Merrill - “It's a Keeper's job to remember.”

And you're ignoring the actual events of the game, where no-one in the expedition can end up dying whatsoever.

Until they ran into the blocked path and were forced to detour, Varric states they didn't run into any serious problems. Varric and Hawke scouted another route and cleared the way for the others, thus further minimising the danger for the rest of the expedition. Once Bartrand locked them in the Thaig, it seems that the others (such as Bodahn and Sandal) managed to return back to the surface with no problems.

People die in the Deep Roads all the time because there are Darkspawn down there... and there wasn't many of them down there during that period of time. Thus you're over-exaggerating the danger to ridiculous levels, because the game doesn't paint the expedition as dropping like flies, but being perfectly fine.
The codex and Varric tell us that she's stopped leaving the house. The game repeatedly shows and has characters voice that her obsession with the Eluvian is unhealthy. The game never has Merrill explain how she thinks it could help, save for bringing back a lost piece of their history.

So whether you agree or have a different opinion doesn't matter, because the game itself says otherwise.
Which misses the obvious fact that the primary way the Dalish avoid the Chantry and Templars is by never staying in the same place for too long and avoiding human settlements entirely. Y'know, the things that Merrill cannot do since she's now living in the middle of Kirkwall.

If you send Fenyriel to the Dalish, we see in Act 2 that the Templars have been harassing them. Likewise, Merrill repeatedly voices her concern for her clan by mentioning that the Dalish should have moved on years ago.

Merrill's primary means of hiding is to try to blend in among the Elves of the Alienage. Given that the Templars still managed to collar Huon, then that's no guarantee that she wouldn't be caught, even if she was careful.
No, Merrill's entire story is about her obsession with the Eluvian. Even claiming that it could help the People is a flimsy justification for her actions, because there's no way that she could know the Eluvian would have any meaningful impact on the lives of the Elven people.

Restoring the Eluvian is analogous to say, rediscovering the Tomb of Tutankhamun. Something that does provide a lot of insight into a lot bit of history from Ancient Egypt, but otherwise has no real tangible effect on modern day life.
Not sure what you're rabbiting on about inconsistent dialogue for... since it neither answers nor addresses anything which was being discussed.

The point - since you've clearly missed it - was that the game, codex and World of Thedas all make comment on her reclusive nature and that she's a veritable stranger among her neighbours. So it's pretty much canon that Merrill was not familiar with that many people in the Alienage.
You can assert that Hawke is obsessive and Merrill is the Elven Mother friggin' Theresa, but that doesn't make it true either.

I was merely offering a hypothesis for what may have happened in the interim period, between the characters fleeing the city and what we're told they were doing in Inquisition, based on the evidence at hand and how that ties into their resolution of their storylines at the end of Act 3
Except that the companion books, codex entries, game's events and dialogue all provided a plethora of canonical evidence that points to Merrill being very much a reclusive hermit by the start of Act 3. The codex explicitly states that she's become "increasing insular" over the years, so she wasn't always. Thus accounting for why she may be familiar with a few people in the Alienage, although she admits she still doesn't know them all that well.

No, this is not my own opinions on the matter, I'm providing you actual evidence and facts in the game.

After a Blight, there are less Darkspawn in the Deep Roads for anyone to run into, this is an indisputable fact. The expedition only runs into a small amount of Darkspawn when forced to make a detour. Hawke and Varric clear most of them out, allowing the rest of the expedition to proceed safely.

The Deep Roads is not the swarming radioactive ants nest that you keep trying to make it out to be, at least during this brief window of time.
Considering that Marethari's actions have zero bearing on Merrill's obsessive fixation on the Eluvian and her increasingly insular nature over the several years preceding the release of Audacity... the reason why I didn't mention it is because it has nothing to do with it.

Marethari's screw up does not excuse or even provide any kind of rebuttal, to the many cited instances where Merrill actively refused to everyone around her who was telling her not to do something, because she believed she knew better.
Did you not even bother to read what I'd written? I clearly wrote that Merrill was told "not to venture into the Elven ruins again".

The Dalish Origin is suggested to have happened regardless of Duncan's involvement. Merrill, Mahariel and (perhaps) Fenarel were sent to look for signs of Tamlen in the Elven Ruins, where at some point the Eluvian got smashed. Following this, Mahariel ended up succumbing to the corruption (without Duncan to recruit him), which was what convinced Marethari that both the cave and mirror were dangerous.

Merrill was explicitly forbidden from going back there, for fear that the mirror would lead to more corruption or attract Darkspawn.
I already stated previously that Merrill and Marethari found Audacity together in the short story, leading to Marethari warning Merrill not to venture back into this cave. It doesn't matter that Audacity was bound in the real world, it was still dangerous to communicate with it because we know it was perfectly capable of possessing people. Audacity is not the only time we've seen this either, as both Kitty and Imshael attempted to possess unwary people despite being in binding circles.

