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I’ve just seen the most incredibly wrong thing about Zevran on my dash and I need to say something.

Zevran was groomed from childhood to be a killer. He had no choice in the matter. Kill or be killed, that was his life.

Now I see where people would be coming from, saying he’s done so without remorse if they never bothered to get to know him, but here’s the thing. He takes an impossible mission to kill two Grey Wardens, who are famed warriors of great skill and are not to be trifled with. I say impossible because that’s what he wanted. He didn’t want to succeed. He wanted to die. Your character sparing him is a mercy he neither expected nor wanted when it was given.

If you go down his romance path, or even just get to know him well enough to get him to stay after Taliesen confronts you, you would know this. You would know he does this because he’s filled with a profound guilt after he allowed Taliesen to murder the woman he loved because he trusted the wrong man. He laughed and spit on her corpse and when he found out he was wrong, he became suicidal. That is not the reaction of a person who lacks remorse.

And frankly, with this in mind, his humor is no longer the trait of a callous person. It’s the defense mechanism of a person so broken by what his past made him that he has literally zero faith in himself as a person. He can’t see himself as a good person, he hates himself for what he did. He’s aloof in his interactions with the Warden because he doesn’t think they would believe him.

LIke at the end of the day, Zevran did shitty things, but those things tore him apart. He’s not happy with himself and it takes the literal entire game, which spans the course of a year, to believe himself worthy of love or respect.

And that’s it, really.

Zevran was as much a slave as Fenris ever was.

He was literally bought. For coin. He tells you how much. Then he was tortured, broken, and trained to be what the Crows wanted him to be. There were eighteen recruits bought by the Crows the same year as Zevran. Two survived. Two. One of those other survivors is Taliesin, aka the closest thing Zev has to a friend if the warden doesn’t befriend him, aka the guy he has to decide to kill if he wants to stay with you.

When Zevran wanted to leave the Crows, they tried to kill him.

And it makes me so mad because the ONLY reason people don’t realize this is because Zevran downplays this and always insists that his situation could have been worse. He was one of two kids who survived horrific torture and he thinks that makes him lucky, because he survived. He got bought for three sovereigns by a criminal organization and he thinks that makes him lucky, because other kids who were in a similar position ended up suffering even worse fates.

What doubly pisses me off about it, though, is that Zevran’s natural personality - the one that starts to sneak through when he’s not around the Crows any more - is fantastic.

Like, okay. This is Zevran. Talking to the Dog:

Zevran: I noticed some dog drool in my pack this morning.
Dog: (Happy bark!)
Zevran: Not that I like to make accusations. And I even appreciate the artistry behind a good burgle when I see it, to tell the truth. But leaving all that drool as evidence? Sloppy.
Dog: (Happy bark!)
Zevran: I’ll take that as an apology.
Dog: (Happy bark!)
Zevran: I’m so glad you’re pleased. It really is quite something to find such enthusiasm in one’s companions.
Dog: (Ecstatic bark!)
Zevran: I agree. Go, team. Hurrah.

I just… he is like that. He makes jokes and pleasant conversation and waggles his eyebrows and if left to his own devices and not asked to kill people, he is ridiculously sweet.

Wynne tries on numerous occasions to get him to talk about feeling guilty over his past, and he rebuffs her by commenting on her bosom… but to the Warden, he actually will open up, and admit that he feels so guilty he tried to commit suicide.

The truth is, Zev wants very desperately to get away from the Crows. He just doesn’t know what he’ll do with himself when that happens, necessarily, whether or not he can do something other than what he’s been trained for, and if he can actually process his guilt over his past without wanting to die. Like a lot of people stuck between becoming a total monster to survive or being killed over matters of conscience, he’s taken a third option: lying.

It’s probably worth noting that Zevran is one of the few characters whose dialogue can completely fail to reflect his approval losses. He can cheerfully converse with the warden while you ding yourself down and down and you’d never know if you didn’t have the counter telling you so. Because he is wary of you.

You literally have his life in your hands. He’s an escaped slave who’s been taught his only value is as a killing tool, and his life literally rides on how useful you find him.

So then if, on paper, his primary use to you is as a Person Who Kills Stuff, why would he ever confess to having reservations about killing within earshot of a warden he doesn’t completely trust?