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What does the song "Mage Pride" from the Dragon Age 2 soundtrack represent to you?
Plight of mages
Anders
Extension of Fenris' theme
Mage!Hawke or Hawke's mage bloodline
Tevinter
Other (please mention in comments)
Here is the song "Mage Pride" for reference:
And here is Fenris' theme, which is a subdued instrumental version of "Mage Pride" for comparison:
DA Anders WIPs and scribbles
Some random Anderses that have been gathering dust in my WIPs
My friend asked for a Cyber Anders, I am still and forever getting stupidly stuck but I'll get there someday.
I just need some encouragement XD Or discouragement Idk anything really.
Sharing is caring. If you like my art, why not reblog and let others see as well.
Mage Pride Icons: middle finger edition
Want to show your pride while saying "fuck you" to the Templars? Well your wish has been granted!
Thanks/credit to @ankokon for making the mage hand giving the middle finger.
02.06
Bethany Hawke and Shadow - Commisssioned work done for the always lovely @msarduenna 🥰 thank you so much for the support, friend!!!
I often hear from DA fans that they love Anders, but “they feel too conflicted” over the Chantry exploding
And they can’t condone the act, even when they recognize that Anders “had a good reason”. Arguments are generally “I agree with the purpose but not with the action”, “blowing up a palace is too extreme”, “by doing that, Anders turned into Meredith”, “he’s as bad as the Templars”.
It could be argued that there is no in-game validation for hundreds of people dying. That only a bunch of Chantry-folk exploded with the building - we’re talking about 20 to 30 casualties here - and that the bomb was limited to the building and collateral damage wasn’t excessive.
It could also be argued that Anders had no choice. He tried for six years to peacefully petition for mage rights, he wrote his manifesto, he smuggled fugitives out of the Gallows and sheltered them in the clinic. He healed the poor and the sick in Darktown. After six years, the whole province was under Templar dictatorship, and Meredith had already requested Annulment directly to Orlais. It’s not like Anders could have done anything else.
But let’s get real, and admit that it's understandable that the "grand" gesture of blowing up a building leaves people “conflicted”, prompting them to shook their heads in disbelief, and blame Anders of being “the real bad guy”. Why? But because that’s exactly how the game is trying to sell it.
There's some narrative there. Just look at how that building explodes. Two big columns of light converging, ominous music. The camera zooming on the terrified people inside, helpless as the world around them becomes a burning blast of white/red destructive magic.
It’s horrifying to watch, especially because it takes after a very dark chapter of real world history, and the first-run players witness it wide eyed, shocked as they couldn’t fathom such a sheer amount of destruction falling onto the city they learned to love through three Acts of Dragon Age 2. But let’s also consider the fact that for those three Acts, what the player does is pretty much kill people. There are a few missions where the foes are only monsters - such as those on Sundermount and the Bone Pit - but for the most part, Hawke and their merry band of misfits spend their time together slaughtering men and women, old and young, named or unnamed.
Some could say that these people “attacked first”, but that’s surely not always the case: in a lot of instances it’s people minding their own business, and Hawke barging in to put an end to it, for a reason or another. In some others, the player decides that a person/group of people can’t simply walk away, therefore they kill them or prompt a companion to do it.
During the first time skip, the player can also decide to have Hawke work as a mercenary, and they do so for an entire year. A mercenary by definition - as also seen with the first mission - kills people for money.
Moreover, there are a lot of routes the player can take that allow pretty bad stuff to happen.
Some examples: If Hawke sides with the Templars, they get to butcher a group of mages and their families, as they were about to flee Kirkwall. If the player allows Ser Karras’ group to get to the Starkhaven apostates in Act 1, some mages get murdered and Karras rapes Alain. The player can also have Feynriel turn into an Abomination if so they wish, which prompts Arianni to kill herself, and leads to a ton of awful things happening in Kirkwall. Not to mention that if you say the wrong thing to the Dalish hunters after Marethari’s death, you end up wiping out the Sabrae clan in its entirety. And that you can literally sell a person into slavery - not a random person, one of your companions.
