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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   23844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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However, for those willing to sift through it, there is a lot there to like. Act two is easily the best part of it, with the qunari a fantastic depiction of the genuine appeal of fanatical religious asceticism. Sometimes I hear people wonder what drives people to support the Taliban, and the answer I want to give every time is, "play DA2". The Arishok and the qunari are deeply repulsive to liberal values. They preach strict conformity, obedience, and discipline. But they exist in a context where everything else is falling apart. In comparison to Kirkwall, they have solidarity with each other. They do not tear and bite at each other, as everyone else does. Each person works for the good of the whole, and each person is looked after. What hardship exists is shared, and when successes are achieved, they are also shared. The qunari have an aura of righteousness - they sit there above the strife, perhaps the only non-hypocritical faction in the city, issuing judgements of the degeneracy around them. They are an island of order in a sea of chaos and you can understand why people would choose them. You cannot choose them yourself, of course, but the Arishok's respect matters to me, and I care about winning it.

I appreciate that you made that emphasis of the appeal of ascetisim, because while I fully agree on how the Qunari present a coherent society that takes care of its own, the game also does a good job on letting you scratch a little deeper to see that, no, the Qunari are just as dysfunctional and failing a society as everyone else.'

The Qunari in DA2 are a shipwreck remnant because the supreme military authority of the state had to lead the pursuit for a relic-book, which in turn means the rest of the Qunari state is working without one of its three key leaders. The Qunari maintain a 100% non-defection rate by categorically re-categorizing all defectors as no-longer-Qunari, and thus not acknowledging or dealing with the issues driving the desertions. The Qunari, supposedly the most rational and scientific of all the peoples of the continent, are also the most primitive and superstitious when dealing with the subject of magic, indulging in superstitions such as cutting out the tongues of mages to prevent their words from spreading demonic possession, when everyone else inn the setting has known it doesn't work like that for millennia. Even in the penultimate act of Act 2, the takeover of the city, the Qunari variously are willing to walk away from the coup-that-could-cause-a-world-war if they get a book and a prisoner, or let their supreme leader fight a one-on-one duel to the death to decide.

The Qunari are interesting society, and they work well in part because they can point to how bad the rest of the setting is, but they're beyond fananticism and just stupid in their own right. But that contrast / pointing at the ills of the others really does demonstrate the appeal of ascetism, even if the proposed alternative is even worse.

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