A Whole lot of Silence and Trousers: Ostagar doesn’t Know they Made Women Grey Wardens.

DRAGON AGE ORIGINS (DAO) STORY -  OSTAGAR

Content Labels – Sexism, mostly.  A little fantastic racism.

There are times in this game that I feel I give it too much and too little credit simultaneously.  The feeling tends to kick in around the time I get to Ostagar and resurfaces occasionally.  Most of the time, I feel like I give it too much credit.

Duncan brings Sooney to Ostagar, which is, apparently, a fortress built where the old empire decided “eh, let’s just stop expanding.  That always works for empires.”  It’s very pretty, but it doesn’t look like much use as a fortress.  There’s not really anything keeping an enemy out of the place.  I suppose it stands to reason, since Ferelden doesn’t seem to know how to use fortifications.  Or cavalry.  Or pants.

We assume that Sooney has worked through at least some of her grief during the map-and-voiceover that leads to a meeting with the king.

What a guy!

No really, Cailin wears golden armor with pauldrons the size of basketballs (he’s not the only one with the pauldrons), and within two lines of meeting the sovereign of Ferelden, we know three things about him.


He’s a dead man walking.
That fact is a kindness, because he is the kind of person who would otherwise live a long, long time before, in a horrifying flash of self-awareness, he realized the magnitude of the joke the universe has played on him.  If he were a modern guy, this realization would be somewhere in his early 50s, and probably when he was trying to sneak a look down the front of his step-daughter’s shirt.
He LURVES the Grey Wardens.

Cailin (trade that first i for a y, and you have the perfect name for a five year old in Christian home-school) rushes on down to gush at Duncan about how totally radical the coming battle is going to be.  To his credit, he does promise to send his army to kick Arl Howe’s taint through his soft palate as soon as they're din here, but I’m pretty sure Sooney does not expect to collect on that promise.  I’m pretty sure that, though she is but in the dewy bloom of her youth, the girl knows the king is nothing but a head of hair on a pile of expensive metal.

So begins Sooney’s introduction to the war camp as the new warden recruit, and we learn something very quickly: Ostagar doesn’t know they made women Grey Wardens.  It’s pretty much the first thing out of the mouths of every male character you meet whose not the tranquil guy or the deserter.  It’s the first thing her fellow recruits say.  It’s the first thing Alistair says, and ALISTAIR I THOUGHT YOU WERE BETTER THAN THAT. 

Here’s the gag, and the part where I feel I might be giving DAO a little too little credit.  Sooney is hardly the smurfette of the war camp.  There’s Wynne, the leader of the contingent of mages.  There’s chantry sisters.  Oh, and there are soldiers.  Lots of them.  When you get to the scene at the beginning of the doomed battle, every third or fourth soldier in the valley is a woman, wearing that terrible boob-plate armor.   Sooney’s shady-looking fellow recruit is pulling PUA* shit on one when Sooney meets him, and the first thing he says to her is how surprised he is that there’s a woman getting recruited.

I suppose the darkspawn blood you have to drink distresses the womb or something.  But then again, it kills the little shady recruit, so yeah.

Sooney tells that guy Duncan needs to see him right away, because solidarity.  Friends don’t let friends fall into the clutches of a PUA.

Ok, so the reason why I wonder if I am not giving too little credit is this, in a world where 25 – 30% of the soldiers are women, assumedly 50% of the mages are women, there is a recurring theme of surprise any time one of these women shows up as a Grey Warden.  Mom Cousland spent a significant proportion of her precious dialogue time decrying Sooney’s choice of vocation, when she seems to have no problem fitting into the armor of her youth and shooting dudes with the arrows thereof. 

I am tempted to say that it sort of works as a commentary on the invisibility of women in male-dominated fields (like drinking poison and hunting darkspawn, apparently).  Shady fellow recruit turns from a soldier woman he was just trying to pick up to voice his surprise to another soldier woman that she’s even there, while the first stands just behind him, looking like she wished the darkspawn would hurry up and just kill them already.

I’m tempted, but I have played to this point from most of the different origin stories, and when you’re an elf, they voice surprise that you’re an elf.  There are a handful of elves in the camp, doing the menial stuff that elves in DAO get to do; they aren't fighting.  If you’re a dwarf, same business, and you don’t so much as see another dwarf for another 2 hours of game time.  Same thing if you’re a mage, but magic in Thedas is… complicated.  So, yeah, men (human, not mage) are default and universal in Ferelden, and despite the fact that there are a sizable plurality of women fighting as soldiers in the front line, apparently one more warrior’s** vagina is worthy of comment.

I’m tempted, but Darkpaisley (who works in the male dominated field of light construction and house painting, and deals every day with folks who didn’t know they made women contractors), says the whole thing is bullshit, and she’s really glad they made it a non-issue in Dragon Age 2 and only brought it up in Inquisition when it was actually worthy of comment. 

I’m going to defer to greater experience on this one.

* PUA = Pick Up Artist.  If you don’t know about these guys, you probably should for sake of self protection, but you’re not going to like what you learn. 
** There are warrior and rogue versions of Sooney for sake of game mechanic based posting in the future, but in DAO, warrior and rogue aren't really speciated, not the way mage is and not the way they will be in the later games.