Dragon Age games lack agency, and that's the whole point

In 2014, I was having a string of dreams about my mother coming back from the dead wrong. Cancer took her life late in 2013, we were very close, I was deeply unprepared, it absolutely changed me forever — but the point is: the dreams. 

In the year after her death, my slumbering subconscious would bring up a "back home with family" scene, but it was as if my brain hadn't yet patched in the "dead mom" update. These routine dreams of spending time with family would at some point twist into surreal nightmares, as my still-in-process grief insisted there was a terrible reason why my mother should not be there, and invented an explanation. 

In 2014, I also played Dragon Age 2 for the first time, a game about Hawke, head of a refugee household consisting of their widowed mother and two siblings. Hawke's resolute attempts to put a solid roof overhead topple a line of dominos that eventually leads to the fall of a continent-wide social order — and leaves Hawke, which is to say, you, holding the bag. 

If you've played the game, you might already be wincing. Because among the many tragedies that befall Hawke in DA2, one of the more outrageous is a mid-game questline in which Hawke's mother is senselessly murdered, thrust into a hideous state of waking unlife, and then dies a second time in the hero's arms. And yet, I found a cutscene of Hawke cradling a Frankensteinéd body topped with their mother's decapitated head to be more… bracing than devastating. 

I'd played the whole sequence expecting it to end in a fantasy of heroism — arrival just in the nick of time, victory from jaws of defeat. What I got was something much more relatable, and not just because of the zombie stuff, although watching a character experience my literal nightmares probably helped. There was an immense relatability in watching even a very capable person realize that a terrible outcome was beyond their ability to change. Beyond anyone's ability to change. (OK, except for the evil necromancer turning women's body parts into a macabre golem of his dead wife… but you get me.)