dalishious:Fenris: All that Andraste did long ago to end the tyranny of magic has been undone.Anders

dalishious:

• Fenris:All that Andraste did long ago to end the tyranny of magic has been undone.
• Anders:She ended the tyranny of magic and replaced it with an entirely new one.
• Fenris: Considering all that magic has done to my homeland and my race, I weep for your predicament.
• Merrill:She freed our people as well. But it was your Chantry that ended that.
• Fenris:And who enslaved us in the first place? Don’t be naïve.

This conversation is frustrating. Fenris comes so close to identifying colonialism as the real problem!

With Anders, this is one of the rare moments that Fenris actually verbally identifies with his race. Most of the time, like when Merrill tries to relate with him, he acts as if him being an elf has no meaning to him personally or no part of his story. But here he points out to Anders that he knows tyranny plenty well, as his people are subjected to plenty of it themselves. (This is also something that Anders has more than once shown his ignorant colours on.)

And yet with Merrill, Fenris calls her naïve when she rightfully points out the Chantry’s colonialism when he praises Andraste for her fight against Tevinter. “Who enslaved us in the first place?” Fenris means Tevinter mages, but that’s not the whole truth. Humans as a whole enslave elves all over Thedas, not just in Tevinter.

This bounces back to the way Fenris blames magic, not humans, as responsible for what has been / is being done to his people, with Anders. And this is what pisses me off, because it’s sucha white writer’s line of thinking. It reeks of the same logic as those who claim “it was the disease small pox, not the settlers who used germ warfare, that killed millions of Indigenous peoples.” This displacement of responsibility onto magic instead of the people behind the acts, usingmagicas a means of creating their system of colonial power, is where Fenris is wrong.

it also shows that whether there is an anti-magic chantry or a country with mages as an upper class, humans don’t need magic to genocide elves. there is one tool, there will be another.