Maker bless you, warriors, rogues, and mages, and welcome to our review of “Dragon Age: Deception.” This is the goofiest of the Dragon Age comics so far, and impressively, it’s also the most tragic. Tonal shifts are handled with aplomb; they don’t feel jarring, rather they reflect the reasonable outcomes of larger-than-life characters in a tragic situation. Bright colors and atypically stylized drawings move the reader seamlessly from silly escapades to mournful cries. There will be heavy plot spoilers for this book as well as the game Dragon Age II, so keep your wig on, and summon your mabari, here’s my take on “Dragon Age: Deception.”
Written by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina WeirCover by Sachin Teng
Illustrated by Fernando Heinz Furkawa
Colored by Michael Atiyeh
Lettered by Nate Piekos of BlambotOlivia Pryde hasn’t worked an honest day in years. Once an actress, she now lives by the con, and has come to Tevinter with a new target: Calix Qintara, the heir to a wealthy house. Once she approaches the young man, she quickly realizes that he is not exactly who he says he is—and she may be in too deep. This volume collects Dragon Age: Deception #1–#3.
Our hero protagonist Olivia Pryde is described many times as a failed actress, but she has put her acting skills to use as a successful and prolific con-artist. Her personality fits the ac-TOR archetype; she’s snooty, self-involved, and egotistical. That’s not all there is to her, but it is a lot of what there is to her. She is our number one larger-than-life character, and this is her story told from her perspective. She begins her story putting on her wig for the “role of a lifetime,” Magister Aramis. She hopes to blackmail Calix Qintara, heir to a wealthy recluse who probably has ties to the Venatori, dragon cultists who want to overthrow the Tevinter Imperium. But here’s the twist: Calix is just another con-artist, pretending to be a Qintara heir to scam people into helping him move his family fortune out of the imminently besieged city, similar to the classic “Nigerian Prince” scam, or as they call it in the book, the “Chasind Prince” scam. So we’re off to a pretty goofy start: a con-artist tries to con someone who turns out to be another con-artist. This goofy meet-cute is followed by a goofy caper in which the two con-artists attempt to be the first to con either one of a pair of siblings. Bright colors, wry smirks, and cartoonish beads of sweat underline the lighthearted quality. But these scenes are interspersed with scenes of Qunari outside the city gates, primed to kill or convert everyone in the city within days. Our hero con-artists are not unaware of the impending doom; in fact they’re using it to their advantage in their respective con-artistry. Thus, a tonal dichotomy that might otherwise feel insensitively juxtaposed is made fluid.
Coincidentally, the inn our heroes are working over happens to also be populated by our old friends Dorian Pavus, Ser Aaron Hawthorne, and his squire, the lovable protagonist of “Dragon Age: Knight Errant,” Vaea. Ser Hawthorne actually blackmails Olivia and Calix into working for the Inquisition, setting up the main adventure.. In my previous Dragon Age comic reviews I’ve criticized the way the stories seem to happen to the characters instead of the characters themselves driving the story forward. This one is less egregious than “Magekiller,” which spent a great deal of time cajoling Tessa and Marius into participating in their own story, but it’s not as successful as “Knight Errant” in which the quietly confident and proactive Vaea decisively leads the action. Olivia and Calix are initially blackmailed into following the plot, but this fact is quickly forgotten as they invest themselves fully in their mission, inviting we readers to invest ourselves in their mission too.
If you’ve only read the comic, you might barely remember this tale’s MacGuffin. It’s the thing they have to steal from the wealthy cultist because the Inquisition said so. However, if you’re a fan of the greater Dragon Age canon, you know it’s not a MacGuffin at all; it’s Meredith’s red lyrium-infused sword. Knight Commander Meredith is either the primary or secondary villain from the game Dragon Age II, depending on the choices you make as a player. In “Knight Errant” Vaea finds Meredith’s petrified corpse still standing (er, kneeling), in the Kirkwall gallows and astutely notices her missing sword. Meredith had empowered her sword with a red lyrium idol that Hawke (Dragon Age II’s player character) and Varric found in the Deep Roads, that later drove Varric’s brother Bartrand insane. It’s an item with a backstory as legendary as it is convoluted. We know this item will continue to be significant as it (arguably) appears in the teaser trailer for the yet-to-be-released Dragon Age IV game.
Olivia Pryde makes for an interesting if puzzling anti-hero. After successfully completing phase one of their mission, she sleeps with Calix and then coldly ends their relationship, breaking his heart as well as the heart of the lovelorn Ser Hawthorne who relapses into alcoholism, in turn disappointing his trusting squire, Vaea. It’s an elegantly structured series of events that stirs up interpersonal drama, making everyone on the team angry with each other just at the moment they need to come together the most. Still, Olivia’s choice to sleep with Calix is a little baffling, and it goes unexplained. It could be simply that she wants to because she wants to, and who is anyone to deny her that, but a more interesting possibility is that she fears her own feelings for Ser Hawthorne, and this is a characteristically selfish and immature way for her to distance herself from him. Olivia might come across as unlikable, but she redeems herself in the end when she sacrifices her own life to save the rest of the team. The deeply flawed anti-hero who has good deep down inside them is a difficult archetype to get right nowadays, but Olivia nails it.
“Dragon Age: Deception” elegantly walks the line between comedy and tragedy with a complicated hero and her on brand rag-tag band of friendos. It’s a lighthearted romp with a touch of melancholy. It’s a fun silly caper through impending doom that is no less sorrowful for how inevitable it was from the very beginning. Until next time, Maker bless you.
