So take me through what happens if Anders is stopped from blowing up the Chantry. Walk me through his actions and thought processes and what he does next if he's able to escape. Does he go out not with a bang, but with a whimper? Is there any hope for Kirkwall? I'm too intrigued not to ask.
By Act III, I honestly think that it’s inevitable that something will happen. I think that the red lyrium will take effect, I think that it’s power will likely influence the other templars and infect them, I believe that it will make things turn for the worst with Meredith’s already exceedingly and exponentially growing paranoia and suspicion of mages.
The tighter she grips, the more they suffer, the more they suffer, the more the mages will feel themselves having few options — I always think about how Anders always says that mages living is ‘tolerated’. So there will be lives lost, either by the hands of the mages themselves, or the templars. I think that they will feel like they have no option but to turn to blood magic (and it’s I think a major reason why Anders hates it, because he sees it as becoming what the Chantry and the men and women that follow it expect them to be, and the inevitability in that and the lack of faith in them being anything but a vessel and tool for chaos from forces that few can contend with).
The blowing up of the chantry was something Anders intended to do because he knew this is what would happen, and he knew that matters would be taken into the hands of those with a name and place. The Kirkwall circle would be anulled and the mages killed. Orsino and those who tried to hard to defend the mages that lived there, felt frustration and sought a failed peace would crack. There would be more death, murder, and suffering from the mages, and there is the fear that what comes then is simply like a genocide. There is nowhere for them to stand, there is no one there to give them cause to believe they have the right to be alive and to live as normal people who have blank slates and open fates.
If he doesn’t do this, there would be no war fought for what he and Justice thought was right, and any sense of a hope for change would be lost. This is what Anders would be thinking, because the process he finds now is slow, and those who have the ability to change it are not doing enough. It’s lazy, by Justice’s standards, and he cannot stand by it alongside Anders. Anders feels the same way, it’s simply that Justice catalyses his actions.
If Anders and Justice were to fail, it would be frustrating, because this is that single opportunity and he cannot. So, honestly, I think it would have been worse — I think there’s potential that there would be less control of the situation, and that more lives would be lost if he hadn’t. I think that Anders would do all he can and all in his power to make it so, or at least, create the same effect — his life is nothing compared to the cause, and he would willingly give himself entirely to it, as he has done with Justice and him saying that he and the spirit are one. He would not walk away from it, and even if he wanted to, Justice would not let him.
Perhaps he is forced to run, but not quite to hide - it would be an assembly of sorts, acquire the skills and means and resources necessary. But that would take time, and he had already planned the blowing up of the chantry, it wasn’t something that he’d thought up for a week, no. It was months. Years had led him to that place where the propagating future ended in more closed doors and broken options than he wanted, until there was only that one single path and one single point.
I don’t think Kirkwall would stand a chance, not with what happened, not with the inaction on the parts of some. Not with the anger felt, the suffering and hopelessness.
Elthina would die, or she would need to. But there needs to be more than that, that bang is necessary, and if he is the one that causes it by walking into the chantry himself than so be it. And if that happened, there would likely be no Anders left in the rubble, just the spirit of Justice left for that one final word before he disappeared.
