Dragon Age VI: Siege Harder

[Morty]

Spoiler: What Pride Hath Wrought

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Hmm. Mosaics of beings with slouched limbs? I've missed those when I went through the temple. It might be relevant to some theories I have...

[VoxRationis]

@Morty: Yeah, that, along with a few other murals in a similar style, are copy-pasted throughout the Dales on various old elven ruins. The one I refer to shows a line of humanoids with low foreheads, pointed ears and chins, and long, drooping forelimbs walking forward, neither carrying nor wearing anything. Their eyes vaguely resemble the depictions of eyes of darkspawn in the DA:O intro, though that might be coincidence.

Edit: Also, I noticed when doing some exploration of the Forbidden Oasis that

Spoiler

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"Solas" means "pride" in the elven language.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Grrrr, I broke the battle with Hakkon at the end. He's stuck up BEHIND a ledge, can't hit me, and I can't hit him. And I almost killed him too! Gah!

[Psyren]

I'm replaying the game and I realized - I was pretty hard on Sera before. But on a second playthrough her philosophy makes a lot more sense than I realized.

Just finished her companion quest The Verchiel March - the one where a weaselly noble and his mercs kill her contact (a hapless peasant) and attack you, and if you talk to him too long afterward she'll kill him herself. On this playthrough I was smart enough to frontload all the conversation perks before Haven was destroyed, and so I was able to use my Nobility perk to absorb his assets without earning her disapproval.

Anyway - in the conversation afterward, the Inquisitor has the option of berating her for getting her people hurt by encouraging them to provoke nobility. And she rightfully threw my victim-blaming nonsense right back in my face. "They're already being hurt!" she admonished me, "So we should let bad nobles keep being bad because they might become worse? What kind of lie-down-and-take-it shyte is that?"

And so I realized that having someone in the Inquisition whose job it is to make sure we don't lose sight of the little guy is a very good thing.

Sera's writer is coming back for Andromeda, and where before I might have greeted that news with an eyeroll, I'm kind of looking forward to seeing more of their work.

[Inarius]

Honestly I think Sera was one of the characters that had the greatest growth in Tresspasser. Everyone else was mostly the same with a few minor differences depending on your choices in main game. Sera on the otherhand seemed a lot more mature like she had mostly grown up finally. Interestingly enough Vivienne drove me to my breaking point with her in Trespasser, but only because she was somehow even more obnoxious because Leliana was Divine.

[Psyren]

I'm looking forward to that. Another mistake I'm correcting on this replay is installing softened Leliana as Divine. Both of my previous playthroughs ended with a Divine I didn't want (First Hardened Leliana, then Vivienne - yuck!)

I wouldn't mind Cassandra - in fact I supported her in both cases - but it seems that several of the dialogue choices I make beforehand make her candidacy difficult, so I'm happy to go with soft Leliana instead.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

I haven't finished the game yet, but I really don't mind Sera, especially when she gets into her righteous angry moods. When she's happy and silly, I can see why people dislike her, but when she's talking about things that are important to her, I go "yeah, you will always be grounded, the inquisitor needs your grounding."

[Keltest]

I haven't finished the game yet, but I really don't mind Sera, especially when she gets into her righteous angry moods. When she's happy and silly, I can see why people dislike her, but when she's talking about things that are important to her, I go "yeah, you will always be grounded, the inquisitor needs your grounding."

Yeah. She's frivolous, which I personally find amusing but can see why people wouldn't like it, but she's also usually right. Orlais in particular tends to trample all over all the things, and since the Inquisition is kind of sort of orlisian, we need to be aware of that and compensate for it when we can.

[Morty]

I don't understand the widespread, intense dislike for Sera either - but then, the sheer depth of people's anger towards game characters confuses me in general. Her perspective on power structures and class warfare does get somewhat lost in her... random approach to life in general.

Her actual bad traits, to me, are her wilful ignorance and prejudice. Not buying into elven culture just because she happens to be an elf is fine - belittling people who do buy into it is not. She does get better about it in Trespasser, though. And when I say "bad", I mean personally bad, not bad writing.

