i’m not going to make an argument for pushing through if you can’t deal with how he talks because like, it sucks and as i say, they did not do anything with it or make him get better on that. that being said, i think there is something interesting to his character and what can be done with it.
maybe i’m just desperate for dwarven lore lmao. there are three, total, dwarven companions in the series, counting one from a dlc, and i will take whatever lore i can get from my beloved orzammar
oghren operates in a really fascinating space in orzammar’s caste system. he’s born warrior caste, and once, he was everything orzammar values and a great prospect for a brilliant girl from the smith caste. then when she’s less than twenty and he’s presumably around the same, she becomes a paragon, a living legend, the voice of the ancestors. they soar up to being a noble house in a role neither of them are prepared for. oghren goes from being a very desirable match socially to an uncultured hanger-on who doesn’t even have branka’s attention as she becomes obsessed with her work (and quietly seeks a lover elsewhere in her new house). when branka goes into the deep roads two years before the events of the game, she takes the whole house—except him. and she doesn’t come back. oghren’s the single leftover of a house with no head. he’s also a berserker with ptsd, and when he loses control of himself in the proving arena and kills a young man, he’s no longer allowed to fight within the city bounds. if he left it, he’d be casteless; but inside it, he’s not far from that, unable to be the warrior that orzammar’s culture has always told him it is his only role and purpose to be.
there’s a lot of orzammar caste and gender politics in all of that. the guard who tells you about oghren says that he might have been something to be afraid of before the assembly “practically gelded him” by banning him from fighting. losing your ability to perform your caste role is emasculating and oghren’s over-exaggerated masculinity in his crude jokes is a response to that perceived shame. even before the ban, orzammar has the biggest gender inequality of anywhere we’ve spent time in thedas, and there’s a lot of implied social loss in becoming the lesser partner to his wife. both because she’s a woman and was once a lesser caste than him. in his fade nightmare, he’s drunk in tapsters, as strangers berate him for being a shame to branka’s house, dragging it down. he’s openly mocked in the same way in orzammar for all of this. for him in this dream, and in his life prior to meeting the warden, it’s easier to drink than to listen
there’s a lot to get into about how orzammar treats its warriors. they’re sent against the horrors of the deep roads, taught to harness this berserker rage, to be the only thing that stands between their home and the darkspawn, and... then what? is there a system in place for taking care of those veterans? i doubt they hold the same value once they lose the ability to perform their caste role. oghren talks a little about this, but he’s not even able to conceptualise that he should have been helped, it’s more like, how could they teach me how to fight out there like that and expect me to be able to hold back in that proving fight? a warrior’s going to do what a warrior’s going to do! but i don’t think it’s a surprise that someone like oghren turns to alcohol and i sincerely doubt he’s alone in that. compare it to someone like warden brosca’s mother turning to alcohol to deaden herself to life in dust town, and you can see that the dwarven love of drink so often played for laughs is the weight of the caste system in action
