#hurricane anders

Part of it is that Anders himself doesn’t always have a clear understanding of what he thinks or wants. He spends much of those seven years in Kirkwall evolving his own position, struggling to come to terms with his own upbringing and lived experience. A lot of his dialogue and earlier writings reflect that confusion. Even aside from that, while he certainly is a very wordy person, that doesn’t mean those words are necessarily eloquent or clear -- he hasn’t exactly taken a class in public oratory or communications. And depending on Hawke’s status, he may have been struggling to come to terms with his own message in the face of being gaslighted and undermined by the person in his life who is most important to him.

Anders has a lot of feelings, a lot of thoughts. A lot of messages. He tries to communicate them to the world, in a lot of ways. In his manifesto: “The oppression of mages stems from the fears of men, not the will of the Maker,” he writes. In his actions: “Magic is not awful, and mages are not evil,” he says with every healing spell, every kind act of charity gifted to those in need. And finally, when all other words and actions have failed him, when it has become starkly clear that the only language the Chantry knows is that of violence, in a burning bleeding skyward scream of pain: MAKE IT STOP.

What does Anders believe? What does he want? A lot of things. Some can be boiled down to a sound bite: The mages must be free. Some can’t, entire systems of philosophy and theology. He tells the world his messages in a dozen different ways, a dozen different times. At least some of them got through, judging by the fallout of Kirkwall and the subsequent events of the Mage Rebellion. But a lot of the message got lost, and one of the biggest parts of the message that I feel was lost was one of the most important: it’s the Chantry, not the Templars, that are doing this to us.

Anders’ manifesto doesn’t talk about how much he hates the Templars and wants them all to die. Anders didn’t plant the bomb in Templar Hall. Anders understood something very important: the Templars are only a symptom, only a military manifestation of the greater system of subjugation and theology. It is the Chantry that makes this system, that profits from it, that upholds it. The Templars are as much pawns in that system as the mages are. Killing Templars is not the way to freedom; only overthrowing the Chantry power structure can do that. The Chantry was made by men, and it can be brought down by them.

And so many people fail to see that. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things that most annoyed me about Inquisition was the way the conflict was constantly framed as being between the Templars and the Mages while the Chantry stood on the side, wringing their hands and tsking sadly about how terrible all this violence was. By the time of the Inquisition the Mage Rebellion has completely lost sight -- if it ever had it in sight -- of who its true enemy was, allowed itself to be distracted, allowed the Chantry to position itself as the higher authority that could broker peace.

In that respect, what Anders was trying so desperately to do -- to remind the world who really authored this war -- failed. And I do grieve for that.

Whose fault was that? I can’t really blame the mages, honestly; for all they frame the conflict as a “war,” the mages are mostly civilian refugees desperately trying to find a way to survive the conflict with a group that literally wants to exterminate them. I could blame the Chantry, if I thought it was their propaganda that was reframing the narrative, but really I mostly blame Inquisition itself.

Inquisition, as a story and narrative, works damn fucking hard  to make you forget Anders’ message. Every part of it, from start to finish. In the first act of the game, the conflict is never even mentioned without being sure to rush “magesandtemplars” in one breath, to make sure to underline and emphasize how alike and equal and equivalent they are. And it never misses a turn to assassinate Anders’ character and smear his message. Of all the ways Inquisition dropped trou and took a shit on his character -- from having random mage mobs to a literal demon  wearing his clothes and hair -- I have to say that the one that leaves the bitterest taste in my mouth is the little random house where you find a pile of corpses and a copy of Anders’ manifesto. For all the years of blood and sweat and labor he poured into trying to get his message out, Inquisition never once mentions it except to link it with the ramblings of a sadistic murderer. The message could not be more explicit: Anders was a monster and everyone who agrees with him is likewise a monster.

