#well actually i think you can sell da2 fenris back to slavery so

[crossdressingdeath]

Okay yes I will ask your thoughts on Anders :D

Well, to start with something simple (and I assume not particularly controversial): the sequence of events we’re given for how Anders ended up in Kirkwall makes no fucking sense. I mean, it makes sense that the Chantry would ignore the Right of Conscription and try to drag him back to the Circle, but where the fuck is the Warden in all this?! If memory serves in some piece of the canon it’s implied or outright stated that the Chantry went over their head to get Templar agents into the Wardens, but they’re still the Warden-Commander? We’re expected to believe that the Warden, someone who will in most saves count Anders and Justice as dear friends and can be adamantly against the Circle, the Templars, and the Chantry as a whole, would just let a bunch of Templars run the two of them out of Amaranthine? The Warden would permit the cat they gave Anders to be taken away from him without so much as a fight? They may have to answer to Weisshaupt but even so! If Weisshaupt was interfering in the running of the Ferelden branch that much I’d expect it to be at least mentioned! If you played your Warden as someone who cared about the people under their command Anders and Justice getting forced out by the Wardens makes no sense. Honestly even if they don’t give a shit about their people Anders has friends! At the very least there should have been some mention of how exactly this was allowed to happen (maybe the Warden and the Awakening companions minus Anders and Justice were called away for some extremely long mission or something), or preferably Anders and Justice should have been chased out of Amaranthine through means entirely unrelated to the Wardens; you could have a bit about Anders being scared that after merging with Justice he’d bring trouble down on the Wardens that they couldn’t weather, it would be good and give him an element of connection to the people we spend the entirety of Awakening watching him bond with, and most importantly a connection to the previous player character that both Oghren in Awakening and Varric in Inquisition get but he doesn’t. Like, think about that for a second; Oghren obviously already knows the Warden and Varric pretty much waxes poetic about how great Hawke is every time they come up, but Anders doesn’t even react to learning about a fucking assassination plot against the Warden! Give me some friendship points for dealing with that, at least! And when you run into Nathaniel if memory serves Anders doesn’t even ask about the Warden, who Nathaniel is presumably still serving under! He doesn’t ask Zevran about the Warden either, even if you romanced him in Origins! Basically just the fact that DA2 doesn’t acknowledge your approval value with Anders even while remembering such things as whether or not you slept with Isabella in the Pearl irks me. This is your carryover companion, Bioware! Try a little harder to remind us of that!

Anyway, moving on. Honestly so much about Fenris and Anders’s dynamic bothers me? I remember seeing a post about how maybe actually after a while they settled into actual discussion and learning from each other but Varric decided to spice it up by keeping them super aggressive in his storytelling, which I do like better, but in the canon story? I mean, they’re just playing hot potato with the misery poker at this point. And do not get me started on the guy with the spirit of justice in his head approving of selling someone into slavery. I don’t care how much he hates Fenris, Justice disapproved of having a pet cat in Awakening! And Bioware seriously expects us to believe that the guy with, again, the spirit of justice in his head would wave off fucking slavery because “mages have it worse”? I do not buy that. It makes far less sense now than it did in Awakening, where Anders had spent most of his life in a tower where elves were at least nominally on equal footing with humans and was only just getting out in a way that was likely to be permanent.

