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Dragon Age "Elf Fandom"
Mar. 19th, 2021 07:24 amI'm back to trying to play Dragon Age 2 after having quit last year when things got difficult in my personal life, making it hard for me to find time and space and to do so. And once again I am thinking about something that I have found hard to articulate but finally think I have found the words to express.
CW: discussion of fictional racism
So, I know some people go bananas about elves across all fantasy genres. They identify with them in the way that a person might identify with werewolves or vampires or other humanoid but not-quite-human creature that one might wish to be. Elves have an association with magic and often with nature. They are unusual-looking, but among fantasy creatures/races, they are often the closest to human standards of beauty. Liking elves can have a lot of different meanings. Some elves are small and basically the lithe and magical counterpart to more muscular and practical dwarves. However, just as with the trend of sexier or more elegant vampires, most elves in fantasy tend to be on the tall and elegant, LOTR side of things.
On the other hand, I know people who resent elves for some of the same reasons. Specifically, the fact that they are the "pretty" fantasy creature in such a way that it tends to be juxtaposed to a lot of the other choices. Basically, I know people (at least one personally) who sort of has a little bit of a prejudiced view of elves and their fans from a defensive position of... like... not wanting to need to be the "pretty one" or whatever.
I tend to lean slightly more toward the second viewpoint these days, but I sympathize with both, and I don't think Liking Elves in general is bad.
And neither do I think liking Dragon Age elves is bad. Let me be clear about that.
But I think I got to the root of something that bothers me about the ~fandom~-within-a-fandom that is focused entirely upon the ~Elvhen~ or whatever.
Let me also say that, as a fan, I am a mostly-cis-gendered white woman, and I am bi. I understand that part of my identity is marginalized while another, significant part of it, is very much not. I feel this is important to say because I want to acknowledge that I think some of what I am about to say and kind of complain about may come from a place of people seeing themselves reflected in the Elvhen.
Dragon Age elves draw loosely from several real world cultures including Native Americans/First Peoples and medieval European Jewish and Romani populations. I get that, and I acknowledge it, and if you are related to one of these real world demographics, please know that my whining is in absolutely no way directed at you. You have a hard enough time finding direct representation in media, so if you hyper-identify with Dragon Age elves for this reason, then I am glad you have the outlet.
That said, I don't think that anywhere close to a majority of this "Elvhen First" branch of fandom within Dragon Age fandom is made up of anyone covered in my previous paragraph. I could be wrong, and if I am I preemptively apologize.
But basically, the thing I am complaining about is when a Dragon Age fan latches onto the Elvhen plight, struggle, culture, history, etc., that they start relating it as a 1-to-1 correlation with real world, modern day struggles faced by real marginalized people. Furthermore, even if they aren't currently talking about it like it is a 1-to-1 correlation, even in Escapism Land, I have sometimes encountered this tendency for people to basically merge their Dragon Age Fan identity with being their Elvhen characters so much that it's almost... inseparable from their appreciation for or criticism of the Dragon Age universe as a product or work of art?
And I think that, sometimes, it comes across to me as, like... cosplaying being an oppressed, marginalized minority for... emotional catharsis? Or to feel that one is on the right side of Thedas history? Something like that.
And that makes me really uncomfortable from the perspective of a white person who isn't, to my knowledge, related to any of the real world inspiration sources for some of the stuff the elves have been through. I just... don't think that - if you are not uniquely positioned to personally understand some of the inspiration material and rarely see it acknowledged, etc. - a fan should basically jump into the role of an elf on all DA-related thought and arguments to the point that it almost becomes a felt... aggression if someone doesn't agree with the elves of Dragon Age all the time.
Actually, the exact same thing can be said about the plight of Dragon Age mages. I think I find it uniquely uncomfortable as a definitely not-racial-minority fan to see other fans who might be in similar situations to me deciding to perform racial activism on behalf of elves on a computer screen from the perspective as if they were said oppressed fantasy race.
Magi and superpowers being used as a metaphor for sexual identity is not new (X-Men is a common example), so I guess I find it less egregious as an exercise in empathy that perhaps goes too far into other people's experience of escapism. It doesn't seem like cosplaying something that might be offensive if you as any kind of marginalized person identify with the plight of mages as presented in Dragon Age. But it's still a problem if your emotional relationship to an escapism world means that you find other people having a different opinion than you about some social issue in Thedas to be... Idk... objectively evil.