For the first question, we simply don't know at all; video game compression makes it impossible to guess simply by counting. We'll have to make assumptions based on Kirkwall's presence on the map as a city-state, compared to the population counts of towns or cities in feudal societies approximately equivalent to Thedas'.  Pulling from the first source I could think of -- Italian city-states such as Genoa, Verona and Florence in the 11th century -- gives us a population core of about 50,000 people. If we assume that Kirkwall is a relatively small city-state of that type, or cut down the population only to the people who live in Kirkwall proper as opposed to in the surrounding countryside, let's start with a working base of about 10,000 people.

Of those, let's set aside about 10% to be upper class, the noble and merchant classes who live up in Hightown. The remaining 9,000 would be distributed in Lowtown and Darktown. (It's unclear whether we should count Ferelden refugees, Qunari migrants, or Gallows mages into this tally, since none of the above categories are actually citizens.)

For the second question: life in Kirkwall appears to be quite dangerous. Obviously Hawke sees the worst of it, since troubleshooting danger is his job, but the living conditions of the poor (much of the infrastructure in Lowtown appears to be crumbling) the nonexistent safety precautions in dangerous jobs such as mining (as seen in the Bone Pit, among other places) as well as the extremely high and violent crime levels wracking the city are all constant, continuing opportunities for injury even without the city periodically breaking into open conflict such as the Qunari or the attempted annulment of the Circle. 

As for illness, there doesn't appear to be any kind of public health measures in place, and if there's a dedicated sewer system we don't see it [Consider that not only are no bathrooms ever shown, but the closest thing we ever see to a toilet is the chamber pot in Hawke’s bedroom, which at the very least implies no indoor plumbing.] Darktown explicitly has health hazards such as the Chokedamp, but the fact that so much of the city's industry is based on mining, forging and refining (all heavy pollutants) means that the air and water quality for the rest of the city is not likely to be very good either.

Pulling a sample off this chart  from the most dangerous areas mentioned (since we've already established that Kirkwall is a hellhole) we have 750 emergency room visits out of 1,000 per year. Expanding that to the estimated 9,000 or so non-wealthy, that would suggest about 6,750 major injuries in the Kirkwall population per year, or an average of 18 per day, which would not be seen by the Chantry or by higher-end medical professionals.

For the third question: We can assume that the upper class has their own source of medical care, since medical care has always been within reach of the wealthy. The primary health care providing organization in Thedas is usually identified as the Chantry, and in other cities we see them providing healing and hospice care, but this is explicitly said to not be the case in Kirkwall. We do not see any ill being taken care of in the main Chantry, and the Chantry is said to have no significant presence outside of Hightown.

I consider it very likely that Lowtown and Darktown would have their own population of working-class healthcare providers -- alchemists and apothecaries, midwives and barbers -- but it's unlikely that they have access to much in the way of advanced medical supplies or equipment. While they might be able to (and probably do) see to the everyday needs of the populations, minor injuries or illnesses, when it comes to major life-threatening cases, it is likely that their only real hope would be Anders. (In most comparable historical setting, cases of this severity would most likely just have died.) This means that Anders would likely only see the absolutely worst-off patients in Darktown and Lowtown, but that also  means that there’s a high probability that most patients he saw would have died without him.

Another thing to consider is the sheer length of time that Anders was working in Darktown. He was there for seven years, and as far as we see, he keeps the clinic open for all that time. At one point I made a joking, off-the-cuff post that estimated Anders' patient care record at some three hundred and fifty people; I reached that number by assuming that Anders treated only one patient per week in the entire time he was in Kirkwall. 1 p/pw * 52 weeks a year * 7 years = 364 patients.

If we assume (based on the above calculations) that Anders' patient load was more realistic, that number goes a lot higher. Of course, Anders is not always in his clinic -- he's often out adventuring with Hawke, or working with the Mage Underground. So let's assume an average of no more than one patient case per day, and the total patient caseload jumps up over 2,500. If he saw more than one patient per day (and we've already established he could have seen much more, from fifteen to twenty in any given day) the number goes up considerably higher. The more I run the numbers, the more ridiculous they start to seem.

