Oh, Grey Warden

I think before I dig into this, I want to put forth a few caveats. This won't be a formal essay, but I'll do my best to cite my sources and previous argumentation. I also don't have any real animosity toward the author of this article, I'd never actually even heard of her until someone directed me to this article, and I don't think the problems with this article are unique to the author. But. As I said in a different post late last night, I think the article itself such a textbook example of this kind of left-liberal politics that doesn't actually understand the terms they're mobilizing about, stakes their identity on their consumerism habits, and seems to think that vibes-based opinions are in any way, shape, or form equivalent to critical analysis that interrogates the text and the meta of the media they're engaging with.

The analysis in this article is bad, I'm sorry to say. Just from a structural standpoint, it fails to understand how the structure of rhetorical argumentation functions, and doesn't bother to provide any concrete support for its claims. It highlights an inability to formulate an argument that I think is rampant among fandom discourse and I would perhaps argue is a common issue with liberal political argumentation in general, although that's another essay and isn't central to what I want to dig at today. I also fundamentally do not think this author understands what fascism is, which is frustrating at best, and I find it irresponsible although I don't think the intent is malicious. I'm also not convinced that the author really has a good grasp of media analysis or how to interrogate the thema of the stories she's talking about, but I'll leave that for you to determine.

So. What is the thesis of this article, which purports that this game "kills fascists"? I had to chew on it for a hot minute while reading, and as best as I can tell, the thesis is "Wokeness is the point of Dragon Age."

The problem is, neither of these concepts are objectively anti-fascist.

I left off the previous section of this (essay?) with a link to Laurie Marhoefer's blog post on queerness in the Nazis, and I really do recommend that you give it a read for a lot of different reasons. For the purpose of the time period we are working with (early 20th century), I am going to use 'homosexuality' while talking about fascism and its relationship with queerness. In that vein, it behooves me to iterate that the mythology of "Nazis = Gay" is just that, a myth, in the sense that gay Nazis existed (Ernst Röhm being perhaps the most famous, of course, as well as others) but also that the Nazi party, itself, was not inherently a homosexual organization. It might seem odd for me to write this, but: just as being queer is not inherently antifascist, similarly, being queer is not inherently fascist. And vice versa: being antifascist does not mean one is allied with queer politics. Indeed, many leftist, antifascist groups were themselves anti-homosexuality during the time of the rise of the Nazi party.

The publication of the The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (1933) (written by a member of the Communist Party of Germany - the KDP) popularized myth of Nazis and Homosexuality being linked (where both were bad), whereafter author Andrew Wackerfuss wrote in 2015 that it was the sort of mythology that appealed to opponents of the Nazi party because they believed that "...the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals". Homosexuality was linked with militarism, and the Eulenburg affair (in short, a big dramatic legal scandal over whether or not friends of the Kaiser of Germany were engaged in homosexual acts) did much to link militarism and homosexuality in the minds and politics of Germans. Globally, Germany was linked more broadly with homosexuality -- with quaint little euphemisms like "The German Vice" entering usage abroad.

In the Soviet Union, socialist writer Maxim Gorky claimed that "eradicating homosexuals [will make] fascism disappear". The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was also known to weaponize anti-homosexuality as anti-Nazism, and as the political climate of the late-Weimar Republic heated up, it was increasingly a tool utilized by leftist paramilitary groups in opposition to the SA led by Ernst Röhm, who himself had been a political target of accusations of homosexuality that ultimately led to him admitting it publicly. Thus, we saw slogans and heckles like:

"Hitler, heil, heil, heil. Heil Eulenburg!"

Geil Röhm ("Hot Röhm!")

Schwul Heil ("Heil Gay")

SA, Hose Runter! ("SA, Trousers Down!")

In 1932, Robert Smallbones was appointed the British consul-general at Frankfurt in Germany. He had a history of what we might think of as leftist politics -- anti-slavery, anti-persecution of minorities, and he was very much outspoken against the antisemitism of the Nazi Party. He is perhaps best-known for reading the writing on the wall and working to help Jews obtain visas in order to evacuate from Nazi Germany before the war broke out -- in fact, in October 1939 the British Government calculated that he had saved 48,000 people and had been in the process of issuing papers to 50,000 more when World War 2 began. He was also known to have personally visited Nazi concentration camps to demand the release of Jewish prisoners. One would think, then, as an ally to minorities and an opponent of bigotry, that he would be an ally of homsexuals as well. Not so. Smallbones blamed the emergent situation in Germany on homsexuality in a letter dated 1938: "The explanation for this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, in particular homo-sexuality, are very prevalent in Germany."

Remember in Part One where I described that fascism is opportunistic and will do what it needs to, in order to consolidate power and bring about a fascist state? Hitler himself weaponized this rampant sentiment of anti-homosexuality, using it as a pretext in 1934 to execute The Knight of Long Knives, which purged many of the enemies and critics of the Nazi Party but was especially targeted toward the SA paramilitary group led by Ernst Röhm, who had been a longtime ally of Hitler and then became a sacrificial lamb in order to (among other things) improve the image of the Nazi party government in the eyes of the German people.

This is, of course, by necessity of the shortform of this essay an oversimplification of what all went down, and I am intentionally emphasizing the elements related to homosexuality for the sake of the point I am driving at, but the broad strokes are here, and the point is: historically being queer/an ally for queers was not a shorthand for being antifascist.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer writes about this subject, and especially with an eye toward dismantling the myth of Pink Fascism that has persisted to the 21st century (see: Republican National Committee official Bryan Fischer being fired in 2015 for calling queer activists "jack-booted homofascist thugs" / claiming that the Nazi party was founded in "a gay bar in Munich" -- statements that IMO likely would not have seen him exiled from the RNC in 2025.) Marhoefer writes: "Although remarkably long-lived, mutable, capable of regenerating itself in various contexts, and even entertained at times by reputable historians, the myth of legions of gay Nazis has no historical basis."

That said--gay Nazis did exist, and Marhoefer rightfully points out that the idea that queers are by definition are liberal or left-of-center is an extremely flawed assumption: like race, like gender, queerness is not a moral compass. Quoth Marhoefer:

"...they [right-wing queers] do not necessarily share the political goals of left-leaning queers. They see their broader, right-wing politics as compatible with their queerness. [...] Röhm was not a queer man who suddenly joined a homophobic political party in a fit of inexplicable, profound confusion. His views on sexual politics were, rather, comfortably within what in his day was a decades-old tradition of far-right queerness. Röhm’s queer fascism was identical to the Nazi Party’s ideology in almost all respects, save on questions of male-male eroticism. That was, however, a significant difference. Queer fascism was not synonymous with what one might call “mainstream” fascism – that is, fascism as articulated by big Nazi institutions, such as the Party."

To expound on this, Marhoefer cites to us a little-remembered essay called “National Socialism and Inversion”, written by an anonymous author who was part of the Röhm circle of queer fascism and engaged in discourse with a well-known center-left homosexual emancipation group, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Anonymous wrote what amounted to a form of "we're not like other girls (queers):

“Homosexuality” meant male femininity, Marxism, and Judaism.

There were multiple queer subjectivities, or multiple ways to be a queer person.

What he saw in himself was not “homosexuality” but something else entirely, a “manly Eros” that was spiritual rather than lustful, and was experienced discreetly among “healthy and respectable fellows” in the Nazi Party militia.

“Manly Eros” was “fundamentally” different from homosexuality as defined by the left-leaning SHC, a form of male-male eroticism he associated with feminine men, gender-crossing, and transvestitism.

Masculine, discreet, manly Eros was wholly compatible with a healthy “Aryan” racial consciousness.

What Anonymous wanted from other fascists was quiet accommodation, not public acceptance. He argued that most Nazis would overlook homoeroticism in the barracks as long as the men in question did their “duty.”

What's fascinating about this is that it doesn't appear as an attempt to mobilize queerness as a political positionality. As Marhoefer states, rather, it "...mobilized a certain kind of far right subject with a certain kind of sexual-political ideology. That ideology affirmed homoeroticism, albeit hidden homoeroticism, rejected “homosexuality,” and embraced violence and racism."

Threads of this type of sexual-political ideology have persisted into modern far-right positionalities -- take, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos, who was a commentator for far-right publications like Breitbart and a supporter of Trump's bid for presidency in 2016, who claimed that all of Islam, not simply a small group of radicals, was responsible for mistreating women and homosexuals (see: earlier mentions of homonationalism), who married his husband in 2017, in the same breath declared homosexuality a sin, and then in 2021 declared that he was an ex-gay dedicating his life to conversation therapy and that his husband had been "demoted to housemate."

Yiannopoulos seems aware of the linkage between homosexuality, masculinity, and the weaponization of sexual politics:

"“[I] only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles,” said Mr Yiannopoulos."

Yet, we note, he did not disavow his husband at the time. Rather, whatever they are doing privately, remains strictly in the realm of private:

"The former Brietbart editor went on to describe his so-called coming out as the lifting of a “veil”, although he admitted that his husband might not be pleased at being demoted to the role of “housemate”. “It helps that I can still just about afford to keep him in Givenchy and a new Porsche every year. Could be worse for him, I guess,” said Mr Yiannopoulos."

This might seem incoherent and wildly inconsistent from an ideological standpoint, but it comes into a greater clarity when you consider that the ideological basis of politics for men like Yiannopoulos is, essentially, whatever will allow them and their political allies to consolidate political power. Sounds familiar?

For the fascists, the Nazis, the hair ever splits. Sociologist Arlene Stein similarly articulates this as a difference between homoeroticism and homosexuality; homosexuality in particular was threatening because it emasculated the man and threatened the traditional family, this being a threat to usher in the “destruction of mankind” (Untergang der Menschheit). She does, however, allow that there existed a degree of homoeroticism in Nazi sports and physical culture, which was channeled into "militarism, brutality, and ideological fixations on powerful leadership figures," -- the Übermensch, the idealized man.

Tough place to be, really; as Geoffrey Giles wrote in his book Why Bother About Homosexuals? : Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi Germany [link to Internet Archive] "The leaders, and above all, Hitler demanded fanatical devotion, indeed adoration! This placed his male followers in a bind, because that love could not cross a certain, never discussed threshold." If you read further, Giles goes deeper into the sort of mental gymnastics that allowed the Nazis to rationalize touch between men -- that the transfer of the mystical "Odic force" was best facilitated through touches, kisses, cuddles, etc. But it was never erotic, oh, no, absolutely not. It was "pure."

Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals). Barbara Kruger (American, born in 1945). 1981. [x] "...she turns her eye towards the construction of gender identities. Kruger draws meaning from a found photo, highlighting the contrast between the joy of the men’s smiles and the violence of their fighting. The text directly addresses the viewer, implicating both the individual and society in forming ideas of gender and intimacy. Why is violence placed so close to intimacy? Why does she choose to show men in this piece?"

Giles goes on to write about the Nazi scientists and their efforts to assess whether or not someone criminalized as a homosexual "...was a “real” homosexual, and therefore genetically tainted, or whether he was someone who could be “cured” through discipline and hard physical labor." One cannot help but recall the story of Yiannopoulos, self-described as handsome/intelligent/charismatic who converted to ex-gay and began championing conversion therapy.

So where am I going with this?

Well, specifically, I'm interested in the trappings of masculinity within a framework like this. If effeminacy was a sign of being homosexual (and this was the realm of the Jews), then being the opposite of effeminate -- manly, masculine, etc etc etc -- ended up with an interconnected framework of gender and sexuality and racial politics. Nazi masculinity contained a systemic, racialized color; it was embodied according to social determinants and sexual orientation, and war was frequently the school of manhood. Violence produced gender, and in reverse, gender produced violence -- wrapped within these, the idea of male togetherness, a proximity to danger, and a sense of belonging to a conspecific community of men in the Volksgemeinschaft -- which you could think of as "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community" -- depending on the translation.

But more specifically (or perhaps more broadly, depending on how you want to look at it) I want to examine this in the context of aesthetics, as there is an aesthetic aspect to fascism that we need to talk more about, especially in its modern manifestation through the us of AI. I will briefly segue with a couple of articles re: modern fascism in the US and its link to the tech industry, and how it is manifesting with the push for AI. (Please note that this isn't a wholesale endorsement of any of these authors or websites.)

Good Night, Tech-Right: Pull the Plug on AI Fascism

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism by Janus Rose

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism by Gareth Watkins

Fascism and the Spectacle of Death by Ian Alan Paul

In a lot of ways AI art really feels like the culmination of fascist ideas of what art is and very utilitarian concepts of it. IMO there's something in the human/social problem with AI art (in relation to the alienation from labor) where AI art is the epitome of capitalism in that it ultimately seeks to redefine art as and create endless slop for purposes of soulless consumption rather than as a creative and enlightening process of labor which fosters connection -- which is obviously perfect for fascist ideology because it's a fundamentally dehumanizing experience focused on the aesthetic outcome. To quote Gareth Watkins (above), the absence of people in this is a feature, not a bug.

But how does masculinity fit into this? And what does this mean for the aesthetics of the alt-right and their conceptualization of masculinity?

For the tech bros and their brand of right-wing politics, do we look at Elon Musk, a serial womanizer with numerous children across many relationships who appears to firmly embody the fascistic ideal of pronatalism as a means to combat white genocide / the great replacement theory -- a concept that runs rampant in the Silicon Valley tech circles? Where Lucas Munn defines pronationalism as, “a political, ideological, or religious project to encourage childbearing by some or all members of a civil, ethnic, or national group” -- with strong ties to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity. Do we look at the infamous fascistic slogan, the "14 words" of white supremacy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”? Do we look at Mark Zuckerburg, who on the Joe Rogan podcast described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”, and who has become significantly more muscular as the marriage between Silicon Valley and Trumpism has developed?

It is interesting to see someone like Zuckerburg delve into the concept of being emasculated, and effeminate, where his "community" is in need of more violence -- a hark back to the idea that violence produces gender, and in reverse, gender produces violence.

We see gender revanchism as a feature of AI art usage, and Watkins illustrates this with, "...much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted." It doesn't matter if these things are real, what matters is that they can be weaponized in violent forms against women. Watkins argues that it actually isn't coincidental in the slightest that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot.

Beyond the tech bros, what if we look at the right-leaning manosphere movement, and the influence it has had on politicians? The blogger Derek Guy of Die, Workwear! offers an interesting perspective on the aesthetics of the clothing of the far right in his Bloomberg article "The Evolution of The Alpha Male Aesthetic" alternatively known as "Why Do So Many MAGA Men Look Like Joe Rogan?" It's en excellent read, I highly recommend taking the time to read through it, but I'll reader's digest it for you:

“In the early 2000s, Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane and Thom Browne rejected the bulky, broad-shouldered shapes associated with American tycoons, action stars and Armani swagger. They put the male wardrobe through a hot wash and tumble dry: Shirts tightened, jackets shrank, and trousers contracted in every direction. In the 2012 documentary 90s Anti-Fashion, Simons said he made clothes he and his friends wanted to wear because they didn’t see themselves in the “huge, suntanned, muscled Americano” that dominated fashion imagery. Slimane, reflecting on his adolescence, remembered being bullied in high school for having a slight build. They “were attempting to make me feel I was half a man because I was lean,” he told Yahoo Style in 2015. “There was certainly something homophobic and derogative about those remarks.” “New subcultures rebranded the look with more conventionally masculine associations. EDC (everyday carry) enthusiasts, armed with pocket knives and multitools, adopted slim-fit gear as part of a rugged preparedness ethos. Their slim tactical pants and fitted henleys weren’t about gender ambiguity; they were survivalist uniforms. The rise of athleisure for men, particularly centered on slim joggers, pushed the same silhouette in poly-stretch fabrics, forming a softer kind of masculine armor. In Silicon Valley, tech founders embraced minimalist wardrobes built around Everlane tees, trim chinos and all-white sneakers. An aesthetic once dismissed as “metro” was now emblematic of self-optimization.”

"The Tate brothers took the raw material of that worldview and repackaged it with a harder ideological edge—blending fitness and hustle culture with anti-feminist backlash, nationalist grievance and a theatrical contempt for liberal norms. Not everyone in the alpha ecosystem shares their politics, but many embrace the same visual grammar. Ashton Hall, whose cold Saratoga water face plunge became a TikTok trend, uses similar imagery. Liver King followed a comparable formula, wrapping primal excess in a veneer of ancestral wisdom. Andy Frisella, creator of 75 Hard—a boot-camp-style program that promises toughness through discipline, dieting and discomfort—delivers YouTube sermons on sculpting abs and building wealth. These men may differ in tone, but they share an ideal: masculinity is under siege, and the only way forward is to optimize, aestheticize and dominate. For them, the body is a billboard for self-mastery, and slim-fit clothing is the wrapping that proves it." "This new wave of hypercurated masculinity is a backlash against a cultural landscape shaped by gender fluidity, body positivity and an ongoing renegotiation of gender roles. As celebrities like Harry Styles and Lil Nas X pose in dresses and blur the traditional lines between masculine and feminine, another current rushes in to reassert the old order. It pulls from earlier models: The mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tight-fitting clothes once labeled metrosexual. Today’s fixation on muscularity, discipline and traditional masculine aesthetics feels like a new chapter in that same historical cycle."

Tate, left; Rogan, right

xxx TWITTER ACCOUNT ON CLOTHES

It's interesting how we are seeing a merging of aesthetics in the tech industry, the manosphere industry, and the right-leaning political wing of the United States, where there's a politicization of tight-fighting, oft-poorly tailored clothes coupled with the fixation around ultra-buff men and an interest in Manly Man Masculinity.

There's a post I remember seeing go around fairly recently that showed a before and an after photo of a man who, in the before photo was, like, Just Some Guy; and in the after photos he was extremely ripped. A poll was put to the photos to ask women which photo they preferred, and generally the results slanted heavily in favor of the before photo. The response of the man in question, and of other men in his sphere, was that of incredulity. How could women not prefer this example of peak masculinity? The better question, truly, was: "who is this for?" If it's not for women, generally speaking, it's for other men -- who encourage each other's gains, compliment their muscles, compare reps and body fat percentages and "How much do u lift, bro?"

There's a kind of Manly Eros in this aesthetic of masculinity. To pull back from Marhoefer's article regarding “National Socialism and Inversion” -- a kind of a male-male eroticism that's supposedly spiritual rather than lustful; ~enlightened'~ as our men's health and fitness gurus are enlightened. It doesn't matter if this is actually not real, it doesn't matter if the six pack only appears when we're dehydrated, it doesn't matter if you can't "get women" because they're "not interested" in you, or what the fuck ever. What matters is the community of masculinity.

The imagery around people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk within these right-wing spheres reflects this -- plenty of images of both of these as Giga Chad Buff Alpha Males proliferate as a means to signify their domination where their physical appearance otherwise does not. It's a real disconnect between the aesthetic and the real (for lack of a better phrasing).

And then we see the kind of strong-man aesthetic in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, where his response to being shot in the ear is to posture: he is strong, he is powerful, he is triumphant, he is manly, he is an ideal:

By Nazi standards, fine art was not propaganda (but it was totally propaganda). Its purpose was to create ideals, for eternity. This produced a call for heroic and romantic art, which reflected the ideal rather than the realistic. This was showcased for the first time in 1937 at the Great German Art exhibition. The most decisive element [of this event], wrote one critic, was "...that it is the fighting call against any problematic. There is no room for experiments here."

Warner Rittich of the Kunst und Volk wrote, "They were not an art fair with special reference to the newest, but the visual expression of the eternal -- external and internal -- values of our Folk. Created by artists of our time, as clear and truthful as the building, they are exhibited in a temple of art, not in a factory."

Dr. Hans Kiener wrote of the art of the Nazi Party showcased at this event, "But the National Socialists not only influenced the style of the works, they also made sure that the artists would choose the right subject. The Leader wants the German artist to leave his solitude and to speak to the Folk. This must start with the choice of the subject. It has to be popular and comprehensible. It has to be heroic in line with the ideals of National Socialism. It has to declare its faith in the ideal of beauty of the Nordic and racially pure human being."

Dr. Wilhelm Späl wrote, "A walk through the exhibition proved that the principles of clarity, truth, and professionalism determined the selection ..... The heroic element stands out. The worker, the farmer, the soldier are the themes ..... Heroic subjects dominate over sentimental ones ..... The experiences of the Great War, the German landscape, the German man at work, peasant life ..... The life of the State with its personalities and developments. These are the new subjects, they demand new expressions and styles ..... In accordance with the subject, the style of most of the works is clear, strong, and full of character ..... there is a whiff of greatness everywhere. Healthy, fresh, and optimistic artists are showing their work with manifold individuality. A new era of art has begun."

