Chapter Text
After I have made an attempt to create a fairly comprehensible portrait of Dorian Pavus's psychological functioning, I'd like to investigate his canonic sweetheart, Iron Bull. As much as Dorian's characteristic was focused on his inner conflicts and sources of inhibition, I'd like to investigate how the identity known as Iron Bull emerged and tried to coexist with the identity of the Hissrad of Ben-Hassrath. Once again, I will rely on statements and biographic details given in Dragon Age:Inquisition and The World of Thedas compendium.
This time I have decided not to prepare a separate biographical note, because we mostly know Iron Bull as an adult. Suggestions about his childhood will be mostly drawn from the context of Bull's statements given in DA: Inquisition, and any trivia from The World of Thedas that can be meaningful in that matter.
First, I'd like to cast some light on Bull's service in Seheron which is, in my opinion, decisive if we want to understand how Bull's idiosyncratic traits which got a chance to come to surface. Then, I wish to analyse the peculiar dialectic motion between the identity known as Hissrad and the identity knows as the Iron Bull, also in connection with his command over the Chargers and involvement in the Inquisition. Next, having a fairly complex portrait of Iron Bull, I'd like to add the emotional dimension to my analysis of his relationship with Dorian, and point at some dangers faced by this relationship – dangers which haven't been disclosed in the canon but can be implied from my interpretation of both personalities concerned.
Part 1. Seheron is hell in Thedas:
Hissrad's constitutive trauma
Based on the relevant fragments The World of Thedas, Seheron is portrayed as a place ridden by permanent chaos: human settlers rebelling against the Qunari, Tevinter infiltrators clashing with the Ben-Hassrath, open assaults from both the Qunari and the Imperium, Qunari trying to win civillians' trust, other Qunari turning into Tal-Vashoth because they cannot stand the pressure (see: The World of Thedas vol. II, various authors, Dark Horse Books 2015, p. 240). There, in that Gordian knot of Thedas, presumably in the third decade of the Dragon Age, there's an auspicious Ben-Hassrath agent. A relentlessly devoted agent, gifted with wide horns, musculature, an astonishingly sharp mind and a peculiar ability to win others' trust.
Maximal time of service expected from any Ben-Hassrath on Seheron is two years. This one has endured almost ten, but paid a high price for his perseverance. His career on Seheron ended with an incident that scarred Hissrad for life. His unit was poisoned by a local merchant, just as a school full of children, presumably on the advice of Tal-Vashoth rebels. Hissrad was known to despise hurting civillians, and he promised vengeance. According to The World of Thedas, his action was legal and did not undermine the Qun. But it undermined something just as important: Hissrad lost one of his dearest friends, went rampant and murdered all the Tal-Vashoth in fury. I believe that it is precisely that scene that is reflected in Iron Bull's tarot card, the one available when he becomes a Tal-Vashoth. Medical assistants found him broken down among the corpses, asking to be relieved from his function and reeducated:
He declared himself unfit for duty and too dangerous to be around civillians [...]. Hissrad submitted himself to the Ben-Hassrath reeducators, asking that he be repaired or destroyed as best served the Qun. (WoT II, p. 241)
Gatt's report on the unfortunate incident is most valuable, as it provides the key to Hissrad's attitude on Seheron. Actually, this short text provides the key to dismissal of Iron Bull's apparent inconsistence. Thus, I cite it whole:
His state of mind? Am I supposed to say that he wasn't angry? Is that what I'm supposed to say so the reeducators can fill him full of qamek and send him off to break rocks with a hammer for the rest of his life? Because he was angry. Of course he was angry, after what the Tal-Vashoth did to those children. He's always been angry .
I remember the day he raided my master's ship and rescued me from that bastard. He butchered them all, and he wasn't calm as he did it. I'd have been terrified if he was. No, he fought with a righteous fury. He was every ounce of anger I'd been pushing down in my fear. He was rage, and I would have had it no other way.
He was angry when I finished my education and joined his team in Seheron. He'd smile when he greeted the locals, and he'd banter about the food at breakfast, but underneath it all, there was always the anger . How could he be anything else, after watching his friends die from poison or a knife in the back?
