mllemaenad:

mysticme123:

mllemaenad:

Anders is sometimes accused of being a terrorist, which is interesting, since the game provides multiple examples of actual terrorists as a counterpoint. I don’t think the idea is entirely the fault of the audience, as Bioware is clearly aware of the current cultural association between exploding buildings and terrorism, and I know some of the writers made comments in that direction. But if that’s what they were going for, it’s one of those places where authorial intent failed utterly.

They seem to have forgotten that the defining feature of terrorism isn’t violence (although of course by its very nature it is often violent) but fear. It’s right there in the word, but even so.

When Anders blows up the Chantry in Act 3, it is not meant to inspire fear. It’s not a threat: ‘Let us go, or this is what we will do to you’. If it were, it would be a pretty bloody useless one. Though, of course, magic is used to light the fuse the primary weapon is gaatlok – gunpowder. He is incredibly secretive about the formula – even Hawke, helping him, doesn’t know he also needs charcoal – and has no expectation of surviving the act. Repeating it would be a pain in the arse. Anybody who wanted to would have to start from scratch.

Rather, it is a public demonstration of the helplessness of the mages. He commits a very public crime. And it immediately becomes clear that no authority figure is even slightly interested in dealing out justice. Hawke can kill him, if they are so inclined. But if they don’t, no one is going to force them to. You can be a completely pro-Templar Hawke and waltz into the Gallows with Anders in your party to participate in the Rite of Annulment, and the Templars do not call the whole thing to a halt – because, hang on, here is the actual perpetrator.

It is an excuse to do what they were planning to do anyway. They’d find an reason, one way or another, regardless of Anders’s actions. But this one is handy. Meredith claims that her hand is forced because the city would demand vengeance. Would it? Maybe. We never find out. It does, however, tell us how Meredith plans to spin the attack. The mages were always going to be victims of her fear and her power grab. This just makes it visible.

The people who really do deliberately inspire terror in Kirkwall are the Chantry. Meredith has been ruling the city through threats of violence for decades:

Meredith’s message was clear: remember who holds the power in Kirkwall. Remember what happened to Threnhold when he overreached. To drive home her point, she presented Marlowe with a small carven ivory box at his coronation. The box contained the Threnhold signet ring, misshapen, and crusted with blood. On the inside of the lid were written the words ‘His fate need not be yours’.

World of Thedas II

She’s also practising on the mages in the Gallows – three Starkhaven mages are made Tranquil at random, just to demonstrate to the prisoners in the Circle that it is within her power to do this. By Act 3, of course, she’ll have expanded her reach further, using her Templars to harass and assault Kirkwall’s citizens.

But, until Act 3, Meredith is something of a background figure. The ultimate villain lurking behind the scenes. The clearest foil for Anders is Petrice.

Here, then, is our actual terrorist. Petrice’s end goal is violence: she wants the people of Kirkwall to take on the Qunari. Of course it wouldn’t end there. There would be a war, and an Exalted March and (in her head – almost certainly not in reality) the crushing of the Qunari by the might of the righteous Chantry.

And her method is inspiring fear. Her assaults are relatively small, but calculated to make each side think of the other as violent, dangerous and evil. She’s arranged for the murder and mutilation of Qunari before: the bodies left for Arvaarad to find, so he would think Hawke and the Saarebas were responsible. She’s used poison gas on her own people (it would have been blackpowder, had she been able to get her hands on any) in an attempt to frame the Qunari. Here, she has arranged for the torture and murder of a Qunari delegation, to demonstrate to the Arishok how far the ‘faithful’ will go to be rid of the Qunari. Eventually, she will have a high-status Qunari convert murdered so she can use his death as propaganda.

Everything Petrice does is designed to frighten people. There’s a threat behind every strike: If we don’t fight the Qunari, look what they’ll do. Each act of violence is aimed at inducing a panic response – in the full knowledge that, eventually, people will be frightened enough to make war.

The contrasts are numerous: Anders is a commoner, a Fereldan (in addition to the whole mage thing), and at present living in the sewers. Petrice is apparently of noble Orlesian stock (so says The World of Thedas), and belongs to the most powerful institution in Kirkwall. The first quest actually makes a point of this: while the people of Darktown rally around their healer and Anders is quite at home there, Petrice, a Chantry sister supposedly responsible for the wellbeing of Kirkwall, is painfully out of place even in Lowtown. Moreover, whereas the underground falls apart around Anders, Petrice is a rising star – a Sister when Hawke first meets her, a Mother by Act 2. Where Anders’s plan requires that he take the blame for his actions, Petrice does everything she can to shield herself – she always works through agents, and here she sells out her own accomplice.

