What? Lead? Me? No, no, no. No leading. Bad things happen when I lead. We get lost, people die and the next thing you know I'm stranded somewhere without any pants! ~Alistair Theirin 9:30
āWhen we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
āAnd we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-ā
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. āThings got pretty bad after that,ā she muttered. āI know itās silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We donāt know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if sheās even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when Iām out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didnāt - didnāt really take that well.ā
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. āAnyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.ā
wei wuxian is such a lesson in contradiction like he's so nice he's a jerk he's so smart he's very naive he's friends with everyone nobody likes him he's the best cultivator alive he can't use a sword he's a whore he's a virgin he's lazy he'll work for days without sleep he's so calm under pressure his temper is atrocious his ego is massive he has no self worth he's dead he's alive he's a saint he's a monster he's a victim he's a villain he's a great teacher he's a terrible student he's a charmer he's so so annoying he saves everyone's asses he's the reason they're in this mess he's a brother but not really he's a son but not really he's a father but not really he's a sect leader with no sect he's so selfish he puts everyone before himself he made so many choices there was nothing else he could have done like no wonder it's so difficult for people to understand him he's literally everything
Dragon age origins is likeā¦. Youāre nineteen, new in town, and itās your second day at pizza hut. You donāt even know how to work the register yet and you just watched your manager get carted off by the paramedics. You have no contact info for him, his next of kin, or corporate. The only other employee is the guy whoās been here for two weeks and is a bit of a doofus, and neither of you really know what youāre supposed to do now. You both desperately need this job though, and the doofus at least has a drivers license and *kiiinda* knows how to use the oven so you just. Shrug, and start taking orders and making pizzas and praying to god that the bills are on autopay.
And weirdly enough youāre really good at this: making pizzas and dealing with shitty customers and breaking up fights in the parking lot and pretending to be Duncanās cousin on the phone so the utility company doesnāt cut off the power. But running a store is a lot of work for two dumb kids, so slowly you start accumulating a bunch of competent weirdos to help out, like the nun who left her convent because god told her to help you make pizzas, and the elderly school teacher who just survived a mass shooting, and the guy the papa johns down the street hired to run you over. And really thereās no way any of this should be working as well as it is - youāre absolutely committing fraud of some kind here - but youāve managed to dodge the landlord every time heās stopped by, and the health inspector never shows up to tell you to stop letting your dog hang out behind the counter and youāre all still kinda looking at each other and asking āare we allowed to just do this?ā before shrugging again and continuing to make pizzas, until somehow, through a series of unlikely technicalities, your doofus coworker ends up on the ballot for governor.
And after like five months of this the regional manager wanders in out of nowhere and youāre sure heās about to chew your ass out for this mess, but it turns out heās pretty chill and honestly kind of impressed with how you managed to keep the place up and running all on your own. So now youāre all thinking āthank god, thereās someone here who actually knows how to run a Pizza Hutā only for him to get hit by a car two days later on the night of the Super Bowl.
If you ask me why I love Alistair I would probably say that it's because he is kind, loyal, cute, funny, and on some level I emotionally relate to him. But if you ask me on a deeper level...
Alistair is anything but boring. At it's heart his story is about a man whose birth was a mistake and is only kept around as a spare, which he carries that inside him like a stone. He does not joke because he is light-hearted. He jokes because he learned to make himself smaller, softer, less threatening, more likeable.
He is unwanted by his father, by Eamon and Isolde, by the Chantry, which treated him as a body to indoctrinate in their war against magic. Every institution in his life teaches him the same lesson: you stay as long as you are convenient. And when you arenāt, you go.
When he is finally offered the chance to choose his own path, it is an organisation whose purpose is to die. Of course he clings to them. The Grey Wardens are not a heroic calling for Alistair. Theyāre a logical conclusion. A place where his disposability is finally honest. A place where being temporary is not a failure of character but a job description. He idealises them not because theyāre noble, but because they make sense. If heās going to be unwanted anyway, at least here his death will mean something.
People only care about the Wardens when they are useful. Just like him. Necessary, tolerated, mourned briefly, then potentially erased but also heroic and sacrificial. Not tied to any authority and he's nothing special, just another Warden equal and understated.
Alistair could be the main character - he has the bloodline, moral clarity, charisma, looks, competence if hardened - the narrative hands him every justification. But he does not want it. Not because he is lazy, childish, or incapable, but because he knows what power costs. He has seen institutions rot people from the inside. He has been shaped, used, discarded by many of them. He criticises them because he understands them. And that is why he refuses to romanticise leadership.
Cynicism is treated as intelligence so he appears dumb but Alistair never confuses moral numbness with wisdom. He refuses to trade his conscience for authority. His complexity lies in the fact that he still trusts and defers to authority even when he doesn't agree with it unless it crosses a line because he tries so hard not to be the one to rock the boat. To some people this is annoying but in reality it's just another way to minimalize his own input to avoid blame, scrutiny, or conflict. These are very realistic flaws for someone like him.
