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thewardenisonthecase · 23 days ago

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Ungrateful - part 2

King!Alistair x Queen!Cousland

Part 1 here.

Read on AO3

A/N: I don't love this but its the best I can offer.

Anneliese was in the training courtyard, sparring with some of the new guards they recently recruited, when Teagan approached her, a worried look on his face.

“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, Your Majesty, but you must come with me.” He said. “It’s an emergency.”

She turned to the guards, telling them to keep on training, before nodding and following Teagan. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing yet, but it will soon if you don’t intervene.” He said, as they hurried down the halls. From afar, Anneliese started to hear shouting.

“Is that-”

“Alistair and Eamon, yes. I don’t know how it started, but they’ve been at it for some time.”

Anneliese stopped and put a hand on her forehead. “Oh Maker, I know what it is.” She sighed. “Teagan, I think its best if I go alone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Just…make sure no one else approaches the King’s study, yes? I’ll handle this.”

“Of course.” He nodded and walked away, and soon, Anneliese sprinted, the sound of shouting getting louder and louder.

She stopped right in front of the door, taking a moment to catch her breath before nodding to the guard as he opened it and she stepped into the room.

“What in the Maker’s name is going on here?” She said, loud enough for the two men to stop and look at her.

Anger was written all over Alistair’s face as Eamon just shook his head, looking down.

The elder man spoke. “Your Majesty, I think it would be best if you left-”

“No.” Alistair cut him off harshly. “She’s going to stay and you’re going to repeat everything you’ve told me to her.”

“Alistair-”

“Don’t ‘Alistair’ me. If you’re brave enough to say all that to me, surely, you can say them to my wife.”

Eamon looked at her, eyes almost pleading for help. Anneliese turned to Alistair and walked towards him. She put a hand on his back, before turning to Eamon. “What is it that you told him?” She feigned innocence.

The old man sighed before straightening his back. “I only made a suggestion, Your Majesty. One that would benefit the future of Ferelden.”

“Oh, please.” Alistair said. “When you put it like that, it sounds like you’re suggesting to have the Empress of Orlais over for dinner and not…” He stopped himself, taking a deep breath. “And not that I replace you with another, just to have a child.” He said, looking at Anneliese.

Anneliese sucked in a breath. So, Eamon had done what she insisted he wouldn’t and just as she assumed, it had all blown up. Great.

She looked at it. “Is it true, Eamon? You’d suggest such a thing.”

“Yes.” He said. “I know that you love each other, but this is about the future of Ferelden. You have no heirs, and it is your duty-”

“Enough.” Alistair interrupted him once again. “I already gave you my answer. If you want to keep any goodwill I still have of you, you’ll stop with this conversation. Anneliese’s brother has sons, if we fail to produce a child, I’ll pronounce them as my heirs.”

“But the Theirin bloodline-”

“I don’t give a damn about this bloodline! I don’t care about it, it can die with me if the other option is letting go of the one person who’s ever cared about me.”

“Alistair.” Anneliese whispered, putting a hand on his cheek. He sighed, turning to her before rubbing his forehead. “Eamon.” She said. “This topic is over.”

“I-” he sighed in resignation, dropping his head. “Of course.”

She nodded, and turned to Alistair. “Let us go somewhere else.”

He nodded and followed her outside.

They were in Alistair’s room, Anneliese leaned on the bed frame as he paced back and forth.

“You’re going to dig a hole in the ground if you keep with this, love.”

He stopped to look at her. “I’m sorry, it’s just…I cannot believe he would even dare to suggest such a thing. After you’ve done for him.” He walked to her. “Though, you’re taking this better than I expected.”

She looked at him. “I already knew about it, Alistair.”

“What?! How?”

“Zevran intercepted a letter for me, one in which Eamon spoke of you divorcing me and remarrying someone capable of carrying a child.”

She could see by the look on his face that he had even more questions, but he only shook his head and asked “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

Anneliese sighed. “I had hoped that Eamon would come to his senses. I urged him to not bring this topic with you but it is clear he did not listen.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I know that, despite everything, you still care about Eamon. I did not want your relationship with him to be jeopardized because of me.”

Alistair’s gaze softened as he looked at her. Truth be told, he and Eamon had not been on the best terms for quite some time. He felt that Eamon still treated him like a child with mud on his face asking for help while Eamon felt that Alistair never listened to him. It was only a matter of time until it all came to a head.

