I wouldn't say they "forgave" him, because I don't think that many people cared about Cory in the first place - but they were pretty eager to ascribe almost every crime Cory committed to Solas, as if Cory had no agency of his own at all, or were not shown to be a pretty elaborate schemer who has a flair for dramatic.
*snaps fingers* There you go. That's the description I was looking for.
Yeah, I don't know what it is about our culture, but when someone is shown or described as evil, it's like people suddenly think, "Well, that's all they are and all they can ever be, so we shouldn't hold them responsible for their actions--we'll hold everyone around them responsible for not stopping them."
It's like Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. He gets super mad and blames Gordon and Batman for Rachel's death because neither got to her in time, even though the Joker was the one who kidnapped her, tied her up, and blew her up. The Joker even convinces him, "I'm just a dog chasing a car, but they let me off my leash," and he buys it. Gordon and Batman even call him out on it later, basically saying, "Why are you mad at us? The Joker's the one who killed her!" and he said something like, "The Joker's just a dog, but you let him off his leash," holding them entirely responsible for the Joker's decisions. It's like, "he's evil, therefore he's not a thinking being who should be held accountable for his choices, therefore I'll blame his decisions and actions on others."
In fact, for my G.E. critical thinking class in community college, I remember we read a short story about an adulterous wife who was having an affair with the man across the river from her house. Every day while her husband was at work, she'd pay the ferryman to take her across, have sex, then then pay him to ferry her home for when her husband arrived. While there was a bridge up-stream, she never took it because she'd have to walk through a wood where a murderer was said to live. However, one day she stayed a little late and forgot the extra coin to pay the ferryman. She begged him to take her across with an IOU, but he refused. She banged on her lover's door hoping to borrow a coin, but he was enjoying a post-sex nap and ignored her. Desperate to get home before her husband found out, she finally resolved to walk through the murderer's forest to get to the bridge.
Afterwards, we were asked, "Who's directly responsible for the woman's murder?"
We had a ten-minute discussion of it, with some saying, "The ferryman because he wouldn't take her across," or "the lover because he wouldn't answer the door," or "the cheating **** for having the affair in the first place / choosing to cross the bridge knowing the risks" or even "the husband for making the woman so scared of what he'd do to her if he found out that she thought risking her life in the murderer's forest was better than him finding out."
At the end, my professor said: "The murderer. The murderer is directly responsible for the woman's murder."
And we all just sat there kind of stunned. Since the short story never showed him and only described him as "the murderer," we didn't really think of him as a character with agency, moral choices, etc. We kind of thought, "Oh, it's a murderer. Murderers kill people. It's what they do" and didn't think anything more about it. So we spent so much time exploring the morality, agency, and choices of other established characters, that we forgot that the murderer is a person who has agency and makes choices like anyone else, and should be held accountable for it.
And just like my classmates (and myself), everyone seems so stuck in the mindset that "Corypheus is a villain. That's all he is," that they fail to remember that in-universe he had agency and made the moral choices he did, and that he should be held responsible for his crimes rather than just those around him.
Retour en haut
