there can be no half measures

I'M LATE but I wanted to add at least something to DA Sapphic Week

So I had to do the Cyberpunk AU sketch with them too of course

Portraits of the Habsburg family and of knights killed in the Battle of Sempach (1386)

look @ this gorjousse book full of dead knights!!!!!!

TOM: Have you ever heard of a hag?

WIDOW’S BAY

As we mentioned, the Chinese version of Oblivion Mobile included music, unlike the known English versions. This was a MIDI version of Reign of the Septims, the main theme of Oblivion, which in-game plays as this 16bit-esque rendition of the song.

In Orzammar women are always already broodmothers.

Broodmother is a narrative reflection of that use and that reality, a use of women which is justified in Orzammar as having to replenish the Warrior and upper castes due to the constant pressure of Darkspawn, but in the deep roads is stripped away of all its social pretence.

Orzammar’s narratives are entirely about people being used, abused and consumed in the service of caste and necessity, and how this particularly effects people who are assumed to be able to give birth, how it creates not just sex work but pregnancy work, and the coercive ways necessity operates on people.

It’s not at all a subtle parallel. The darkspawn do not defeat House Branka; Branka- Paragon, Noble, highest caste and most powerful woman in Orzammar- feeds her lessers to the darkspawn.

She has all her story reasons for doing it, but at the base and inescapable level, she (like all the other Dwarves of Orzammar) use and discard lower Castes because they can, because they have the power to, because the caste system organises them to be able to.

I honestly absolutely hate with a spitting seething passion the kind of analysis that sees horror, especially horror against women, being committed in a narrative and immediately becomes incapable of saying anything about media other than “it’s just edgy/gritty/grimdark” and dismissing it.

Life is edgy gritty and grimdark for a lot of us. I was a teenage sex worker. My life was edgy gritty and grimdark. I experienced some of the most vulgar expressions of how gender works in my society, and I experienced them bluntly.

And to dismiss depictions of sexual, gendered violence as “purely for shock” when they are not, when they have something to say about gender and power and violence in a setting, is to assign stories like my real life as “shock value”.

There is more feminist shit to say about Orzammar alone than anything in Veilguard, because Orzammar is actually interested in gender and in the social roles and violences that create, reinforce and are a consequence of gender systems*.

And personally, I will pick a story that clumsily tries to say something about power and violence and society over a smooth story that says nothing about those things every single time; but that doesn’t mean Broodmother isn’t worthy and deserving of criticism (it is!) but can we please at least start from a place of criticising it for what it actually is and what it is actually doing in the game? The work and text that is the game?

there’s been such a weird shift in media overall where the assumption seems to be that people DON’T want to engage with like, basic statements or ideas that may reflect reality? and it’s really been weirding me out. and people have been using the whole “oh but i don’t like grimdark” thing as an excuse and it’s like???? that’s not what that means???

like sorry not to make everything about Star Wars on main, but take the first film (A New Hope) for example. LITERALLY the word “hope” is in the mf title! i highly doubt that if you asked anyone who’s seen it to describe the film they’d say it’s grimdark or depressing. but you know what it has?

among other things:

oppressive authoritarian fascist government

a scene in which the main character’s parental figures are burned alive in their own home

a scene in which a captive character is heavily implied to be tortured

a cybernetic death samurai who kills people with his evil-colored laser sword for Breathing At Him Wrong

and if you took any one of those things out of the narrative it wouldn’t hit the same. they’re important to the narrative at least in part because even though they’re negative or uncomfortable, they’re reflections of things that are real, and the narrative takes those reflections and holds them up in front of you and says “i think we should talk about what America is doing in Vietnam” (George Lucas was hugely anti-Vietnam war and it shows in his depiction of a fascist government fighting to exterminate a rag-tag group of Rebels) or “i think we should talk about how Western society’s idea of love is actually kind of possessive, and sometimes love is about letting go and moving on and that’s ok” (George Lucas is Buddhist and again it comes across in his depiction of the Jedi and their philosophy). and while i personally think he was extremely valid for saying those things, whether or not George Lucas was correct or even if he made those points well is not the point, the point is that he was willing to engage in the discussions in the first place.