#a blue bubble

[zhe-lazy-fox]

Have you seen Trollhunters? (another dreamworks/netflix show)

I have not to be hosest, seen some art and vids on tumblr and such but i never watched it, heard it’s good.

ask me stuff

[vodka-aunt-coran]

Something i realised from season 2: Coran really wants to be the cool protagonist, but it was never his role (dreaming of piloting a lion, younger Coran, those pirate outfits (Corans looks like the protag outfit from an anime, compared to the others). Stuff like that.

ohhhhh noooooo you’re breaking my heart :’( i hope he knows how much we all love him anyway

[vodka-aunt-coran]

@a-blue-bubble listen....my dad and (LITTLE) brother are ~5'9" and the tallest in my family..…my older sister and i are the next tallest at 5'3"…..my mom is 5 even….5'9" is Giant Status to me

[starfiyah]

@a-blue-bubble it’s a problem because no one is just leaving it at that. people are using it to excuse all the times steve was a jerk to jim/literally tried to cause him physical harm. like..... yea as a kid i’ve had crushes on guys before and when i tried to flirt with them it came across as a little mean bc i didn’t know what i was doing, but that kind of thing is not on the same level as what steve has done. moreover, i’ve seen posts shipping steve and jim together because of steve’s supposed crush which is totally fucked. it really shows how eager people (read: cishet women) are to fetishize any kind of mlm relationship to the point where they will ship anything!! even a hate-hate relationship which, like you said, is unhealthy and not the kind of thing we should be encouraging in the fandom

[bubonickitten]

spirits of compassion and such are drawn to people who are hurting/distressed, yes? Maybe that's why anders has a knack for healing. Idk if you've thought of this before

yup. I think it’s one of the main things that lead Anders to spirit healing in the first place.

according to lore, spirit healing can draw on a number of beneficial spirits (like fortitude and hope) but I think they probably end up working with compassion spirits the most frequently -- it would make sense, since compassion spirits find purpose in directly helping others. they probably don’t need much convincing to collaborate w/ spirit healers and I wouldn’t be surprised if they actively seek out healers.

spirit healers are actually supposed to be rare, specifically because it requires an ability to gain the trust and assistance of spirits, which can be difficult, since sometimes spirits require that a person prove themself first (e.g., in the case of compassion spirits, they probably wouldn’t be drawn to someone who didn’t care about others -- they’d be attracted to someone who they think lives up to compassion as an ideal). and supposedly for some spirit healers, it’s more of a calling and they were ‘chosen’ for it so to speak, rather than pursuing it on their own. like, sometimes spirits will take an interest in a person and guide them to that specialization.

I think that’s what happened with Anders. he’s naturally a compassionate person. as much as he tries to pretend he’s selfish in Awakening, his actions just don’t match up with his words. one minute he’ll say he only cares about his own freedom, and the next he’s risking his life and his freedom to help others -- e.g. in the beginning, if the Warden-Commander tells him to run rather than join them when they first meet him at Vigil’s Keep, he ends up coming back to help anyway (if the Warden-Commander asks him why, he says something like “I’m bad at the whole ‘fugitive from justice’ thing,” which... sums him up very well tbh, lmao). and let’s be honest, if he was selfish and only cared about his own well-being, there’s no way he’d be able to earn cooperation from compassion spirits.

arriving in Kirkwall and immediately opening a free clinic in Darktown, revealing himself as an apostate and risking capture in a city crawling with templars just so he could try to help others -- that wasn’t Justice’s influence, that was all Anders. it’s who he is. he can’t ignore people suffering. he’s always been willing to help people in need, though he’s used to doing it on an individual level. what Justice wanted him to do was to fight for systemic change, which is a lot different from healing one person at a time, and that’s why Anders was initially reluctant to fight for mage freedom. it had nothing to do with selfishness or a lack of compassion, it was just that he’d been oppressed and disempowered his entire life. he didn’t feel like he of all people could do anything to make a difference, til Justice convinced him otherwise.