But he appreciated that Anneliese still thought of his feelings in such a delicate situation. The Maker knew how much the topic of pregnancy - or a lack of it - hung over both of their heads, and how much it pained her.

“You know,” She broke the silence, interlacing her fingers with his “at least there was something good to come out of this.”

“Really?” He raised a brow. “And what would that be?”

“Now I know that you truly are never getting rid of me.” She smirked.

“You had doubts?” He said, dramatically.

She smiled. “I wouldn’t say doubts, but maybe-”

“Let me make it very clear then.” He interrupted her. “You’re stuck with me forever, young lady, whether you want to or not.” Alistair said, before tackling her on the bed, placing kisses all over her face as she laughed.

“Alistair!” She breathed as he stopped to look in her eyes. “What was that for?”

“Clearly, I’ve been doing a poor job of showing how much I love you, if you were questioning that. I’m fixing that.”

Anneliese chuckled, playing smacking his chest. “You idiot.”

“True, but I’m your idiot.” He leaned in for a kiss.

She smirked. “Of that, I have no doubt.”

Thanks for reading! If you liked this fic, please consider reblogging it and leaving a comment, they're extremely appreciated!

#alistair theirin #alistair x warden #alistair x female cousland #alistair x cousland #king alistair #queen cousland #dao #dragon age origins #dao fic #aliwarden #anneliese cousland #arl eamon #small teagan cameo

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laurelsofhighever · 1 year ago

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Hey, just saw your fic with Maric x Serving Girl Alistair's Mother. I read your author's notes on Ao3, and were you hinting at conflicting information on Alistair's mother's identity? Or is my tired brain misinterpreting? I'm all for writing whatever you want, go nuts, no problem with the fic. But this peaked my interest, because I've never heard of anything disputing Fiona, given 'The Calling' novel. Does it have to do with there being no acknowledgement in DAI if you have Alistair and Fiona at Skyhold at the same time? Any information or clarification you provide would be appreciated. I always loved Maric.

Hi Nonny! This has consumed my entire evening and I hope you’re prepared for the splurge about to be unleashed. Thank you for the ask! The disclaimer at the top of the fic is there because historically the subject of Alistair’s mother has been a… charged subject, for reasons that I won’t get into now because it’s not really relevant to your ask and I don’t have a horse in that specific race.

However, if you look into canon, there is indeed a bunch of conflicting information about the identity of Alistair’s mother – or rather, there’s a bunch of information that conflicts with the Word of God confirmation from David Gaider that Fiona is Alistair’s mother. Which… is also not exactly true. In an interview from 2014 when asked specifically about it, he said (after a long, weary sigh), “I never actually meant for it to be a thing … I thought the book was fairly obvious and then people were asking and I just never confirmed it … it comes up in the game and I will leave it at that” (timestamp starting 35:28 if you want to check it out yourself). Thing is, it doesn’t come up in the game, either in DA:O or in DA:I – which may be the game he’s referring to, since the interview is mostly to hype its release. It isn’t clear.

We do come close to getting in-game evidence for Fiona: in DA:I, the Inquisitor can ask her about her past, and if you read between the lines there is wistfulness there, and she’s sorry he dies, but her comments about it being “too late” to know him could just as easily be taken as being about her time as a Grey Warden if you haven’t read The Calling (TC) – she never comes out and directly says it, and we never witness a conversation between them, even if he’s a Warden presumably curious about how she became immune to the Calling (I have thoughts about this, but we’ll get to that later). In the DA:O end slides, it says someone orders an investigation into Alistair’s parentage that comes back “inconclusive” – but even without the dubious canon of the end slides (given that some, like Cullen’s, got heavily retconned in later games) this is a shaky piece of evidence at best that Alistair’s mother was anyone other than a servant. An inquest is politically motivated, after all, and would have been more concerned with his connection to Maric than the identity of his mother.

So where does this leave us? Well, we could go in circles debating what should count as canon or not, which isn’t entirely useful because people can draw lines in the sand wherever they like to make the points they want. We could argue that BioWare is really good at retconning and muddling its own lore and that the simplest explanation – that the devs made a mistake in some of the details and no one caught it – is the most likely, and that caring about it more than Gaider obviously does (with his well-known dislike of Alistair as a character) is kind of a waste of time.

