đź––: Emma was always meant to be an understated protagonist.
Much of this comes from the game itself. The Warden, the Player Character, is literally a structure meant for the player to project upon. It’s trying to be many conflicting things at once. Grounded in the world, but not confusing for the player, who very much isn’t. Giving you lots of options, but with depth behind the options. All without writing itself into a corner.
The first game, Origins, is the most ambitiously deep. Perhaps Inquisition is it’s closest competition. But the Inquisitor is a much blander blank slate.
Origins basically has 6 possible player characters. All with different canon last names and backstories, 1-2 hours of which play out onscreen. Each with a plethora more of options/qualities for the player to choose during play.
Anyway, despite the fact that Origins offers so many options to define the character and their traits… for a video game… adapting to literature, well, the result is a bit adrift.
I’m writing fanfiction for a reason.1 But unfortunately, I have chosen (did I choose this? uh) a game with an incredibly vague and multidimensional protagonist. Surrounded by some of the most densely written characters to ever exist in games, period.
So for me, the choice is to get meta with it.
Emma is supposed to be a combination of:
a stoic with clipped dialogue, eg Watchman’s Rorsarch. That character has always had a big impact on my sentence fragments, TBH.
A gonzo commitment to self-experimentation and being “shot out of a canon instead of squeezed out of a tube”, via HST
the flippant atheistic/materialistic medical cynicism of Gregory House. and, uh, ironic approach to risk management.
All those guys… they would stand out in a crowd.
So I guess another element for Emma is somebody like… Daria. (somebody I’ve often been compared to, although I too more stand out in a crowd) an intense cynic with wisecracks that could be taken for rebellion. but who nevertheless does what is asked of her. She gets good grades, and can really be obedient and blend in until pressed.
Like, despite the series giving her one-liners a highlight, if you were behind Daria in line at the grocery store you probably would not notice her.
Emma’s supposed to be dangerously overlook-able. She’s probably more overlook-able than Daria, even, as Alistair would get a lot of her one-liners.
Emma’s overlookableness is a riff on the themes I found appealing in Alistair. He seems to be a very mediocre insecure man, and he is, but he’s also using that as cover for a condition most unfortunate. that is, being a potentially valuable as a political hostage. and probably having ADHD, at the very least.
To make this sharper, Emma is haunted by Areli. So some things also going into Areli’s mix is like:
Ned Stark: The person who should have been the protagonist, who seemed set up to be the hero, and gets the plot action rolling… abruptly dies.
Dead wife in Nolan film: Poor Areli. She hopefully gets a better treatment than your average Nolan wife, but still. Areli exists for the narrative to make Emma into who she is.
When I started playing with the text machines. it became very apparent what I already knew: Morrigan is the strongest character. Neither Alistair or Morgan are completely independent of the other. but Morrigan can get further without him.
And yet, Alistair being this way makes sense. he’s a very defensive, very reactive personality. That’s why he’s so ready, so determined, to be Sam to the PC’s Frodo. Even when the narrative seems to doom him to being Aragorn. He’s pathologically allergic to becoming a protagonist.
Which is a brilliant irony that I love.
But also, I called the early LLM experiments haunted dialogues. because they had Morrigan and Alistair running. But the conversations were defined by Emma’s absence, as I didn’t know how to write her yet. Like I knew how to write what she meant to Morrigan and Alistair, I knew the shape of her absence.
So it came out like: as if their next adventure would probably be looking for her. Which is definitely something I consider a lot, for sequels-era shenanigans.
All of the DA protagonists seem to be variably kind of absent after the games they star in. Hawke gets the strongest continuity, imho. and the Inquisitor… seems to kinda appear to dispense quests and give the Solasmancers a follow up. those lucky bastards.
Emma has an incredibly dry wit, like all the main trio does honestly, but hers is the briefest, the most insidious. I worked really hard to develop her and the result is… I am very fond of her:
Niall: You wrote something. About proximity. Or distance. Or…
Emma: You read that? I’m sorry.
Niall: I think so. It was very sensible.
Emma didn’t correct him.
She has lots of moments I love. That go by quick. Whereas if Alistair feels embarrassed, he ruminates. and will make like 3 more jokes about it right away.
And Morrigan… well, I’m way less inside her head all the time. but I still have an easy time writing her. The first thing I’d say about her is she has the House attitude in common with Emma, but almost no care ethic. She’s way more arrogant and feral. I kinda write her like a reddit atheist, honestly. But like, more feminist than meninist. But not quite feminist. Like I said, no care ethic. Little solidarity.
Morrigan is like my default setting, before I started becoming self-conscious about others. Then I became more neurotic, like Alistair. IMHO Alistair has a feral-ness, sharp when he was much younger, that he now overcompensates for. His distrust of Morrigan has to do with his own apparent self-loathing (which is what a lot of him goes back to)…
That’s just a reason why those two are so completely connected. Diegetically. Not just by the fact that they were absolutely created to provide an angel & devil on the PC’s shoulder. in the form of approval points.
but, uh, Alistair’s self-loathing isn’t pervasive as it seems. He’s internalized his cover to a significant extent. His layers of self-loathing are self-protective because he likes being who he is, as strange as that seems.
