Flutiebear: Rambling My Way Through Thedas

If you haven’t played DA2 or you haven’t played it in a while, you might be scratching your head at Varric’s tombstone in the Fade. “Becoming his parents”? Why would Varric be afraid of that? (I mean, besides the obvious fact that many children fear becoming their parents.)

In DA2, we learned that Varric’s family was once a Noble house in Orzammar, but they were kicked out because Big Daddy Andvar was fixing Provings (or dwarven duels of honor that are often used to settle political disputes and inter-house conflicts in Orzammar). Andvar took his family to the surface, and eventually they settled in Kirkwall.

The Tethras family never got over the loss. Andvar died five years after reaching the surface for unspecified reasons. After he passed, his wife, Ilsa, smoke and drank herself to death.

Bartrand was a young boy when the family was exiled, but still he remembered enough of Orzammar to miss it terribly, and to find everywhere else lacking in comparison – a sentiment probably inflamed by his parents. He worked himself to the bone, transformed House Tethras into a leading force in the Merchants Guild, all to recapture some of the glory his parents had once had.

Three people, stuck in the past, frozen in the moment they’d lost their homeland forever. Grief killed two of them, and defined the life of the third. Sad, really. Just sad.

Varric, however, was born three years after the Tethras’s exile. He never knew Orzammar. He never knew what his family had lost, except by the hole it left in their lives. And he was perfectly happy to live in the surfacer world he was born to. Maybe it was because he saw what misery clinging to the past could bring, but Varric moved on when nobody else in his family could. And so Varric didn’t just survive in Kirkwall, as Bartrand forced himself to; he thrived.

Which is why the Varric we see in Inquisition is so broken.

The other Companions call Varric out for being fixated on the past (Sera, I believe, has a banter about him needing to put “other books on his bookshelf”), and they’re not wrong, really. It’s been four years, right? It’s time to move on, like Cullen did.

But Varric can’t. He’s still very much in mourning, because when Anders blew up the Chantry, he didn’t just blow up a building or a city. He destroyed Varric’s home. The Kirkwall that Varric knew, that lovable shithole he fondly called home, it went up in flames for good. Even if the buildings are rebuilt and the people come home (and Sebastian stops attacking it for two seconds GOD), Kirkwall can never again be what it once was. Fundamentally it is now a different place, forever scarred by the mage-Templar war.

But it’s more than that. In Varric’s mind, Anders even took away Varric’s right to call Kirkwall home. When the Chantry blew, hundreds of civilians died, and hundreds more Varric was forced to kill personally. And all because of the actions of a man Varric once considered a close friend, a man that Varric couldn’t – no, didn’t – stop in time.  

In his head, Varric knows that what happened at the Gallows was inevitable, given Meredith’s paranoia, the influence of the idol, and tensions between the mages and the Templars. He tells as much to Cassandra at the end of DA2.But in his heart? Varric feels it is his fault, just as surely as it is Anders’s. That blood is on his hands too. Kirkwall burned because Varric didn’t stop the one who started the fire.

How can he ever dare to call Kirkwall home again after that?

And so Varric goes into self-imposed exile from Kirkwall; he runs from his homeland straight to the Inquisition. But he can’t move past what happened four years ago. He can’t let go of the friends he made, of the good times he had, no matter how much it hurts. In his heart, he’s still playing Wicked Grace with six of the best people in the world, drinking themselves silly in a Lowtown tavern that stinks of piss and vomit. And if he can’t play Wicked Grace with those friends, then Varric will play Wicked Grace with his new ones.

But it’s not the same. It can never be the same.

Stuck in the past, grieving for home. Varric’s worst fear has come to pass: He has become his parents.