#for the love of god spare me from discourse i'm doing everything in my power for this not to turn up in tags

[carriagelamp]

what don't you like about the bioware fandom?

Mostly that it seems set to hate everything.

It is friggin exhausting my dude.

And yes, I get that this is a skewed perception from manydifferent people disliking a few individual things each rather than a singleentity hating every single thing about the entire b//ware library but I swearto GOD that’s what it feels like some times.

Seriously, every game seems to be hated for some reason or another and I’m honestly dreading the release of the next game because i know if i don’t block the hell out of it people are gonna do their damnedest to burn it the the ground. you should have seen my blacklist when the newest m/ss e//ect game came out, like sure, there are always things wrong with new media, but give me a hot second to actually enjoy it first smh.

I suspect what makes this fandom particularly… volatile? is thefact that there isn’t really a “true” canon. As much as we in fandom loveeschewing canon, it does, ultimately, act like an anchor. Of course there is adegree of fixed plot in the b//ware games, but there is also a lot of personalchoice – which is fun gameplay, but a treacherous fandom dynamic. The waycharacters acts, which characters like which characters, what events happenedor should happen or couldn’t have happened, it all changes depending on theperson, with a healthy layer of personal interpretation thrown on top. But whenyou’re looking up fanart and fanfiction, the truth is that we are generallylooking to see works that reflects our own understanding of “canon”, to continueon the story we know and love, and so when those fan works DON’T reflect what aperson considers a fundamental part of their own canon, things get… tricky.

At least, that’s my theory. And it ties horrifyingly intothe fucking awful and aggressive ship wars. God listening to people bitch aboutwhich relationships are and are not abusive makes me want to lovinglysmothering the entire damn fandom. Yes, I get it, you prefer Protagonist with RomanceableCharacter A, that’s fine, great, live your best life.  Just search the relationship tags you likeand c h i l l rather than trying to attack people that prefer the Protag withRomanceable Character B – or, heaven forbid, those that prefer RomanceableCharacter A with NPC 1. People don’t seem to realize their own preferences,their own “canon”, isn’t being diminished by someone exploring a different dynamic.

Another thing that makes b//ware buckwild is the fact that alot of the dilemmas ARE moral dilemmas, in which you need to weigh your own beliefswith those of your player character and be willing to acknowledge the shades ofgrey that exist within a number of these questions. Tumblr, as I’m sure we allknow, is not particular fond of this concept, and goes hard for puritypolitics. So people get really pissy about people that like characters or plotchoices that push against their own decisions about what is the morally rightchoice.

I’ve seen people get upset that a “morally wrong choice” is even an OPTION. Like… this is a roleplaying game? The characters don’t necessarily have the same life experiences and beliefs that you the gamer do. If you want to play the game only going by your own meta understanding of the series, go for it, follow your bliss, but we don’t all want to play that way. My characters can vary a lot and so can their responses because my dalish elf doesn’t have the same knowledge as my human noble or my vashoth mage. And then people will go a step further and decide it means that b//ware itself is #evil for providing that option… somehow forgetting all the other options and social criticism they also offer? Like, just because every npcs doesn’t immediately renounce the chantry’s wicked ways doesn’t somehow mean that the company itself endorses slavery what… what are you talking about. It’s giving a glimpse into the minds of characters who have grown up with a very different set up ideological beliefs than us and… and I get tired just thinking about this.

TL;DR: basically you get this shitty combination of a massive ship war, tumblr’smorality politics, and no firm canon… and then wrap it up in a 30-100hr game that people get invested in and put it in the hands of a bunch of video game nerds, and this is what comesof it: a fandom that is determined to vocally and aggressively tear down everyelement of the games, the creators, the fanwork, and their fellow gamers.

Thisfandom has taken vows of mutually assured destruction and it’s gonna take everyonedown with it.