I Am Completely Serious

So all the DA2 characters have a personal specialization with character-relevant skills described like this:

Experienced Hand - This isn’t Isabela’s first dance. And it won’t be her last.

Veneer of Calm - Fenris maintains an appearance of calm, but it is only a facade. Every wound he takes stirs at his deeply buried resentment, increasing his attack damage.

Kickback - As a merchant prince, Varric knows that sometimes you need a well-placed bribe, and sometimes you need a well-placed bolt.

Thick Skin - Long years on the front lines have made Aveline unusually… durable.

And then there’s Hawke. This is her whole personal skill tree.

Dog - Hawke yells at the dog.

Fucking Kentuckian.

Lead in the water supply, probably.

Was it totally impossible for Hawke’s friends/frenemies to be friends with each other? Merrill and Varric are the only ones who really even try, and Merrill is too confused to get far with anyone except Varric.

Obviously Anders is the fucking worst: Like two seconds after Fenris is horrifically betrayed by his long-lost sister, Anders is yelling at him about being mean to mages again. Fenris expresses despair, Hawke tries to comfort him “you have friends,” Anders goes “not me!” Apparently Anders actually approves if you betray Fenris to Danarius, but I can’t stand to watch that scene.

And they’ve known Merrill and Anders for like six years by act 3, and Fenris and Sebastian are still talking wistfully about turning them in to the Templars to be killed. Isabela literally starts a war and then leaves to let everyone else deal with it! Aveline cannot appear to stand anyone in the party, including Hawke half the time, and it’s hard to fucking blame her!

Like, it felt weird in DAO if you lost Alistair and the party just didn’t acknowledge it, but here, it feels totally reasonable if you lose Isabela and no one says a word! Because these people are not actually friends. They’re a bunch of intensely intolerant ideologues with differing ideologies and occasionally-intersecting personal goals. None of them gives a shit about the others. It’s exhausting.

1) Why is it totally impossible to use sarcastic dialog options with Anders and Fenris when they're full of shit. Why do they have to do the tragic faces. It's exhausting.

"Don't you understand my deep deep pain" yes guys you've given me a decent working knowledge of your deep deep pains by now I think. I am going to check all the shops to see if there is a "sense of proportion" upgrade available.

2) Do we find out at the end that Varric made up their tragic backstories after reading a pile of manga. In the final scene is one of them sarcastically reading the other's fictionalized lines aloud, while the other engages in dwarf tossing.

3) Merrill needs to be in the party at all times so that she can get ASD all over everything.

4) But she is wayyyyyy too emotionally immature for it to be responsible for any variation of Hawke to get romantically involved with her. Not really much in common with the way she acted in Origins! Maybe the doom mirror gives you brain problems. Tamlen just started playing Dwarf Fortress and never stopped, is what happened to him.

5) Aveline is the only character not completely off their gourd, which of course means that she is not a romance option.

6) Fenris's "Bitter Pill" questline was fucking brutal. As was Aveline's "Long Road," but that was in, you know, a different and more exasperating way.

I'm really disappointed that the women don't really have non-antagonistic conversations with each other. Leliana and Wynne are the only ones who don't actively dislike each other - Shale and Leliana have a single mostly-positive conversation about shoes, and that's it.

(And Shale seems really ambivalent about the necessity of the whole gender thing, so I'm not sure I should even count them in this unfortunate little census.)

The antagonistic discussions mostly aren't even funny. Nearly half of Leliana and Morrigan's written dialog is just them fucking competing over a male Warden. I don't understand the mindset that would make someone spend so much more time on that than on Leliana hassling Morrigan about shapeshifting or Morrigan egging Leliana on about killing dudes she's fucked. The straight men must be stopped.

Zevran and Alistair don't do the same thing, either - they only have one fighting-over-the-girl conversation, whereas Morrigan and Leliana have nine fighting-over-the-guy ones. And it would make a lot more sense if the reverse was the case? Alistair is the World's Most Insecure Man, and Zevran likes messing with him.

Whereas Leliana wants to be friends with literally everyone, and it doesn't make sense to me that Morrigan would air that sort of grievance in public. She hides away from everyone else at camp, and complains to the Warden when they ask her "personal" questions anywhere else.

On the plus side, Shale and Sten almost accidentally propose, Morrigan clearly wanted to rescue Sten specifically to get a guy she considers hate-fuckable into the party, ( spoilers )

*wakes up shortly before dawn*

me: Oh hey, Dragon Age: Origins is basically grimdark Chrono Trigger, like it has the same basic narrative structure and similar plot branch points, but the alternate scenarios are fleshed out more, which unfortunately makes them less emotionally-plausible rather than more at a number of crucial points in the narrative

*goes back to sleep*

*alarm goes off a few hours later*

me: Fuck this game I hate it now