Unfortunately, you’ve asked me about it, so what we’re actually going to do is go through every relevant piece of Dragon Age media, assume it is all canon, and weigh the evidence in the text to try and offer some clarification. Where things contradict, I will give more weight to the version that targets the broadest possible audience, i.e. the games > the books and novels. Where things contradict within the games, I’ll be considering which source of information is more authentic and direct within the game’s context, i.e. Alistair should know more about his history than a tavernkeep who’s listening to rumours.

Having said this, let’s start with TC, where all of our problems begin. In the last scene of this book, Fiona introduces Maric to a baby she says is theirs, and asks him to find it a home where it can be free of the stigmas of being the child of an elven mage. Fair enough. However, as conspiracy-brained as this is going to sound, there is no direct evidence to confirm that this baby is Alistair, and one or two things that suggest it isn’t. I’m not so shallow in my literary analysis that I count the fact that the baby is never named as one of those pieces of evidence. That would just be petty. Far more compelling is:

Timing: TC is set after Queen Rowan’s death. There’s some quibble about dates in World of Thedas and whether it was supposed to be set in 9:10 or 9:14 bur really that’s a numbers game and it’s beside the point, because it’s built into the plot that Maric decides to go with the Grey Wardens specifically because he’s feeling depressed and reckless through grief for Rowan. This is important because, as gets mentioned quite a few times in DA:O, Alistair was hidden in Redcliffe because Rowan was still alive. This is a conflict of information, and as already stated, games > novels.

There’s no amulet: Giving Alistair his mother’s amulet is a pretty significant moment in DA:O. It’s all he has of hers, and it’s something that ties them together narratively. If this was all meant to wrap up neatly, then the least Gaider could have done would have been to mention Fiona taking off her Andrastian amulet and gifting it to Alistair to be something of hers he can keep even when she’s not with him anymore. The fact that this doesn’t happen makes this scene emotionally empty when we know he got an amulet from a person whom he considered to be his mother. If not Fiona, then where did it come from?

'“He’s human,” [Maric] exclaimed out loud': if there’s one thing a lot of DA fans can agree on, it’s that “human/elf hybrids are totally human” is bullshit. It’s not how genetics works, it has some yikes implications considering how heavily the devs took inspiration from oppressed minorities to create the elves, and it’s not a plot point that’s ever used in an interesting way (we will get to Michel de Chevin in a moment). It’s also not true. In DA2 there is an entire series of quests about a character named Feynriel, who was born to a Dalish mother and a human father, and who is visibly part-elven. He has points on his ears! He has facial proportions halfway between the humans and elves in the game! He’s rejected by both sides of his family because of it! Now, there is also Michel de Chevin, who in The Masked Empire (TME) is revealed to have an elven mother, but this is never mentioned when he appears in DA:I, and is kind of a non-issue in the novel as well. This is the most nebulous piece of evidence by far, as it relies by default on picking which bits of material are canon, which I've already said we’re not doing here, and to be honest the physical differences between elves and humans are only really noticeable in DA2 where there was an effort made to make them look deliberately nonhuman.

Except for the timeline of the book, the evidence in TC is circumstantial. We get to more definite evidence in Until We Sleep (UWS), the third volume in The Silent Grove comics storyline, where Alistair gets to meet and talk with a dream version of his father, Maric. When Alistair asks his father to come home, Maric says, “I had a life. The people I love are all here – Cailan, your mother, Loghain… none of them are in the real world any longer, are they?” (A+ parenting there btw). Since this series takes place before DA:I, Fiona is definitely still alive, so Maric can’t be talking about her. Also, it’s interesting to note that this too is written by David Gaider, so it’s not a case of writers being at cross-purposes or not getting any intra-office memos. There are continuity mistakes in these comics, but these are mostly confined to the fact that neither Alistair nor Isabella match their in-game appearances – and remember, the games have more weight than the comics. Having said that, it does conflict with the "official" story.

With all this said, let’s come to the other beginning of all our problems, most people’s proper introduction to Alistair’s character, DA:O. In this game, it is a significant plot point that Alistair is the son of a servant from Redcliffe: it is explicitly stated in Alistair’s codex entry, and furthermore, it is something that multiple characters assert is true, including Loghain and Alistair himself.

First, Loghain. If you spare him at the Landsmeet, he joins your party and has dialogue options that talk about Alistair and why he was kept at Redcliffe. According to him, Maric nearly acknowledged Alistair, but “had more than his honour to think of”, namely the effect it would have had on Rowan and Cailan (implied: how that would have affected political stability in a Ferelden still recovering from the Orlesian Occupation). He points out that Alistair "would have been a continual reminder to Rowan of Maric’s infidelity”, which as mentioned above, means that she would have still been alive when Alistair was born.

