Spirits and Personhood in Dragon Age

[bemused_writer]

I’ve been sitting on this idea of spirits vs personhood for a while now (i.e. months) and the way Dragon Age: Inquisition portrays the dilemma. I have a lot of frustrations with how spirits are portrayed in this game, so I figured I would take some time to look over the question the game posits: Do spirits qualify as people or not?

Full disclosure: I opted for Cole to remain as a spirit in the game and while I criticize the idea of making Cole human this isn’t a judgment on how other players are playing the game. It’s more a critique of how the writing addressed the dilemma to begin with. Also, this post meanders … a lot. It has kind of become a general post about spirits in Dragon Age. I haven’t read the books, so if anything here is completely misinformed or if there’s info I’m lacking, feel free to let me know.

With that out of the way let’s get into it! At a certain point of the game we have to help Cole decide whether he will be more of a spirit or more of a human. I really wish we’d gotten a chance to just ask Cole what it was he wanted at some point. Granted, at the time he really just wanted to murder a guy and he very well could have turned into a demon afterwards, so I suppose that wasn’t an option.

So instead of the ideal, we’re given two viewpoints on the matter to fill the void: Solas’s and Varric’s.

Solas, our resident expert on spirits, believes it’s important that Cole accept himself for who he is. This way the ideal he aspires to, compassion, won’t be corrupted.

Varric thinks Cole should have a chance at being a person and phrases it to Solas as such: “All right. I get it. You like spirits. But he came into this world to be a person. Let him be one.” It kind of makes it sound like Solas’s appreciation of spirits is akin to a fondness for cats.

More to the point, Varric sees Cole remaining a spirit as robbing him of any chance to be a real person. But why? Why would being a spirit automatically make Cole less of a person?

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