Professional Younger Brother

barbeauxbot:

ademska:

barbeauxbot:

ademska:

barbeauxbot:

I was basing that more on how he treats Fenris and Merrill. Fenris’ life as an escaped slave and Merrill being more interested in preserving Dalish culture than freeing mages is just completely glossed over as he focuses on what’s IMPORTANT: mages. (Which also happens to be the part that affects him)

Of course, if he wasn’t a mage he wouldn’t have been able to merge with Justice. And it is merging with Justice that makes him so single-minded. Before that he had no small measure of frustration with the Circle but was a lot more interested in his own freedom and didn’t feel compelled to work for anybody else’s. 

ahhhh see i think you’re at a false starting point there tho

the issue with using his treatment of fenris and merrill, who have their valid independent-of-mage-stuff issues, as a jumping point, is that you’re ignoring that a central part of their characters do relate back to mage stuff.

anders is not ignoring that, unfortunately. he ignores them as whole people with justification and validation for their actions to focus on what of them negatively impacts his own cause—for merrill, her blood magic, which he definitely realizes is a big problem with mage pr on top of being flat-out dangerous, and for fenris it’s the fact that despite not being a political player as an potential influence on hawke he’s still an outright threat to mages.

like, dgmw, that kind of judgment is a super shitty trait of anders’, and it’s totally an intentional character flaw, but his compassion (or perceived lack thereof) is not defined by it. this is the same dude who opened a free clinic in the sewers for refugees.

Yeah but how much of that impulse to open the clinic was him and how much was it Justice? I know that as the game goes on (particularly if you push him toward a friendly relationship and not a rival one) the distinction becomes less important. But he starts that clinic not long after merging, when they were more separate entities. I think that clinic had a lot more to do with Justice than Anders. 

except in awakening he refuses to leave until you either send him to the templars or he’s caught by templars because he wants to help people in vigil’s keep? and he’s against sacrificing amaranthine?

also, in his backstory, one of his escapes was foiled because he stopped too long to heal someone.

also the bit where healing is his whole specialty in the first place.

the intro videos of da2 are really, really well thought-out. they’re supposed to encapsulate everything you need to know about the character in a tight 15-second spot. aveline is a fierce warrior, fiercely protective, and upends gender tropes. isabela is saucy but sly and, most importantly, dangerous. why do you think it is that we see anders wearing himself to exhaustion healing a boy before he flashes blue with justice and rounds angrily on hawke?

anders at times appears selfish and callous, and in awakening he’s got a lot of self-preservation instinct and the inner conflict to go with it, but it’s a mistake conflate his flaws to a place they wholly don’t exist.

Being a healer doesn’t magically shield somebody from being self-centered and arrogant. I think the fact that he is generally quite a bit smarter than pretty much everybody he meets plus his ability to heal would only lead him to ignore or attack people who disagree with him (like Fenris), or even simply choose to have different priorities (like Merrill) despite their totally valid reasons for the things that they do.

Anders doesn’t respect their reasons because they don’t affect him personally. Which is why I believe that if he were not a mage, and thus the oppression of the mages didn’t affect him personally, he wouldn’t really care about it. I don’t see his interest in the cause as especially altruistic. 

As to why I think that we see him glowing blue, etc. I believe that was the fifteen-second way to establish right off the bat that Anders has changed significantly since we last saw him in Amaranthine. And in no small part because of Justice (the whole blue part).

I think ignoring characters flaws, or glossing over them, or trying to turn them from flaws into virtues is ultimately a flawed assessment of the text. Anders has to be arrogant to do the things he does. He has to be self-centered to believe that starting a war to benefit people like him is a good thing to do. I also find it amusing that nobody’s questioned my first assertion. 

Anders was always self-centered, and I think that more than his anger, Justice was corrupted by that self-absorption. Anders claims it was his anger, but as the person experiencing his emotions and having been wildly altered by his merging with Justice, he’s not necessarily the most reliable observer.

To me it makes the most sense to argue that Anders’ sudden charitable streak by the time we meet up with him in DA2 is due to Justice, which is really interesting: it means that the Anders we encounter in DA2 is fundamentally different from the Anders of DA:A, even though at first they appear somewhat similar.

I wonder how much of the rage of Vengeance is really from Anders and how much of it is born of Justice’s frustration at suddenly possessing Anders’ desires for freedom and prestige and having those desires thwarted. As a being of pure virtue, Justice’s goals and methods were one in the same: he was incapable of wanting one thing but acting in a way that served another. Now, in possession of Anders’ sense of self-interest, he is biased. He still wants justice, but for mages like Anders first, and at the expense of anyone who disagrees — which isn’t justice at all.

mediocrememory:

It’s filthy in a charming way.

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fuckyeahvarric:

““Correct me if I’m about to get punched…””

Varric Tethras (via katerynthegrand)

I want to rub Varric all over my body.