What you're saying doesn't even agree with Merrill herself, who knew perfectly well the danger and accepted the risk in speaking with Audacity;

"Anders, there is no such thing as a good spirit. There never was. All Spirits are dangerous. I understood that. I'm sorry that you didn't."
So Marethari and all of Clan Sabrae, were completely ignorant of Elven culture, Eluvians and didn't know the plight of the People?
Which as I said before, has nothing to do with or justifies Merrill's actions in any way.

Just because Marethari screwed up when it came to allowing Audacity to posess her, does not mean she was wrong to have warned Merrill not to go go back into the Elven ruins, not to fixate on the mirror, not to go into the cave containing Audacity, not to use blood magic and not to try to restore the mirror.

You're saying that it was fine for Merrill to play with fire, because the woman telling her not to, accidentally ended up burning herself.
Once more, Merrill was not operating with any of the information or knowledge that Briala had about the Eluvians. Thus we cannot use that as proof that Merrill was right about the Eluvians being important, because there was zero way she could have known that to actually be the case.

We know that Merrill was right in hindsight, but being accidentally correct about something does not make unfounded beliefs valid. Anymore than saying that someone who always suspects their partner is cheating on them, actually was "right" to have behaved so jealously, should it turn out their partner does end up having an affair.
Which is complete nonsense. The game makes it perfectly clear that Merrill left because the clan did not like her obsession with the mirror and her use of blood magic, which made them no longer trust her. Furthermore, leaving preventing her having any more arguments with Marethari, who kept telling her to put her fixation aside.

Merrill didn't do it to help the People, she did it because she wanted to satisfy her own pride.
The game uses all these terms interchangeably. So yes, they equate to the same thing. Stop quibbling over pointless semantics, it doesn't matter. Can we kindly stop this debate from getting even more derailed than you already have forced it to become?
The game clearly presents in that scene that Varric is concerned enough about Merrill's behaviour that he feels he has to try to intervene and coax her out of the house. Which further ties into how Varric has been taking steps to make sure she's still eating (if not romanced), which was clearly stated in the codex.

Argue with the game if you want, that doesn't change that the evidence shows that Merrill is ignoring those around her to work on the mirror.
You don't know that Merrill studied any lore whatsoever. And you've been making definitive about things without any evidence either, such as Hawke's "obsession" and Merrill wanting to help the people, when she really only says that she wants to restore it for the sake of learning more about their history.
Merrill wanting to fix the Mirror does not mean that she's trying to end the plight of the Elves, so I don't know where you got this ridiculous notion into your head? She wants to restore the Eluvian to bring back a lost piece of their history, in the hope that it can teach the Elves something about themselves. That's all the help she thinks it can provide.

And if you don't see why Merrill spending years focused on the mirror to the detriment of everything else in her life is a bad thing, you really need your eyes checked. Her obsession leading her astray is the entire theme of her storyline, not some noble struggle of her trying to help the Elves.

And yet you ignore the many times game itself explains why the danger involved in Hawke's expedition was substantially reduced from normal, which I have repeatedly attempted to make abundantly clear to you.

I'm simply reported the facts as presented in the game, with the explanation and rationale that they provided in the game, for why Hawke and Varric consider it an acceptable risk to embark on the expedition.

If still you want to complain at someone, either start another thread or yell at Bioware on Twitter. Yelling at me won't change the facts of the game, regardless of whether you approve or think that it didn't justify the scenario enough. Personally, I think the explanation was perfectly adequate.
She doesn't tell the truth about what she's doing, even though they both know it. So yeah, she's lying by omission.
Here are the scenes in question;



Here we see that Merrill has a very clear and noticeable pause before telling Hawke that she's going to the Alienage, as if she's not sure whether or not to admit that's where she's going. She then quickly tries to make it seem as if it's nothing. The diplomatic response makes it even more obvious that Hawke clearly knows what she's going down there for.



In the unromanced version, Varric came to coax her out of the house because Merrill has been hold up there for days. Whereas in the romanced version, Varric comments whether or not Hawke even knows that she's there. A romanced Merrill also is a little embarrassed when speaking to Hawke, saying that she should have told Bodahn where she was going, suggesting this was yet another instance of her slipping out of the estate.

So we have Merrill either spending days locked away, sneaking down to work on the her pet project and show embarrassment and anger when those closest to her catch her out with what she's doing. Not sure how I've misconstrued anything. And if you really cannot see the parallel that my analogy was making, again, you need your eyes checked.

(I suspect you may assume I dislike Merrill based on my criticism, but that's completely not true. She's actually one of my favourite characters in DA2. But that said, I'm not blind to her faults and going to pretend that her obsession with the Eluvian was in any way healthy, nor did she not suffer from an abundance of stubborn pride. Again, these not my opinions, but something the game shows us clearly and is part of the reason why she's a tragic character and her storyline plays out the way it does)