straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2016-09-29 03:10 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2016-09-29 03:10 pm
101 | in which I replay Dragon Age Origins <3
► Recently, I finished up a replay of Dragon Age Origins! And by “finished”, I mean “finished the main game”; I haven’t done Awakenings or any of the other post-game DLC yet.
This was definitely a more...thorough playthrough than my last one, mainly because 1) I played the ultimate edition this time, and so had the extra DLC to play with, and 2) I actually managed to not miss out on any easily obtainable companions, cough cough Leliana.
I also played it on the PC instead of the 360! Partially because I don’t actually have access to a 360 right now, but mainly because I’d already decided that I’d switch over to playing on the PC for any future playthroughs of the Dragon Age games. I’d...originally intended to keep playing them with a controller, but apparently you can’t do that with Origins? So I used the keyboard controls, and while there was a bit of a learning curve, and I had to remap the walking keys to something that felt more intuitive to me, I ended up really enjoying playing it this way!
(Side-note, but I took a lot of screenshots of this playthrough— 2225, to be precise. Definitely got a bit drunk on power there, but hey, I had to make up for being utterly unable to share how gorgeous my Mahariel was!)
► Now, for a bit (and by a bit, I mean a lot of rambling) on my Warden for this playthrough, and her relationships with the people around her.
Here’s my Warden from this time around:
Uta Brosca, dual-wielding rogue and casteless dwarf! I’ve been thinking about her story for quite a while, and let me say, it was a delight to actually play through it.
How should I describe her…? Let’s put it this way— if my Mahariel was mainly driven by grief and a strong sense of duty, then Uta’s driven by self-interest and a strong desire to come out on top. Which is not to say that she’s a bad person, necessarily— if all things are equal, she’d rather do the right thing than hurt someone. But she won’t hesitate to kill or otherwise harm even innocent people if she thinks doing otherwise could come back to haunt her. She’s cunning and sneaky and practical, and a good liar.
Basically, she had the traits it takes to survive in the carta, but also a smothered desire to prosper (her reaction to killing Beraht was ‘and now let’s take over the carta and rule it ourselves!’, before Leske brought her back down to earth). I feel like she was very much like Morrigan in the sense that her reaction to growing closer to her companions was “What is this friendship thing of which you speak??”, but she actually was really attached to Leske, though she thought of it more in the sense of a deep and strong partnership. They worked well together, and thought similarly, and though it probably was technically a friendship, she’d never thought of it on those terms. Which made his later betrayal very striking to her, but more on that later.
She did care about Rica, her sister, but in a distant sort of way? She definitely chafed against how Rica seemed to see her as someone she wasn’t (i.e., innocent and good-hearted), and kept trying to protect her from things that she full-well understood, and didn’t need protection from (i.e., when Rica became a noble-hunter), but she didn’t particularly want harm to come to her, and was genuinely pleased when she came back to Orzammar and found that Rica had become the mistress of a potential next-king of Orzammar— and not just because that gave Uta herself better leverage in Orzammar politics.
She reacted much more strongly to Duncan than my Mahariel did— Lúthien mostly went with him out of a sense of duty, and while she found his death sad, it was in a distant sort of way. Uta, on the other hand, was strongly struck by how kind he was— she was completely unused to that, and while she was far too practical to let something like that influence her decisions, she did genuinely feel sorrow at his death.
As for the actual party members…
I should mention that for this playthrough, I strongly limited my use of gifts (basically, I only gave gifts if they were character-quest-related, or if I could think of an in-game reason for Uta to give them that gift), so that affected things.
Uta found out about Alistair being King Maric’s bastard almost immediately, and started getting Ideas. As in, ‘get on Alistair’s good side, make him King, and be the power behind the throne’ kind of ideas. So, yes, Uta romanced Alistair under false pretenses, and then completely surprised herself when she ended up actually falling in love with him. Which put her in an awkward situation re: her above plans— did she go ahead with making Alistair King (and therefore make him miserable, but further her own ambition), or did she give up on that idea, and just have them live as Wardens together? But I’ll expand more on that when I get to her actual plot decisions.
She bonded very strongly with Morrigan, something that Alistair was definitely baffled by. Morrigan was actually the first companion (other than the dog) that Uta had 100% affection with. It helped that they both had somewhat similar, cynical views of the world. But they both had this “what is friendship” type of reaction to one another, like I mentioned above, and it really was adorable.
