#he's the world's sweetest kindest qunari but this also makes him the worst

[dumbhero]

endlessly curious about padan. tell me more

is this because of all the posts i tag him in well let me tell you he's wormed his way into my brain and will not leave. every song i listen to becomes about him and if it doesnt fit canon him it fits one of his many au's this is because i'm sick in the head

so a friend of mine decided to start a dragon age ttrpg campaign and invited me to play and i was hype and they really like dark and gritty campaigns and dragon age is already dark and gritty and me being me i was like what if i was silly lol ! what if i made a qunari mailman who got lost and ended up on another continent! and he's a little ditzy haha! completely not realizing at the time that like, what i described is a qunari horror story

because like their entire personhood is their job. if they fail at their job they're expected to kill themselves about it. this is seen as the honorable and reasonable thing to do. because if you fail you're functionally worthless and being worthless is worse than being dead. their whole deal is that they see their society as being one organism and individuals serve to perpetuate that organism and obviously because of this there's defectors and stuff but there's also lots of converts because life under the Qun (their religion/governmental body) is way better than life in a lot of other places where you'd have more freedom because like, they don't have money or poverty or hunger and they have superior medicine and sanitation to most of the world, right, and a convert is treated no differently than someone who was born into it and probably garners quite a bit of respect because it's difficult

but also like. they're very focused on efficiency--working as one is efficient, having individuals is inefficient--so people are assigned jobs based on what they're good at and their entire lives are controlled and monitored by other people. you arent allowed to have relationships or hobbies that arent approved right and like Padan is a huge believer in all this right because the system does like. Work. it's just that when it has failures the failures are compounding and untenable, like how mages are treated which we are Not getting into. but they're very like, not unemotional but every emotion is strictly controlled because if you don't you'll fuck up and fuck ups stall efficiency

but basically like Padan is a kind sweet boy with a profound amount of emotional intelligence just like, naturally, which caused him to act in ways that got him in a lot of trouble because kindness is seen as weakness so even though he's naturally very curious and smart he repressed his emotions so hard and punished himself out of being curious so hard it gave him brain damage and now he has basically zero short term memory. on top of this he's also kind of nearsighted so this makes it kind of hard for him to navigate traditionally but luckily he's also inordinately lucky (and much better with his other senses lol) so he always manages to be at the right place at the right time and also due to his empathetic proclivities he landed a Military Mailman Job

'karapadan' (which is his actual name and job) doesnt actually like exist in canonical Qunari lore but i based it off a real life military position my grandfather had (Chief Payment Officer), did have to modify it a little because they don't. have currency. so basically his job is to carry letters and things between soldiers and military leaders on the battlefield, hence why he's governed by the Arishok (head of military) and not the Ariqun (head of like, information) and we were joaking having fun because like, when this is set it would put him in a perfect position to deliver some sensitive information to a canonical character from the games, and him totally borking it by accident was funny and sorta tragic

his goal is/was to deliver a letter to Iron Bull to tell him to start espionage in Orlais (which is like fantasy france) but when he was getting on the boat the harbormaster accidentally directed him to the one taking him *to* Orlais instead of to Seheron (island next to the one he was on) where Iron Bull is. but the kicker is--he's never been off his home island. he's heard descriptions of these other places but never seen them, he has no idea how long a journey to Seheron or Orlais takes. on top of that he's struggling so hard to remember what he's supposed to be doing and what the person he's looking for looks like that not only does he forget Iron Bull's name, but he doesn't realize for several days he's not in Seheron.

he meets an elf and a human who kindly allow him to accompany them--he thinks they're converts, and because the elf has tattoos he can't make out well, he assumes they're of a higher rank than him (he's about as low as you can go, lol) so when he figures out he has not only failed and cannot hope to rectify his failure, but that all his hard work to become useful didnt pay off, he nearly commits suicide but his elf companion manages to unknowingly talk him off the edge. however, this presents a new problem--not doing so is considered a crime. the longer he lives the more his abject failure compounds and the more he has to face his life's worth of repressed emotions and the less he's able to cope with that

he also cares deeply about his classmates (qunari children are raised communally by one teacher who basically controls the rest of their lives, usually separated from any relatives) and when he was home he kept in touch with all of them despite most of them having vastly different jobs and never wanted much of anything except to see them and to Be Useful and now he's hundreds of miles away from them and can literally never return home or contact them and if he ever saw them in the wild they'd very likely kill him for defecting so he's really not handling that well. because like, he was very much holding this group together and without his involvement it's unlikely they'll talk much if at all .

basically i care him so much and i'm hitting him with hammers but i do want him to be happy but he's got to suffer a lot right now and if i keep going this post will be too long <3