Now let's compare this with Anders' body count.

A lot of the same uncertainty in the above equation is at work with determining how many people would have been killed in the Chantry explosion; we can assume that there were probably more than four or five people in the Chantry when it went up, but it's hard to say exactly how many more. It's also hard to say how many people not in the Chantry itself would have been killed by the explosion, and how many more casualties would result from pyroclastic debris falling on the rest of the city and fires started thereby. (It's worth noting, however, that while a wood-and-thatch city would have been in serious trouble, Kirkwall is explicitly a city built of stone, and any fires that caught would likely be small and localized, which matches what we actually see in the game.)

But as of DAI, the question has been largely answered for us. We've had two similar answers, given by two different sources. Sebastian, in his letter to the Inquisition, describes "several dozen" deaths as a result of the Chantry explosion. Varric, in one of his banters, pegs it as "a hundred." These numbers don't exactly match, but they're not irreconcilable; Sebastian might have been referring to the clergy personnel only, or Varric might have been rounding his number up for the sake of brevity. Either way, neither of these people at this point in the story can be considered Anders' friends, neither of them have any reason to lie or underestimate the death toll, and both were eyewitnesses. So we can go with "about a hundred" people, pretty safely.

Comparing that to the above numbers, this means that Anders has saved the lives of anywhere between ten to twenty times as many people as he's killed, in Kirkwall alone.

Returning to the original assertion -- that the explosion of the Chantry probably killed "most of" or "half of" Anders' patients -- seems mathematically impossible. Even if all 100 people killed in the explosion were Anders' patients, that would still be less than half of them. But the explosion's casualties weren't all Anders' patients. In fact, it's extremely likely that none of them were Anders' patients.

Aside from the people caught in the initial blast, the most casualties from the explosion would have come from people struck by falling debris.  Which is, undeniably, pretty awful and would have injured and possibly killed a lot of people. The further out from the Chantry you go, the less the danger of falling debris; the lower and more crowded the neighborhood, the more likely you would be to be shielded by the sheer mass of rock between you and the point of the blast.

But you know where flying debris is unlikely to fall at all?

In Darktown. Because it's underground.

The poorest and most desperate of Kirkwall's inhabitants, the Ferelden refugees, the sick, the outcast and the poor, would out of all of Kirkwall have been the least affected by Anders blowing up the Chantry. Which, I don't doubt, was something he considered in his planning. This was an act of class warfare more than anything else, and he picked his target accordingly. Uncomfortably ableist in-game dialogue aside, there is really nothing to indicate that anything about Anders' decision was impulsive or irrational. He had a long time to think about what he was going to do, how he was going to do it, and why.

So, that brings us to the second stage of this speculation: Given the above, and given that we're never given any indication -- in game or otherwise -- that the Chantry explosion killed off large swaths of Lowtown and Darktown residents, why are so many people independently jumping to the conclusion that Anders directly caused the deaths of his own patients?

 The undercroft is a place of shadow, of heavy stone and jumbled storage, but Anders knows exactly where he is: ten yards down from the eastern balcony, near the wall. Ten yards down from the place, seven years ago, that Karl bled out his life. Ten yards and seven years from the place it all started will be the place it all ends.

 Except for him the basement is deserted; there is no one to see him making his preparations, mixing and fixing and disguising the explosives as just another set of innocent boxes and barrels that fill the forgotten storage room. No one sees him, no one knows he is here, and no one will stop him, not even himself. Especially not himself.

 As he works he can't stop the tears from falling -- tears not of grief (only,) but of frustration, of thwarted rage, and of bitter regrets. Not for what he will do, but for what he has not already done. One tear for every death. For every mage who had died while he waffled and waited and delayed. One tear for every person who will die when he does this? No, he decides. He will never have enough tears for that. He couldn't even begin.