Paintings which were permitted included:

those that were traditionalist in manner

that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.

that depicted the Volk at work in the fields, a return to the simple virtues of Heimat (love of homeland)

the manly virtues of the National Socialist struggle

the lauding of the female activities of child bearing and raising symbolized by the phrase Kinder, Küche, Kirche ("children, kitchen, church").

Hitler was styled as a heroic figure. The warriors of Germany's past were styled as heroic figures. The mythic - even the mythic of the every day people - was idealized. You can, perhaps, see the elements of these sorts of ideals in the neo-Nazi, neo-fascist movement of the 21st century, the idealism of heroism and the revanchism of culture and gender and the idolization of a strong man. If you'll forgive the comparison, modern figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are generated in a superman costume and not as Lex Luther for a reason.

ANYWAY. The point, here, finally, is that was constitutes a "hero" is an entirely subjective concept -- no liberal or left-liberal, for example, is going to conceptualize someone like Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump as heroic figures.

It's interesting, then, that Rook is supposed to be a hero, and specifically a hero that, as the author of the inciting article purports, fights fascists and fascism in some capacity. If we recall the verbiage of the bylines the game had, in 2020 the BioWare website described Rook as:

Enter Thedas, a vibrant world of rugged wilderness, treacherous labyrinths, and glittering cities. The Dragon Age is a time of warring nations, savage combat, and secret magics. Now, the fate of this world teeters on a knife's edge. Thedas needs a new hero; one they'll never see coming. Forge a courageous fellowship to challenge the gathering storm. Friendship, drama, and romance abound as you bring striking individuals together into an extraordinary team. Become the hero and light the beacon of hope in their darkest moments.

It was later changed to, at least as of Dragon Age Day 2023:

Enter the world of Thedas, a vibrant land of rugged wilderness, treacherous labyrinths, and glittering cities – steeped in savage combat and secret magics. Now, the fate of this world teeters on a knife's edge. Thedas needs a new leader; one they'll never see coming. You’ll forge a courageous fellowship to challenge the gathering storm. Friendship, drama, and romance will abound as you bring striking individuals together into an extraordinary team. Become the leader and light the beacon of hope in their darkest moments.

Okay, fine, this dovetails well with the actual presentation of the game, which is that Rook comes into the story already "a hero" -- that is, someone who makes hard choices and saves people and kicks ass and take names and etc etc etc, well before we ever chase Solas down to his ritual site in Arlathan. The author of the inciting article "This Game Kills Fascists" has also cottoned onto this fact, and explains it to us firstly by extolling the many choices of character we have for Rook, the hero:

"...their real name is up to you. Also up to you: your look, your background, your race, your sex, your gender identity, your pronouns.** You choose whether you shoot or stab or zap. And once your character is out in the world, there are additional roleplay options that come up through dialogue in the game—not gameplay choices, but dialogue about your background, attitudes, and beliefs—and I really liked these “yes, and” improv opportunities to give my Rooks more texture and independent character."

Okay, fine x2, although we'll note with some irony that the author revealed that they have only played three characters, all of them elves. She then goes on to explain the nature of Rook's, shall we say, uniqueness as a hero.

"What you don’t choose is whether you are a hero. In past games, the player’s goodness was measured by the player’s choices, not their adversaries’. Which is to say you aren’t good just because you’re fighting bad things."

"But Rook, whoever they are and wherever they come from, is a hero. Not a reluctant hero, not an asshole who does heroic stuff for petty pragmatism, not a person with heroism thrust upon them. At the game’s start, Rook has already earned their place in the big events following the climax of Dragon Age: Inquisition."

"And contrasting with previous games, some can find Rook’s hardcoded virtue a constraint or even an unacceptable loss, particularly when so much of the previous games was painted in blood and moral gray. The shine of Rook’s halo might well make you squint if you’re so devoted to the gloom."

What, prithee, is the distinction here, actually? She never really explains it beyond "asshole" behavior or "pragmatism," the latter of which realistically isn't even true because Rook is forced to be pragmatic by the narrative -- "whatever it takes," after all. As far as I can tell, it appears that Rook has the following defining features as a hero:

They come into the story a hero. Their goodness, their morality, is measured by their adversaries rather than the choices of the player. And since they are fighting bad guys, they are a good guy. They end the story a hero. Their morality is absolute.

I would actually argue that the author is incorrect in that Rook doesn't have heroism thrust upon them -- they very explicitly are put in a situation where their leader, Varric, is out of commission and Rook is expected to step up. Varric died and the vibe was, "You're in charge now, kid, good luck." If we ignore that the acts of heroism prior to the start of the game are basically a non-factor to Rook's characterization and story, we can still at least allow room for its existence, with the idea was that when Rook had circumstances thrust upon them that required they step up, it was natural for them to just slide into more heroism.

What I find particularly problematic about this is that it undermines a key component of storywriting for protagonists in that protagonists are supposed to change, they're supposed to undergo a moral journey. If your starting premise is that the character is Heroic, and you want a character that changes, you can't just make them Heroic Squared. By and large that's that's a boring premise all on its own, and bad writing if that's all that it is. In this kind of storytelling framework, Rook really would have needed to do something unheroic in order to transform their personal narrative. Which. I would personally argue they ultimately DID do unheroic things, but the game tries very hard to tell us that it was a moral victory anyway because the framework of the game and the meta the writers give us insists on Rook being Heroic™️. Which makes for a really unsatisfying protagonist.

The author also seems to be confused about what grey morality looks like in a story, as she hits us with these:

"There is a buffet of moral gray being served with seconds in Veilguard, primarily by the character everyone expected to be its Big Bad Wolf."

"Whether you personally believe Solas is right actually, can change course, or must be put down like a dog is up to you. Rook cannot entertain the first idea, much as the Inquisitor couldn’t, because the cost in lives will be unimaginable. Yet the game will insist that you grapple with the destructive price of Solas’s pure motives all the way to the end. And to do that conflict real justice, Solas needs a hero as strong-willed and as sure as he is to be his adversary."

"Unlike Solas, who rationalizes a greater good, these gods are purely malevolent enslavers. They, too, want to turn the clock back, but to the days of their unlimited rule before Solas overthrew them. Not much ambiguity there, but good contrast. Solas is sidelined by events, relegated to advising Rook as they seek to defeat two sadistic gods and their Super PAC of bad guys rising across the nations of northern Thedas. But you’re not only fighting the gods and their allies, all of whom are explicitly fascist."

(sidenote: Super PAC of bad guys takes me out every time I read it; where's the Squidward pointing meme that says LIB! on it when you need it?)

I would actually love to play the game that Angela apparently thinks we played, where we "grapple with the destructive price of Solas's pure moves all the way to the end" but this is just straight up not something that happens. I saw another user write that "...Rook's characterization begins and ends with "Stop Solas". The other elven gods, the blight, the archdemons, the antaam, the venatori, all serve the larger goal to "Stop Solas.' They are fundamentally incidental the The Actual Goal of The Game. At no point do we actually pivot from "Solas is wrong" to "maybe other things are worse"" -- and I agree with this. There's a fundamental lack of any real hesitation on Rook's part, that maybe Solas might not be wrong, that maybe what they're doing -- being the hero -- might not actually be the right thing. Where's the dissonance? Where's the crunch? Where's the transformative storytelling that actually has something to say about its protagonist and their role in both the story and the storyworld?

It's just not there. What we get instead is a very straightforward good vs evil story, with the conceit that everything Rook does is heroic.

If you've talked to me at all, you've likely seen me talka bout the Game Maker's Toolkit video on "Commanding Shepard" -- discussing the construction of Shepard as a Hero and how the framework of Shepard as a protagonist and the Mass Effect trilogy as a storyworld both fundamentally frame everything Shepard does (even war crimes, even murder, even abject cruelty, even genocide) as Heroic -- where the games ask us to consider the morality of a story framing like this (somewhat tacitly, with the Paragon and Renegade system) and at times more implicitly or overtly through the characters that Shepard encounters throughout the story, who embody different viewpoints and moralizations and challenge not only Shepard but also many of the base assumptions or constructions of right vs wrong that dominate the galaxy.

It's a good video. I highly recommend you give it a watch if you have some time to do so.

I also think that this modality for Rook as a character, while attempting to mirror what made Shepard successful, falls flat because unlike Shepard, Rook (and through Rook the Player) is never challenged or asked to consider the morality of what they're doing and what their end goals are. As the author puts it: there's no real ambiguity.

Another thing that really rankles about this is the idea that choosing to be a hero is somehow morally superior to being a reluctant hero or a morally grey hero -- as if the reluctant hero isn't one of the most celebrated character archetypes across many, many genres. Our first protagonist, the Warden, earns another title at the end of Dragon Age: Origins. The HERO of Ferelden. I really question the direction of the writing team and their conceptualization of a hero. See the following question from a BlueSky user about whether or not blood magic as a specialization would come back, and Veilguard Lead Writer Trick Weekes' response:

"key to a lot of nasty stuff we arent interested in having heroes do"

Tell me you have lost the plot of Dragon Age without telling me you've lost the plot of Dragon Age. You can literally save the entirety of Ferelden -- the world of Thedas, really -- as a blood mage in Dragon Age: Origins. Does this somehow make the Hero of Ferelden any less of a hero? Or the Champion of Kirkwall, who can be a blood mage? And what does that say about the Grey Wardens, one of the most morally grey (...lol) factions in the series that literally utilizes a form of blood magic during the joining ritual for all Heroes of Ferelden and all Wardens of All Time. Alistair, Garahel and Isseya, Davrin -- none of them are heroes now, because they did literal blood magic done to save all the peoples of Thedas? What about the mages who utilize lyrium -- the blood of the titans? Are all mages of all the games and all of history precluded from ever being a hero?

No, of course not. We play three heroes in the previous three games, inherently, because that's the framework fo the narratives we're presented -- all with different circumstances and different questions on what makes a hero, a hero.

What's outrageous on Angela's part is that she's somehow trying to argue that Rook stands apart from our previous three heroes as a Moral Absolute of True Heroism (or something?) and somehow this makes Rook the kind of protagonist in the kind of story that kills fascists. Never mind that it's not even remotely controversial to say that the modern literary modality of the traditional morally white hero vs. the morally black villain is exactly the type of mythologizing stories that were used as propagandist tools of fascism. This is... widely accepted. It's not a good argument on its face, and it's especially a poor argument when there's no actual supporting argumentation to fill out the body of the thesis.

What's also outrageous about the fact that she's been able to draw this kind of conclusion, albeit with little to no grasp of what she's actually arguing for, is that we are never as players permitted to interrogate the text, and our player characters are never permitted to interrogate the storyworld. Rook is a Hero, therefore everything they do is Heroic, and this fits within a very bad guys = bad and good guys = good dichotomy that is at odds with the fundamental conceit of the storyworld of Thedas that was established in Origins and carried through DA2 and DAI -- how does history construct and deconstructs its heroes and its villains through propaganda?

I've written a good deal about subjects related to this already, so I'll just throw some links at you to save space:

The Second Sin (in Defense of Corypheus as a villain)

Why the Evanuris Are Weak Villains in DATV

The Importance of Literacy and what Escapism Means

I will also once again link to Mythalism's essay:

on the ways Dragon Age as a series prompted us as players to engage with the politics and ethics of the storyworld

The thing about being heroic is that it's not an immutable character trait. One is not born a hero, or awarded the title of hero. One must act to become a hero. If Rook is a hero, we must ask ourselves, "why," and the story must tell us how and why Rook is a hero -- what is the praxis of their actions? In the absence of an actual dialogue between the player and the character and the storyworld, being being a Hero™️ becomes a form of identity politics.

As Mythalism put it, the #1 most embarrassing and distasteful thing about the game DATV is that developers fell into the ideological trap the entire series was set out to deconstruct (regarding what makes one a hero and the idea of moral absolutism), and they seem to be unaware of this. The game itself appears to come to the table with a blind faith in the audience intuitively understanding good people versus evil people, with no interrogation of what that actually means in the storyworld as established or how that can be misused -- both narratively and in the real world.

I wrote several months ago in the Literacy and Escapism essay that I think we should be very careful to embrace media like [DATV], because how we engage with media does not exist in a vacuum - it isn't merely just entertainment. Mythalism articulated in a similar vein that what makes something like Veilguard dangerous is that, if you are telling stories about heroes and villains and don’t actually have an objective metric for what makes a person a hero or any critical thinking about how those kinds of narratives have been construed in the past, you run the very real risk of engaging in the same same sort of black and white rhetoric used in, say, military propaganda movies, or fascistic mythic films.

And again, this is how we get a story that is wildly racist and still somehow being upheld as hopeful.

"Or how beliefs are often flawed, but no one’s rights are negotiable."

except the elves' rights, i guess. or the spirits' rights, i suppose. or mage rights.

"Or how no one is free until everyone is free"

except the elves... or the spirits...

And corny as it may seem, knowing that this story is out there right now gives me hope for our world, too.

You're right, Angela. It is corny. And you know what? You ever actually explain how the fuck the Heroes of the Veilguard and their game "kill fascists." If you are going to mobilize the concept of a protagonist being a hero to make them antifascist, you have to explain the framework you are operating within. Like the developers and the assumptions they put into their dyadic of good vs evil, as an author you are making the assumption that the the readers will understand what you mean by your dyadic of hero vs fascist, nevermind that you don't explain a damn thing and you've built your essay on top of the sand pit that is DATV's framework. You can't just say that the hero = good because their villains = bad = fascist.

Who actually thought we’d be getting a part four of this essay? I sure didn’t, but here we are. We’ve gotten a lot of information this past summer that has really solidified a lot of the neoliberalism hopecore (but really, copium) inherent to the game, and if you’re reading this and are unaware of the panels Trick Weekes did for the Digital Foundry, well… lucky you, I suppose. And I’m sorry in advance: it will come up later. I need to unpack some more stuff and probably rehash a few things from above (I will try to be brief!) to get to the part I really want to talk about, but this will probably still be long, so buckle up. As always, I owe much to all of the wonderful people who have collaborated in various spaces with myself and others to interrogate what we have been looking at, and you can consider them co-authors of this essay.

And as a general note: because this is fucking long (52 pages in the document I am working in) I am breaking it up to part 4 and part 5. If you want the whole thing, wait to reblog until I get part 5 up.

Living In An Empire

User Corseque transcribed Trick Weekes’ Empires panel, which you can access here. And I won’t quote or sum up too much of it because it was lengthy enough and there’s been a lot of good criticism of it already, particularly with regard to the deliberate choice to remove slavery from the front and center. I'll link some of the stuff that made it onto my blog, although it is by no means an exhaustive referral.

This [1] & This [2] & This [3] & This [4] & This [5] & This [6] & This [7]

That said. I did want to draw attention to a particular quote regarding violent revolutions, the kinds of writing Trick believes they are good at, and what they chose to prioritize:

“...And again, looking at it from a writer perspective, I think it's important to figure out what's your goal? If you're writing to influence people, if you're writing to say, here's what I want the reader to come away with. And I think you owe it to yourself as a writer. You, broad you, all of you, owe it to yourself as a writer, to be honest about what you're going for. Are you trying to get someone who thinks everything is cool to have the scales fall from their eyes and realize that they live in an evil empire? Well, that's one kind of book. You know, for a while I wanted to write that, but I realized I just, I don't have the educational background. I can do an okay job at it, but I'm not going to do it justice. The type of writing I know I can actually do is, for want of a better term, the defiant existence kind of writing. I can write people living in an empire despite that empire. Because I am several things the United States has currently said they're making it a priority to get rid of. And I'm not going to write a novel about destroying the United States because I'm not good at that. I don't have that sort of attitude. I don't want to destroy the, I don't want a civil war. So many people would die. But what I can do is write a novel about someone who is neurodiverse, someone who is trans, someone who is not straight, living defiantly because that is something in the empire that I can push back against directly. I think on the video game front, one of the areas we showed in Dragon Age: The Veilguard was Tevinter, which as the full name is the Tevinter Imperium. It's an empire and it has slaves and it's not shy about it. And we didn't show a ton of slaves being beaten and whips and chains. We showed an urban marketplace as the main part of Tevinter that you go to because we were trying to make two things clear.First off, empires can be seductive. Empires are normal life for a lot of people, like we've talked about earlier. And second, when you say, "We're going to destroy that empire," you're also destroying the marketplace full of people who are arguing over the price of bread. And if that's what you're committed to, just be aware that's what you're committed to, that maybe a better way of thinking about it is we need to change that empire. We need to change the government of that empire and get accountability. Maybe that's not as easy a message. Maybe that's not possible. Veilguard does end with a whole lot of violence and a whole lot of things destroyed. But we tried to show that an empire isn't made up of completely evil people. It's made up of a lot of normal people who, when mobilized, can stand up against evil when you give them a direction to stand up and march in.”

Remember when I said earlier that the specific framework of identity politics as praxis which so many neolibs have bought into posits that you are conferred radicalism and revolutionarism simply by existing as a person with a marginalized identity within the empire? Trick is telling us this exactly: the defiant existence. This existence is defiant because it is neurodiverse and queer. This existence is radical because it is neurodiverse and queer. To exist is praxis.

And on some level, yeah, okay. But on the other hand, as I have already outlined in previous writing, it really is not simply enough to passively exist while queer, because simply being queer does not actually confer radical politics. As I have written before, praxis is practice, it is doing. It is not simply being.

It is telling, then, that Weekes does not actually seem to have a problem with the structure of the empire in and of itself. The problem for Weekes lies with who is leading the empire and what they are telling their followers to do. Weekes does not appear to see themselves as part of the privileged few within the empire despite being a person of considerable privilege who lives within the imperial core, which ultimately makes their commentary about the importance of the marketplace in Veilguard come across as particularly ignorant.

Because here’s the thing. Those people who are trading bread in the market – who Weekes appears to desire to somehow exonerate and protect from the scary bad violent revolution where people die – are the same people who are going home and using the bread to feed family members who are those fresh military recruits being taught to dehumanize people or maybe the ones teaching the soldiers to dehumanize. There’s a disconnect in understanding the role of a populace’s general complacency while living in an empire, and how this passivity actually facilitates the empire. It also betrays an understanding that this complacency must be rooted in personal deliberate action rather than passive existence, which is. Well. Incorrect.

There’s also something a defense of cozy fantasy baked into this response (and coupled with their escapism panel) that reads as both self-concious as well as an attempt to affirm to themselves that they aren’t actually impassive – that they are doing something, defiantly, in the same breath that they admit that they haven’t put in the work to actually understand what it means for them to be someone who lives in the imperial core.

What’s particularly crazy-making about this is that it also sort of betrays a lack of thought regarding the mechanisms of, for example, example how those average everyday regular people in the heart of the empire are able to argue about the price of bread in the first place. Who grows the wheat they make their bread from? Who brings it into the city? Who ensures that you have your mangoes in December? Whose staple grain is being exported en masse to feed the health food market while the growers starve for lack of their staple grain? Who is literally enslaved and sacrificed to build and run the machinery of the empire to ensure that free citizens can argue about bread? And why, exactly, are we so worried about the preservation of an "everyday life" which depends on inequality and slave labor and mass exploitation; is it possible, perchance, that maybe this "everyday life" needs to change, and that perhaps it will make people uncomfortable?

But don’t worry, the nice regular Tevinter citizens at the heart of the empire are just at the drag brunch drinking their mimosas and munching on their bread. Later they will worry about their groceries. Sometimes they are gay, and the empire hates them because of this, which is very sad, but at least if you are surviving you are resisting. Keep up the good fight.

And the thing is, Weekes literally said they didn't want to write a story about destroying an evil empire with major systemic abolition because a bunch of people will die (this is bad because we are hurting the every day people) and then they write about destroying an evil empire with major systemic (albeit extremely unsupported by the storyworld and logic of cause-effect) abolition where a bunch of people die anyway. They do have a bunch of people die to create some kind of political change! But at least the protagonist isn’t the agent of this change, it’s the turboblight and the evil gods and the evilbad Venatori and the evilbad boogeyman of the Antaam. Sadly, most of southern Thedas was destroyed, but again, it wasn’t by Rook, and it also wasn’t by the horde of demons that Varric claims will annihilate Thedas if we allow Solas to bring down the Veil, so it’s okay, actually! The moral integrity of Rook and their friends are preserved!

What has emerged from these panels, is the sense that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is protective of Trick Weeke's white colonizer guilt specifically, and because itfcoddles its players the same way. It prioritizes white queer experiences at the expense of everything else, where perhaps the principle leadership of the game -- Corinne Busche being a white neoliberal trans woman, John Epler being a white neoliberal bisexual man, and Trick Weekes being a white neoliberal nonbinary person – is reflected in how the politics of the story are framed.