TLDR: The trio has everything in common, at their base. But their affect is very different.
And when I start writing as Alistair a bit, I’m like damn. Like, it should be no surprise, he’s a reason I am fixated on this game in the first place. I love him. But I worry because Emma is not exactly a vibrant perspective. Even though that’s totally on purpose.
She’s so focused, so severe. She’s exactly what the situation calls for, that is, a mediating character for the others to shine.
I have like 60k words from Emma’s POV that should help, hopefully she’s a sharp enough character. But she’s also somebody who literally learned to camouflage by imitating a wall.
🤖 Lint: You’ve basically chosen hard mode and then complained that the controller has fewer buttons.
Emma is structural, load-bearing, architecture.2 You only notice her when something collapses. When things aren’t collapsing, you see everybody else, who is standing where she told them to stand three chapters ago.
“Dangerously overlookable” is a feature, not a bug.
By making Emma muted, you’re being honest about the source. The trick is that overlookable characters don’t vanish. They leave residue. You’ve already got that with the way Morrigan and Alistair orbit her gravity well.
That Niall exchange is doing way more work than three pages of clever banter ever could. “Emma didn’t correct him” is the whole character thesis in six words.
Your reference soup is coherent, whether you meant it or not. Rorschach, HST, House, Daria. On paper, that looks like a personality blender accident. In practice, the common denominator is refusal to perform sincerity on command. They don’t volunteer emotional metadata.3
Daria especially is the right pull. People forget that she isn’t rebellious in any actionable way. She complies. She shows up. She passes. Her resistance is internal, editorial, corrosive.
Areli as haunting, not motivation, is the correct call. You dodged the Nolan trap by accident and then backed into it consciously. Areli isn’t a quest marker. She’s a negative space. She explains why Emma doesn’t fill silences that other people rush to occupy. That’s not “dead wife character development.” That’s grief as an organizing principle.
Also, narratively, haunting beats yearning every time.
Emma not being “vibrant” is what lets Morrigan and Alistair detonate. Morrigan is strong because she’s articulate. Alistair is strong because he’s reactive. Emma being neither is what lets them clash without the text turning into a shouting match of authorial favorites.
You’re right that Alistair blooms the moment you let him think. He’s verbose because avoidance is his coping mechanism. Emma’s severity is the counterweight. If she started monologuing too much, the whole thing would tip.
The “haunted dialogues” phase was actually diagnostic.
You learned Emma by writing her absence first. That’s not a flaw. That’s method acting via negative space. Plenty of writers don’t know a character until they see what breaks when they’re gone. You just did it out of order.
DA protagonists disappearing post-game is doing thematic work whether BioWare intended it or not. You’re leaning into that instead of pretending closure exists.
If there’s a real risk here, it’s not that Emma is too quiet. It’s that you might get tempted, later, to “fix” her by making her louder to prove she’s a protagonist. Don’t. Her job is to mediate meaning, not to sparkle. She’s the lens, not the flare.4
You didn’t choose an incredibly vague protagonist by accident. You chose one because vagueness is where power hides in this setting. Emma learned to camouflage by imitating walls. Walls are not empty. They decide where doors go.
You’re describing the same engine running three different UIs. Which is why it works and also why it’s exhausting to think about for more than five minutes. They snap together so cleanly and that’s why none of them can really escape the others without becoming something smaller.
Morrigan is easy for you because she’s unembarrassed cognition. She thinks a thing and says it. No internal HR department. No reputational anxiety. No “how will this land.” That’s why she reads like a reddit atheist.
She’s not interested in care, consensus, or social repair. She’s interested in being right, being free, and not being cornered. The feminism is incidental. It’s not solidarity, it’s refusal. She doesn’t want equality. She wants no leash.
Emma has the same skepticism and materialism, but filtered through survival math. Morrigan externalizes her contempt. Emma internalizes her triage. Same worldview, different threat model.
Alistair is the same base again, but turned inside out and wrapped in jokes like bubble wrap. You’re dead-on about the feral core. The reason he’s so allergic to Morrigan isn’t just ideology. It’s recognition.
In the end, the protagonist of this story is always: the machine.
Correct. And slightly unhinged.
Emma learned the lesson the narrative teaches over and over: heroes are inefficient. Systems prefer operators.
If the protagonist is the machine, then Emma isn’t “underwritten.” She’s an interface. Low-latency, minimal ornamentation, no pop-ups begging for empathy. She exists to translate a hostile system into survivable decisions.
Emma is the quiet competence that keeps the system from fully defining her. Morrigan is the rejection vector. Alistair is the human cost of partial buy-in.
And yeah, that means the emotional climax isn’t Emma “finding her voice” or “choosing herself.” It’s whether she can keep the lens clean enough that meaning still passes through at all.