Never On Sunday

Replaying Dragon Age: Origins, I again find considerable difficulty keeping on Morrigan’s good side. Actually, that’s not true. Thanks to numerous gifts included in the game precisely to bribe your way into your companions’ good graces, it’s easy to stay on everyone’s good side. But as far as dialogue goes, and choices of who to side with in the various power struggles about the land, Morrigan hates everything I do and say and think and probably my haircut too. If it weren’t for gifts, she’d have slit my throat in camp long ago.

This is because Morrigan is a hateful bitch. Other PCs can be relentlessly nice (Alistair, Leliana, Wynne) or frequently harsh (Sten, Oghren, Zevran), but the harsh ones still abide by some kind of consistent moral code, even when it bites them in the ass—Sten locks himself up for murder, Oghren turns on his wife, and even moral opportunist Zevran abides by his promise of eternal servitude when you offer him manumission. Morrigan is presented as someone with a harsh but fair moral code: a hyper-libertarian law of the jungle born of growing up in a swamp with no companionship but a demon posing as a bitter old woman, preparing Morrigan as a sacrifice to her own eternal life. Unlike her fellow companions, however, she won’t abide by that code.

For example, she’s big on freedom to establish personal contracts, but gets pissy if you take side quests from the Chantry board. We’re wasting time, she argues, and besides, all those people are weak and helpless. She doesn’t seem to mind wasting time on side quests for apostate mages, though, and begs your assistance against Flemeth when Morrigan finds herself in need. She’ll try to seduce Sten even if you’ve taken her as a lover—she explicitly announces your shared sex life is freely given and without attachments when you take her to a tent—but objects if you should later decide you prefer to bed Leliana or Zevran, and even gets catty about your flirtation with bar wenches. She gets huffy about being “volunteered” to rescue Arl Eamon from the Fade, even though there’s no option to get her approval first. She constantly puts down fellow companions for stupidity, and holds religious faith in contempt, then tops them all with a scheme to give birth to a god—on no more rationale than blind faith that raising a demonic creature from beyond the Fade with a little caring and without any darkspawn taint will make it not be a demon. Whether it could be horribly dangerous even without being a demon apparently hasn’t even crossed her clever little mind.

Morrigan’s loud and frequent protests of the value of individual freedom and responsibility are merely a veneer of respectability pasted over complete sociopathy. “Freedom,” for Morrigan, means “freedom for Morrigan,” and “jack squat for everyone else.” “Personal responsibility” means “confessing your actions,” usually without apology, not seeking to repair harm you’ve caused or—Maker forbid—taking care not to do harm in the first place. She seeks the freedom to do whatever she likes to whomever she likes, without consequences or interference, and the same for mages like poisoner/blood mage/thief/apostate Jowan. It’s the law of the jungle, minus a sense that that sword cuts both ways. This makes it hard to find game choices that please her. Even if you consistently go with the “hateful bitch” option, offending all your other companions in the process, she often finds grounds to take offense, because you have to side with somebody in every discussion, and the roulette wheel that serves as her moral compass will arbitrarily demonize oppressors or demonize their victims for being too weak to deserve better. Side with the wrong one, and you’re either sponsoring tyranny (Morrigan -5) or preserving weakness (Morrigan -3).

Turns out she’s not very good at crowd control, either. If you want crowd control, you’ll have to generate it yourself, whether as a tank or an ice mage or a stun-heavy rogue. This is generally true no matter your class choice or party composition, but CC is supposed to be Morrigan’s specialty, as an ice/mind control mage. Worthless bitch. Stupid, too. Did I mention stupid?

Postscript: At one point in the game, you’re given the option to execute a prisoner in the Redcliffe dungeons. He admits to poisoning the Arl, and is likely to be indirectly responsible for the undead swarming nightly out of the castle to attack the village below. (If you met the prisoner in your backstory, you already know him to dabble in blood magic and other crimes.) The castle is in chaos, and there’s no guarantee he’ll ever get the proper trial he deserves and the just punishment he asks for. If you select conversation options that suggest you’re about to grant him a sentence, Morrigan objects to killing a mage. You might explain that you’re not killing him for what he is, but for what he’s done, at which point Morrigan will explode in indignation, “Oh! So that’s some sort of crime now, is it?”

Yes. Yes it is. Poisoning is a crime. It’s always been a crime. Especially poisoning a legitimate and popular ruler to allow a violent usurper to take the throne, but poisoning just about anyone is a capital offense. How can she be such a popular companion? Judging by the poll results, we kill amateur bandits who steal out of desperate necessity but think her devotion to selfish expediency is cute. She’s a crazy, dangerous bitch queen who needs to be put down. There’s a reason she has to sit at her own personal campfire, far from everyone else.