#I still think it's a cruel joke that I sometimes develop (mild) crushes on women while disliking any form of physical intimacy

[diningwiththeasquiths]

These past years pride month never felt like a celebration to me. After all, I do not feel any pride. Worse than that, I hate the fact that I'm aroace. So I felt pride just wasn't for me.

This month started out the same. But today I finally realised that pride month can be about (the struggle for) self-acceptance too. Which seems pretty logical now, but I guess my brain actively worked against me on this, like it often does.

So yeah. I do feel part of it now, and that helps me feel less alienated this month. Sadly I am part of the (large) group that still struggles with self-hatred, but we just have to keep trying to work on that, because we too deserve the joy of self-acceptance.

[theharellan]

So it’s Dragon Age Day, and the prompt for this year is “How has Dragon Age changed you?” and while I didn’t submit anything, this was partially because of how busy I was the last few weeks and also it’s hard summarising the ways the series has changed or affected my life. I still wanted to talk about it somehow though, so I’m gonna write about it here! CW for mild discussion of depression and heteronormativity.

I first picked up Dragon Age completely on a whim, I wanna say the summer of 2011 because I’d just finished my first year in undergrad. I think I’d seen my dad play it once or twice but I actually thought it looked bad, because like... Origins is ugly. I love it, but it’s not a pretty game, and its gameplay didn’t do much to sell me, either. But I picked it up because I was bored, and immediately after I hit “new game” I saw I could play as a dwarven princess and I was hooked. My first true Dragon Age love was actually Gorim Saelac, and Alistair would always be a step down from him, sorry Alistair.

I blazed through the game in a matter of days, and I saw that Dragon Age II had been released earlier this year. I also saw it was getting pretty mixed reviews, and said to my dad I probably don’t want it. He didn’t listen to me and bought it anyway, which is also how I ended up with AC: Unity, but in this case I’m glad he didn’t listen because DA2 is my second fave in the series now, after Inquisition.

I went into the game sort of expecting to romance Fenris or Anders, I’d never actually picked a woman to romance in these types of games. I grew up on Harvest Moon, where you were sort of forced to play as a man and romance women, and it was a novelty to get to be a woman and date men. Also, I’d been a big fan of Final Fantasy XII and loved Fenris’ voice. Only then I met them and they were both very angry and intense and I was immediately turned off.

So I romanced Merrill.

There are problems with that romance, no question, but romancing Merrill was probably one of the first positive ways I’d been able to express my attraction to women ever, even if I wouldn’t quite realise my romantic orientation until years after. Like, before it had been put upon me, because developers didn’t realise that Harvest Moon fans had a significant female fanbase and made me play as a man, or shell out more money for a second version of the game, and there was no option to be queer. Or it was things like when my internalised sexiam and internalised homophobia got tangled in a net when I was a child and I wound up disliking fictional female characters I had a crush on until I grew out of it. Or assumed heteronormativity made me believe it was just friendship I was feeling. Being able to choose to play a woman and choose to romance a woman meant a lot to me, especially as Merrill quickly became my favourite character in the series. I joke sometimes that “Merrill made me gay” but these games-- and other Bioware games or those like it-- gave me space to explore what I hadn’t explored in reality, thanks to heteronormativity and the struggles that I find a lot of ace people have with figuring out their romantic orientation.

But that wasn’t the only way Dragon Age helped change me. As I said, I started the series after my first year in college, and by the time Inquisition came out I had just graduated a few months prior. I was unemployed and wasn’t sure what to do with myself, and was in a deep depressive episode that in some ways I’m still trying to claw myself out of. Inquisition was the main thing I was looking forward to, albeit with some apprehension as I was overall disappointed with Mass Effect 3. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry, as it became my favourite. Playing Inquisition, as well as replaying the other two, helped alleviate my mood, as did writing. I had made an rp blog for my Inquisitor, Thora, the day before the game came out, and after the Temple of Mythal I made a blog for Solas.

Writing both of these characters has really helped me over the years. Through Solas I was able to better understand my own mental health issues, researching his symptoms and seeing myself reflected in them. Same with Thora, the expectations put on her and the anxieties she has, some she could meet and some she couldn’t.

I also started writing Solas around the same time I started drifting farther left, and while I can’t credit Dragon Age for turning me into a leftist, that would be doing a disservice to the real, living, breathing activists who influenced me, it was unquestionably a lens through which I could see corruption in power structures and the importance of them being dismantled. My first time playing DA:O I was sort of neutral on the concept of Circles, I sided with the mages, thought things like the Rite of Tranquility were cruel, and advocated that Jowan be let go, but with our main perspectives coming from Wynne, who is pro-Circle, and Morrigan, who has a very Randian view of “they didn’t stop this so they deserve it,” it wasn’t until DA2 and replaying DA:O that I began to question its existence entirely. Which I think is one of the brilliant things about DA:O, it introduces the world in such a way that you step into it as though you lived it, rather than dropping you into the world similar to a TES game. It grants the player an opportunity to learn to question the existing power structures through slow experience and learning, rather than an rpg where you have so little context that you question it because you are a stranger dropped into an unjust world.

The last thing I wanted to talk about the way Dragon Age has changed me is through the fandom. Korth knows we have had our differences and frustrations, but as I said I started writing Solas five years ago, and in those five years I’ve met a lot of people through this fandom. Many of the people I was writing with five years ago aren’t around anymore, but some still are and I want to say I appreciate your presence so much, whether we talk or we are just comfortable mutuals, whether you’ve moved fandoms and still follow me or still talk to me on Discord. Through writing Solas and Thora I’ve met some of my best friends, and my darling Joly, which is more than I could ever ask of any game. It’s strange to think that something I picked up on a whim one boring summer is why I have the happiness I do now, but I’m grateful to it, to the hundreds of people who created the game, and most of all the people in the fandom I’m lucky enough to call ‘friend.’