Talk:Depths of Depravity

=Ethics of siding with/killing the Architect= This is one of the choices BioWare has set up that has actually stopped me in my tracks and forced a bit of internal debate. The Architect, if you can believe him, shares a common enemy with the Grey Wardens (Mother AND the Calling, which leads to Blights). Blights are the true enemy of the GWs, not the Darkspawn. The Darkspawn are a symptom of the problem, not the root of it. If Darkspawn didn't follow the Calling, and if they were more rational like the Architect appears to be, they may be no less odd, foreign, or dangerous than the Qunari. Remember, according to Sten, the Qunari are on a crusade of sorts to invade and conquer non-Qunari lands.

So I got to thinking, as a GW, my main job is to protect people, all people, from the Blights. Helping the Architect might make that job easier. Then I got to thinking of the alternative ways to end the Blights and I recalled something from either the intro movie, a codex entry, or maybe one of those hits that appears when new zones are loading that said there were only ~7 or so Old Gods/Blight-leading Dragons ever, and ~5 were already dead (killed at the end of the previous Blights). The most recent Blight ended with the death of the dragon but not the "uncorrupted" Old God (which is now contained in Morrigan's baby). So that means there's only 1 potential Blight left to fight, right?

This lead to a 'Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." question. Which is better: A) killing the Architect and the Mother, and as many Darkspawn as you can, all the while waiting for the last Blight, and hoping you win that one too, or B) siding with the Architect, possibly gaining a useful ally who may be able to avoid the need for a final Blight at all.

For me, I followed the old idiom. If non-Darkspawn have defeated 100% of the Blights so far (albiet at great cost), and if there's only one left, that's a known enemy, a known problem, a known solution, and a perfect (though costly) success rate. I chose that as the better of two evils. In order for siding with the Architect to turn out better than not siding with him, many questionable things woudl have to happen:
 * The Architect would have to be telling the truth
 * The Architect would need to eventually be able to "cure" the Calling
 * The Architect's "cured" Darkspawn would have to be willing to help wipe out all the non-cured Darkspawn, including all those in the Deep Roads, before they found the last Old God.
 * Grey Wardens would have to provide an unspecified amount of blood over an unspecified amount of time to enable the Architect to continue his research
 * The Grey Wardens, in doing so, may be supporting Blood Magic (though this would also mean that the Grey Wardens are a product of Blood Magic. I'm not sure if this is true or not.  It probably depends on one's perspective.)
 * The "cured" Darkspawn would have to be okay with leaving currently-populated lands to avoid conflict with the existing populations
 * The "cured" Darkspawn would have to be okay either dying off through old age (unless they don't age) or learning how to procreate amongst themselves because right now, they exist through the killing of non-Darkspawn, which would certainly be prohibited by any kind of alliance.

These are just the questionable conditions I can come up with right now. There may be more, and all of them would have to be true in order for any deal with the Architect to be better than suffering through the final Blight.

Perhaps it's odd that I spent so much time on this question, but I bet if BW read this they'd be happy that they created a big enough moral dilemma to prompt this kind of response. Did anyone else have to pause to consider what to do when faced with this choice? Did anyone side with the Architect, and if so, why? Servius 22:52, April 23, 2010 (UTC)