Would you also appreciate Merrill being honest about being willful self-proclaimed messiah, or Anders being honest about being manipulative scheming hypocrite? Too bad they don't until the very end, when it doesn't matter. I don't see you giving them the same fair treatment.
Hell, Merrill wouldn't even admit that she's at least partly at fault after slaughtering her entire clan, if she's on friendship path. That's one of the main reasons I never friend her.Talk about honesty.
Merrill never tries to control anything she can't. What trips her up in the end is Marethari's treachery, and why would she anticipate that?
However, I will appreciate Fenris being honest about being paranoid, mean and potentially murderous, that I may avoid him in the future.
Oh come on. Merrill is in way over her head. She betrays Hawke for a demon in Night Terrors despite being a mage and claiming to know how to deal with demons. The other companions without magical abilities had no way of preparing themselves for a demon's mind control and had little chance to resist, but she should have been stronger than that. She has to ask Hawke to accompany her in Act 3 because she fears she might end up as an abomination. If that doesn't make it clear there is a reasonable chance she cannot control the demon, then I don't know what does. The demon has been using her and toying with her from the start. Either it would use the mirror to force possession on Merrill or it would somehow possess Merrill when she returned to it for advice. Or Marethari would release it from the statue and allow it in her. The demon was pretty much set to win no matter what, while Merrill would probably never have gotten the mirror to work, because she had to solely rely on the demon's aid and advice to do so. And yet Merrill keeps blathering that she knows exactly what she is doing and that it is her decisions to make anyway and that nobody understands, etc. etc.
Also, not trusting a blood mage and abomination is hardly paranoid. DA2 literally throws hordes of them at us to slaughter. Blood magic has the reputation to corrupt and abominations have no or little control over their actions, especially when the spirit/demon takes over completely. The only reason you could accept those things and be nice to those persons anyway is because "they're so nice" and "they mean well" and Fenris is not going to settle for that.
As for being mean, Anders is plenty mean to Merrill, Fenris and Aveline, yet for him this is somehow okay and no reason to avoid him?
Potentially murderous... I don't recall Fenris ever making a death threat to Merrill or Anders (only in romance-related banter when Hawke moves on from Fenris to Anders, and then it is related to "if you hurt Hawke", not "one move, abomination").
New page needs a Fenris.
Would you also appreciate Merrill being honest about being willful self-proclaimed messiah
She is.
or Anders being honest about being manipulative scheming hypocrite?
Manipulative and scheming, yes. Hypocrite, no. He fully recognizes his own misdeeds and expects to die for them.
Hell, Merrill wouldn't even admit that she's at least partly at fault after slaughtering her entire clan, if she's on friendship path. That's one of the main reasons I never friend her.Talk about honesty.
She's not. Even slightly. She never makes an aggressive move towards them. It's Hawke's honesty that makes them all launch an idiotic suicide run against her and Merrill.
Oh come on. Merrill is in way over her head. She betrays Hawke for a demon in Night Terrors despite being a mage and claiming to know how to deal with demons. The other companions without magical abilities had no way of preparing themselves for a demon's mind control and had little chance to resist, but she should have been stronger than that.
Demonic mind control. Dreamer realm. Mind control greatly enhanced. And Fenris is supposed to be highly magically resistant, yet falls for the same demon.
She has to ask Hawke to accompany her in Act 3 because she fears she might end up as an abomination. If that doesn't make it clear there is a reasonable chance she cannot control the demon, then I don't know what does. The demon has been using her and toying with her from the start. Either it would use the mirror to force possession on Merrill or it would somehow possess Merrill when she returned to it for advice. Or Marethari would release it from the statue and allow it in her. The demon was pretty much set to win no matter what, while Merrill would probably never have gotten the mirror to work, because she had to solely rely on the demon's aid and advice to do so. And yet Merrill keeps blathering that she knows exactly what she is doing and that it is her decisions to make anyway and that nobody understands, etc. etc.
Well, it is her decision to make. However, Merrill only brought Hawke along as a precaution (sensibly so, given how often things go horribly wrong in Kirkwall in general), not because she was going to unbind the demon; her only intent was to have a conversation. Additionally, she'd only spoken with the demon once before, before the game even started; it wasn't manipulating her at all (Marethari, on the other hand, who was actually on Sundermount the whole time...). The Eluvian doesn't even lead into the Fade, from what we know of Witch Hunt and The Masked Empire, so the Marethari abomination was clearly full of ****. Finally, Merrill had gotten the Eluvian working again, she just didn't have the activation phrase.
Also, not trusting a blood mage and abomination is hardly paranoid. DA2 literally throws hordes of them at us to slaughter. Blood magic has the reputation to corrupt and abominations have no or little control over their actions, especially when the spirit/demon takes over completely. The only reason you could accept those things and be nice to those persons anyway is because "they're so nice" and "they mean well" and Fenris is not going to settle for that.