[Kish]

Her actual bad traits, to me, are her wilful ignorance and prejudice.

Yeah, that. If I was to play a blindly classist character, maybe Sera would seem better by reason of being a counterpoint to something that needs one--but I generally don't, which means Sera's most prominent feature is her anti-elf racism, and what makes her "righteously" angry is the suggestion that the Andrastan religion isn't revealed truth, or that elven culture has any value. Though "anything I don't understand is automatically STUPID STUPID STUPID" does her no favors. (If you didn't catch the implication, neither does her limited vocabulary and excessive fondness for a certain word.)

[Dienekes]

I haven't finished the game yet, but I really don't mind Sera, especially when she gets into her righteous angry moods. When she's happy and silly, I can see why people dislike her, but when she's talking about things that are important to her, I go "yeah, you will always be grounded, the inquisitor needs your grounding."

She pissed me off the moment she hid a hive of bees to disrupt training of my soldiers. I can understand (though would personally hate) someone doing weird little stunts to annoy their superiors, but that's painful and dangerous for the common folk she claims to protect.

I also found her voice insanely irritating.

It's not that I don't think she has some points: don't forget the little guy (not that my Inquisitor ever did protecting the common was kind of his shtick), but her attempts to do it are strange, often nonsensical, and making everyone else's life harder or more annoying to do it just makes people hate her instead of taking her seriously. And her straight refusal to learn, both from her mistakes and just about the world in general is idiotic.

All said, I don't think she's a poorly written character, per se, but I will never want her on my team. Ever.

Interestingly, because I rarely took her out adventuring or just with Solas her anti-elf prejudice didn't really show up as much in my playthough.

[Kish]

I think she's a poorly written--and frankly, classistly written--character, but I can't really go into details with the no-politics ban.

[Dienekes]

I think she's a poorly written--and frankly, classistly written--character, but I can't really go into details with the no-politics ban.

Eh, I can sort of get where I think you're going. But since I've met/lived with people of lower means and education who seem downright proud of it, I don't really hold it against writers to try and show people who actually exist in their works.

Now, if they were to imply that everyone of lesser means was like Sera, that would be problematic.

[Psyren]

I can't fault her too much for her attitude towards elves either. Solas is the one who brings it up, providing his opinions unsolicited. First he jabbers at her in Elven out of the blue expecting her to automatically understand, which is as bad as walking up to a random Chinese-American and expecting them to be fluent in Mandarin solely because of how they look. Then he is the one to drop condescending lines like "you are the furthest from what you were meant to be" when she doesn't respond favorably to this approach. How can you expect her not to have an extremely negative reaction to all of that?

"It is a shame Sera that you were denied an Elven life," he says out of the blue, "even one as patchwork as the Dalish interpretation." And yet Sera is supposed to be the racist here? I'd tell him to "go sustain himself" too.

[Kish]

That would be a much better point if Sera's blatant racism was limited to her interactions with Solas, instead of starting right away and only getting worse from there if the PC is an elf.

Edited to add: Indeed, when she was doing her "gloat that the elves' beliefs failed, that proves that they were worshiping demons, Andrastianism uber alles!" thing after the Temple of Mythal, it was thoroughly annoying that my elf only had the option to protest that it was "our heritage" and my Vashoth couldn't say much at all (except to restate that I wasn't Andrastian, which was enough on its own to start the spittle flying and the screams of "stupid!" in both cases). I really wanted an option something like, "Y'know, Sera, crapping on elves will never make humans see round ears when they look at you, however much you might wish."

[JadedDM]

Edit: Also, I noticed when doing some exploration of the Forbidden Oasis that

Spoiler

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"Solas" means "pride" in the elven language.

Yes, I figured that out myself on my first playthrough and then became convinced that the big plot twist would turn out to be...

Spoiler: Solas

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that Solas was in fact, a Pride Demon. I was wrong, but oh, well!

I got along well enough with Sera, although my character was human. She was a bit put off by my magery, but she got over it. By the end, she was like a kid sister to my Inquisitor. She helped keep him from becoming too humorless. I think my favorite scene with her was toward the end, at Skyhold. The two of us sitting on a roof, just chatting and watching people walk by. I'm not sure how to really explain it, but it really resonated with me.