And of course, the big one: the whole thing where the narrative flattens Anders forcing a confrontation by blowing up a building that’s closed at night and only really has a couple people in it even during the day to kill the woman signing off on the mass slaughter of innocent people with the expectation that if the Templars are really interested in justice they will execute him instead of killing the mages of the Circle to just “crazy mage blows up a building and kills huge numbers of people to force everyone to go to war” pisses me off. This is a series that allows you to justify abandoning an entire town to be killed by skeletons! In this game you can sell your friend to slavers! And yet there is no serious moral discussion about Anders’s actions. It’s bad, case closed, no possible justification for it. And... other people have made this point more eloquently than me, but it seems pretty obvious that they made it a big, dramatic (and incredibly nonsensical, what the fuck is even happening with that explosion, was the point not to do it without magic, why did it look like that) explosion to set off that knee-jerk “explosion = terrorism” response that most people have; a public killing didn’t have to involve blowing up a church, now did it? I don’t believe for a second that a man who could plant a bomb in the Chantry without anyone noticing despite being a known apostate couldn’t find a way to get Elthina out of the Chantry and into a public area where she could be killed dramatically and without any risk of collateral damage from his own actions, especially with the situation reaching the point where she was having to directly interfere to keep the chaos from going too far. Hell, even burning it down would’ve been better (and honestly more satisfying I think, given how much time every other part of Kirkwall spends in flames)! Note also that in Trespasser, which would’ve been written well after 2 came out and people started talking about how Anders had a point, they have a bit where Varric talks about massive death tolls and enough rubble to change tidal patterns in a port city. The destruction of one building cannot do both those things! I don’t actually think it could do either given we’re shown that it is practically empty when it goes up, but it certainly couldn’t do both! We were not supposed to actually... think about this explosion. We were supposed to conclude that Anders was wrong because explosions are Bad and then when people didn’t come to that conclusion they crammed in a bunch of nonsensical bullshit about death tolls and tides without considering whether that made any sense from a logic standpoint in an attempt to push us to stop questioning it. And... in a series that put so much thought into complex morality in the first game, that was just a massive disappointment and step back in the complexity of the morality. And almost certainly the first step towards Inquisition’s “Well actually in this conflict where one side wants to be allowed to imprison and torture people and the other side wants to not be imprisoned and tortured both sides are just as bad as each other” bullshit, which just makes it even worse.

Basically at the end of the day Bioware took a complicated character with every reason to hate the Chantry and a brilliant plan for exposing just how uninterested the Templars are in justice (a plan that works, may I add; the Circles didn’t rebel because the Chantry blew up, they rebelled because the Templars proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they would use anything as an excuse to murder their charges even if they had the actual perpetrator of whatever they were using as that excuse right in front of them) and flipped the narrative to “crazy terrorist mage who killed infinitely more people than logic would suggest was possible while still doing all the other shit they claim that explosion did”, and I hate that.

#dragon age #anders #rynne #asks

[hidethedecay]

The ‘Anders Approves of Slavery’ Arguement

Is so stupid and before I get into it, I want to preface this and say that I love all of the DA2 characters to death, but especially Anders and Fenris.

Everyone who hates Anders likes to latch onto the fact that he approves if you sell Fenris back as proof of him being an awful person and that he’s down with slavery(???). 

1. It’s not. 2. It’s a ridiculously shallow reading of what is a pretty nuanced situation, but you know what? I’m not even going to argue this point. I could, as there’s a lot that goes into why Anders would say something like that, but I have another point that I want to make. Should he have bit his tongue? Yeah, but...

Actions speak louder than words.

While everyone’s huffing and puffing about how terrible Anders is for approving... no one stops to think about how no one else cares. Oh sure, the rest of the characters will disapprove, but they don’t actually speak up - they react negatively, but they don’t try to stop Hawke. The player is not given a dialogue wheel in which they try to talk him out of it. After it’s over, they don’t condemn Hawke for what he’s done. They don’t leave the party, which is the normal fucking reaction to your leader selling one of your own to his former master. 

It’s the worst thing you can do in DA2, in my opinion. You sell someone that has fought by your side for years to his tormentor. Whether your Hawke likes him or not, it’s awful and once it’s over, everyone’s like, well, I guess there was nothing I could do. Carry on. 

Or here, same thing: Fenris. Fenris, the one who is super anti-slavery, the one who’s been a slave, doesn’t stop you from taking a slave!!! I repeat, Hawke can acquire a slave and sure, Fenris will argue with you and spit in your face, but when you tell him to fuck off he goes, “Fine, keep your slave. Let’s continue my quest.” If that’s not selfish, I don’t know what is. 

So yes, Anders approves (and it’s complicated) and everyone else disapproves, but they didn’t do fuck all to stop it, did they? Tell me again, why is Anders the only one who sucks?

#anders #fenris #dragon age #dragon age 2 #andersdidnothingwrong

[tearlessrain]

So here’s the thing about DA2. It could have been good. The “trash friends running around their trash city having adventures while society collapses and no one can stop it” concept isn’t inherently bad, it could be a very fun and very powerful way to go if they did it well (especially in the current global climate, plenty of people would find that motif relatable). The problem is they didn’t do it well, either aspect, and it falls completely flat.

This turned into a freaking thesis so I’m putting it under a readmore.