The common ground is a fervent belief in a cause, and at some stage (right off the bat for Petrice; in the endgame for Anders) a belief that violence is the only way to move forward.

And in the cause lies the important contrast.

Anders’s plan is only of value if he’s right. He’s not trying to inspire fear. It’s knowing that the fear is already there that prompts him to act as he does. If he’s wrong and the Circle and Templars are not oppressive institutions designed to control and brutalise mages – then he gets hauled off to prison (and no doubt subsequent execution), and nothing happens to the other mages. Once the Chantry blows up, he can’t lose. It doesn’t matter whether he lives or dies. It doesn’t matter whether Hawke saves the Circle or helps destroy it. The Templars do hold innocent mages accountable for something they had nothing to do with. The word goes out that the Annulment of the Kirkwall Circle was unjust. The Templars impose harsh restrictions on mages of other nations, who had even less to do with all this than the Kirkwall mages – and Fiona seizes her chance.

Point pretty well made.

Petrice, though, is trying to control people’s actions through fear. She is trying to make the people of Kirkwall think the Qunari are a terrifying threat, while still making them think they can take them in a fight. She is using fear to manipulate people, without any regard for the truth. By the time the Qunari uprising begins, Petrice is either dead or disgraced, making her a personal failure. But the uprising itself demonstrates how painfully wrong she was. A small, depleted Qunari force takes control of the city in a matter of hours. No fight, no war, with the Qunari is ever going to be easy – and one that started in Kirkwall would almost certainly result in the loss of the city. It turns out that the Qunari were easy prey for her before this because they didn’t want to fight.

And that shreds her other argument. She has been depicting them as unthinking savages. Terrifying in their brutality, yes, but so inherently less than Chantry folk (specifically humans), that they cannot help but lose. But the truth is that they have thought about this. The Arishok has been trying to avoid bloodshed. The Qunari troops have resisted provocation to a heroic degree. The Qun is what it is, and certainly no better than the Chantry. But the Qunari – the horned people who make up the majority of its adherents – are not monsters, just people like any other. Big, strong people who could have wreaked havoc a hell of a lot earlier, had they not been trying to keep the peace.

It’s easy to make people afraid, particularly if you’re willing to lie and kill to do it. But if that’s all you’ve got to work with, you’re pretty well screwed. And, well, there you go. Terrorism. Inspiring fear in order to achieve political ends. That’s Act 2′s story.

okay, as well thought out and articulated as this is, no.

you cannot tell me that anders isnt a fucking terrorist. it doesnt matter about intentions. it matters about results.

he blew up the chantry, killed innocents, and started a war between mages a templars that was inspired largely bc of fear on both sides.

normally i wouldnt get angry about this kind of thing in fandom, but like i say, what happens in video games and their fandoms is a reflection of reality.

this type of thing happens all the time irl. we get to know anders, befriend him, maybe even help with his cause. and when shit blows up (quite literally), we excuse him. hes the “lone wolf,” “misunderstood and misguided” white terrorist we see in the newspapers.

Your example of petrice just exemplifies the other side, usually the poc “violent madman with criminal tendencies” thats showcased in biased media. because we only knew her from one perspective, any efforts of understanding (even if they lead to disagreements) were blinded by blame. yes, she definitely depended on fear for control. but does this negate what anders did himself? hell no.

we decide on dragon age’s “terrorist” based on personal preference. which makes it hard for people to admit what anders did.

you can like him and write him and ship him all you want, but it doesnt change the fact that he. is. a terrorist.

Here’s the thing, though: I can tell you exactly that. I can’t force you to agree with me, but I can say it with conviction. And to be clear, I also get angry at this kind of thing because what happens in stories reflects what happens in reality.

Let’s start from the top: I do not regard Anders as misguided. I regard his actions as drastic but necessary. I am not a pacifist, but in the vast majority of real world cases I tend to think violence is wrong. But not in all cases. There are times when people have no choice but to fight for their rights and their freedoms. I do not think a slave revolt is morally wrong. I do not think a population rising up to throw out an occupying force, or a local despot whom they cannot oust by vote or law, is wrong. I think there are cases in history when revolution is nothing more than a desperate act of self-defence.