They throw even larger hordes of warriors and rogues at us to slaughter.
And if Fenris can't make exceptions, that's his problem. I'm thankful that his urge to follow Hawke is sufficient for him to prevent Sebastian from turning anyone in, however.
As for being mean, Anders is plenty mean to Merrill, Fenris and Aveline, yet for him this is somehow okay and no reason to avoid him?
I didn't mention Anders initially because this isn't an Anders discussion thread. However, yes, I'm also annoyed at him for his attitude toward Merrill (Fenris, in my opinion, was the one who started their dispute).
As for being mean, Anders is plenty mean to Merrill, Fenris and Aveline, yet for him this is somehow okay and no reason to avoid him?
I'm part way through a new play through, and I've got the music turned right down so I can hear the conversations better, and woooooow. There's some pretty spiteful stuff he spouts.
does anyone have a link to a still of fenris in that dragon age 2 cgi trailer? I've been looking, and its been so long I cant seem to find one. I'm just curious how he turned out in cgi since male-hawke and isabella look so different... I have a crappy laptop computer, so pausing in the video only results in a blurry image. Any help would be appreciated 
It IS blurry, I'm not sure if you can tell the difference, but here you go:
thank you 
now I'm wondering if its blurry on purpose so they'd have less work to do...I believe my "lack of cgi knowledge" is showing, lol. Do they create characters and then have them move, or is it more like movies with frame by frame? The hair looks the same as in game, so maybe they just reused the model and blurred it so we wouldn't notice?
Why do you think he should look different in the trailer to begin with?
Hawke and Isabella look so different, I wondered what fenris would look like in their cgi version. Its different software...(I think). sorry, tried to post some pics as example, but its not working with me 
Very nice. You like playing mage Hawke, I take it?
Very nice.
I played all classes, I just think mage!Hawke x Fenris romance has unique dynamics. Besides, mage!Hawke has the best finisher cinematics, which counts for movie-making.
I'll just post it here (imho, very sensible observation of Fenris' Rivalry development):
from ravel-puzzlewell :
I have a soft spot for Fenris because 1) I worked for some time in crisis center helping victims of abuse 2) he agonizingly fits one of the types of psychological adaptive mechanisms from my favorite typology, so I see him in “expanded” version.
Fenris also one of like two characters who have an actual cohesive character development arc in Dragon Age2, and not only that, but he works as a character, with internal logic and ****, and surprisingly, very little of him rings false. I don’t know how he managed to get all that in the mess of self-contradicting plotholes that is DA2 and I can’t say which of this was intentional and which is a lucky coincidence. I guess it helps a lot that he obviously brewed for years since Valen from Hordes of the Underdark (he’s srsly Valen version 3.0)
Anyway, I’m going to talk about him as of a wholesome in-universe person, without guessing for what of this bioware actually deserves credit and what is a product of lucky stars combination.
Fenris has an arc of survivor of just about all types of abuse and two very defined paths of dealing - relatively healthy and Rivalry. Because Rivalry\Friendship for him has absolutely nothing to do with changing his opinion on magic.
His anger is a natural response to being wronged, it also helps him to not slip into depressing self-loathing - at least not completely, because hey, if anyone noticed, he gets broody sometimes. It’s seriously very common for survivors. When Hawke tells him that he should move on and it’s his choice to be angry and hurt, it shifts the blame for it from his old masters to himself and reinforces the idea that his pain is worth nothing and he doesn’t have a right to stand up for himself. “If you wonder why you can’t move on, that’s why” and etc in Rivalry is a textbook victim-blaming. The thing is, you can’t control your emotions. When you are feeling something, you can’t just stop or start feeling something else by choice. It’s a basic psychology, google it. You can’t just stop being traumatized. Also, telling him that he should move on shifts focus from him dealing with his issues to him trying to stop feeling what he feels. Which, as I said already, is impossible, so he’ll feel helpless and deficient. It’ll only make him more angry and miserable, and so a wonderful spiral of self-loathing will be cemented. But there’s another textbook emotional manipulation classic in Rivalry - conditional acceptance. “I’ll like you if you change yourself\agree with me”. The core of it is that he’s not good enough as he is.
So what we have in Act 3 final conversation is pretty logical - he’s ten times more miserable and angry, but that’s not even the sad part. The sad part is this quote: “Clearly making decisions for myself isn’t my best quality.” He just gave up and basically shrugged off responsibility for his life on Hawke, and how sad is that after surviving through hell, fighting for this, for freedom to make his own choices for almost a decade, he gives it up, because the only person he trusts convinced him that it’s his fault that he’s miserable.
