I love it when Icelandic sagas attribute every microscopic inconvenience that befalls a hero on his journeys to “witchcraft”. It makes me picture a really bored witch just micromanaging the hell out of this one particular guy’s daily travails.
My favorite bit of Icelandic saga is when one dude’s house is invaded by not one, but two bands of zombies (because he pissed off a witch, obviously), which did such terrible zombie things as taking the best spots by the fire and throwing clods of dirt at each other.
The homeowner, being a fine upstanding Icelandic farmer/warrior type, did what you’d expect a Viking warrior to do when faced with invading zombies.
He sued them. In court. With lawyers. As one does.
When my cousin Olivia was three, she started preschool and became best friends with a boy named Abraham. Most people called him Abe, even then, because Abraham is a mouthful for a three year old and, to most people, it’s the logical nickname.
Not, however, according to Olivia, who decided to nickname him Ham.
No one’s really sure whether she wasn’t totally listening when he was introduced and only caught the last part of his name, or if she decided Abe was too boring a nickname, or maybe she was just hungry, but the nickname has stuck for the last twenty years. Of course, Olivia was and still is the only person to use it.
When they were seven or eight, he decided to get back at her by calling her Olive. That nickname stuck, too, and they’ve been Olive and Ham since. But only to each other. They get highly offended if anyone else calls them that.
Last night was their seventh anniversary, and Abe proposed to Olivia, and she said yes. And how did she announce it on Facebook, you may ask?
People used to tell me “If you like ham so much, why don’t you just marry it?” So I am.
Shout out to Olive and Ham, who are still engaged and adorable and who are planning on getting married sometime next summer
Its interesting to me how the fandom seems to take Cullen having PTSD as fact. Especially considering if thats true, then he has no place leading armies in a position of power.
I don’t normally reblog these types of confessions, but I noticed something very strange with this one: I’d seen it before, or so I thought. This prompted me to see if maybe it was double posted, but it wasn’t, and that’s when I noticed a pattern.
There’s this confession above, then this one, and this one, all on the same blog and posted within the past month. So my question is this: Is someone spamming the blog’s inbox, or is Cullen’s abilities in leading the military arm of an organization really so obscure and difficult to surmise?
Granted, these confessions suggest differing things, but the overall theme of them is his experience and qualifications. However, given the amount of time that’s not only passed between games, but also during the games when we’re not with him 24/7/365 or however many days a Thedosian year possesses, why is it so hard to believe that he’s acquired the necessary skills and is completely qualified to be a General of the Inquisition’s army?
I can’t help but ask this question considering he’s spent over half his life in the ranks of a military organization that would certainly train its members. Additionally, if you’re looking for actual experience on a battlefield, we don’t know exactly what his part in the Mage/Templar War has been so far, or if he’s fought there/done whatever else (aside from the fight against Meredith, which I guess doesn’t qualify as being a battlefield or something).
We also don’t need evidence aside from Bioware’s word that Josephine is skilled at diplomacy (and I’m most certainly not picking on her either, just using this example because I’m not seeing anyone asking what her qualifications are).
So yeah, as stated above, I don’t normally reblog these confessions, and I’m not naysaying the OPs’ opinions here in my points. Just couldn’t help but make note of the hubbub everyone’s making over this particular topic and wondering why it’s apparently such an issue. =|
It’s an issue because people don’t understand what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is.
I’ve lived with it now for thirteen years. I was diagnosed by a psychologist and that diagnosis has been upheld by the therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and specialists that I’ve had to see in the years since. And living with PTSD is nothing at all like what they show in the media.
People seem to get most of their facts from the media or “public knowledge.” But when PTSD shows up in the news, it’s inevitably because someone killed someone else. So there’s this idea that people with PTSD are dramatically unstable, violent, and about ready to kill someone at the drop of a hat.
I’ve been confronted with this idea over and over again, to the point where I just don’t tell people about my diagnosis anymore.
“Oh, god, you have PTSD. You don’t have guns, right?”
“Holy shit, are you allowed to be walking around free like this?”
“Do you think you’ll be able to handle the stresses of a desk job?”
“Give up. You can’t handle the stress of working or having a house. You should get on disability instead.”
“Does that mean that you’re going to kill me?”
There are times when I just want to scream shut up, but I’m pretty sure that would make it worse.
