i’m having feelings about the hawke-anders parallels.
Hawke starts out surrounded by a family to love and protect, but over the course of the game they lose them all, in one way or another. No matter what choices they make, no matter how hard they try to protect their family, Hawke fails. And by the end of Act 2, they’re left rattling around in this big empty house on their own.
Anders has that exact same plot arc.
He loses the lover he came to Kirkwall for. He starts out surrounded by people willing to help and protect mages - we know what happens to mages in this town, and it ain't gonna happen to him - but over the course of the game we see the templars "purging" mage sympathizers, until in the end, the mage underground is all but destroyed. He’s left on his own, just like Hawke. And by the start of Act 3, Meredith has already sent to Val Royeaux for the Rite of Annulment that will kill everyone in the Gallows. Anders has failed, just like Hawke.
The difference is that although Hawke loses everyone they’d originally been trying to protect, they can reach out to the companions and create a new family among them. But Anders spends the entire game reaching out and getting shut down.
He lights up whenever he’s given the least bit of support - but when he talks to the companions about the mages, they treat it as an annoyance; the manifesto written to convince people is treated as a joke; the authorities repeatedly prove unwilling or unable to help. The people in the underground who had been helping him are either dead or have otherwise been convinced to give up. And the only solution he can see in the end requires him to isolate himself even further.
The culmination of the game is simply Hawke choosing whether he really is on his own.
And Hawke knows exactly what it’s like to lose everything you were trying to protect, and to refuse to let that end as a tragedy.
