I’ve been thinking more about DAO stuff lately, and while I always thought Alistair was okay as a character, I never dug too deeply into meta-analysis for him up to this point. Also, whitethornwolf asked me for Alistair meta almost a year ago now (I bet you thought I forgot :x), so I thought I’d finally give her what she asked for.
Anyway, I was thinking about how people constantly criticize him for being flaky, or whiny, or emotional, or naive. And maybe he is, to an extent, but I don’t think he’s overly so, or unjustifiably so.
His whole life, he’s been bounced around like a pinball, shuffled around to suit other people’s needs and wants. He’s got all these responsibilities and things expected of him, and yet he’s kept in the dark and never really taught the ins and outs of much of anything. He has no real roots, and makes a lot of mistakes because he’s blundering around blindly more often than not.This is a great post, thank you so much for doing this. Now I’m going to put down some of my thinky thoughts on him.
For a lot of people with self-deprecating natures, and for people who use humour to cover their real thoughts, it’s easy not to take them seriously. I should know, I have both of the above traits, and maybe that’s why I feel like I understand his character.
I’m going to talk about him here, and I’m going to be frank. I love him, he’s my favourite character, but I am not in the habit of woobiefying any character, or sugar-coating things.
Please read this, if you have read my post before. Tanya can - of course - express it far better than I could ever do it. But there are a lot of thoughts I had by myself in the past, or very simelar to my own.
Thanks for writing this <3
I’ll keep the tags because I can empathize with them quite well right now.
I’ve been thinking more about DAO stuff lately, and while I always thought Alistair was okay as a character, I never dug too deeply into meta-analysis for him up to this point. Also, whitethornwolf asked me for Alistair meta almost a year ago now (I bet you thought I forgot :x), so I thought I’d finally give her what she asked for.
Anyway, I was thinking about how people constantly criticize him for being flaky, or whiny, or emotional, or naive. And maybe he is, to an extent, but I don’t think he’s overly so, or unjustifiably so.
His whole life, he’s been bounced around like a pinball, shuffled around to suit other people’s needs and wants. He’s got all these responsibilities and things expected of him, and yet he’s kept in the dark and never really taught the ins and outs of much of anything. He has no real roots, and makes a lot of mistakes because he’s blundering around blindly more often than not.
I would even go further on the PC-point. He not only respects you for taking lead.
I think there is somwhow the hope in him to experience the same things from now on. The pc is not keeping him out. S/He is including him, sharing the knoledge they gather.
The pc is taking him serious. S/He is no father figure like Duncan has been. S/He is the first real friend he ever had. He tells us thet both the rich and the poor kids hated him for what he is. Even his first father figure, Eamon, had to give him away because of this. And the Warden just stayed the same after knowing that he is the bastad prince. A friend who he considers loyal. And If s/he is recruiting Loghain, Alistat feels betrayed again. Like it has been his whole life. The one person, he considered he considered a freind, something like a family, a sibling maybe, if you don’t romance him, or his love if you do, makes a decision, that hurts him so much, that he can’t fogive it.
Again he seems to be the little boy no one cares to listen to. He thought they both had wittnesed the same things and came to the same conclusions. He trusted the Warden and now s/he decides to let the one person live that Alistair focused on his whole hate the last months. The person that has destroyed his perfect little world within the Wardens. His surrogate family.
I can perfectly understand that he takes his leave here. “If my opinion is nothing worth to you and you don’t care about all the people that have died because of him, you are no person I want to support.”
(Okay, I hope I didn’t make any mistakes that make it impossible to understand waht I wanted to say.)
A last hurried, fumbling moment together, in a darkened corner between a crumbling watchtower and a pile of smoke-darkened rubble. Her robes lifted around her waist, back pressed against the rough stone wall, the edges of Alistair’s tassets biting bruisingly into her flesh as he pounded frantically into her, neither of them gentle in that moment, feeling only need and want and desperate desire.
