For the last day of @andersweek, Speculative Sunday, I have a thoughtdump for Anders in my modern AU with a focus on BDSM/Kink, community and trauma, carve your niche.
I find Anders particularly tricky to translate to AUs in all his particularities, and in this case I made it so his trauma comes from constant psychiatric institutionalization and that he has DID, making Justice one of his alters.
TWs: ableism/sanism, psychiatric institutionalization, medical abuse, child abuse, death, homophobia
Is in his mid-late 30s by the time he meets Fenris, so he was born in the late 1970s.
He was born in rural Ferelden with the last name Anderson and named after his father.
His family was wildly dysfunctional and abusive—there were traditional patriarchal expectations that Anders failed to live up to as he was quite the gay little boy. Frequent physical abuse made him learn to dissociate as his main survival mechanism, and he had his first split at eight years old.
He was caught self harming by his father when he was twelve, and quickly sent off to a psychiatric facility as a way to “fix” him.
He was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (as was the terminology at the time) and his home was deigned not safe for him to go back to after he spoke at length about what he went through there.
He was bounced around the foster system, often being returned to psychiatric facilities due to his instability and trauma. He spent most of his teenage years institutionalized, heavily medicated and abused. Food denied as a punishment, solitary confinement, etc.
He was nicknamed Anders by the children in the first ward he went to, as he refused to speak to anyone and the doctors and nurses referred to him by his last name. He decided to go by it later as he preferred it over his father’s name.
After aging out of the foster system, he spent a few years at a time in freedom, though oftentimes he had breakdowns and a trauma holder-protector alter, who believed the wards were safer than the “real world”, brought him back inside.
In his mid-late 20s, he started to get involved in antipsychiatry and mad pride. While dealing with his DID, CPTSD and other such things in therapy and support groups, he worked to advocate for himself and other people with mental health issues. This made him… quite unpopular with the doctors in the psychiatric institutions he ended up going back to quite often.
He met Karl Thekla during this time; he was also a chronic ward patient, though he had not left nearly as often as Anders and didn't share his penchant for freedom. He fell madly in love with him despite the rules being against it. After a while, Anders was discharged just so they would not be involved any longer. When he returned years later, Karl was so heavily medicated as to not be recognizable. It broke Anders’ heart and he blamed himself for him being “lobotomized”.
During one of his stints outside wards, he met Justice, an older man heavily involved in mad pride circles. They formed a strong friendship, with Anders seeing him as a father-like figure. Some time after meeting Justice, Anders was institutionalized again and went through systemic abuse at the hands of a doctor who considered him “beyond recovery”, unfit for the outside world and a danger to himself and others. In the stressful situation of solitary confinement, Anders dissociated and split off an introject of Justice as a new protector. When he got out of the ward (after a few years, lots of arguments and many different medication regiments), he went on the search for the ‘real’ Justice, only to find out he had died due to a drug overdose while fighting homelessness. His introject was now the only Justice that existed.
After this, he spent some time in a commune, where his resilience, unpredictability and creativity were considered a net positive rather than something bad for the first time in his life. There he met Sigrun, Velanna and Nathaniel, all people he tries to remain in contact with to this day.
When he turned 35, he had a bit of a midlife crisis as he realized he had spent his entire life chained to a system that hated him, either stuck inside it or trying to fight it. He moved from Ferelden to the Free Marches and started working whatever jobs he could to stay afloat along with his disability benefits. He also works as a street medic during protests.
Away from psychiatric institutions for the first time in his life, he started to explore himself and his interests. Thinking of the games he played with the commune, he started investigating BDSM and kink.
Which is how he ended up in the Kirkwall Kink Club, throwing himself at anyone and everyone dominant for a chance at turning his brain off.