[Anteros]

I can't fault her too much for her attitude towards elves either. Solas is the one who brings it up, providing his opinions unsolicited. First he jabbers at her in Elven out of the blue expecting her to automatically understand, which is as bad as walking up to a random Chinese-American and expecting them to be fluent in Mandarin solely because of how they look. Then he is the one to drop condescending lines like "you are the furthest from what you were meant to be" when she doesn't respond favorably to this approach. How can you expect her not to have an extremely negative reaction to all of that?

"It is a shame Sera that you were denied an Elven life," he says out of the blue, "even one as patchwork as the Dalish interpretation." And yet Sera is supposed to be the racist here? I'd tell him to "go sustain himself" too.

To be fair, anyone looks like a better person if you're comparing them to Solas.

[Giggling Ghast]

To be fair, anyone looks like a better person if you're comparing them to Solas.

If there is a hell, Solas is waiting for us all down there.

https://themoanoffice.wordpress.com/...t-kampff-test/

[Maryring]

Solas in a nutshell.



As for Sera, she may be a realistic character. That doesn't change that she's just plain unlikeable to be around. She's selfish, stupid, shortsighted, shallow and sassy. And the purpose she's ostensibly there for, reminding the Inquisition about the little folk, falls flat when my Inquisitor already does ten times as much thinking about the people as she does.

[VoxRationis]

Honestly I think Sera was one of the characters that had the greatest growth in Tresspasser. Everyone else was mostly the same with a few minor differences depending on your choices in main game. Sera on the otherhand seemed a lot more mature like she had mostly grown up finally. Interestingly enough Vivienne drove me to my breaking point with her in Trespasser, but only because she was somehow even more obnoxious because Leliana was Divine.

How does Vivienne get even more obnoxious? I was just about done with her by the time the game finished.

Spoiler: End of the Game (no DLC)

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The final boss seemed sort of anticlimactic. I mean, he just sort of throws himself at you without preparation or planning and his actual attack doesn't make a lot of sense? Why waste energy lifting a castle into the air? Why canhe just reopen the Breach? Wasn't that his big-ticket plan to godhood? The implication previously had been that the opening was a one-time deal and he couldn't do so again in a timeframe lower than "decades or centuries." If he could just do that, wouldn't it make sense for him to hide somewhere, open the Breach there, and then walk into the Black City before I could notice and stop him?
Then your dragon loses the fight with his dragon and you have to kill the mock-Archdemon yourself, which makes me wonder why I even bothered with that in the first place (and also why I was running from the dang thing for so long). Corypheus isn't smart enough, apparently, to understand concepts like "concentration of force," so he holds back while you kill his strongest minion. Then you polish him off lickety-split. All in all, the tone, "classic final boss battle on floating rocks," was mismatched with the surrounding circumstances—that is, you having destroyed his forces and built up your power while eroding his consistently throughout the game—as well as with the actual difficulty of the fight.