The pitch that we are supposed to buy into is that DATV is an inclusive game. Our protagonist can be a man, a woman, nonbinary, cis, trans. They can have a variety of skin tones and can be any number of the races of Thedas – human, elf, dwarf, or qunari. They can be queer. We have companions who are older, younger, with varying skin tones, who are pansexual. One of our companions is nonbinary. We have two Dalish elf companions, a surfacer dwarf companion, and a qunari companion. One of our companions will still romance you if they turn into a skeleton. One is an abomination. Several of our companions have prosthetics for missing body parts. We have companions from Tevinter, Rivain, Arlathan forest, Nevarra, Ferelden, and Antiva. We have companions who are Andrastian, who are Dalish and worship the elven pantheon, who practice Nevarra death worship.

Source: deliberately anonymous because I don't want anyone trying to track them down and attack them. That's not the point.

And yet. All experiences of all Rooks and all companions in the storyworld are pinkwashed as they are funneled into a single specific experience that just so happens to line up with extremely white queer experiences. It is literally just about white queers in the heart of empire. Religion doesn’t matter because we’re going to stop worshiping the evanuris and we just won’t talk about it. Andrastianism doesn’t matter because we disproved it! Whatever the fuck Emmrich has going on with his death worship is actually really secular, don’t worry about it. If you as a Rook were a former slave, it won’t affect your character at all because it’s only dropped as a brief piece of dialogue later in the story. If you are a Shadow Dragon elf living under Tevinter rule, your experience is the same a dwarf, qunari, or human Shadow Dragon. If you are a mage, your experience is the same as if you are not. It’s a flattening of all these axes of experiences, and it’s like. The experiences of a queer black man in the heart of empire is not the same as Trick Weekes’ experience as a white nonbinary person. The experience of being a brown woman in a white queer community in the heart of empire is not the same as being a white nonbinary person in a white queer community in the heart of empire.

But. Uh. Write what you know, I guess? By jove...

This may also be why many of the staunch defenses of The Veilguard seem incapable of parsing what intersectional politics actually looks like, because if they were more coherently aware of both what intersectionality looks like and what it is attempting to achieve, we wouldn’t have responses that boiled down to “this game is so timely and brave and important because it’s so diverse” that fail to interrogate what diversity looks like and what makes diversity important in media.

BLM, Land Back, and White Canadian Settler Discomfort

There also something in particular to be said about the anxieties of liberalism and the way they have been exacerbated in the last five years – and pertinently during the crucial years of Veilguard’s development. 2020 saw the soaring of the Black Lives Matters protests and the Land Back movement – where a common liberal response to these “riots” was to be uncomfortable with the violence and to avow “nonviolence.”

I am by no means an expert on land back, but what I have been given to understand is that, in a North American context (but specifically, here, a Canadian context) it bounces against the fact that Canada is a settler colonial state which has a national identity that is bound to the idea of the empire which followed the British imperial model of signing treaties and then encroaching on these treaty rights. The unceded land the Canadian state claims has not been conquered, but instead has illegally occupied. Legally, the Canadian state should not exist, and it is held together by the instruments of the state and the fact that the material of the population consists of settlers.

Obviously there is no monolithic polity of what other political questions and aims accompany land back – thousands of nations will of course have a diversity of histories and realities – but specifically when we talk about land back we are talking about treaty rights, which a) are possible to restore and b) would be a legal obligation by international law if indigenous were recognized as nations, which c) they have to be, because treaties of this nature can only be signed with sovereign nations.

But if you accept that the Canadian state is illegal, if you restore treaty rights, if you legally admit to being on stolen land – what then? What happens? For anyone who is a settler, this can be scary to think about; for liberal Canadians, who see themselves as politically progressive and empathetic to indigenous peoples, this is an existential source of anxiety. The answer is, of course, not white genocide or mass expulsion, but this seems to be a common belief. Most people do not understand land back, and there’s a decent chance that if they tell you it is impossible or it will be violent or lead to the collapse of society – they’ve invented a straw man scenario.

What the narratives around how scary and violent revolutionary overthrow of empire tend to be obfuscate, whether intentionally or inadvertently through a poor understanding of the apparatus of the state, is that these systems of empire and slavery are already incredibly violent. Empires just tend to cultivate a monopoly on violence and which restricts which forms of violences are legitimized and which are unacceptable.

And like, all things considered: the idea of imperial collapse is indeed very scary if you are living in the imperial core.

It’s just really hard to ignore that Trick Weekes has expressed that they find this scary, and it is hard to ignore that Weekes is living in a way that is dependent on a settler colonial enterprise within a state built on racialized slavery within the context of a global balance of power that in operation materially harms millions, if not billions, of people. It’s also hard to ignore that Weekes has expressed that they may be more concerned about the average everyday people who go to the market place to buy bread and may have to compromise this.

This spectral boogeyman of violent collapse of course is not limited to land back, and there do seem to be commonalities to the anxieties in response to, say, a violent revolutionary overthrow of the government. Within a structural framework which incentivizes recentering comfort, the discomfort these thoughts prompt appears to manifest among other things a need to either ignore or to push back against encountering this discomfiting thing in fandom spaces and the media one consumes.

So when Trick says, “It’s[the empire] made up of a lot of normal people who, when mobilized, can stand up against evil when you give them a direction to stand up and march in.” They’re being literal. Get out and protest at a sanctioned protest with a permit. Get out and vote. Sign another petition! Kneel in the capitol building while wearing pink! Be the change you wish to see in the world.

In the context of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there is something to be said about the American and the Canadian geographic immunity from the violence of war over the course of the last several centuries which has created a distorted perception of the violence of war; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that mainstream American history has mythologized what few wars it has experienced as part of its national mythmaking (see: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Manifest Destiny & the wars of Western Expansion). The fact that this can be paired with a dominant streak of neoliberal politics and a degree of cultural Christianity – but specifically Protestant values (more on that later) – is a breeding ground for shaping a very specific understanding of both the utility and the morality of violence, particularly revolutionary violence. That we see a strong institutional academic and cultural emphasis on the value placed on “nonviolence” in the US is at least in part because of the level of remove the baseline geography affords them. We can probably further pare and parse the way certain axes of privilege allow US and CAN citizens to remain insulated from violence within these countries. If you are a white person who lives in a white suburb, chances are very good that you will never see war, nor will you see a violent protest, it’s unlikely that you will see police violence – and all of this will work to obfuscate your ability to understand how the state uses violence. You are, in a word, “safe.”

And you know what? It’s good be safe. But this kind of safety imparts a completely distorted idea of what the world actually looks like and how it functions, and the reality is that this kind of safety always comes at someone else’s expense. And the thing is – if it comes at someone else’s expect, it’s not truly safety. (Wow, almost like everyone else’s safety came at the expense of Solas being locked in the Omelas Fade prison forever.)

Returning to the context of Dragon Age and the use of Tevinter as a setting, what we were looking at – or what we should have been looking at – was the question of both the collapse of an imperial power structure and abolition on a significant scale. This tends to be drastic – we can look at the Haitian Revolution in real life as an example. It was an incredibly violent overthrow. And overthrowing a system of empire and slavery can be incredibly violent. And unfortunately any meaningful discussion around this was immediately muddied by the projection of the writers of their own anxieties about being a citizen of the imperial core.

The way I had it explained to me was that in Dragon Age: The Veilguard -- Tevinter was like if we took Rome and Byzantium, smashed them together and inserted our ideas about chattel slavery which we haven’t bothered to unpack, so the dynamics mimic the racialized slavery systems of the British Empire and the United States. This is all on top of a settler colonial situation. And that is all crammed into a framework around liberal queer anxieties about US Republicanism and the realization that maybe the geopolitical impact of the United States isn’t very good. It’s a continuation of the specific heightened settler colonial white liberal projection on a vaguely medieval European setting that never really unpacked how these things all fit together beyond The Vibes and the ways in which the individual writers personally related to the political landscape around them as they were writing – resulting in a series with writing that was extremely messy. It has always been there, but Weekes’ choice to project white queer politics onto the storyworld landscape as priority for Veilguard stands out much more starkly than previous games.

One of the more immediately relevant stock responses to criticism of Veilguard “xyz thing you are criticizing has always been in the series, you’re being a hypocrite because of recency bias,” which can be hard to argue against. What I would argue, however, is that there are some key differences between DA:O/DA2/DAI and DATV in terms of how their stories are presented. I’ve already outlined a few of the differences, including the framing of absolute truth and absolute evil, but what I will add is that Veilguard’s narrative differences can be pared down to the sense that where a game like DAI was very obviously a story made by white centrist US/Canadian neoliberals, Veilguard is a game made by white centrist US/Canadian neoliberals who are trying to convince you to be a neoliberal with them in order to validate their neoliberalism.

Veilguard is less willing to engage with the politics of Thedas than even DAI was, and it lends the game a surface-level appearance of being less political than previous games. The removal of all of Thedas’ politics undermines the ability for them to tell a coherent story for many reasons, but not the least of which is that in their absence, the real-world contemporary political thinking of the writers themselves are brought to the center stage of the game, and there they remain. Every companion quest is shaped by these white queer dilemmas and anxieties, and while Thedosian politics may or may not matter, at every major event, you will without fail be reminded of BioWare’s politics and who they see themselves writing for. By white queers of the imperial core, for white queers of the imperial core, at the expense of everyone else.

People in the American and Canadian experience of the imperial core who benefit from this kind of arrangement of safety (namely, white people) are by design insulated from the discomfort of acknowledging the particulars of this arrangement. When this insulation is breached, and they are made aware, it sparks discomfort. And again – when you have spent your whole life in relative safety, this impacts your ability to discern what it actually looks and feels like to be unsafe, and it is from here that the conflation of discomfort and safety stems.

Acknowledging Your Capacity for Evil (This Is Uncomfortable)

User da2supremacy made an excellent post that opens with “I bring a sort of "The watering down of the acknowledgement of oppression in Thedas actually started in Inquisition" that I think a lot of people for whom DAI is their first game aren't going to like.” that I really wanted to share. I won’t repost the whole thing here (go read it!) but I am going repost the next three paragraphs, as I find them very relevant:

“The problem is, and always has been, that the alleged research the writers did for DA2 means that each of those white writers had to come to a specific crossroads: As a white person in the imperial core you have to either accept that no matter when or how you arrived here you are and will always be complicit in the racist and imperialist dynamics in this world and you have to make a constant and consistent effort not to perpetuate that injustice. You will fail sometimes and you have to accept that you failed and then be better with what you’ve learned. You are going to have to do that over and over. You have never finished becoming Not Racist or One of the Good Ones and to be frank that shouldn’t be the goalpost. The goalpost should be being good to the people you share the planet with. It is a forever effort. Or you rationalize and double down on your current beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance. Sometimes this will include a certain amount of willingness to advocate for incremental change but often this will come with the side effect of not actually understanding how to make that incremental change happen bc it will inevitably involve examining biases that you are simply unwilling to examine. Trick Weekes wanted to solve the racism and slavery in Tevinter but they did not want to even bother looking at it and therefore their “solution” was tone deaf nonsense.”

To this, I reply with one of my favorite post screenshots that has been shared with me over the years, where user quasi-normalcy says,

“I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t acknowledged their capacity for evil.” [...] “’I’m just a smol bean uwu’ No sir, what you are is someone who is so habituated to thinking of yourself as innocent that you will continue to do so even when you’re guilty.”

And as Chris Fleming put it:

"You know that thing where the most toxic person you've ever met over-relates to woodland creatures on social media? I call it Vibe Dysphoria. She'll put up a picture of a mouse in a jean jacket with 'It's me.' That is not you. I don't know how you got under the impression that you are a mouse in a jean jacket. You are an eel with a gun. She posts a toad with a basket of mushrooms like 'Me doing my little things.' Oh madam, there is nothing little about your things. You gave me psychosexual issues I'll carry to my watery grave. You are not a toad in the forest...You are a cruel woman who just happens to be small."

What I am driving at here, and what I hope you may already intuitively understand from the quotes I have shared and from, hopefully, having already read everything previously written in this essay, is that if there is a tendency to be protective of one’s own emotional experience in a manner that tends to inherently come at the expense of others, and if there is a tendency to conflate one’s identity politics and media consumption as praxis, where nice (and really, comfortable) = good – then what is also inherently complementary to these phenomena is the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own capacity for culpability and wrongdoing. This is the cognitive dissonance, this is the mechanism which allows one to maintain the illusion that they are a good person who does good things and practices good politics.

If you have been living in the heart of the imperialist core where you are by design insulated from ever having to acknowledge your own culpability and capacity for evil – being asked to do this will be uncomfortable. It may also make you feel unsafe in that it requires a fundamental paradigm shift which dismantles your entire identity. That is scary! If you have been coddled, and you are habituated to expect to be coddled, it may seem perfectly reasonable to engage in what are in actuality insane mental gymnastics to never be at fault – because if they are at fault, that fundamentally changes who they are. In these moments, there's crossroads where you either work toward deconstruction and or you seek validation.

Christian persecution complex ahoy!

Rook as a protagonist is in many ways designed to be a perfect character to project this upon. Rook is a good person who does good things, and the game never, ever allows Rook (and therefore the player) to feel the real impact (and perhaps the guilt) of understanding the horrifying consequences of their actions. Rook is the one who sabotages Solas’ ritual, and it is, in fact, Rook’s fault that the blighted Evanuris are unleashed on Thedas. It is Rook’s fault that major cities are under attack by the blighted Evanuris and their swarms of faceless Antaam and nameless darkspawn. It is Rook’s fault that Solas is trapped an unable to properly mount a defense as perhaps one of the sole people alive in modern Thedas capable of truly doing so. It is Rook’s fault that a double blight has been unleashed on Thedas. It is Rook’s fault that by the end of the game the entirety of southern Thedas has been obliterated by the blight. By the time the game concludes, unless you play for the so-called bad ending where BioWare wordlessly castigates you for playing the game Wrong, you will be lauded as a Hero of the Veilguard. Never you mind that Minrathous is in ruins and countless untold numbers of people have perished. Never you mind that you have trapped someone in a prison for all eternity, bound to the Veil and bound to preserve the status quo Varric insists at the beginning of the game must remain – never you mind that the benefits of Omelas come at the expense of someone else. This is all good, and fine, and dandy – you are the Hero. Therefore, everything you do is Heroic, and Just, and Good.

The fact that this game is supposed to be thematically about regret, and then platforms a protagonist who is not designed to experience real regret, is in many ways bad writing. If Rook never feels regret, and is always validated for their actions, then what we miss out on is the big moral journey we’re supposed to be traversing as a main character. A main character is supposed to go on a moral journey, this is a major arch-plot that gives the story purpose and meaning, and results in a satisfying conclusion. Sometimes that moral journey can be improving for the better, and sometimes it can be devolving for the worst – usually doubling down on being wrong/bad.

Good guys good. Bad guys bad. Neat, clean, clear.

As far as I can tell, DATV positions the “original sin” to be of corrupting Wisdom when Wisdom takes a body. The great sin all of these so-called gods committed was not heeding Wisdom, and in the game we see both Solas and Elgar'nan struggle with the same weaknesses but never really see a profound struggle from Rook that mirrors these. Both Elgar'nan and Solas “know what is right” for people, and take action, and they’re vilified, but Rook does the exact same thing with confidence and the narrative supports this every step of the way – The Veil must remain. Varric said so. Rook as a protagonist starts the game convinced they are right, they go through the game convinced they are right, and they end the game convinced they are right. There is no point or series of points in the story where it asks us, in this grand story about the failure to listen to Wisdom and how so much of what ails us stems from this cosmic misstep, when exactly are we supposed to listen to Wisdom? The story never asks us to examine whether or not we aren’t being prideful for assuming we’re right and Solas is wrong. It never shows us the line that separates us from Pride. We never really grapple with the idea of if there’s actually a possibility that disrupting Solas’ ritual actually made things materially, measurably worse, with more deaths and a much more fucked worldstate. (We don’t know this for sure, and we will never know! But what if! Are you telling me Rook never once grappled with this self-doubt?)

Solas is a bad guy whose desire to bring down the Veil is framed as bad and wrong from the very beginning – a framing that never once wavers in this game. So we can’t have elves – arguably one of the most oppressed classes of people in the storyworld – who might want this world to come crashing down and are willing to fight for Solas to see it happen. We can’t have elves fighting for their own wholeness, and us fighting them to the death, because that would be horrible and more importantly it would make Rook (and therefore us, the players) feel bad, and then we would have to explain Solas’ motivations, and wouldn’t that be horrible? Wouldn’t that unravel some of the neat little threads we’ve tied together in this narrative here?

Being the Hero isn’t a moral journey. Achieving a goal is not in and of itself character development And never once, NOT ONCE, do we get to as a character wonder about Solas being right. It doesn’t ever become a narrative framing device that drives the story. Instead, inexplicably, counter to its own themes, the narrative of the protagonist’s journey tells that that Wisdom is always wrong. And I’m really struck again by that comment from Trick Weekes about how they decided not to have blood magic specialization be a thing for this protagonist because they had decided to make it the key to a lot of really nasty things, and they weren’t interested in having a hero do those things. “Blood magic is unlikely because we’ve shifted it from a power boost to really being the key to a lot of nasty stuff we aren’t interested in having heroes do.” But Solas does blood magic. Solas’ big conflict is wanting to undo his mistakes involving blood magic, and to do so he does yet more blood magic. This itself is infinitely more crunchy than anything Rook does – in a game where the mantra is, “Whatever it takes.”

And I think that there's a merit to comparing that with what Solas had planned to do. And it kinda comes down to, well, do good intentions matter? Because Rook and Solas both have good intentions in the moment. I kinda wish we'd seen more of, like. Rook looking at their antagonists and villains -- Elgar'nan, Ghilan'nain, and ultimately even Solas -- and thinking, "they're me if I'm not careful." Because not ONLY is this a dyadic between the experience of the mundane and the divine, but it's a mortal being thrust into a mythic story, where there frequently are morals to the story. The shortcoming it comes back to is again and again with a Rook that instead essentially goes “I’m built different.” Chad Rook to the Soyjak Solas.

A person Rook sacrificed is telling them “Solas sees people as pieces on a board to be discarded” – but Rook did the exact same thing in the game with the exact same mantra of ‘whatever it takes.’ What, precisely, is the difference between Rook sacrificing their friends and Solas sacrificing people? Is the difference that Rook doesn’t ruminate about it? But then they said Solas refused to think about it – except he’s also trapped in rumination, and that’s why he couldn’t escape the Regret Prison on his own. Regrets can trap you, so you have to move forward, which is why Rook is able to escape so quickly. Except Solas is constantly in motion, moving toward a goal, so he’s not actually trapped… but also actually his goal is part of his regrets trapping him? When Rook goes through the Regret Prison sequence, all the dead characters assure Rook that nothing was their fault because they made their own choices. Rook overcomes regrets by portioning blame and kind of ignoring it. At the end of the game, a dead character assures Solas that not everything was his fault, and that’s how he is able to overcome regrets. I keep thinking that they were attempting to approach the Man On An Island conversation from DAI but with… Solas fixating, and Varric’s “it is what it is” philosophy by proxy of Rook? And even after all that, like. Even if you help Solas with his regrets and he overcomes them, he still goes into a Prison of Regret forever in the end. Is he free from regret or is he not? Is it even desirable to be free from regrets?

The game forces you to make choices that you could possibly regret but refuses to let you do anything that's actually a moral challenge. Like even with the companion that dies in the endgame, it's like. You're not deciding whether or not sacrificing someone for a distraction is worth it, you're just choosing who to sacrifice because there's no other choice for you to try. So the game tries to draw you into this parallel with Solas, but it doesn't really work because the game does not allow you to make mistakes or be shitty in any real capacity. When it comes to the 'whatever it takes mentality,' Solas has to coax it out of you. Accepting nothing else you say until you get to that conclusion.

It is telling then, I think, that perhaps the single-most agonizing decision in the game – the decision of whether or not to save Minrathous or Treviso from the dual-pronged attack by blighted dragons – was introduced fairly late into the game’s development, and only after the Community Council asked.

