I wanna talk about queer representation, specifically in Dragon Age: Veilguard. It'll take some time to explain, first I'm going to get into Dragon Age as a series, and then I'll get into Taash.
When it comes to Dragon Age on the whole I have some mixed feelings. It's one of those series' that sells itself as being serious and about serious things, but it isn't. This doesn't mean that it's outright bad, just that it isn't compelling.
Origins has a similar problem that a lot of games from the 00's had, where they're not being "dark" necessarily, they're just being edgy. I'm sure someone on the team wanted to talk about ghettoization, etc., but that's not fun for a lot of people, the fun part is "the zombie horde is attacking!!"
A similar sort of problem continues all the way into Veilguard, where we could go into like the slavery capital of the world, but the part they're more interested in is "go smite some dragons".
Now here's the thing, "awkward" isn't a huge problem, all that means is that it's benign, that the story isn't very interesting. "Adequate" is fine, not offensively terrible.
Here's where we get into Taash, a non-binary character.
A part of the problem is that human men in fantasy, and games in general, are allowed to be utterly boring or without personality. But when it's a woman, or gay characters, or trans characters, folks act like it's a crime when they "just exist", something they can't position as life changing.
Do I want to see more queer characters who do things other than be queer? Whose personalities and stories are about more than just "I'm the non-binary character"? Sure, absolutely.
But at the same time if all you have is "I'm uninteresting outside of being snarky", well... that was good enough for Morrigan. And Dorian. And Sera. And Varric. If that's good enough for them, then it's good enough for everyone.
[#]DragonAge
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