The Problem with Politics - Let's Play Dragon Age II

Doing the LP really affects me. I think it's because I read so fast I generally look a line over around 15 times while putting pictures in and writing reactions instead of just hearing the line spoken once. I was pretty much one with Joyce at wanting to hurt him at the end and I do not usually feel that way.

Luckily, I'm a Spirit Healer, so if he's getting a time out, screw him!

Yeah... I wish he had a little more 'light' in him in DA2 to contrast with that dark brooding-ness. I miss old Anders.
/sadfaic

I consider the few times he is light-hearted and joking my points of solace with him. I MISS the old Anders so much. I miss the old Justice, too. If they HAD utterly ruin some of the Awakening characters, couldn't it have been Velanna or something? T_T

On an unrelated note, angry beaver seems to be digging through the LP from the start and is at page 7-8 now. When you make it here, good sir/madam, I tip my cap to you and your commitment.

I am for some reason insanely sleepy, so to stay awake, I update my LP. I am so smart.

ine: You're incredibly talented, Merrill. I can see you are meant for great things.
Merrill: Thank you!
Aveline: But... You're stupid.
Merrill: ... I'm sorry, what?
Aveline: Don't you think it would be better to work on where you are now, instead of recreating old glory?
Merrill: No. No, that's kind of the opposite of what I've been saying? I'm the stupid one? Whatever...

Yes, Merrill, yes you are.

Merrill: Did you step on something sharp, Fenris?
Fenris: No.
Merrill: Slam your fingers in a door?
Fenris: No.
Merrill: Smack your head on a low beam?
Fenris: Is there a point to this line of questioning?
Merrill: Just wondering why you're so cross all the time.
Varric: I think he jabs himself with those spikes, personally.
Fenris: Perhaps it's the inane prodding.

Merrill: How do you suppose the Qunari scratch their heads with those horns in the way?
Isabela: Why do you think I would know?
Merrill: Because you know lots of things! I wonder if they rub their heads against tree trunks like halla do.
Isabela: I'd pay a sovereign to see that.
Merrill: No wonder they seem so cranky all the time....

Varric: So, I hear you've been visiting the viscount's garden, Daisy.
Merrill: Oh, they're enormous! And they're always empty. Why don't more people go to see them?
Varric: Probably because they're private and surrounded by guards...
Merrill: I thought all those men looked a bit cross!

Sebastian: I hope this wasn't presumptuous, but I added your husband's name to the memorial wall in the Chantry.
Aveline: Wesley? But... you never knew him.
Sebastian: He was a templar. He refused to abandon the people of Ferelden to the Blight. He died too young.
Sebastian: The grand cleric will read his name during the Chant of Remembrance.
Aveline: Thank you. That is... very kind.
Sebastian: He walks with the Maker. But it is no shame for those left behind to mourn.

Anders is in fact NOT getting a timeout. For gameplay reasons.

Stuff like that scene makes me wish they'd done more playing around with the whole framing device of Varric as narrator. I suppose they felt like it'd be bad to have Cassandra and Varric interrupting the flow of gameplay too often, but it's always so neat when they do and something you don't see in other video games.

More Varric making shit up!

Also, man, I feel so bad for him right now. :c

I'm fearing it might have been another time constraint deal. That they'd maybe planned to do it a few more times but ended up with it just being the once. I mean, once pr. act wouldn't have been so bad.

As for Varric... I wish the poor bastard could have a happier tale like he deserves. Unlike SOME MAGES I could mention he doesn't bring any of this upon himself.

Oh, and I just realized, this LP has 1 month anniversary counting from 1st post. I feel ACCOMPLISHED.

Varric! Why can't I romance you? Waaah D':

He's spoken for, damn that crossbow. Forget everything else, Bioware, THAT was videogame cruelty. Directed at the player.

No one ever makes dwarves romanceable =(

I swear, I am going to write my own RPG where the main love interest is a romanceable dwarven bard.

Also there's a depressed elf because there has to be.

And a fat Orc?

Yes. Fat and jolly and loveable and he is romanceable too.

