Darkspawn of the Devil
You fire up Dragon Age: Origins, and immediately enter into that traditional video game rite of passage: the character creator. The first decision you must make in this game of many decisions is what your character’s gender will be. To help you choose, Origins provides a short but intriguing insight into its world: men and women are generally regarded as equal, with the same roles being available to both. Good, you think as you choose to be female, hopefully this means that my ability to hero won’t be impeded by any sexist buffoonery.
After selecting the human noble origin (because unless you’re really into magic, why would you pick anything else?) you make your character a face and then set them free into Origins’ home turf of Thedas. Immediately, you are met with not one, but two separate attempts to coax you into an arranged marriage. Fortunately, the player character is put through this same nonsense even if male, so Origins’ claim of equality holds up thus far.
Soon, it all goes a bit pear-shaped for your character, and after some betrayal and battling, you escape as the apparent sole survivor of your family line with the help of a skilled fighter called Duncan. He’s the Commander of the Grey Wardens, an order of warriors who particularly excel at killing Darkspawn, the evil creatures that periodically threaten Thedas—and that just so happens to be what they’re doing at the moment. Duncan recruits you into his order and whisks you away to where the other Wardens are gearing up for battle. It is here you first meet future party member Alistair, a fellow Grey Warden. In his opening conversation with you, he happens to notice the fact you are a woman, and thusly comments upon it, wondering why it is he hasn’t really encountered many women in the Grey Wardens. You can give him a snarky reply, or you can pull a classic ‘I’m not like the other girls’. What you can’t do, though, is get a proper answer. The Grey Wardens are a secretive organisation, so there’s no way you, the newest recruit, have any idea why it’s a bit of a sausage fest. Alistair, as a greenhorn himself, clearly doesn’t have a clue either. And it’s not like you can ask anyone else—everyone’s a bit focused on the coming battle in which, spoiler alert, all the other Grey Wardens die.
With a lot more pressing issues to deal with in the aftermath, it’s easy to forget about the apparent contradiction in Origins’ opening text and Alistair’s question. But despite the chaos my character was suddenly thrust into, I couldn’t push it out of my mind. Why had this game told me men and women were equal if the order that is the focus of the game itself isn’t actually equal? Alistair is only a junior member of the order when you meet him, but later conversations confirm he’s met plenty of other Wardens, so why weren’t any of them women? Duncan provably doesn’t discriminate, as you can start the game as any one of its three races, in any kind of social position—he’ll even hire criminals, given that he once was one himself. In fact, the whole Grey Warden order is supposedly an equal opportunities employer, with the only job criteria being the possession of great skill in battle. Why, then, is there not a 50/50 split of men to women? Why not even something close to that, like 60/40? Why are the Wardens equal in principle, but not in action?
I don’t know if there was something I missed in the opening stages of the game that could’ve explained this mystery, but I like to think there wasn’t. Not just so I don’t look like a fool for pondering it for so long, but so the reveal of the actual reason much, much later in the game is a lot more dramatic. About halfway through the game—or so it is intended to be—you journey to the dwarven city of Orzammar. The city is in the middle of a political crisis, and to help solve it, you need to venture into the Deep Roads to find a missing woman. The Deep Roads are ancient dwarven tunnel systems that extend far and wide under the surface of Thedas—they’re also where the Darkspawn hang out when they’re not on the surface wreaking havoc. After spending a good few hours hacking your way through the Deep Roads on your search for the missing woman, you finally come across one of the people the woman was with when she disappeared, Hespith. Unfortunately, after spending two whole years chilling with the Darkspawn, Hespith is a bit…different. You find her in a particularly fleshy corridor, muttering to herself about—you guessed it—flesh. It’s a bit hard to gather from her ramblings what exactly has happened to her, but grasping the gist of it is more than enough to disturb even the strongest of stomachs. The horror doesn’t stop there, though. Moving on from Hespith’s fleshy accommodation, you find yourself in an even bigger, even more flesh-covered room. Within it, you get a first-hand experience of just what had broken Hespith, and finally realise exactly why women are a rarity in the Grey Wardens. You come across, for the very first time, a broodmother.
Broodmothers are gargantuan, tentacled boob monsters. Don’t let that description fool you—they’re not your typical needlessly sexualised female boss monster. In this case, their breasts are an ugly reminder of the purpose they serve to the Darkspawn, like some kind of Freudian nightmare. These creatures are where all those Darkspawn you’ve been fighting are produced; they birth twenty to fifty toddler-like Darkspawn in each litter, and will have offspring in the thousands by the end of their lifespan. The most disturbing thing about the broodmothers, however, is the fact that they were once people. Or, more specifically, women.
By this point in the game, you’re well aware of the Darkspawn ‘taint’. This taint is a form of corruption or darkness, and can be passed on through blood or other fluids, or tainted objects. When a humanoid creature is afflicted by the taint, sometimes, instead of dying, they succumb to the much less pleasant fate of becoming a ghoul. Ghouls seek to serve the Darkspawn, sometimes by working for them as craftsmen, sometimes by fighting on their behalf, or sometimes by being a nice snack after a hard day’s work terrorising human villages.
However, these usually tend to be the options for male ghouls only. If you’ve put two-and-two together, you should be able to guess what happens to female ghouls. Yes, that’s right: they become broodmothers. The process of this transformation, though, only begins with contracting the taint. What happens after that is…not pleasant. If you don’t want to hear this stuff—and I don’t blame you, because curiosity will very much kill the cat—then skip this next paragraph. If you’re good to continue, though, then do.