plus, he had only just been released from solitary confinement not long before we meet him -- canon says he ran away again very shortly after getting out of solitary, so during Awakening he’s still just barely starting to recover from that and he’s in no shape to jump right into being a revolutionary. hell, the templars are still hunting him even though he’s a Warden and technically no longer under their jurisdiction. if they catch him again, he’ll probably go right back into solitary again, at the very least. he tells the Warden-Commander he thinks it’s only a matter of time before they brand him a maleficar, even if it’s not true, and just kill him outright. he’s scared. and it’s a lot easier to pretend he doesn’t care than to admit that he feels vulnerable. (which is a theme in his DA2 romance route, too. he tells Hawke about how he’s always had to hide any potential weakness just to survive, to the point where he couldn’t even love openly. all that ‘I don’t care’ stuff in Awakening is just a front.)

but anyway, yeah, I think maybe early on, he might have first captured the attention of compassion spirits because, like you said, they seek out people who are in pain and try to help. the Circle is kind of a demon buffet, given all the suffering going around and how emotionally vulnerable many of the mages are, but I think benevolent spirits are drawn to the mages there too, especially the kinds of spirits that find purpose in helping mortals. we also know that sometimes the Veil is thin in places where there has been a lot of suffering and death, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if the Veil is thinner at Circle locations.

that’s one of many reasons why I call bullshit on the Chantry’s and the templars’ claims that the Circle is supposed to ‘protect’ mages and society against the dangers of magic. if anything, it increases the dangers of magic: continuous abuse makes mages more vulnerable to demons, makes them more likely to take desperate measures to escape their abusers, and makes it more difficult for them to learn how to control their magic -- abusing people doesn’t exactly make for a good learning environment. but lbh, the Chantry doesn’t actually care about protecting against the dangers of magic -- all they care about is that the Circle provides them with a free labor source to exploit and a very convenient scapegoat to justify the Chantry’s doctrine.

sorry, got off topic there. I can never resist an anti-Chantry rant.

anyway -- yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if compassion spirits initially sought out Anders because he was suffering. he’s an abuse victim and he’s already mentally ill, which probably made him a beacon for any spirits wandering around looking for someone to help. (probably made him a target for demons, too -- and spirit healers in particular are frequently targeted by demons, given their direct interaction with the Fade, so spirit healers have to be constantly on guard when they’re using their skills -- but that’s another topic.)

once he attracted the attention of benevolent spirits (probably inadvertently at first), it wouldn’t take them long to figure out he’s a compassionate person and try to lead him down the spirit healer path.

I can see him being wary of even benevolent spirits at first -- the Circle teaches mages to be distrustful of spirits and the Fade, and that demons will do anything to trick you -- but they might’ve been some of his only sources of genuine support in the Circle, at least early on. and he’s always been desperate to prove himself -- if you read between the lines it’s very clear that he has a serious hangup when it comes to proving that he’s a ‘good’ mage. it gets to the point where it can even be self-destructive, esp since a lot of it has to do with the fact that he’s a devout Andrastian who was subjected to years of spiritual abuse in the Circle -- his faith taught him he should hate and fear himself, and he internalized a lot of that, and even though he fights against it, he’s still grappling with it even in DA2 (I think it’s where a lot of his ‘I’m an abomination’ and ‘I don’t deserve love/friendship’ thinking comes from). in the Circle, becoming a healer probably gave him a way to try to prove himself and it would’ve given him a purpose, not to mention a sense of positive identity he could latch onto.

I’m rambling. tl;dr -- between his own pain and how he naturally channels it into helping others, yeah, compassion spirits were probably attracted to him even before he took on the spirit healing specialization. I wouldn’t be surprised if they guided him to it in the first place. he was practically a shoo-in for it. and I’m pretty sure it was his saving grace, or one of them anyway. spirit healers aren’t too common. the Circle sees mages as tools, and the fact that Anders had a rare talent made him a valuable asset, no matter how much of a headache he may have been to them. I don’t know if they would have let him get to escape attempt number seven if they didn’t see him as potentially useful.