Calpernia: From Corypheus to the DA 4 Party?

Going to play Devil's Advocate again. Currently the world is ruled by the Chantry's idea of the Maker. Actually this god does nothing to help improve anything within the world and it is even taught that he has turned his back on it. He abandoned the slaves along with everyone else, even though Andraste's mission was to free them and her Champion, an ex slave had tried to save her. Nevertheless the Chantry, both Orlesian and Imperial, have enormous power in the world on the basis of their claim to represent him.

Corypheus believed in the Old Gods and thought they lived in the Golden City. The Chantry teach that the Maker used to live there and it was Corypheus' fault that he left. Corypheus says that when he got to the Black City (it was already that way when he arrived) he found an empty throne. So what he was proposing was to set him up as a god who would actually doing something about the problems of the world. He would rule from the Fade, with his faithful lieutenants ruling on earth. That is not so different to what the Chantry already do.

So if he had given one of his lieutenants, a slave he had freed, the idea that he wanted to raise the status of all those like her and get rid of the current corrupt ruling elite, why wouldn't she believe him? If he promised to end the tyrany of the respective Chantries, who still promoted slavery in Tevinter and the effective slavery of mages in the south, again why wouldn't she believe and support him?

Without Corypheus backing her, I doubt any of the current Altus members of the Venatori would give her the time of day. It is clear from Tevinter Nights that the majority of them care nothing for slaves and only see them as tools they can use for their own ends.   Also it would seem they are drawn exclusively from the Altus class who would object to being ruled by an upstart Liberati.

A lot depends on what the aims of our new PC are. If it is just stopping Solas then it matters not whether the ally is a force for good or ill, provided they support your aim because the alternative is annihilation. However, if we want to do more than simply bring him down but change the world for the better at the same time, then I agree it would be worth taking a long hard look at her motives for helping.

Nah, the Venatori are way too big and widespread a cult in Inquisition not to have left a whole bunch of angry and confused stragglers once the big man disappeared. I was thinking something along the lines of her mobilizing some of the others who were duped into helping Corypheus for similar reasons to her, or who just wanted to atone for their actions in supporting him once the dust settled and it became clear that all they managed to do was cause a lot of terror and misery.

I don't care how smug and entitled a bastard you're bred to be, realizing that you've been made a fool of by an ancient deformed freak darkspawn thing, caused atrocities for no reason at all and almost broke the world would do a number on anyone's conscience. There's no way there wouldn't have been a lot of deserters and maybe a couple of mutinies between games.

And, uh, I meant trust her basic faculties and/or judgement enough to use her as a momentary source of information or as a necessary expert on some magical gewgaw, or even just trust her not to need her throat slit ASAP. There's no way she's ever getting any sort of power or influence over what happens to the world on my watch, or that my character will turn their backs to her. I feel like even just the call of letting her continue to live and work towards her own ends independently of you would be a dilemma. The idea of our characters actually deciding to truly trust her and her goals and welcome her into the fold never even crossed my mind. I definitely don't see how she could be a party member.

And I would dearly love to object that surely nobody would be fucking stupid enough to gamble with the world's existence in the hopes of trying to make it 'better'. But my last five years on the internet has unfortunately disabused me of that naivete.

You'll need a lot larger of a sample size than two in order to really support your argument that such actions are required. 

William Wilberforce comes to mind. As far as I am aware, he never committed any atrocious actions. 

I was more arguing against the notion that someone had to resort to those kinds of actions to achieve abolition, rather than me expecting a certain character to. Them choosing that path is a lot different than that being the only path that works. 

I absolutely agree on it being ridiculous that Calpernia wouldn't realize that. But then from what we can tell of her character, she doesn't care about anyone beyond herself and her people. After all, what causes her to defect from Corypheus isn't realizing that he is a monster or his plan will kill countless innocent people. No, what causes her to etray him is when she realizes she will be negatively affected. Then she just leaves instead of trying to help stop him. So yeah, she wouldn't be a reliable ally at all. 

(a 2-minute google search later)

He married a woman 12 years younger than himself. I seem to remember you having a problem with Han Solo loving Leia because of the ten-year gab between them. He also married her in 1797 England, which means that he had full authority to beat her and she had no legal grounds to refuse him on anything, and he sired six children on her. That would make him a serial rapist and a slave-owner by my country's current legal and moral standards even if his wife was madly in love with him and they were the happiest couple on Earth, and even if he personally did everything he could to make her feel like they were equals in the marriage, which I hope and imagine he would given his apparent values, but which we can't prove was the case.