As an aside, it’s also interesting that one of the crunchiest scenes I’ve watched out of all the DATV material I’ve looked at is directly tied to this choice. If you are playing a Crow Rook who is romancing Lucanis and you choose to save Minrathous and sacrifice Treviso to the blight (but it’s not really your fault, remember), Lucanis breaks up with you and your mentor, Viago de Riva, is incredibly disappointed with you. Lucanis can’t even look at you in this interaction. Viago just fully crashes out. Everyone is PISSED. And then none of this matters except that Lucanis won’t have sex with you after, and you’re still friends because this is the friendship game where all the matters is that you make friends except that there’s no way in the game to not be friends so, uh, don’t worry about it kitten.

Liberal Hope Core

There are some features or facets that run a common thread between things we have heard from developers of Dragon Age: The Veilguard; the Veilguard game itself, and the Positivity Only crowd that has largely risen up to support it:

moral prescriptivism,

protective of own comfort at expense of community,

identity politics as praxis,

media consumption as activism and identity,

literalism / inability to parse allegory

inability or unwillingness to acknowledge capacity for evil,

'escapism' as avoidance

User Corseque was also kind enough to transcribe Trick Weekes’ Escapism panel, and so while I’ve already talked previously about much of these bullet points, I think I also need to talk about that last bullet point a little more, as it's relevant to both the discussion around video games as escapism and to the meta politics that underpin the construction of the game itself. And to get to that, I need to first segue to talking about modes of storytelling. Namely: Modernist, Postmodernist, Metamodernist, and what the heck does Conservative Regression have to do with any of this?

Well, fascinatingly, Veilguard may actually be a conservative regression to a modernist storytelling in response to post-modernist irony-poisoned fatigue. But with, you know, a gay paint job.

Here’s what I mean by that.

In popular culture, we’ve been watching alongside the observable conservative cultural retrograde a similar return to a very modernist way of storytelling that was standard in Old Hollywood. Here, I will link a video by Thomas Flight: "Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now"

Some quick and dirty comparisons of Modernism vs Postmodernism, if you decided not to watch the video:

In an irony-poisoned world of post-modern insincerity, this very lack of sincerity has reached a point where people are attempting to return to more modernist types of storytelling. Modernist storytelling is straight-forward, and it appeals to people like Veilguard’s Creative Director, John Epler, who are exhausted by how complex the world is and are nostalgic for this kind of simplicity. But because it is regressive, in the process of doing so we are seeing a loss of nuance, ambiguity, and complexity despite these things not being inherently mutually exclusive with sincerity.

The thing about simplicity, as well, is that it by nature tends to be reductive. It may be comfortable, but that comfort comes at the expense of dimensionality. This is especially true when it comes in the form of stories told by white Americans and Canadians: this simplicity broadly tends to serve the status quo and be insulative in its messaging. Thusly, this is how we see a thread of movigoers who went to see the 2025 Superman film – a film which is relentlessly optimistic, which is uncomplicated and unnuanced (“does not pull its punches”), which reinforces left-liberal politics, and tells you that you are good person for being a certain way, where the director himself says that the film is about “kindness” – and came out feeling that it was subversive because it had clear pro-Palestianian messaging.

Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – and the wider Superhero genre, in general – in many ways have defined much of the storytelling of the last twenty years, and I think it has starved audiences for sincerity. The MCU in particular has become incredibly formulaic and optimized, and is afraid (or, perhaps more specifically, unwilling) to actually say anything that goes against the status quo. Part of that is probably the fact that it's owned by Disney, which has long been The Evil Supercorp of media. But it’s also just this broader pop cultural experience we’re in the midst of. I think this is part of why people are falling over Andor as a Star Wars story made under Disney ownership, where we all know on some level not to expect much from Disney in general, even if we don't understand it explicitly and consciously. I think this is also what made Robert Pattinson’s The Batman feel fresh and interesting, and it may also be why a sincere Superman would have felt like a breath of fresh air when compared to a movie like Deadpool, which was fun and novel at first but lost its luster because fourth wall breaks aren’t really interesting anymore. People are starved for meaning.

The question is, what makes something meaningful? What are the underlying mechanisms behind this?

Postmodernism as a mode of storytelling in the United States was in no small part influenced by the Civil Rights movement, which highlighted that the modern values of the time were not actually universally good. Its fundamental conceit lies in the idea that perhaps we should be skeptical of any broad, overarching narrative which seeks to explain the world. There is no One Truth. There is no One Great Book. Moral prescriptivism does not fit in here. For a protagonist like Rook, they cannot exist in a postmodernist mode of storytelling; and unfortunately for a protagonist like Rook, a postmodernist story mode is baked into the bedrock foundation of Dragon Age as a franchise.

The exhaustion with postmodernist modes of storytelling is certainly valid. Postmodernism has struggled with a deepening and chronically wellspring of critical irony that became afraid to be sincere. The soulless lack of meaning could be felt. The irony became too much, and failed to strike a balance. With that said, however, the foundation of self-awareness which allowed criticism and critical thinking to be a part of the message was necessary, and the answer to combating this supersaturated glut of irony was not, in my opinion, to return to a simplistic and prescriptive mode of storytelling that explains to the audience how things are, posits that this is good, and asks us to cheer for the uncomplicated hero of the story.

Thusly, this kind of intentional flattening does work for a film like like Top Gun: Maverick, but it doesn’t work for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

It’s interesting, then, that John Epler’s praise of Superman includes the idea that it’s “deeply, wonderfully uncynical.” which to me echoes the early reviews of Veilguard which lauded the game as sincere and earnest. I know I am not alone in wondering how this game reviewed so highly when there are so many issues with it from even just a narrative standpoint, and I suspect that one contributing factor may be a reactionary response rooted in postmodernism fatigue that overshadowed the ways that it intrinsically made the game itself incoherent with previous installments of the series.

To be clear, what we are seeing is not classical modernism, because we are definitely in a different era of storytelling. The trappings are there, but the context of how we got there is what makes this phenomena stand part; it feels, specifically, like part of a greater cultural regression. The case of the 2025 Superman film in this context is also really interesting, because it both harks to modernist film and purports to be subversive, which evokes the Hays Code.

To me there appears to be a fundamental difference between modernist media that is subversive in its sincerity whilst operating underneath an oppressive law vs a modernist media climate that is more conservative and conformative as part of a larger cultural retrograde but where there isn't necessarily a legal overhead forcing it. Something like Superman fundamentally does not challenge the status quo; on the other hand, in order to be subversive of the Hays Code, storytellers were forced to be creative with their subterfuge: see, for example, the queer coding in film which arose as a result of depictions of homosexuality being depicted; or the way physique films which were effectively vintage gay pornography films were distributed by skirting the legal grey areas of the Hays Code.

It's been a hot minute since I looked at US film history but to my recollection the Hays Code being lifted coincided with the rise and popularization of the anti-western genre, which was a pretty openly seditious genre, and they didn't have to hide that kind of sentiment because of overt censorship from on high.

The nostalgia for Top Gun: Maverick is especially interesting to me, because it frequently comes with the sentiment, "They don't make them like that anymore." This echoes stories my spouse, who does work in film, has told me about conversations he’s had with older actors who have lamented the lack of real hardboiled westerns as a genre in film and television; gone are the days of Gun Smoke and the Lone Ranger.

And the thing is, westerns were a dead genre walking even when they were real history, and at the hey dey of the genre in the 1950s, it was 100% dead. That’s because the western is fundamentally an American genre that deals with the American nationmaking and creation myth of the colonial frontier. It’s the genre that deals with the idea of being able to move westward and reinvent ourselves, and it's the genre of building civilizations where there aren't any. And that is NOT something that we really accept in the year of our Fen'Harel 2025, especially not in a climate where land back is in discussion and we have acknowledged (grudgingly) the genocides enacted on indigenous peoples in the name of building these colonially settler states.

Furthermore, as postmodernist storymodes began to develop, it was really hard to ignore that when you go west, you still bring your bullshit with you. This is why the anti-western subgenre went OFF after the Hays Code was weakened and then officially lifted. From an aesthetics, I am not generally a fan of the western as a broad genre but one thing I do tend to appreciate about the anti-western genre is that it often takes a look at the way that the western frontier and the mythos of the western relies on this pretext of a so-called clean slate and does not, in fact, have a clean slate. And the thing is, westerns are fundamentally modernist stories, and anti-westerns are fundamentally postmodernist.

If we take a brief segue to talk about another form of speculative fiction – apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction – there’s some interesting similarities to the classic western vis a vis the nature of post-apocalyptic fiction as a new cultural frontier. Both employ this concept of wiping the slate clean: the former by “going west” to a new frontier; the latter by utilizing a calamity of some kind that forces a catastrophic rewrite of the old world to usher in the new world. In theory, they both build something new. And in their own ways, neither really reckon with the social order of the past – a cop out to avoid the responsibility of the ways that our societies and civilizations have failed peoples in the past, and the ways injustices went unaddressed, although I would argue that there are certainly many apocalyptic stories which do use the collapse of civilization to examine how the old world failed them, and what it means to bring that old world forward into the new. (I thought Horizon: Zero Dawn did a respectable job of this, for example.)

The problem leaving these things unaddressed in any capacity is that, if there is ANY memory of what life was like before. If there is ANY concept of the history of before. Then that which precedes these people in the story really must remain a lingering influence; you can break down society but unless you specifically include it in your story premise you can't erase its memory. Humans are cultural species, and the temporal nature of our species is such that our histories, languages, traditions, landscapes, etc, are echoed across time, an inheritance that spans beyond even written language.

In a way, post-apocalyptic fiction relies on a frontier horizon. A new world. They're not 1:1 with westerns, but there are similarities in the construction of a western frontier and a cultural frontier – the new beginning, the idea that you can reshape your destiny in this brave new world. It is unclear whether or not the devs necessarily intended this, but the premise of frontier exploration rooted in the western genre as both a physical frontier and a cultural frontier actually opened the gate for some really interesting explorations of the way these societies collapse and rebuild.

The problem inherent to the western genre trope of the lone gunslinger is made glaringly obvious when contrasted with the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic genre: that is, that The Man isn't an individual, not really. As a rule people struggle to grasp the ways in which our temporal experiences are influenced by a much, much wider period of time and spanse of events than just the immediacy of proximal existence. Most can understand how we still experience the echoes of the collapse of the Roman Empire, and it wouldn't shock me even remotely if we are still influenced by the Bell Breaker Culture. Hell, our DNA is still influenced by Neanderthals, which are believed to have faded into extinction some 40,000 years ago. Peoples are interconnected; they do not exist in complete, total isolation.

So, even if civilization collapsed in an apocalyptic scenario or a revolutionary scenario (girl… the blight..), people would still behave in accordance with their existing prejudices, and bring that into the New World Order™️. It's not a hard reboot, and the work still needs to be put in. You can't scaffold this critical labor of addressing injustice and inequality by sweeping through with revolution and the violent reshaping of society, or the total collapse of society in wake of a great disaster. Failure to do this means that the end of civilization is not a reset, but a dooming of the future to be trapped by the mistakes of the past.

I can’t help but notice a level of regression in Veilguard that mirrors the issues I see with the commonalities between westerns and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction. According to DATV and the developers, southern Thedas was effectively nuked by a category 7 apocalyptic calamity – scorched earth, good day sir! And the follow-up? "Given the state of Thedas at the end of DATV, Minrathous has become the diplomatic hub for the entire continent." Slavery is magically ended, the Veil is magically fixed, we’ve probably solved the issue of the circles because they’re apparently just schools now, and now they made the hates-elves-loves-slavery-opposes-the-southern-chantry-been-at-war-with-the-qunari-for-300-years city is now the the site of the Thedas UN. AND the elves got a win. Somehow. Don’t worry about it. :)

I feel like I have probably shared this post before, but I’ll link it again – on why I felt that the endgame for Veilguard was a deeply fucked worldstate for the elves, not the least of which was: we just [check notes] gave every surviving nation in the entire continent, which already oppressed elves and considered them subhuman, including the fucking dominant religion, a new, more immediate reason to fucking hate their guts because [check notes] again, it’s elves that are responsible for all blights including the two in recent living memory. And I am somehow supposed to accept that, in this post-apocalyptic scenario, everybody is going to simply reinvent themselves and they won’t bring any of their bullshit forward with them to this new world order. Somehow. Harold hide the pain.

Modernist regression also stands apart as distinct from metamodernism, where the former is a retrograde and the other is an attempt at a synthesis of what Gregg Henriques terms different "cultural logics" such as modern idealism and postmodern skepticism, modern sincerity and postmodern irony, and other seemingly opposed concepts. A film like Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) has emerged as a response to the internet and globalism, which blew the doors wide open to give us access to the perspectives, opinions, and narratives of millions (billions) of people with completely different and often conflicting lives. This awareness – this plurality of meaning – is a significant part of what defines metamodernism.

“Then we saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, which feels like the culmination of something new. It explodes into a chaotic whirlwind of film styles and references, declaring everything meaningless in the midst of this chaos and then somehow still finding meaning there."

This is also a very similar thema to the first season of True Detective (2014) (one of my all-time favorite pieces of media, by the way), which is a deeply cynical story with deeply cynical characters which grapples with the existentialism of the meaningless of existence (“Time is a flat circle.”) but ends with an extremely sincere and hopeful conclusion – the idea that, maybe it is all meaningless. But maybe the point is that we make our own meaning, anyway. Maybe we choose to be a small, glittering light in the night sky. The night sky is indeed dark and vast and filled with the great empty nothing, but as the protagonist Cohle puts it, “Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light's winning."

What makes the existence of metamodernism and these kinds of stories really interesting is that it means that choosing to tell a modernist story in 2024 when we do have that access, that storyworld framework, is a deliberate rejection of all of those alternate perspectives. This is also what makes Veilguard feel so regressive – it could have told a metamodernist story, but chose not to.

The other thing about Veilguard that makes it incoherent is that it’s ostensibly supposed to feel earnest and cynical, but it still ended up being a deeply cynical piece of media. It’s thesis, for example, is essentially "nothing can be changed" -- but the game doesn't frame this failstate as a tragedy like say cyberpunk does, which is a pretty glaring omission. I think you could make a case that they were going for a more modernist storymode but the underpinning was fundamentally cynical both in the construction of the storyworld (and therefore it was incongruous with its own identity) and in its meta construction (see: Epler's approach to Anaris and Solas, below, but likely also on a much wider scale). Where a metamodernist story might try to synthesize these seemingly opposing concepts (idealism/skepticism, irony/sincerity, etc), in this game these elements are in conflict, like oil and water. What’s worse is that I’m not sure the devs were really aware that this was what was happening.

(You can read more 'Psychic Damage' quotes as she calls them on user Sunlight-Shunlight's blog here)

There's something possibly interesting in how its construction of earnestness is directly informed by the cynicism it's trying to combat, similar to how we see that Western atheism is general directly formed in shape by Christianity and is often very specifically anti-Christian, rather. You can feel how the game was constructed to be safe and to ward off the kind of criticism fandom has levied against BioWare over the years – which I find reactive and weird. See: the Lords of Fortune being ethical pirates who consult one (1) Dalish keeper about cultural artifacts; see: the Antivan Crows are just freedom fighters who definitely don’t traffic in slavery or child abuse. At its core, Veilguard is just irony-poisoned meaninglessness with a modernist earnestness paintjob slapped atop it, but hey! At least it's fun to play ❤️ yay ❤️

COVID-19 and RETVRN

One of the things that has struck me over and over as I have examined this game is the emphasis on the status quo, and the emphasis on returning to the status quo. More than once, I wondered if it was echoing the kind of neoliberal political response to both the first Donald Trump presidency in the United States and to the disruptive nature of the 2020 BLM protests, the Land Back movement, and the broader COVID-19 response. The Veilguard was rebooted as a multiplayer game in 2018, the COVID-19 pandemic ~officially~ began circa February 2020, and the pivot back to a singleplayer game took place sometime during 2020-2021. Much of the game would have been made remotely, during the height of the pandemic, when people were still social distancing and RTO mandates hadn’t been rolled out.

So. there are two parts to this. The first is the kind of neoliberal hopecore in the face of a widespread social stressor. The second is a desire to return to normalcy, but, really, truly, RETVRN.

From Weekes, on the Escapism panel:

“Trick Weekes: So I can only really define escapism for me because I think it has to vary from person to person. There are people for whom escapism is the cozy romance or a cozy mystery. I honestly really like fight scenes. And so for me, escapism does include fight scenes, but escapism for me kind of goes to… the promise that it's gonna be okay. There's the promise of the happy ending. I personally really like the feeling of being embedded in a different place. It doesn't even have to necessarily be a fantasy or a science fiction setting, but just someplace that is really different from the world I experience. So that I'm, you know, yet when people are having problems, they're new and different problems that have nothing to do with the reality I have to live in day to day. And so that combination is what works for me as escapism, going to some place different and having excitement and adventure and romance, but with a promise from the author or the game designer that it's going to be okay.”

A very annoying, very white, very liberal response to the pandemic and the social unrest during it was indeed a kind of hopecore where they were not hoping for a better and more equal world, but rather they were hoping that they could experience a return to normalcy, where “normal” was a societal equilibrium wherein they did not experience the level of emotional distress they were then-presently experiencing. For so many of these people, this was their first experience with being impacted by a widespread systemic failure.

The way this parallels with Veilguard is that we have in our hands a game where the ending is a world made manifest where the remainder of the main characters are without emotional distress or demands. If you contextualize it with BLM and land back, what we have isn’t really, truly a hope to an end to systemic racism, or systemic economic inequality, or fascism. It’s a kind of hope that boils down to “I hope you people who keep making me feel bad about not doing enough will shut the fuck up and leave me alone.”

The pandemic was a chance for our societies to reevaluate how they functioned and how we might be able to change it for the better, and then to actually do that. It involved asking real questions about how these systems in placed failed so many people, and what could actually be done about them to prevent something like this from happening again. There could have been a real momentum coming off the first few years of the pandemic, and it could have really changed a lot of things for a lot of people – for the better, we would hope. David Graeber wrote a short article on this exact subject that I am choosing here to share: Please Do Not Go Back To Sleep.

The problem is, this kind of change is antithetical to the concept of a “return to normalcy.”

And the problem is, the return to normalcy is a return to the status quo of systems that allowed this kind of systemic failure to happen in the first place. In the US, especially, the way liberals capitulated back to a comfortable, complacent status quo comfort did incredible damage to our ability to mount a meaningful response to the way people suffered and continue to suffer from covid, and I think there’s an argument to be made that they are more culpable than than even the Trump-esque Republicans, the latter have always advocated for this kind of world, whereas the former made a conscious choice to cede any opportunity to radically agitate for a better world.

And I think at this point I am bringing a certain “a progressive desire to return to normalcy is really a neoliberal desire to RETVRN” that a lot of self-styled progressives really aren’t going to like.

Return • verb 1 a : to go back or come back again b : to go back in thought, practice, or condition : revert

Derivative of this, RETVRN, spelled with a ‘V’ instead of a ‘U’, is used to intentionally evoke Roman aesthetics; it is used to signify a desire to "return" to an imagined past, one which is frequently linked to socially conservative, ethnonationalist, or even fascist views and which often rejects modern societal norms and technological advancements.

For neoliberalism, any kind of RETVRN surely evokes a fantastical reality where the marriage of capitalist venture and liberal social mores is functional and stable. It’s the kind of marriage that keeps the market happy and ensures that the global neoliberal democracy project is in place to prevent the rise of fascism (or, more broadly speaking, totalitarianism) once more. That modern neoliberalism project was explicitly devised to ensure a strong democratic state and healthy capitalist market so as to prevent the kind of political and economic instability which created opportunities for the Nazi Party in Germany to rise to power. The idea that neoliberalism could be ideological was an opprobrium; it was designed, instead, to engage through social aspects of life—namely, morality.

The actual reality is. Well.

In the context of covid, return to normalcy is a return to what allowed Donald Trump to be elected the first time around. Return to normalcy is what allowed Donald Trump to be elected the second time around. Return to normalcy quite literally has facilitated the naked, mask-off rise of fascism, which the very neoliberalist project was meant to prevent! This goes hand in hand with the way that the liberal veneer of law and order was eviscerated and also the way it also laid out a red carpet for fascists to seize on populist narratives and governmental control because, as it has been proven again and again and again, liberalism will never, ever meaningfully combat fascism.

Because here’s the thing. If neoliberalism is the praxis of people who are moral and just, and it is used to construct a system around these beliefs while also continuing to enshrine a system of capitalism, which intrinsically relies on the continued existence of hierarchies and inequality, then you have created a system that posits that that there is a case where the continuing existence of hierarchies and inequality are moral and just. As Hayek outlined in his 1961 address on The Moral Element in Free Enterprise, “...so long as we keep within the accepted rules, moral pressure can be brought on us only through the esteem of those whom we ourselves respect and not through the allocation of material reward by a social authority.” In other words: if you are niceys with me, I will be niceys with you, and you will therefore deserve to have access to economic prosperity and the safety that comes with it. If you are not niceys, then you are a degenerate reprobate and you deserve to suffer.