Uta initially only spared Zevran because she was Very Intrigued by his assassin skills, and wanted to see if he’d be willing to teach her, and figured that she could always kill him later if he turned on her. I feel like, out of all the party members, Zevran was the one who understood Uta best, and vice-versa— they really were quite similar in many ways. He was also the party member that got the most gifts (which...still wasn’t that much, haha), in a kind of “I rub your back and you rub mine” kind of exchange. Their friendship was less like “we’re friends and I care about you I guess???” like the Morrigan one, and more of a “I understand you” with more respect and less squishy feelings running underneath. Idk if I’m explaining it well, but I was rather struck by it.
He was also the only party member (outside of Alistair, presumably) that she stuck with, post-game— Morrigan had vanished, obviously, and Sten was going back home, but when Zevran asked about her plans to travel and offered his company, she gladly accepted it.
Uta and Sten didn’t always quite understand each other, but there was a lot of mutual respect, and they ended up being very firm friends— he was actually the third person she had 100% affection with, after Alistair, though she admittedly had some gift-related help with that one.
She and Leliana never became best friends, but Uta was diplomatic enough to avoid flat-out saying, “I think you’re delusional”, which helped, and was actually really, really struck by the revelations of Leliana’s personal quest— particularly in the questions Leliana raised in her own soul-searching afterwards, because they struck a little bit too close to home. Uta: not someone used to wondering about the morality of her actions. She ended up telling Leliana that “evil people don’t question whether they’re evil” at least in part because that was something that she needed to believe of herself.
She didn’t like Oghren.
(I did have Wynne and Shale in my party, but my thoughts on her relationships with them are either too vague or not particularly interesting, even to me— and this section is long enough as it is— so I’m going to leave those out.)
► As for the more general events of my playthrough...
After Ostagar, Uta decided her best bet was to keep with the Wardens and clear their name, mainly because it wasn’t like she had any connections topside, and she figured that Loghain was probably going to hunt her down either way, so she might as well go all in.
Also, she named her mabari Rosie.
She initially intended on going to the Circle first because the news she heard from there sounded rather worrying, and she figured that she’d better go fast before there wasn’t any allies left to take with her. But then she noticed that Redcliffe was along the way, and figured that they could make a brief stop there, as there was a chance for allies, and she figured throwing Alistair a bone now and then would probably be the best way to keep him going along with her decisions.
Of course, that’s when she found out that Alistair was King Maric’s bastard son, and she started getting Plans.
...Which she almost immediately horribly stumbled on. I-as-the-player actually spent about ten minutes going over what Uta would see as the pros and cons of letting either Isolde or Connor die— I even made a list! In the end, it was actually Alistair’s opinion about blood magic (“two wrongs don’t make a right”) that swayed me/her to kill Connor— which is why it came as such a shock when we returned to camp, and he immediately started shouting. Uta quickly sweet-talked her way into lowering the amount of disapproval, but it definitely was a shock to her, and taught her that she needed to tread a bit more carefully if she wanted for her plans to succeed.
Uta very much did not enjoy her time in the mage’s tower— she’d always thought magic was kind of weird, but what she saw there actively horrified her. She’d never really understood just quite what magic could do before that point. She did spare the mages in the end, but only because she couldn’t help but be persuaded by the image of what that power could do for her, when at her disposal.
There’s...not really that much to say about the Brecilian Forest quest? Though I did get a great image of Alistair literally sitting at Uta’s feet. :D I know that she brokered a peace between the two, but I actually can’t remember my reasoning anymore. Maybe because she definitely didn’t want the Dalish to get killed, because allies for her army, but she also wanted to try to sway the werewolves to her side? Or maybe because it was one of those situations where doing the right thing didn’t really hurt her in any way, so she went for it. Idk.
After that, she made her way to Haven, mainly because she wanted to procrastinate as long as possible on going to Orzammar. (In hindsight, me-as-the-player would have really loved to see what the not!Leske would have said if you went there after the Orzammar quest, but it was the decision that made the most sense for Uta herself, so.) She didn’t destroy the ashes, and was probably helped in that decision by the fact that her party was made up of Alistair, Leliana, and Wynne, and also because Kolgrim was insane, but she did take down a High Dragon rather dramatically. :D
Then she went to give Arl Eamon the ashes, because procrastination. After that, though, there really was no other excuse she could give, and so she went to Orzammar.
