Anders (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eleutheromanic) wrote2014-12-03 08:56 pm
eleutheromanic) wrote2014-12-03 08:56 pm
Ryslig Application
OOC INFORMATION
Name: Leah
Contact: malea.botor [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: n/a
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Anders
Age: 37
Canon: Dragon Age
Canon Point: After his death/end game
Character Information: Anders’ personal history. As far as the most important things for Anders which can change:
Awakening
- He came with the Warden to the final confrontation.
- He was friends with the Warden who was a human female mage.
2
- Hawke had a rival relationship (non-romantic) with him and was an aggressive/sarcastic male mage
- Anders came along on the Legacy DLC
- None of Hawke’s companions left or were sent away
- Hawke helped him find his ingredients for his bomb
- Hawke supported the Templars and killed him in the end
Personality: There’s a prevailing fallacy amongst Dragon Age fandom that Anders was a substantially different person in Awakening than who he is in Dragon Age 2. This is very shallow thinking: he may be more prone to jokes in Awakening, more serious, sad, and fervent in DA2, but there is a natural progression between the two. Exacerbated by the new presence of Justice, perhaps, the spirit he took into himself, but building off of aspects that have always been a part of Anders.
Despite thinking of himself before Justice as out for himself, Anders has always been concerned with the wellbeing of others. When you first meet him in Awakening, he has just been found in a very suspicious situation, surrounded by the dead bodies of the Templars who were sent to bring him in. It would be in his best interests to run as soon as he’s given the opportunity. However, even if you tell him to leave, Anders shows up just before the boss of that area, waiting for you and asking if he can help. This, it seems, isn’t his first time helping when it would have been safer to stay on the run. He comes into your party in Awakening equipped with the “Fox’s Pendant”, which he apparently received as a reward for saving the life of Bann Ferrenly, his first time escaping the Circle. He has also always been outraged by the plight of the mages, in Awakening there are a few points where he rants to your character about how mages are enslaved, or how he wants such simple things but he’s seen as dangerous. Justice, when Justice is still separate, asks him why he doesn’t “strike a blow against his oppressors” to which Anders first says it sounds difficult, and follows it up by mentioning that he doesn’t want to die.
In DA2, when he’s taken in Justice, his natural inclination to help people expresses itself in a couple of ways. Firstly, his free clinic in Darktown, a place full of the poorest people in Kirkwall. He works himself endlessly to give help to those who wouldn’t find it elsewhere, mages or not. And then, in terms of the plight of the mages, one of the reasons he took in Justice in the first place. But even then, in Act 1, he’s still repressing that, hiding and helping in small ways as he was before Justice. He’s in Kirkwall to try and help his friend escape from the brutalities of their Circle, and that’s all. When Karl is made Tranquil just for exchanging letters with Anders, this serves as the impetus to have Anders trying to strike a greater blow against injustice. In Act 2, he joins the mage underground, helping mages escape from the Circle, helping refugees and runaways. He also starts to write a manifesto, arguing why he believes that mages should be free, and that their imprisonment isn’t by the will of the Maker, but by the will of people in power. When the Templars take control of the city in Act 3, and the Commander of the Templars and the High Enchanter are locked in a disagreement while more mages are abused, Anders’ last desperate attempt to help the mages leads to an act of terrorism, setting off an immense explosion in the Chantry, which apparently kills hundreds. He is still trying to help, but at this point, his simple attempts to help have been corrupted by desperation, and the simple singlemindedness of the spirit in his mind. The mages need Justice, and if the Templars and mages are in a stalemate forever, the mages will never have it. It’s very clear that this is a corrupted version of basic Anders, however. He isn’t in his right mind, sitting and waiting for Hawke to kill him to bring justice to those who “had” to die for the mages’ cause. He also says that the carnage after the explosion is worse than he’d thought it would be if you let him live and fight with you. With Justice, he was thinking in terms of concepts, simple ideas that are clean on paper, but messy in real life.
Anders still tells jokes in DA2, although the frequency becomes less and less as the years pass. When you can clearly see the anger underneath the joking exterior in Awakening, when he’ll say something serious about the mages and then follow it up with a diverting joke, it’s clear he’s using the joking as a shield. He’s unhappy and trapped, depressed, and the jokes are a diversion until the depression and helplessness are too much and his focus becomes solely his cause. He constantly tried to escape the Circle, running away at least seven times and always being rounded up and brought back by the Templars. He wanted to feel free, but he never could, not even when he finally escaped. There was always a Templar watching him, or the risk of being recaptured. He couldn’t live his life free of the fear of being killed, or made Tranquil.