I've been playing through Awakening recently, and it really hurts to interact with Anders. It makes his DA2 characterization even worse. I fought for you, you stupid mage! I stood up for you to the Templars and fought for the freedom you later squandered. I did NOT break your phylactery so you can do one of the dumbest things a mage can do and then get beaten over the head with the crazy stick! I don't even want to bother with him; if I didn't need a healer, I would have handed him to the Templars at the beginning of the game. It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble, that's for sure.

DA2 Anders' problem in many places is that they made him TOO annoying, TOO whiny and one-sided. Fenris is just as set in his ways, but he's not millitant about it, and he can at least pretend he's listening. Merrill is a bit of the same, she's set in her ways, but she's not preaching to YOU about her stupidity and only asks for help if she can't do things alone. Anders, most of the time, is that annoying millitant classmate who wants everyone in on every stupid political statement he wants to make and if you don't want to, onus is on you as far as he's concerned.

Again, it makes sense they write him as they do, but did he have to be SO annoying?

This playthrough is pissing me off even more at him because I do everything in super-slow and read his lines so much they grate on me. I am now very glad Fenris won the vote.

I always marry Orcs in Skyrim. Ghorbash is a badass. <3

I know, right?

And dammit, I really liked Justice in Awakening, too. ;_;

I can't really find Anders annoying. He's obsessive, but I sympathize with that.

Sadly you're stuck with that Anders no matter what. Even if he dies in your game he's alive with some handwaving and as annoying as ever.

This LP has ruined Anders for me. That might actually be a good thing.

But man, I loved the guy in Awakening...

I... kind of disagree, I think, although I partially agree as well. The difference between Anders and Fenris is that Fenris has a sense of perspective and acknowledges that his irrational hatred is wrong. (This is especially obvious if you romance him.) He states that he doesn't want to hate, and that he knows not all mages are the same. He even realizes the twisted nature of his circumstances; by hating mages, a hatred that was instilled in him by mages, he is allowing them continued power over him. He knows he's in the wrong and he knows that it has to stop, but he doesn't know how. That sense of helpless frustration only contributes to his bitterness. If loyal to Hawke, he's able to finally over come this- in a way- and a rival to Fenris can further his character development even more.

Anders, on the other hand, is mired in his own misery and stupidity. First off, I don't believe that Awakening!Anders would have ever merged with Justice and abandoned the Wardens for Kirkwall. I really don't. That was a monumentally stupid move on both their parts, and directly led to everything he does in DA2. Anders should have known the problems of dealing with Fade spirits- unlike Merrill, whose stupidity can be slightly explained as a result of a incomplete magical education, Anders was raised in the Circle and should have had the dangers of spirits and demons pounded into him at a young age. I also don't recall Justice being such an absolute hardass. He was very serious about the concept of Justice, obviously, but he also showed an interest in subtle beauty and art and the pleasures of the world around him. There's also the problem of Anders being totally uninterested in any fight against the Templars that doesn't involve him. In Awakening, he isn't interested in anything but being free. That's his whole motivation, and it's a very selfish one. I could see it developing into a desire to free others, but that has to be shown, not told! It's too sudden to go from a mostly content Anders in Awakening to a desperate, hunted freedom fighter version of Anders. He ended Awakening deciding to stay with the Wardens (in my import save, anyway) and seemed to consider them his home and family. What happened?

It also doesn't change the fact that, no matter what you do, he

In my opinion, that's unforgivable. He deserves that murderknife, every inch of it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I find his writing to be consistent with an obsessed, desperate radical... but I don't see why that obsessed, desperate radical had to be Anders, nor why he had to be so one-dimensional. His character never really develops, unless you consider developing into a plot device to be development. It's also such a dramatic 180 from his previous characterization, and the given reason for that is out of character for him.

It makes me sad.

You're absolutely right and I'd like this more than once if I could.

For Justice, I get the sense the old Justice has pretty much been warped away and it's Vengeance calling the shots. The one time you meet the old style Justice in the Fade he hasn't changed much, but that does leave me the rest of the time wanting to shout at Anders when he talks about Justice. No, you STUPID cheesemonger, Justice isn't talking to you, VENGEANCE IS. You should bloody well KNOW he's there, you MADE him. Knowing that, TRY to examine your actions and I won't have to take a sledgehammer to your nuts.

Although that still begs the question of what the hell Justice was thinking in the first place. I have such a love-hate relationship with this game. There are parts that are amazingly good, and parts that are amazingly bad. I couldn't really say what my overall opinion is.

