AnasAbdin
Today's Document
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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Game of Thrones Daily
Love Begins
Janaina Medeiros
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
PR's Tumblrdome
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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izzy's playlists!
almost home
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
oozey mess
Product Placement
NASA
#extradirty
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia
seen from Egypt
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
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@templarappreciationlife
Apparently this is going to be news to some of you, but I support the Templars. Just so we’re 1000% clear.
I cannot believe that templarappreciationlife would say such a thing. I am completely blindsided!
I’m so sorry I hid this from you all for so long. 😭 I just couldn’t live a lie anymore. 😭😭
The main thing that troubles me about anti-Cullen posts is how many of them imply or even out-right say that he can’t be redeemed because he hasn’t suffered enough. People can feel however they feel about whatever, but personally, I find this logic disturbing. Cullen suffering would not undo the suffering of those he failed to protect as Knight-Captain. It would just be another person suffering.
In my opinion, redemption requires the following things:
Regretting one’s previous actions and desiring to change.
Attempting to fix (in whatever way possible, even if it’s not complete) whatever they broke during the period they regret.
Not repeating the behavior.
Cullen ticks all three boxes, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not necessarily troubled by people who disagree with me on that point; opinions vary according to what exactly you think Cullen did wrong and the extent to which you find the Templar organization culpable for his actions. I’m only troubled by people who argue that Cullen’s redemption wasn’t “earned,” which almost always seems to translate to “It was restorative, and I wanted it to be punative.”
I would also say we can never know the true extent of someone's suffering. He clearly beats himself up alot. That kind of beating on yourself, day in, day out, over and over, it's so damaging.
What did people want to see? Him tortured? Because I'm pretty sure he's been torturing himself over it for a long time. That, to me, is a stronger redemption arch than having someone else do the torturing.
And we don’t see his whole arc, we see the start of him trying to redeem himself through his work for the Inquisition, but he knows it’s going to take his entire life to make up for what he did and for what the Chantry did through him.
The Chantry isn’t at fault for the things he did wrong, though. Almost everything he did wrong was a negligence of his duty, not a fulfillment of it.
It's a bit much absolve the Chantry of all blame since it was the systematic abuses of the Chantry that allowed (and encouraged) negligence of duty in the first place, from him and others. If Cullen was just a lone negligent templar, he wouldn't have been promoted to captain, and Elthina would have stepped in long before Meredith asked for the Right of Annulment. And he cannot be blamed for the actions of other templars in other Circles.
Cullen's acknowledgement that he did things wrong and his desire to atone is what makes it a redemption arc, but part of that is recognising that the Chantry used him as a blunt object to control mages, and he didn't speak out against that until it was nearly too late. It doesn't mean he shouldn't take responsibility for his actions - and he takes a lot of responsibility - but there should be an understanding that those actions didn't spring up from nowhere, they were enabled and encouraged by a corrupt institution.
I might agree with you if Cullen had been a regular Templar at an average Circle, like he was in Kinloch, but that simply wasn’t the case at the Gallows. He was second-in-command at what is pretty universally acknowledged in canon as the worst Circle in Thedas.
Elthina did step in a couple of times, when issues were brought to her attention. For the most part, however, it was not Elthina’s job to keep the Kirkwall Templars in check. It was Cullen and Meredith’s. It was literally their jobs within the Chantry to keep things under control. They, personally, failed to do that. That’s on them.
Cullen didn’t treat mages the way he did because of the Chantry. Greagoir taught him better than that. Elthina was clearly opposed to violence against mages. Cullen’s negligence toward the mages and nativity about the Templars was a result of his own personal trauma, and Meredith keeping that trauma fresh in his mind and dragging him into a downward spiral that brought out the worst in both of them.
I’m not saying the Chantry isn’t at fault at all. The Seekers of Truth fucked up big time in Kirkwall. The war could probably have been avoided if Cassandra’s people had actually done their jobs. But the Seekers of Truth are a fail-safe that should never have been necessary. It would not have been necessary if Cullen had actually been doing his job. So while I don’t think the Chantry is totally innocent, I don’t think it’s fair to blame them for Cullen’s actions on the grounds that it didn’t stop him.
