It will surprise no one whoās familiar with me to know that Iāve sat on these opinions for what is, embarrassingly, close to a decade. I remember not having the vocabulary to explain how I felt at the time, and my opinion has done a little evolving since then, but seeing as Iām doing the whole Mass Effect thing right now, I may as well explain myself.
Iām very much not a fan of the Joker/EDI pairing, and if you are, power to you. However, I have some feelings about that that come from who I am as a person as well as just surface level stuff such as not finding that romance particularly substantive, but there we are.Ā
I donāt have osteogenesis imperfecta, but I am a disabled person. Aināt that fun to write. Iām not embarrassed about it, but I also donāt like talking about my stuff too much, since, like, itās private? So forgive me for being a little vague. Itās relevant to the points Iām making, though, so bear with me I guess.
So part of the reason I like Joker so much as a character is that heās lived a life where people have just told him no, all the time, and yet he aggressively exists, even in spite of it. Wasnāt born into money, had a bunch of horrible problems, and didnāt ask for any of it. Everywhere he looked, some dickhead was at the door telling him to stop trying. However, he had his dream and his drive and his passion, so fuck what those people said. He went for it, he broke all the rules that people had put in the way of even letting him try. He knew that if he had a shot, he could do it. It was just about getting that shot. He knew his specialism could do the rest.
Man, I relate.
I canāt tell you how many times Iāve been forced to have toĀ āprove myselfā to fit into someone elseās definition of what aĀ āgood candidateā is. There have been so many instances where, because I donātĀ āfit in the boxā like everybody else, Iāve had to work twice as hard and still get overlooked anyway, even despite having the knowledge or the skills. Itās honestly bullshit, so seeing him in the position heās in really means a lot to me. Itās a breath of fresh air to see someone with such obvious struggles still do what they love to do.
So, being disabled, you get condescended to, quite a lot for one reason or another. People talk to you like youāre a child, or make weird assumptions about what your life experiences are, or start being a dickhead to you once theyāre tired of how you struggle with your disability. It seems like people just kind of expect you to get over it at some point, especially so if the disabilities arenāt visible.Ā āI guess I just thought youād be better at this by nowā starts to become a phrase you can just tattoo on yourself and have a person point to whenever they want to say it so it doesnāt waste any more of either of your time. It can make you cagey, defensive, emotionally withdrawn, and fucking tired. Not only do you have to deal with whatever it is physically or mentally or both, but now youāve got your own insecurities and other peopleās insecurities about you to deal with all the time, every day.
Some people turn this acid manufactured through this daily experience into sarcasm and dry humour, a sometimes self-deprecating deflection tool you can deploy to make people smile and defuse the situation and not talk about anything important because good god letās not go through that again.
You can sometimes get weird ideas about whether or not you deserve to be loved like everybody else. Because youāre different, and you function differently, you can sometimes feel like you are looking at the world from the outside, on the sideline. Because you have a disability that does indeed work to your detriment, whatever it is, because of its very nature as a fucking disability and not a superpower, getting caught up in that question of whether or not you deserve to be loved and the āI just thought youād be better at this by nowā exasperation from other people combines into this huge ugly thing.
Now, Iām a big fan of sci-fi and transhumanist concepts and I love moral and ethical discussions about what constitutes a person and all that good stuff. I enjoy EDI as a character and as a concept. I especially enjoy EDI when sheās a sphere with a little Winamp visualiser for a mouth, because I feel like it creates a lot more of a dialogue around that specific idea and itās fun to talk about. When she looks like an abstract object, how can she be a person? And yet, she both is and is not.
So, I find it more than a little thematically weak that EDI gets this like, 1950s style fembot body that looks like sheās wearing garters. I mean, Iām bi, I like hot women too, but that aesthetic decision was very strange and I felt undermined the previous and interesting work done to explore EDI as a concept. EDI grows and evolves in several ways throughout the games, but is, at the end of the day a machine, and doesnāt experience love in the same way, if at all. She learns to approximate human behaviour and eventually learns to mimic and anticipate quite a lot, but she is what she is, and I donāt think thereās any taking away from that.
From a purely writing based perspective, I found that path fairly tokenistic and poorly justified, in my view. It also always read to me as ādāaww, throw the guy a bone,āĀ āhaha pat him on the head and give him a toyā type thing rather than an actual real emotional exploration, which, given how the entire game series makes it very clear to us that Joker is a very important character, seemed... weird.
So when you combine all of this, Iām so allergic to the Joker/EDI pairing because personally I find it condescending. I find it communicating to me that, no, I and others like me are in fact not worthy of a powerful and passionate romance with peers. What we are worth is a tokenistic, fetishistic and ultimately unrequited fling with a fleshlight. Like, thatās how it feels to me! I get that my experiences arenāt universal or whatever but Iāve had nearly ten real entire years to think about it, and I canāt interpret it any other way. I literally do not have any animosity whatsoever where it comes to Joker and any other pairup. Itās only Joker/EDI and itās fucking frustrating that thatās the canon one. Iām sure I can make another equally long and boring post about the case for Joker/Shep and Iām sure I probably will do because itās not like weāre leaving the house much these days.
Inb4 y u take fictional character so srs y u talk about art