Anders is sometimes accused of being a terrorist, which is interesting, since the game provides multiple examples of actual terrorists as a counterpoint. I don’t think the idea is entirely the fault of the audience, as Bioware is clearly aware of the current cultural association between exploding buildings and terrorism, and I know some of the writers made comments in that direction. But if that’s what they were going for, it’s one of those places where authorial intent failed utterly.
They seem to have forgotten that the defining feature of terrorism isn’t violence (although of course by its very nature it is often violent) but fear. It’s right there in the word, but even so.
When Anders blows up the Chantry in Act 3, it is not meant to inspire fear. It’s not a threat: ‘Let us go, or this is what we will do to you’. If it were, it would be a pretty bloody useless one. Though, of course, magic is used to light the fuse the primary weapon is gaatlok – gunpowder. He is incredibly secretive about the formula – even Hawke, helping him, doesn’t know he also needs charcoal – and has no expectation of surviving the act. Repeating it would be a pain in the arse. Anybody who wanted to would have to start from scratch.
Rather, it is a public demonstration of the helplessness of the mages. He commits a very public crime. And it immediately becomes clear that no authority figure is even slightly interested in dealing out justice. Hawke can kill him, if they are so inclined. But if they don’t, no one is going to force them to. You can be a completely pro-Templar Hawke and waltz into the Gallows with Anders in your party to participate in the Rite of Annulment, and the Templars do not call the whole thing to a halt – because, hang on, here is the actual perpetrator.
It is an excuse to do what they were planning to do anyway. They’d find an reason, one way or another, regardless of Anders’s actions. But this one is handy. Meredith claims that her hand is forced because the city would demand vengeance. Would it? Maybe. We never find out. It does, however, tell us how Meredith plans to spin the attack. The mages were always going to be victims of her fear and her power grab. This just makes it visible.
The people who really do deliberately inspire terror in Kirkwall are the Chantry. Meredith has been ruling the city through threats of violence for decades:
Meredith’s message was clear: remember who holds the power in Kirkwall. Remember what happened to Threnhold when he overreached. To drive home her point, she presented Marlowe with a small carven ivory box at his coronation. The box contained the Threnhold signet ring, misshapen, and crusted with blood. On the inside of the lid were written the words ‘His fate need not be yours’.
World of Thedas II
She’s also practising on the mages in the Gallows – three Starkhaven mages are made Tranquil at random, just to demonstrate to the prisoners in the Circle that it is within her power to do this. By Act 3, of course, she’ll have expanded her reach further, using her Templars to harass and assault Kirkwall’s citizens.
But, until Act 3, Meredith is something of a background figure. The ultimate villain lurking behind the scenes. The clearest foil for Anders is Petrice.
Here, then, is our actual terrorist. Petrice’s end goal is violence: she wants the people of Kirkwall to take on the Qunari. Of course it wouldn’t end there. There would be a war, and an Exalted March and (in her head – almost certainly not in reality) the crushing of the Qunari by the might of the righteous Chantry.
And her method is inspiring fear. Her assaults are relatively small, but calculated to make each side think of the other as violent, dangerous and evil. She’s arranged for the murder and mutilation of Qunari before: the bodies left for Arvaarad to find, so he would think Hawke and the Saarebas were responsible. She’s used poison gas on her own people (it would have been blackpowder, had she been able to get her hands on any) in an attempt to frame the Qunari. Here, she has arranged for the torture and murder of a Qunari delegation, to demonstrate to the Arishok how far the ‘faithful’ will go to be rid of the Qunari. Eventually, she will have a high-status Qunari convert murdered so she can use his death as propaganda.
Everything Petrice does is designed to frighten people. There’s a threat behind every strike: If we don’t fight the Qunari, look what they’ll do. Each act of violence is aimed at inducing a panic response – in the full knowledge that, eventually, people will be frightened enough to make war.
The contrasts are numerous: Anders is a commoner, a Fereldan (in addition to the whole mage thing), and at present living in the sewers. Petrice is apparently of noble Orlesian stock (so says The World of Thedas), and belongs to the most powerful institution in Kirkwall. The first quest actually makes a point of this: while the people of Darktown rally around their healer and Anders is quite at home there, Petrice, a Chantry sister supposedly responsible for the wellbeing of Kirkwall, is painfully out of place even in Lowtown. Moreover, whereas the underground falls apart around Anders, Petrice is a rising star – a Sister when Hawke first meets her, a Mother by Act 2. Where Anders’s plan requires that he take the blame for his actions, Petrice does everything she can to shield herself – she always works through agents, and here she sells out her own accomplice.
The common ground is a fervent belief in a cause, and at some stage (right off the bat for Petrice; in the endgame for Anders) a belief that violence is the only way to move forward.
And in the cause lies the important contrast.
Anders’s plan is only of value if he’s right. He’s not trying to inspire fear. It’s knowing that the fear is already there that prompts him to act as he does. If he’s wrong and the Circle and Templars are not oppressive institutions designed to control and brutalise mages – then he gets hauled off to prison (and no doubt subsequent execution), and nothing happens to the other mages. Once the Chantry blows up, he can’t lose. It doesn’t matter whether he lives or dies. It doesn’t matter whether Hawke saves the Circle or helps destroy it. The Templars do hold innocent mages accountable for something they had nothing to do with. The word goes out that the Annulment of the Kirkwall Circle was unjust. The Templars impose harsh restrictions on mages of other nations, who had even less to do with all this than the Kirkwall mages – and Fiona seizes her chance.
Point pretty well made.
Petrice, though, is trying to control people’s actions through fear. She is trying to make the people of Kirkwall think the Qunari are a terrifying threat, while still making them think they can take them in a fight. She is using fear to manipulate people, without any regard for the truth. By the time the Qunari uprising begins, Petrice is either dead or disgraced, making her a personal failure. But the uprising itself demonstrates how painfully wrong she was. A small, depleted Qunari force takes control of the city in a matter of hours. No fight, no war, with the Qunari is ever going to be easy – and one that started in Kirkwall would almost certainly result in the loss of the city. It turns out that the Qunari were easy prey for her before this because they didn’t want to fight.
And that shreds her other argument. She has been depicting them as unthinking savages. Terrifying in their brutality, yes, but so inherently less than Chantry folk (specifically humans), that they cannot help but lose. But the truth is that they have thought about this. The Arishok has been trying to avoid bloodshed. The Qunari troops have resisted provocation to a heroic degree. The Qun is what it is, and certainly no better than the Chantry. But the Qunari – the horned people who make up the majority of its adherents – are not monsters, just people like any other. Big, strong people who could have wreaked havoc a hell of a lot earlier, had they not been trying to keep the peace.
It’s easy to make people afraid, particularly if you’re willing to lie and kill to do it. But if that’s all you’ve got to work with, you’re pretty well screwed. And, well, there you go. Terrorism. Inspiring fear in order to achieve political ends. That’s Act 2′s story.
Long post but people, read all of it.
The only thing I disagree is that there wouldn’t have been a all out war Thedas VS the Qunari if Hawke had not stop the Arishok but aside from that, gold.
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