Before even getting into the conversation with Bhelen, I wanted to highlight this line from Vartag after you complete the first task: “It’s touching to see how strong your love is for your brother.” This one sentence encapsulates so much of what is insidious and heart-wrenching about going back to Orzammar. Whether Dru still loves her brother or not, it is enough to mock her for having once loved him and for whatever lingering sentimentality has compelled them to be his errand boy just for the chance of talking to him again.
(Because why else would she do it? Dwarven politics is at once so impersonal and indifferent and oh so intimate and violent, so Vartag doubts that Dru could be helping Bhelen out for any other reason than their familial bonds.)
Bhelen: Well, who would have imagined... My big sibling, back from the dead, and calling herself a Grey Warden.
Dru walked back into her family home for the first time in months, and Bhelen immediately grabbed the knife he had left in her back and twisted it in deeper. I’ve already made two posts about the dissonance that Dru is experiencing between her new identity as a Warden and her old identity as Princeps Aeducan, and that was before Bhelen threw that dissonance in their fucking face.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe Dru is just calling themself a Warden. Maybe it’s all play-acting, just like when they were the princeps.
Dru: Why did you do it, Bhelen? What did I ever do to you?
Bhelen: You’d have acted against me in a heartbeat if I hadn’t done it first. The same way you turned everyone in the Assembly against Trian. The same way our father--may the ancestors bless him--convinced his elder brother to enter a Proving against a convicted murderer. Who do you think gave the murderer the poison to put on his blade?
Dru: You’re wrong. I never plotted against you or Trian.
Low blow number fucking two. If Dru wasn’t on their back foot and desperate given how Bhelen opened the conversation, they are now. As much as the bloodlust of Orzammar politics has always seemed quotidian to them, they didn’t know that particular unsavory detail about their father killing his brother.
They’ve also just spent a couple of hours running around the Diamond Quarter and the Commons hearing all about how Bhelen is different and wants to do dwarven politics differently, why can’t he be different about this too? Why, indeed, didn’t he consider that Dru would be different about it too-- would be eager to set aside the conspiracy and subterfuge and death otherwise inherent in their politics?
Bhelen: You should thank me then.
But no. Bhelen’s desire to reform stops short of his ambition and power lust, and then he has the audacity to tell Dru she should thank him. For exiling her!!!
Bhelen: [pontificating about how a king needs to be ruthless] Neither you nor Harrowmont is that king.
The most aching thing is: he’s right!!! And, beyond the scope of his own bloodthirst, he’s right more generally: he is a progressive, radical, and decisive leader that neither Harrowmont nor Dru ever would be.
Dru knows he’s right. They never wanted to be the monarch of Orzammar, and in the months since their exiled, they’ve certainly rationalized to themself that Bhelen would probably do the best job of their siblings despite the means by which he took that job.
It’s not that he’s wrong. It’s that the one thing Dru wants so desperately to hear from her brother is something approximating an apology: some feeble acknowledgement of those means and their cost and the pain they caused her even if she’s happier for it.
As the player, I wanted to go with a dialogue option that expressed that agreement. I was hoping for something a bit more direct (along the lines of “Well, at least that’s something we can agree on”). What I picked was:
Dru: I guess I can’t blame you for playing a wining hand.
I’m sure there are some Wardens for whom this is an expression of a genuine admiration for Bhelen’s guile. It is immensely fucking hollow for Dru. They have spent the whole damn game telling themself this: that they don’t really blame Bhelen for what he did, not because they would do the same thing in his place, but because it gave her the life she always wanted for herself.
And when she had to confront Trian in the Temple of Sacred Ashes, she also had to confront for the first time that that wasn’t true.
When she says this, she’s trying to prompt Bhelen to disagree with her. At this point, she’s given up on an apology! But some inkling of remorse, some faint recognition of their suffering, even just a recognition of them! Just s o m e t h i n g from the brother they lived and grew up alongside.
And how does Bhelen respond?
Bhelen: And I guess you’ve finally learned something about politics.
When I tell you that I, the player, almost started crying! It’s so cruel and so unfair I want to scream into a pillow about it!!! Dru never asked for any of this! They didn’t want the burden of royal responsibility, and they certainly didn’t want the cutthroat death sentence it came with. She spends the first half of this entire conversation trying to connect with Bhelen and meet him on some common familial grounds, and he mocks and disdains her throughout for those very efforts.
It breaks my fucking heart, and that’s before the younger sibling smugness of it all makes me want to punch his fucking teeth in. I’m not gonna type up the rest of the convo, but I wanted to highlight two more moments because they pile onto the slimy awful insidiousness of this whole reunion.
The first is:
Dru: I thought you were such a strong ruler, Bhelen.
Bhelen: I can hold my throne, thank you. But I cannot hold it and send the troops you need. Or do you take back that request? ... I didn’t think so.
And the second is:
Dru: Just point me at [Jarvia] and your trouble’s over
Bhelen: Your eagerness is charming.
I--------- /muffled incoherent screeching/ THE FUCKING CONDESCENSION OF IT ALL Bhelen knows he has what Dru wants as much as he knows that they’re not going to go to Harrowmont for help, so he can dangle his help over her fucking head.
It’s just such a different tone than what you get with the other treaty quests. In both the Circle and the Brecilian Forest, your interactions are more... mutual? The mages and the Dalish will not help you until you help them, but they’re fighting for survival. Bhelen tells you point blank: I do not need your help, but you need mine, and I’m going to be such a smarmy DICK ABOUT IT.
He spends the entire conversation talking down to Dru, and it leaves her desperate and unmoored and angry, and they go get shitfaced in Tapster’s before going to Dust Town.
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