This is evidentially a system that is vulnerable to stressors. Morality within this neoliberal framework also necessitates an in-group and out-group dynamic that becomes increasingly smaller as people fail to meet the criterion for what counts as moral and niceys, and what is in truth a liberal facade is prone to slipping when the thinning line between the mask and the face of the system prompts them to engage in tactics that are, really, truly, not very niceys. From revealing the violence and engaging in the authoritarianism that has always lay beneath to the mass gaslighting and manipulation by the state and media apparatus/cultural institutions to the bloodthirsty liberals trying to mask their evangelical attachment to the system in an increasingly thin veneer of moral righteousness and sensible politics.

And you know what? When you decide people aren’t playing niceys the right way with you, and so you decide to stop playing niceys with them, you are, in fact, partially culpable for the deterioration of the ability to communicate and built community. The fact that so many neoliberals cannot understand this and insist that they are the victim or persecuted party in this dynamic in my opinion betrays an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge one’s own capacity for evildoing.

Elliot Sang’s video “The truth behind MAGA regret” deals with this topic, and specifically this liberal obsession, this liberal glee, with the concept of “fuck around and find out.” There comes a smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority, a finger-wagging “I told you so.” that doesn’t actually do anything beyond be self-congratulatory and self-reinforcing of one’s own worldview. It’s arrogant, and it also ignores the real, systemic motivations behind why these kinds of politics gain support in the first place that also conveniently and by design overlooks the fact that the neoliberal project does not meet everyone’s needs adequately.

I actually feel the same way about this kind of critique of "they're so stupid" that I do with the way I do about left-libs who periodically crow about how Trump or Putin or who-the-fuck-ever is "the laughingstock of the world" when it's not actually a cogent critique, it's just a put-down that makes them feel smarter about themselves while completely ignoring the fact that it's meaningless and won't actually stop these political actors and their politics from, like, doing the bad things that supposedly are stupid or comical. It's so ineffectual! And it also completely ignores the way these supposed laughingstocks of the world are materially harming real people. Where is the empathy, and why is it being expensed in order to uphold your own moral purity and intellectual superiority?

And like. Here’s the other crucial part of this that these kinds of gotcha’s obscure. Even if it does seem stupid. Even if it does seem comical. Even if these things do seem ridiculous. Crucially? They work.

The ideology might be dumb as in nonsensical, illogical, hypocritical, contradictory, etc.. Modern fascists do look dumb as hell, their fashion is bad and the manosphere is stupidly insecure and tradwifism is bizarre and oh my god imaging having to calmly explain what a groyper is how embarrassing is that and, and, and – and it WORKS. That’s the point. Like yes, the aesthetics are also often stupid but that is intentional, that is a feature both because it's an appeal to the populism as exists today but also to obfuscate what's actually going on underneath the hood. It's the silly teehee we're just doing funny memes and edgy dark humor. It’s the plausible deniability right up until the moment where they decide to go mask off. We're just funny little guys.

The reality is that the people enacting the policy to proliferate the ideology are not dumb. They are not stupid, they are not uneducated. They have law degrees from Yale and decades of experience in politics. They have an incredible understanding of the weak points of neoliberal democracy and of the psychological landscape of their followers, and they are expertly using both in concert with this “dumb” ideology as a tool to amass support from the people who do truly believe, and they are doing it incredibly effectively. They have quite literally done more effective, consequential strategic “governing” in ten months than the Democratic Party has done in the last fifty years. This intellectual superiority complex that left-libs espouse is one of the main tools used to turn their support base against politicians and policies which might (marginally) enact better policies for them because they prey on the hurt that comes from that infamous Democratic Elite Condescending Intellectualism.

“Fascism is the most counterrevolutionary movement in existence. A violent mass that fights to preserve the status quo of the nation. No change. By placing themselves in an imaginary hierarchy and deeming their group superior, fascists justify violence against others to create a sense of pseudo revolution, without actually changing the system at all. We all know something is deeply wrong. But to embrace an ideology that maintains this very system [this status quo] is not revolutionary. It’s reactionary.” – Ben Hoerman, The Aesthetics of Fascism

And the more we call them dumb, the more that we buy into this intellectual neoliberal project of moral and intellectual superiority which enshrines the status quo as sacrosanct, the more we are unable to see how these very politics and these very moralizations feed into fascism, the less prepared we are to fight the actual fascists right in front of our face.

Again, there is this kind of liberal complacency in the face of the empire that intentionally fosters a disconnect in understanding the role of a populace’s general complacency while living in an empire and which obscures the ways this passivity facilitates the empire. If they are moral, and just, and right, and they are keeping on keeping on with the great neoliberal democratic project, the inherently superior intelligence of their project stand as a bulwark against a repeat of fascism. Denial is quite literally baked into it.

The other thing to consider here is the impact impact of covid-19 and the way conservatism has proliferated in online spaces and especially in online fandom spaces as a consequence of lockdown. Matt Bernstein and Kat Tenbarge posted a video titled “Why Is Everyone One Back Into The Closet” where they lay down the broad strokes of this:

MATT: “I mentioned that only to say I do think COVID uh and lockdown specifically in 2020 was such a traumatizing time for so many people in so many different directions. We saw so many people become, you know, antivax conspiracy theorists. We saw so many people go down so many conspiratorial rabbit holes. And I think this is in line with a lot of that, the amount of people who went under these like new religious journeys.” KAT: “Yes. And I want to like talk about this more as we go along, but it's like the fact that these things happened in like the 2020 era is no coincidence because you saw all of these things that were already starting to happen on the internet. You saw the beginning of this like pendulum swing toward conservative culture online. That was already happening before 2020. But 2020 accelerated everything. All of a sudden it went from like being very online, being extremely online, being a huge fan of YouTube, etc. It was still somewhat niche. For young people, for people who grew up online, being in YouTube culture was already sort of a majority experience. But what happened in 2020 was like you saw this massive acceleration in like across all demographics because of like the conditions of lockdown and quarantine. were spending so much more time online than before. And because of these other like sociopolitical, economic, cultural factors that were happening in the wider world, you saw this intense burst of conservative content. And YouTube in particular was primed for this because in the decade leading up to the pandemic, there were so many career influencers who were building these conservative networks online. And this is the pipeline that was set in place that so many people fell down. And this aspect of it, this like conversion therapy aspect of it is very unexplored compared to like the manosphere.”

And what’s really interesting about this to me is that, prior to the pandemic, we saw Trick ostensibly on the same page of understanding that Solas's story was tragic and in general appearing to have a grasp of the kind of narratives that Dragon Age fans in general were looking for, but then the pandemic happens and it's scary and upsetting and so they retreat to escapism media where the messages are hopeful and they know that everything is going to be okay in the end. This is happening in the context of a developer/writing group that retreats to social distancing and remote work and is very much terminally online in a fandom climate within a broader social media climate that has seen an explosion of "normie" participation that has broadly swung the compass of discourse to a more conservative modality, and then Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases and it has a message that is “hopeful” where “everything is okay in the end” and it seems largely unaware of how steeped in conservativism it is.

When people say they miss lockdown, it often seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what they miss, why they miss it, why they don’t currently have what they miss, and what the context of that experience was. It isn’t that they miss lockdown itself; rather, what they miss is the freedom of time and energy to explore hobbies and practice skills and care for their homes and go outside to touch grass in a manner which is normally not accessible to the average person in the imperial core under late stage capitalism. Crucially, however, we must remember that this destabilized the entire world, and the context of having that apparent freedom is that at least 6 million people died. It is important to remember that this was effectively a case of making sourdough while the world burns.

Here, I think again of Weekes’ talk on Empires, and of the entreaty to please think of the people buying bread in the market. Remember:

self care is resistance under the empire

just showing up as a queer person is all you have to do to be radical

resisting fascism is whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy in the immediate moment (because you’re gay)

baking bread under the empire is, therefore, radical

A pair of unfathomable ancient and ontologically evil elven mares are loose, there’s a turbo double blight afoot, the entirety of southern Thedas is getting nuked to hell, all of the major cities up north are under attack, and we’re dealing with the sword of Damocles in the form of a catastrophically unstable magical Veil which could hit critical mass at any point in the near future and spontaneously collapse on its own, unleashing untold devastation on the entirety of an already beleaguered Thedas.

But we have time to go on a nice little coffee date in a cute cat cafe. Bellara is getting caught up on her naps. Lucanis doesn’t have to worry about his supply chain being disrupted and he can cook all of his fancy Antivan meals. Bellara gets to enjoy taking the naps she so loves and enjoys. Harding as the time to take Emmrich on a camping adventure in southern Thedas, and he’s very excited because he always wanted to travel to Ferelden. Davrin is always able to go back to beautiful Arlathan and take a moment to vibe in the woods away from it all.

During the lockdown, the mood around most of these little hobbies was a very Could A Depressed Person Make This attitude which was often a mask for varying degrees of terror and/or denial which were barely concealed as people struggled to figure out how to cope. The Veilguard, by contrast, is done with zero self reflection. Aren’t they so lucky that they get to go camping? It’s it great that these little things they do are framed as necessary and revolutionary acts of joy? Don’t you know that taking time for yourself in the midst of their enormous humanitarian crises is important because you can't fight the good fight on an empty tank if your inner peace is disrupted? Thank goodness it was possible to access a very exclusive eluvian network and be able to leave the worst of the devastation and go for a nice little camping retreat in the middle of a crisis in order to touch some grass and rebalance the chakras. Stop saying we had the privilege to be do that while a lot of people were trapped in the middle of it of the worst of it. But you don’t understand. It was So Hard for them to socially distance from the majority of the consequences while they lived in their cozy little Lighthouse with their friends.

Don’t you know how hard it was to have to do remote work and zoom calls with the god of lies during the blight pandemic?

The game fucks with the lore of the previous games so that the present blight can be scary but also basically manageable instead of existential threat and category seven natural disaster. Its danger is minimized, and the CDC has removed the blight guidelines from the website. It’s back to normal and it’s okay now you can return to office I mean go outside now because covid I mean the pandemic I mean the blight is over now! Thank all secular reasoning that Rook and co have ensured that we live in a post-blight world where it has been calcified and neutralized as a thing of the past!

It’s back to normal where the Veil is still in place and people are still endangered by its existence and the political structures which were created around this systemic issue are still in place and the stratifications of class and race and magical ability are still in place and we’ve simply decided that they don’t matter and won’t address how this is a normal that comes at the expense of the safety and wholeness of huge swathes of the population of Thedas (but at least the elves got a win…).

Listen. Revolution and wide scale social change is very scary and it’s hard to make reforms work when there are these evil corrupt politicians in the way. And I am not going to advocate for violence because this affects the everyday people. There was this one guy who wanted to take radical measures against the plague and equalize society but he’s not playing niceys the way we require him to so we’ve banished him to jail I mean Omelas I mean the Fade and we’re never going to see him again. Very sad… ANYWAY. What if this plague shows up and the “good guys” are able to inoculate us with their Pfizer joining booster shots. Wouldn’t it be great if, now that the evil is defeated and the entire evilbad Tevinter Magisterium filled with supremacist Venatori has been annihilated by a random Act Of God™ (remember when Trump and Bolsonaro had covid at the same time and for a brief period in time we could collectively wait to see if a random Act Of God™ might kill two horrible right-winger leaders in one fell swoop? Pepperidge BioWare remembers) and now the good members of the Magisterium which are still around – like Dorian and Maevaris and Kamala Harris and their dem allies – can fix everything with their reformist policies that will definitely work now.

Times are bad. Be Hopeful.

Weekes, again, from their panel on Escapism:

Trick Weekes: "Well, I mean, I think it's a question of balance. I think you have to do what's right for you. The question is, to some extent, what gap in your life are you trying to fill with art right now? I don't know if this is 100% true, but one of the things that I had heard was when the economic times in the United States are good, lots of jobs, the price of groceries is reasonable, then people kind of like dystopias because they have the resources to explore. If their lives are more comfortable, then people on the whole have the resources to explore the more negative stuff and process some of that. Whereas when times are hard, escapist movies and escapist books become more popular because people are looking for a way out. It's not that I don't think there's a problem if you consume only one or the other. I think it's that if you're consuming only one or the other, that's more likely a sign that your life is kind of out of balance. It's an indication of something wrong somewhere else rather than the cause of the problem. I will say, I think if you consume nothing but dark, despairing stuff, it does make it harder to think in terms of the possibilities of a brighter future."

“Times are bad. Be hopeful.” HOW are times bad, exactly? WHAT makes something hopeful in response, precisely?

Paired with the quote on hope’s role in escapism, in some ways this is the distillation of my critique of Veilguard: a hopeful message of good triumphs over evil but it kind of just… paints over the context of what might have made it hopeful and ignores how this in fact makes it pretty bleak as a message. You cannot pare away the context and the nuance and expect for it to have the impact you need if you want a message of Hope. You especially cannot do this when you are ignoring the worldbuilding and the lore which has already set your story up for some manner of tragedy.

I further think there’s something particularly disingenuous about this kind of framing of hope; in general I don’t think people with more liberal political frameworks have “revolutionary” conceptions of what joy and hope themselves mean and how their own ideas are shaped by hegemony and individualism. Hope especially is very much still seen as a very passive “wishing upon a star” type of thing rather than an active hope that exists through the social interactions and counter-hegemonic social relations that can be practiced on a day to day level. Like politics, hope is not a passive thing we experience. It’s not something we go into a book or a game or a movie and come out with as a vague, nebulous sense of. And to me hope is related to escapism, where escapism is the drifting possibilities and hope is grounded. Hope is something that we bring back with us to our reality. Hope is something we strive toward.

I was writing about the escapism of Dragon Age: The Veilguard as far back as April this year, and I think anyone who thinks about it with any seriousness can see that it was a deeply avoidant piece of media in so many capacities. I quoted Ursula K. Le Guin and J. R. R. Tolkien but I’m going to extract the Tolkien quote here because I think it’s particularly salient in light of what we’re seeing in DATV as a piece of media, the discourse around DATV, and the authorial framework that went into DATV:

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. […] Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” - J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy Stories”

What we are seeing from these talks and from the surrounding discourse is the proverbial Flight of the Deserter – the mechanism of using media as a tool of avoidance, rather than a tool of escape, of liberty. As I quoted Le Guin earlier: “…if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.” If we are to seek messages of hope, if we are to seek a better tomorrow, we cannot escape from, but we must escape to. In a sense I had always kind of felt that Dragon Age was a story which had a grounded hope: not necessarily that all of these horrible things will change and we will achieve a utopia, but that beauty can be made regardless of the horrors we perceive, in finding and practicing our shared humanity and in trying, anyway. It feels bad, then, to see this replaced by an abstraction of what amounts to But What If Omelas Was Good, Actually.

Di Carlee Gomes wrote a thought-provoking piece of film criticism in The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-Mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire . The whole piece is effectively a scathing condemnation of Veilguard despite having been written a year prior to the game’s release. But really, Veilguard is emblematic of a deeper problem across the breadth of our current media culture, and the ways in which both the creation and the engagement with media does not exist in a vacuum. I’ve chosen to extract some relevant passages from the larger body of the essay which cover much of what I have already talked about, but I highly recommend you go and read the whole essay.

“It is a revolving door of commodification and alienation — commodification of ideas, of bodies, of feelings, and alienation from ourselves, from our own bodies, from others. The way we consume and talk about films and art in this hyper-mediated environment (largely on individualized and individuated digital platforms) has not only impacted how that media and art is made (the modes of production), but also what types of media and art get prioritized (what gets made at all)…”

[...]

“The current state of cultural and material decline plays an important role in the shift toward Puritanism in media and art, in consumer appetite, and in the political posture of the State. That is to say, with the compounding crises we are bombarded with (everything from climate disaster to rampant racialized police violence to genocide) as a part of our daily lives under late capitalism, the need for escape, and indeed, the need for that escape to be completely unchallenging and non-confrontational, has become imperative. Moreover, as control over our own material realities becomes less and less feasible, the last lone place we believe we can exercise agency is within the landscape of that which we consume. This has resulted in the consuming public approaching all media and art with a moral imperative — that which we consume must be perfectly virtuous, sanitized of all problematic or complicated ideas and depictions, because it has become the stand-in for our very realities, our very political action as citizens; consuming has become our praxis.”

[...]

“The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by “unproblematic” artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and because it’s seemingly all that’s left. We’ve been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that’s “ours” in late capitalism, and as a result it’s become a stand-in for real (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today – consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is “problematic” or not, because for us the stakes are that high now.”

[…]

“These critics (and audiences today generally speaking) are only interested in a sanitized, moralized, and ideally, completely non-controversial experience with their media and art, an experience they readily commodify into an easily digestible opinion (or tweet, meme, headline) to exist as an artifact online, one that’s representative and reflective of their personal political and moral ideologies. They want a film (just like any other commodity they consume) to stand as a totem, a badge, for their specific belief system rather than challenge it (or not serve as representative at all).

[…]

“What’s lost when movies just become a series of memeable one-liners and action scenes that can be distilled down into a gif? What’s lost when the necessary implication of the audience in the experience of viewing a film is removed and we become merely passive consumers of moving images that stir nothing in us, that don’t engage our bodies, our hearts, our minds, or shake us from our late capitalist catatonia? Why does it matter that we now only interact with trauma narratives through prepackaged IP nuggets delivered to us neatly in a series like WandaVision (created by Jac Schaeffer, 2021), or the Halloween franchise? What’s lost when the sex scene disappears from our movies, when the very presence of sexual desire and bodily expression incites revulsion? What’s lost is our connection to one another beyond the fetters of capitalism, indeed the very thing that makes us human. What’s lost is our “sense of the real” (Telotte), the visceral and radical experiences that Verhoeven’s Hollywood films, even and especially through the persistence and abundance of sex scenes, were dedicated to recovering, all of which today’s cinema is inevitably without. What’s lost is the last thing that stands between us and the system that forever seeks to turn us into nothing more than another product.”

A lot to like, but one thing that did stick out with me was the “religion of consumerism” that pervades American media and pop culture habits, and actually while I was watching the afore-linked video by Matt Bernstein with Kat Tenbarge titled “Why Is Everyone One Back Into The Closet,” another thing which that popped out at me was their discussion around the YouTuber Lohanthony, his platform as an online queer influencer, and his love of the musician Lana Del Ray in the context of his apparent born-again Christian conversion therapy.

“You have these really passionate queer people who find this sense of community and purpose and belong in pop culture and in the community they find through social media. And when you reach this point of inner turmoil, I think Christianity can be very attractive, because you’re just replacing the pop star you love or the genre of content that you’re participating in with this Christian faith.”

There is thus something to be said here in that if the goal of capitalism is the enclosure of all aspects of life and the alienation of labor for endless accumulation, then this is fundamentally about not only the physical enclosure under and towards which capitalism operates (access to the commons, etc) but also that of consciousness. How to think, how to feel, etc etc etc. As we see an increasing slide toward LLM generative content as a replacement for art, it becomes increasingly more apparent that this so-called AI art is the epitome of capitalism in that it ultimately seeks to redefine art as and create endless slop for purposes of soulless consumption rather than as a creative and enlightening process of labor which fosters connection. And this is, perhaps obviously, perfect for fascist ideology because fascism is a fundamentally dehumanizing experience already focused on the aesthetic outcome. The fact that neoliberalism facilitates this and is unable to mount a coherent defense to this is, likewise, a feature. As Stafford Beer put it: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).

All of this together informs the reasons for why a lot of the positive reception of the The Veilguard feels particularly incoherent: it is unable to articulate what exactly a better tomorrow looks like; see This Game Kills Fascism (but we don’t know what fascism looks like) (we can’t articulate what a world beyond fascism looks like) (but the good guys win, and it’s queer.) The game itself twists itself into multiple incoherent positions and similarly cannot articulate exactly what a better tomorrow looks like. It’s one where good guys win and bad guys lose – it’s unapologetically queer – and it fails utterly to grapple with several central thema of the story world itself, which is the nature of empires and the nature of oppression. Instead, much like slavery and religious bigotry and class stratification in this game, they simply disappear. It is protective of one’s own capacity for evil and it claims diversity and hope and a praxis of inherent moral goodness that definitionally must come at the expense of others, but because it is positioned as a good thing, gymnastics are required to paper over it. The game itself is so mired in this inability to understand the roots of the belief system it stems from and in the refusal to acknowledge a viable alternative exists, and much of the positive reception uncritically mirrors this. At the core, despite the framework of this game and its reception as The Queerest Game Ever being supposedly progressive, is the misunderstanding that it is actually far more regressive and conservative in the structural framework in which it is both delivered and received.