He is also a deeply lonely person. If Hawke romances him, Anders explains that in the Circle, you could never truly risk getting attached to another person, or letting the Templars know you were involved with another person, because then they could use that person against you. His life is one of self-imposed isolation, setting himself apart with humour, with words, by running away. This was exacerbated when after the second-to-last time Anders tried to run away, the Templars put him in solitary for a year, where his only company on occasion was the Tower’s cat. Even when he adopted a cat himself, the Grey Wardens made him get rid of it. He hasn’t been allowed much friendliness or humanity in his life. People who are important to him leave, or are taken away, or killed. His own father was afraid of him, thought he was a punishment from the Maker for having magic, and he was taken far away from his home and home country to be raised at the Ferelden Circle rather than anywhere in the Anderfels. He also has a bad habit of driving people away, either by going on endlessly about the mage plight and demanding they choose a side, or by finding something in someone else he finds horrible in himself, and picking away at their choices with immense hypocrisy.
The thing about Justice is he’s come to the point where he no longer believes he’ll manage to have anything good for himself, he believes he has to sacrifice it in order to make justice happen for mages. That’s the major difference, besides the motivation that Justice gives him. He can’t think of himself as a deserving individual anymore. He’s a means to an end, and so is exploding the Chantry, and so is dying to bring justice to the people who died, and to become a figurehead for the cause. He’s never been permitted much personhood as a mage, so with Justice setting everything up for him as a concept, it’s difficult for him to look beyond concepts and ideas. He’s slowly losing himself as a person. However, despite how strong Justice is, Anders will is often even stronger. He does lose control over Justice on occasion, more often later as their goals drift farther apart, but very often, he manages to keep the spirit inside him locked down. He’s always had to do this: as mage, very angry with the situation he’s been put into, he would have had demons, constantly tempting him to make a deal with them, let them in. But he stayed unpossessed until his late twenties when he let Justice join him, as an agreement with a friend. Additionally, as a Warden, he has a connection to Darkspawn through the taint in his blood. In the Legacy DLC, he manages to hold out against the whisperings of an extremely powerful Darkspawn until they’re nearly at him, before succumbing and attacking the party. And after that, after he’s been defeated, he manages to control the voices again, long enough to help you fight and kill the powerful Darkspawn in question. His life is a struggle against himself, and the voices he can always hear, and more often than not, he is successful.
As a rivalled version of Anders, he is a lot less confident, as Hawke has belittled his cause and ideals at every opportunity. He also already thinks of himself as a monster, as a dangerous abomination, and was progressively losing more and more control over the corrupted spirit inside him, losing chunks of time as Justice took over his body to control him.
Justice Addendum:
What Justice did for Anders didn't necessarily majorly change his personality or anything. I see it in a few parts. First of all, before Justice, Anders wasn't particularly motivated outside of himself. He came first. He was angry on behalf of mages but his own well-being was important. He did want to help other people, sometimes to the detriment of his safety, but primarily, acting outside himself seemed dangerous, and difficult. Another thing Justice did was make it very difficult to be angry without action. Before, he could see a major injustice, and rant about it later. With Justice, he would see something terrible, and either need to act immediately, or have to struggle to prevent Justice taking control. The end of Dragon Age 2 came about because Anders needed to act, because Justice needed him to act, so any sort of slowly enacted change was unacceptable.
Without Justice...it will take some time, but I think Anders will slowly come back to allowing himself to do things...for himself. He still has some pretty unhealthy spirit-taught mental mechanisms, like seeing anything he does for himself as selfish, but he no longer has that force telling him that no matter what. He can't help but see himself as culpable for the Chantry, even though he was blacking out, even though Justice was making him do things for what was simplistically Just, because he still went along with it at some points. He gathered the ingredients for the bomb, he emotionally manipulated Hawke, and he still thinks that if he'd only, perhaps, killed himself earlier, all that death could have been avoided. Even though he isn't an abomination any more, he still sees himself as monstrous. He's always seen himself as the one at fault, as the one who, with his human failings and anger, was responsible for corrupting Justice into Vengeance.
Now that it's only him, I think he'll eventually try and seek out some sort of penance. Aiding the templars against his own cause wasn't enough. He'll want to help people somehow, aid the innocents here to try and make up for those who died for Justice in Kirkwall. Of course, it will depend on whether he can fight his own monstrous nature again.
5-10 Key Character Traits: Strong-willed – uses humour to deflect – angry – empathetic – hypocritical – self-loathing – talkative
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER?Either! He was already assigned Demon when he was previously here!