Did you know his last commander became Tal-Vashoth? Of course you do. You've got records on everything, including the attitude I'm displaying right now that will doubtless come up as an area for improvement. Your people will tell me, and I'll sigh, and I'll take it, because I've seen the world outside the Qun, and while I might bang against the walls of this life, I'd rather be here than anywhere else.
So would Hissrad. The difference between him and me is that he's never known anything else. He grew up in this orderly world you all made, and it all makes sense to him, people make sense, and he thinks that if he does the right thing, then everything will work. He's been in Seheron ten years trying to make everything work, telling himself that he's the tool you made him to be, doing the job he was meant to do. He hunted down and killed his old commander. He killed civillians working for the rebels. There are times I'm grateful for those Tevinter mages coming in to attack. At least Hissrad doesn't have to argue with himself after he kills them.
Now he killed the Tal-Vashoth who killed those children, and he broke himself doing it. He thinks it's his fault, that he failed to live up to the demands of the Qun. But we all know this isn't really true, is it? Seheron was a mess. We and Tevinter made certain of that. We grind ourselves down until we end up dead or turning Tal-Vashoth, and Hissrad would rather die than do that.
He's a good man. He believes in you. You owe him better than what you've done to him.
- Post-mission deposition from team member Gatt
on mental state of his commander, Hissrad (WoT II, p. 241, emphasis mine - SA)
This short note can leave us rather disillusioned with how the Qun functioned in practice for this individual. Actually, Hissrad's case is an example of the Qun contradicting itself on the practical level. It produced an individual who is fundamentally tragic in Aristotelian sense of the word, stained by an irremovable inner conflict: the more he tries to obey and fulfill demands of the Qun, the more frustrated he becomes; the same thing that makes him a perfect Qunari destroys his emotional nature. His virtue results in a catastrophe.
This is what Iron Bull himself reveals about his service in Seheron:
(with the Inquisitor)
IB: They sent me to Seheron because they needed someone who could fight and hunt down problems. That whole island was a sack of cats. Incursions from Tevinter, Tal-Vashoth, and native rebels fighting both sides... And in the middle, me, trying to wrangle the rebels and restore order.
Inq: [Sounds fun to you.] You seem like a type who enjoys a good fight.
IB: There's a good fight, and there's finding out who put rat poison in the bread and killed a bunch of children. I hunted down a lot of rebels. Lost a lot of friends to the Vints, or the Fog Warriors, or the Tal-Vashoth. One day I woke up and couldn't think of a damned reason to keep doing my job. Turned myself in to the reeducators.
Inq: [That was brave.] Not many people would have the courage to do that.
IB: I thought about letting some rebel kill me, but I couldn't get any of those bastards the satisfaction.
(banter with Cole)
Cole: When we fight, you make them not people. So their death doesn't stick to you.
IB: Yes. Picked that up in Seheron. Got to keep it separate. Out here, anything could be a threat. You kill for the team, no questions asked.
Cole: I see it: a wall of wounds. Nothing on this side has a family.
IB: When we're at the tavern, or back home, it goes back to normal. People get to be people again.
Cole: What if someone attacks you in a tavern?
IB: That's when shit gets messed up.
The banter with Cole shows clearly how a regression into schizoid splitting (See: M. Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms", Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, Hogarth Press 1975, pp. 5-24) can serve as a defense mechanism during war: in the fight, there are only persecutive objects; in a tavern, there are only good, friendly objects. "Shit gets messed up" when two split up parts come together and return soldier's mind into depressive position. That's when aggression must be directed at good objects, and when survival requires killing a friend.
I believe we should not take Hissrad's eagerness to turn himself in only as an act of total devotion. As The World of Thedas indicates, after the incident with Tal-Vashoth "[Hissrad] would be dangerous as a police agent, defiant as a soldier, and wasted as a laborer" (WoT II, p. 241). Anyway, irreversibly damaged. Based on the most traumatic part of the story, revealed in The World of Thedas, we can suspect that the main reason why Hissrad turned himself in could have been an authentic deathwish. "Repaired or destroyed as best served the Qun" – Hissrad's companion Gatt had no illusions what the most feasible way to repair Hissrad at this point would be: the use of qamek. The World of Thedas provides a pretty self-explanatory description of this device:
A poison used on the hopeless who refuse to be reeducated, as well as on captured magic users (who are considered already hopeless). It effectively lobotomizes victims and turns them into mindless laborers (WoT I, p. 42).