As I said before, it also just doesn’t feel particularly helpful, in this case.
Apparently this is going to be news to some of you, but I support the Templars. Just so we’re 1000% clear.
The main thing that troubles me about anti-Cullen posts is how many of them imply or even out-right say that he can’t be redeemed because he hasn’t suffered enough. People can feel however they feel about whatever, but personally, I find this logic disturbing. Cullen suffering would not undo the suffering of those he failed to protect as Knight-Captain. It would just be another person suffering.
In my opinion, redemption requires the following things:
Regretting one’s previous actions and desiring to change.
Attempting to fix (in whatever way possible, even if it’s not complete) whatever they broke during the period they regret.
Not repeating the behavior.
Cullen ticks all three boxes, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not necessarily troubled by people who disagree with me on that point; opinions vary according to what exactly you think Cullen did wrong and the extent to which you find the Templar organization culpable for his actions. I’m only troubled by people who argue that Cullen’s redemption wasn’t “earned,” which almost always seems to translate to “It was restorative, and I wanted it to be punative.”
You’re arguing with something that is beside the point of my post and that I explicitly said people might disagree with me on.
You’re also taking that quote about Meredith completely out of context, and I can’t imagine that you don’t know that.
Cullen does not throw screaming fits. He barely raises his voice. He immediately accepts your decision to ally with the mages, trains them as allies, and reminds his former brothers-in-arms to treat them as allies.
Also, the Avaar mage in question was literally already an abomination. That wasn’t a hypothetical. The demon was calling from inside the house. That’s why she couldn’t stay with her own people; because everyone, including her, knew how dangerous what she was doing was.
I don’t know what you expected from a blog called “Templar Appreciation Life,” but I support the Templars and the Circles, and you don’t strike me as a person who is capable of having a good-faith discussion about why someone might do that, so I think we’re done here.
The main thing that troubles me about anti-Cullen posts is how many of them imply or even out-right say that he can’t be redeemed because he hasn’t suffered enough. People can feel however they feel about whatever, but personally, I find this logic disturbing. Cullen suffering would not undo the suffering of those he failed to protect as Knight-Captain. It would just be another person suffering.
In my opinion, redemption requires the following things:
Regretting one’s previous actions and desiring to change.
Attempting to fix (in whatever way possible, even if it’s not complete) whatever they broke during the period they regret.
Not repeating the behavior.
Cullen ticks all three boxes, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not necessarily troubled by people who disagree with me on that point; opinions vary according to what exactly you think Cullen did wrong and the extent to which you find the Templar organization culpable for his actions. I’m only troubled by people who argue that Cullen’s redemption wasn’t “earned,” which almost always seems to translate to “It was restorative, and I wanted it to be punative.”
I would also say we can never know the true extent of someone's suffering. He clearly beats himself up alot. That kind of beating on yourself, day in, day out, over and over, it's so damaging.
What did people want to see? Him tortured? Because I'm pretty sure he's been torturing himself over it for a long time. That, to me, is a stronger redemption arch than having someone else do the torturing.
And we don’t see his whole arc, we see the start of him trying to redeem himself through his work for the Inquisition, but he knows it’s going to take his entire life to make up for what he did and for what the Chantry did through him.
The Chantry isn’t at fault for the things he did wrong, though. Almost everything he did wrong was a negligence of his duty, not a fulfillment of it.
The main thing that troubles me about anti-Cullen posts is how many of them imply or even out-right say that he can’t be redeemed because he hasn’t suffered enough. People can feel however they feel about whatever, but personally, I find this logic disturbing. Cullen suffering would not undo the suffering of those he failed to protect as Knight-Captain. It would just be another person suffering.
In my opinion, redemption requires the following things:
Regretting one’s previous actions and desiring to change.
Attempting to fix (in whatever way possible, even if it’s not complete) whatever they broke during the period they regret.
Not repeating the behavior.
