All his sweaters are borrowed, without a sense of permanence. All his sweaters have belonged, at one time, to other people, because he likes the smell of them, the half-life scent has, before it starts to fade.
It’s in his apartment lease that he can’t have any pets.
He leaves bowls of food out by the trash cans for stray cats anyway.
It takes him three years of knowing Hawke to kiss Hawke at one of Isabela’s parties. He’s panting at the end of it, somehow less and more afraid.
He’s wearing someone else’s sweater. Hawke is wearing a father’s faded button-down hand-me-down, red plaid, black squares, touching the frayed edge of Anders’s left sleeve.
On their first real date, Anders takes Hawke to a community garden on mulching day.
‘Is that shit, Anders?’ Hawke asks.
Yes, Anders explains. But it grows things. Flowers don’t discriminate.
Dirt gets under their fingernails. Hawke washes Anders’s hands clean in the kitchen sink until the water stops running brown from his fingertips, nails he bites in the mornings, broken nails he wants to rake through Hawke’s hair.
it’s not anders being in an m/f ship that erases his bisexuality, he’s bi no matter what gender he dates, as are merrill, isabela, fenris, leliana, zevran, josephine, (and bull who is pansexual, also regardless of the gender he is paired with)
it’s that when playing as an mhawke anders EXPLICITLY says ‘does it bother you i’ve been with men’ and talks about karl as ‘his first’ in an obviously romantic sense
the fact that the dev team felt the need to remove this for his playthrough with fhawke is erasing anders’ VISIBILITY as a bisexual character, even if he is still bisexual
which is just a shit move tbh, people try to justify it all the time, but as a bi person myself i don’t buy into the regular excuse of ‘well why would you tell someone that the person you just had to kill was your lover that u cared deeply for for many years that’s soo not what people do’
Anders was constantly ignored for years while protesting peacefully in Kirkwall, wrote a manifesto, met with the grand cleric, and helped mages escape through the mage underground, etc.
However by the end of ACT 3 Anders is literally backed into corner with no one listening to his peaceful protests aside from (depending on the choices you make) a pro-mage Hawke, but even then there is only so much they can do.
As the grand cleric it was Elthina’s duty to mediate between the mages and templars yet she did nothing to prevent or stop the templars from taking advantage of the mages and instead took a stance of neutrality that did nothing but help the templars oppress the mages.
Mage Circles, weren’t as great as just as the Chantry wants you to believe.
Screenshots of Dungeons in the Circle tower the place here Anders spent a year in solitary confinement.(X)
Anders was locked up in solitary confinement for a year after his seventh attempt at escaping, keep in mind this was seen as a “light punishment.”
Cole recounting the experience of a mage that was left to starve to death in a cell by templars.(X)
In the Orlesian Circle, the mage Cole possesses was locked, imprisoned, forgotten about, and left to starve and would later have any records of his existence destroyed.
The mages were lobotomized(Chantry law states that mages who have passed their harrowing are not to be made tranquil, throughout the game you see the Kirkwall circle repeatedly breaking this law and go unpunished for it), sent to harrowings unprepared, abused by the templars (there are even hints that templars have been sexual abusing the mages.)
Knight Commander Meredith was already pushing for the Rite of Annulment way before Anders considered blowing up the Chantry.
Kirkwall Chantry
Poor refugee talking about the Kirkwall Chantry. (X)
The Kirkwall Chantry is located in Hightown, the place where the upper class live. The Chantry’s purpose is to give aid to the poor and those in need yet it’s unreachable to people living in Lowton, the place where the lower class live, and they are unable to afford to move closer to the Chantry.
So after peacefully advocating for mages for years, being dismissed by the grand cleric who’s job is to ensure that templars abuse their positions, realizing the Chantry’s system is filled with corruption and failed the mages, seeing that the knight commander was hellbent on committing genocide upon every mage in the Kirkwall circle led Anders to making choice where no one had no choice but to look, but to listen while giving the mages a chance to fight for their lives rather than be slaughtered like cattle.
Queer Fortress 