He hides behind jokes, behind being a himbo, behind being annoying. He lets people think he is unserious so they will not expect too much, because expectation leads to disappointment, and abandonment as he has learned. If people think he is shallow, they cannot be hurt when they discover he is afraid. He is kind, loyal, emotionally intelligent and aware of other people's emotions in a way that people who grew up in emotionally inconsistent environments are and this is why he is so relatable.
He wants to be underestimated. He engineers it. Being thought annoying is safer than being thought important. He knows exactly how ugly the world is. He just refuses to become fluent in that ugliness.
When someone responds to his jokes with genuine interest or emotional openness, he is often unsure how to handle it because he is not used to being approached as a full person.
Yes, he can be stubborn. He can be uncompromising, morally rigid to the point of frustration. But that rigidity is survival. When your life teaches you that one mistake means being thrown away, principles are a lifeline. Bend too far, and thereās nothing left.
People call that immaturity, whining. Even the writing tries to convince him that he is too emotional and soft. Stop joking, be serious, be more mature. What they are uncomfortable with is a man who wears his emotions openly in a world that treats detachment as superiority. Alistair does not harden by default. He feels, and he lets you see it. That vulnerability gets punished by audiences the same way it gets punished in-world: by dismissal.
Even when hardened either by player insistence or naturally by the time of Inquisition as a Warden, he still doesn't lose his emotional intelligence and his empathy - he just learns to finally put duty first like the world is telling him to but he still refuses to compromise himself entirely. He is still very young in DAO which is why his hardening is a push and a harsh one at that. How he appears in DAI as a warden, albeit briefly, shows that natural growth.
What he wants more than anything is someone who will see those flaws and keep him anyway. Not fix him. Not elevate him. Not use him. Just keep him. He can be exiled, killed, become a drunk, crowned, left a Warden, and no matter which path he takes, one thing never changes: ethically, he never compromises who he is. He does not become cruel or tyrannical. He does not stop caring.
If he becomes king, you do not give him agency. You take it. You choose for him, as the world always does, for the greater good. Yet he never resents you, because he has been trained his whole life to accept that his wants are secondary. He will even endure horrors for duty, because that is what he has been shaped to do. He does not want to be his father. He does not want to be Cailan. He does not want to be remembered as a symbol or trapped by duty.
He just wants a family to belong in. Thatās the quietest, cruelest truth. Not a throne. Not glory. A place he isnāt temporary. A place he can fail and still be kept. One not covered in chains. But the narrative will not allow him that.
The poetry of his writing is that the only choice the world consistently allows him to make without protest is self-sacrifice. It's the only good he thinks he can really do if he is made King and you don't do the ritual.
Sometimes the narrative even refuses him that, as he might have wished to take Duncan's place, the Hero of Ferelden's, or even Hawkeās. The world keeps trying to make him a hero, but he would rather fade into footnotes. Heroism carries too much meaning, too many expectations, and titles have only ever brought him anguish. If he had never been bastard, Warden, hero, maybe he could have been happy. Accepting all these titles means accepting that his happiness comes second, and the narrative never lets him forget it.
That is why he drives me insane. Alistair is the Main Character TM who should have been the hero but steps aside because he knows he cannot. It is something most real people in leadership never possess: the humility to walk away.
He compels me because he is written like a tragedy that pretends to be a comedy. He remains kind in a system that punishes kindness, that expects the facade to drop at any moment. I love him because no matter how many times the world tells him he is not enough, he refuses to become someone he hates just to survive.
So in a morally grey world I think Alistair's refusal to change is really neat. He represents Bioware's changing worldstates as he has so many different outcomes and they all lead to either him eventually being in a leadership position or death.
He is trying, desperately, to be proof that moral clarity can exist within moral greyness. He knows the Wardens are grey and he understands that pragmatism is sometimes necessary. He just refuses to let that be an excuse to stop being good. He knows where to draw the line even if he is not always sure of himself enough to draw it.
For all his flaws, Alistairās story is raw, and heart breaking. The things that some people complain about they are not nuisances or annoyances. They are the very elements that make him real and relatable. They're not things to 'fix' either. They're proof that heroism doesn't always look flashy.
He is doomed by the narrative in so many ways and he doesn't deserve it. Just like how in real life, it doesn't matter how good you are, you can still suffer by things out of your control. That your flaws are still a part of you and they be your strengths. I think that is the beauty in him and why I don't see him as a one-note character.
That's why I love his story. Good characters often get called boring but that's probably because if you look deeply they often hold a mirror with our own reflection looking back at us.
not wanting to be outdone by the benders in the gang, sokka invents the flamethrower, the supersoaker, the leaf blower, and the concept of throwing rocks at people
I don't care if they're the highest grossing movies on planet freakin Earth, you say "Avatar" and everyone and their mom still thinks that bald little bitch and his magic cow. Soggy James can keep his millions, he'll never have the streets.
telling your online friends "wait there i'm coming" is funny regardless of the distance that you are from them. if they're within driving distance it has the humor of being a real possibility and if they're overseas it's funny because how are you getting there. especially if it's a limited time event. one of my personal favorites is saying i'm walking in their general direction
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