So here’s a funny story - instead of using that Physics BA of mine for, uh, anything career related, I’ve been trying for FOREVER to model this explosion and figure out an actual probable damage toll for it. In the process, I have found:
Modeling explosions is hard af and I really cannot seem to find any good papers on it, oddly enough
I am nonetheless 95% sure that this explosion is bullshit.
Like, okay, look. I came into DA2 hella fucking spoiled. I had a friend who was super into the games not long after DA2 came out, and while I wouldn’t play it for years, I knew about the Anders thing. I’d read the wiki for quotes, knew the Chantry went boom, etc. So I had that image in my mind - a decent-sized building in some corner of Kirkwall goes boom, maybe like 12 people die, Meredith tries to kill the people in some other corner of Kirkwall, the game gives the Obvious Evil Option of siding with the Templars and the Obvious Good Option of siding with the mages, with some moral conflict over Anders’ actions themselves. Cool.
Then, years later, after finals burnout in my first semester of my senior year of college, I actually saw the explosion in the game. I’m sure some people were shocked. Some people were horrified. Some people were totally on board. Me, though, I had just one thought-
What the actual fuck kind of explosion is that?
Are there - crossbars? What? Multiple charges? Why are they going into a line? What the fuck? Is this supposed to be magic? Wasn’t the point of that Justice quest that he wasn’t using magic to do this, aside from annoying ominous foreshadowing? I thought that was-
Wait, is it swirling? What is-
Like Meredith’s over here going on about how the Grand Cleric is dead and I’m just sitting over here going “How does this make even the slightest bit of sense? Why would everything rise into a column like that? Even if Anders magicked it that way why would he do that? That takes way more energy, why wouldn’t he just drop it back into place? Wait, okay, look, you can see the buildings around it are unharmed, maybe he’s trying to throw the rubble clear of the city? Wait, what’s she saying? Is she just talking about Elthina? Weren’t there other people in that Chantry? IDK, I guess it looked pretty empty - oh, right, yeah, whatever, let’s go kill Meredith and then I’ll yell a bit and we’ll run off together, Anders”
And then the game continues on to only talk about the Grand Cleric, so I’m like “Well, that seems weird, but I guess it’s not like that rubble would have hit much so whatever”, because no, I’m being dead serious here, outside of the immediate blast zone that’s how explosions work, right? Just the explosion pattern itself was confusing me.
So basically the nonsensicality this explosion has been pissing me off on a personal level from the moment I saw it
But then - then - I’m reading around and I see a reference in an interview to “rubble rained down over half the city” and I’m just like “Wait, what? I know it was a big chantry but that seems like a gross overestimation? How big is Kirkwall? I mean a lot of it’s not going that far away from the blast radius anyway - wait, it had that weird explosive pattern that made no sense, was that supposed to increase the amount of rubble over the city? Are we sure that wasn’t Varric making it up? Oh my god this historical explosion with a similar sized building literally only even hit like three people in a more densely populated area, there’s no way this adds, up, I’ma start googling”
Like, literally, I start combing through papers trying to find models of explosive patterns, historical data on city size and population density from places similar to Kirkwall, the rubble size we’re looking at here, the rubble size at varying velocities it’d take to kill a person, etc.
Mostly, I’ve found that it’s really fucking hard to model. Like, super hard, holy shit. But from the rough numbers I have managed to run, I’ve found a few good rules of thumb:
For a city-state like Kirkwall, we’re looking at about 10,000 people in a square mile.
As far as injury to fatality rate, we’re looking at between 10 and 30 injuries for every 1 death.
This explosion makes no fucking sense
Look. From my back of the envelope “try and get an upper limit on the maximum plausible casualties” calculation, the chance of a significant number of people being hit directly by the shrapnel chunks is miniscule. Like, using that rule of thumb above, we’re looking at about 1000 people being hit, conservatively, in order to kill 100 people. The entire estimated 10k people living above ground in Kirkwall - since Darktown wasn’t getting shrapneled for obvious reasons - make up about, uh… .03% of the surface area of Kirkwall, give or take? So like, people getting hit directly is out. We’re mostly looking at incidental deaths from caved in buildings, of which there were probably more b/c buildings are a way bigger chunk of the landscape, but then we’re also factoring in the fact that building roof integrity is going to be a lot tougher so that’s either a lot of deflected brick-sized chunks or a lot less Chantry to go around here and seriously how big was that Chantry again? This doesn’t add up?
