The companions’ remarks during quests can be pretty revealing sometimes how personal the task currently at hand is to them, for reasons Hawke may not be aware of yet. Wayward Son hits close to home for a lot of them.
(For a lot of them the reason is parents, but not only that. In any case, warning for, in addition to references to slavery, child abuse or otherwise difficult relationships with parents.)
Bethany: Can we help this woman? This could be Mother...
Carver: This will be Mother if we're not careful.
Carver and Bethany both make the connection that Arianni’s situation could easily be their own mother’s, with a templar at their doorstep asking Leandra for her apostate child’s whereabouts. Their reactions are the opposite, though. Carver reminds Hawke to be cautious, Bethany wants to step in and help.
Bethany understandably identifies with Feynriel’s plight, and she must know it’s risky, but sometimes you’ve got to be the kindness you want to see in the world. Carver’s reluctance to get involved in helping mages and complaints when Hawke does so can seem uncaring to a mage Hawke, whose choice of words to gain Feynriel’s trust with is “I am you” of all things. But it’s because Carver does love his older sibling, and keeping Hawke safe, and off the templars’ radar to achieve that, comes first to him.
Isabela: Some people just aren’t built for family life. At least Feynriel has a mother who cares about him.
I think this is the first time it comes up, but from previous playthroughs I remember this is a running theme with Isabela. Mother-child relationships draw her attention. She’s probably not fond of Arianni’s plan to send Feynriel to the Circle, but she can tell it’s a last resort for her and that she only wants to protect him.
Considering she also comments similarly about Leandra and Marethari, the former of whom loves her children but also takes out on them (especially on Hawke) a lot of the bitterness she feels about how her life has turned out, and the latter also does something questionable to try to protect her child (Merrill) against said child’s wishes, I wonder if part of her tries to reason what her own mother did into a misguided attempt to protect her, too. Whatever her mother’s reasons were, it still caused Isabela undeniable harm. I don’t think anyone owes forgiveness to someone who has hurt them, and good intentions don’t change that. Maybe she finds the idea comforting, though, for her sake I hope so. She also empathizes with Feynriel for his father wanting nothing to do with raising him, because hers wasn’t around, either.
She’s usually wary of getting involved in other people’s business, and sometimes gives rivalry points for Hawke doing so, but she’ll give +5 friendship for encouraging Feynriel to go to the Dalish like he wants to, to pursue his own path in life in freedom.
Vincento: Maldición! You're a mage! I suppose you'd be kind, then, to a boy who resists being taken in by templars?
Merrill, with a sweet smile: To an elf-blooded child, abandoned by his human father? Of course we would.
Merrill’s heart goes out to a child born to the Dalish who has trouble fitting in either with them or in the human city she herself is learning to navigate. He’s a young, confused mage with unusual powers, and his human heritage doesn’t spare him from the discrimination elves face. The comment she makes to Feynriel’s neglectful human father is the most (deservedly) vicious one out of all the companions.
She also encourages Feynriel to seek out her clan when he expresses interest in joining them, reassuring him they’ll probably take him in. All the while at the back of her mind must be the thought he’ll be welcomed into the community and family that rejected her, which probably stings at least a bit. How much, she keeps to herself. It’s not his fault.
Anders: You have no idea.
Anders would of course be interested in helping a mage avoid the Circle, but Feynriel’s situation is probably personal quite a bit here, too. Advising Arianni not to trust the templars to have her son’s best interests at heart is definitely spoken from experience. But I also wonder what’s going on in Anders’s head when meeting Vincento, who despite hardly being father of the year, does at least care to help his son avoid the templars. Not by much, but considering Anders’s own father called in the templars to take away his twelve-year-old child for turning out to be a mage, it’s not insignificant.
Malcolm Hawke’s love for his children is an inspiring, and a little bittersweet reminder of how much better things could be for young mages and could have been for Anders, in a better world. Vincento is a reminder of how low the bar would have been for “better” and that Anders Sr. still managed to crawl under it.
Aveline: My husband, Wesley, was a templar. They're not all fanatics to be feared.
Aveline isn’t really listening to Arianni, and is more interested in telling her how things are from her point of view. #NotAllTemplars because Wesley would never, but that doesn’t really help here because Kirkwall templars so would. She probably does think she’s helping, but it’s more that she’s defending her husband’s memory, which she feels is insulted by criticism of his profession. This is an approach she could stand to work on, to be a good guard-captain who treats all civilians she’s tasked with protecting equally. Mourning or not, she brings more of her personal life and biases to her work than she realizes.
Fenris: Don't coddle this boy. If he is a mage, he's dangerous and belongs in the Circle.
Fenris does his very best not to think of Feynriel as a child and vulnerable. He doesn’t want to feel sympathy or Maker forbid empathy for him, because Feynriel scares him, and it would be easier if he could just think of individual mages, too, as the boogeyman they are to him as a group after a life of being abused by some of the worst of them. But I doubt it is easy when he finally has to actually look at big bad Feynriel, and sees a kid with a Tevinter slaver’s sword at his throat.
Fenris’s default reaction to something upsetting is to go almost absurdly stoical, and that he seems calm and collected doesn’t always mean he is, but when he’s caught off guard rather than the upsetting situation building up slowly so he knows what’s coming, the mask slips. Fenris gives friendship or rivalry points for killing or sparing both Danzig’s band of slavers and the ‘Vint slavers holding Feynriel captive. He only says something out loud about the latter group, though, both to shout his protest about sparing them and to taunt the slavers before you kill them. Oops, he relates to a mage after all.
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