tbh i think my appreciation for good templars plays a p big role in the fact that i do lowkey ship surana/cullen, but like...NOT UNTIL INQUISITION. because it honestly breaks mei’s heart a little bit to hear him say the things he does when you find him in the broken circle quest. she considered him one of the decent templars, the kind who might be misguided but whose heart is in the right place, and she might even have called him her friend with time.
and from a meta standpoint i recognize that he’s only like nineteen during origins and maker knows how long he was being psychologically tortured before the warden arrives; all we really know is that greagoir has already called for the rite of annulment by the time you arrive in lothering and it takes about a week to get to kinloch hold from there IF you choose to go directly to the circle of magi first.
and knowing how his story goes, how he makes some really awful choices but goes on to work on himself and seek some kind of penance for those choices, i am...probably...a bit more forgiving of cullen than a lot of the opinions i’ve seen (not necessarily on my dash, just in general this fandom can be really hard on cullen—and i get it, i just don’t rly agree).
HOWEVER, it takes mei a while to really make peace with the reality of the state she found cullen in and how it broke him down to the point where she couldn’t maintain the tenuous trust i imagine she’d had in him (as much as a mage CAN trust a templar, anyway).
i’m not sure if she’s able to forgive him either, because for a long time, as far as she knows, cullen is still the man she found trapped behind that barrier. she doesn’t know his story. doesn’t know what became of him later. doesn’t know how hard he’s worked to heal and Do Better and fight his instinct to jump to the worst conclusions about mages. doesn’t know it’s taken him ten long years to reach the point he’s at during inquisition.
and i’m just really interested in how a reunion would go there because mei is a person who believes deeply in the value of second chances for people who’ve shown a real desire to do better next time, cullen is a hugely important example of how toxic ideas can be rehabilitated if a person is willing to work on himself, and it would be such a relief for her to finally be able to forgive him for the things he said and did while at his absolute worst.