Out of curiousity, I'd like to see if this bothered you too: the fact that the game stopped being shades of grey and became shades of black. Almost every single mage in the game either ends up being a blood mage

or incredibly stupid (or both- hi, Merrill!), and almost every single Templar is a psuedo-Nazi. I was pretty offended at the out-of-nowhere Holocaust allusion with the "tranquil solution" side-quest, and I don't offend easily. I really liked the Qunari plot, but the mages fell completely flat for me. When your choice is between demon-worshippers and Nazis, you'd probably be better off giving Kirkwall the finger and fleeing on Isabela's ship.

It bothers me no end. I'm discussing DAO in another thread, and I liked how when you had two awful choices your character could go "We're NOT letting the child die, we're NOT letting his mother die, we're LISTENING TO THE MAGE and taking the third option."
And damnit, I know there's decent mages here, game, I met Ella and Alain. I also know there's decent Templars, because I met Cullen, Thrask, Emeric and Carver is one. You get hints Meredith probably wouldn't approve of what Alrik and Karras do, either, and all that explains why they keep the assholes around is a throwaway line of Cullen's about how they need to keep up their numbers. Apparently that was a problem AFTER they fired Samson for a much more minor offense.

In DA2 TWICE you get a situation where they tease you with compromise

and take it away from you again. I really hope DA3 takes place in a world that feels a bit more worth saving or, failing that, doesn't give my PC a random idiot ball. Yes, I am still mad Joyce let Corypheus waltz away. The game's ups outweigh the lows, but it drives me nuts sometimes.

Yeah, I was practically screaming at the screen when it wouldn't let you

(I played a male rogue, by the way.)

It makes me sad. This game has so much good in it, and so much potential for good, but it feels ultimately unsatisfying. No matter what you do, everything leads to the same miserable end. As far as a book or a movie goes, you might be able to argue that it's the artistic point of the thing- but this is a game. It's like reading a choose your own adventure book that ends with every single option leading to a game over page. It's frustrating, it's depressing, and worst of all it's not fun.

I kind of think the game would have been better off if it focused mainly on the qunari and teased the civil war, then left the civil war itself for 3. That would also give time for Anders to have better character development. DA2 is overly ambitious, and it's only natural that they couldn't devote enough time and effort to all of the ideas and conflicts they try to bring up.

Aaaa I have a completely different opinion about Anders than basically everyone in this thread and I don't have time to ramble on about it the way I'd like so I'm just gonna toss some Awakening banter here that foreshadows the whole Anders/Justice thing, because a lot of people say Anders is a completely different/ruined character and that it came out of nowhere and I disagree entirely U:

Also, re: plot stuff, it's worth remembering/noting that they had barely any time to work on this game and it was extremely rushed. DA3 is getting way more development time and they took feedback for DA2 very seriously, so hopefully it's a lot more polished. (Some of the concept art had dudes riding giant scorpions? What. I want one.)

It could make sense, again, if we're shown the transformation and character development instead of told "no wait, it totally happened!" I would likely have no problem with that sort of plot device if only it were implemented better. I guess it really just comes down to the player's interpretation of the characters, though.

I don't think the game being rushed was much of an excuse, either. I can forgive a free game done for a challenge some of its faults. Dragon Age 2 was a big-name release put out by a critically-acclaimed studio and an evil overlord of a publisher. It's like the fiction version of saying that a truck with no brakes should be viewed in a more favorable light because Ford was forced to rush it out the door.

Awakening is one long Horrific In Hindsight. I can point a bit of how Anders act at the fact Varric is an unreliable narrator and even when he tells the truth some of it happened a near decade ago for him, so it makes sense when he summarizes all of Hawke's major interactions with someone they end up beating on their specific dead horse because that's what he recall them doing the majority of the time (headcanon; a godsent). You see Justice already starting on the slippery slope without Anders - he's starting to feel jealousy of what Aura and Kristoff had at the end of his quest, and while you can reassure him there, it might be the first step. The problem, as Tallulah says, is that it's a lot of Tell Don't Show (And Then I Fused With Justice And He Became Vengeance You Can read That In an External Short Story and BTW this Codex Entry Says How Everyone In Kirkwall Goes Nuts), so the contrast is very jarring. It's not like they can't write a gradual descent - Anders' banter and demeanour changes subtly from act to act where he becomes more and more miserable and humourless, kind of like how Fenris becomes more animated - he's very taciturn and withdrawn when you first meet.

