TW: Canon-typical mention of sexual assault, rape, child abuse, genocide
thinking about how Anders showed up in Kirkwall with nothing and proceeded to heal refugees, deliver their children, and generally help anyone in need - including criminals and gang members and elves - for nothing, asking for nothing in return. thinking about how that generosity and humility leads to other refugees talking about him as if they know him personally and talk to him often, as if he shares things about himself with them. thinking about how he inspires loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice, but he never asks for it. thinking about how he is immediately willing to fight to protect these people for whom he never stops working.
thinking about how he spends four years smuggling teenagers out of the circle. thinking about how he is fully aware of the rumours and reality of sexual harassment against children, the lobotomy of children, and myriad abuses of power. thinking about how he risks his life alone on top of healing miners and delivering babies for four years explicitly to protect these children from experiencing the abuses he’s witnessed. (and perhaps experienced himself).
thinking about how it takes six years of peaceful protest and healing for free to turn a doctor into a soldier. thinking about how it takes two years of not being able to help the children: two years in which he sees more and more teenagers turning up lobotomised in the gallows courtyard, numbly, publicly speaking about the sexual abuses they’re suffering. thinking about how ‘templar death squads’ go after non-mage Kirkwall citizens for taking in relatives who’ve escaped the gallows and are bleeding to death from flogging. thinking about how anders starts healing non-mages and mages alike from templar abuses. thinking about how he sees everyone and everything he has come to care for in this city being abused and murdered by a military dictatorship.
thinking about how he attacks the chantry at night, when it’s closed to the public. thinking about how the explosion doesn’t expand outwards, but goes straight up into the sky, a targeted beacon. thinking about how grand cleric elthina expelled the previous viscount of kirkwall in a trial without legal precedent, functionally turning kirkwall into a theocracy. thinking about how grand cleric elthina claims to be powerless, when she is the one who crowned meredith. thinking about how the only person meredith answers to is elthina. thinking about elthina, in a church full of gold, sending chantry sisters to demand donations from prostitutes in lowtown, providing no aid to the refugees or the poor, knowingly permitting the rape and lobotomy and murder of dozens of children. thinking about elthina signing a right of annulment at the start of act 3, without just cause, knowing meredith will use it, when the circle is swollen with starkhaven mages and it will lead to the slaughter of over 1000 innocent people of all ages, including children and the elderly. thinking about genocide.
thinking about how american christian imperialism has excused the invasion and slaughter of millions of people in dozens of countries. thinking about how the american government has repeatedly deposed legal rulers and installed puppets. thinking about how the american government sells weapons to terrorist cells and fascist militaries around the world and claims it’s justified in ‘the war on terrorism’. thinking about how by Israeli law “sleeping” is a terrorist act. thinking about how the american government sets up military training schools in other countries that teach soldiers to rape and torture their victims. thinking about how the american government’s stranglehold on what does and does not count as terrorism functionally equates to who is and is not obedient to the christian, capitalist party line.*
thinking about how media is not removed from its context. thinking about how strange it is that a story about a doctor working for free who attempts to prevent a genocide becomes a story about a twisted villain who wants only power and is clearly deranged and evil.
thinking about why a doctor who works for free to help the poor is threatening to american imperialism. thinking about the difference between military occupation and fighting back. thinking about who’s on the wrong side of the war.
*For sources see Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World by Belén Fernández