And, oh, let me just break out of my narrative to say, I loved going to Orzammar with Brosca. It was just so immensely satisfying— the contrast between who she was, and who she was now, seeing her sister again, seeing people who knew her before, having to confront her past, and who she once was— when I saw the carta members demanding protection from that one merchant it just sent chills down my spine, because Uta was that person once. She was carta, and now she’s come back, and she tears it all down.
And Leske. That hit her hard. (And me too, as the player.) Because, the thing is, his actions made sense. Uta would have done no differently in his position— whatever it takes to survive. (Though she probably wouldn’t have fought to the death for Jarvia.) But she was so genuinely pleased to see him— he was one of the few people she’d actually cared about back in Orzammar— and then the sudden shock of betrayal—
She spent some time questioning if she’d gotten too soft, after that. That she was so surprised.
She supported Bhelen, of course.
Then came the Deep Roads. She initially planned on siding with Branka, and making golems for the war effort, but then one of the party members said something in protest that made her realize she wouldn’t have direct control of them, and who’s to say they won’t be turned against her, somehow? So she reluctantly decided to destroy them, for her own peace of mind.
(Side-note: it actually really surprised me when Branka died— while I figured there’d be a boss battle, somehow, I didn’t realize that her dying was even a possibility?)
Then came time to return to Arl Eamon, and then Denerim, and the lead-up to the Landsmeet. Uta chose to break out of Fort Drakon herself, which worked out since she was a rogue, and while I did like doing that, I was a bit disappointed about not getting to choose which friends who’d rescue me— I remember Zevran and— Morrigan, I think it was?—’s efforts in my Mahariel run as being hilarious, and I really wanted to see what Morrigan and Sten (which would have been Uta’s top two) would have done.
Which brings me to the Landsmeet, and my decision.
I mentioned above that I’ve been thinking about this character, Uta, for some time, and one of the first things I knew about her was that I was going to go for the King & Mistress ending. (Mainly as a reaction to the overwhelming popularity of f!Cousland in general and King & Queen Alistair/f!Cousland in particular— I will never understand why someone would choose to play as a human when you have the option to play as anything else, and the fact that Cousland is so popular, and so many fics have her as Warden / that as the ending, made me determined to 1) romance Alistair with someone, anyone else, 2) go for the King & Mistress ending people seemed to dislike so much, and 3) have the Warden in question at least begin the relationship with the intention of becoming the power behind the throne, in my never-ending quest to make as many deliciously dysfunctional relationships as possible. Hence Uta, and the basis for her personality.)
But as I played, I… got indecisive? I could definitely see Uta still going for the King & Mistress thing, in the interest of… self-interest, and also because she doesn’t entirely trust Anora, and doesn’t like the idea of having so much power over her. But she also does genuinely care about Alistair, and realizes that he’d hate being king— and it’s not like she’d be left in a powerless position, afterwards (especially since, as it turns out, she ends up responsible for making Anora queen), and would have more freedom in how she directed her life.
So there were both options, and I could see reasoning for Uta to do either one of them, and I could not decide. So, I did the sensible thing, and split my save file in two. One save where she’ll make Alistair king, and one where she won’t. It works out rather well for me, actually, since I was actually a bit indecisive about which of my planned Inquisition playthroughs would have Uta as Warden in the worldstate— this way, I can just use King & Mistress!Uta for one and Grey Wardens!Uta for the other one.
I initially wanted to do the former first, but… I either didn’t realize, or forgot, that you need to harden Alistair for him to be up for a mistress. A bit of googling told me that I can edit his state on the PC, but I decided to do that another time. So I went with Anora as queen, and Alistair & Uta as Grey Wardens together first. Oh, and she executed Loghain— there was no way she would leave such a potential enemy still standing.
She did the Dark Ritual, because she’s selfish at heart, and refused for the possibility of either her or Alistair dying. She was actually a lot more honest with Alistair about what it entailed than my Mahariel was, actually— mainly because she knew she was persuasive enough to convince him regardless, and figured that the backlash if he ever figured out the truth would be much worse for her.
They fought— the archdemon died. Anora then gave me a heart-attack by referring to Alistair as one of the Wardens who died fighting, but I suppose it must have been a bug, because he was alive and well at the celebrations. Uta choose the “I’m going to travel a bit” option— I considered the “title and riches” choice, but while I think Uta would go for the riches, I think she wouldn’t be particularly interested in a title. So travel it was. She said her goodbyes to her companions, made arrangements to meet Alistair and Zevran later, and the curtains closed.
