Am I the Only One who Likes Every Companion? [spoilers all]
Ever since I played the three games a matter of months ago, and joined this subreddit, and started engaging with fan-content on YouTube and the like: it seems as though pretty much every fan of Dragon Age carries with them a deep disdain for at least one of the companions in all three games.
Am I just tone-deaf or crazy? Because… I like pretty much every companion and side-character in every game. I can’t name any character that I even mildly dislike. The closest I’ve ever gotten to genuinely disliking any character was when Isabela ran off with the Book of Cringe and left me to clean up the mess— and even then, I got over it when she sacked up and came back. Also: Solas planning to destroy the world and daring to pretend that he’s doing everyone a favor by helping out the Inquisition one last time— however, I *still* understand him and I can somewhat empathize. Even when Morrigan repeatedly irked me with her vaguely-aloof superiority complex, I found reasons to ultimately care about her. Oghren was kind of a fucking moron, sure, but that’s far from *all* he was.
It also seems like every fan of the series takes sides in in-universe conflicts as though they genuinely identify with the issues at hand, despite literally being outside-observers to a world they haven’t lived in. And then they proceed to dismiss fictional characters as people, on the basis of their own stance on fictional political issues. It seems to me, meanwhile, that the games go out of their way to give every player every reason to empathize with practically every side to every story. Even Tevinter and the Qunari get their advocates in Inquisition.
No, I don’t hate Vivienne, because although she’s sheltered and arrogant, she never denies that the system has problems— her main quibble comes down to the fact the Mage Rebellion was incredibly poorly-timed and will ultimately only hurt all Mages and all common people, in the future. And she isn’t wrong. The Inquisitor walking in and proceeding to single-handedly fix everything doesn’t mean her concerns were baseless.
No, I don’t hate Cullen for being a Templar— I don’t hate *any* Templars just for being Templars. They live in a world where people can be born with the power of walking WMDs, and where they can be turned into skin-suits for literal-fucking-demons just by being stressed or tempted. Cullen watched half his friends and colleagues get mulched by the precise kind of person he was trained to guard against, and was tortured by them. No fucking shit he shut down and doubled down.
Fenris is willfully ignorant in many ways, and has precisely no filter, but what else would you expect? Bro was a slave to Mages, everything in his life was partially tainted by magic, and it’s really no wonder that his hatred of magic extends to himself, seeing as though he killed the fog warriors thanks to magic and thanks to his own subservience to it.
I’m probably just rambling at this point, but you get the picture. Am I alone in having no real beef with any companions or side-characters?