The Cryptographer

there really is something very might makes right and dog eat dog about dragon age as a series that, especially when it comes to any character being put in a position to empathise with any person other than themselves, I both admire and think is wildly uncharitable. Like as a quick example I think it rocks that when Merrill goes ‘poor Anders’ in act 3, Fenris calls her out on projecting her own issues onto him ‘you pity him because he’s you’ and he gets to be right about it (only to have her turn around and go ‘well you’re him too and the only reason you don’t pity him because you pathetically can’t have pity for yourself’ and she’s also right about that) like yeah it’s so cool that everyone’s psyches are accounted for and they’re all hypocrites and that empathising with someone else isn’t just this neutral good action completely divested from the construction of self serving personal identity and belief. but also yeah, maybe I don’t think this makes Merrill mcfucking stupid and cringe and baby when she directs all that cognitive dissonance towards advocating for the lives of the Gallows mages in TLS even though they are not her people and this is not her fight. Maybe I think, despite what she says to the contrary, that her believing in more than just people is good, actually. Maybe I don’t think nothing matters and opinions are like testicles and it’s all just everyone enacting epistemological violence on everyone else forever. Anyhow more on this later. Need to lock in now

i think frankly this is a bigger thesis and hypothesis than i can easily prove. like. it goes way beyond any particular character's banter that i can just drag off the wiki and throw up. and besides i don't think dragon age is necessarily a series of works overflowing with ideological consistency and one artistic vision in mind shared and communicated by all of its creators. but i do think it's a series that kinda evens out in a weird place where i appreciate some of the realism in people being fallible allies with fallible idea of solidarity and their own emotional attachments to issues that aren't truly about them (the whole way merrill condescends to fenris and other city elves, leliana having all these underbaked and unexamined racist-classist-ableist beliefs even when she's ostensibly advocating for mage liberation and elves to be allowed into the clergy in DAI, zevran taking his own baggage about the crows and projecting it in wildly different ways on the situation in the mage tower and the situation with branka's anvil, sera not even being from a working class background but feeling more comfortable appropriating their struggles than that of people sharing her own ethnicity) i feel i'm being increasingly prompted to find the strong convictions these characters had embarrassing because of said fallibility. and meanwhile i'm also being asked to find the strong convictions people had on behalf of their own ethnic or social class also embarrassing and overly biased and selfish. and the characters who end up looking good and cool are meanwhile the ones who are endlessly and incrementally relinquishing their right to advocate for collective rights and identity - maybe i should just care about me and my friends and not pretend at anything more. but yeah, that just sort of is an everyone out for themselves dog eat dog sort of mentality that is then being made worse by the fact that this is the game where you make political choices about people's lives and then fight them to death if they disagree so like... you maybe see what i'm getting at here when i say the game kinda ultimately presents the image that the least cringe thing to do is to fight for the interest of oneself and one's friends and not worry about whether or not you need to murder a billion other people to do it.

the thing about talking about characters that are politically conservative in such a way that is overly punitive with themselves as much as everyone around them (ie. Fenris, Vivienne) is that I am just also a pretty punitive and unforgiving person and actually it is my God-given right to be angry and resentful about the wrongs I have both done and suffered forever, and to hold myself and the people I choose to allow into my personal life to whatever unreasonable biased standards I wish. And I can do all that and still think that it’s irresponsible to create public policy so as to embody that.

tbh the issue with vivienne isn’t that she doesn’t care - I’d say she does show more care for tranquil and young and vulnerable mages than most people - it’s that she holds a pretty deeply ingrained belief that the Circle is, or should be, a meritocracy where mages need to prove their skill before earning the right not to be killed in harrowings or made tranquil, and I think she often (but not always) prizes this belief (and the ways it feeds back into her own sense of identity and self worth) more than the lives of those mages getting made tranquil or harrowed to death

this also isn’t something I think makes her like- uniquely evil or unworthy of compassion or attempted understanding. Like I think anders for instance has a lot of deeply ingrained beliefs from his time in the Circle about what makes a ‘good’ mage in such a way he will write off the feelings and wellbeing of great swathes of them, and I think he is a level of careless with people who are vulnerable on axes of marginalisation that he isn’t (tranquil, a woman, racially marginalised, elderly) that vivienne is simply never going to be. But there’s something about how I’m often being asked to like- judge whether or not they have empathy or good intentions or a heart that’s capable of bleeding in the same breath I’m being asked whether or not I think their political activism sucks, as if those are even remotely related things

there was this very fascinating post abt enemies to lovers i was reading the other day that was abt how its a fantasy abt the intimacy of being known at your worst with someone with the power to annihilate who does not annihilate, but instead who knows you in a way that means you don't have to pretend. which is true abt like some part of the erotic draw, but it was very fascinating to me that the frisson of being ideologically opposed or having different goals in like life didn't enter into it at all and so there's evidently no eroticism being derived from either negotiating a middle ground or in characters being emotionally conflicted abt ideals versus emotions, or characters walking away from an ideologically destructive edifice and love as redemptive power. to me it is simply not enemies to lovers enough if there isn't some genuine difference, a genuine source of contention that they need to resolve or negotiate, bc the question is whether the love will be enough or not. that's a sexy question to me, anything less just leaves me feeling cheated which tbf is also how i feel abt 90% of enemies to lovers stuff that i try to read/engage with bc there is very little interest in even having a genuine barrier or source of contention that needs to be navigated, that requires one or both of the characters to like, change their entire worldview for the other. surface level love stuff, i want the deep intimate eroticism of love being fundamentally earthshaking, worldbreaking ffs.

Listening to more of Butter Honey Pig Bread and I think I was unfair to it when I accused it of not being raw enough earlier. Like yeah, it’s definitely started to let itself bleed in the more recent chapters as the characters confront the type of repressed and shying away from vulnerability that they are, but I do think it is for [redacted] reasons sort of triggering me regardless.

okay i take it back. doubling down on my original critique. there was something i assumed was like... the direct build up to the climax of the book that was actually just the climax full stop