What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

agirlwithachakram:

emeraldscholar:

lingering-nomad:

tuxedo-rabbit:

agirlwithachakram:

honestly the worst part of DA2 was the fact that Anders and Fenris couldn’t find common ground. Anders in particular still was all “Fenris isn’t MY friend!” after killing Danarius despite Danarius saying horrible things about how he owns Fenris and implying Very Awful Things about his relationship with Fenris. the kind of things that would thoroughly enrage Justice and probably Anders too. just because Fenris hates mages (which, given his trauma and his understanding of mages’ power in Tevinter, is kind of understandable!) doesn’t mean that Anders should totally write him off. if anyone can understand hating a group of people because they abuse and oppress others, it oughta be Anders.

And Fenris, fucking Fenris couldn’t open his eyes and see what was happening in Kirkwall and most of Thedas that wasn’t Tevinter. or rather, he couldn’t see how terrible it was because of the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of mages. he didn’t care that mages were mistreated and oppressed because he thought he knew everything. knew that mage freedom automatically led to magisters and Tevinter and the seven trying to play god and dooming Thedas to the Blights. and nothing he saw changed his mind. He only sides with a pro-mage Hawke at the end because of Hawke and Hawke alone. It’s not Anders or the Circle or protecting innocent mages he cares about. he just decides he owes his loyalty to Hawke and fights with them.

and that is a SERIOUS MISSED OPPORTUNITY. Because they could have come to understand each other! Anders could have made useless promises like he’d try to help the Tevinter slaves after he freed the mages. Fenris could have agreed that the Circle was a prison and pushed mages to demons and blood magic just as surely as the politics of the Magisterium. they didn’t have to remain enemies! it could also have set them up as a freedom-fighting duo in DA4 when the slave rebellion starts.

I disagree with this. Both Fenris and Anders are recovering from years worth of abuse. They’re angry (rightfully so) and it makes sense that this anger would come out in their interactions with each other. 

It’s also worth it to point out that during the course of Dragon Age 2 Fenris fights his main abuser and wins while Anders is still in the process of fighting throughout the entire game. They’re at different points in their character development. Anders is still angry and fighting while Fenris is trying to move past his negative emotions. A lot of Fenris’s conversations are about how he wants to stop focusing so much angry energy on his past. In contrast, Anders talks about his ongoing fight to take down the oppressive system that abused him. His dialogue is about him struggling to find ways to take down the circle/protect mages, and dealing with the stress, anger, and depression that comes with doing that at the same time. There is an interesting bit of meta here (a little tiny one) that shows the point at which their character development intersects. (also shows that Fenris does try to reach out to Anders, and why that doesn’t work out).

I think it does a disservice to both of their characters to blame them for not focusing enough on other problems. Anders is wrapped up in the mage rights fight and so is Justice. It’s shown to take up all of their energy. Fenris is just moving past his negative experience in Act 3. It’s a slow process. I think it’s unrealistic to expect him to be completely on board with mage rights in such a short amount of time. Especially with the amount of blood mages and abominations you fight in DA2 reaffirming every single one of his fears. That doesn’t mean he isn’t learning though, which is why I think it’s unfair to say he only sides with the mages because of Hawke.

  According to the Wiki as long as you don’t have any rivalry points with him you can convince him to fight with you (the wiki is a bit unclear on this but I think you can even convince him up until you reach 50% rivalry). If his willingness to fight for the mages required him to like Hawke then the game would make it more difficult to convince him by requiring you to have high friendship.( I’d also like to point out that he’ll refuse to join at first if you don’t finish his Act 3 Questioning Beliefs quest, where he talks about trying to move past his anger).

TL;DR It would have been extremely difficult for the writers to make Fenris and Anders come to terms with each other given the path of character development for each of them.

Just a small correction: if you want Fen to side with you against Meredith from the get-go, you need 100 friendship OR 100 rival points. In other words, you need to max him out one way or the other and have completed all his personal quests + questioning beliefs convos (QB3 only triggers once his friendship/rivalry is maxed out). If you’re higher than 50, but under 100, he will initially side with Meredith, but will defect and stand with you if you ask (this can be buggy, so sometimes he won’t side with you, even if your score is over 50). Under 50, and you’re gonna have to duke it out.

If you understand what it means to be a slave in the Imperium and what exactly he endured under Danarius, then you get an idea of how much Hawke asks when siding with the mages. It’s only fair that Hawke should earn Fen’s trust 100% (over 6 freaking years) to be justified in asking that of him.

The problem with this game is, that ALL CHARACTERS come with such insane emotional baggage, that it renders them completely immune to sympathizing with each other. 

There are notable moments, I’ll give them that, but generally, they are all so hurt that handling their own misery takes up their energy. And they can’t be blamed for that. They have all rights to be miserable and indifferent and distrustful. They have reasons to be like that, and it’s fine.

The tragedy is, that there’s no option to sit them down at a table piled with cookies and good wine and talk to them. There would have been plenty of time to do it, but alas, we are not allowed.

That’s why we have so much fanfiction.