As for Alistair, yes he was a baby at the time so doesn’t really have an objective viewpoint, and it’s not confirmed whether the person he considers his mother died in childbirth or just in his early years – the codex entry says “when he was young”, he says “when I was born”. Nevertheless, it’s clear he’s asked questions about her because he knows roughly who she was and what she did, and also at some point learnt the name and rough location of the person his entire companion quest (and Fade dream) revolves around.

Let’s talk about Goldana.

Really, she is the biggest wrench in the certainty that Fiona is Alistair’s mother, because there’s no way to square away that fact with her existence, and by extension the existence of the servant in Redcliffe who was her (and Alistair’s) mother. But what if she’s just an exceptional liar, thinking she could make a quick sovereign out of the king’s bastard by playing along? It’s possible. However:

When you take Alistair to meet her, she’s the one who brings up Maric (“I said the babe was the king’s, and they told me he was dead, and gave me a coin to shut my mouth”) – Alistair until that point has only mentioned his mother and that she worked in Redcliffe Castle. If she was hedging her bets, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to accuse him of being Eamon’s bastard?

If she were talking nonsense, why would “they” bribe her with hush money? It would be very easy for someone as powerful as Arl Eamon to dismiss or debunk such claims, and he shouldn’t care what a random servant’s kid has to say – unless there’s a kernel of truth in it that he doesn’t want anyone looking at more closely

On that same note, why would “they” tell her the baby was dead if it wasn’t, if it was just some random’s kid? Either there’s an entirely separate baby that Goldana believes for some mysterious reason was fathered by the king, which Alistair – actually fathered by the king – replaced at just the right age that nobody noticed, or they’re the same baby. One of these options is far more plausible than the other

If she’s that good at lying, why is she still just a washerwoman living in a hovel and asking three copper per load? She should be running Denerim!

Facetiousness aside, Goldana’s story confirms that at the very least there was a serving girl in Redcliffe Castle who had a baby at roughly the same time that Alistair was born, and that for whatever reason, she was connected enough to Maric that multiple people in the castle suspected he was the father (and resented Alistair because of it). If this was an entirely separate baby, then it makes Maric an absolute shit of a person to have taken one son and used him to replace one that had just died in childbirth. Either that or a complete idiot for sending his actual son to a place where he’s rumoured to have a son and deciding that’s a secure hiding place – because you can’t tell me Eamon wasn’t aware of what was going on under his own roof. Even the fact that Alistair himself knows and was aware of it from a young age suggests that it wasn’t a very well-kept secret.

So where does all this leave us? From here, things get a little more suppositional, a little more Doylist, and a lot more subjective. To start with, taking into account all of the above evidence, if Fiona is Alistair’s mother, then his arrival at Redcliffe relies on a – I would say – plot-breaking set of contrivances.

1: Fiona, somehow cured of the darkspawn taint enough to have a child, arrives in Denerim with Alistair, who isn’t old enough to be weaned yet, asking for somewhere to put him that won’t draw attention. She does this after walking pretty much all the way across Thedas even though, as mentioned in TC, the Wardens already have procedures in place for fostering children born to their ranks, presumably ones that don’t involve so much steady exercise.

2: Instead of using his kingly resources to track down a woman in Denerim who has recently given birth and telling her to take on an extra kid, Maric decides to send the baby to the other end of the country, to the house of an unmarried nobleman who will definitely not stir any gossip if he shows up on his own doorstep with an infant he wants someone to care for. Where did the baby come from? Don’t ask. Are you happy that everyone will think this kid is your bastard? I’m sure it’s a decision that won’t have any negative consequences for me in the future. But you are going to tell everyone he’s your bastard to keep up the ruse, right? No, now stop asking questions.

2: Luckily, there’s a woman in Eamon’s household who has recently given birth, or is at least close to it, and they can substitute? add? this baby to that baby without having to pay her off, because she’s an employee. The bait ‘n’ switch is timed so perfectly that no one notices that there are in fact two babies, or that the baby is suddenly several months older than it was before (truly, a medical miracle). Unless they’re exactly the same age, in which case what are the odds.

3: Somehow, despite all the secrecy, this woman’s other child knows that the baby is the king’s and won’t shut up about it, to the point where someone has to pay her off and send her packing. But that’s all unnecessary, because the woman – and her original baby I guess? – both die and leave no witnesses.

