Why is Fenhawke tragic? I agree and love them very much - I just wanted your take on it
Prepare to board the feels train, motherfucker.
Also, I generally roll a mix of 60% blue/30% purple/10% red Hawke and I prefer the friendmance because it gives me warm fuzzies
These are both genuinely good people who try their hardest to protect their families and just survive—they have no grandiose ideas, no illusions about romance.
Fenris gives up everything (literally every part of himself, any little bit than Danarius could exploit or erase) to free his mother and sister from slavery. He’s tormented to extreme degrees. Hawke loses his father, then his village and a sibling to darkspawn, and another to the taint or to a deadly faction. His mother is killed by a blood mage. By Act 3 he is completely fucking alone and an entire city is looking to him for its protection.
They’re both traumatized, both broken. Fenris needs someone who will respect his boundaries and be patient with his various PTSD complications, and Hawke needs someone who he can—but doesn’t necessarily need to—protect.
Fenris likes that Hawke makes him laugh, sees him as a person, devotes time to him, ignores the decrepit state of his house, lets him into his home and among his circle of friends, gives him his space when he needs it. He trusts Hawke. A lot. And it shows. Just look at the expression on his face when, after killing Danarius, Hawke says “I’m here.” He’s terrified of a time when that might no longer be true. For all of his bitterness, he’s vulnerable as shit.
They fall in love in Thedas’ biggest shithole and are pulled, against their will, into its political machinations. Hawke is a tragic accidental hero: he isn’t trying to do anything except feed his family and keep them safe, and ironically, he loses all of this. No matter what path you take he’s forced to flee Kirkwall at some point and Fenris follows. They’ve just got each other. They’re all the other has.
Now, remember—Fenris has never known love before this, and if he has, he’s lost it. He opens himself up because he wants happiness, and wants to get better, and lead a “normal” life. He tells Hawke twice that being without him would be torture. I’m pretty fucking sure that Hawke was dead set on retiring somewhere and marrying him and keeping him sheltered from all of Thedas’ bullshit before Inquisition happened, which they both needed.
And that’s when the templars started farming red lyrium in every corner of Fereldan and Orlais. Hawke is probably horrified because his lover is made of the stuff and having to watch Fenris die or, worse, watch him become corrupted and then be forced to kill him are fears that push him to abandon him. He leaves him alone, knowing that he himself could die, even despite the fact that Fenris told him straight-up that “I can’t bear the thought of living without you.”
Then there’s the Fade. The physical fucking Fade. Where he’s constantly being taunted by thoughts of Fenris dying, where he’s probably wracked with guilt about not being able to save Kirkwall, or his family—where the only hope of saving Fenris is perhaps by sacrificing himself to a Nightmare. And remember. This is the PHYSICAL Fade. We don’t know what happens when you die there. Hawke doesn’t either.
No matter what, Hawke VOLUNTEERS. And that BREAKS my heart into thousands of tiny pieces. Because he never wanted this. Fenris never wanted this. Hawke has been doing his best to just live and let live and keep his loved ones safe, and it’s this “flaw” in his character that potentially kills him, and let’s face it—it’d kill Fenris too. Even if he didn’t go on a suicidal rampage he’d be dead inside. He let himself be vulnerable and opened himself to something that was frightening for him and, one again, fate ripped his happiness away.
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