Sometimes things just fly in out of the left corner like how Anders is suddenly bisexual and had an affair with Karl he only mentions if you play as a man, despite having shown no such inclinations in Awakening. it's not that I mind his being it as much as it just suddenly being A Thing without any signs it was in the planning before DA2, unlike the Vengeance thing. In a way, really, I'd prefer they hadn't gone the Everybody is Bi way (Sebastian is not a real romance, he doesn't count). I like some stuff that gives replay value and it was nice how in Origins the love interest constellation changed a bit depending on gender when you can't have the old style RPG where every stat influences what people say at any given time. On the other hand it was nice to be able to do more or less as you pleased on that front, so maybe the grass is just greener on the other side.

I will, ending this before I write an essay, give Adam Howden he is an amazing VA and one of the reasons I think I like Anders much better when I listen to the game instead of reading the screenshots.

Everyone is being very rational and smart about all of this. I just can't. Anders just gives me so many feelz, the only way I can not romance him is to never, ever talk to him at all. I feel like he's shouting at me "LOVE ME DAMMIT" and I can't tell him no. I'm too soft. It's the reason I can't really hate Merril either, as annoying as she is - she just has this "no one ever loved me" aura. *sigh* And I call myself a cynic. Really, I'm just a big softie inside, I can't do what really should be done, no matter how much Seb bugs me to do it.

I didn't had any sleep last night, so I'm probably not very coherent at the moment, but basically: I'm ashamed of weakness but do not regret it. Ignorance is bliss after all.

Yeah. I think I know what you mean, and I have experienced similar feelings myself. You're right about Anders... Even though it's just a game I found myself desperately wanting to help him as well, and it hurt my heart to refuse him. In hindsight, he reminded me of a certain painful past relationship (like I'm sure other people have said before).

I think Anders accidentally soured me on him the first time I met him. (I never actually played Awakening.) I was playing a Diplo Hawk for my first runthrough.

And I hit that fucking flirt trap.

Which left me going 'WOAH MAN I JUST WANTED TO BE FUCKING POLITE WHY ARE YOU- what the fuck fifteen rivalry how can you hate me that much we just met and you're being creepy'.

...But that does let me take him to meet Fenris and get on Fenris' good side by agreeing mages are dangerous without losing approval with Bethany or Merril. So there's that.

*Claps hands* Guess what!

Or at least, a very controlled one. I think he's rarely actually calm, but he does a fantastic job of faking it until something like this sets him off. So, yeah, kudos to Gideon Emery on his voice-acting in general.

I also love how thoroughly chagrined he is when Hawke clarifies that she's giving Oriana a paying job.

Agreed, controlled would be a more accurate word. I'm having a bad case of the word-replace nonsense syndrome. I was writing 'someone' when I meant 'something' up there, and I implore anyone who notice a fault I didn't see to tell me. Colds play havoc with my brain-to-fingers interpretation.

As for the rest, he absolutely flips his lid if you say slaves are useful. I YT'ed it because I haven't had a Hawke that was so much of an asshole as to do that.

I haven't dared YT it. It was bad enough watching video of what happens if you take the asshole choice in his Act 3 personal quest. He's too gutted to even get angry! :c

EDIT: You updated! <3
I love Emery here. It's just so perfect.

Also, romance <3

(I'll stop here before I draw hearts everywhere.)

OKAY, HERE IT COMES A BIG WALL OF TEXT IN BADLY WRITTEN ENGLISH.
I'm not even sorry.

First thing firsts: I love Anders, even if I spent a lot of time wanting to punch him because DUDE, WE GOT IT, THIS IS NOT THE MOMENT. STOP BEING DUMB.
I actually excuse a lot of his behavior because he has a point.

The point is: nobody really gives a fuck about what happens to mages.
Let me explain, Anders is that guy that comes to you while you're out minding your business and tries to give you a lecture about animal rights/people dying from hunger/horrible things that happen in the world. He's right but he's annoying - I'm tired, I have a lot to study, I have to go home and cook and doing chores and someone stole my bike, go away.

