#anyways. david gaider and lukas kristjanson my enemies

[jzargo]

Grey Wardens and Broodmothers

So, around a year ago, back on my main blog (before I'd quarantined everything over here) I made a post about how poorly thought out the role of female Wardens was, especially considering the horrific revelation of what Broodmothers are (and the implication that female Wardens would become them if they went down into the Deep Roads and were captured). Since then, I've received replies and comments all claiming, to similar extent, the same thing:

"The Joining makes Wardens immune to the Taint, and Wardens are infertile anyways"

And I'm here to say....neither of these things are true, and female Wardens are at risk of becoming Broodmothers.

So, let's unpack this.

The Joining doesn't make the Wardens immune to the Taint so much as it does give them a very slow exposure to it. It will eventually turn the Wardens into a full-fledged ghoul, the process just takes longer. This is why they respond to the Calling by going into the Deep Roads and dying an honorable death: it's preferable to slowly turning into a Ghoul and joining the Darkspawn hordes. It's reasonable to then infer that this could be accelerated by the process that potential Broodmothers undergo (as that is a much more horrific and invasive process than typical Taint exposure). And even if the Joining made female Wardens immune to becoming Broodmothers, this needed to be said in-game in no uncertain terms, not left to inference.

Wardens are not made entirely infertile by the Joining. It makes them less likely to conceive children, but they still can have children. David Gaider himself has said this (on the now-deleted bioware social forums) "A Grey Warden can have a child… just not with another Grey Warden...Grey Wardens have a limited chance of conception with a non-Grey Warden, but it does happen" And, again, even normal, non-Warden women do not produce babies at the rate that Broodmothers do. Whatever happens during the transition to Broodmother does something to majorly boost fertility in the victim. It is, again, reasonable to assume that this process could entirely circumvent whatever lowered fertility rate female Wardens have.

And this is the most damning piece of information I found...David Gaider himself, when asked this very question, admitted he hadn't thought of whether or not a female warden could become a Broodmother, but acknowledged it was a possibility.

Q: Do Grey Wardens still do the Calling, now that they know about Broodmothers? That was a really terrifying revelation in the first game "Oh my god, any women who are down here in the Deep Roads get taken off to spawn horrible monsters!" DG: They always knew about Broodmothers, but they didn't know where Broodmothers came from. Knowing that…wow, I hadn't really considered whether they'd stop doing the Calling. I think if anything it makes it more problematic for female Wardens to do the Calling. That may be something we could incorporate into the future. It'd be an interesting question. Let's say a female Grey Warden starts to hear her Calling and says "Well, my time has come" and the rest of the Wardens say no, you can't go. You're a woman. You don't deserve to take part in what has been long, for many centuries, held as an honorable tradition, as a way for the Grey Wardens to go out in a way where they retain…I don't know if you read The Calling, the novel. The reason they do the Calling is because there's a tipping point at which the corruption in them starts to affect them physically, so rather than become some kind of ghoul they want to die while they still have their humanity, doing what they've spent the majority of their life dedicated to, killing darkspawn, one last hurrah. To go to a woman and say "No, you can't have this honorable ending because of what might happen to you." I think that would be an interesting story. I think in the end it might be up to the individual Warden. I could definitely see a female Warden who would rather kill herself than allow for the possibility that she could be transformed into a Broodmother.

So, in short, my original point still stands. They writers (or at least David Gaider, and very likely Lukas Kristjanson, who wrote the A Paragon of Her Kind questline) did not think about the implications of this. They should have. They should have let female wardens unpack this horrific information they receive, either with Alistair or Riordan when they find him.

If they've since added something to the lore, if they've retconned this entirely, if a new World of Thedas book has confirmed female wardens do something different than going into the Deep Roads, that's great. They should have thought about that when first writing this, though.

And what's especially infuriating is it almost seems like they're alluding to it when a female warden first meets Alistair! He outright says "I always wondered why there were so few women in the Wardens." It would be so easy to circle back to that off-hand comment he makes that originally just seems like the writers being a little sexist (which, it is).

So. Yeah. Female Wardens can become Broodmothers. The writers did not think about the implications of this.

God I hope we don't see any in Veilguard.