gaming 😎

Imagine if you locked Light and Patrick Bateman in a room together. They would be having the most generic conversation but you wouldn’t be able to hear it over the sound of their overlapping internal monologues. There would be a few seconds where their monologues both play in sync to say something misogynistic.

It’s insane to me that Dragon Age 2 is sandwiched in between two WAY HUGER and WAY MORE SUCCESSFUL games about more traditional fantasy protagonists facing off against world ending threats and winning and it’s this…weird, raw, personal tragedy about how no matter what you do, you can’t always stop crisis and disaster from occurring. Like The Hero or Ferelden, no matter who they were, wants to stop a Blight. The Inquisitor wants to repair the sky. And Hawke, like, wants to make some money, hang around their friends, and keep their family and their adoptive city safe. And they can’t even fucking do that, so unlike the heroes before and after them. You spend seven years in Kirkwall until the game says, “yeah, no matter what, the prejudices and traumas and hurts of this world are Too Much for one person to stop them. The world changes, wars roll over the land, you cannot stop history, Hawke. You tried. You failed.” And then you just sit there, sixteen years old, listening to “I’m Not Calling You A Liar” and you’re like….well, I guess I really wasn’t a hero. Damn. I love it.

ORV reels you in with the "What if all my useless interests were suddenly SUPER important in real life and I was better than everyone for investing all that time in them" isekai power fantasy and then when you're invested pulls a bait and switch like "Actually they WERE always useful and necessary! They are what kept you going through life all this time! Even if that was the only way they ever served you, it still was not a waste of time because the only thing that matters is that they helped you survive"