Tl;dr: Identify with elves or mages all you want but don't cosplay oppression when you could be doing better things with your energy, maybe.
CW: discussion of fictional racism
So, I know some people go bananas about elves across all fantasy genres. They identify with them in the way that a person might identify with werewolves or vampires or other humanoid but not-quite-human creature that one might wish to be. Elves have an association with magic and often with nature. They are unusual-looking, but among fantasy creatures/races, they are often the closest to human standards of beauty. Liking elves can have a lot of different meanings. Some elves are small and basically the lithe and magical counterpart to more muscular and practical dwarves. However, just as with the trend of sexier or more elegant vampires, most elves in fantasy tend to be on the tall and elegant, LOTR side of things.
On the other hand, I know people who resent elves for some of the same reasons. Specifically, the fact that they are the "pretty" fantasy creature in such a way that it tends to be juxtaposed to a lot of the other choices. Basically, I know people (at least one personally) who sort of has a little bit of a prejudiced view of elves and their fans from a defensive position of... like... not wanting to need to be the "pretty one" or whatever.
I tend to lean slightly more toward the second viewpoint these days, but I sympathize with both, and I don't think Liking Elves in general is bad.
And neither do I think liking Dragon Age elves is bad. Let me be clear about that.
But I think I got to the root of something that bothers me about the ~fandom~-within-a-fandom that is focused entirely upon the ~Elvhen~ or whatever.
Let me also say that, as a fan, I am a mostly-cis-gendered white woman, and I am bi. I understand that part of my identity is marginalized while another, significant part of it, is very much not. I feel this is important to say because I want to acknowledge that I think some of what I am about to say and kind of complain about may come from a place of people seeing themselves reflected in the Elvhen.
Dragon Age elves draw loosely from several real world cultures including Native Americans/First Peoples and medieval European Jewish and Romani populations. I get that, and I acknowledge it, and if you are related to one of these real world demographics, please know that my whining is in absolutely no way directed at you. You have a hard enough time finding direct representation in media, so if you hyper-identify with Dragon Age elves for this reason, then I am glad you have the outlet.
That said, I don't think that anywhere close to a majority of this "Elvhen First" branch of fandom within Dragon Age fandom is made up of anyone covered in my previous paragraph. I could be wrong, and if I am I preemptively apologize.
But basically, the thing I am complaining about is when a Dragon Age fan latches onto the Elvhen plight, struggle, culture, history, etc., that they start relating it as a 1-to-1 correlation with real world, modern day struggles faced by real marginalized people. Furthermore, even if they aren't currently talking about it like it is a 1-to-1 correlation, even in Escapism Land, I have sometimes encountered this tendency for people to basically merge their Dragon Age Fan identity with being their Elvhen characters so much that it's almost... inseparable from their appreciation for or criticism of the Dragon Age universe as a product or work of art?
And I think that, sometimes, it comes across to me as, like... cosplaying being an oppressed, marginalized minority for... emotional catharsis? Or to feel that one is on the right side of Thedas history? Something like that.
And that makes me really uncomfortable from the perspective of a white person who isn't, to my knowledge, related to any of the real world inspiration sources for some of the stuff the elves have been through. I just... don't think that - if you are not uniquely positioned to personally understand some of the inspiration material and rarely see it acknowledged, etc. - a fan should basically jump into the role of an elf on all DA-related thought and arguments to the point that it almost becomes a felt... aggression if someone doesn't agree with the elves of Dragon Age all the time.
Actually, the exact same thing can be said about the plight of Dragon Age mages. I think I find it uniquely uncomfortable as a definitely not-racial-minority fan to see other fans who might be in similar situations to me deciding to perform racial activism on behalf of elves on a computer screen from the perspective as if they were said oppressed fantasy race.
Magi and superpowers being used as a metaphor for sexual identity is not new (X-Men is a common example), so I guess I find it less egregious as an exercise in empathy that perhaps goes too far into other people's experience of escapism. It doesn't seem like cosplaying something that might be offensive if you as any kind of marginalized person identify with the plight of mages as presented in Dragon Age. But it's still a problem if your emotional relationship to an escapism world means that you find other people having a different opinion than you about some social issue in Thedas to be... Idk... objectively evil.
Tl;dr: Identify with elves or mages all you want but don't cosplay oppression when you could be doing better things with your energy, maybe.