Hissrad's years in Seheron had been filled with constant frustration, and revealed a dangerous pattern in his behaviour: withholding anger until it bursts out and turns him berserk. Hissrad has even learned to wait for an occasion to turn his rage against enemy objects. In a sense, he became the tool he was intended to be, even as he reached the limit of emotional endurance. Yet, Gatt makes it very clear why Hissrad became so frustrated: he saw too many people around him slaughtered. Some of them were his close friends and companions. He killed some of them in the name of what he thought was right. He was betrayed by his own sensitivity. Here, as I believe, we can see the dimension of Hissrad's personality that might be overlooked easily: he's much more vulnerable than he shows when facing situations of loss and betrayal, with depression and guilt related.
Here comes an important factor which makes Hissrad's potential depressive states less bearable than they would be for a relatively healthy person raised in the Southern manner: the Qun taught him to be selfless , in many possible contexts. As Melanie Klein shows in her work, an individual can only undergo states based on depression and mourning successfully if the ego or self (I'm not entirely sure if she uses these terms interchangeably) is strong enough to perform reparation on its lost objects. A selfless ego gets stuck in the paranoid attitude: it develops an observation skill that is always aimed at potential danger and persecution, and may hence be heavily distorted (See: M. Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States", Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945, Hogarth Press 1975, p. 271). And this may be a careful reminder about the origin of Iron Bull's responsiveness.
Hissrad is stuck between paranoia and the genuinely depressive inability to retrieve his lost good objects. This is another reason why Hissrad, according to Gatt, has always thought that he was not good enough at obeying the Qun – unresolved mourning deprives the ego of hope. But the enviroment created on Seheron does not allow successful transition from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive mode of emotional functioning, from enmity and careful observation to trust and identification based on empathy. Neither does it allow a clear, persisting splitting of emotional life that allows survival in the paranoid-schizoid position. Hissrad isn't even in a healthy paranoid-schizoid position where the splitting is necessary to keep the good object intact – he appears in a situation similar with the early development tainted by envious destructivity, as described in Envy and Gratitude. Seheron is a place where nothing good can grow despite all the efforts. The corresponding frame of mind, according to Klein's view, comes down to severe confusion in many spheres of life (see: M. Klein, "Envy and Gratitude", therein, pp. 200-201, 221).
It appears as if Hissrad was stuck in between a paranoid regression, necessary for him to be an efficient agent, and melancholic depression, filled with hopelessness and emptiness. He wanted to help, but the only thing he could draw from himself was more frustration and more aggressive force. Ultimately, it turned out that despite his physical strength and combat abilities, Hissrad was not a man made for the reality of war – a strong argument in favour of Dorian's decision to keep Iron Bull away from Tevinter. The fight with Corypheus is fundamentally different than the conflict on Seheron: the enemy is clearly defined, the Inquisition creates a safe refuge and a peculiar environment for acceptance and accommodation. And Tevinter... Tevinter is just a stone's throw away from Seheron, not only geographically.
Moreover, Hissrad's ego appears, to a great extent, absorbed by the superego (and this, once again, might be relevant for the Qunari in general), scattered around object relations that constitute his social role in various aspects: Hissrad as a war companion, Hissrad as a drinking buddy, Hissrad as the spy, or the confidential of civilians. As many faces as various relations. Thus, I shall risk a hypothesis that the influence of Qun made Hissrad keep his internal object development on the paranoid-schizoid level, on the level of part-objects that are easily instrumentalised, splittable and disposable (see: M. Klein, "A Contribution to Psychogenesis...", p. 263; "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" , p. 34). As the inner condition of ego always mirrors the inner condition of objects, I should infer that Hissrad's ego is also purposefully placed in paranoid-schizoid dissociation: chopped into pieces that serve various social functions, and can be recomposed "as it best serves the Qun".
