Kirkwall Defense League

August 28, 2014

Anonymous asked: Funny thing about Meredith is that everyone will say that she was a crazy bitch or that she was brutal towards the mages, but they will bend over backwards defending Cullen even though he practically gushes about Meredith and the codex even states that the reason he rose in rank so quickly was because he was the only one who agreed 100% with Meredith.

dreadwulf-dragonage:

Yes, exactly.
And Meredith had a lyrium idol driving her mad, so what’s Cullen’s excuse?

fenrispenris:

officialjacobtaylor:
U forget about the part where he was tortured or did u skip that quest in origins

Is it entirely possible for any of you people to go one day without character bashing or are you doing it on purpose to aggravate the shit out of me? Cullen said and did terrible things after his experience in the circle being tortured emotionally and physically by blood mages, demonds and abominations.

He was suffering from very understandable and very real PTSD. While none of this excuses the things he said and did, they do explain his actions and where he was coming from. When he first comes to Kirkwall, he agrees with Meredith whole heartedly that mages can’t be trusted but as he goes, he begins to see that Meredith and her system are just as corrupt and evil as mages who use blood magic.

It’s called character development. You are very welcome to read this to learn how to correctly read into a character and see character development. And for the rest of Cullen’s story.

The point, if you had read the rest of the conversation you are barging in on, is that Cullen gets people tying themselves in knots to explain his actions, and Meredith gets nothing. Zero. Zip.

The point is the difference in how these characters are treated by fandom, which you are so nicely demonstrating.

Cullen gets one-fifth of the screen time of Meredith and yet he has reams of meta going into his mental state and why he says every single line and why this and why that and defenders who will leap onto strangers blogs and their untagged posts at any hint of dismissal of his character AND YET Meredith is just a crazy villian. No legion of Meredith defenders. In fact, the exact same Cullen fans will turn around and bash Meredith in order to make their hero Cullen look even better. Which makes it hilariously ironic that most of what Cullen actually does in DA2 is hero-worship Meredith.

As I said in the related post, if Knight Commander Meredith had been Knight Commander Martin, with no other changes, he would be one of the most popular characters in this fandom and I would be listening to meta about how tragic his struggle with the lyrium idol is. I would have piles of fanfic about Martin and his sister and how hard he tried to save her and the terrible consequences of his actions in doing that. How traumatized Martin would be by such an experience and watching 50 people be slaughtered around him because he tried to save one mage. But no, Meredith couldn’t be traumatized or have ptsd or a character of her own or anything like that. Instead I have to hear all about Cullen because he is a dude. He appears in like three scenes and acts like a creepy dick in all of them and yet fandom latches onto him and demands he be brought back and now I have to see him again in Inquisition. This is, frankly, bullshit.

This is why I do not care one single bit about Cullen or his poor boring feelings. Yet another throwaway male character gets championed by fandom at the expense of equivalent, and imho much more interesting, female characters. And I can’t even talk about this frustration on my own blog without Cullen fans storming in to talk about how tortured their poor baby is.

But thanks for demonstrating all this for me perfectly. Fandom is so entirely predictable.

9:27am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZgF6iw1PPyE5H

(Notes: 147)