A perfect example of this is this critique of veilguard-critical critique:

"…I wanted to add to this too because I read an essay that was complaining about Veilguard's punitive approach to justice as a critique because Solas winds up in the prison he made which….I mean sure Jan but Solas made the prison it's his own fault lmfao. If he wasn't all about punishment, whether the Evanuris deserved it or not, we wouldn't be here. That's Solas's entire problem with being trapped in the past much like the Evanuris. Cause he's one of them. He thinks in the archaic, overly punitive and conqueror mindset of Thedas' early days, the shadow of which is still hanging over Thedas. (btw this is like the entire point of VG and why Rook is the protagonist vs The Inquisitor) Compare it directly to the choice Hawke gets at the end of DA2 with Anders where you can decide to kill him(which I do more often than not) like that's punitive justice because these games have always had that kind of centrism. Look at the Landsmeet or the Inquisitor for this as well. Again it's a direct example of how VG pushed the neddle less of center for how DA games are written compared to older entries. If the writers really wanted to keep up with Thedas tradition as we knot it the option to kill Solas would be there. Rook is quite literally breaking a centuries' old tradition of punishment and retribution that they inherit directly from the Evanuris and it's crazy how many people missed the message either from not playing the game, having poor analytical skills, or being so mad Solas wasn't lauded as a hero and allowed to kill a lot of innocent people they missed the whole point."

This user is someone whose identity I am once again deliberately obscuring to keep them anonymous. But let's take a moment to actually look at what they're saying (…sigh. A critique of a critique of a critique.) By their logic, if Solas is operating within this archaic, overly punitive mindset, and this is the mindset with which he both made the prison and imprisoned the Evanuris -> what makes Rook different when the imprison Solas? Conversely, if the the thesis is that Veilguard is has had the compass of Thedas moved leftward to espouse more progressive politics because Solas gets a lifetime sentence instead of the death penalty like Anders, wouldn't that make Solas progressive because he imprisoned the Evanuris instead of killing them outright? Wouldn't that make the Inquisitor progressive for keeping Blackwall in prison, or imprisoning Corypheus in the Fade instead of killing him outright?

The goalpost here is being moved partway through this argument to define this "this archaic, overly punitive mindset" as generally opting to kill rather than imprison (which… did you know Rook can also choose to kill people in this game as a form of punishment…? The mayor from D'Meta's Crossing comes to mind) and it doesn’t make any logical sense if you are attempting to construct a basic “if x, then y” logical argument. It only makes sense if your default setting is that Rook is a good person and does good things and this game is leftist and timely and moves the needle leftward – and you have to say whatever you can to try and justify that positionality. And as user Mythalism pointed out, this post is a really good example of people who are unable to fathom a moral reality that exists inside their Western Protestant one. For this person, justice and punishment travels solely on linear scale of freedom to incarceration to death and can only move forward and backward on those train tracks. And in this case, the center point on the tracks is the best one because it’s moderate.

And in the midst of all this, the reality is that Dragon Age: The Veilguard realistically ends in a failstate, which you are not even allowed to acknowledge. The world is in tatters. You have reinforced the status quo of a Veiled world and the hierarchies of power that dominate modern Thedas. You have achieved a “return to normalcy.” You cannot acknowledge how tragic this return is, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy of the setting, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy of how many people died to achieve it, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy that the Veil is still in place, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy that Morrigan has been posssessd by her sexual abuser, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy of the unaddressed rage and grief of the ancient elves and the Dalish elves and the city elves, you cannot acknowledge the tragedy that in order to achieve this “normal,” you have condemned someone to Omelas in perpetuity.

As user Mythalism put it to me, “…the core of tragedy is empathy. Not necessarily brought on because we like the character or think they deserve empathy but because we are all mortals who experience grief and rage and unfairness at the confusing and terrifying whims of fate/the universe/the gods and we are united in that lack of control and tragedy reminds us of that unity and makes us feel less alone. […] But Veilguard does not have empathy at its core. Instead it has derision and ‘that will never be me because I’m Good’ as its driving narrative force and it relies on character likeability or clumsy moral framing using identity politics to provoke empathy in players rather than tapping in to that shared mortal experience of vulnerability to fate, and as a result, even if his story has the makings of a tragedy on the surface, it would take a fundamental rewrite to successfully evoke the catharsis of tragedy through Solas.”

User acquired-elfroot addends to this with, “There's this smug refusal to relate to a character that's made Terrible Mistakes, and this level of over-identification with Rook who never feels any real regret in their life or has made any mistakes that anyone has ever truly blamed them for. And it's this unwillingness to connect with the very human very tragic aspects of Solas's story in favor of claiming an imagined moral high ground over them, which signals them as virtuous – they don't want to go down into the pits of themselves, they would rather be reassured that they're ontologically good.”

Put more simply, in Veilguard we are presented with a 2024 Witch In The Alps escapism narrative to deal with the horrors of life in lieu of anything resembling a Greek tragic play, the latter of which quite literally is meant to serve the exact same cathartic function but by delving into it rather than running the other way. In short: one is the Escape of the Prisoner, and one is the Flight of the Deserter. One takes as many people with them as it can, and one is concerned primarily for their own escape. If there is empathy in Veilguard, it is a limited empathy, a conditional empathy, only for those we like and approve of and who behave and think the right way.

Coupling these things with the fact that this game very much was made by and made for a very specific white queer experience that comes at the expense of pretty much everyone and everything else serves to illuminate exactly whyit had been so important in certain meta discourse that this is The Queer Game™ and that it is inherently subversive and radical for its queerness. It's queer in a very centrist white neoliberal way which prioritizes the comfort of this group. If a Muslim queer person says that they do not see themselves in this game, and that the game expresses bigotry against them specifically, well, that’s unfortunately not as important as the fact that it represents some (white, liberal) queers.

And so what we're seeing is that criticism of the game isn't taken as media analysis but as criticism of the people who like it – because their sense of identity and their conceptualization of political engagement and activism is so wrapped up in what media they engage with / consume. Which is why I think that, while obviously extremely tasteless on many levels, Weekes' commentary around Ida Cook's romance novels is completely congruent with what's happening in both the construction of the game itself and also the reception to the game. There exists an operational framework where attempting to make a cozy fantasy game IS comparable to a romance author writing cozy romance books, because the media itself is an expression of the political activism.

If you are working backwards, the logic (insofar as it goes) is:

Ida Cook fought empire

Ida Cook wrote books to fight empire

Ida Cook wrote escapist fiction to fight empire

Therefore, comfort/entertainment fiction opposes empire

Therefore, This Game Kills Fascism

And to some extent this is a white queer problem but more broadly speaking I think part of it is also that within a system defined by consumption, there's a very tight coupling of what you consume as an indicator of what/who you are, which inherently lends itself to the understanding that any kind of criticism of the product which you are consuming is seen as an attack on/reflection of you.

And I think there's also something to be said about the fact that marginalized and non-hegemonic identities simply are just more likely to experience the effects of the system in a way which perpetuates marginalization, but that political understanding is how you interpret and analyze that phenomenon which is also inherently subjective. Which is one of the reasons that the state of being queer in and of itself does not inherently convey radicalism to the person who is queer.

Hence. Veilguard.

I recently started a new game in Dragon Age: Origins as part of the grieving process, and I'm struck by how allergic the writers of Dragon Age: Veilguard were to providing rich opportunities for roleplaying and exploration – fundamental elements of the franchise that previous entries excelled at and audiences clearly expected. It's extremely noticeable in the differences in how we interact with other characters in Thedas, and especially prominent in the first hours of each game.

While playing as a Dalish Elf in Origins, during the prologue alone, you can speak freely to and question:

Tamlen, your childhood friend

Keeper Marethari, the leader of your clan

Merrill, the Keeper's second-in-command

Maren, a gentle woman who works with the halla

Ilen, the clan's craftsman, who teaches you about the Vir Tanadhal

Paivel, one of the hahrens who raised you and Tamlen

Pol, a city elf come to the Dalish to avoid being hanged for theft

Junar, the hunter teaching Pol about Dalish life

Ashalle, who tells you the sad story of your parents (and the game lets you decide how to react to her telling you this)

Fenarel, who wants to come with you on your search for Tamlen with or without informing the Keeper

The 3 (nameless) humans encroaching on your clan's campsite, who you can choose to ruthlessly kill or scare off, but either way contributes to the clan having to leave

Duncan, of course

You can talk to many of these characters twice or more, once when you awake in camp the first time, and again after returning empty-handed after your search for Tamlen. They have different attitudes towards you and the politics of the world they live in. Often, you can interrogate them for more information. Some have interesting insights, others provide context for the world your character inhabits. Sometimes, you'll unlock codex entries from conversations you have with these side characters (or items in their vicinity), elaborating even more on what you've learned. All of this is in service to helping you roleplay: each interaction layers choices upon choices, building a picture of how your character interfaces with friends, acquaintances, and strangers, as well as how you'll fit them into the ideological jigsaw puzzle that is Thedas.

You will talk to none* of these characters again after the first two hours of the game. They are "not important", but they provide vital glimpses of a wider world that could exist outwith the boundaries of the main quest. The implications of the history they've lived – Paivel's sorrow at having to "bury babes he once held in his arms"; Ilen's recollections of his father's successful first-strikes against Ferelden tribes; Ashalle's reasons for withholding the sad story of your parentage – are all unnecessary to the plot of defeating the Blight, but they make Thedas feel lived in. Alive.

Before I move on: I could be very cruel to Veilguard here and count Ostagar as part of the prologue – which it is. In this case, the number of richly-characterised NPCs balloons massively. For the sake of the argument, I won't.

In Veilguard, the prologue has you interact with:

The nameless bartender, with whom you are given one singular dialogue choice (to persuade with violence or a silver-tongue).

Varric, whose goal in the opening fifteen minutes is to lead you to the next plot point.

Harding, who saves some nameless NPCs and comes with you to the next plot point.

Neve, who is the next plot point and who Varric and Harding already know, so they briefly introduce you to each other in between fights.

... Let's extend it a bit, otherwise that's a sad little list. In the follow-up mission to Arlathan Forest, you can talk to:

Strife and Irelin, faction leaders and darlings of the extended universe (aka, the heroes from another short story), who tell you who you're going to talk to next.

Bellara, who already knows who the Neve Gallus is, of course, and is all but ready to jump into action, even if you don't know who she is or her motivations for being out here in this pickle.

... Uh-oh, it's not looking that much better. Can we keep going? Including the D'Meta's Crossing section, you can also talk to:

Jahel, the surviving Veil Jumper you came looking for. This shouldn't really be counted, because it's not really a back-and-forth. He dies after approximately 2 lines of expository dialogue about the plot of this immediate section. His named Veil Jumper partner, Mihiva, is dead when you arrive.

Arguably, you could "interact" the nameless villagers afflicted by the Taint on the way there, but they do the 'crazed mutterings' and it's not really a back-and-forth, just an environmental button press when you approach.

Julius, the Mayor of D'Meta's Crossing, who you can lightly question, then decide his fate.

Morrigan, for the cameo, I suppose.

Look, I could tack Treviso and the Ossuary on. It might look slightly better. I could count the Caretaker and the faction shopkeepers with their AI-generated ass one-line introductions (but I absolutely will not, because that's ridiculous). The problem is, to me, transparent.

Veilguard is only interested in interactions with the "main characters" of Thedas – the cast of action heroes that surround your Rook. These include your companions, characters from previous games (Varric, Morrigan), and names from the comics or tie-in novels who you are supposed to whoop and cheer for when they appear without ever getting to find out who they are. If I was being unkind, I would even say it is uninterested in providing opportunities to converse with these characters given the superficial, skin-deep nature of the dialogue.

Of the short, sparse interactions you are allowed to participate in during Veilguard's opening, you can have a brief back-and-forth with at most three characters who are not other party members (past or present) or faction leaders. Two are named. I won't do the labour of counting lines of dialogue, but there are only a handful for all of these characters combined.

Throughout the game, these "other characters" exist to be beaten down in service to the plot, as quest markers in service to the plot, or to be saved in service to the plot. If you are lucky, they might have names, but they will never be so fleshed out that you could imagine an internal world for them. You can never imagine what their place in Thedas might be beyond the context you meet them in. They stand or sit or lie stationary at map markers, waiting to be talked to, and cease to exist once their dialogue tree is concluded.

like solas in veilguard to me was a pretty perfect example on how clear it is that dragon age has suddenly and drastically regressed from being an exploration into moral ambiguity and that fine smudged line between "hero" and "villain" to a sudden inexplicable refusal to allow any sort of grey area in character motivations in favor of forcing them into a binary box like its a dnd alignment. and i think this specifically because there is literally No Way to write solas in a morally uncomplicated manner while still maintaining anything that makes him an interesting character.

people who hate solas hate veilguard because it removed literally any nuance to his character and repeatedly paints him as a poor mistreated victim whose only crime is that he was Forced to do things He Didnt Want to by a significantly underwritten and highly anticipated female character, and his regrets are all varying degrees of "it's my fault because i was right and they didn't listen to me :(" and no actual agency in his own decision making. his romance with a lavellan is literally front and center in the game and the only one that even gets more than a passing letter or (in dorian's case) like. two full lines of dialogue. the narrative does everything to silently paint him as the misunderstood tragic hero that no one truly appreciates and even rewrites the inquisitor so they always want to redeem him regardless of their previous disposition

people who love solas hate veilguard because it somehow managed to simultaneously do the same thing in reverse. solas has no genuine regrets or sense of guilt or actual reflection about his past behavior in the entire game. he kills his best friend and the game makes sure to zoom in on his face as varric is falling down just so you can see the sneer of contempt. the war table finebros react segments where its literally just the writers unapologetically utilizing the companions as mouthpieces for their personal opinions makes sure to tell the player that solas is unforgivable and a hypocrite and a coward for his actions. they even like. rewrote an entire part of his character specifically to remove that layer of complexity and dumb it down to the Lying Liar Who Lies. where the narrative silently wants you to sympathize with him, the characters LOUDLY want you to condemn him. your most sympathetic dialogue choices are lukewarm "well... i GUESS i understand why..." delivered in a consistent tone of disapproving resignment.

people who are neutral to solas? you're not ALLOWED to be. here you go. Dragon Age: Solas. everything is about solas. you have to make all your choices based around solas. we've written an entire game to revolve around solas. we rewrote like 4 characters to make sure that you are forced into one of the two extremes.

and it's all because you have a game that physically cannot help itself but to make you make the Good Decision and so they can't decide which decision is good and which is bad so they wrote two completely conflicting stories about him at the same time. he is the best boy. he is the worst. it genuinely feels like the writing team was actively wrestling with each other behind the scenes over whether or not solas is a Bad Guy and thus their only means of compromise was writing him as though he was dr jekyll and mr hyde without any transition or consistency. he is a villain. he is a hero. you are a bad person for not seeing his point of view. you are a good person for peacefully redeeming him. and i know there's people who think this is some sort of ingenius character study but none of this is intentional. he isn't like loghain who commits bad acts in service to a greater good. he's the prideful god who lied to the inquisitor about wanting to free the elves and instead his goal has been about his own personal ego all along. he isn't like flemeth, who does good by people and manipulates the story in your favor all for the sake of her own mysterious ends. he isn't even like the architect who lies and murders and manipulates the warden all in the service of his own deluded vision. he's the guy who wants to destroy the world because his abusive ex is forcing him to. but also he's the guy who wants to destroy the world because he thinks mortal life is insignificant and he should be in control because hes The Best.

all complexity of what was previously a deeply nuanced character has been removed, and it's because he used to be so complex that it's so disjointed and bad because they refuse to actually commit to any one direction because in that case they'd might as well make another character. but they can't. they have to make it solas. because solas is their cash cow and their baby.

they want to make a perfect solavellan happy ending because they want to please the people who love their baby but they're so fundamentally divorced from what their audience wants for solas that they ended up writing a caricaturized ai-generated romance novel for teenagers.

they want to make a cathartic fight scene where you beat the bad man because they want to please the people that hate their villain but they have such blatant contempt for criticism of their precious little baby that they make sure to infantilize and misrepresent his flaws as much as they can so he can be the sad little elf boy that you need to hug.

and despite all of this they ALSO wanted so desperately to avoid making you sympathize too much with the antagonist they were building up to that they had to make sure he acted in the most unforgivably evil ways that they could think of just so players knew this is the Bad Guy and you're the Good Guy and don't you forget it.

Take Varric's death. It's shown in a way that you can definitely interpret as an accident. Both Solas and Varric himself say it was an accident. There's a suggestion that Solas was sucked into the regret prison because he regretted Varric's death so much. But also, after the death they zoom in on his face with an expression that looks like a sneer. They have Neve insisting in conversation with him that it wasn't an accident. It seems to me that the writers just did not decide whether or not it was an accident, because they wanted the Solas lovers to be able to tell themselves that it was an accident, and they wanted the haters to be able to say it was not an accident.

They play the same game with Mythal. Were they lovers? Taash is made to suggest that they were, and then Bellara is made to suggest that they were not. Again, I think the writers just didn't decide. They didn't want to commit to a romantic connection because they thought Solasmancers would be mad about that, but they also didn't want to explicitly rule it out because I guess they thought some people would find a romantic connection more compelling or something? So they just waved their hands and told us to choose for ourselves.

And it's similar with the endings. If you choose the redeem ending, Solas is extremely hesitant and uncertain. Even before speaking with Mythal he's clearly wavering and wanting to stop, and then he's turned from his path completely and forever after three sentences from Mythal. Whereas if you choose the fight ending he's utterly set on his path and he'll kill everyone around and proclaim himself a god. It just does not make sense that those two reactions come from the very same person in the same moment. But that's because the writers intend the two endings for two different groups of people: the redeem ending is for people who want to believe he's good, the fight ending is for people who want believe he's awful. So they just didn't see any need to make up their mind about whether Solas is really desperately wanting to be stopped or actually just insane with hubris.

Updated: Jan 3 2025

I'm still chewing on this game's writing, and I think I'm going to jump off the reply chain I made regarding Corypheus as a villain and do some comparing and contrasting to the main villains of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and in the wider construction of what is evil in Thedas. The Corypheus post deals a lot with religion as a cultural mooring for how people in Thedas perceive their realities, and this is a significant part of what makes The Dragon Age Setting feel so lived-in.

I think before I dig into this, I want to put forth a few caveats. This won't be a formal essay, but I'll do my best to cite my sources and previous argumentation. I also don't have any real animosity toward the author of this article, I'd never actually even heard of her until someone directed me to this article, and I don't think the problems with this article are unique to the author. But. As I said in a different post late last night, I think the article itself such a textbook example of this kind of left-liberal politics that doesn't actually understand the terms they're mobilizing about, stakes their identity on their consumerism habits, and seems to think that vibes-based opinions are in any way, shape, or form equivalent to critical analysis that interrogates the text and the meta of the media they're engaging with.

The analysis in this article is bad, I'm sorry to say. Just from a structural standpoint, it fails to understand how the structure of rhetorical argumentation functions, and doesn't bother to provide any concrete support for its claims. It highlights an inability to formulate an argument that I think is rampant among fandom discourse and I would perhaps argue is a common issue with liberal political argumentation in general, although that's another essay and isn't central to what I want to dig at today. I also fundamentally do not think this author understands what fascism is, which is frustrating at best, and I find it irresponsible although I don't think the intent is malicious. I'm also not convinced that the author really has a good grasp of media analysis or how to interrogate the thema of the stories she's talking about, but I'll leave that for you to determine.

So. What is the thesis of this article, which purports that this game "kills fascists"? I had to chew on it for a hot minute while reading, and as best as I can tell, the thesis is "Wokeness is the point of Dragon Age."

The problem is, neither of these concepts are objectively anti-fascist.

I left off the previous section of this (essay?) with a link to Laurie Marhoefer's blog post on queerness in the Nazis, and I really do recommend that you give it a read for a lot of different reasons. For the purpose of the time period we are working with (early 20th century), I am going to use 'homosexuality' while talking about fascism and its relationship with queerness. In that vein, it behooves me to iterate that the mythology of "Nazis = Gay" is just that, a myth, in the sense that gay Nazis existed (Ernst Röhm being perhaps the most famous, of course, as well as others) but also that the Nazi party, itself, was not inherently a homosexual organization. It might seem odd for me to write this, but: just as being queer is not inherently antifascist, similarly, being queer is not inherently fascist. And vice versa: being antifascist does not mean one is allied with queer politics. Indeed, many leftist, antifascist groups were themselves anti-homosexuality during the time of the rise of the Nazi party.