Part of the issue with the “group of friends” aspect is that the writers tell you one thing and then actually present you with something else, and it throws off all the dynamics between the characters. The vast majority of this group of alleged friends either don’t get along or outright hate each other, with varying degrees of valid reasons. Almost every interaction between them that doesn’t involve Hawke is snippy and adversarial or openly hostile. The only reason any of these people are voluntarily anywhere near each other is because they’re all friends with Hawke, and even that feels awkward and forced because of the friendship/rivalry system. The writers need all these people to be together for their story to function so no one will do more than snap at you a bit no matter how terrible you are to them. You can literally become a blood mage, free every crazed murderous apostate you come across, and keep Orana as a slave and Fenris will still, for some reason, hang out with you (and then you can sell Fenris back into slavery himself and all your other friends, even if horrified, won’t intervene and will still, for some reason, hang out with you). You can bring Aveline with you to do blatantly illegal and sometimes immoral things and she’ll follow you with only minor complaining. Carver leaves midway through the game, sure, but it’s not because of any choices you make, you can’t prevent him from leaving in any way even if you somehow manage to have a positive relationship with the little shit. There are literally no consequences or real changes in outcome to anything you do or say.

And there are ways to avoid or at least mitigate some of this. Even if there’s a story that needs to end a certain way, it would be possible to vastly change the feel of it without making it impossible to create the game. Take Anders, for example. I could write a book on all the reasons I hate his self-victimizing hypocritical ass, but ignoring the bad writing for a moment, he was a golden opportunity to make it feel like your actions made a difference on a personal level even though you couldn’t stop the ultimate outcome. The way the game is now, Anders’s path is set as hell. It doesn’t matter whether you’re friends or rivals, either way he descends over the course of three acts into a batshit crazy extremist who’s lost all sense of scale and reality in his obsession with freeing the mages, to the point that he blows up the chantry and kills hundreds of people and thinks he’s justified in doing so. The only difference is whether he does it with or without your semi-unwitting help, and the only choice you have in the matter is whether to kill him or not after it’s already done.

What if, instead, the writers created an alternate way for the chantry to get blown up and whether or not it’s Anders’s fault depends on your relationship with him. So if you go the rivalry path, the original outcome happens because your abrasiveness/dismissiveness toward his cause deepens his persecution complex and strengthens the hold Justice/Vengeance has on him. BUT if you go the friendship path (which doesn’t necessarily imply agreeing with everything he does, but being understanding/sympathetic to the cause itself and stopping him from letting Justice run amok), he develops a degree of self awareness/drops his personal victim complex and ultimately isn’t the one to blow up the chantry. Maybe they change Orsino’s writing a bit and he does it (it would certainly make the ““morally ambiguous”” mages vs templars choice less forced and one-sided), or maybe it’s the collective effort of the radical mage underground, who knows. Anders would still side with the mages, obviously, ideally regardless of who Hawke sides with, but he’s less radical and cares more about the civilians caught up in this, which would be entirely in character for him given his introduction. Hell maybe you could have a third choice where you support him but in a bad way and voluntarily help him blow shit up (at the cost of several of your other friends leaving you along the way). This still wouldn’t be a perfect system, but I think it would better achieve the concept I think the game was going for of “you can’t stop the world from going to shit but you can affect the lives and fortunes of some individuals along the way and maybe that has to be enough.”

And just choice-dependent character outcomes in general. Break the law and piss off Aveline enough and maybe she stops associating with you and you have to start evading the guard as well as dealing with the gangs. Have at least one or two companions put their foot down and fight/leave you over selling Fenris. There’s no reason most of them have to be with you at the end, make it so that you can alienate people and potentially wind up at the end of the game alone with your choices. Give the player’s actions some gotdamn consequences instead of having the whole game feel like an ideal world as dreamed up by a redditor who unironically uses the term ‘amoral.’ You could do all this easily without having to do more than record a few extra lines of dialogue in DAI, because it’s all on a personal level and aside from one or two of them, whether or not your friends like you isn’t going to affect the fate of Thedas. If DA2 is supposed to be a more personally focused game, then make it one. One thing I really liked about DAI is that some of your companions will up and leave if you piss them off enough, and if they don’t they have valid reasons for staying in spite of you.

Also Isabela isn’t a progressive character at all and her interactions with Fenris are completely messed up and tasteless and swapping the genders on shitty tropes doesn’t make them not shitty, but that’s an entire other rant that goes beyond just dragon age and this has already gotten too long.

#the discourse age #dragons for ages