“In Death, Sacrifice”
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction: Grey Wardens, Blights, and Staying Vigilant Bodies are porous and under threat of mutation for both Grey Wardens and the darkspawn they fight in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing videogame series Dragon Age (2009-2024). If they survive the Joining Ritual, Grey Wardens become abject figures, poised in the liminal space between ‘us’ and ‘not us’. Since the Joining forges a connection to darkspawn that will also, inevitably, eventually, mutate them into a blighted creature themselves, Grey Wardens exist in a tremendously Gothic state of becoming. On the other side of this binary are the darkspawn, transgressive entities first introduced as scurrying and bipedal. Eventually, however, the player can encounter figures of horrifying maternal abjection when they meet the darkspawn Broodmother in the Deep Roads. This end-point of corruption is pushed further in the confronting grotesquerie of antagonist Ghilan’nain, a monstrously mutated creator/mother who sculpts the Blight itself. The series introduces the Grey Wardens in the first game, Origins (2009), in which the player character – by something approximating a choice or else kicking and screaming against destiny – must be initiated into their secretive ranks in the opening hours of play. Essentially, they are an order dedicated to keeping the world-threatening peril of the Blight at bay. Spilling up from under the earth, the Blight functions as an eco-gothic threat that can infect and mutate land, water, and people. Sickening crops and poisoning water, the Blight is very much the catastrophic environmental change defined by Smith and Hughes in their seminal discussions of the eco-gothic (5-6). Moreover, the Blight reflects “the non-human ecology rendered uncanny, monstrous” in the changes wrought by its contagious spread (Pinder, para. 1). Thomas Fahy argues that this change, this “preoccupation with hybridity” acts as a recurring motif of the eco-gothic as a mode (3). The fourth game, The Veilguard (2024), is particularly striking in this sense – whole swathes of snowy countryside bubble with blight pools and are encircled by pulsing, blood-heavy tendrils that erupt through the soil, the landscape’s “permeability” made monstrous (Edwards et al., xiv). It is also, crucially, usually dormant – the Grey Wardens, therefore, remain vigilant for decades at a time until they are needed, and until the Blight returns to haunt the landscape. Darkspawn accompany the Blights, monstrous entities that are very much in line with Noël Carroll’s useful framing of “fusion” figures, or monsters that are “amalgams”, that disrupt attempts at categorisation (137). They are recognisably humanoid for the most part, but also consistently skewed or ‘off’ – they move oddly, or appear to have mutated patches of skin or uneven flesh, or they wear armour, but it is positioned strangely on their frames, or their limbs are elongated in a way that feels incorrect. Markedly, they do not speak (with some significant exceptions to be underlined later). While the games broadly draw from classic dark fantasy and Medievalism in equal measure, there is a seam of the Gothic running through them a mile wide, thoroughly exemplified in the darkspawn and the cycles of creeping Blights. Some of the homages are blunt: Ferelden, the nation the player character explores in Origins, is an on-the-nose stand-in for Middle Ages England, complete with wretched weather and a nationalistic love of dogs, along with a long-standing historical feud with neighbouring Orlais, which is France with a few names changed to protect the guilty. Both Dragon Age 2 (2011) and the third game, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), do not allow the player to role-play as a Warden. Instead, they tick companion boxes in both. Interestingly, though, the Inquisition’s Warden, Blackwall, is masquerading as a Warden, though he can become one properly later – a secret that the player can guess, though the player character is ignorant of it. They are also the focus of the first game’s expansion, Awakening, and also feature in a host of transmedial connected texts including – but not limited to – short stories, novels such as The Calling, and graphic novels published through Dark Star Digital. In looking at the mutations of the Blight, and the way this is connected inexorably to the Grey Wardens themselves, the focus here will be the first and then the most recent of the games, Origins and Veilguard respectively, since these are the two that force (in Origins’ case) or allow the player to choose (Veilguard) to be a Grey Warden. Fig. 1: The blighted village of D’Meta’s Crossing. Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024). Screenshot by author. “Join us in the shadows, brothers and sisters”: Grey Warden Secrets As far as monster-hunting secret(ive) societies go, the Grey Wardens beg and borrow most blatantly from Andrzej Sapowski’s Witcher books (and arguably CD Projekt Red’s video game adaptations of the same) and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Like the former, the Grey Wardens engage with dark magic in order to gain powers that allow them to fight monsters. Similarly, akin to the Night’s Watch and their position as steadfast sentinels, the Grey Wardens vow “in peace, vigilance”, “in death, sacrifice” in their roles as watchers (Origins). A point of difference, however, beyond the initial intertextual referencing at play here, can be found in the manner by which their ranks are initiated. The Joining ritual is not easily survivable – Alistair, one of the companions, notes that “in my Joining, only one of us died. But it was … horrible” (Origins, see fig. 2). Of the two other non-player-characters who are also present at the ritual, Daveth succumbs to death almost immediately after drinking from the chalice. In an unsubtle but decently presented display of the game world’s dark ‘sting in the tail’ narrative approach, the other, Jory, refuses to drink upon witnessing this, and is summarily executed by the senior Warden present in order to keep Warden secrets safe. The games are not shy on the consequences of blighted mutation if the afflicted person does not become a Warden, which is occasionally pointed out as a stopgap cure of sorts. Veilguard’s Antoine and Evka, for instance, are found to a little too frequently accept ‘new recruits’ for the Wardens in the Anderfels in order to help locals who have encountered darkspawn. Instead, they are shunted through the Joining, and then never really expected to become fighters. On the other side of such encounters, the lost dwarf Ruck shies away from torch lights and has lost most of his mind, his skin grey and on the way to rotting; the infected elf Tamlen can ambush the party camp, unrecognisable in his monstrosity, mutated almost entirely into a darkspawn; and an optional player character origin can find themself in need of even more speedy an initiation into the Wardens, since they have had the bad luck to be infected by darkspawn corruption. Fig. 2: The player character (centre of group) as she is about to be initiated through the Joining. Dragon Age: Origins (2009). Screenshot by author. Crucially, the ritual involves the drinking – the ingestion – of darkspawn blood in a gambit that plays almost like a bleak riff on vaccination. If they survive, they will not succumb swiftly to the darkspawn infection if it is passed into their mouth or eyes during combat. This, the player character soon learns, is also the manner by which they will, as a Warden, be able to sense the darkspawn – a connection that both helps but also represents the eventual cost of the Joining. In ingesting darkspawn blood, the process of mutation is slowed – stretched out to maybe thirty years at best – but not halted, and always present. Grey Wardens, therefore, are abject figures that collapse the border between ‘us’ and ‘not us’. The threat of corruption, “death infecting life”, as Julia Kristeva puts it, cannot however in this case be “thrust aside in order to live” (3). Instead, Grey Wardens exist in a corrupted and most Gothic state of mutated becoming. They are adrift amid “indeterminacy and estrangement from one’s own body” (Aldana Reyes 54). So frequently does the Gothic return to the notion of “the coexistence of life and death”, and here, this hybridity is found in the mutating body of the Warden themself (Cavallaro 201). In the game world, this presents in the way Wardens can sense or ‘hear’ darkspawn; in how they, as they grow older, will have terrible, sense-corroding dreams; in how, for some years, they are immune to the blight. It also damns them to their Calling – that point-of-no-return at which individual Wardens find their thoughts overwhelmed by the “song” of the darkspawn, and ritualistically head for the Deep Roads beneath the earth (Origins). While Alistair, optimistic as they come, suggests that this is so the Warden might take out as many darkspawn as they can in combat before being killed in return, it is far easier to read something much darker at work here. In taking themselves into the deep darkness, the hypothetical Grey Warden’s Calling with all its eventual corrupting mutation into a darkspawn necessarily happens out of sight. Interestingly, in her response to Julia Kristeva’s work, Barbara Creed argues for the way social rituals address the abject: that, essentially, “societies both renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element” (“Monstrous-Feminine” 212). By contrast, the Grey Wardens occupy again that liminal space within which they make that contact and then enshrine it within themselves; no exclusion is permitted. Elizabeth Stang argues for the Grey Wardens here as representing the “normative … order”, as standing in for the heroic and non-monstrous figure opposing the ‘other’, the hero ready to save the land (237). However, this reading softens – or even arguably ignores – the position of the Grey Wardens as part of the horrors they
Source: M/C Journal
DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3156
Author: Rachael Robertson
Institutions: The University of Melbourne, Australian Catholic University
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411442514