Edit: Re: Party Members
I, too, found Sera kind of annoying. I sort of found it odd that she seems to rebel against a perceived dominant "elves should seek to preserve their heritage" idea, when the environment she's been in most of the time doesn't act like that. Most nobles and commoners, in either Ferelden or Orlais, couldn't care less about elven heritage. It's only the Dalish, who don't go to the cities where she frequents, and Solas, whom she just met, who make a fuss about that. It's very strange to find yourself with one coworker who has a particular opinion, but then act like your entire workplace is echoing that opinion.
Vivienne seemed interesting at first: a mage who also masters social situations? But the game gradually showed me that she was a master of social situations because she was a calculating, selfish, passive-aggressive character whose personality seemed copy-pasted from Mean Girls, and who dismissed the concerns of mages everywhere because the Circle she was at was nice (apparently).
Iron Bull... He's nice, but he's the nice face of an intrusive and dangerous religion of fanatics eager to trample over individual rights, and I don't like having an active Ben-Hassrath spy in my ranks as a point of principle. If I play a Vashoth, I'm going to be sure to not let him in (particularly if I'm a Vashoth mage). Also, his head is tiny. Why is it so tiny? Sten's head was of a normal size.
Dorian is amazing and fantastic. His affected egotism is charming (largely because it is affected, unlike Vivienne's, which is unstated but very real), and he jokes without actually ignoring serious matters. I found myself wishing I could have him in the party more often, but I often needed to have other characters, as his build was kind of similar to my character's.
Cassandra... it's nice that she no longer wishes to kill me, I guess? A pious Chantry woman doesn't come across in the best light when one's character is a Dalish mage and one's personal inclinations similarly look askance at the Chantry.
Cole is nice morally but an annoyance to have to deal with. I hate his hat, I hate his mannerisms, I hate the dialogue options available when dealing with him (seriously, half of them are "stop reading people's minds," and a good portion of the rest are "did you read people's minds?").
Varric is great! Reasonably moral, but not cloud-headed or offensively pious. Capable of taking things seriously, but not without a love of having a good time.
Apparently Solas is a pain to PCs of races other than elf, but, playing an elf, I didn't notice that and he seemed nice enough to my dwarf and human party members. Generally, he advocated for moral actions and his party role was helpful, particularly at low levels where alternative means of avoiding or healing damage are limited. Moreover, his personal likes and dislikes corresponded well to both personal preference (I love to ask questions, he loves it when you ask clarifying questions) and in-character goals. Consequently, I came out with a pretty good opinion of him.
Blackwall has the actual personality of a wall, as best as I could tell. Useful as a party member, but not terribly interesting to talk to.

[Psyren]

That would be a much better point if Sera's blatant racism was limited to her interactions with Solas, instead of starting right away and only getting worse from there if the PC is an elf.

Indeed, she hates elves, which is why she is incapable of falling in love with elven Inquisitors. Oh wait.

No, it's primarily her interactions with Solas himself that provoke the negative reactions she is known for, and they are less due to racial outlook and more an attempt to get under his skin in retaliation for his smug attitude towards her.

To be fair, anyone looks like a better person if you're comparing them to Solas.

I personally haven't seen any Trespasser content yet, so I can only judge based on what I know about him from the base game. As an advocate for mages and spirits, he is exemplary - I almost unfailingly take his side when he's debating Cassandra and Vivienne. It's only when it comes to judging races (both his own and others) that I think his flaws become more prominent.

At the end of the day, everyone in the party has good and bad aspects to their personality. What I wanted to point out was that I am beginning to appreciate the good parts of Sera's more clearly. The one possible exception is Cole, who is close to being truly innocent (much like Legion) with his one flaw being an inability to heed other people's boundaries, and that's not something he can control.

How does Vivienne get even more obnoxious? I was just about done with her by the time the game finished.

Spoiler: End of the Game (no DLC)

Show

The final boss seemed sort of anticlimactic. I mean, he just sort of throws himself at you without preparation or planning and his actual attack doesn't make a lot of sense? Why waste energy lifting a castle into the air? Why canhe just reopen the Breach? Wasn't that his big-ticket plan to godhood? The implication previously had been that the opening was a one-time deal and he couldn't do so again in a timeframe lower than "decades or centuries." If he could just do that, wouldn't it make sense for him to hide somewhere, open the Breach there, and then walk into the Black City before I could notice and stop him?
Then your dragon loses the fight with his dragon and you have to kill the mock-Archdemon yourself, which makes me wonder why I even bothered with that in the first place (and also why I was running from the dang thing for so long). Corypheus isn't smart enough, apparently, to understand concepts like "concentration of force," so he holds back while you kill his strongest minion. Then you polish him off lickety-split. All in all, the tone, "classic final boss battle on floating rocks," was mismatched with the surrounding circumstances—that is, you having destroyed his forces and built up your power while eroding his consistently throughout the game—as well as with the actual difficulty of the fight.

No DLC information below so unspoilered:

Cory could always make another Breach because he has the orb. However, without the Anchor (the mark on your hand), any rips he makes in the veil would prove as lethal to him (or at least his physical body) as they would to anyone else trying to go through, and furthermore risk destroying the world he wanted to rule (Thedas.) So making another Breach at the end was an act of desperation to lure you to the final battle; without an Anchor of his own, Cory attempting to re-enter the Fade to reach the Black City again would be impossible. Only the person with the Anchor (you) and those with you are capable of physically entering.

