[quote]Lord Aesir wrote...
Just about anyone could see that Kirkwall might be headed in the direction Anders pushed it. He only speeded the process along. Knowing that widespread devestating harm could result generates very real very rational concerns, concerns that she took to heart and sent her most trusted agent to investigate. Why would she assume the problem was on the Templar's end when foreign Mages not in the circle were stirring up much of the trouble? Besides, Meredith was not incompetent in her duties, just overly harsh in their fulfillment. What would the Seekers do? Tell her not to guard the Mages more closely when it is a very real possibility some of them may be working with the Resolutionists?[/quote]
Because the Templars are ruling Kirkwall. They are the ones in charge of the place. And the Divine is in charge of them. It's called Chain of command. In normal, competant military or political organizations, it works. In the case of the Chantry, it's virtually non-existant.
And Anders did not push Kirkwall in any direction until he blew up the Chantry. which came at the end of act 3. After the Divine's agent had long been gone. He only matters in the picture at that point, before that, he's just another faceless apostate milling about Kirkwall. Before that, it was Meredith, and probably Orsino, though we don't see anything going on with the Circle mages at all, so its hard to tell.
Regardless, Chain of command. Sh*t rolls uphill as well as downhill. It was clearly obvious the Chain of command was breaking down, especially when Meredith was going over Elthina's head to get her annulment invoked.
[/quote] No, the first thing she should be looking into is the cause of the trouble. And she did, she found that the Resolutionists are stirring up trouble for the Templars, setting off the reaction I mentioned earlier. Guilty mages should matter to you when judging the divine's actions. They certainly matter to the Divine and factor into her decision. Why send Seekers when the source of the troubles is a group of Mages, and thus a Templar issue? Clearly, she realized that the Templars of Kirkwall were not succeeding in their task, for she thought an Exalted March might be necesary to contain their failure.
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Yes, she should be looking into the cause of the trouble. The problem was, she was only looking at the Resolutionists, and they were only part of the problem, and a problem that was growing due to the incompetance and mismanagement of Meredith and Elthina. She can worry about resolutionists till her heart's content, and ignore her own ranks that are creating the situation where extremists thrive.
Meredith was fully incompetant. Hell, you don't even need an investigation that deep to reveal this fact.
1. She had turned the City of Kirkwall against the Templars. Templars, who are often seen by the common folk as valiant protectors, are now seen as Tyrants and assh*les by the common folk. That Meredith destroyed perhaps the Templar's most powerful resource, the love and respect of the common people, should have been looked at right then and there, because this is something unheard of in most of the rest of Thedas. Where templars are still respected and loved by the common folk. And this has been going on for years, because in Act 1, Cullen even says that people are starting to look unkindly at the Templar order. This reeks of incompetance.
2. Her own men were conspiring with blood mages to overthrow her. Hello. Red flags. If there was any reason to investigate the templars that in itself should have garnered a closer look.
3. Kirkwall in Act 3 was overrun with escaped apostates. The Templar's job is to hunt them down and keep them under wraps. They are obviously failing miserably at this task. That alone should make the Divine send a whole unit of Seekers to figure out what the problem is. Why the Templars are not doing their job. And well...isn't that was the Seekers are supposed to do? Step in when Templars are failing their duties?
4. Orsino. Meredith, as Knight Commander, could have very well forced Orsino to allow her to search the tower for corruption. The mages are under the Templar's rule. templars have the final say, pretty much, and if meredith was that convinced the tower was corrupt, she could have forced the search, whether the mages liked it or not. She did not. Because she's an idiot.
5. Flagrant abuses were taking place right under her nose, there was corruption in her own ranks. As a military commander, it is not only her job, but responsibility to keep order and function within her own ranks, and to know everything that is happening amongst her men. If she knew about it, she was condoning it. If she didn't, she was an incompetant commander, because it is her job and duty to know exactly what her men are doing. That's standard in ANY military chain of command, and a commander who tried to claim ignorance of their troops actions in a court martial would get stripped of rank and thrown in the brig, and laughed out of the courtroom.
The reason I said I do not care about the resolutionists, is because they are not shown at all, and only mentioned by leliana. Before the quest Faith, I'd spent about 4-5 years in Kirkwall, never meeting any, nor encountering a group of them, or discovering any plot of theirs. Only Act 3 mention of them.
While I do not doubt that they are involved in some manner, the level of their involvement seems pretty minor, with what I've seen in the game. Since I've never met any at all. or really know exactly how they are supposed be stirring things up, I really don't care what they are doing. I don't even hear rumors, or get little hints or evidence, of their activity. other than the Mage Underground, which has been mostly helping apostates escape, something that is not unusual. We had the Mage's Collective in Ferelden, after all.
It was poor writing, I'll admit. If they wanted to have the mages play an equal role in Kirkwall's troubles, they should have shown, and not told us, about the resolutionists. They did not. All they showed me were batsh*t crazy apostates and blood mages. And while problematic in their own right, they are small potatoes compared to what was going on in the bigger picture of Kirkwall. They looked to me more a symptom of breakdown, incompetance, and corruption, not the cause. The Divine is looking into the symptoms, but not the cause, in Kirkwall.
And the biggest cause of everything I saw boiled down to the two in charge: Meredith and Elthina. Elthina couldn't keep her own zealots in check (Petrice and her templar accomplices) and they almost caused the Qunari to take over. And she did absolutely nothing about Meredith and Orsino, two people she was not only in a position of authroity over, but had the distinct responsibility, as part of her job, to deal with them should they get out of hand.
The actions of a terrorist group should be secondary to the Divine's concerns when her own ranks are full of corruption, incompetance, and lazieness. That the Divine sent one person, leliana, to investigate the situation, shows she's an idiot. She should have sent an entire contingent of Seekers to investigate everyone in Kirkwall. Instead of sending one person to decide if the city needs to be destroyed.
That is, if the Divine had a brain. Which she clearly does not. Like her predecessors, she is quick to consider an exalted march as a solution for a problem that could have been solved through less violent means. But that's the Chantry in a nutshell.
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