He declares then that he’s going to stop blaming magic, but it’s just there to fit a bill for conditional acceptance. It’s just “Am I good enough now?” Because he gets even more bitter after that, so let’s not talk bullshit about how he really changed his mind. Take the scene where Hawke tries to gift him the ceremonial Tevinter sword. In rivalry he immediately flips tables because he thinks Hawke is trying to insult him. Even if he’s romanced. And just think about it, how ****** tragic is the idea that when the closest person in your life, someone you love, is gifting you something, the first thing you assume is that they want to humiliate you. “I’m yours” in this context is sickeningly, dysfunctioningly depending.
Ok, I guess enough? Going to skip Friendship and adaptive mechanisms, because TLDR already.
Ehhh, I'm not going to agree with this one. I don't think "if you're wondering why you can't move on, this is it' is Hawke victim-blaming Fenris. Hawke is never saying Fenris is at fault for what happened in his past. Hawke is trying to stop Fenris from letting his past control the present and the future. I don't see that as the same thing. With his freedom Fenris gained the opportunity to make his own decisions, but his fear and hatred for Danarius cripple him. By the end of the game he's been free from Danarius for almost a decade, and six years of that he's lived in Kirkwall. What does he have to show for it when he finally gets to tear out Danarius' heart? The only friend outside of Hawke's direct circle he's made is Donnic. He has no real job and lives in a neglected mansion. He's pushed Hawke away for three years and risked his chance to find love. Those are decisions he's made, and that reflects the "clearly making decisions for myself isn't my best quality". That doesn't mean he shifts responsibility for his life on Hawke. He asks what Hawke thinks he should do now on the friend path too, if I recall correctly. He doesn't say Hawke should decide for him from now on. Instead, he acknowledges he has made decisions in the past that have contributed to his isolation and unhappiness. He acknowledges it, and now he can finally move on and change things.
Shifting the blame for everything on magic is his easier way of coping, not necessarily the healthiest. It allows him to shift responsibility for what he is doing to this uncontrollable outer force. It's part of his old slave mentality. It's saying "I can't control this part of my life and it's all magic's fault". Because this idea is a lot easier and confronting to accept, he is less frustrated and angry when friended. In that way rivalry does try to change his views on magic. How many times don't you get the chance to say "magic is not to blame for this"? It doesn't change his overall distrust of mages, that's true, but it does change his belief that magic is this evil force that keeps controlling his life.
I disagree that he gets even more bitter after Act 3 QB. That's nonsense. The only scene you can get with him after that is the Blade of Mercy, and that depends on the order you do his quests in. His reaction to the Blade isn't different from the Book, so he's not even more bitter. I think on rivalry he just doesn't want something like this reminding him of his time in Tevinter. He doesn't assume a gift from Hawke is given with the intent to insult by default. It just so happens that the two gifts Hawke can give him are very much tied to his past as a slave.
So, yeah, I'm not a fan of this very pessimistic view on the rivalry relationship.
I quite literally just finished setting up my years-old account so that I could add my voice to this thread with undying appreciation (and love) for this character. I have never felt more attached to a companion character as I do/did Fenris; his writing was brilliant, and his development arc was award-winning.
Welcome to the thread, Dreamer! I'm afraid it has become pretty quiet, but every now and then we still manage a little burst of activity.
Hope none of you mind me sharing something really, really silly? 
We know that the red band on Fenris's wrist is Hawke's favor, and there's a comic where it shows that the red band is Hawke's underwear. Last night I was trying to come up with a story behind that band, and then I remembered one scene from Castle with Gideon Emery.
Coincidence? I think not. I'll go back to my corner now.
^Bwahahaha, "one size fits all". Alright then. 
Hawke has some special underwear.
Hope none of you mind me sharing something really, really silly?
We know that the red band on Fenris's wrist is Hawke's favor, and there's a comic where it shows that the red band is Hawke's underwear. Last night I was trying to come up with a story behind that band, and then I remembered one scene from Castle with Gideon Emery.
Ahhh it was awesome hearing his voice AND seeing him act! The other cop (not Twilight-look-alike guy) needs to lighten up though 
Sigh why do I know in my heart of hearts I'll never meet another character like Fenris. And never play another relationship like Hawke x Fenris. I play male PCs and I don't see either Dorian (meh) or Bull (meh) being similar. But that's okay, I guess. Fenris truly was special.
People didn't give Fenris to Danarius?
Heresy.
Begone, fiend. You have Tevinter support thread.
I've never been able to ... even in my *******!Hawke playthrough, I couldn't. Those sad puppy eyes are a powerful, powerful thing.
Guest_Master Lavellan_*
For the record, I'm a big Fenris fan.
But I became a bigger fan of my Lavellan, so I had to share his (comedic) screenshot with the Fenris community:
"There's a new elf in town!"
I find the lack of fan art disturbing
Retour en haut
