Fenris and Merrill's first meeting (Dragon Age 2 spoilers)

Originally posted to tumblr on January 6 2018. Reposted here for archiving of posts I want to keep.

I’ve never had Merrill as the only mage in the party during this quest, and hadn’t gotten this dialogue before.

Fenris: And now I find myself in the company of even more mages.

Merrill: Are... you talking about me?

Fenris: I saw you casting spells inside. I should have realized sooner what you really were.

Fenris: You harbor a viper in your midst. It will turn on you and strike when you least expect. That is in its nature.

Hawke: Merrill's quite capable of handling herself.

Merrill: I am? I mean— yes, of course I am!

Fenris: I'm not blind. I know magic has its uses, and there are undoubtedly mages with good intentions.

Fenris: But even the best-intentioned mage can fall prey to temptation, and then their power is a curse to inflict upon others.

Merrill: Is that how you feel? It's terrible what those mages did to you.

This is the first conversation Merrill and Fenris have, and I think it supports quite nicely my interpretation that Merrill understands, from the get-go, that Fenris’s dislike of mages is fear based on his trauma, and that he expresses it in particularly harsh words specifically when he’s very afraid. Instead of getting confrontational back at him, she is sympathetic. I don’t blame Bethany and Anders for their different approach, and they are not wrong in what they say to him in this situation, but Merrill’s patience is admirable, too, and in Fenris’s case would probably be the most effective. He has heard the arguments, he has rarely been shown kindness to back them up. Too bad that Fenris has more reasons than just her being a mage to be afraid of Merrill, probably the most out of Hawke’s mage companions.

Merrill’s little slip up of “I am?” doesn’t really help her be convincing, but I think it’s a result of her own bad experiences. She is not used to someone believing in her.

Another thing I find interesting is that Fenris calls the mage companion (whether it’s Merrill, Bethany, or Anders) a viper of all things. Snakes have a worse reputation than they deserve as far as animal stereotypes go, though a viper is at least a venomous snake, but I don’t think it’s just that he picked an animal with popularly negative connotations as a random insult. Snakes are a symbol of Tevinter.

I don’t like the ableist wording of “I’m not blind” as synonym for “I’m not ignorant”, which I chalk up to people writing Fenris’s dialogue not having questioned a common (but ableist) phrase rather than it necessarily being an indication of Fenris’s’s ideas about blind people. It’s an unfortunate but demonstrative example of writers’ biases bleeding through to their writing as biases it doesn’t make particular sense for the character to have and which never get questioned in the writing, as a result of the writers not acknowledging ableism as something that should be questioned. Much like the misogyny that’s everywhere despite Thedas supposedly not having any.

But let’s also not let that overshadow the observation that even at the very beginning of his acquaintance with Hawke, Fenris has been willing to admit there exist good uses for magic, and good-intentioned mages, and this is not something anyone needs to teach him. I feel like it’s a bit of characterization easily forgotten when portraying his character development in pro-mage fanworks. Logically at least, he knows magic and mages are not all evil, though he probably wishes he could think they are as it would make things simpler, and so far its/their potential to be harmful has kept him from taking the risk of trusting that this one won’t hurt him.