I think it’s … a bit odd that you’re accusing me of excusing Anders as a ‘“lone wolf,” “misunderstood and misguided” white terrorist’ and condemning Petrice as the ‘usually the poc “violent madman with criminal tendencies”’ when that’s fundamentally the opposite of what we’re looking at here.

Petrice is a very blonde, very white woman. I mean – scroll up and look at her. She is an Orlesian woman of noble heritage (her father was Lord Durand) and a member of the Chantry. Remember also what the Chantry is: the official religion of the Orlesian empire. It is a part of the Orlesian war machine: one tool they use to expand their empire. It is backed by Templar swords, and absolutely known for invading and destroying native cultures. It is thinly disguised Christianity at its very worst, and uses tactics familiar to anyone who’s looked at colonial expansion and empire building.

We have some insight into her motives:

It is with regret that I say these things about the young mother. Her trauma prior to becoming a sister informs (but does not excuse) what happened. I knew of her father, Lord Durand, and that the family was accustomed to a much different life before the 9:22 attack on Val Royeaux destroyed their holdings. Their expectation was to be societal peers to families such as the Launcets, and Petrice was raised in similar sheltered fashion. It seems the scars of that loss did not fade as quickly as her initial good works suggested.

– World of Thedas II

So Petrice is a fallen aristocrat, made bitter by her loss of social status. We also have her own words, her own framed defence, for her actions:

But while its form showed the appeal of the divine, its faith was a lie, its training heretical. Their way is a corruption that has to be ended. But how to show they are not like us? How to ensure that no other can be even momentarily enamoured?

– World of Thedas II

Pretty damn clear, I’d say. Petrice has, at most, a single ‘equal’ accomplice, (although of course she is not above rallying a mob) and she throws Varnell to the wolves to save her own skin almost immediately. She is not called a terrorist in the game, in fact Hawke has the opportunity to support and protect her, and the people she is persecuting are non-humans, with one of the more ‘alien’ designs among the Dragon Age series.

She is … the walking example of the lone-wolf white terrorist type, oozing privilege and resentment.

Now Anders … okay. To be clear: I recognise that the tendency in media to put white people in persecuted positions more usually experienced by people of colour is problematic, at best. Where well-intentioned it is probably meant to inspire empathy, but it’s dubious how well that actually works, and ultimately it just results in audiences hardly ever seeing non-white characters get to lead the revolution against the story’s oppressors. Bioware has a tendency to whitewash the fuck out of its elves over the games (as well as some other characters) so there’s something quite uncomfortable going on there. But I can’t do much about that … so. Okay? Okay.

As a mage, Anders probably best represents neurodivergent people, rather than a race, although there’s a hell of a lot of intersectionality here, as we know that races that can probably be considered ‘people of colour’ by in-universe standards – the Rivaini, the Dalish, the Chasind, the Avvar – are typically non-Andrastians who regard magic as a gift and make use of it in their religious practices. These people are driven to the margins of society, or persecuted for practising their native faiths.

He is also, it’s worth noting, a Fereldan, in a story where Fereldans are regarded as despised refugees: he is protected by his own people because they are without work, homes or assistance, and the runaway mage healer is one of the few people they can count on: 

Ferelden man: Hey! We heard you in there. Asking about the healer.

Now, making him a refugee does not make him a person of colour – of course not. But surely the demonisation of refugees is a pertinent story point, and if anything now even more than when the game was first released?

The existence of Justice as an alter-ego, and the fact that he’s clearly suffering from his days in the Circle, mean that he’s also coded as mentally ill. The game goes out of its way to play up the idea of Anders as ‘crazy’ and tends to link his ‘madness’ to his cause (to be fair, it does this with Meredith too, and I don’t think that’s right either; red lyrium certainly affected her cognitive abilities, but she was a brutal tyrant before she ever laid eyes on the stuff). Anders’s Manifesto is a running joke throughout the game, rather than a potential thread Hawke could follow to help convince people of the plight of the mages.

In fact, that’s the heart of it: we do get to know Anders as a snarky and somewhat argumentative friend, but we are given no more time to appreciate his cause than we are Petrice’s. We know he works with the mage underground, quite possibly the bravest people in Kirkwall, but we are prevented from ever seriously engaging with this group. We see mages through quests, sometimes, as we see Qunari through quests, but we mostly get secondhand tales of the mages’ fight for survival.