Not everyone reacts to PTSD the same way, just like nobody reacts to depression, ADHD, OCD, grief, loss, or transition the same way. As Sten once said, “People are not simple.”
Here’s the thing about PTSD: it turns you into a control freak. Many, many, many people with PTSD need to control their environment somehow. Most victims attribute their PTSD to “not being in control” of the traumatic event.
If only I had just done something.
If only I had moved out of the way.
If only I had grabbed the gun.
If only I had pushed him off me.
So there’s this overwhelming fear that if “[I] lose control of the situation again,” someone will be there to take advantage of that so-called vulnerability. Victims blame themselves as much as society blames them. They (we) want to be stronger, smarter, faster, with quicker reflexes and the ability to stay ten steps ahead of everyone else. We don’t want to follow; we want to lead and make sure the traumatic event never ever repeats itself again.
What Cullen is doing is not out of character for someone with PTSD. He was hurt by both the templars and the mages. Now he’s on top. The way the thinking goes for someone with PTSD is like this: he was hurt by both the templars and the mages, and both times he didn’t have control over the situation, so if he has control (as a General), he can make damn sure that neither inflict that sort of pain on anyone else (or him) ever again. He wouldn’t trust someone else to make those decisions again. He trusted Greagoir and Meredith and Hawke and things still went to shit. He was still hurt.
Now he’s in charge, and he’s going to make sure that things get done right this time.
Does Cullen have PTSD? It’s never been stated. Anywhere. Given that Dragon Age is a medieval fantasy with no real psychology, it probably never will be. I have my own opinion that he does have PTSD, because of his actions and statements, but this isn’t supported by the Word of God. The writers haven’t said a word.
Would Cullen’s PTSD (if he were diagnosed properly) prevent him from being a General in the Inquisitor’s army? No. If anything, it would push him straight into it.
This.
I have PTSD thanks to an unpredictably violent childhood. It took me a long time and several therapists before I would even accept it as a valid thing for myself because I’ve never been in war I don’t have unpredictable violent outbursts I am not a danger to other people I don’t have vivid flashbacks etc etc. For twenty years I insisted it was just garden-variety anxiety.
Media portrayal was something I had to get over before I could even accept my own goddamned diagnosis, so I can appreciate that there are lots of people out there who don’t have a great understanding of how it would manifest in fictional characters.
Mine manifests in extreme claustrophobia, fight-or-flight reactions to violence (physical, psychological, and verbal) perpetuated against me (even by myself), a need to be as in control as possible in any given situation, and absolute perfectionism to the point where if I can’t do something 100% I don’t do it at all.
Cullen’s behavior in DAI is righ in line with my own experiences. Throwing the lyrium kit, throwing daggers at a training dummy, punching a bookshelf: those are all reactions I could see myself having (I’ve punched a couple of walls in my day). Wanting to quit being the commander because he doesn’t feel he’s in enough control of himself: absolutely something I would do, and I’d be too scared to even tell Cassandra and probably just run way in the middle of the night because even though it’s not a reasonable fear I’d be scared of her abuse at my admission of failure. Knowing intellectually that most mages are probably perfectly safe but unable to stop his deep-seated fear from allowing him to be truly at ease with their presence: welcome to how I feel about most men.
All of this wonderful brave commentary that I have nothing to add to, plus the fact that it’s stated repeatedly by multiple characters in-game that he’s doing a great job. I really don’t know why this keeps coming up; it’s a shitty red herring, it’s insulting and insubstantial.
I also have nothing to contribute to the amazing commentary, but I have a theory why this point, specifically, is being brought up so much.
Some people like to claim that it makes no Watsonian sense for him to even be there, or make long youtube video rants about how Cullen would have been on the side of the red templars in Inquisition, realistically.
And I’m pretty sure we could argue all day long how that’s bullshit, but at the end of the day, all these people see is a pretty man added to please dumb fangirls who liked him when they played a female mage in Origins. They’re usually the same people who like arguing how DA2 was the worst game ever and anything happening in there is not admissable evidence to the discussion, so none of the character development Cullen had in there counts. So yeah. My two cents.
anyone else find it creepy that the mandrakes were basically sentient and seemed to have social interactions and things like that, and they all got chopped up at the end of the year?
Overdressed & Underappreciated 