ΣΕΛΗΝΗ

Jacaerys Velaryon, Heir to the Iron Throne, and Prince of Dragonstone.

🎨 commission by @lunarprincessanni

uh. the significance of that particular point in time just occurred to me, specifically in relation to the gallows itself.

because alistair and the warden are happily pelting around ferelden right this moment with a newly liberated morrigan, an adorable zombie granny, a tal-vashoth sten, a mabari, a nun/bard, and a sexy, sexy antivan crow, right? and one of the places they may be present in… is kinloch hold.

….the gallows may be a horror show but say a prayer for the future knight-captain, lads. he’s currently off being extensively tortured right this minute by blood mages in a different circle tower!

either that or he’s locked up in a chantry to “recover.” for like. a hot second. how long does it take before hawke meets cullen in kirkwall? two, three years? not long enough.

i mean no wonder the guy is trying new intimidation tactics that nearly get him killed and falls back to repeating dogma when confronted with opinions on mages!!! he’s practically a fuckin teenager!

fresh from a nightmare-inducing trauma at ferelden circle, wants to impress his absolutely terrifying knight-commander

and the stakes are SUPER high because not only did she specifically import him to kirkwall to specifically imbue him with a fear & hatred of mages in order to take her spot….. but he also took his vows like, two years ago & older templars resent it, his parents died in the Blight & he undoubtedly doesn’t even know where his siblings went yet. he is reliant on the templars for lyrium and alone in a strange city. obeying the knight-commander’s orders without question is literally his only option.

and now the recruits he’s meant to be training and protecting (some of whom may be older than him????) are going missing and he’s worried they’re dead or in thrall to blood mages

worst of all, now he’s made a complete tit of himself in front of a pretty girl with a big sword. and her judgy friends

:(

And Cullen has a canonical birth year, too. Which means we have a very good idea of how old he was during Act 1 of DA2.

My poor boy was only twenty, maybe going on twenty-one, when he meets Hawke the first time.

Like seriously. He's barely not a teenager, still freshly traumatized, probably getting extra doses of lyrium to help him cope with that, and under the worst Knight-Commander ever's command.

something sad happens. nihilism.

a good person dies. nihilism.

characters make terrible decisions and then have to live with the consequences. somehow, also nihilism.

i’ve just never read grrm that way.

if asoiaf were actually nihilistic, there’d be no point in characters like ned, davos, brienne, sam, or dunk existing ( just to name a few) in the first place. they aren’t there to prove that goodness is pointless. they’re there to ask whether goodness is still worth choosing when it comes with a cost. and that people do!

that’s fundamentally a very different question!

ned dies because of the sort of man he is, but the books spend the next several thousand pages showing that his choices mattered. not because they saved him, but because they shaped the people he left behind.

the same goes for davos. for brienne. for dunk. none of them are rewarded in the way fantasy usually rewards its heroes or good guys. sometimes, actually, pretty much always, they’re punished for trying to do the right thing.

but grrm never implores us to think they were fools.

if anything, he infers and the opposite.

i’ve always thought the point of asoiaf is that goodness isn’t easy. it isn’t safe. it isn’t guaranteed to change the world. but it still matters.

i don’t think that’s nihilism.i think that’s hope and goodness refusing to take the easy route it often does in other fantasy stories.