Dragon Age II/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


BioWare marketed Dragon Age as "dark fantasy." They weren't kidding.

  • Leandra's death. She's killed by Quentin, a demented blood mage, so he can use her head to reconstruct his dead wife using parts from other women he's killed. If Hawke hadn't killed Quentin then she would have been aware of what he was doing to her for the rest of his life, completely unable to do a thing about it.
  • The little tidbit in 'Alone' that will simultaneously want to make you grab the Brain Bleach, kill Danarius in the most brutal fashion possible and make even the most ardent Fenris hater feel bad for him.

Danarius: Do I detect a hint of jealousy? It's not surprising. The lad is quite skilled isn't he?

    • Danarius' voice. There is no doubt in this man's mind that all he's done and all he's doing is perfectly acceptable, no, worse, that it's right. If you hand Fenris over, the letter makes it clear that he thinks that the mindwiped!Fenris is happier and better off that way. He even invites you to come and visit sometime.

Danarius: You weren't always this way, Fenris. Once upon a time you had affection for me. I remember it fondly.

  • The music that plays when you have only one wounded party member left alive.
  • Orsino's transformation into a harvester using the corpses of the other dead mages.
  • In the Anders companion quest "Dissent", you learn about Ser Alrik who wants to use the Rite of Tranquility on all mages. What makes this even worse is that when you get to the scene where he threatens a young mage woman, it's heavily implied he's doing so to effectively make tranquil women his sex slaves! Add in some Fridge Horror, if one considers that the templars with him might be in on the whole thing. And finally this quest shows how badly out of control Anders/Justice is becoming, turning into Vengence. One of your companions is losing control and can potentially murder an innocent girl.
    • And if you go to the Gallows during Act 2, you will get to hear a human female tranquil talking to her former lover. she tells them that she belongs to Ser Alrik now.
  • The Varric companion quest "Family Matter", his brother Bartrand has gone insane and has been performing horrific experiments on people, driving his guards mad as well and rigging the place with traps. Not to mention the Lyrium Idol is gone, and is now in Meredith's possession. It turns to tearjerker territory if you bring Anders along and temporarily make Bartrand lucid, showing how much its influence has destroyed him.
    • Really, the Idol itself deserves a mention. It drives people insane and is one of the causes of the Mage-Templar War.
  • In the Poisoned side alley there is an insane elven woman that screams something about something "sharp and shiny". The way she says shiny is really disturbing.
  • What happens to Meredith after you beat her. Start at :41.
  • The Bone Pit is generally a creepy place, particularly once you learn of the abuses that the Tevinter slave masters carried out there. The music is unsettling, and the sounds of animals fighting or howling somewhere in the distance doesn't help.
  • If you've followed all the Enigmas of Kirkwall through all the acts, you'll be blessed with the pleasure of finding out this interesting fact: Kirkwall was turned by the Imperium into a gigantic blood sacrifice ritual, causing such problems as failed Harrowings, constant problems with blood mages, people getting lost and a Veil so weak that demons could come in easily enough and in such numbers that they hunt down normal people because there's too much competition to get to the mages. Why is this? The Tevinters wanted the Veil weakened by the thousands of slave sacrifices to try and summon the Forbidden Ones, ancient powerful demons that taught the people how to use blood magic in the first place! How bad are they? In Origins, you faced one as a bonus boss Gaxkang the Unbound. In Dragon Age 2, you face two of them, the bonus bosses of Act 2 and Act 3. And the worst part? According to the codex, there's one left, The Formless One. Not to neglect the special neighbor in the Vimmark Mountains, Corypheus, one of the Tevinter Magisters of old that tried to storm the Golden City and one of the first Darkspawn!
  • Playing as a character who loses one sibling to death, potentially another to death, kidnapping, or betrayal, and a mother to horrific murder, watches friends suffer awful tragedies or slowly lose their minds, and is potentially used by a lover as an unwitting accomplice in a terrorist attack, if you romanced Anders makes Dragon Age II a goldmine of Adult Fear.
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