And that's how most of people in Kirkwall do. I think Cullen is wrong when he talks about the fact everyone nowadays sympathize with mages: they might - there are after all mages who lived with their family before being caught, like Feynriel and Ella - but Kirkwall is a city so fucked up where probably everyone is just minding his own business. It's not like they're pro-mage, they just don't want to get involved. They think tomorrow should pretty much resemble today (Kirkwall is Ankh Morpork).
We see in that quest where someone goes around killing elves child but they're elves, so who cares? Ferelden refugee have it badly too, but not Kirkwall problem, right?
The Arishok may not be the most reliable person in the world but he's right, Kirkwall sucks.

Sure, there is the mage resistance, but they're not really fighting for mage rights, they're mostly helping mages to leave Kirkwall so they can go and hide somewhere else. And the other parties who want mage freedom are the ones who want a new Tevinter.
Anders doesn't want to live hide forever or a new Tevinter, Anders wants the Harry Potter third option: mages who are given an education and then a live on their own. And he's pretty much the only one: mages in the Circle can't really do anything and have different opinions and mages outside it are crazy or just minding their own business as well.
So Anders ends up being the only one who actually has an agenda which makes sense and the only one who actually cares and tries to do something.
It' like Justice says in Awakening: he is now free, shouldn't he use his particular condition to free people like him? (Also, isn't this what Andraste did? This religion is so useful.)

Also, people around him don't really care. They may approve or sympathize him and support mages when they can - that's what a pro-Mage Hawke does - but they're not involved in his fight for mage rights.
So he ends up going around trying to make people care and people just don't and I think Anders can't believe that people actually don't.
In Awakening he had a similar attitude towards magic: magic is awesome and it's a gift from the Maker, why he shouldn't be proud of it?

tl;dr Anders keeps talking about mage rights because he's the only one who has an agenda that makes sense and he's kinda the only one who cares.
Which is also the difference between him and Fenris, Fenris story arc is about him growing as a person. I think it makes more sense comparing Anders with Sebastian - Elthina is so wonderful, she's always right and goddammit Sebastian.

I won't excuse him saying awful things to Aveline or to Ser Thrask - Anders you make me so angry - because he actually is like that. He always hated Templars and now that he has a spirit of vengeance stuck in his head things won't get better, especially since he's fighting for mage rights and it's easy to translate it in a "we against them" kind of situation.

Also I have the same headcanon Davian has about how Varric tells the story.

Agree with Bec about Anders in Awakening. There is a lot of foreshadowing in these banters.
Also, there is a difference between spirit and demons, according to the Chantry. We can see it first hand in the Mage origin: hey, handsome spirit of Valor, give me a staff to fight a demon, there is no way this can go wrong! It's a bit like the difference between angels and demon in the Bible: demons are fallen angel, demons are spirit perverted by their desires.
Merrill had a better education about it - they are like humans, you can't go and trust one of them just because it has a different name - but thought she was able to handle the one she had a deal with.

Also, maybe it's just me, but I found Justice a bit harsh in Awakening:
Justice: YOU MUST KILL THE ONES WHO KILLED KRISTOFF
Warden: Okay, I'll probably do it
Justice: NO, YOU MUST DO IT, THAT'S HOW JUSTICE WORKS

Also, Justice was already having some desires of its own - he didn't want to die for istance, and he was fascinated by Kristoff memories and feelings and he found it fascinating and he actually thought a lot about it. He wasn't a demon, but he was having some desires. For instance, the lyrium ring. He was so happy about it, I giggle everytime I give it to him.
Joining with Anders didn't really helped, because he end up having to feel everything Anders feels, and he wasn't ready for that. As Anders says, he was so angry about everything happened to him and Justice felt that anger, but he didn't know how to deal with it. He didn't had enough time to became more human.

(If someone watches Supernatural as well, I'll just say: angels. "Too much heart was always Castiel problem" I love this quote They have some things in common. )

I agree about the "show don't tell" part, you have to care enough to spend time digging all the stuff that is going the two games to have an idea about why Anders changed so much. First time I played I kept having Anders in my party because between him and Fenris I always have different viewpoints, but I also spent a lot of time loving Varric because he made the whole thing fun.