4: Rowan still manages to be mad about this and everyone is worried for her reputation despite having been dead for two years.

It’s a level of convolution that does not exist with the alternative, which has been pretty common since forever in the real world: powerful man sees pretty woman, decides he’ll have that, doesn’t want to face the consequences, makes everyone miserable in the process. Alistair’s mother being an ordinary person caught up in the orbit of someone she can’t resist is so much more narratively coherent, if significantly less romantic.

And this is where we get into the biggest problem that I have with Fiona-as-Alistair’s-mother: it has no payoff. These are fictional people, structure is important for narrative, and while I’m not saying that every little thing has to have purpose or direction, a pretty significant amount of Alistair’s character arc in DA:O is wiped away if his mother isn’t who he thinks it is. His story is about social class and identity and whether legacy is even worth it: Fiona’s identity means nothing to him, and that’s not something that ever changes. In DA:I she looks a bit sad when she mentions him, but there’s no work ever done to explore that, or to explore how Alistair might feel if his mother is actually alive but abandoned him, and how awkward that makes things for him if he’s king. OR to have him hear that she’s now immune to the taint and be just a little bit curious about how that came about. There’s no conversation, no status quo shift. Instead, the devs rely on the fans who know this metatextual fact to do the emotional heavy lifting for them and extrapolate the consequences they don’t want to deal with themselves.

It is lazy writing.

In some cases I also think it becomes a prop that invalidates the point of his character arc – and even breaks the worldbuilding a little, turning what was originally a struggle to forge an identity separate from people’s expectations, into a straight case of nepotism. The two most egregious examples?

Is he able to use templar abilities without lyrium because anyone with enough training and discipline can do it, and the lyrium is just the Chantry’s way of keeping its army leashed and loyal? Nope, it’s because he’s special because his mummy was a mage and it gave him special latent mage powers. That’s far more interesting than examining the ramifications of a religious order using addiction and brainwashing to make sure its soldiers will commit atrocities without question.

Is he a Warden because of his strength of will and determination to survive, chosen from the ranks of the other potential recruits because he had a spark of something that Duncan knew would be valuable in the fight against the darkspawn? Nope, it’s because his mummy was a Grey Warden and gave him special taint immunity powers, and also she was best friends with the current Warden-Commander so he was picked even though there were better fighters among the potentials competing that day. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that all Wardens secretly have Warden blood already because that would be ridiculous, it’s just Alistair who needed that extra leg-up because otherwise he’d be useless at everything.

I promised myself I would rein in the sarcasm but from a storytelling perspective it really annoys me that this shift turns him from an ordinary person into the specialest boy in the world, because it denies him his agency and takes the teeth out of his achievements. I’m not even going to get into how it lets BioWare off the hook for representation, insisting he is half-elven and taking a gold star when he’s never identifiable in-world as a member of an oppressed minority, and it never has any bearing on how he views the world or how it views him. It feels like it’s giving the devs far more credit than they deserve, especially when the effort they put into this (minimal as it was) could have gone into giving Zevran more to say on this. exact. subject. He’s right there, and he is perfect for exploring this aspect of the worldbuilding when he isn't being overlooked.

This is getting a little ranty now so I’ll wrap it up with thanks for your patience, Nonny, if you’ve made it this far. What’s the conclusion? At the end of the day, people can make up their own minds with their own reasoning, all I’ve attempted to do here is lay out the various threads untangled from the snarl that is BioWare’s incomparable ability to fuck up their own lore. Personally, I think Alistair’s mother being an ordinary servant makes his journey and the themes of his character arc more compelling wherever he ends up, and I like that this means his parentage is a facet of his identity rather than the only interesting thing about him. I also think the weight of evidence in DA:O, the game where he’s first introduced, is greater than in a tacked-on scene at the end of a tie-in novel written by a guy who seemed to just think it was a good idea at the time. But hey, I’m not the authority.

However, if there’s one solid takeaway from this then here it is: don’t give BioWare more credit than they deserve, don’t do their work for them, and especially don’t assume they’re leading us down a merry path with super-secret truths for enlightened minds only when the simpler explanation is that no one stopped (in this instance) David Gaider getting carried away.

#dragon age #dragon age meta #bioware critical #dragon age: origins #dragon age: inquisition #the calling #dragon age 2 #alistair theirin #maric theirin #alistair's mother #arl eamon #teyrn loghain

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