Hawke definitely kills a lot of people during the game. Innocents or not, involved or not, for one reason or another, petty or serious, for money and glory or for a good cause. Varric makes a rough count at some point in Act 2, and by then it's already around 250 deaths, speaking only of those Varric witnessed firsthand.
All of this gets a free morality pass from the game.
Sure, sometimes other NPCs judge you for your actions, but there’s no single occasion where the game presents Hawke’s choices as unforgivable, ominous or inhuman. There’s no single occasion where the game shows a cutscene of “helpless innocents” dying at Hawke’s hand, which stays forever burned into the player’s mind.
Then Anders blows up the Chantry.
He blows up the symbol of centuries’ worth of abuse and oppression, which has the whole Kirkwall province under Templar dictatorship, which never once in game has done anything remotely useful for the poor and the sick of Darktown. Which spawned and empowered people like Petrice, which allowed Templars like Ser Alrik to rise in the ranks, which orchestrated the murder of the Viscount’s heir and provoked the Qunari enough to have them almost destroy Kirkwall.
Anders blows up the Chantry, Elthina dies alongside a bunch of chantry-folk, and the game gives you THAT scene. That terrible, horrifying scene which screams “WRONG”, yelling that it doesn’t matter what mages have suffered and are still suffering, it doesn’t matter that they’re all about to die because Meredith already called Annulment, nothing matters anymore: this is just unacceptable.
Forget about everything else Anders did in those six years. Forget about the clinic, the manifesto, the friendship or love he shares with Hawke. Anders is unforgivable now, the game itself is telling you he’s a monster. That he went too far. “He put a bomb into a building full of innocent people”. In a world such as Thedas, “innocent people” dying for a reason or another is a daily occurrence. Mages dying on a whim of their Templar captors is a daily occurrence. Mages ripped away from their families as children, locked up, abused, raped, beaten, lobotomized.
And they’re innocent too. All the victims of Chantry brutality are innocent to some degree, but all of this too is completely wiped out by that short cutscene.
The Chantry explodes, Elthina and her subordinates die, and people blame Anders for rebelling instead of blaming the Chantry for everything else. Even if Anders tried peacefully for six years. Even if he was one single man against that colossal institution of oppression and abuse of every race and culture, which brainwashed almost an entire continent into mindlessly following their “divine law”. The game yells that “killing innocent people” is wrong.
I yell that no Chantry-folk in Kirkwall was innocent.
Even if I put the bloody, murderous history of the Chantry aside, if one allows law enforcements to rape and kill, one is not innocent. Elthina and her cronies were the most complicit of them all.
It’s 2019. Stop blaming the victims of abuse, and stop buying into BioWare’s narrative of “innocent people dying”, purposely intended to villainize and shame the one person who dared to stand up against systemic oppression, giving a voice to all the mages whose cries were snuffed out.
It is lore-established that countless innocent people died because of the Chantry - in the seventeen Rights of Annulment pulled in Thedosian history, in the Exalted Marches, in the systemic erasure of Dalish and Chasind culture. That innocent people die every day of starvation in the alienages and in the city slums, and in the Circles when Templars decide to kill or lobotomize them.
Innocent people don’t live in a luxurious palace in the most opulent part of the city, so coated in gold that it could buy the whole Free Marches.
Innocent people don’t have an army of brainwashed zealots to enforce their laws, kept on a leash by drug addiction.
Innocent people don’t preach and empower centuries of abuse perpetrated upon others, whose only fault is being born different.
Anders&Justice did the only right thing possible, and their actions should be a fandom-wide appreciated symbol of pride and freedom.
Confession: Since the song Mage Pride is deemed to be from Tevinter, I headcanon that there were some Tevinter Mages who truly felt bad for the mages in the south. Maybe we’ll even figure out that Mage Pride is sung in the Tevinter Chantry in the upcoming game.