The publication of the The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (1933) (written by a member of the Communist Party of Germany - the KDP) popularized myth of Nazis and Homosexuality being linked (where both were bad), whereafter author Andrew Wackerfuss wrote in 2015 that it was the sort of mythology that appealed to opponents of the Nazi party because they believed that "...the heart of the Nazis' militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals". Homosexuality was linked with militarism, and the Eulenburg affair (in short, a big dramatic legal scandal over whether or not friends of the Kaiser of Germany were engaged in homosexual acts) did much to link militarism and homosexuality in the minds and politics of Germans. Globally, Germany was linked more broadly with homosexuality -- with quaint little euphemisms like "The German Vice" entering usage abroad.

In the Soviet Union, socialist writer Maxim Gorky claimed that "eradicating homosexuals [will make] fascism disappear". The Social Democratic Party (SPD) was also known to weaponize anti-homosexuality as anti-Nazism, and as the political climate of the late-Weimar Republic heated up, it was increasingly a tool utilized by leftist paramilitary groups in opposition to the SA led by Ernst Röhm, who himself had been a political target of accusations of homosexuality that ultimately led to him admitting it publicly. Thus, we saw slogans and heckles like:

"Hitler, heil, heil, heil. Heil Eulenburg!"

Geil Röhm ("Hot Röhm!")

Schwul Heil ("Heil Gay")

SA, Hose Runter! ("SA, Trousers Down!")

In 1932, Robert Smallbones was appointed the British consul-general at Frankfurt in Germany. He had a history of what we might think of as leftist politics -- anti-slavery, anti-persecution of minorities, and he was very much outspoken against the antisemitism of the Nazi Party. He is perhaps best-known for reading the writing on the wall and working to help Jews obtain visas in order to evacuate from Nazi Germany before the war broke out -- in fact, in October 1939 the British Government calculated that he had saved 48,000 people and had been in the process of issuing papers to 50,000 more when World War 2 began. He was also known to have personally visited Nazi concentration camps to demand the release of Jewish prisoners. One would think, then, as an ally to minorities and an opponent of bigotry, that he would be an ally of homsexuals as well. Not so. Smallbones blamed the emergent situation in Germany on homsexuality in a letter dated 1938: "The explanation for this outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, in particular homo-sexuality, are very prevalent in Germany."

Remember in Part One where I described that fascism is opportunistic and will do what it needs to, in order to consolidate power and bring about a fascist state? Hitler himself weaponized this rampant sentiment of anti-homosexuality, using it as a pretext in 1934 to execute The Knight of Long Knives, which purged many of the enemies and critics of the Nazi Party but was especially targeted toward the SA paramilitary group led by Ernst Röhm, who had been a longtime ally of Hitler and then became a sacrificial lamb in order to (among other things) improve the image of the Nazi party government in the eyes of the German people.

This is, of course, by necessity of the shortform of this essay an oversimplification of what all went down, and I am intentionally emphasizing the elements related to homosexuality for the sake of the point I am driving at, but the broad strokes are here, and the point is: historically being queer/an ally for queers was not a shorthand for being antifascist.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer writes about this subject, and especially with an eye toward dismantling the myth of Pink Fascism that has persisted to the 21st century (see: Republican National Committee official Bryan Fischer being fired in 2015 for calling queer activists "jack-booted homofascist thugs" / claiming that the Nazi party was founded in "a gay bar in Munich" -- statements that IMO likely would not have seen him exiled from the RNC in 2025.) Marhoefer writes: "Although remarkably long-lived, mutable, capable of regenerating itself in various contexts, and even entertained at times by reputable historians, the myth of legions of gay Nazis has no historical basis."

That said--gay Nazis did exist, and Marhoefer rightfully points out that the idea that queers are by definition are liberal or left-of-center is an extremely flawed assumption: like race, like gender, queerness is not a moral compass. Quoth Marhoefer:

"...they [right-wing queers] do not necessarily share the political goals of left-leaning queers. They see their broader, right-wing politics as compatible with their queerness. [...] Röhm was not a queer man who suddenly joined a homophobic political party in a fit of inexplicable, profound confusion. His views on sexual politics were, rather, comfortably within what in his day was a decades-old tradition of far-right queerness. Röhm’s queer fascism was identical to the Nazi Party’s ideology in almost all respects, save on questions of male-male eroticism. That was, however, a significant difference. Queer fascism was not synonymous with what one might call “mainstream” fascism – that is, fascism as articulated by big Nazi institutions, such as the Party."

To expound on this, Marhoefer cites to us a little-remembered essay called “National Socialism and Inversion”, written by an anonymous author who was part of the Röhm circle of queer fascism and engaged in discourse with a well-known center-left homosexual emancipation group, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Anonymous wrote what amounted to a form of "we're not like other girls (queers):

“Homosexuality” meant male femininity, Marxism, and Judaism.

There were multiple queer subjectivities, or multiple ways to be a queer person.

What he saw in himself was not “homosexuality” but something else entirely, a “manly Eros” that was spiritual rather than lustful, and was experienced discreetly among “healthy and respectable fellows” in the Nazi Party militia.

“Manly Eros” was “fundamentally” different from homosexuality as defined by the left-leaning SHC, a form of male-male eroticism he associated with feminine men, gender-crossing, and transvestitism.

Masculine, discreet, manly Eros was wholly compatible with a healthy “Aryan” racial consciousness.

What Anonymous wanted from other fascists was quiet accommodation, not public acceptance. He argued that most Nazis would overlook homoeroticism in the barracks as long as the men in question did their “duty.”

What's fascinating about this is that it doesn't appear as an attempt to mobilize queerness as a political positionality. As Marhoefer states, rather, it "...mobilized a certain kind of far right subject with a certain kind of sexual-political ideology. That ideology affirmed homoeroticism, albeit hidden homoeroticism, rejected “homosexuality,” and embraced violence and racism."

Threads of this type of sexual-political ideology have persisted into modern far-right positionalities -- take, for example, Milo Yiannopoulos, who was a commentator for far-right publications like Breitbart and a supporter of Trump's bid for presidency in 2016, who claimed that all of Islam, not simply a small group of radicals, was responsible for mistreating women and homosexuals (see: earlier mentions of homonationalism), who married his husband in 2017, in the same breath declared homosexuality a sin, and then in 2021 declared that he was an ex-gay dedicating his life to conversation therapy and that his husband had been "demoted to housemate."

Yiannopoulos seems aware of the linkage between homosexuality, masculinity, and the weaponization of sexual politics:

"“[I] only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles,” said Mr Yiannopoulos."

Yet, we note, he did not disavow his husband at the time. Rather, whatever they are doing privately, remains strictly in the realm of private:

"The former Brietbart editor went on to describe his so-called coming out as the lifting of a “veil”, although he admitted that his husband might not be pleased at being demoted to the role of “housemate”. “It helps that I can still just about afford to keep him in Givenchy and a new Porsche every year. Could be worse for him, I guess,” said Mr Yiannopoulos."

This might seem incoherent and wildly inconsistent from an ideological standpoint, but it comes into a greater clarity when you consider that the ideological basis of politics for men like Yiannopoulos is, essentially, whatever will allow them and their political allies to consolidate political power. Sounds familiar?

For the fascists, the Nazis, the hair ever splits. Sociologist Arlene Stein similarly articulates this as a difference between homoeroticism and homosexuality; homosexuality in particular was threatening because it emasculated the man and threatened the traditional family, this being a threat to usher in the “destruction of mankind” (Untergang der Menschheit). She does, however, allow that there existed a degree of homoeroticism in Nazi sports and physical culture, which was channeled into "militarism, brutality, and ideological fixations on powerful leadership figures," -- the Übermensch, the idealized man.

Tough place to be, really; as Geoffrey Giles wrote in his book Why Bother About Homosexuals? : Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi Germany [link to Internet Archive] "The leaders, and above all, Hitler demanded fanatical devotion, indeed adoration! This placed his male followers in a bind, because that love could not cross a certain, never discussed threshold." If you read further, Giles goes deeper into the sort of mental gymnastics that allowed the Nazis to rationalize touch between men -- that the transfer of the mystical "Odic force" was best facilitated through touches, kisses, cuddles, etc. But it was never erotic, oh, no, absolutely not. It was "pure."

Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals). Barbara Kruger (American, born in 1945). 1981. [x] "...she turns her eye towards the construction of gender identities. Kruger draws meaning from a found photo, highlighting the contrast between the joy of the men’s smiles and the violence of their fighting. The text directly addresses the viewer, implicating both the individual and society in forming ideas of gender and intimacy. Why is violence placed so close to intimacy? Why does she choose to show men in this piece?"

Giles goes on to write about the Nazi scientists and their efforts to assess whether or not someone criminalized as a homosexual "...was a “real” homosexual, and therefore genetically tainted, or whether he was someone who could be “cured” through discipline and hard physical labor." One cannot help but recall the story of Yiannopoulos, self-described as handsome/intelligent/charismatic who converted to ex-gay and began championing conversion therapy.

So where am I going with this?

Well, specifically, I'm interested in the trappings of masculinity within a framework like this. If effeminacy was a sign of being homosexual (and this was the realm of the Jews), then being the opposite of effeminate -- manly, masculine, etc etc etc -- ended up with an interconnected framework of gender and sexuality and racial politics. Nazi masculinity contained a systemic, racialized color; it was embodied according to social determinants and sexual orientation, and war was frequently the school of manhood. Violence produced gender, and in reverse, gender produced violence -- wrapped within these, the idea of male togetherness, a proximity to danger, and a sense of belonging to a conspecific community of men in the Volksgemeinschaft -- which you could think of as "people's community", "folk community", "national community", or "racial community" -- depending on the translation.

But more specifically (or perhaps more broadly, depending on how you want to look at it) I want to examine this in the context of aesthetics, as there is an aesthetic aspect to fascism that we need to talk more about, especially in its modern manifestation through the us of AI. I will briefly segue with a couple of articles re: modern fascism in the US and its link to the tech industry, and how it is manifesting with the push for AI. (Please note that this isn't a wholesale endorsement of any of these authors or websites.)

Good Night, Tech-Right: Pull the Plug on AI Fascism

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism by Janus Rose

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism by Gareth Watkins

Fascism and the Spectacle of Death by Ian Alan Paul

In a lot of ways AI art really feels like the culmination of fascist ideas of what art is and very utilitarian concepts of it. IMO there's something in the human/social problem with AI art (in relation to the alienation from labor) where AI art is the epitome of capitalism in that it ultimately seeks to redefine art as and create endless slop for purposes of soulless consumption rather than as a creative and enlightening process of labor which fosters connection -- which is obviously perfect for fascist ideology because it's a fundamentally dehumanizing experience focused on the aesthetic outcome. To quote Gareth Watkins (above), the absence of people in this is a feature, not a bug.

But how does masculinity fit into this? And what does this mean for the aesthetics of the alt-right and their conceptualization of masculinity?

For the tech bros and their brand of right-wing politics, do we look at Elon Musk, a serial womanizer with numerous children across many relationships who appears to firmly embody the fascistic ideal of pronatalism as a means to combat white genocide / the great replacement theory -- a concept that runs rampant in the Silicon Valley tech circles? Where Lucas Munn defines pronationalism as, “a political, ideological, or religious project to encourage childbearing by some or all members of a civil, ethnic, or national group” -- with strong ties to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity. Do we look at the infamous fascistic slogan, the "14 words" of white supremacy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”? Do we look at Mark Zuckerburg, who on the Joe Rogan podcast described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”, and who has become significantly more muscular as the marriage between Silicon Valley and Trumpism has developed?

It is interesting to see someone like Zuckerburg delve into the concept of being emasculated, and effeminate, where his "community" is in need of more violence -- a hark back to the idea that violence produces gender, and in reverse, gender produces violence.

We see gender revanchism as a feature of AI art usage, and Watkins illustrates this with, "...much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted." It doesn't matter if these things are real, what matters is that they can be weaponized in violent forms against women. Watkins argues that it actually isn't coincidental in the slightest that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot.

Beyond the tech bros, what if we look at the right-leaning manosphere movement, and the influence it has had on politicians? The blogger Derek Guy of Die, Workwear! offers an interesting perspective on the aesthetics of the clothing of the far right in his Bloomberg article "The Evolution of The Alpha Male Aesthetic" alternatively known as "Why Do So Many MAGA Men Look Like Joe Rogan?" It's en excellent read, I highly recommend taking the time to read through it, but I'll reader's digest it for you:

“In the early 2000s, Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane and Thom Browne rejected the bulky, broad-shouldered shapes associated with American tycoons, action stars and Armani swagger. They put the male wardrobe through a hot wash and tumble dry: Shirts tightened, jackets shrank, and trousers contracted in every direction. In the 2012 documentary 90s Anti-Fashion, Simons said he made clothes he and his friends wanted to wear because they didn’t see themselves in the “huge, suntanned, muscled Americano” that dominated fashion imagery. Slimane, reflecting on his adolescence, remembered being bullied in high school for having a slight build. They “were attempting to make me feel I was half a man because I was lean,” he told Yahoo Style in 2015. “There was certainly something homophobic and derogative about those remarks.” “New subcultures rebranded the look with more conventionally masculine associations. EDC (everyday carry) enthusiasts, armed with pocket knives and multitools, adopted slim-fit gear as part of a rugged preparedness ethos. Their slim tactical pants and fitted henleys weren’t about gender ambiguity; they were survivalist uniforms. The rise of athleisure for men, particularly centered on slim joggers, pushed the same silhouette in poly-stretch fabrics, forming a softer kind of masculine armor. In Silicon Valley, tech founders embraced minimalist wardrobes built around Everlane tees, trim chinos and all-white sneakers. An aesthetic once dismissed as “metro” was now emblematic of self-optimization.”

"The Tate brothers took the raw material of that worldview and repackaged it with a harder ideological edge—blending fitness and hustle culture with anti-feminist backlash, nationalist grievance and a theatrical contempt for liberal norms. Not everyone in the alpha ecosystem shares their politics, but many embrace the same visual grammar. Ashton Hall, whose cold Saratoga water face plunge became a TikTok trend, uses similar imagery. Liver King followed a comparable formula, wrapping primal excess in a veneer of ancestral wisdom. Andy Frisella, creator of 75 Hard—a boot-camp-style program that promises toughness through discipline, dieting and discomfort—delivers YouTube sermons on sculpting abs and building wealth. These men may differ in tone, but they share an ideal: masculinity is under siege, and the only way forward is to optimize, aestheticize and dominate. For them, the body is a billboard for self-mastery, and slim-fit clothing is the wrapping that proves it." "This new wave of hypercurated masculinity is a backlash against a cultural landscape shaped by gender fluidity, body positivity and an ongoing renegotiation of gender roles. As celebrities like Harry Styles and Lil Nas X pose in dresses and blur the traditional lines between masculine and feminine, another current rushes in to reassert the old order. It pulls from earlier models: The mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tight-fitting clothes once labeled metrosexual. Today’s fixation on muscularity, discipline and traditional masculine aesthetics feels like a new chapter in that same historical cycle."

Tate, left; Rogan, right

xxx TWITTER ACCOUNT ON CLOTHES

It's interesting how we are seeing a merging of aesthetics in the tech industry, the manosphere industry, and the right-leaning political wing of the United States, where there's a politicization of tight-fighting, oft-poorly tailored clothes coupled with the fixation around ultra-buff men and an interest in Manly Man Masculinity.

There's a post I remember seeing go around fairly recently that showed a before and an after photo of a man who, in the before photo was, like, Just Some Guy; and in the after photos he was extremely ripped. A poll was put to the photos to ask women which photo they preferred, and generally the results slanted heavily in favor of the before photo. The response of the man in question, and of other men in his sphere, was that of incredulity. How could women not prefer this example of peak masculinity? The better question, truly, was: "who is this for?" If it's not for women, generally speaking, it's for other men -- who encourage each other's gains, compliment their muscles, compare reps and body fat percentages and "How much do u lift, bro?"

There's a kind of Manly Eros in this aesthetic of masculinity. To pull back from Marhoefer's article regarding “National Socialism and Inversion” -- a kind of a male-male eroticism that's supposedly spiritual rather than lustful; ~enlightened'~ as our men's health and fitness gurus are enlightened. It doesn't matter if this is actually not real, it doesn't matter if the six pack only appears when we're dehydrated, it doesn't matter if you can't "get women" because they're "not interested" in you, or what the fuck ever. What matters is the community of masculinity.

The imagery around people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk within these right-wing spheres reflects this -- plenty of images of both of these as Giga Chad Buff Alpha Males proliferate as a means to signify their domination where their physical appearance otherwise does not. It's a real disconnect between the aesthetic and the real (for lack of a better phrasing).

And then we see the kind of strong-man aesthetic in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, where his response to being shot in the ear is to posture: he is strong, he is powerful, he is triumphant, he is manly, he is an ideal:

By Nazi standards, fine art was not propaganda (but it was totally propaganda). Its purpose was to create ideals, for eternity. This produced a call for heroic and romantic art, which reflected the ideal rather than the realistic. This was showcased for the first time in 1937 at the Great German Art exhibition. The most decisive element [of this event], wrote one critic, was "...that it is the fighting call against any problematic. There is no room for experiments here."

Warner Rittich of the Kunst und Volk wrote, "They were not an art fair with special reference to the newest, but the visual expression of the eternal -- external and internal -- values of our Folk. Created by artists of our time, as clear and truthful as the building, they are exhibited in a temple of art, not in a factory."

Dr. Hans Kiener wrote of the art of the Nazi Party showcased at this event, "But the National Socialists not only influenced the style of the works, they also made sure that the artists would choose the right subject. The Leader wants the German artist to leave his solitude and to speak to the Folk. This must start with the choice of the subject. It has to be popular and comprehensible. It has to be heroic in line with the ideals of National Socialism. It has to declare its faith in the ideal of beauty of the Nordic and racially pure human being."

Dr. Wilhelm Späl wrote, "A walk through the exhibition proved that the principles of clarity, truth, and professionalism determined the selection ..... The heroic element stands out. The worker, the farmer, the soldier are the themes ..... Heroic subjects dominate over sentimental ones ..... The experiences of the Great War, the German landscape, the German man at work, peasant life ..... The life of the State with its personalities and developments. These are the new subjects, they demand new expressions and styles ..... In accordance with the subject, the style of most of the works is clear, strong, and full of character ..... there is a whiff of greatness everywhere. Healthy, fresh, and optimistic artists are showing their work with manifold individuality. A new era of art has begun."

Paintings which were permitted included:

those that were traditionalist in manner

that exalted the "blood and soil" values of racial purity, militarism, and obedience.

that depicted the Volk at work in the fields, a return to the simple virtues of Heimat (love of homeland)

the manly virtues of the National Socialist struggle

the lauding of the female activities of child bearing and raising symbolized by the phrase Kinder, Küche, Kirche ("children, kitchen, church").

Hitler was styled as a heroic figure. The warriors of Germany's past were styled as heroic figures. The mythic - even the mythic of the every day people - was idealized. You can, perhaps, see the elements of these sorts of ideals in the neo-Nazi, neo-fascist movement of the 21st century, the idealism of heroism and the revanchism of culture and gender and the idolization of a strong man. If you'll forgive the comparison, modern figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are generated in a superman costume and not as Lex Luther for a reason.

ANYWAY. The point, here, finally, is that was constitutes a "hero" is an entirely subjective concept -- no liberal or left-liberal, for example, is going to conceptualize someone like Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump as heroic figures.

It's interesting, then, that Rook is supposed to be a hero, and specifically a hero that, as the author of the inciting article purports, fights fascists and fascism in some capacity. If we recall the verbiage of the bylines the game had, in 2020 the BioWare website described Rook as:

Enter Thedas, a vibrant world of rugged wilderness, treacherous labyrinths, and glittering cities. The Dragon Age is a time of warring nations, savage combat, and secret magics. Now, the fate of this world teeters on a knife's edge. Thedas needs a new hero; one they'll never see coming. Forge a courageous fellowship to challenge the gathering storm. Friendship, drama, and romance abound as you bring striking individuals together into an extraordinary team. Become the hero and light the beacon of hope in their darkest moments.