► There were other things that I wanted to talk about (mainly, things that stood out to me in context of the other games, particularly Inquisition), but this entry has gone on long enough. Next time, perhaps.
This was definitely a more...thorough playthrough than my last one, mainly because 1) I played the ultimate edition this time, and so had the extra DLC to play with, and 2) I actually managed to not miss out on any easily obtainable companions, cough cough Leliana.
I also played it on the PC instead of the 360! Partially because I don’t actually have access to a 360 right now, but mainly because I’d already decided that I’d switch over to playing on the PC for any future playthroughs of the Dragon Age games. I’d...originally intended to keep playing them with a controller, but apparently you can’t do that with Origins? So I used the keyboard controls, and while there was a bit of a learning curve, and I had to remap the walking keys to something that felt more intuitive to me, I ended up really enjoying playing it this way!
(Side-note, but I took a lot of screenshots of this playthrough— 2225, to be precise. Definitely got a bit drunk on power there, but hey, I had to make up for being utterly unable to share how gorgeous my Mahariel was!)
► Now, for a bit (and by a bit, I mean a lot of rambling) on my Warden for this playthrough, and her relationships with the people around her.
Here’s my Warden from this time around:
Uta Brosca, dual-wielding rogue and casteless dwarf! I’ve been thinking about her story for quite a while, and let me say, it was a delight to actually play through it.
How should I describe her…? Let’s put it this way— if my Mahariel was mainly driven by grief and a strong sense of duty, then Uta’s driven by self-interest and a strong desire to come out on top. Which is not to say that she’s a bad person, necessarily— if all things are equal, she’d rather do the right thing than hurt someone. But she won’t hesitate to kill or otherwise harm even innocent people if she thinks doing otherwise could come back to haunt her. She’s cunning and sneaky and practical, and a good liar.
Basically, she had the traits it takes to survive in the carta, but also a smothered desire to prosper (her reaction to killing Beraht was ‘and now let’s take over the carta and rule it ourselves!’, before Leske brought her back down to earth). I feel like she was very much like Morrigan in the sense that her reaction to growing closer to her companions was “What is this friendship thing of which you speak??”, but she actually was really attached to Leske, though she thought of it more in the sense of a deep and strong partnership. They worked well together, and thought similarly, and though it probably was technically a friendship, she’d never thought of it on those terms. Which made his later betrayal very striking to her, but more on that later.
She did care about Rica, her sister, but in a distant sort of way? She definitely chafed against how Rica seemed to see her as someone she wasn’t (i.e., innocent and good-hearted), and kept trying to protect her from things that she full-well understood, and didn’t need protection from (i.e., when Rica became a noble-hunter), but she didn’t particularly want harm to come to her, and was genuinely pleased when she came back to Orzammar and found that Rica had become the mistress of a potential next-king of Orzammar— and not just because that gave Uta herself better leverage in Orzammar politics.
She reacted much more strongly to Duncan than my Mahariel did— Lúthien mostly went with him out of a sense of duty, and while she found his death sad, it was in a distant sort of way. Uta, on the other hand, was strongly struck by how kind he was— she was completely unused to that, and while she was far too practical to let something like that influence her decisions, she did genuinely feel sorrow at his death.
As for the actual party members…
I should mention that for this playthrough, I strongly limited my use of gifts (basically, I only gave gifts if they were character-quest-related, or if I could think of an in-game reason for Uta to give them that gift), so that affected things.
Uta found out about Alistair being King Maric’s bastard almost immediately, and started getting Ideas. As in, ‘get on Alistair’s good side, make him King, and be the power behind the throne’ kind of ideas. So, yes, Uta romanced Alistair under false pretenses, and then completely surprised herself when she ended up actually falling in love with him. Which put her in an awkward situation re: her above plans— did she go ahead with making Alistair King (and therefore make him miserable, but further her own ambition), or did she give up on that idea, and just have them live as Wardens together? But I’ll expand more on that when I get to her actual plot decisions.
She bonded very strongly with Morrigan, something that Alistair was definitely baffled by. Morrigan was actually the first companion (other than the dog) that Uta had 100% affection with. It helped that they both had somewhat similar, cynical views of the world. But they both had this “what is friendship” type of reaction to one another, like I mentioned above, and it really was adorable.