And I got the happy ending slide too. Then again, according to the short stories the Warden left Amaranthine and the Chantry wanted MOAR TEMPLAR WARDENS so I can't blame him for leaving. And for hating the Templars even more. But Bioware, stop messing up your own endings.

^THIS.
I want to ride awesome things. I think we'll get horses at least, since Orleasians have them.

I probably don't find it strange because I'm pansexual myself and I have a lot of not-straight friends, so I can came up with a lot of reason for Anders not telling the Warden that his first lover was a man. Other than "When I was supposed to tell you, by the way? And why?" XD
I just hope that Anders told about Karl to f!Hawke at some point, sexuality doesn't seem a big problem in Thedas so it's unlikely that she would have told him "I can't stay with a pansexual man, I'm leaving you forever". I'm not really into that "Anders didn't tell f!Hawke that Karl was his first because he was flirting with her" thing I think it was most about the writers being careful about not emphasizing his relationship with Karl so female players wouldn't have to think about it.
I read that Zevran also doesn't talk much about the "I like man" part if romanced by a female Warden - aside from banters - while he admits to liking woman more while romanced by a male Warden.
Then again, Anders romance in Act 1 has a lot of problems. Like the fact that you can't let him down gently and that Edward Cullen moment if you play as f!Hawke.
Really Anders? I might appreciate that you don't want to encourage flirting because you're fucked up, but you don't give this speech to m!Hawke, do you? And if you flirt with Anders immediatly after his quest he...fucks up everything...? I don't know, there is some emotional moment going on and he's distracted by a stranger flirting with him. I get it, he's lonely and he wants to be loved, but that was weird.

Plus the romances don't have a "You do this thing I absolutely hate so I'm leaving you" moment, which doesn't work.

^This.

I get the sense ideally the Circle DID work that way at least in the past. Shale's owner, William, was a circle mage who lived outside the Tower and who was apparently allowed a family, and mages are allowed to, grudgingly, serve in the army, but it's becoming more and more difficult, seemingly, to make any exceptions.

The funny thing is a leading statebuilding theory says that Europe ended up developing the groundworks for liberty precisely because church and kings were always butting heads and going in each their direction. It faciliated the geopolitical pressure that makes a state forced to evolve, but it maintained a common cultural identity that allowed for trade. It made classes who along the line became capable of advocating for rights, and because the estates weren't in agreement, not even absolutist kings had total power. So what keeps Thedas, in theory, from getting a common rights of man going is the Chantry being too influential.

Antiqua, I think you make a lot of really good points there - too many for me to quote each one.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that nobody cares about what happens to mages, though. Certainly there are a lot of people who don't care, because they're not mages, they don't personally know any mages, and it's not an issue that's relevant to their daily lives and anyway Kirkwall is, as you so accurately point out, a crapsack place that's full of injustice towards a lot of people even aside from mages.

But there are also a lot of people like Hawke and Aveline who dislike injustice in general, and recognize that mages have a raw deal, and who are willing and able to stand up for them on an individual basis but don't have a solution to offer for the larger problem, so acting on a case-by-case basis is really all they can do until they or someone else comes up with a workable answer.

I also don't think that Anders is offering a solution that makes all that much sense. He's campaigning rather strenuously for the Circle to be abolished, and the Circle is a very deeply-rooted and long-established institution with the power of the setting's main religion behind it, so whether the Circle is actually necessary or not, and no matter how poorly it works, you can't just stand up and say "it has to go, completely and as soon as possible" and expect to get many people behind you. It's too radical and extreme a change, and his expectations of the timeframe in which that change should happen (specifically: this minute now now now) are completely unreasonable.

Add to that the fact that mages are potentially dangerous due to their vulnerability to possession, and the fact that in Kirkwall in particular mages turn to blood magic at the drop of a hat, and there are some valid reasons for people who agree that the current state of things isn't working to nevertheless have reservations about leaving the entire population of mages completely unsupervised.

So it's not really surprising that no matter how Anders preaches, he can't gather any support. If he were able to focus more on gaining public sympathy and support for reforms, which could lead to further reforms and maybe to the abolishment of the Circle somewhere down the line, it would probably go a lot better. But he can't, partly because he's got Vengeance screaming in his brain and partly because he doesn't give much indication that he's interested in taking a long view anyhow - which contributes more to which being an exercise for individual player interpretations.