DreamerM wrote...
I do think that DA:2 had TOO MANY BLOOD MAGES. Really, they are everywere! But we don't meet very many Abominations. I would have liked for them to explore more of what being an abomination, especially an intelligent one, would actually mean.
Like we get some banter where Anders talks to Merril about what it's like to be possessed, and he sounds like he's talking from experience, implying there are times when Vengence/Justice takes over and he can't control his actions, but then he goes back to insistence that he and Justice "are one," impying they are equal and merged and of one mind and all that. Which should mean that Anders is never not in control, because Anders and Justice are the same.
So mixed signals. Yes it's ambiguous, but I think the point of ambiguity to get you to think more deeply about the issues raised. And I think there's kind of no point in thinking much more deeply about Janders, because I will never ever figure it out, because I am given no base of knowledge to try figuring it out with, because there's probably no clear answer anyway, and that makes me think even the writers didn't know, maybe they didn't care, hey, if THEY didn't care then why should I care, why am I fishing for an answer that's non-existant, why am I wasting my time, why oh look my pizza rolls are done!
I've written about it before, and the best I can make sense of it is this:
When speaking about his situation impassively, Janders describes the Anders/Justice entity as being "one". What he means by this is probably that they process experiences simultaneously through the same medium of thought. This likely manifests itself in perpetual cognitive dissonance; while he experiences his conflicting viewpoints as any singular person would, his memories of his individual experiences as Anders and Justice informs him enough to know from which half each of his contradictory opinions probably originate. This is probably what he means when begins attributing things to Justice as if he is an autonomous being.
The friendship/rivalry dichotomy affects how he handles this cognitive dissonance. On the friendship path, he begins to reconcile it -- his "Anders" aspect begins to submit and assimilate with his "Justice" aspect -- while on the rivalry path, he exacerbates it, actively fighting against consensus despite Anders's comparative weakness to Justice.
I think part of the confusion is that Anders deliberately "anthropomorphizes" Justice to absolve himself of responsibility for some of his thoughts and actions. Because Anders is the host body and most immediately familiar to him, Janders identifies more strongly with Anders at the beginning of the game; he is sometimes unwilling to face the reality of his choices and paints Justice as more of an outside influence than he is. He
makes Justice into a demon because he
wants him to be one (especially apparent on the rivalry path), because sometimes it's easier than accepting responsibility for things he regrets.
The issue becomes a bit more fraught when Janders's temporal proximity to his original separate states grows further away and he becomes less certain which thoughts are "Anders's", whom he wants to identify with, and which are "Justice's", whom he has internally vilified and built as a scape goat. This is something he accepts on the friendship path and something that drives him to near madness on the rivalry path.
The "possessions" are less clear. I can hypothesize that, like a blood sample in a centrifuge, stressful stimulus causes his "Justice" aspect to rise to the top of his mind and appear temporarily distinct from the whole. In a normal state, "Justice" is dispersed evenly through his consciousness, but extraordinary circumstances can separate the metaphorical colloid. He may black out as a sort of defense mechanism. As far as I am aware that is something that can happen in real life.
Neither do I, I just think his character's concept didn't quite match the way he was utilized in the story. The guy who bombed the chantry should have been an idealistic Bill Ayres styled character, someone who really thought what he was doing was RIGHT, not a broken tortured half-spirit unable to stop the voices in his head. Then the choice would be more about you and what YOU believe, and less about whether or not the bomber's in full control of his facilties.
There is a lot of dramatic potential for Janders, but of all the possible roles for him to play, I think they picked one of the weaker ones.
Janders
does think what he's doing is right -- or, rather,
"Justice" does, and "Anders" agrees with him on the friendship path. His possession is really sort of incidental to his action at that point. He doesn't blow up the Chantry because he is a crazy abomination, he blows up the Chantry because he opposes the institution and what it represents (and even when "Justice" is working on his own on the rivalry path, he really does believe that the status quo is inherently unjust; "Anders" does as well, but that aspect of him simply becomes wrapped up being contradictory for contradiction's sake because Hawke has convinced him fighting for individuality is more important).
Either of them separated would have believable reasons for bombing the Chantry beyond cheap insanity, so I'm not sure why it's a problem if they're doing it together. Justice is
not simply a one-note demon who hijacks Anders to create chaos, he is the source of that motivation and it's a believable, human one.
Modifié par ipgd, 17 juin 2011 - 06:15 .
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(edit to put up a better version of the pic)
:crying:
