i recently played da 2 and i noticed that anders is a bit of a dick. Like if you try to let him down gently he gets mad saying your trying to control how he thinks and stuff. then later he asked if i was really going to be with fenris and said a dog was more of a man than fenris. also when I was looking up how to get his approval you get +5 friendship if you give fenris to danarius. is he always like that or is it because i romanced fenris? its my first play through and I want to know

bubonickitten:

He can be a dick sometimes, yeah, and that comment he makes to a Hawke who romanced Fenris is uncalled for and made me uncomfortable, and I’m glad there were dialogue options to call him out on it. iirc he makes a comment to Hawke who romances Merrill, too, but I forget what the dialogue is. (talked about it a little bit before, most recently I thnik was here, but I think a lot of his jealousy boils down to fear of abandonment/rejection. it doesn’t excuse it, but it does put his behavior into context.)

I also want to point out that Fenris does something very similar if Hawke romances Anders. In Legacy DLC, in the first conversation you have with Larius, there’s a purple/humorous dialogue option you can choose that makes Hawke say, “Because I always like to follow the advice of tainted crazy people” (which is ableist as fuck but that’s besides the point). If you have Fenris and Anders in the party and Hawke has romanced Anders, Fenris will say something like, “That hasn’t stopped you before,” referring to Hawke’s relationship with Anders. Anders is a canonically mentally ill character who gets gaslighted and called “crazy” by almost everyone, sometimes even Hawke depending on how you play them, for the entire game. Fenris’ comment there is malicious and uncalled for, just like Anders’ comments about Fenris are malicious and uncalled for. iirc there are some party banters where the two of them are going at each other over Hawke, too.

I love both Anders and Fenris – they’re two of my favorite characters – but they treat each other like shit and it’s a major flaw for both of them. It’s mutual and I honestly wish the game had given more nuance to their interactions bc they’re VERY similar (was talking about this a bit very recently here). They’re both abuse survivors who are on the run and in constant danger from their abusers for most of the game, and they send up all kinds of red flags for one another, and it leads to neither of them really understanding the other. But I think they’d both need to be in a safe place before they could sit down and have a conversation and bridge those gaps, but both of them lead lives where they’re never able to feel safe, so they have trouble letting their guard down, especially with each other.

As for Anders giving +5 friendship if Hawke gives him back to Danarius, I think that’s one of the most striking examples of inconsistent characterization in the entire game, I wrote a big post on it awhile back here. imo it would’ve been more consistent with Anders’ and Justice’s characterization if it actually netted rivalry points. Throughout the entire game, it’s made clear that they’ll sacrifice almost anything for the sake of freedom and justice as ideals, because to them, that cause is more important than any one individual. I’m actually surprised that selling Fenris back to Danarius wouldn’t make Justice immediately manifest to stop it, tbh – I mean, in Awakening, Justice balked at Anders having a pet cat at first
because he didn’t understand and thought it was a form of slavery. There’s absolutely no way he would stay silent, let alone approve, if
someone was being sold back into slavery in front of him. So, yeah, that’s an example of bad writing. When it comes to Anders, there are character flaws (and I have a tag where I talk about those things) and then there are writing flaws, and this particular instance is a writing flaw imo. (Fwiw, the friendship/rivalry gains during that entire quest are weird. Aveline will only give +5 rivalry if Hawke gives Fenris back to Danarius, and Isabela gives none, even though she and Fenris are involved if Hawke doesn’t romance either of them. I don’t think that quest was wholly thought through. It’s fucked up that Hawke is even able to give Fenris back to Danarius in the first place, imo.)