#Viv’s doing pretty good too but he is at least aware of the horrors (even if he hasn’t experienced any)

[mushroominaforest]

Some people are more stoic than others

[feynites]

Vivienne is such a complicated character.

Like, here you have this woman who has heard for her entire life that she is dangerous. That’s one consistent thing which almost all mages, whether they’re born to a noble family in Tevinter or peasants in the Anderfels or traders in Rivain, are told. Even Dalish and Avvar mages get this message to some extent. You’re a mage - you’re dangerous.

And especially for Circle mages, being dangerous is expected to eclipse everything else about you. The Circle requires a phenomenal balancing act from people. If you’re not good enough at magic, there’s a chance you won’t even be deemed capable of taking your Harrowing, and you’ll just be made Tranquil. This was what prompted Jowan to start using blood magic, in fact - if you go through Irving’s notes in the Circle Tower, you will discover that, in order to meet certain quotas for how many Tranquil the tower has and to maintain the status quo (wherein mages never forget who is holding their leash), the head enchanters single out mages who aren’t talented enough to profit the Circle and chantry as Harrowed mages, and they are basically set up. Instructors warn that they’re not meeting their skill requirements, temptation is offered in the form of books or tomes that provide illegal knowledge, and if the mage takes the bait, all they have to do is slip up. Then the templars move in, no one can really argue the point because blood magic is considered both illegal and immoral, and no one has to worry that Owain is getting too old to carry down the higher boxes in the store rooms anymore.

This is the kind of atmosphere in a good Circle, too. If you can’t prove that your magic would be a profitable commodity for the chantry, then you start to look like dead weight - or the potential materials for a docile labourer, who will just work and work until told to stop, and never offer up protest or a potential lack of compliance.

But, if you’re too powerful or talented, you become worrying for other reasons. A skilled mage can make a lot of coin, healing and entertaining nobles who can afford to pay for the expense, or serving in a military capacity. Powerful mages are also more likely to gain the kind of worldliness and mobility that would enable them to act upon any revolutionary impulses they might have, though, and can threaten the templar’s authority by challenging their ability to pose a physical threat. Again, if we go back to DA:O, Jowan was perfectly set up to be branded a blood mage and made Tranquil for his transgressions. But he was singled out, most likely, for being the least adept among his peers - that didn’t necessarily mean he was actually that bad at magic. And he proved to be adept enough at blood magic itself that the plan blew up in Irving and Greagoir’s faces when he successfully disrupted the templars enough to make a run for it.

The downside for the chantry in making sure templars are indoctrinated to fear mages’ power is that, on the instances when they’re actually called to fight, they do seem to hesitate an awful lot. Kinloch Hold saw the supposed anti-mage elite barricading themselves into the front entryway while the main force opposing Uldred was actually made up of mages; DA2 saw Hawke cleaning up the majority of magical incidents, while Meredith’s goons mostly just bullied the already-legal-and-complacent mages within the Gallows, or else occasionally ventured off to things like torture Dalish kids on Sundermount.

So, the tightrope which mages have to walk. If you’re too weak, you’ll be targeted for Tranquility. If you’re too strong and not compliant enough, you might actually scare the Templars, and face the same treatment. And if you’re just middle-of-the-road, you can probably get by with only the standard danger in your life - but you’ll also probably never venture far from the Circle’s walls, unless some disaster or another calls for all mages on deck, like the Blight.

That’s a pretty grim prospect, overall. Tranquility hanging like a blade on both sides of the accepted skill range, and lifelong imprisonment nestled securely in the middle.

But now we have Vivienne, and unlike... pretty much all of the Circle mages we’ve met before her, Viv has figured out how to navigate the very narrow space left open to her, and actually succeed. She’s skilled enough at magic that no one doubts her prowess, and anyone who tries to tempt her - demon or scheming enchanter or templar alike - is going to be faced with nothing but a firm denial. I think that was probably so essential to her initial survival among Orlais’ cutthroat Circle politics that it more than explains how unnerved she is by the likes of Cole. Tolerance of things that are even remotely questionable by chantry standards is evidence of ‘corruption’, and that could be used to condemn her, or halt her progress. For Vivienne to succeed in the environment she was brought up in, she had to be skilled, and there had to be no question that her skills came from purely acceptable schools of magic. Anything else could be ammunition for rivals, or an excuse for the templars.

Of course, such things could still be manufactured, if anyone had a sufficient reason to frame her. So Vivienne not only had to be squeaky clean, she also had to make herself a vastly preferable mage for the positions she aspired to than any other candidate. How does she do this? By cultivating the reputation required in order to alleviate any and all suspicion that she would be reckless, that she would challenge templar or chantry authority, or that she might use any freedoms granted to her to that end. The kinds of mages who leave Val Royeaux’s Circle to go and entertain the nobility, are almost certainly the kinds of mages who say things like ‘templars are a necessary precaution’. 

