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[Xilizhra]

As some of you may know, I'm ardently, vehemently pro-mage. However, I cannot say that I hate Meredith, for a few reasons. For one thing, she's just a bad example of a whole evil system, and it's far too easy to pin all of the blame for Kirkwall's problems on her alone instead of the templars as a whole. But for another... quite frankly, she was broken by circumstance years before the present, and isn't really functional because of that.

Meredith seems to me to be more of an abusive but technically loving parent than a straight-up tyrant. She sees all mages as being inherently dangerous and worthy of tyrannical repression because of it, but she also believes that she's protecting them as well, and seems to sieze any chance she can get to be merciful and justify it to herself, which explains her strangely inconsistent actions. By Act 3, this has become truly acute, cycling between demanding brutal punishment  against Orsino to simply sulkily walking away, and then talking about how her measures break her own heart to demanding the death of all mages in the city for, well, no real reason. But then backing down from it if Hawke makes it an issue when siding with her. And then just flat-out trying to kill everyone, though at that point her sword had clearly hijacked her mind.

I believe that Meredith, in short, sees all mages as being her own sister; she loves them but also wants to keep them paralyzed and ineffectual so that they don't cause trouble... and, ultimately kill themselves. It's really quite tragic, because not only is Meredith possibly the worst person to fill the position of knight-commander, the position of knight-commander is the worst thing to happen to her; given that her whole life was shaped by trauma from failing (as she undoubtedly sees it, regardless of how much she could have actually done about it) to take care of one mage, who in Dumat's name thought it would be a good idea to give her responsibility for an entire city's worth?!
I personally believe that it was the job that broke her; her paranoia and seeming hatred of mages was really just self-loathing and fear of herself slipping, directed outward, probably because she couldn't stand to keep it all internal. I also believe that at minimum, Elthina deserves slapping with a wet trout hundreds of times for failing to notice any of this, or perhaps just never reading Meredith's file (assuming the templars keep records that well). And I really, really want to give her a hug, possibly made even more tragic by the fact that, not counting those you sleep with, she's one of the people you have the closest physical contact with; her helping you up after killing that Saarebas in Demands of the Qun. In that scene, definitely, I could connect with her and even want to work with her... but despite my sympathy for her, I could never do so. While I'm not certain that she can be held fully responsible for her actions, especially with the sword driving her, Hawke can.

[David Gaider]

I find it interesting that someone would compare Meredith to a parent-- the initial character sketches for Meredith summed her up as "PTA Mom gone wrong". Apropos, I think.