#but deep diving into the full writing of DA2 and DAI would take. so much more strength than i have

[x-letsbreaksomerules-x]

Saw your tags that were like “I have more thoughts about Anders but no I shan’t.” Well I think you should

It's hard for me to concisely talk about all my opinions about Anders and more specifically the chantry explosion and the way that its spoken about in game(and outside of it). But i think it's interesting just how hard Inquisition rails against Anders, despite everything that the game shows us(especially when it comes to unity and drastic measures being needed to save the world). And i won't get deep into 'Anders was right!!!' territory, because do i think blowing up a church was right? Not really(and writing wise. this was a very charged choice. remember how post-9/11 these games are, thats important). But i came away from the Chantry explosion feeling a little like the morality of that action doesn't matter in this context. Anders didn't care about it being truly justified, at the end of it. He knew what he'd done was in fact wrong, and drastic, and people are dead now. But he was right about the fact that there are many cases where nothing is ever going to change if something horrible doesn't happen. The Chantry could hear petitions and even want good things for the mages, the Chantry could change, little by little, but that slow progression still allows the preservation of their power. Inquisition rails really hard against Anders, but it has no choice besides proving him right in the fact that desperate times often call for desperate measures, and disaster does in fact prompt change. In fact, if i want to get really funny about it, i could point out that this game's entire premise is how disaster brings people together or wakes them up, and how the game can get really hypocritical when it comes to what its trying to tell us. But i'll leave that for another time when i can form a stronger point about it. I think a lot of people get into these like, debates about if or if not Anders was right to do what he did, and i think they kind of miss or diminish the point sometimes. End of the day it wasn't about if it was right to kill people or blow something up or how terrible and awful the chantry is and if these people deserved their fate because they're rich or evil. It isn't really about them. The chantry explosion, at some point, is no longer the product of a personal vendetta, it was a tool to force people out of compromise and into something different. Because compromise only ever resulted in the preservation of existing structures of power. Anders was wrong to kill people and blow things up, and that is important. That wrongness is important. What he was right about, is that it was always going to take something that wrong and terrible to change things.