Doctor wont give me elf HRT

happy pride to the eldest son of rendon howe he somehow "forgot" about having 🏳️‍⚧️

Anyway like a number of people have pointed out already, while it’s not fair to say Sebastian is spending the whole time trying to convert the gang, it’s also not really fair to say he’s not at all invested in proselytizing to party members. As an ex-Christian, the way Sebastian talks about Andrastrianism to non-Andrastrian or less faithful party members is very familiar, and also complicated.

When I was in college, I got involved in an on-campus Christian group. It was very chill - most of the meetings were mostly hanging out, with maybe a vague talk about being a nice person and putting good into the world at the end of it. Long term members were really friendly — I was getting invited to a lot of social gatherings straight away and they were all pretty areligious, we were mostly just hanging out with each other.

Eventually some of the leadership found out that I was already a Christian and asked me and a couple other members to lunch to talk about “Christian leadership.”

They explained that as Christians, we had a responsibility to reach out to people who weren’t. Not to convince them to be Christian, but to be kind and nonjudgemental, and also model what being a good Christian looked like at them. The goal was to get people interested in why their new friend was so wonderful and nice and really had their shit together so they would maybe start getting into this Christianity thing and maybe hit up youth group

At the time, I was really upset by having this laid out to me — largely because I was having a very lonely year so the idea that these sudden new connections I had made had come from Christian obligation rather than genuine interest really put me off.

In hindsight, this approach is all throughout Christian practice — most youth programming I had been in had been light on the religion and actively encouraged kids to bring their non-Christian friends — I had just never thought of it that way

I think it’s also a little more complicated than I felt at the time, when my feelings were still pretty wrapped up in a sense of interpersonal pride and rejection. I think the people who succeed at this evangelical approach are already generally socialable people who enjoy new friends and getting to know people. Religion is part of it — and it’s hard for it not to be in a religion where the stakes of your new friends’ beliefs is literally heaven and hell — but not the whole story

Sebastian’s more religious banters always make me think about that experience. I think it’s more subtle with him — I certainly don’t think he joined Hawke’s crew with the goal of converting people, but I also think his ultimate goal of “helping people” is intertwined with his key value of “being Andrastrian”

He more or less says this is what he’s doing here. He’s not generally pushy and he’s never aggressive, but he also generally believes people would be better off if they were Andrastrian. It’s what he believes saved him, and he’s a faithful member of a religion that emphasizes the importance of spreading it

The Fenris banters are kind of worse than I remembered LMAO — they’re not terrible and I think Sebastian is undoubtedly trying to come from a good place here, and I don’t think Fenris seems overly bothered by the way he engages with them, but again, the conversation here is familiar!

(Not every fenseb religion banter but a good number of them. There’s a lot)

Sebastian is asking for an understanding of Fenris’ feelings on religion with the intent to persuade him to accepting his. I think he engages more directly with Fenris on this than anyone else, not wholly because Fenris is especially vulnerable and traumatized, but because Fenris is reluctantly willing to have the conversation.

There are a couple other very early companion banters that I won’t include bc I think I’m kind of reaching lol where I think you could read Seb as trying to initiate the start of a conversation like this, but the topic is otherwise deflected and he doesn’t push it further.

That’s what makes it complicated — Fenris is at least begrudgingly willing to have the conversation, and he quite possibly could benefit from the religious community and comfort Sebastian is trying to encourage. On the other hand, Sebastian trying to convince Fenris to recontextualize his trauma through Sebastian’s religious perspective is pushy and insensitive at best

Again, Sebastian means well, but the thing about evangelical religions is that even a progressive outlook can be coercive

Take this banter with Merrill. I’d imagine that Sebastian’s perspective here is a bit subversive — he’s validating elven religion that the Chantry has spent centuries suppressing. But like many progressive Christians who espouse “we all worship the same god,” this perspective is a double-edged sword. Seb does think there’s a “right” way to interpret this story, and getting Merrill on board with this interpretation would be a step closer to getting her to accept a version of Andrastrianism

(Though okay in hindsight is pretty funny that Sebastian is probably right here but elven version would have been the original/closer to the truth. Would pay to hear what his perspective is on all this by the time Veilguard has rolled around)

Or these banters about the Qun. Again, Sebastian is being comparatively progressive here! He doesn’t dismiss other religions as heretics, he’s empathetic as to why people would be interested in the Qun in a way I don’t think we see from an Andrastrian (or nearly any non-Qunari) again in the series. But the perspective here isn’t “to each their own,” it’s “we need to do better or they’re going to out convert us.” Granted, I think Sebastian cares about the Chantry “doing better” as more than just a marketing technique, but it’s a concern that he of course has as a practitioner of a religion focused on spreading the word of the Maker.

TL;DR: Sebastian and evangelizing is complicated. He means well, but also subscribes to a belief system that upholds religious faith as the end goal for personal and societal fulfillment. He has a vested interest in promoting Andrastrianism and behaves like it, even if he’s also compassionate and generally respectful of people’s boundaries.