What pisses me off about Anders is that he ONLY reacts (points-wise) to decisions/convo options Hawke makes regarding mages. Executing a rebel mage, killing the child killer, any interactions with the Qunari, none of those decisions ever cause him to change his opinion of Hawke. I'm not expecting him to take up every other worthy cause, but it would be nice if he cared at ALL about anyone but mages.
Agreed. Whereas, by contrast, something that struck me strongly about Fenris is that, even though you can win approval from him under a variety of conditions, he doesn’t give it easily. Doing a blandly decent thing that costs you nothing doesn’t make him like you, but if your Hawke does anything past that - if they offer more than platitudes, or give real help to children and elves in particular - Fenris responds to it. Which is, I think, really important in understanding his morality. He doesn’t reward you for doing the bare minimum to acknowledge the humanity of people like him: he rewards you for actually proving it, valuing actions over sentiments. This is only really inverted when it comes to mages, but even then, there are key moments in the plot where, if Hawke makes a mage-sympathetic decision or uses magic in some disreputable way - notably around Leandra’s death and attempting to rescue her - Fenris doesn’t penalise you for it.
For me, a really telling moment is if you offer to employ Orana after rescuing her. Fenris, raw from confronting Hadriana, leaps furiously to the assumption that Hawke means to keep her as a slave, and has to be gently told that no, she’ll be paid, it’s okay. And he just kind of deflates and goes quiet, like it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would give a shit about what happens to her next if they didn’t mean to exploit her.
I just. I have a LOT of feelings about Fenris, okay?