Wow, Hanako. "Celebrating" a rapist and a slaveowner. That's completely disgusting. Unless somehow you think that environment and circumstances and scale and intent at least have something to say in whether or not someone is a heinous criminal. In other words, that it might be more complicated than just pointing at something they did and loudly calling it the worst possible thing you have an excuse to while completely ignoring the context. Imagine that.

And you kind of did say that you could absolutely expect that, yes. But regardless, I definitely think you could argue that violence is the only way to abolish slavery in a lot of historical situations too. William Wilberforce would have had a hell of a time traveling to 932 AD Scandinavia and trying to verbally convince a bunch of pagans with no real central government who spent their summers raping and pillaging the rest of the continent and fundamentally had no Christian notion of the sanctity of life that they were doing anything wrong by capturing slaves. And same for the Ancient Roman populace who considered watching the slaves of dead statesmen, including women and children, getting torn apart by lions to be a good afternoon's entertainment.

I mean, someone like him might be able start a movement to end the practice taking a few hundred years and a couple of civil wars. But that's kind of a longshot, and a fuckton of miserably dead slaves in the meantime.

I don't have an issue with Calpernia feeling that taking drastic action was her only way of changing the slavery situation, even if she somehow did have the option to go into politics and try to change the system from within. It's more the fact that she chose to help an obviously insane actual monster literally try to take over the world as her primary strategy that makes me dubious about her ability to tell right from wrong and sense from nonsense. 

Pretty sure it wouldn't, if those 'nitwits' could create and possess influential people inside your virtual reality and through them effortlessly condemn you and everything around you to death or worse based on insanely high and luxurious standards of moral forethought from an environment impossibly far removed from the one you'd grown up inhabiting. 

I'd want those nitwits to give it some thought and talk things through with each other and consider various perspectives to try to make just or at least informed decisions. But maybe that's just me.

Uhm, yeah? I'd definitely say that being taken in by him is a count against Bianca's sense and sanity. Especially because she's obviously portrayed to be very clever in terms of IQ, which tends to coincide with emotional sensitivity, delusion and susceptibility to mental disorders. Branka was very intelligent and inspiring and incredibly well-respected as well, and that didn't stop her from also turning into a mad cow with seemingly no impetus except her own need to achieve the impossible.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. All I know about Andraste comes from the games, and I find it hard to imagine that whatever you learn about her in that book is intimate and extensive enough to say one way or another what exactly it was about her that made people follow her, if it was even something about her person. Sometimes there's a bit of madness in great people, and it's part of what makes them great, or even godly to some. Very rarely are half of their faces also covered in Blight rot, though.

Not to mention being an ancient arch-slaveholder directly complicit in the catastrophe that ruined his own Empire and launched five successive zombie plague invasions on the world and counting. 

You're beating on a straw man here. Nobody doubts that someone sufficiently persuasive and charismatic and powerful with the right arguments could theoretically seduce Calpernia and a host of others into doing what they do, because of or in spite of a bit of mad zeal or an unusual nature. That the Corypheus we see and hear with our own eyes and ears on the screen managed to do it is what indicts them as having either no judgement or no morals.

Eh. No she wasn't. She could have defected and lived her life outside his influence or betrayed him for worthier masters and helped save the world instead of destroying or at least brutally conquering it at any time. There's no shortage of powerful people in Thedas who resent the Tevinters and slavery, who don't want to take over the world and who aren't half-darkspawn.

Corypheus claimed that the Maker was false, but he still used to be one of the prime slaveowners and dragon-worshipers of the ancient Tevinters. And from what I've read of his human life it was pretty clear that he did what he did because the Magisters' power and influence over the people was fading, and he couldn't stand giving it up even if it meant cracking open the sky and trying to confront God to reinvigorate their hold on the world. It wasn't out of any kind of love for or trust in the Maker himself.

I don't see that humanizing loss of faith you're talking about. Just a two-dimensional infinitely power-grasping caricature of pompous entitlement that anyone used to serving under capricious and unscrupulous masters should have smelled a mile away.

