As for why Anders and Fenris would be interested in each other, well... sometimes you start with physical attraction and everything shakes out from there. Here I'm going less from personal experience and more from observation, but it's true. That's how a lot of the better Fenders stories start... a moment of unexpected closeness when they both forget for a moment who the other is, and they're just people.
I thought I was going to avoid the embarrassingly revelatory personal anecdote here, but then I thought of one. Why does this thread make me bare my very soul?
So, college, mandatory community service project with the whole class. We go on busses to this park and pick up crap. I go with the super ambitious group, the one that is wading into the river and pulling out abandoned shopping carts. By the end of the day, I'm one of the last people on the bus. I'm dry now, but filthy and tired. I take the last available seat next to someone I barely see, and I fall asleep.
A year later I'm talking to this guy that I'm dating, and he lets me know that back on that bus I fell asleep... on him. That I had my head on his shoulder the entire bus ride back to campus. I have no memory of this; well, I remember the clean-up and the bus ride, but not him, not so much. He doesn't say it, but I can tell that it certainly helped spark his interest in me.
And I can see Fenris and Anders starting with something like that. Some moment where the fact that there's another human being (well... sort-of human being) near you and it's nice and why can't more things be this nice? Only instead of waking up groggily to realize you've fallen asleep on a stranger, you realize that you're spooning your worst enemy, or that his hands are on you healing you, or whatever. Alternatively, maybe you catch them being especially good, or heroic, or vulnerable and it makes you see a side of them you never wanted to admit existed. And maybe that's nothing. Maybe you run from it nine times out of ten. But maybe one of those times it makes you stop and think. Maybe one of those times you ask yourself if the fighting hasn't gone on just too long, if you aren't both making things worse.
I'll agree that there's little and less (to steal a phrase from George RR Martin) that would logically make Anders and Fenris decide to be interested enough in each other to sit down and talk. But the heart isn't logical. And once they break through that crust of stupid hatred, there's a really interesting dynamic there that pulls me in: if they learn to respect each other, it makes them both better people. They can both learn a great deal from each other, more than they can learn from Hawke, really, and all it takes is breaking the crust on the top. Fenris can teach Anders that all mages aren't simply innocent victims, that they have the capacity to be as awful as everyone else, which is something Anders forgets way, way too often. Anders can teach Fenris that a mage, even a scary, out-of-control mage, is still also a person. And so much more... once it gets started.
True, it's the getting to the point that is the hardest part (I'm stealing lines from EVERYWHERE today), but that moment when you're just close to an acquaintance or a stranger and you think "man, why doesn't everyone just hug everyone all the time" does happen, and I think it happens more often than we'll admit. A friend of mine has a similar story to the one above. She was on a flight to France, stuck in the middle seat, prepared for misery. When you're in the middle seat, your entire job is to not get too close to other people, to not lean over too far either way, to not "make any trouble." There's this french girl in the window seat, so that's good, it wasn't one of those flights where you're stuck between two massive dudes who take both the arm rests without thinking. They're sitting together, and the sides of their arms touch. There's nowhere for my friend to go, because on her other side IS a burly dude, so she waits for the French girl to pull away, like you do on airplanes, and she doesn't. She just sits there, as if platonic contact with other human beings wasn't a horrible taboo in our society. And so my friend doesn't pull away either. They don't say anything the entire flight, they don't even know if they share a language, but when one of them leans into the other they don't apologize, when one of them falls asleep they aren't paranoid they might tilt slightly and cause eternal humiliation, and the flight is, generally, a hundred times more comfortable than it is when everyone is paranoid and uptight about their personal space. I'm not saying this works for everyone, or advocating mandatory plane-wide snuggling, but it's an interesting case study on the whole... cultural expectations thing.
Ok, that was a lengthy aside, but there is a POINT to it, I promise. Incidental physical closeness is a powerful thing, and it's something that I think it's entirely in-character for either of our boys to respond to. A lot of people see incidental physical closeness as a stupid plot device like the blanket or the shower, but I think it's much less unrealistic than those things. There is a huge barrier to Fenris and Anders making that first bend, that first step, that first concession, I'm not denying that. But there are a bunch of ways to get them past it, and once they are, there is so much gold there.
Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 05 août 2011 - 09:29 .
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Maybe Anders saw turning Fenris over as an appropriate retribution for supporting a system he sees as slavery. 
Fenris fail.