Roleplay Sample: TDM
Name: Leah
Contact: malea.botor [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: n/a
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Anders
Age: 37
Canon: Dragon Age
Canon Point: After his death/end game
Character Information: Anders’ personal history. As far as the most important things for Anders which can change:
Awakening
- He came with the Warden to the final confrontation.
- He was friends with the Warden who was a human female mage.
2
- Hawke had a rival relationship (non-romantic) with him and was an aggressive/sarcastic male mage
- Anders came along on the Legacy DLC
- None of Hawke’s companions left or were sent away
- Hawke helped him find his ingredients for his bomb
- Hawke supported the Templars and killed him in the end
Personality: There’s a prevailing fallacy amongst Dragon Age fandom that Anders was a substantially different person in Awakening than who he is in Dragon Age 2. This is very shallow thinking: he may be more prone to jokes in Awakening, more serious, sad, and fervent in DA2, but there is a natural progression between the two. Exacerbated by the new presence of Justice, perhaps, the spirit he took into himself, but building off of aspects that have always been a part of Anders.
Despite thinking of himself before Justice as out for himself, Anders has always been concerned with the wellbeing of others. When you first meet him in Awakening, he has just been found in a very suspicious situation, surrounded by the dead bodies of the Templars who were sent to bring him in. It would be in his best interests to run as soon as he’s given the opportunity. However, even if you tell him to leave, Anders shows up just before the boss of that area, waiting for you and asking if he can help. This, it seems, isn’t his first time helping when it would have been safer to stay on the run. He comes into your party in Awakening equipped with the “Fox’s Pendant”, which he apparently received as a reward for saving the life of Bann Ferrenly, his first time escaping the Circle. He has also always been outraged by the plight of the mages, in Awakening there are a few points where he rants to your character about how mages are enslaved, or how he wants such simple things but he’s seen as dangerous. Justice, when Justice is still separate, asks him why he doesn’t “strike a blow against his oppressors” to which Anders first says it sounds difficult, and follows it up by mentioning that he doesn’t want to die.
In DA2, when he’s taken in Justice, his natural inclination to help people expresses itself in a couple of ways. Firstly, his free clinic in Darktown, a place full of the poorest people in Kirkwall. He works himself endlessly to give help to those who wouldn’t find it elsewhere, mages or not. And then, in terms of the plight of the mages, one of the reasons he took in Justice in the first place. But even then, in Act 1, he’s still repressing that, hiding and helping in small ways as he was before Justice. He’s in Kirkwall to try and help his friend escape from the brutalities of their Circle, and that’s all. When Karl is made Tranquil just for exchanging letters with Anders, this serves as the impetus to have Anders trying to strike a greater blow against injustice. In Act 2, he joins the mage underground, helping mages escape from the Circle, helping refugees and runaways. He also starts to write a manifesto, arguing why he believes that mages should be free, and that their imprisonment isn’t by the will of the Maker, but by the will of people in power. When the Templars take control of the city in Act 3, and the Commander of the Templars and the High Enchanter are locked in a disagreement while more mages are abused, Anders’ last desperate attempt to help the mages leads to an act of terrorism, setting off an immense explosion in the Chantry, which apparently kills hundreds. He is still trying to help, but at this point, his simple attempts to help have been corrupted by desperation, and the simple singlemindedness of the spirit in his mind. The mages need Justice, and if the Templars and mages are in a stalemate forever, the mages will never have it. It’s very clear that this is a corrupted version of basic Anders, however. He isn’t in his right mind, sitting and waiting for Hawke to kill him to bring justice to those who “had” to die for the mages’ cause. He also says that the carnage after the explosion is worse than he’d thought it would be if you let him live and fight with you. With Justice, he was thinking in terms of concepts, simple ideas that are clean on paper, but messy in real life.
Anders still tells jokes in DA2, although the frequency becomes less and less as the years pass. When you can clearly see the anger underneath the joking exterior in Awakening, when he’ll say something serious about the mages and then follow it up with a diverting joke, it’s clear he’s using the joking as a shield. He’s unhappy and trapped, depressed, and the jokes are a diversion until the depression and helplessness are too much and his focus becomes solely his cause. He constantly tried to escape the Circle, running away at least seven times and always being rounded up and brought back by the Templars. He wanted to feel free, but he never could, not even when he finally escaped. There was always a Templar watching him, or the risk of being recaptured. He couldn’t live his life free of the fear of being killed, or made Tranquil.