It's also worth pointing out that his second Breach

Spoiler: ending spoilers

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resulted in the Orb breaking - though this could just have been due to the ensuing battle - but in any event, it's not hard to see why he wasn't willing to risk using it again in this way until he had no more options left and all his other plans failed.

[Inarius]

How does Vivienne get even more obnoxious? I was just about done with her by the time the game finished.

Spoiler: Vivienne in Tresspasser

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Basically when you go to the spa with her and Leliana is Divine shell get bent out of shape over it and make a thinly veiled insult about you and your choices. I figure shes just mad cause she has less power without the Circles which is probably why she reforms them after Tresspasser despite Leliana disbanding them.

[Giggling Ghast]

Oh, I quite like Vivienne, in much the same way I like Wynne. She feels like a bit of a mother figure to my Inquisitor. Certainly she's using the Inquisition to her own ends, but her goals align with mine, so I don't mind. That's the Game, my dear.

[Landis963]

Spoiler: Vivienne in Tresspasser

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Basically when you go to the spa with her and Leliana is Divine shell get bent out of shape over it and make a thinly veiled insult about you and your choices. I figure shes just mad cause she has less power without the Circles which is probably why she reforms them after Tresspasser despite Leliana disbanding them.

I just looked over that scene on YouTube and no such line was evident. Also, during that scene Vivienne is as unflappable as she ever was.

[Inarius]

I just looked over that scene on YouTube and no such line was evident. Also, during that scene Vivienne is as unflappable as she ever was.

Yeah, none of the scenes I looked up online were the same as the one I got on my second run through.

So I loaded up my old save to check and yep there it is right after she asks about my relationship with Josephine she says

Spoiler: this

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"well at least one facet of your life hasn't fallen apart due to incompetence."

I think the most annoying part about her saying that is you don't get a chance to respond, you just get the regular followup dialogue.

[Kish]

Indeed, she hates elves, which is why she is incapable of falling in love with elven Inquisitors. Oh wait.

No, it's primarily her interactions with Solas himself that provoke the negative reactions she is known for, and they are less due to racial outlook and more an attempt to get under his skin in retaliation for his smug attitude towards her.

Dude, if you're not going to address what I'm saying, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop pretending you're actually responding to me. Unless, you know, you can point to somewhere where I (not random Internet people who you're arguing with by proxy) said anything about the way Sera acts around Solas.

[Psyren]

Dude, if you're not going to address what I'm saying, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop pretending you're actually responding to me. Unless, you know, you can point to somewhere where I (not random Internet people who you're arguing with by proxy) said anything about the way Sera acts around Solas.

You (real you, Kish, not proxy internet whoever) accused Sera of "blatant racism." I refuted that by saying her negative attitude in conversations about elves is due to the context of such conversations always being people - both elves (both kinds) and non-elves - trying to dictate to her how she should feel about her own culture. She thus approaches other elves more guardedly, and humans equally-guardedly for that matter, yet the Inquisitor can overcome that with relative ease all the same. She reacts more positively towards dwarves and qunari not merely because she's more attracted to their body types (though that certainly plays a role), but also because in her experience these two groups tend to treat her as a person first and an elf second, instead of the other way around.

As a party member, she has grown on me. I still dislike her romance and would not pursue it - she's not emotionally mature enough to make a good partner for the sorts of characters I play - but I'm now much more apt to consider her a good friend and an asset to the Inquisition.

[Kish]

You (real you, Kish, not proxy internet whoever) accused Sera of "blatant racism." I refuted that by saying her negative attitude in conversations about elves is due to the context of such conversations always being people - both elves (both kinds) and non-elves - trying to dictate to her how she should feel about her own culture.

That would, indeed, be a solid refutation were it not so completely lacking in factual accuracy.

