DPSSOC wrote...
Mainly she was the only thing preventing mass slaughter. Yeah the guy with clear anger management issues, possessed by a spirit that amplifies this at least 10 fold, who levelled a building for the sole purpose of getting as many people killed as possible sounds like a fountain of self restraint.
He's been keeping that same spirit reasonably well in check for the better part of a decade. In fact, Anders rarely loses his cool.
It's not an "anger management issue" if you have legitimate reasons to be that angry. And Anders has those in spades. I'd like to see you or I or anyone else on these forums cope with the crap he puts up with every day. The man's life is at constant risk, and he's already seen good friends lose their lives and their minds at the hands of the Templars and the Chantry.
Elthina wasn't very good at her job, but she could have been a lot worse. She kept Meredith from just outright killing the mages, she prevented her from killing, imprisoning, or Tranquilling a First Enchanter who actually had the courage to stand up to her. She was trying, maybe not hard enough but she was trying to keep Kirkwall from blowing up and bringing an Exalted March on all the people who live there, mage and non-mage alike.
All she had to do was
fire Meredith and appoint someone more reasonable. It's not a difficult or particularly complex task, and I refuse to believe that this was in any way beyond her capabilities. Instead of treating the symptoms (inadequately), she could've eliminated the source of them, making life a lot easier for herself as well as everyone else.
Well when you've got an authourity figure accusing you of using Blood Magic you could you know, not. The mages could have not set about justifying Meredith's fears at every opportunity.
Well they weren't, were they. There are only a few Circle Mages that were ever shown to be using blood magic, and notably Meredith was never the one who caught any of them.
They could have let her conduct her searches and continually find nothing. Eventually Meredith's paranoia would have been revealed as such and either her superiors or her subordinates are going to at least rob her of any bite she might have.
They
could have, but why should they? In the real world, the authorities can't just barge into your private space and demand to search it.
Her paranoia is already obvious, as is her incompetence.
Hawke is the one catching all the blood mages and violent apostates while Meredith looks for monsters under her bed. and sticks her nose in issues that don't concern her in the slightest. As I said before, Meredith should've been fired
before Hawke even came to Kirkwall. The fact that Elthina hadn't done that already proves that the situation was already beyond hope.
The fine line between paranoia and caution is reality. If the Mages didn't consistently justify Meredith's stricter measures she wouldn't have been able to gain support. It's when you've got people like Tarohne and Decimus running around that people like Meredith thrive because there are real, and legitimately terrifying, instances they can point to in order to strengthen their position.
What's 'terrifying' is that the Templars under Meredith's command are so awful at their job that an unskilled mercenary and his
apostate friends have to do it for them.
The Mages might not have been able to change anything legally but they are to blame for consistently showing themselves to be everything Meredith accuses them of.
Except they didn't, and there is nothing to indicate that the majority (if not all) of the mages slaughtered by Meredith's Right of Annullment were anything less than perfectly well-behaved. There is no reason to suppose that the mages Hawke meets are represntative of the mage population as a whole, especially given that he is a mercenary and meets dangerous people of
all kinds every single day.
"The Mages" are not a hivemind anymore than "The Elves" or "The Dwarves" or "The Teenagers" or "The Christians" or "The Gays" are. They are a group of individuals who just happen to share a single trait that causes them to be unfairly persecuted.
As even a cursory glance at the history of civil rights will tell you, keeping your head down and silently submitting to your oppressor's demands is exactly how change
doesn't happen. Slaves didn't earn their freedom by working hard for their masters, they earned it by fighting back and escaping.
Mages have, by and large, been well behaved for the past thousand years, and in fact have often acted for the obvious
benefit of the Chantry and Thedas as a whole, like when their magic was the deciding factor in the conflict with the Qunari. These positive acts receive no reward and no recognition. The Chantry has had penty of time to re-evaluate its treatment of mages, who have been patient for long enough.
Modifié par Plaintiff, 18 février 2013 - 02:52 .
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