He is also a deeply lonely person. If Hawke romances him, Anders explains that in the Circle, you could never truly risk getting attached to another person, or letting the Templars know you were involved with another person, because then they could use that person against you. His life is one of self-imposed isolation, setting himself apart with humour, with words, by running away. This was exacerbated when after the second-to-last time Anders tried to run away, the Templars put him in solitary for a year, where his only company on occasion was the Tower’s cat. Even when he adopted a cat himself, the Grey Wardens made him get rid of it. He hasn’t been allowed much friendliness or humanity in his life. People who are important to him leave, or are taken away, or killed. His own father was afraid of him, thought he was a punishment from the Maker for having magic, and he was taken far away from his home and home country to be raised at the Ferelden Circle rather than anywhere in the Anderfels. He also has a bad habit of driving people away, either by going on endlessly about the mage plight and demanding they choose a side, or by finding something in someone else he finds horrible in himself, and picking away at their choices with immense hypocrisy.
The thing about Justice is he’s come to the point where he no longer believes he’ll manage to have anything good for himself, he believes he has to sacrifice it in order to make justice happen for mages. That’s the major difference, besides the motivation that Justice gives him. He can’t think of himself as a deserving individual anymore. He’s a means to an end, and so is exploding the Chantry, and so is dying to bring justice to the people who died, and to become a figurehead for the cause. He’s never been permitted much personhood as a mage, so with Justice setting everything up for him as a concept, it’s difficult for him to look beyond concepts and ideas. He’s slowly losing himself as a person. However, despite how strong Justice is, Anders will is often even stronger. He does lose control over Justice on occasion, more often later as their goals drift farther apart, but very often, he manages to keep the spirit inside him locked down. He’s always had to do this: as mage, very angry with the situation he’s been put into, he would have had demons, constantly tempting him to make a deal with them, let them in. But he stayed unpossessed until his late twenties when he let Justice join him, as an agreement with a friend. Additionally, as a Warden, he has a connection to Darkspawn through the taint in his blood. In the Legacy DLC, he manages to hold out against the whisperings of an extremely powerful Darkspawn until they’re nearly at him, before succumbing and attacking the party. And after that, after he’s been defeated, he manages to control the voices again, long enough to help you fight and kill the powerful Darkspawn in question. His life is a struggle against himself, and the voices he can always hear, and more often than not, he is successful.
As a rivalled version of Anders, he is a lot less confident, as Hawke has belittled his cause and ideals at every opportunity. He also already thinks of himself as a monster, as a dangerous abomination, and was progressively losing more and more control over the corrupted spirit inside him, losing chunks of time as Justice took over his body to control him.
Justice Addendum:
What Justice did for Anders didn't necessarily majorly change his personality or anything. I see it in a few parts. First of all, before Justice, Anders wasn't particularly motivated outside of himself. He came first. He was angry on behalf of mages but his own well-being was important. He did want to help other people, sometimes to the detriment of his safety, but primarily, acting outside himself seemed dangerous, and difficult. Another thing Justice did was make it very difficult to be angry without action. Before, he could see a major injustice, and rant about it later. With Justice, he would see something terrible, and either need to act immediately, or have to struggle to prevent Justice taking control. The end of Dragon Age 2 came about because Anders needed to act, because Justice needed him to act, so any sort of slowly enacted change was unacceptable.
Without Justice...it will take some time, but I think Anders will slowly come back to allowing himself to do things...for himself. He still has some pretty unhealthy spirit-taught mental mechanisms, like seeing anything he does for himself as selfish, but he no longer has that force telling him that no matter what. He can't help but see himself as culpable for the Chantry, even though he was blacking out, even though Justice was making him do things for what was simplistically Just, because he still went along with it at some points. He gathered the ingredients for the bomb, he emotionally manipulated Hawke, and he still thinks that if he'd only, perhaps, killed himself earlier, all that death could have been avoided. Even though he isn't an abomination any more, he still sees himself as monstrous. He's always seen himself as the one at fault, as the one who, with his human failings and anger, was responsible for corrupting Justice into Vengeance.
Now that it's only him, I think he'll eventually try and seek out some sort of penance. Aiding the templars against his own cause wasn't enough. He'll want to help people somehow, aid the innocents here to try and make up for those who died for Justice in Kirkwall. Of course, it will depend on whether he can fight his own monstrous nature again.
5-10 Key Character Traits: Strong-willed – uses humour to deflect – angry – empathetic – hypocritical – self-loathing – talkative
Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, or EITHER?
Roleplay Sample: TDM