I mean, what? Are you saying that you think I'm lying about the conversations I described--at least one of which you can't have not seen yourself unless you avoiding talking to her after visiting the Temple of Mythal*? That her entirely volunteered, unsolicited "Ha ha, the elfy temple was a ruin and clearly the elves were worshiping demons" thing was somehow a response to something Solas said without being anywhere near at the time? (That conversation certainly had someone telling someone else how they should feel about their culture: it consisted of Sera screaming at me that I had to stop pretending there might be value in other cultures and start acting like the Herald of Andraste because everything but Andrastianism was STUPID.)

*Edited to add: It just occurred to me that she might say something different if she was actually at the temple instead of you talking to her in the inn afterward. If she actually doesn't say the same racist things in that case, that means she can, apparently, change, though whether I'll take her there in the future remains highly questionable; she still starts out a horrible racist, Cole is pure awesome in a silly hat, and I even like Varric in DA3. He's much cooler when he isn't narrating himself.

[Psyren]

That would, indeed, be a solid refutation were it not so completely lacking in factual accuracy.

I mean, what? Are you saying that you think I'm lying about the conversations I described--at least one of which you can't have not seen yourself unless you avoiding talking to her after visiting the Temple of Mythal*? That her entirely volunteered, unsolicited "Ha ha, the elfy temple was a ruin and clearly the elves were worshiping demons" thing was somehow a response to something Solas said without being anywhere near at the time? (That conversation certainly had someone telling someone else how they should feel about their culture: it consisted of Sera screaming at me that I had to stop pretending there might be value in other cultures and start acting like the Herald of Andraste because everything but Andrastianism was STUPID.)

I don't fault her for gloating in that circumstance, no. Her entire life she's been made to feel like a "bad elf" for not wearing sackcloth and ashes like so many of the rest of them, for wanting to look forward what could be instead of being constantly woe-is-me over the loss of Arlathan and Halamshiral. One of my favorite quotes from her sums it up perfectly - "of all the trees they could be praying to, they could at least pick one with apples." It's a subtle yet cutting dig at the sheer impracticality of focusing on ephemera instead of actually solving the real problems her community faces - not merely as elves, but as downtrodden citizens, and the two frequently go hand-in-hand in Thedas.

As for her opinions on Thedosian religions, another quote - "There can't be a bunch of gods AND the Maker - it just doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it." She might phrase this a bit acidly, but she's right, and even Solas himself agrees during the main game ("I don't believe they were gods") if you drank from the well.

And for the record, her disapproval in your beliefs is just that - a difference of opinion. She doesn't draw a line in the sand and quit the Inquisition if you express belief. It's no different than Vivienne thinking you're stupid for believing in mage freedom, or Solas thinking you're stupid if you believe no spirit can be trusted. The fact that she's more in-your-face about it and uses that word more often doesn't mean that's what the others aren't thinking. When Vivienne coldly says "I see. Carry on darling" - what do you think is going through her head? If I were leading a force like the Inquisition, I'd probably even prefer that blunt assessment.

Now, she doesn't want to romance you if you believe in elven gods, sure, but that's just realistic (differences of faith break up real relationships all the time) and I couldn't care less about her romance anyway.

[Kish]

You're the one who keeps bringing up her romance. You're half right: it is exactly like Vivienne's sneering anti-mage prejudice, and while it's nothing like Solas reacting badly to you saying something actually awful, there are plenty of things Solas does say that it can be analogized to. But at this point you're not even trying to argue that she's not racist, much less support your claim that she only has "such conversations" (conversations in which she spews bile at elves) when someone tries to dictate how she should feel about her culture (which would rule out her starting one in a bid to tell the PC how to feel about her culture); rather you're saying that her racism is somehow not a negative quality because it's other people's fault that she's racist, and when she tells the PC how to feel about her culture and screams "STUPID STUPID STUPID!" at not getting compliance, it's just a difference of opinion. This is seriously looking like "what she does is immaterial, including when she does exactly what I said she never does; Sera isn't racist because Sera isn't racist because Sera isn't racist."

I am surprised that you apparently sympathize with Vivienne; I would have expected you to despise her as much as I do (she's the reason Sera's only my second least favorite character who joins). But "her negative reaction to you telling her her prejudices are wrong is no different than something Vivienne does" is nowhere near being a defense.