The opening few hours of Dragon Age: The Veilguard entice old players and get new ones up to speed with the clever use of one character: Varric Tethras, scribe of heroes. As a companion in the previous two games, he’s a familiar face, and as the guy who wrote the (fictional) book, he can tell you firsthand all about the events of Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition.
But there’s one thing Varric will never talk about: Why he calls his crossbow Bianca. Dragon Age fans did eventually get an explanation — but to be honest, it’s only ever raised more questions.
[Ed. note: This piece contains some spoilers for the opening of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.]
Bianca, Varric’s steampunk-ass repeating crossbow, doesn’t feature much in Veilguard’s opening hours. At June’s Summer Game Fest, BioWare’s gameplay preview revealed that Bianca takes a mighty blow from Solas’ magic, shattering into pieces. Maybe Varric can put it back together again, maybe he can’t — you’ll have to play the game to find out. But if it is the end of Bianca, it’s an epic death for the only inanimate object in Dragon Age canon worthy of character status.
Varric and Bianca are jointly introduced in Dragon Age 2 when a pickpocket lifts your player-character’s coin purse and Varric fires a single bolt so accurately that it pins the fleeing thief to a wall by his clothing. Varric talks to Bianca as if it were alive and horny for him (it’s worth clarifying that it is not alive, considering this is a fantasy setting) — half his combat barks are things like “Bianca, baby, introduce yourself!” or “Bianca, you minx! That was beautiful!” — and while he definitely likes to showboat, he’s not wrong to value it as a weapon.
In the main story of Dragon Age 2, you learn that Bianca is singular — there’s no other crossbow in the world that fires automatically, never mind so quickly and powerfully. It’s the perfect weapon for a self-described lazy merchant prince and part-time novelist. What you never learn, however, is where Bianca came from or whether it’s named after a person named Bianca. As Varric describes it in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it’s the one story he’ll never tell.
Dragon Age 2’s Legacy DLC has the game’s first “explanation” for Bianca’s origin: It was created by Gerav, a dwarven engineer and old mafia contact of Varric’s — which Varric explains after he’s forced to kill Gerav, who’d been driven mad by darkspawn infection. You’ll note, however, that this doesn’t explain why he calls Bianca “Bianca,” and fans would eventually find out that this was a lie of omission, easy to make because Gerav could no longer speak for himself.
Bianca’s namesake would be revealed for the first time in the tie-in comic Dragon Age: Until We Sleep, and eventually Dragon Age: Inquisition. The real Bianca — I mean, the human Bianca — no, wait… The living Bianca was a dwarven smith and Varric’s secret, long-distance true love; they could never be together because of dwarven mafia politics and her arranged marriage. Gerav created Varric’s crossbow, but he never succeeded in getting it to work. It wasn’t until Varric brought it to his clever lover that Bianca (the dwarf) was able to make Bianca (the crossbow) into the fearsome weapon he wields in the games.
Having done that, however, Varric and Bianca realized they had to keep the origins of the crossbow secret, lest she be hunted down and forced to mass manufacture it for the scariest bidder. And as of the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition, Bianca (the dwarf) is still alive, and her secret is still safe. Only Varric’s closest friends and a few members of the Inquisitor’s inner circle know the truth.
This part of the story makes sense — Bianca the crossbow is essentially a fantasy machine gun. “A crossbow that fires this far and this quickly with so little training? Every battle would be a massacre,” Varric tells Solas in Inquisition.
But the rest of the story, if I may say so as Polygon’s foremost Varric Tethras fan, comes apart like tissue paper. If Varric and Bianca made a pact to keep this crossbow from being widely manufactured, then why didn’t they just destroy it? Why is Varric swaggering around Kirkwall pinning muggers to walls in broad daylight? If they want to keep it a secret that Bianca created this crossbow, then why did Varric name it after her? Why is he constantly calling the crossbow Bianca, loudly, in the middle of every fight?
Video games are huge projects, made from the work of hundreds of creatives, and that’s before you factor in sequels, DLC, and tie-in comics. You can’t expect a work of world-building like Dragon Age, which is over 15 years old and made from many, many hands, not to have some plot holes. And as a dyed-in-the-wool superhero fan, I know the best way to respond to plot holes: Just relax and go with them.
Everything we know about Varric says that he’s a keen judge of humanity and a canny schemer with a heart of gold, who’s willing to sacrifice his own time and well-being to protect those closest to him. The thing that tickles me, as a Dragon Age fan, is that calling his crossbow Bianca says that he’s also a dumb idiot who can’t shut up about the accomplishments of his loved ones. And I enjoy believing that, because it’s very endearing.
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