Texts From the Normandy Crew

you’re my favourite commenter on the citadel

Once I told someone from a different part of south London that I grew up in Thornton Heath and they asked how many times I'd been stabbed

That could def work too - Cora as an actual Asari.For swapping Liam with Cora - and this'll go some way to explain why I've been so absolutely leery of the "Cora invited into a different culture" explanation as those of us born into majority white cultures often don't feel invited when it is our only culture - Liam is from England. Post-Brexit (and indeed, in the run-up to) even in London there's been a huge rise in hate crimes against PoC. Those of us who have parents and grandparents born here, who have lived here our entire lives, British citizens who've never known anywhere else, get accused of being illegal immigrants and have abuse shouted at us. People have had acid thrown in their faces, been physically and verbally abused, for the crime of looking non-white. Even white people that "look" European have had hateful things shouted at them, if not flat-out attacked. I'm not saying that England is some Wild West style terror-dome and totally unsafe (except for Croydon). Just that even those of us who have no other home have that awareness beeping in the back of our minds when we walk home at night or see a UKIP bumper sticker on someone's car. I said before that racism isn't the only way to engage with accurate representation of people of colour, but I can see swapping Cora and Liam's stories being particular poignant for Liam as he finds a culture that's totally accepting in a way that places like England often aren't.

No problem!

If only EA had shut it down sooner and saved us all the whining from SWM over Anders hitting on them that sprung up from DA2

FUCK YES TO ALL OF THIS.

Nobody is arguing over the fact that Dalish myths/legends aren't accurate. The entirety of the game is basically that. To take your metaphor, I would point out that the best professors, when teaching a subject about a culture to an audience belonging TO that culture don't lecture but rather make it a democratic process - to discuss history, they might discuss myths and dovetail into what part of that myth is a metaphor for real history. Mortician not acknowledging the player's background speaks of someone who isn't a good professor. Which is probably IC! But the lack of 'as you might know, being Dalish' gives people the impression that they're being...steamrolled, or it breaks their suspension - especially after DA2 when so much of Merrill's SL as a Dalish elf was about keeping and learning history. It was tiny, but gave players the impression that that suddenly wasn't important. Morrigan not acknowledging the Inquisitor's background if the Inquisitor is Dalish could likely have been fixed with an if:then flag and a few extra lines of dialogue. That's hours - potentially days/weeks depending on what bugs pop up during testing - more work (which is probably why it wasn't implemented - I wouldn't be surprised if the writers already had that situation mapped out) but it would've def been a lot more involving and less suspension-of-belief breaking. Bc...if you're gonna reason out Morrigan not acknowledging the fact that she might be repeating some knowledge a Dalish apprentice keeper might've already heard you've got to assign a lot of arrogance to her (which admittedly is p in character for Morrigan).

There's a lot of potential that's absolutely just...not fulfilled with so many character storylines that Bioware picks up. A lot of it can be excused with lack of time, but then so much feels like a total lack of research or experience. It's all over the DA franchise too.

I'd be cautious about using the phrase 'invited in' bc like...there is literally nobody there from her training to be like 'yes we invited her in'. We have her word for it, p much. It's also extremely difficult for a person of one culture to be invited into another like...yes maybe you've married into it, or grown up in another country, or adopted another homeland as your own. That doesn't mean that every single person native to that culture has invited you in. There's a casual comfort that Cora has using Asari culture to define herself that is genuinely uncomfortable to view. To answer your specific points: she did not grow up with the Asari and was an adult when she was invited to train with them, which is different to being invited to join the Asari in general - I've yet to see any British troops training with, say, American troops that come back insisting that they are now American, for example. Plus there's an absolute obnoxiousness to her personal quest where so many dialogue options boil down to 'hello I am the True Asari let me tell you Asari how to do Asari I am Cora the Asari' which is absolutely just...nope.

Mass Effect is dead

Y E S.

In western fantasy and science fiction, we PoC have been trained to, rather than look for ourselves amongst the cast of humans, look to the aliens. Science fiction has long been one of the most diverse art forms, casting black actors in main roles long before a lot of other genres. But those main roles are of aliens. Aliens in science fiction - and non-human roles in fantasy - are coded non-white. They go through what we go through in metaphor. A half-elf torn between the culture of humans and the culture of the elves is more likely to be represented than a human biracial person. Star Trek in the 60s was using aliens to represent the civil rights conflicts of the era (for an extremely frustrating example see "Let that be your last battlefield", 1969). Diverse landscapes like Mass Effect or Star Trek do show us on screen. But by removing the racial element of our experience (often by hand waving it away as 'doesn't matter; society is too advanced for racism' as though that's the only part of our experience - I just wanna know if Jacob grew up with joloff rice or aki and saltfish man) we aren't truly represented as a whole - what we get are one-dimensional ciphers - the writing carefully steers clear of anything to do with any culture outside of the overarching American-Canadian-European hegemony. Writers of science fiction and fantasy seem more comfortable writing characters from alien cultures like the Asari. And so they become the closest thing we have to full representation as they represent that rich culture that we bring to the table, as well as experience of butting heads with the mainstream (because yes the Asari do have a cultural power in the galaxy that humans don't wield, but as we see the story through human eyes and they invariably make up a minority on the ship, we get to hear them deal with all kinds of assumptions that we go through - especially the hair stuff. That struck a real chord with me as someone who has dealt with multiple questions regarding my hair). What we see most of all is, just like we have, a rich history and culture. So when a character like Cora - who is white and blonde and blue eyed - borrows liberally from it, it becomes an uncomfortable metaphor for every white chick at coachella wearing a bindi.