Cullen ticks all three boxes, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not necessarily troubled by people who disagree with me on that point; opinions vary according to what exactly you think Cullen did wrong and the extent to which you find the Templar organization culpable for his actions. I’m only troubled by people who argue that Cullen’s redemption wasn’t “earned,” which almost always seems to translate to “It was restorative, and I wanted it to be punative.”
I would also say we can never know the true extent of someone's suffering. He clearly beats himself up alot. That kind of beating on yourself, day in, day out, over and over, it's so damaging.
What did people want to see? Him tortured? Because I'm pretty sure he's been torturing himself over it for a long time. That, to me, is a stronger redemption arch than having someone else do the torturing.
True!
He’s also, you know, literally been tortured. That is a thing that has already happened to him in canon. (And anyone who says it was exactly the same as a Harrowing doesn’t understand what either of those things actually are.)
He didn’t exactly come out better for it.
The main thing that troubles me about anti-Cullen posts is how many of them imply or even out-right say that he can’t be redeemed because he hasn’t suffered enough. People can feel however they feel about whatever, but personally, I find this logic disturbing. Cullen suffering would not undo the suffering of those he failed to protect as Knight-Captain. It would just be another person suffering.
In my opinion, redemption requires the following things:
Regretting one’s previous actions and desiring to change.
Attempting to fix (in whatever way possible, even if it’s not complete) whatever they broke during the period they regret.
Not repeating the behavior.
Cullen ticks all three boxes, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not necessarily troubled by people who disagree with me on that point; opinions vary according to what exactly you think Cullen did wrong and the extent to which you find the Templar organization culpable for his actions. I’m only troubled by people who argue that Cullen’s redemption wasn’t “earned,” which almost always seems to translate to “It was restorative, and I wanted it to be punative.”
really need people to understand that the Templars you encounter in the hinterlands are rebels who abandoned the order as a whole and do not represent the goals and ideals of the order. the same could be said for the mages.
my point is that the goal of the Templar Order is NOT to wipe out all mages, actually, and it’s weird that so many people seem to be taking it for granted that it is.
CONFESSION:
I just can hardly take DA Tumblrs all consuming hatred of Templars There’s not even a tag you can use to see templar characters or content without seeing a blistering storm of antis and rants and projecting IRL political views into a deeply complicated fictional setting. You get eaten alive for wanting a templar romance FFS! They’re not cops!!This isnt normal, other fandoms don’t act this way at all about SW stormtroopers or the brotherhood of steel. Thank the Maker non tumblr DA com isn’t like this.
Templar OC: Cressna Lechner by artist Tanzanight
Oct 28th, 2018
Credit:
https://www.deviantart.com/tanzanight/art/Dragon-Age-Templar-OC-Cressia-Lechner-770232986
Champions of the Just by DeepWoodian
https://www.deviantart.com/deepwoodian/art/Dragon-Age-The-champions-of-the-just-566376339
Evarist and Lidia by Yuhime
https://www.deviantart.com/yuhime/art/Evarist-and-Lidia-255537762
Sorry I’ve missed a couple of days; I’m sick and also very overwhelmed by life. I’ll try to make them up when I’m feeling better.
Templar Appreciation Month - Favorite Templar Quest
Without a doubt, my favorite questline for the Templars in Dragon Age is Champions of the Just. It beats out In Hushed Whispers because of Envy alone - so creepy and awesome at the same time. And, of course, we can’t forget the good Templars who have been trapped by the machinations of their officers, like Ser Barris. I don’t like losing Fiona, of course, but I don’t like losing Barris worse. XD
Templar appreciation: Ser Otto
Ser Otto
who went out of his way to help elves in Denerim Alienage.
Templar Appreciation Month - Day 9: Delrin Barris.
What can I say about Delrin Barris that hasn’t already been said by the Inquisitor during his promotion? He protects both mages and non-mages, takes control of the situation at Theirinfall despite being a relatively low-ranking Templar, questions authority when appropriate, and genuinely cares about the people of Thedas.
He’s also a total babe.
