Just finished last night. Bravo, Bioware. Warning, giant TL;DR below!
I think it's doing this situation a severe disservice to break it down into 'the Chantry is eeevil' or 'the Chantry was full of totally innocent people' just as it would be to label Anders as being irredeemably evil period or entirely justified in his actions.
It was a brilliant writing move to make the Grand Cleric the way she was. She IS a sweet old lady who is very reasonable, calmly and quietly explains why she is doing what she is doing, obviously has a great deal of faith in her god, and is trying to make the best out of an increasingly bad situation by not adding fuel to the fire. She's also a pacifist, as someone pointed out above, to the point where it's not just a detriment to her own well being but to the well being of everyone in her city, especially the mages. She will not take a stand. She will not take sides. She will trust in the Maker that things will happen as they are meant to happen, and in the meantime all she's willing to do is try to be a mediator (but not too much of a mediator). What happens when Mother Petrice is revealed to have murdered the Viscount's son in an attempt to instigate a war with the Qunari? She turns her back and walks away, and acts as though she doesn't even notice when Petrice gets two well deserved arrows from a Qunari archer. This is who she is, and over the course of seven years, it's fairly obvious this is who she would always have been.
Unfortunately, her inaction saves no one in the end. Ignoring the powder keg that Kirkwall was, refusing to take a stand against Meredith (which, yes, by Act III this is all but impossible for her, but precisely because she's allowed Meredith to all but rule the city since the last Viscount before the one you meet was ousted and thus consolidate power), never openly speaking out in favor of any one side, regardless of which side, regardless of saying 'hey fanatics knock it off', was exactly the opposite of what was needed. All she did, and all she could do at the end, was try desperately to maintain the status quo in a situation that would absolutely not remain stable forever.
Why does Anders kill the Grand Cleric? He states exactly why, and so have many of the posters here. Because she was THE only hope for another compromise, and 'there is no compromise'. The horrifying part is that he's probably right. 'Compromise' in this situation, compromise as it has always been in this situation in Kirkwall, is maintaining the status quo. But the status quo in any Circle is a gross imbalance of power that essentially boils down to people imprisoned for the possibility of being dangerous and their appointed overseers and jailers who have a considerable amount of leeway in what they're allowed to do to said prisoners (and in practice, at times go much farther than they're allowed). The status quo in Kirkwall is even worse, because Meridith holds all of the real power and is getting so bad that her own Templars are turning against her and helping their charges to escape her grasp. Maintaining the status quo, working out another compromise in yet another argument between Meredith and Orsino, would have only guaranteed two things: that the abuses would continue, they just would not, for a time, get too much worse (within the Grand Cleric's hearing anyway), and that this situation would happen again. And again, and again, and again, until the Grand Cleric was no longer able to be the voice of reason or until all the mages were gone or until open rebellion happened anyway.
Attacking the Templars would have been sensible, but would not have forced the Circles to fight for their own survival. Further, mages are always attacking Templars. The peoples of Thedas are used to this. Oh, mages going nuts and the valiant templars have to put them down. Those are deaths they are used to and summarily tend to comfortably ignore. Templar deaths would not have made people sit up and take notice in the way that blowing up
a grand Cathedral and a beloved old priestess did. Suddenly, it's everyone's problem.
So he kills a woman who absolutely did not deserve to die and anyone else unlucky enough to be in that building at the wrong time. He does something that horrifies everyone, in public, in front of the Knight-Commander and the First Enchanter, and confesses to exactly why he did it and exactly why he felt it was necessary. Meredith's response? To order the death of every single mage in the Free Marches. Remember, this isn't just Kirkwall's mage population. There are only two Circles in the Free Marches, and Starkhaven's is gone, with the survivors shipped to Kirkwall or escaped. Every mage complying with the Chantry's orders (or being held against their will) is sentenced to death for the actions of a longtime apostate who has never been a member of the Kirkwall Circle. And now the Circle mages have no choice either. They can either fight--a fight they'll lose, have a look at how many Templars are there in the end--, flee, or lay down and die. They're desperate, they're terrified, they're going to be cut down without remorse--every man, woman and child--and they literally have nothing left to lose. Of COURSE there are so many demons and abominations running loose in the finale. What's the point of resisting the demons when you're going to get murdered regardless, and no one's going to care whether you were valiantly resisting temptation to the end because your body is going to get burned on some mass pyre somewhere and no one will ever know what happened to you? To quote Orsino: "Why don't they drown us at birth? Why wait so long? Why give us the illusion of hope?"
This last quest may as well have been titled 'Despair'. Everyone seems to be falling victim to it. It drives Anders to do something horrifying, Orsino and a whole lot of his Circle to become abominations, and I would even say that it was a prime factor in Meredith's insanity as well (her expression just before Anders blows the Chantry is telling).
It is horrific and twisted my emotions in knots and I love it because it's complex.
To answer the initial question after that giant spiel, however, my Hawke spared Anders. She was furious with him, felt betrayed, but at the same time had lost so much and so many people that losing the man she was in love with was something she couldn't bring herself to do, at least not then, not at that moment of crisis where killing or not killing him wasn't going to stop what was happening. Do I think it was the right decision? I have no idea. I let that be her great big questionable act, and it works well for her story.
Modifié par Kartikeya, 21 mars 2011 - 11:46 .
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