 It has been a long time coming to this, ten yards and seven years of fighting, arguing, debating, writing, healing, and struggling -- with himself as well as with others. Even when the end began to close on him, inevitable and profane, for a long time he had still hesitated. He knew what must be done, but he did not know where.  

 He had debated setting his charges in the Gallows: bring down the prison, melt the slave statues, break the chains. But there is no possible way to evacuate the mages first, not with the Mage Underground shattered, not by himself alone -- and although the Gallows may be doomed, may be slated for death already, it will not be him who brings down the axe.

 He had thought of bringing the destruction to the Templar Hall, and even begun to lay his plans to that effect; but in the last hour something turned his feet away, and he knew it was not fear of the Templars that did it. It was Justice, but more than that, it was understanding.

 He hates the Templars, but he also knows them. He's lived among them all his life -- he knows how the system works. The indoctrination, the addiction. Coercion and control. He knows that there aren't enough sick sadistic bastards in Thedas to volunteer to fill out their ranks, so they fill them instead with recruits from Chantry orphanages. Chantry orphans, half of them snatched as babes from a mage mother's arms -- the magic in their blood lends them to it, makes it easier for them to abide the lyrium, easier for them to channel the power... set child to jail parent, tear every family apart. 

 He doesn't pity them; he still hates the Templars, he always will, but Justice helped him to look past his own pain and see the ways that this was much bigger than him, much bigger than any Templar Hall.

 He has come to understand at last that it doesn't matter how many Templars he kills; the Chantry will merely make more. It doesn't matter how many corrupt Knight-Commanders they depose; there will always be another waiting in the wings, ready to step into their place. Nothing will change so long as the power of the Chantry sits unopposed, ruling all with an iron leash. It is not a person he must kill, but an idea -- the idea of the Chantry's inviolability, their untouchableness, their divine right to order the lives of others, all in the name of keeping people safe.  People. Not mages. Because that's what it's all about, in the end, we are people we are people Void take you we are alive and we are real, we are not animals we are not food for demons we are not things.

 No, for all he hates them, he knows it isn't the Templars that are the problem. They are only a symptom of the corruption. The Chantry is the source. Templars are only the military arm of the power that is the Chantry; they can only carry out the edicts the Chantry sets. It is the Chantry that feeds self-loathing to every mage, weakening their hearts against the demons that would prey on them; it is the Chantry that pours poison into every ear in Thedas against them. It is the Chantry that rides the mages like a bridled horse, spurred and bound, that whips them on like beasts even as it drags back the bit between their teeth. Magic is a gift, it could do so much good in this world if only the Chantry would let them;  instead they keep them locked away, never to live or work or breathe save when it profits the Chantry. The Chantry keeps all good in the world for their own doing while all ills are laid so squarely on the shoulders of the mages. 

 Reforms will never come. Too much of their power is bound up inextricably with the subjugation of mages; not only for the money it brings them, wrung out from the soulless bodies of the Tranquil, but for the legitimization of their power. To justify the war against the devil, after all, there must be a devil that the common man can see. Tevinter is far away, but mages can be born anywhere, anytime; it gives them all the reason they need to post their soldiers in every town, in every city, in every principality. A show of ubiquitous force, a visible reminder of who controls these lands -- a subtle threat unspoken, never forgotten. We can come into your home at any time, we can take your children from you, and there is nothing  you can do to stop us.

 Children torn from their families, bodies stripped of their personhood and made the property of the Chantry, voices smothered screaming into silence. He can’t, he won’t believe that this was what Andraste would have wanted. And the Maker? The Maker is gone. The Chantry doesn't get to speak with his voice, no more than Anders does.

 It should come as no surprise to the Chantry what harvest their history of fear and force has sown. There is nothing in the Chant of Light, after all, that advocates peace.