Okay, hang on, okay, I can make sense of this, right? The weird visuals are Varric exaggeration, and the damage to Kirkwall only started with the Chantry incident - the mages and templars fighting would have caused some damage (which I suppose explains why the weird fireless cold explosion would somehow cause fires), and there are lines referencing looting (which, again, explains the fires), so if we say that the total casualties from the fighting, including the templars, mages and anyone caught in the fire, was somewhere in the low hundreds, that makes a lot more se-
Did Trespasser just fucking say that the explosion left enough rubble in the harbor to change tide patterns??????
IT’S A FUCKING PORT CITY?
LITERALLY HALF OF IT IS SURROUNDED BY WATER?
THAT MEANS THAT HALF OF IT WOULD HAVE GONE INTO THE WATER IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE?????
SHIPS SINK THERE CONSTANTLY AND IT DOESN’T CHANGE THE TIDE PATTERNS BUT HALF OF A CHANTRY SPREAD OUT OVER THE ENTIRE PORT DOES?
IF IT’S THAT FAR OUT THEN THE SHRAPNEL IS INCREDIBLY SCATTERED?
THIS EXPLOSION MAKES NO SENSE I HATE THIS EXPLOSION
Look. Here’s the thing. The Chantry Boom killed innocent people. It did. I gained my early reputation in the Dragon Age fandom as the Chantry-Boom-critical Anders defense squad member, who thought it was probably over the line but still understood the desperation driving Anders’ actions and forgave it like she did basically every other Companion’s Designated Shitty Stunt in the games. But you know, I was willing to hear arguments, and to consider things. It wasn’t like Bioware really gave us much context into the situation, as to how pressing the time crunch was, as to how the political situation was and what potential alternates there were and what plans had already been tried and had failed, etc. It was an interesting, complicated situation where someone I cared very much about was driven to a terrible thing that worked exactly like it was supposed to, for a cause I believed in. Like, you wanna talk about some great fucking grey morality there? Yes please!
Buuuuut then the additional canon lines started filtering in and I started trying to make more sense of the situation and eventually realized that, yes, this was never a situation meant to be made sense of. Because, yes, at some point in my research into medieval population densities I did, in fact, understand that I was, as with most of my fannish endeavors, putting entirely more thought into this than Bioware did.
But here’s the thing. If you can’t figure out what sort of fallout to this sort of thing would be realistic, then…. maybe… don’t?
Or if you were planning to introduce the potential rubble damage as a component, maybe mention it… in the game… where it happens… in the immediate aftermath… instead of scattering it into side conversations and codices throughout the sequel game?
Except lbr, they didn’t fucking think about this until they realized that there were people who saw the Chantry Boom and didn’t immediately have that kneejerk “omg terrorism” reaction.
Because let’s not kid ourselves that we were ever supposed to think about this explosion in any way, shape or form. That’s why they chose its form - a shitty gutpunch trick meant to evoke deliberate associations, a cheap shortcut to put a “Wrong” label on this and then never think about it again, aside from as one of those “see some mages do bad things, so the templars are just as valid a choice and it’s a completely acceptable reaction to go on a churchstate-sanctioned killing spree!” We were never meant to think about the complexities of bringing down an institution like the Circle because the writers wouldn’t even commit to it being an institution that needed brought down in the first place. Chantry goes boom, we go “ooh, bad,” we fall nicely into that dialogue tree they’ve already got programmed in, the story continues, right?
Which brings me to the word terrorism and how utterly little in the way of fucks I could give about that word at this point
Like, oh my god, I really cannot emphasize enough how little I care about the definition of terrorism as it relates to Anders’ actions at this point. Who cares? I sure don’t! Does it change anything about the situation? Does it change the number of people who died? Does it change Anders’ motivations? Does it change the end results? Does it change anything about the actual reality of the situation? No!
But you know what it does? It does the same thing that the writers’ choice of narrative device discussed extensively above does - it shuts down the conversation. Red light, conversational trump card, “Either you get bogged down in a meaningless semantics debate or you’re defending terrorism!” It’s a punch on the emotional “recent wound” shortcut button and it is a shitty, shitty fucking tactic and you are very, very right in that Anders fucking deserved better.
And I am so, so tired of it.
So please, understand from all of the above, that when I say that this explosion makes no sense whatsoever and the writers will not even provide the prerequisites for me to begin to judge it on an ethical level
I mean that I am d o n e with this fucking explosion. So done. There is no and never was going to be an option on the dialogue wheel here for me, so I’m just gonna go ahead and pick that shiny one that lets me ride off into the sunset with my revolutionary apostate boyfriend and tear down corrupt institutions
FUCKING TOODLES, KIRKWALL
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