Quote Originally Posted by Mr.Silver View Post
That doesn't mean it's not a tragedy, just that's it not a specific type of tragedy. 'Classical tragedy' (where the suffering of the protagonist is a result of their action of mistake) does not account all forms of tragedy, which is why there are works that do, in fact, consist of bad things happening to the protagonist in spite of what they do (e.g. Grave of the Fireflies). Trying to argue otherwise is akin to claiming that something can only be a comedy if it follows the conventions of a farce.
I dunno, I think the medium changes things a little. If the point of a tragedy is to make the audience feel sad or depressed, DA2's "tragedies" fails at doing this precisely because of the player's lack of agency.

They always happen while:

- You're away and you don't learn it even happened until it's far too late to do anything about it. See Mother's kidnapping, the Viscount's death, Shamus's death, Carver/Bethany's death, and the chantry blowing up.

- You're stuck standing around like an idiot because you're in cutscene mode and not allowed to do anything but watch. See the Qunari's initial attack, Bartrand's escape, and the Qunari hostages being executed.


Only very rarely are you allowed to actually try to affect the course of events in some way, but in every single case you either never see the results or the results are overwritten by writer fiat later on, sometimes immediately after. The only people whose lives you're able to actually improve and then see the effects of this improvement are your companions.


I never really felt bad about what happened in DA2 because I was never responsible for what went wrong. The most emotional investment I could possibly have is in emphasizing with the NPCs, and good luck with that. I could sortof get into Merrill and Aveline (at least until Act 2 where her character arc just sputters out and dies) but no one else, really.