It was later changed to, at least as of Dragon Age Day 2023:

Enter the world of Thedas, a vibrant land of rugged wilderness, treacherous labyrinths, and glittering cities – steeped in savage combat and secret magics. Now, the fate of this world teeters on a knife's edge. Thedas needs a new leader; one they'll never see coming. You’ll forge a courageous fellowship to challenge the gathering storm. Friendship, drama, and romance will abound as you bring striking individuals together into an extraordinary team. Become the leader and light the beacon of hope in their darkest moments.

Okay, fine, this dovetails well with the actual presentation of the game, which is that Rook comes into the story already "a hero" -- that is, someone who makes hard choices and saves people and kicks ass and take names and etc etc etc, well before we ever chase Solas down to his ritual site in Arlathan. The author of the inciting article "This Game Kills Fascists" has also cottoned onto this fact, and explains it to us firstly by extolling the many choices of character we have for Rook, the hero:

"...their real name is up to you. Also up to you: your look, your background, your race, your sex, your gender identity, your pronouns.** You choose whether you shoot or stab or zap. And once your character is out in the world, there are additional roleplay options that come up through dialogue in the game—not gameplay choices, but dialogue about your background, attitudes, and beliefs—and I really liked these “yes, and” improv opportunities to give my Rooks more texture and independent character."

Okay, fine x2, although we'll note with some irony that the author revealed that they have only played three characters, all of them elves. She then goes on to explain the nature of Rook's, shall we say, uniqueness as a hero.

"What you don’t choose is whether you are a hero. In past games, the player’s goodness was measured by the player’s choices, not their adversaries’. Which is to say you aren’t good just because you’re fighting bad things."

"But Rook, whoever they are and wherever they come from, is a hero. Not a reluctant hero, not an asshole who does heroic stuff for petty pragmatism, not a person with heroism thrust upon them. At the game’s start, Rook has already earned their place in the big events following the climax of Dragon Age: Inquisition."

"And contrasting with previous games, some can find Rook’s hardcoded virtue a constraint or even an unacceptable loss, particularly when so much of the previous games was painted in blood and moral gray. The shine of Rook’s halo might well make you squint if you’re so devoted to the gloom."

What, prithee, is the distinction here, actually? She never really explains it beyond "asshole" behavior or "pragmatism," the latter of which realistically isn't even true because Rook is forced to be pragmatic by the narrative -- "whatever it takes," after all. As far as I can tell, it appears that Rook has the following defining features as a hero:

They come into the story a hero. Their goodness, their morality, is measured by their adversaries rather than the choices of the player. And since they are fighting bad guys, they are a good guy. They end the story a hero. Their morality is absolute.

I would actually argue that the author is incorrect in that Rook doesn't have heroism thrust upon them -- they very explicitly are put in a situation where their leader, Varric, is out of commission and Rook is expected to step up. Varric died and the vibe was, "You're in charge now, kid, good luck." If we ignore that the acts of heroism prior to the start of the game are basically a non-factor to Rook's characterization and story, we can still at least allow room for its existence, with the idea was that when Rook had circumstances thrust upon them that required they step up, it was natural for them to just slide into more heroism.

What I find particularly problematic about this is that it undermines a key component of storywriting for protagonists in that protagonists are supposed to change, they're supposed to undergo a moral journey. If your starting premise is that the character is Heroic, and you want a character that changes, you can't just make them Heroic Squared. By and large that's that's a boring premise all on its own, and bad writing if that's all that it is. In this kind of storytelling framework, Rook really would have needed to do something unheroic in order to transform their personal narrative. Which. I would personally argue they ultimately DID do unheroic things, but the game tries very hard to tell us that it was a moral victory anyway because the framework of the game and the meta the writers give us insists on Rook being Heroic™️. Which makes for a really unsatisfying protagonist.

The author also seems to be confused about what grey morality looks like in a story, as she hits us with these:

"There is a buffet of moral gray being served with seconds in Veilguard, primarily by the character everyone expected to be its Big Bad Wolf."

"Whether you personally believe Solas is right actually, can change course, or must be put down like a dog is up to you. Rook cannot entertain the first idea, much as the Inquisitor couldn’t, because the cost in lives will be unimaginable. Yet the game will insist that you grapple with the destructive price of Solas’s pure motives all the way to the end. And to do that conflict real justice, Solas needs a hero as strong-willed and as sure as he is to be his adversary."

"Unlike Solas, who rationalizes a greater good, these gods are purely malevolent enslavers. They, too, want to turn the clock back, but to the days of their unlimited rule before Solas overthrew them. Not much ambiguity there, but good contrast. Solas is sidelined by events, relegated to advising Rook as they seek to defeat two sadistic gods and their Super PAC of bad guys rising across the nations of northern Thedas. But you’re not only fighting the gods and their allies, all of whom are explicitly fascist."

(sidenote: Super PAC of bad guys takes me out every time I read it; where's the Squidward pointing meme that says LIB! on it when you need it?)

I would actually love to play the game that Angela apparently thinks we played, where we "grapple with the destructive price of Solas's pure moves all the way to the end" but this is just straight up not something that happens. I saw another user write that "...Rook's characterization begins and ends with "Stop Solas". The other elven gods, the blight, the archdemons, the antaam, the venatori, all serve the larger goal to "Stop Solas.' They are fundamentally incidental the The Actual Goal of The Game. At no point do we actually pivot from "Solas is wrong" to "maybe other things are worse"" -- and I agree with this. There's a fundamental lack of any real hesitation on Rook's part, that maybe Solas might not be wrong, that maybe what they're doing -- being the hero -- might not actually be the right thing. Where's the dissonance? Where's the crunch? Where's the transformative storytelling that actually has something to say about its protagonist and their role in both the story and the storyworld?

It's just not there. What we get instead is a very straightforward good vs evil story, with the conceit that everything Rook does is heroic.

If you've talked to me at all, you've likely seen me talka bout the Game Maker's Toolkit video on "Commanding Shepard" -- discussing the construction of Shepard as a Hero and how the framework of Shepard as a protagonist and the Mass Effect trilogy as a storyworld both fundamentally frame everything Shepard does (even war crimes, even murder, even abject cruelty, even genocide) as Heroic -- where the games ask us to consider the morality of a story framing like this (somewhat tacitly, with the Paragon and Renegade system) and at times more implicitly or overtly through the characters that Shepard encounters throughout the story, who embody different viewpoints and moralizations and challenge not only Shepard but also many of the base assumptions or constructions of right vs wrong that dominate the galaxy.

It's a good video. I highly recommend you give it a watch if you have some time to do so.

I also think that this modality for Rook as a character, while attempting to mirror what made Shepard successful, falls flat because unlike Shepard, Rook (and through Rook the Player) is never challenged or asked to consider the morality of what they're doing and what their end goals are. As the author puts it: there's no real ambiguity.

Another thing that really rankles about this is the idea that choosing to be a hero is somehow morally superior to being a reluctant hero or a morally grey hero -- as if the reluctant hero isn't one of the most celebrated character archetypes across many, many genres. Our first protagonist, the Warden, earns another title at the end of Dragon Age: Origins. The HERO of Ferelden. I really question the direction of the writing team and their conceptualization of a hero. See the following question from a BlueSky user about whether or not blood magic as a specialization would come back, and Veilguard Lead Writer Trick Weekes' response:

"key to a lot of nasty stuff we arent interested in having heroes do"

Tell me you have lost the plot of Dragon Age without telling me you've lost the plot of Dragon Age. You can literally save the entirety of Ferelden -- the world of Thedas, really -- as a blood mage in Dragon Age: Origins. Does this somehow make the Hero of Ferelden any less of a hero? Or the Champion of Kirkwall, who can be a blood mage? And what does that say about the Grey Wardens, one of the most morally grey (...lol) factions in the series that literally utilizes a form of blood magic during the joining ritual for all Heroes of Ferelden and all Wardens of All Time. Alistair, Garahel and Isseya, Davrin -- none of them are heroes now, because they did literal blood magic done to save all the peoples of Thedas? What about the mages who utilize lyrium -- the blood of the titans? Are all mages of all the games and all of history precluded from ever being a hero?

No, of course not. We play three heroes in the previous three games, inherently, because that's the framework fo the narratives we're presented -- all with different circumstances and different questions on what makes a hero, a hero.

What's outrageous on Angela's part is that she's somehow trying to argue that Rook stands apart from our previous three heroes as a Moral Absolute of True Heroism (or something?) and somehow this makes Rook the kind of protagonist in the kind of story that kills fascists. Never mind that it's not even remotely controversial to say that the modern literary modality of the traditional morally white hero vs. the morally black villain is exactly the type of mythologizing stories that were used as propagandist tools of fascism. This is... widely accepted. It's not a good argument on its face, and it's especially a poor argument when there's no actual supporting argumentation to fill out the body of the thesis.

What's also outrageous about the fact that she's been able to draw this kind of conclusion, albeit with little to no grasp of what she's actually arguing for, is that we are never as players permitted to interrogate the text, and our player characters are never permitted to interrogate the storyworld. Rook is a Hero, therefore everything they do is Heroic, and this fits within a very bad guys = bad and good guys = good dichotomy that is at odds with the fundamental conceit of the storyworld of Thedas that was established in Origins and carried through DA2 and DAI -- how does history construct and deconstructs its heroes and its villains through propaganda?

I've written a good deal about subjects related to this already, so I'll just throw some links at you to save space:

The Second Sin (in Defense of Corypheus as a villain)

Why the Evanuris Are Weak Villains in DATV

The Importance of Literacy and what Escapism Means

I will also once again link to Mythalism's essay:

on the ways Dragon Age as a series prompted us as players to engage with the politics and ethics of the storyworld

The thing about being heroic is that it's not an immutable character trait. One is not born a hero, or awarded the title of hero. One must act to become a hero. If Rook is a hero, we must ask ourselves, "why," and the story must tell us how and why Rook is a hero -- what is the praxis of their actions? In the absence of an actual dialogue between the player and the character and the storyworld, being being a Hero™️ becomes a form of identity politics.

As Mythalism put it, the #1 most embarrassing and distasteful thing about the game DATV is that developers fell into the ideological trap the entire series was set out to deconstruct (regarding what makes one a hero and the idea of moral absolutism), and they seem to be unaware of this. The game itself appears to come to the table with a blind faith in the audience intuitively understanding good people versus evil people, with no interrogation of what that actually means in the storyworld as established or how that can be misused -- both narratively and in the real world.

I wrote several months ago in the Literacy and Escapism essay that I think we should be very careful to embrace media like [DATV], because how we engage with media does not exist in a vacuum - it isn't merely just entertainment. Mythalism articulated in a similar vein that what makes something like Veilguard dangerous is that, if you are telling stories about heroes and villains and don’t actually have an objective metric for what makes a person a hero or any critical thinking about how those kinds of narratives have been construed in the past, you run the very real risk of engaging in the same same sort of black and white rhetoric used in, say, military propaganda movies, or fascistic mythic films.

And again, this is how we get a story that is wildly racist and still somehow being upheld as hopeful.

"Or how beliefs are often flawed, but no one’s rights are negotiable."

except the elves' rights, i guess. or the spirits' rights, i suppose. or mage rights.

"Or how no one is free until everyone is free"

except the elves... or the spirits...

And corny as it may seem, knowing that this story is out there right now gives me hope for our world, too.

You're right, Angela. It is corny. And you know what? You ever actually explain how the fuck the Heroes of the Veilguard and their game "kill fascists." If you are going to mobilize the concept of a protagonist being a hero to make them antifascist, you have to explain the framework you are operating within. Like the developers and the assumptions they put into their dyadic of good vs evil, as an author you are making the assumption that the the readers will understand what you mean by your dyadic of hero vs fascist, nevermind that you don't explain a damn thing and you've built your essay on top of the sand pit that is DATV's framework. You can't just say that the hero = good because their villains = bad = fascist.

true, of course. the expectation part i disagree with but thats not what ive been thinking about. im thinking about what made it feel so different to the very similar centrism of da:i. and maybe someone who didnt black out the entirety of veilguard as a cognitive protective mechanism can speak to the specifics but i think ive settled on it being that da:i is undoubtedly neoliberal and centrist just like da:o and da2 before it but despite their clear framing and limitations there was always the encouragement to think and the freedom to do things that the game might condemn narratively as "too radical" but you could at least do them. or say them.

this erodes by the time you get to da:i but in veilguard its absent completely. like making leliana divine or putting briala on the throne, for example. the game presents these options in a very neoliberal and centrist way. the un-softened leliana divine epilogue slide features much of the "radical violence bad!!!!! bad choice!!!!" connotation that all of veilguard has. but you can still do it. briala has incredibly limited power as gaspard's puppetmaster and her epilogue slide similarly slaps the player on the wrist for behaving so radically by putting *gasp* an elf in power resulting in Bad Disruptive Uprisings throughout orlais. but you can do it. hawke can spare anders and let him go. again, the game slaps you on the wrist via character disapproval and the fact he becomes a wandering hermit or whatever the fuck but. you can still let him go. in origins you can make shianni bann and the consequences are disgusting and horrible and writing it that way is literally sickening, but the game lets you do it. origins lets you do a lot of buck wild shit, some decisions less real-world politically coded than others, but you get to DO IT. even if the game and its writers scold you afterwords for getting too disruptive. YOU CAN STILL DO IT.

and this goes the other way too. there is a reason people like greg ellis had a home with dragon age for so many years and his beliefs were able to go under the radar for so long. there is a reason transphobic gamerbros love origins. there is a reason there was backlash to da2's rampant bisexuality. because dragon age let you be leftist about as much as it let you be a racist misogynistic asshole. you can do horrible things in these games. you can quite literally sell people into slavery. templar aligned hawke lets the kirkwall circle get annulled and becomes viscount as a reward for their loyalty. the inquisitor can just execute literally everyone they judge. now, i'll be the first to say that a lot of those options are not nearly narratively condemned enough. bioware has fumbled many a topic in their misunderstood pursuit of "grey morality" that leads them to feel the need to morally equalize situations of clear, unambiguous injustice (cough mage templar war cough). in fact, decisions like sparing anders are often far more clearly narratively punished than things like giving fenris back to danarius, (which kind of just blows over after some approval loss???) and in my opinion that is a writing flaw. i do think RPG games should have choice, and allow players to be evil, but i also think that writers have a responsibility for the message their writing sends to the world. some decisions in dragon age are well-handled. many others recreate and reflect real life racism or misogyny or islamophobia, and reveal the writer's bias against real-life groups of people or political movements. this is the risk of writing stories like these.

but veilguard does not let you do anything. in either direction. ive been calling it a "thought-terminating fantasy cliche" because... it really is thought-terminating. you are not supposed to think about alternatives that may be too radical in the writer's eyes (what if i let anders go instead of face the justice [haha] the game clearly thinks he deserves? what if i install an elvhen puppetmaster on the orlesian throne despite all of my advisors recommendations? what if i support the murder-pope in reforming the chantry through violence and bloodshed?). veilguard has..... what if i save this city over that one? the only one i can think of is saving isseya. are there any others? genuine question. theres nothing to decide and therefore there is nothing to think about. you dont get to think of possibilities past the narrow centrist path presented to you. you dont get to think about an end for solas that doesnt end in jail. you dont get to think about who becomes tevinter's archon and what policies you might like to see them have. you dont make choices between major factions based on ideological and/or practical differences like recruiting mages vs templars. you barely even get to decide anything for the characters, half of the choices are purely cosmetic.

like i feel like theres something to be said for having the choice even if the overall narrative still condemns it. the writer's bias leaks in to the world's reactions to your decisions but you are still allowed to make them. i always intentionally leave leliana hardened because i think radical insane murder-pope who diversifies the church through ASSASSINATION is based. i dont give a fuck if david g/aider thinks its too crazy and tells me so in a thinly veiled epilogue slide reprimand about "the consequences of my actions". idgaf! 1. its a video game and 2. idc what he thinks.

and yes, nothing ever actually changes. dragon age has never allowed you to make radical change within its world even with the decisions that brush up on the possibility. but you can still be someone who believes in the possibility. you can play a mahariel who hates humans and poisons the ashes of their prophet because why should they care when they stole everything from the elves first? you can play a blood-mage circle-abolitionist anders-apologist hawke doing their best to survive in a city where survival and self-preservation sometimes forces them to act against their values. you can play a lavellan inquisitor who refuses to believe in andraste or the maker, advocates for elvhen liberation, and installs an elf on the orlesian thrown despite being forced into the role of figurehead for a religious empire. sure, you cant really actually do anything for the elves, but you can be someone who believes that change should happen. its not perfect. its certainly not some radical revolutionary fantasy nor does literally anyone expect it to be and when people say that its always in bad faith.

like ok. if her clan intentionally threw out a child into the woods, that means they were either cutthroat enough to want to kill her on purpose, OR, they wanted to abandon her, but still give her a chance at survival by being found. which was it?

We started this blog to find and support a human artist in the face of AI taking over the Dragon Age art tag some months ago. Through community effort, we managed to fund a commission of a stained-glass Blackwall portrait from a human artist, and also hopefully inspired others to create authentic human art in this style!

In a fandom brimming over with talented human beings, it was a tough choice settling on just one person that would reclaim the artwork concept from AI, but at last, our artist reported back to us with finished work! We are very excited to see it come to fruition! Be sure to support this gorgeous piece, and others like it, as an affirmation that passion and enthusiasm for genuine human creativity will always prevail.

The artist has also provided a high-res image, so if you are one of the lovely people who backed the Ko-Fi goal, expect Mod Judith to reach out to you, once her irl obligations allow, and arrange for a postcard with the artwork to be sent to you, as a permanent reminder that you contributed to supporting human-made art.

Thank you for taking with journey with us!

In Your Heart Shall Burn

I think about the Inquisitor stumbling through that mountain pass, desperately searching for any survivors, a very normal amount.

Still version:

And to make matters worse the game is deliberately about us going to Tevinter for the first time, a country that notoriously has its own teachings, chantry and divine. So we wouldn’t even be rehashing the same things we’d still be discovering an entirely new practice in a new sphere.

The Tevinter practice of Andrastian teaches their followers that magic is to serve and using it is in their pride as a country. So if they got wind of the veil coming down which they would have after the opening scene you’d think they’d be very proactive on utilising this to their own political advantage. I could easily imagine the Archon wanting to tear it down, to take control over other nations and the Imperial Divine would most likely support this idea. Why? Because seeing the Black City is more likely going to cause mass hysteria and a question of faith.

For everyone else the Black City is a representation of their "sin" and magic is taught to be feared, controlled and punished. So when their the reminder of the Maker turning his back on Thedas is a constant presence in their world, that would likely cause religious hysteria. This concept was already touched on with the Inquisitor, the people of Haven are scared because they lost their divine and out walks someone they see who has the touch of Andraste and cling on to that person to ground themselves. The Inquisitor becomes a dangerous force because in the face of uncertainty they can fix it and actually help people beyond just being told to stay calm.

The appearance of the Black city is like the breach but globally, no one will be able to escape its presence. I'm mostly just assuming that everyone will be able to see it just like its always present in the fade no matter where you are standing. And that this would also be true if the world was full of magic again. This would also create parallels between ancient Arlathan and current Tevinter how both weaponise control over others using magic. Which is what I assume was the point, having Dorian in your team during the trespasser dlc has him point out how similar the Elven gods are to Tevinter Magistrates.

This situation could easily be weaponised by Tevinter, use it as a ploy to act like a charitable nation to those who are weakened by war and struggling with their faith. Thus increasing their power and possibly trying to take over more countries since Tevinter has lost areas to the Qunari. And it would ideally be up to the Inquisitor to fight back against this on a global level. The divine is important but if the veil came down I personally believe that would elevate the Inquisitor's role a lot higher level because the people of the southern countries know they were able to fix something similar beforehand. Obviously the Inquisitor can't anymore but the people don't know that.

To include Rook in this scenario it gives a way better excuse as to why the Inquisitor can't be our main character right now because the south is in a disarray not because its actively being nuked but because it requires the leadership only the Inquisitor can provide. Which makes sense, the Inquisitor whether they believe in the maker or not is a religious figure. They are not a warden general, they don't need to be one either and making them one is kinda dumb imo. It's like making our warden into a religious figure its unnecessary and someone else can take up that role.

I just feel like opting to use the blight again when the problem we're facing is also a magical one that is threatening to tear the world apart is so boring and ignoring the political sphere of Thedas is the problem. You can't ignore the chantry and set your game in Tevinter in the same way you can include the elves of Thedas in your game and ignore their culture and history. Because what you get is so bad that it makes the company seem ignorant of their own work. I think it's especially bad when as a IP dragon age has published books explaining their world, this content exists outside of the games and this content should have been referenced.

#bringbackthejaw