Uta initially only spared Zevran because she was Very Intrigued by his assassin skills, and wanted to see if he’d be willing to teach her, and figured that she could always kill him later if he turned on her. I feel like, out of all the party members, Zevran was the one who understood Uta best, and vice-versa— they really were quite similar in many ways. He was also the party member that got the most gifts (which...still wasn’t that much, haha), in a kind of “I rub your back and you rub mine” kind of exchange. Their friendship was less like “we’re friends and I care about you I guess???” like the Morrigan one, and more of a “I understand you” with more respect and less squishy feelings running underneath. Idk if I’m explaining it well, but I was rather struck by it.
He was also the only party member (outside of Alistair, presumably) that she stuck with, post-game— Morrigan had vanished, obviously, and Sten was going back home, but when Zevran asked about her plans to travel and offered his company, she gladly accepted it.
Uta and Sten didn’t always quite understand each other, but there was a lot of mutual respect, and they ended up being very firm friends— he was actually the third person she had 100% affection with, after Alistair, though she admittedly had some gift-related help with that one.
She and Leliana never became best friends, but Uta was diplomatic enough to avoid flat-out saying, “I think you’re delusional”, which helped, and was actually really, really struck by the revelations of Leliana’s personal quest— particularly in the questions Leliana raised in her own soul-searching afterwards, because they struck a little bit too close to home. Uta: not someone used to wondering about the morality of her actions. She ended up telling Leliana that “evil people don’t question whether they’re evil” at least in part because that was something that she needed to believe of herself.
She didn’t like Oghren.
(I did have Wynne and Shale in my party, but my thoughts on her relationships with them are either too vague or not particularly interesting, even to me— and this section is long enough as it is— so I’m going to leave those out.)
► As for the more general events of my playthrough...
After Ostagar, Uta decided her best bet was to keep with the Wardens and clear their name, mainly because it wasn’t like she had any connections topside, and she figured that Loghain was probably going to hunt her down either way, so she might as well go all in.
Also, she named her mabari Rosie.
She initially intended on going to the Circle first because the news she heard from there sounded rather worrying, and she figured that she’d better go fast before there wasn’t any allies left to take with her. But then she noticed that Redcliffe was along the way, and figured that they could make a brief stop there, as there was a chance for allies, and she figured throwing Alistair a bone now and then would probably be the best way to keep him going along with her decisions.
Of course, that’s when she found out that Alistair was King Maric’s bastard son, and she started getting Plans.
...Which she almost immediately horribly stumbled on. I-as-the-player actually spent about ten minutes going over what Uta would see as the pros and cons of letting either Isolde or Connor die— I even made a list! In the end, it was actually Alistair’s opinion about blood magic (“two wrongs don’t make a right”) that swayed me/her to kill Connor— which is why it came as such a shock when we returned to camp, and he immediately started shouting. Uta quickly sweet-talked her way into lowering the amount of disapproval, but it definitely was a shock to her, and taught her that she needed to tread a bit more carefully if she wanted for her plans to succeed.
Uta very much did not enjoy her time in the mage’s tower— she’d always thought magic was kind of weird, but what she saw there actively horrified her. She’d never really understood just quite what magic could do before that point. She did spare the mages in the end, but only because she couldn’t help but be persuaded by the image of what that power could do for her, when at her disposal.
There’s...not really that much to say about the Brecilian Forest quest? Though I did get a great image of Alistair literally sitting at Uta’s feet. :D I know that she brokered a peace between the two, but I actually can’t remember my reasoning anymore. Maybe because she definitely didn’t want the Dalish to get killed, because allies for her army, but she also wanted to try to sway the werewolves to her side? Or maybe because it was one of those situations where doing the right thing didn’t really hurt her in any way, so she went for it. Idk.
After that, she made her way to Haven, mainly because she wanted to procrastinate as long as possible on going to Orzammar. (In hindsight, me-as-the-player would have really loved to see what the not!Leske would have said if you went there after the Orzammar quest, but it was the decision that made the most sense for Uta herself, so.) She didn’t destroy the ashes, and was probably helped in that decision by the fact that her party was made up of Alistair, Leliana, and Wynne, and also because Kolgrim was insane, but she did take down a High Dragon rather dramatically. :D
Then she went to give Arl Eamon the ashes, because procrastination. After that, though, there really was no other excuse she could give, and so she went to Orzammar.
And, oh, let me just break out of my narrative to say, I loved going to Orzammar with Brosca. It was just so immensely satisfying— the contrast between who she was, and who she was now, seeing her sister again, seeing people who knew her before, having to confront her past, and who she once was— when I saw the carta members demanding protection from that one merchant it just sent chills down my spine, because Uta was that person once. She was carta, and now she’s come back, and she tears it all down.