In virtually every way, he is coded as the kind of person who is called a terrorist in the media without further examination. And now you’re shouting at me for not thinking he’s a terrorist, so I guess it bloody worked.

Look: the Chantry is the terrorist organisation here. Not Anders. Not the mage underground. Not even the Qunari rioters. Petrice is the most obvious example, yes, but they are all part of it: Elthina, Meredith, Cullen and the other Templar officers. The Chantry overthrew the legitimate viscount of Kirkwall before the game even started. They installed Marlowe Dumar as a puppet ruler, and it is common knowledge that Meredith is ruling the city through him, through, you guessed it, terror:

Meredith’s message was clear: remember who holds power in Kirkwall. Remember what happened to Threnhold when he overreached. To drive home her point, she presented Marlowe with a small carven ivory box at his coronation. The box contained the Threnhold signet ring, misshapen and crusted with blood. On the inside of the lid were written the words: ‘His fate need not be yours.’

– World of Thedas II

Act III is just the last stage of their plan: they cement their rule into an outright theocracy, with Templars patrolling the streets and harassing the citizens, and secular positions being replaced by religious ones. It’s a fucking horror show, before we even talk about the mages.

But let’s do that, shall we?

‘he blew up the chantry, killed innocents, and started a war between mages a templars that was inspired largely bc of fear on both sides.’

No.

Seriously – no. The mages fear the Templars because they are murdering and torturing them. They fear them because they take them from their homes when they are children, and they never let them go. Templars despise mages because the specific Orlesian interpretation of Andrastianism puts a lot of weight on the idea of mages being responsible for the Blight, and they’ve built a whole culture around hating magic. Anders didn’t start that. He didn’t start the war (why does everyone forget Fiona? Fiona is awesome, and has been working on this for much longer than Anders has). In point of fact there isn’t a ‘war’, no matter how much the Chantry tries to frame it as one. The mages are trying to leave the Chantry and Circles because they don’t want to be there anymore. The Templars are trying to murder them for that.

In Kirkwall, specifically, the mages are the walking dead.

Ser Karras: All mages are confined to their quarters.

Ser Karras: The knight-commander has sent to Val Royeaux for the Right of Annulment.

Ser Karras: Those robes are gonna get their lesson.Soon.

That’s at the opening of Act III. The slaughter of the mages is planned well before Anders does anything. It is a combination of Meredith’s personal obsession and the Chantry’s determination to dominate Kirkwall.

Your concern for innocent people doesn’t seem to extend to them.

Look: the Kirkwall uprising was brutal and bloody and awful. I know that. It’s not like I think people should have those for the fun of it. But it is as I said before, in blowing up the Chantry, Anders managed to do something that so far no one else has accomplished: he exposed the Chantry’s lies. There are no video cameras in Thedas. There isn’t even a free press. He committed a murder, undeniably. I don’t need to look away from that, or pretend it didn’t happen. But it was a murder, nothing more. The vast majority of the violence and destruction that occurred came from the Chantry’s response to that. And that response, the invocation of the Right of Annulment, was planned before he acted. Pretending this was about him was clear and obvious bullshit. People knew this. The other Circles knew this.

The difference is only that Anders forced them to act in public. You can wring your hands over shopkeepers who might not have been caught up in the fighting had it been done in the privacy of the Gallows – but now think about that shopkeeper’s ten-year-old son, taken to the Circle because he has magic, and how fucking dead he and everyone like him would be had that happened.

I can’t name a single innocent person Anders killed. Is it possible he did? Sure. There might have been some random person in the Chantry. But I’m doubtful. That’s the emptiest building I’ve ever seen in a Dragon Age game. Elthina and her cronies were in there, but they were the opposite of innocent. They were the people holding the city under their thumbs, even if they let Meredith be the face of the regime.

So let me ask you this: is Luke Skywalker a terrorist? There were probably more ‘innocent people’ in the Death Star than there were in the Chantry – I mean, people with low-level jobs and no serious allegiance to the empire. They all died when he blew that thing up. And the only difference between the Kirkwall Chantry and the Death Star is on the technological level.

And please, if you want to argue with me, fine, but do me the courtesy of not assuming that I base my thoughts around ‘shipping’. Fuck.

#i don’t see how anyone can equate fighting for your basic rights and your life as being the same thing as terrorism (via steampoweredstrawberry)