To create new broodmothers, Darkspawn take women captive. Any race is fair game: humans, elves, dwarves, or Qunari. They then force-feed these women flesh. Any flesh is fair game: the flesh of other humanoids, the flesh of animals, or the flesh of Darkspawn. In the Awakening DLC, you even meet a broodmother who was forced to eat her own family. How delightful! But that’s not even the extent of it. These women are also force-fed—brace yourselves—the vomit of Darkspawn. Fortunately, that is the extent of it. The broodmother’s process of reproduction, though absolutely disgusting, stops short of anything sexual. It seems that consuming flesh is all that is required for a broodmother to produce Darkspawn. It also seems that broodmothers aren’t self-aware, which is a saving grace, if a very small one. The aforementioned broodmother you meet in the DLC has regained her sentience, which is the only reason she remembers what happened to her family (and she is understandably tortured by the memory to the point of wanting to be either returned to her comparatively blissful ignorance or destroyed outright). So, presumably, women forced to become broodmothers are at some point driven mad by the taint, and thus aren’t aware of what they’re being put through. At least I hope they’re not.
If you’re not already able to tell, the broodmothers disturb me to my very core. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a woman myself, and the mere concept of being forced to do such vile things to become such a vile thing makes me uncomfortable on a very physical, very personal level. I don’t doubt men would and do find the broodmothers disgusting and disturbing themselves, because they are meant to after all, but I do wonder if it’s to the same extent as I do. I haven’t had anyone to ask; I don’t know anyone else who’s played Dragon Age. I could ask someone, and simply describe to them the broodmothers as I have described them here, but I don’t want to expose people to the idea, just in case they feel as adverse to it as I do. I, admittedly, don’t have a particularly strong stomach for horror and gore and the like, but I can still easily imagine much more resilient women I know replying to my informing them about the broodmothers with ‘I wish you’d hadn’t told me that’. It’s a bit like that scene in Resident Evil 7. It’s so grotesque that you kind of don’t want to talk to people about it unless they’ve played through it themselves, because it’s the sort of mental picture one is better off never having.
The only ‘person’ I have talked to about the broodmothers is Sigrun. She’s a dwarven rogue you encounter in Origins’ Awakening DLC. She’s the last one left of her squad of soldiers, with the reason being that she ran away from a defeat. If you press her for the reason as to why she ran, she replies that she saw the Darkspawn taking women captive, and didn’t want to stick around for that. You can then tell her that this was a ‘good decision’—which, knowing what she was alluding to, I obviously did. She then addresses the topic more directly, as if affirmed by your understanding, and says that there are few things worse than death, but birthing Darkspawn day and night is one of them. That was a powerful line for me, and a key moment. After I first encountered the broodmother in Orzammar, I had to put the controller down, have a cup of tea, and try to process what I’d just discovered. All these questions I’d had about the game world finally had an answer, and it was horrible. Where did all the Darkspawn come from? Why, they were all birthed from enslaved women who’d been forced to do unspeakable things. Why were there variations in Darkspawn? Well, the Hurlocks come from human women, the Genlocks from dwarves, the Shrieks from elves, and the Ogres from Qunari—that explained why some types were rarer than others, too. It also meant that, for the rest of the game, every time I identified the kind of Darkspawn I was facing, I would think of the woman who birthed it. I couldn’t help it. I knew her race, now. I knew what she might’ve looked like, what society she might’ve lived in. Maybe she was a farmer’s wife, maybe she was an apostate mage, or maybe she was smith caste. Whoever she was, though, she was a person. And then the Darkspawn took her, and this was the result. Just another Hurlock stood in my way, waiting for me to slice it in two before I move onto the next one.
There was one final question to which the broodmothers were the answer, though. Why don’t the Grey Wardens have as many women as they do men? Well, for one, to join the Grey Wardens, you have to drink Darkspawn blood to gain their taint. Some recruits die during this process, but those who survive only live for a further 30 or so years before the taint eventually drives them to insanity, and threatens to make them a ghoul—for a woman, that’s the first step to becoming a broodmother. Regardless of that, though, allowing women into an order in which you are constantly facing Darkspawn carries a significant risk: if, somehow, the Darkspawn managed to get hold of a female Grey Warden, then that’s a free broodmother right there. By limiting the numbers of women, you lower that risk. Though it is a little paranoid, it is understandable. Just one broodmother can produce thousands of Darkspawn, so losing just one female Warden would mean thousands more Darkspawn to deal with, and to potentially lose more female Wardens to. If ever there was a good reason for nailing a ‘no girls allowed’ sign to your super-secret boys’ club official treehouse, this would be it.
And thus, the mystery of the Grey Wardens’ inequality ends with the terrifying truth that is the broodmothers. If there’s a lesson to be learnt, here, then perhaps it’s one of storytelling. The contradiction between Origins’ character creator text and Alistair’s question might not be obvious, but if you do notice it, the payoff is incredible. Though I am disgusted by the broodmothers, I am in awe of how their reveal is orchestrated. After spending hours in the Deep Roads, hearing Hespith’s muttering voice for the first time is a moment of relief: finally, you’ve found something relating to your mission here. You lower your guard—though Hespith clearly isn’t all there any more, at least she’s alive. Her ramblings are disturbing, but you can’t make enough sense of them to properly anticipate what’s waiting for you around the corner. The broodmother is a serious shock to your system, even if you hadn’t been pondering the same questions as I. If you had, though, then this reveal is a powerful moment. The game doesn’t tell you that this is why it seems like you’re the only female Warden in existence, but it gives you everything you need to put the answer together yourself. It’s a master stroke of storytelling that occurs in what is, at least for me, one of the more drudging sections of the game.
Perhaps, though, that’s not the real lesson here at all. Perhaps, what we can take away is this: the broodmothers are disturbing in ways beyond comprehension, and I needed to talk about that. Thank you for listening, you brave, foolish soul.
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