And Leske. That hit her hard. (And me too, as the player.) Because, the thing is, his actions made sense. Uta would have done no differently in his position— whatever it takes to survive. (Though she probably wouldn’t have fought to the death for Jarvia.) But she was so genuinely pleased to see him— he was one of the few people she’d actually cared about back in Orzammar— and then the sudden shock of betrayal—
She spent some time questioning if she’d gotten too soft, after that. That she was so surprised.
She supported Bhelen, of course.
Then came the Deep Roads. She initially planned on siding with Branka, and making golems for the war effort, but then one of the party members said something in protest that made her realize she wouldn’t have direct control of them, and who’s to say they won’t be turned against her, somehow? So she reluctantly decided to destroy them, for her own peace of mind.
(Side-note: it actually really surprised me when Branka died— while I figured there’d be a boss battle, somehow, I didn’t realize that her dying was even a possibility?)
Then came time to return to Arl Eamon, and then Denerim, and the lead-up to the Landsmeet. Uta chose to break out of Fort Drakon herself, which worked out since she was a rogue, and while I did like doing that, I was a bit disappointed about not getting to choose which friends who’d rescue me— I remember Zevran and— Morrigan, I think it was?—’s efforts in my Mahariel run as being hilarious, and I really wanted to see what Morrigan and Sten (which would have been Uta’s top two) would have done.
Which brings me to the Landsmeet, and my decision.
I mentioned above that I’ve been thinking about this character, Uta, for some time, and one of the first things I knew about her was that I was going to go for the King & Mistress ending. (Mainly as a reaction to the overwhelming popularity of f!Cousland in general and King & Queen Alistair/f!Cousland in particular— I will never understand why someone would choose to play as a human when you have the option to play as anything else, and the fact that Cousland is so popular, and so many fics have her as Warden / that as the ending, made me determined to 1) romance Alistair with someone, anyone else, 2) go for the King & Mistress ending people seemed to dislike so much, and 3) have the Warden in question at least begin the relationship with the intention of becoming the power behind the throne, in my never-ending quest to make as many deliciously dysfunctional relationships as possible. Hence Uta, and the basis for her personality.)
But as I played, I… got indecisive? I could definitely see Uta still going for the King & Mistress thing, in the interest of… self-interest, and also because she doesn’t entirely trust Anora, and doesn’t like the idea of having so much power over her. But she also does genuinely care about Alistair, and realizes that he’d hate being king— and it’s not like she’d be left in a powerless position, afterwards (especially since, as it turns out, she ends up responsible for making Anora queen), and would have more freedom in how she directed her life.
So there were both options, and I could see reasoning for Uta to do either one of them, and I could not decide. So, I did the sensible thing, and split my save file in two. One save where she’ll make Alistair king, and one where she won’t. It works out rather well for me, actually, since I was actually a bit indecisive about which of my planned Inquisition playthroughs would have Uta as Warden in the worldstate— this way, I can just use King & Mistress!Uta for one and Grey Wardens!Uta for the other one.
I initially wanted to do the former first, but… I either didn’t realize, or forgot, that you need to harden Alistair for him to be up for a mistress. A bit of googling told me that I can edit his state on the PC, but I decided to do that another time. So I went with Anora as queen, and Alistair & Uta as Grey Wardens together first. Oh, and she executed Loghain— there was no way she would leave such a potential enemy still standing.
She did the Dark Ritual, because she’s selfish at heart, and refused for the possibility of either her or Alistair dying. She was actually a lot more honest with Alistair about what it entailed than my Mahariel was, actually— mainly because she knew she was persuasive enough to convince him regardless, and figured that the backlash if he ever figured out the truth would be much worse for her.
They fought— the archdemon died. Anora then gave me a heart-attack by referring to Alistair as one of the Wardens who died fighting, but I suppose it must have been a bug, because he was alive and well at the celebrations. Uta choose the “I’m going to travel a bit” option— I considered the “title and riches” choice, but while I think Uta would go for the riches, I think she wouldn’t be particularly interested in a title. So travel it was. She said her goodbyes to her companions, made arrangements to meet Alistair and Zevran later, and the curtains closed.
► There were other things that I wanted to talk about (mainly, things that stood out to me in context of the other games, particularly Inquisition), but this entry has gone on long enough. Next time, perhaps.