 There'd been a time when he'd believed it did; a time when he himself had believed in peace. There'd been a time when he believed that the world could be changed by peace, and he'd taught Justice as well, or tried to; the spirit is a warrior by nature, a creature of force and battle. Anders tried to teach him that fighting could be more than blows, that it could be words, that it could be actions. Now he doubts himself, hates himself for the time wasted. Because there comes a time when actions mean nothing, when words mean less, when all that is left is force. Justice was right all along.

 Seven years and he's accomplished nothing. All his words have been nothing. He had dreamed of winning minds and hearts with his manifesto; why? He can't even get his friends to read it, let alone strangers. Let alone the Mothers, the Clerics, the Divines -- the ones who  could change things, the ones who never will. The Chantry has no reason to listen, no  reason  to care, and every reason not to. The Chantry is too powerful, they control every crier and every outlet in the land, they can spin the story in whatever way they like. They will slaughter every man, woman and child in the Gallows and then make up some story as to why it was necessary, why it was  deserved, and everyone, absolutely everyone will believe them, because there will be nobody left alive to say otherwise.

 Even the Seekers, the last supposed defense against corruption in the Templar order, have done nothing. They came to the city, they saw the atrocities, and they did nothing;  they swallowed the half-baked excuses and coverups the Knight-Commander fed to them and went away satisfied. They never even thought to investigate the conditions of the mages themselves, any more than a farmer would think to ask the cows in the barn if their accommodations were satisfactory.

 For years he's tried to persuade them, through words, through actions; tried to make himself an example of magekind that could do good, that could help people, that could change things for the better. But he is no longer that man; he is no longer Compassion. He is Justice. Andraste had not stayed her hand for pity of the innocent conscripts, the indentured workers in the fields of Tevinter; and neither will he.

 He can't help but give a bitter, mocking little chuckle at the notion of himself being anything like Andraste. If nothing else perhaps he will have his own burning, like Andraste; perhaps he will even have his very own Hessarian to wield the knife.

 He has spoken in words of reasonable argument, of passionate rhetoric, of heartfelt pleas, and he has not been heard. He has spoken in acts of healing, of compassion and mercy, and he has been ignored. So now he will speak. He will speak now in acts that cannot go unheard; he will speak now in the language of destruction and violence, of the Templars, of the Exalted March, of the only language the Chantry understands. 

 The power of the Chantry must be broken. They are invulnerable only because everyone believes them to be so; because no one dares to strike against them, because no one has ever succeeded. He will show the world that the Chantry is not superhuman, is not divine, that they are only humans wielding human power and they can be brought down by humans as well.

 We must break. Break the system. Break the symbol. Break the Circle. Break the Chantry.

 He knows with a healer's sure experience that sometimes the bone must be rebroken before it can be set, that the limb must be amputated before the poison can spread, that the wound must be lanced so that the infection can heal. All of Thedas is infected, a hot swollen fever that boils and pulses just below the surface, and Kirkwall is where the boil comes to a head. It must be purged, the infection cleansed, the corruption burnt away. Only then can true healing begin.

 There will be war. But not forever. And after the war, there will be peace; some better peace, pray to the Maker, than what they have now. Not this cannibal peace, a peace that must be fed daily with corpses, with sacrifices, with mages ground up in the machinery that churned endlessly away in the name of endlessly upholding the status quo.

 What that new world will look like, Anders can only guess: he himself is too Andrastean, too deeply mired in the Chantry's indoctrination, to imagine another way. Vague hopeful visions of Rivain, of the Keepers, of the Avvar dance through his mind, but he can't quite conceive of how it can be brought about. Others must take up where he falls short;  when he prays, it is not for his own survival -- not even for his own success -- but for that.

But Maker help him, he is still only a man, with a man's dark weaknesses at the bottom of his heart; and as he looks up at the vaulted ceiling of the undercroft he feels the dark bitter satisfaction well in his heart, and Vengeance whispers: All right, you bastards. Now it's come to this. This is where you broke him. And this is where I'll break you.