4. Vivienne

It’s a shame that Vivienne, one of the only mages who isn’t opposed to the Circle of Magi, the mage prison masquerading as a school in the Dragon Age universe, wasn’t in Dragon Age II, the game that had the war between mages and their Templar keepers at the center of its story. As much as I disagree with Vivienne’s beliefs on a fundamental level, I can’t help but be drawn in by the nuance. Vivienne is a mage who fully admits that she and people like her are dangerous, and a system like the Circle could probably alleviate everyone’s problems, but not in its current form. Whereas Dragon Age II paints mages as an oppressed class of people (while also simultaneously believing that they are inevitably going to become threats to society no matter what you do), Vivienne’s view of the situation is far more complex, and it makes you wonder if the catastrophic events of Dragon Age II might have gone very differently if only someone like her had been in Kirkwall. As a person who plays a mage in all of these games, hearing her condescend to me when I say mages should be free still feels like a particularly bad case of tinnitus, but she at least is talking more sensibly about the situation than anyone else in the room, all while having to shoulder her own personal burdens. Dragon Age’s inability to sit with that nuance has been the undoing of a lot of its world-building. It needed a character like Vivienne two games ago.