One of my intense disappointments is that we never got to discuss further with him his whole motivation for going to the Golden City in the first place. The memory of his slave in the Fade raised a lot of questions in my mind which have never been answered. He claimed that his master had become worried by the loss of faith in the Old Gods. This struck me as extremely odd since we had previously been told that the crisis in faith only occurred after the First Blight started, one of their gods started to attack them and the others failed to answer their calls for help. This would seem to be backed by the history of Hessarian. It says that in order to establish the Maker as the dominant faith he purged the ranks of the Altus with blood because they were still attached to the Old Gods. So apparently even after the First Blight the ruling elite still had faith in the Old Gods. One of the southern Divines even removed the Canticle of Silence from the Chant because they acknowledge it was really just a piece of political propaganda on the part of Hessarian, so it is questionable whether any of the motivations he attributes to the Magisters Sidereal are true.

Did they intend an attack on the Maker by going to the Golden City? Unlikely since it was believed to be the home of the Old Gods, just as for the elves it was believed to be the home of the Creators and for the Avvar the home of their gods. In Legacy Corypheus said "it was meant to be golden" as though someone had promised him it would be, although surely you could see what colour it was in the Fade? In DAI he says "I have seen the throne of the gods and it was empty". So he still held to the belief that the Black City was the home of the Old Gods. It was only because the dominant religion of the time claimed it had been the Maker's house that he broke into that he declared the Maker was absent as well. He also pointed out that it was already black when they got there, contrary to Chantry claims, and that they didn't cause the Darkness but discovered it. Also, they did not confront the Maker or hear his voice declaring their sacrilege but merely "dead whispers".

It is also noticeable that his slave says that he only took the name Corypheus as part of the ritual he was undertaking. That wasn't his title before that even though Hessarian maintains the Conductor (Corypheus) of Silence was the official title of the high priest of Dumat. If we hadn't already met the Architect, who I assume was the Architect of Beauty as described by Hessarian, I wouldn't have given much credence to those titles at all.

A couple of other points. In Jaws of Hakkon we learn that the priests of Razikale went into the deep south to find somewhere suitable to try and make contact with their god who had fallen silent on them. It is not clear when this occurred. If it was just before Corypheus' expedition into the Fade, then may be he was heading there to find out why the gods had fallen silent. If the silence only occurred afterwards, then the Old Gods had already fallen silent before the Blight began. So when exactly did they fall silent and why?

Also, Corypheus' slave remembers him as a kind master until the loss of followers made him resort to depravity to try and win them back. He speaks of Corypheus cutting himself ever more desperately, which seems to suggest that whilst he practiced blood magic, initially it was only his own that he used. I guess that now Corypheus is out of the way we will never learn the truth about what occurred but the fact is that on the evidence of the slave alone it is clear that events are not what the Chantry would have us believe.

Her staying with him after he starts mass murdering and mass enslaving however does.

Well he might not have bought this exact scenario but you will recall that he did accept the promise of the Pride demon in the Fade, which was essentially saying he would never have to fear again and all he had to do was betray his friends. Then he got shirty with Hawke for taking him there and putting temptation in his way. I was surprised how easily he succumbed in view of what he had always maintained about Tevinter mages being unable to resist the lure of power, as though it was some inherent weakness of mages, but in some ways it did confirm his assertion that no matter how good your intentions are, eventually everyone will have a breaking point where they can't resist the offer.

Had. He had the potential. Now he’s just another Corypheus (crazy genocidal mage from the past who wants to destroy the world to restore his own) but without the originality of it.

And yet, one is clearly more engaging than the other. Be it sympathy or pure hatred, Solas has invoked and will likely continue to inspire a lot more reactions that Corypeaus ever did. He not only had the potential to be an interesting villain, I'd argue the writers are using that potential. Or planning to, at any rate.

They are clearly aware of the response he got, and it apparently made such an impression that it helped determine the how the devs want to portray characters in general in DA4: "We want characters to either be loved or hated. One of the best examples of that is Solas. Half of the community wants to kill him, half of the people want to marry him, and another part wants to do both." (link)

Hopefully they won't drop the ball on it, but I don't think it can be denied that Solas has potential. They cultivated and presented his story much better than they did with Coypheaus, and it shows. Which is a shame in some respects, because I think they could have better represented him as a desperate  (former) man of shattered faith. With the game itself already dealing with faith as a major theme, it would have been juxtaposed quite nicely alongside the rise of the so-called "Herald of Andraste".