They’re also the kinds of mages who can be charming, and entertaining, and make nobles feel good about themselves. They’re likely full of assurances. ‘Of course Circle life isn’t perfect, but it’s hardly a prison. There are opportunities for those who have the right temperament, the right mindset, to go further in life than they otherwise would have. Why, just look at me - my family wasn’t rich. If not for the Circle and my magic, I would hardly be standing in the greatest city in all of Thedas, speaking to some of the most powerful people in the world’. Vivienne went from Circle politics to Orlesian politics, and those are both environments where the truth is something that people will use to destroy you, trust is a fool’s gambit, and you are constantly surrounded by people who want you dead.

But, what really gets me about Vivienne, is that she’s compassionate. And it’s funny because I don’t think she wants to restore the status quo to the Circles because she doesn’t believe she could hang onto her power and influence without it - although I do think she considers the prospect very daunting. I think she’s a compassionate pessimist. She sees the worst possible outcomes in any situation as the most likely. No guaranteed, but certainly most likely. She doesn’t want a war, in that case, because if you look at the Circle’s revolution from a pessimistic angle, the most probable outcomes are either ‘a bunch of people die, and then everything goes back to Square One anyway’ or ‘a bunch of people die, and then Southern Thedas becomes like Tevinter’. The rebellion early on already causes a lot of death, and destruction, and leads to things like the mass kill of Tranquil mages for nefarious purposes. Vivienne genuinely hates this.

Now, mages and Tranquil were already suffering under the existing system - that’s kind of the whole point of the rebellion. But it’s understandable that Vivienne herself has moved far enough away from Circle life, and is accustomed enough to those kinds of horrors, that I don’t think she’s considering the factor of ‘people were already suffering and dying, they were just doing it more quietly and where fewer people could see’. And that makes sense, to me, because people are often expected to just overlook certain kinds of suffering as inevitable. Since she was taken to the Circle, Vivienne has learned that magic is a threat, and I think that’s also why she uses so many ‘villainess’ trappings, despite not being in any way villainous. She has had to balance the perception of her - and all mages - as inherently dangerous, inherently threatening, with the need to seem skillfully dangerous (because if magic is dangerous and being talented in it is still the only way to get ahead, what else can she be?), and also totally reasonable, and not at all inclined to step out of line.

Like. Holy shit. No wonder she and Solas are the best companions at understanding how stressful being Inquisitor probably is.

But back to the matter of her compassion, I think explains a lot about how Vivienne wants to go about things. Because she does want to shift the balance of power between mages and templars, but she wants to do it in a way that’s virtually unnoticeable to the general public. She wants to keep the templars, and the Circle, and the same titles and systems for the most part. But she wants to utterly nerf the templars’ behind-the-scenes authority, and hand it over to the enchanters instead. She’s aware that the majority of people in the south have no clue what goes on in the Circles, and she wants to turn that to her advantage, to assuage hysteria and panic by providing them the  balm of ‘no look see everything you know is entirely back to normal, here are the mages in their towers, here are the templars in their shiny armour, you just go back to planting turnips or whatever you were doing in your village’, and then just totally upend things in a way that even most nobles probably wouldn’t have to pay attention to.

Of course, to do that, she also needs to keep appearances just right. There can’t be other factions of mages sprouting up, because that will destroy the impression of chantry authority over them. And ultimately, I don’t think her plan would really work, because the system is too entrenched in favouring the templars and has too many inherent flaws - I don’t think you can keep the presentation of it, and change the back room dealings, and actually solve Thedas’ issue with mages. But you could make the every day lives of mages already in the Circle much better, and as with Orsino, I think Vivienne has prioritized that. She doesn’t want to see Bill-the-Mage-Who-Lights-Chantry-Candles or Bess-the-Tranquil-Shop-Assistant die in a bloody conflict, and her approach is actually better than a full-out revolution for preventing that.

So that’s really interesting to me, because I think one of the prevailing ideas about her is that her ambition is throwing other mages under the bus - that she wants to preserve the status quo because this is the system she’s mastered. But, while that might be part of it, I don’t think it’s the whole picture for her. She wants people to be safe. She wants to turn the templars into a pretence. She can’t escape the lesson she’s spent her whole life both learning and proving, which is that magic is a thing worth fearing. She’s very aware of just how precarious her own position is, all this while, not only in terms of this one event but also with regards to the future. A failed rebellion could spell her doom, signing on with the Inquisition is a gamble, she’s spent her whole life having to be charming, beautiful, approachable, formidable, to restrain her anger, but to rebuke anyone who tries to treat her as a doormat in ways that deter repeat offences without also inviting retribution onto herself. She’s masterful at dancing on the head of a pin, but it’s also brutally unfair that she has to. And one can only wonder what kinds of things she’d be doing in Thedas if she didn’t have to devote 50% of her energy to not being killed at any given moment, or rather, if she hadn’t had to spend her whole life doing that.