#anders discourse cw

[anneapocalypse]

No way in hell I am making this rebloggable lmao but one of the things I find the most frustrating about Anders Discourse™ is when people will say Anders Was Right and then totally refuse to engage with even the possibility that there was collateral damage in the Chantry explosion, insisting that the only people who could possibly have been killed or injured in the blast were Elthina and a handful of clerics who also deserved it, and any numbers Inquisition may have stated about the death toll are retcons meant to make Anders look bad.

When... you can see flaming debris raining down on the rest of the city. In the game. Lowtown is on fire. in the game. DA2 may not have given us numbers, but it's canon that there was collateral damage! You can see it! With your eyes!

But if you point this out, you're assumed to be an Anders Hater who is Anti Mage Rights and thinks Anders was unilaterally wrong.

When actually, I think that not only can you acknowledge the damage and still sympathize with Anders' actions in-universe, I think that any argument about the justification or necessity of his attack on the Chantry (including of course his many attempts at nonviolent or less violent resistance that preceded it, the failure of those attempts, the systematic dismantling of the Mage Underground over the course of years, Meredith's call for the Right of Anullment before the attack had occurred, the many ways in which the mages of Kirkwall had been so utterly beaten down and backed into a corner that there was no effective means of nonviolent resistance left to them!) should acknowledge the collateral damage to Kirkwall including the commoners and elves of Kirkwall, and should be interested in discussing what this means in the larger context of all that other stuff I said in the parentheses.

What do we gain from scrubbing this choice clean of undesirable consequences, from pretending that the path to freedom isn't messy, from pretending that the interests of marginalized people in this fantasy world don't ever come into conflict with one another? And what do we lose?

[rat-spit-village]

(cw anders discourse uh oh!!) call me delusional if you must but when anders gleefully celebrates fenris being sent back into slavery my brain blacks out and all i see is a sock puppet with the dragon age writers’ room hand flapping underneath it dementedly. like i know he says that shit canonically but it’s so uncharacteristically evil and makes so little sense for him to find amusement in someone else’s abduction considering his own damage that i’m literally incapable of accepting it

[bardic-inspo]

Anders (DA:A or DA2, you pick) for the character bingo :D

Ohhhh boy okay, right for jugular! A big big disclaimer: I have literally zero problem with folks who like and enjoy Anders and actively encourage my friends who do enjoy him to keep enjoying him (one of my dearest friends is a big big fan of him). I do not judge anyone for enjoying him. But, this is gonna be Anders critical. If that's not something you want to see, that's totally fine, I'm giving a heads up now. He is a very complicated character I have complicated feelings about.

I'm going with DA2 Anders because I've only played Awakening once. It's also worth mentioning, I've played a Dragon Age based D&D campaign for years that is currently in late Act 2 of the DA2 plot.

Also, CW for minor/brief mention of non-physical abuse.

Anders was my first DA2 romance and I got really really swept up in it. At the end of it, I had a sort of...melancholy, which isn't quite the right word, but it's close. I felt like I'd participated in an abusive relationship, one full of guilt and gaslighting, and the potential threat of violence. Those first two are things that were wielded against me on a regular basis as a kid. And in sticking with him, I felt I sort of...relegated myself to it. There was not a good moment in the game that I felt I got to really address those qualms or where Anders truly accepted responsibility for it. After sort of mulling on that for a while, I decided my canon Hawke stuck with him right until the point of leaving Kirkwall, and at that point made it clear the relationship was over, and they went their separate ways. (Hehe, I tend to ship her with just about everyone in her post-game, but I tend to favor her OT3ing with Isabela and Fenris).

It's really important to me to express, I do think there are ways and choices you can make to view that relationship differently. To each their own. I think he is a fascinating character from a narrative/writer perspective and I am glad he is in the series. I feel like fan discourse, at least what I've been exposed to (and I should say, I actively avoid it and avoid most Anders content) makes him out to be a little too black and white.....so often any conversation about him just boils down to what he did with the Chantry, as if that's the only choice he's ever made that could have a moral judgment. This is why I marked "done dirty by fans". Most of my dislike for Anders has little to do with the Chantry event itself, but the lead up to it/events preceding it.

I've also had personal experiences with friends making real life corollaries between real world events/politics and Anders as a sort of rebel figure standing for justice and, as a result, draw conclusions on my political views (and my partner's views) based only on my/my partner's dislike for Anders without even asking either of us (or really caring) why it was we didn't like him. So it's not really a judgment on the character, but that has permanently soured him for me, and basically made me never seek out any content related to him.

[Send in a character for opinion bingo]