly identical scenes where Carth/Kaidan defend your honor from a sleazy guy at a bar. Also in mass effect there’s the Batarian before the archangel mission who calls you princess.

Surely there is a middle ground between not acknowledging a player character’s gender and making the player relieve sexism that they’ve probably encountered in their actual real life.

But then, inquisition doesn’t have any dialog like that and the inquisitor ultimately feels like a less dynamic character- but there have to be things you can do other then sexism.

Morrigan spends all of Lothering harassing Alistair and I respect her energy

Per DA2, the Hawke family is somewhere in this refugee camp, presumably watching their absolute brick house of a cousin (warden Amell, the human mage) run around solving everyone’s problems.