This could explain why he can, later on, get over the sacrifice of the Chargers, and betray his friends from the Inquisition so easily. The problem is, the more object relations Hissrad lost in Seheron, the more his inside emptied out and fell into melancholy, because he had been made incapable of meaningful narcissistic compensation (whose bright example is Dorian's façade). Hissrad's anger could also be aimed at the gradual disintegration of his own psychological functioning, and the unconscious fear related. There are indicators that Iron Bull has an actual strong fear of losing himself, as much as he is taught to be selfless. Bull's headstone in the little Fade cemetery from Here Lies the Abyss points at "madness" as his greatest fear. Well, he was there. His greatest fear is post-traumatic, it concerns the return of madness, the return of Seheron. Hissrad's experiences left him terrified of emotional and mental confusion which, in his case, led to escalated violence, wherever it was directed. The fear of demons is just an extension of this primal fear because demons are creatures who enter your body and take away your mind, making you uncontrollable. That is one of the reasons why Iron Bull will always need discipline and a clearly ordered value system, and will be reluctant to reject the Qun completely.
There is one more factor to be considered here, also shown within the work of Melanie Klein: anger and hatred are just one side of the coin, and the other side is the strong persecutory anxiety. (See: M. Klein, "Personification in the Play of Children", Love..., pp. 203-204). Seheron is the epitome of real life threat and paralyzing paranoid fear. As Klein believed, any threat in external reality, and any fear sufficiently justified with environmental factors, can reinforce the primal existential fear of death. The latter, as she believed, is active practically since birth, as a subjective parallel of the death instinct operating in the body (see: M. Klein, "On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt" , Envy..., pp. 29-30). Hissrad served so eagerly that he pushed himself beyond the limits of psychological endurance. And instead of being simply disposed of, he has been ordered to undergo something of a controlled personality dissociation, to be decomposed and reconstructed, so his remarkable intellectual function could still serve the Ben-Hassrath. He has been ordered to create the Iron Bull. And his superiors could rest assured that he would not take advantage of this new identity entirely and turn away from the Qun, as Hissrad's relations with the Tal-Vashoth is in itself complex and ambiguous – but that will be discussed in the next chapters of this essay.
Frustrated Hissrad was a ticking time bomb wherever his fate would take him. His greatest trauma must have left him with a deep feeling that he was a dangerous thing, and thus he could have become prone to conflict avoidance – as long as the friends are in concern, Iron Bull may prefer manipulative workarounds to open confrontations that would make him actually hurt somebody (the situation with Dorian is more complex, and I'll try to face it later on). As I'd like to elaborate later on, a great part of his life as the Iron Bull will come down to finding ways to avoid and dissolve frustration through various carnal, often playfully aggressive, outlets.
Hissrad may know no difference, but Gatt does. Hissrad cannot even grasp the source of his frustration. He's convinced that doing the right thing will give him the peace of mind, and if something goes wrong, it must be caused by his insufficient effort. Gatt states that Hissrad is simply misguided in that matter, and between the lines of his report he almost openly accuses his superiors of deceit. The elf whom we later encounter during Bull's personal quest probably got so agitated about his commander's situation because, as a liberated convert, he might have noticed a similar kind of exploitation of Hissrad's mind as otherwise occurs to the slaves. Gatt makes a clear statement that he will obey no matter what because he has already made his mind, made the major life choice, and remains determined even if it costs him frustration. Hissrad, on the other hand, would not really be able to choose any set of values other than the Qun. Gatt's obedience to the Qun is deliberate, Hissrad's – conditioned and reactive. Moreover, after ostensibly becoming a Tal-Vashoth, Bull seems to be discreetly guilt-tripped by his superiors through accusations of desertion, and it is Gatt who smuggles this mind trick into the proposition of Inquisition's alliance with the Qunari.
All in all, if Hissrad remains faithful to the Qun, his fate is sealed. In the main Inquisition game, he sacrifices his company of mercenaries and detaches from emotional bonds once more, being almost totally merged with the Qun demands – for a time being. He gradually rejects his Tal-Vashoth image as fake (even though "fake" isn't a good word to describe its validity, as shall I try to elaborate later on). Later, in the Trespasser DLC, he obediently betrays Inquisitor's party when ordered to attack them by Vidasala, delivering a crushing punchline, and must be killed by his former companions, possibly including his love interest (by the way, Dorian appears rather unimpressed by Bull's betrayal in that case, even if they were in a relationship).
These conclusions allow us to view Iron Bull's mercenary life in a different light. By forming the Chargers, he gained a chance to make a huge step in mental recovery, gaining new good objects in relations with whom he could define himself – the Chargers became a new anchor for his identity which, in time, became powerful enough to compete with his Ben-Hassrath role.