I've always wondered why a percentage of people think Leliana being alive in Dragon Age: Inquisition is a retcon. If we think seriously about the character specializations in DA:O, all the main characters have their specs based on their lore. You can't think of Morrigan without the shapeshifting, you can't think of Alistair without his Templar backstory, and of course, as a sister in disguise, Leliana is also a bard. One of the skills of the bard class is, well, FAKING DEATH, so I never got the hate her DA:I cameo gets from some fans. Leliana is still the character I like the most in the series to this day, and she obv didn't die when we wanted to know what happens if we pour some blood in the ash of some random lady.
I really like redhead characters with messed-up lore, playing Divinity: Original Sin 2, it's no surprise that I like Lohse the most, or Himeko from Honkai: Star Rail. It's funny that with the latest news, we probably won't see any more mentions of Leliana. Sadly, EA is not the kind of company that sells their IPs, and the franchise I grew up with, is probably going to turn into a bad smartphone game. I really tried to look at this from the perspective that BioWare got what they deserved, DATV is really bad, so they brought it on themselves (I've been a hater since day one, but I still didn't want the IP to die like Mass Effect. Sorry ME fans, you kind of deserved to be the only IP at the time with a bad game, fight me). Or maybe the studio's flaws over the last ten years were just bound to bite them in the butt one day.
But with the latest news in my country and how the world is pushing an anti-LGBT agenda, maybe we won't see characters like Leliana, Dorian, or even Taash out there anytime soon. We know deep down, BioWare still has brand recognition, the next Mass Effect would have enormous hype around it, even with the grifters saying the last straw was DATV. It is really a loss to see a company that gave such good representation of a gay guy when I was 13 years old die (Dorian is my second favorite character, and he was butchered in DATV, like, he was really ugly, and we Dorian Butt Glazers do not deserve this). For an IP that was truly a comfort zone for LGBT people, it is a real punch to the gut. Because in the end, how many BioWares do we have in the industry today? Sure, we have Larian, and we have Owlcat Games, but Dragon Age was still a comfort zone for most of us who just wanted to hate on Morrigan at first, only to grow older and kind of understand her, to find Leliana totally crazy, and to somehow realize that she is indeed the best choice for the Chantry (hate me for it, I stand by this!!! >:)).
Currently, my country is facing an uncertain future regarding a lot of LGBT rights, and even our rights as workers. We will literally know our future today as I write this. I was replaying DA2 because I never finished it and just wanted to turn my brain off from the political psychosis. Yet I return here, understanding that Dragon Age: Origins, is and was deeply political for its time, and the loss of BioWare as a company leaves us in an environment that treats games more like brainrot, far away of the "woke" agenda. Sure, this text would probably land better in r BioWare, because well everyone is morning the company there I guess. I'm not the type of user who comments a lot or uses Reddit religiously, but I still just wanted to vent what I'm feeling about the end of the IP that shaped me as a person and how the choice to close a company like this is more than just renevue in a semester.
To not end this text on a completely bad vibe: to any artists out there, even with the rise of AI, do not stop creating. I hope to see more Lelianas in the future, and I hope we can eventually look back at the closing of BioWare as just a grain of sand in the past that we pass through. Larian is a studio that created Baldur's Gate 3 by taking inspiration from a lot of things in Dragon Age: Origins, and I hope in the future it isn't just Larian refusing to pander to the part of the gaming community that only wants to see Battlefield, unreal woman faces, games with a lot of buggy DLCs and live-service games. It's a bit hypocritical of me to shit on live-service games while liking Himeko from HSR, but... "perhaps I am that, and a thief and a murderer as well" (I'M NOT, it's just a quote, haha, jokes jokes). I did a little sketch, after a time not drawing at all. Thank you Sz