#i'm not saying this to stop people from writing quirin as a bad father

[wayward-wren]

In Defense of Quirin

Okay I’ve noticed a bit of a trend towards villanising Quirin in fanfictions and I am here to say he would never. 

I totally get wanting to put Varian through grief, I for one am *shoves ao3 account under bed* guilty of that myself *trips and more fics fall out of my shirt*. But making Quirin the whumper doesn’t entirely sit right with me. 

Let’s just have a real quick run down of what Quirin did in Season 1, shall we? (under the cut cos this gets long)

In What the Hair he’s frantically searching for Varian after the destruction the water boilers caused - he runs to Varian’s side

He’s clearly worried about his son! 

And yes, I’m not saying he’s a perfect dad. He’s distant and dismisses Varian very quickly. But that doesn’t mean he’s a bad dad, or an abusive dad! 

And then in Queen for a Day he pushes Varian aside and gets caught in the amber, even after they’ve been fighting. (Side note, yes Quirin did come across as rather aggressive when speaking to Varian about the rocks BUT he knows how dangerous they can be and doesn’t want his son to be anywhere near them because he saw what happened to the Dark Kingdom. He’s just trying to keep Varian safe.

And while we’re on the topic, Edmund isn’t the best dad either - an argument could be made that the Dark Kingdom doesn’t have great role models and growing up in the shadow of the Moon Stone probably isn’t very indicative for knowing how to be emotionally present or even present at all cough edmund cough. I’m not excusing either of their behaviour but i AM saying that while they both made mistakes, they both tried to do what was best for their respective son)

Anyway that aside Quirin loves his son.  

And like,,, he improves. The first thing he did when getting out of the amber is tells Varian he’s proud of him which is a BIG THING for Varian. He recognizes that he’s been distant and hasn’t said what Varian needed to hear and makes an effort to change - something that is consistent throughout season 3 (”I am proud to have my son fighting by my side” in the finale) 

And now I wanna real quick address Team Awesome, because I’ve seen a number of cases where Quirin is made the villain for Eugene to step into that father figure/older brother type role. And I supposed I can understand that, but consider this: Quirin can Dad them both and Eugene can be older brother. 

There’s so many other villains you can pit against Varian - the Saporians are the most common and probably my favourite. There’s the history there, and Andrew probably can slip into the father figure role if we want to go down that route (Varian in prison, Quirin in the amber/already kinda distant - that kid needs a father figure in his life and Andrew is more than happy to oblige) 

Or if you want to go the more Team Awesome route, the Sabbington brothers using Varian to get to Eugene, or even the Baron. That’s just off the top of my head, there’s a lot of other villains I’m sure!

Tangled has a lack of good parents (I can think of uuuh Arianna. Maybe Cass’ dad) don’t take Quirin from us. Explore his and Varian’s complicated relationship - its obviously not perfect but it’s not abusive. And sometimes a relationship in which both parties do love each other but are bad at communicating can be more angsty than an abusive parent if you’re going for angst! 

Anyway all this to say there’s 8 fics on ao3 under the ‘bad parent quirin’ tag and only 6 (as of writing this) in the ‘good parent quirin’ tag and half of them are fics me or @softgreysweaters​ wrote and this needs to change.