agh i wanna hear about your cousland so bad!! what kind of person is she what’s her relationship w sir gilmore why did she side w the templars 👀👀
ahh i hadnt checked my askbox in a few days so just saw this but thank you for asking anon i love you!!
her name is roisin cousland and she's been very fun to play so far bc i didn't have much of a vision for her at the start beyond "cousland who marries Alistair but has leliana as her mistress at the end". (also this picture - the source of which i cannot find its from pinterest - which made me go FUCK i need to start my cousland playthrough) so seeing the way she's been developing has been very fun.. she starts out as, while very capable and a talented warrior and seemingly cool under pressure, deeply privileged and frankly naive about the reality of the world. she sees no reason why she can't live a charmed life as a ladyknight and eventually a great lady in her own right!
of course this all comes crashing down in the most horrific way imaginable in her origin as she suddenly basically realizes that she has been in an entirely different genre than she believed. you thought this was chivalric romance? this is dark fantasy bitch! this fucked up world ate everyone she ever loved so she needs to bite back, and hard, before it eats her too. basically roisin is grappling -- and badly so -- with how brutal she needs to be survive in a world that is fundamentally unjust beyond anything she imagined. that's why she sides with the templars -- she doesn't want to see the mages hurt, but she saw horrors beyond comprehension in the tower and imagines that a response that echoes that same swiftness and brutality must be the only way to respond.
but at the same time she's still kind of naive and getting used to living outside of her nobility bubble.. funniest part of this playthrough was when they met bandits on the road and i realized she would not realize she was being robbed so she just earnestly paid their tax not realizing how weird it was or how expensive it was. (it's one highway tax, alistair, what could it cost? 500 silver?)
i'm still playing in relatively early stages of the game so I'm not totally sure where this is going from here, though i imagine she's going grow past this stage of her grief and understand that mercy and hope have their place as well (this is making me realize it might be cool to do the dalish quest last so making peace can be the conclusion to that arc... hmmm) but we shall see where it goes. right now I'm obsessed with her dynamic with zevran they make me laugh every time they talk because roisin only let him live bc she was fresh out of ostagar (s/o to zev asap mod) and having just witnessed a SECOND brutal betrayal with unimaginably bloody consequences, was really starting to settle into "the only way to save the world is to start REALLY playing dirty. even if it means working with this awful reprehensible assassin. i might need someone this morally bankrupt to win" but ofc as she very slowly begins to start talking to zevran she starts to realize that assassin = evil is not as simple as she thought and that she unfortunately sees a lot of herself in this guy that seems so different from her. so i think that's going to be an important friendship in how she ultimately grows
as for her and gilmore, they were childhood friends growing up, but i think their relationship is probably going to break down a bit as time goes on. I'm still getting to know him via the mod, but the impression i have right now is that he's still very idealistic despite what he went through in highever, and i think it's going to upset and frustrate him to see someone he loves coping with the same thing in such an opposite way, in the same way it's currently pissing off roisin that he isn't drawing the same conclusions about the world from their experience that she did
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