Sylvanpyxie wrote...
I wasn't denying Cullen's ability to resist the torture, or endure the torment. I was simply pointing out that his inexperience may have caused him to suffer greater long term emotional trauma than a more experienced Templar might have.
This is a good point. I think many who hold Cullen's comments in Act 1 against him forget that it had only been a few months prior to seeing him in DA2, that Broken Circle occurred. Also his DAO epilogue has always been just a rumor from one possible type of playthrough and has been patently denied as being canon. What was declared canon says he was elsewhere.
Back to Cullen's inexperience... that event in Kinloch Hold might have been better handled by a more experienced Templar, true. But Cullen was the sole survivor from behind the great door. That would stick with anyone but more so with someone who had no experience with such things. It's one thing to be told something but quite another to experience it.
As time goes on in Kirkwall, we get to see him handling things a bit better. If his encounter with Wilmod had happened before Broken Circle, it wouldn't have reminded him of that horrorific time. But it does. And so soon after getting to Kirkwall too! It was less than a year since he'd survived Uldred's attack on the Circle. I'm surprised it didn't drive him further into a craze about opressing mages. When Hawke tells Cullen what Tarohne was doing to the recruits, he gets a bit vicious. However, if you think about it, he's just been told that a mage was doing to other young knights what had been done to the mages in Ferelden by Uldred and like then, comrades were killed. His nightmare has just come back to haunt him. A few cruel words are the least I would have expected from him.
The fact that he takes until Act 3 to DO something was probably just written that way for dramatic effect by the writers. But since so many want to stick that against Cullen too, I offer my thoughts: He's a soldier. He was more than likely raised in part or entirely by the system he serves. His idea of what's right was formed to suit the Chantry's whims. It's like a slave who doesn't know he's a slave, has never known freedom and can't begin to fathom it.
In the beginning of his career, he thinks mages aren't so bad. Then Uldred happens and he's shoved into a dark place. He claims his fath saved him during that time he spent being tortured. He feels in his heart that if he serves as he's supposed to, he can't go wrong and real word experience has hammered this home for him. So as the events in Kirkwall unfold, he sticks to his faith because it's helped him already. He wants to avoid another Broken Circle at all costs and thinks being soft on the mages will invite just that. When it happens anyway, I would have expected him to go further into Meredith territory. But by then he'd been questioning more and more what was right. He may not believe that mages deserve their freedom (baby steps
) but he doesn't believe they deserve death and worse and he's stopped accepting the lies that say it's fine.
I'm not so much concerned about what Cullen has said or supposedly done because most of that has been addressed. What I want answers to was how much he knew of the goings-on in Kirkwall's Circle. Did he have any knowledge/say over the mages who were made Tranquil for petty reasons? We don't know. It seems in DA2 that any Templar can do it, if they please, at any time so this is murky to me. Many have mentioned rapes yet I have not had any such dialogue pop up during my playthroughs. Whether I was pro-mage or pro-templar, I just never came across it. There's a Tranquil proprieter in the Gallows who asks Hawke not to steal the merchandise or she'll be beaten. What Alrik was planning to do with Ella doesn't say explicitly anything about rape but he's creepy enough that it's not a stretch. So I want this addressed in some way. What did Cullen know of it? And how does he feel about it? If these things were indeed occurring. Like I said, I never ran across it. I'd like to see him grappling with guilt and learning a new path. The possible story it brings would be fascinating to me.
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