I didn’t mean they should be best friends, just that it’s frustrating (and doesn’t make sense) for Anders to be so goddamn immature as to say “Fenris isn’t MY friend” in act 3 after that whole scene. (Not to mention it’s weird that Justice, a spirit of, you know, JUSTICE, isn’t up in arms hearing Danarius gloat about owning and abusing Fenris. What the fuck.)  Seriously over the course of 6 years those two couldn’t at least chill out for two seconds and get that they were both fighting for freedom? It’s true that Anders is in the middle of a journey that Fenris is trying to reach the end of; however, I still think it was a missed opportunity for them to see each other’s side and yeah, freedom-fighting duo in DA4. Especially given that Anders starts out as blind to others’ suffering in Awakening, not understanding the abuse heaped on elves because the Fereldan Circle was fairly equal in human/elf relations–which is just about the ONLY place that’s true. I wanted him to grow. I’m all for revolutionary chantry-exploding Anders but some of that writing was wasted possibilities.

A salient complicating factor in Fenris and Anders’s relationship, all mage-related quandries aside, is their jealousy of each other. If Hawke is in a relationship with Anders, Fenris basically threatens him to treat Hawke right or else; if Hawke goes with Fenris, Anders questions whether Hawke wouldn’t be better off with someone more stable. I don’t know if that still happens if Hawke romances Isabela, Merrill or Sebastian, but even with Isabela’s involvement in stealing the Qunari relic, given that the climax of the game ultimately boils down to a choice between sides whose respective causes are mirrored in Fenris and Anders’s politics - and which, depending on your choices, can result in Hawke killing one or both of them - it doesn’t seem controversial to state that Fenris and Anders are narratively primed to be seen as romantic rivals.

For both of them, Hawke can represent a kind of forgiveness and acceptance they’ve never found anywhere else; enough that the relationship can potentially transcend hard complications, like Hawke being a mage who believes in the circle (Anders) or just a mage at all (Fenris). When I played as Male!Hawke romancing Fenris, I still ended up with 100% friendship with both him and Anders, such that, even though I never took any of Anders’s flirt options, it felt clear that Anders’s feelings for him were more than platonic. By contrast, in the same game, I also had 100% friendship with Isabela and about 80% friendship with Merrill, and yet it never feels like their characters are as into you, or as dependent on you, as Fenris and Anders are. Isabela makes sexy banter and flirts with everyone and Merrill comes to you for advice, but both of them, despite their outsider status, still have some experience of belonging in other contexts; of having a place which, however complicated, is largely good, and where they aren’t abused.

But Fenris and Anders don’t have that. All they have is Hawke, and such happiness as Hawke gives them: neither of them really understands what Hawke sees in the other, and if that’s compounded by having to watch Hawke fall in love with the person who most immediately triggers their own memories of abuse while being in love with Hawke themselves? Yeah, I can see how that’s not conducive to talking.

Also: consider the fact that, whereas Anders is not only educated, but writing a manifesto, Fenris is illiterate for most of the game, and potentially stays that way, if your Hawke doesn’t teach him to read. While both have experiences of abuse in captivity - and while both the Circle and Tevene slavery are rife with sexual violence, which Anders has witnessed and Fenris is implied to have experienced - that’s not exactly something to bond over. And even if they tried, there’s another difference: Anders has had consenting sexual relationships in his adult life, though the Circle made it impossible to love safely, but Fenris, as far as we can tell, hasn’t even had that much intimacy.

And the thing is, though, that even while possessed by Justice, Anders freely admits that his own failings have warped a pure, idealistic spirit into a creature of vengeance - a decision he continues to try and justify throughout the game. Whereas Fenris’s big issue with magic isn’t that it exists, but with the mages who seek to justify their abuse or misuse of it. Anders compares being in the Circle to slavery in front of someone who was actually a slave, talks about the positives of Tevinter in terms of mage treatment, and complains that Fenris can’t get past his biases about it, which - do I have to explain what a monumentally shitty thing that is to say in context? Even if you want to argue that Anders’s attitude is a result of Justice/Vengeance warping him, that doesn’t exactly disprove Fenris’s point, which is that mages who abuse their power invariably seek to justify that abuse through rhetoric.

Anders’s captivity, while absolutely abusive, has nonetheless given him opportunities for education and intimacy that Fenris has never had: a fact which Fenris is aware of, but which - arguably because of Justice/Vengeance - Anders doesn’t really acknowledge.  

THE POINT BEING, it absolutely makes sense to me that Fenris and Anders don’t find common ground in the game - not just because of all the reasons stated above, bur because each of them fiercely resents the relationship Hawke has with the other. Even if Hawke romances someone else, there’s a compelling argument to be made that Anders and Fenris both fall for him/her anyway, or are at least so fascinated/attracted by Hawke despite their better judgement as to make them behave irrationally. That being so, it seems clear to me that, until one or both of them learns to move on from Hawke or to feel independently secure in their situation - or to go through the kind of forced bonding scene that doesn’t happen in-game, but which abounds in fanfic - they can’t realistically come to any accord. 

(via agirlwithachakram)

  1. devotionage reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    Yas!
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    tbh I’m still angry at how unrealistic some of the characterization was just for the sake of preserving the ‘perfect and...
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