Dragon Age "Elf Fandom"

[prixmium]

I'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.

Comments

[dorchadas]

that they start relating it as a 1-to-1 correlation with real world, modern day struggles faced by real marginalized people

This is absolutely the worst thing whenever it shows up in fandom spaces because fantasy/sci-fi/superheroes/etc is often a horrible way to make any kind of oppression metaphor. Jews don't have real magic that can kill people and if we did, honestly non-Jews would be right to be afraid of us. And like, all of the "Templars or Mages?" conflict Dragon Age tries to set up is completely under cut by the sheer number of mages who get possessed or start practicing blood magic and wrack up double- or triple-digit body counts. If there was a group in the real world who thanks to emotional distress or bad training or thoughts of vengeance or whatever, could suddenly flip a switch and start killing everyone nearby in ways they were powerless to stop, I absolutely would want them to be heavily monitored.

Dragon Age shows us that Tevinter is what happens if you let mages off their leash.

(That said, I'm even more annoyed about Dragon Age elves because they set up them as parallels to various real-world oppressed groups and then Inquisition is like "but actually their glorious ancient realm was a genocidal slavemongering colonialist nightmare so maybe they deserve it question mark" which is )

[sideways]

This is very well-put.

[prixmium]

Thanks!

[prixmium]

I've been gnawing over how to respond to this for a few days.

As I said in the above post, I feel like the perspective of a Jewish person might be different due to the inspiration they took from medieval, historic Jewish populations when constructing the stuff about their elves. And I'm not trying to police the reader/consumer response from people in communities I do not represent.

That said, I think you're actually basically taking the complete opposite point of my post.

I am saying that I do not believe Dragon Age did this intentionally:

that they start relating it as a 1-to-1 correlation with real world, modern day struggles faced by real marginalized people

Rather, I think some fans like to hold it up as being that. What makes me so uncomfortable is when certain fans basically act like they ARE elves and that they are speaking on behalf of them and that elves are a real ethnic group it is possible to be harmfully prejudiced against.

It's impossible to actually oppress Dragon Age elves because they aren't real.

Your expressed concern with what "Dragon Age does" is not what I'm referring to here. That is a valid line of criticism, but not the raod I was going down.

In my opinion, however, the "real world parallels" between various real-world oppressed groups is literally the same as drawing inspiration from any historical reality. And yeah, maybe that's fraught, but I do not think it is a fair or good faith reading to be like "and therefore Bioware is saying maybe they deserve it." The thing is, EVERY group and EVERY CHARACTER in Dragon Age is flawed, and that's one thing I enjoy about it, and the thing I am annoyed at is the "no we must protect [x] from [y] because I am projecting way too hard onto them."

That said, I understand that sensitivity reading is something that doesn't happen often enough, and if you are personally actually offended by something that Bioware took as "inspiration" from your people's real world history, then that isn't my place to judge. But to reiterate, I think it's kinda messed up when white fans who sympathize with real-world oppression decide to cosplay it by hyper-identifying with elves or mages.

[dorchadas]

Hmm. I do feel like the issues are intertwined, though, in that the way that Alienage elves are so heavily based on historical European Jewish populations is one of the reasons why some fans are so quick to take their side. They live in (effectively) ghettos with their movement and rights controlled, they have their own secret beliefs but are constantly pressured to adopt the mainstream religion, they have a sacred tree in the center of their settlement (one of the epithets for the Torah is "The Tree of Life" [Eitz Chayyim]), they live in exile (galut, we'd say), they have an ancient homeland which they long to return to...

I have seen a bunch of discourse in Jewish fandom spaces about this, and about how some people are very quick to stick up for elf rights but are very quiet when the issue of real-world antisemitism pops up. As you say, it's hugely messed-up, but I do put part of the blame on Bioware for making it so easy to compare Thedas elves with our history. It's impossible to oppress Dragon Age elves but it's very easy to think of real-world oppression when considering how they're portrayed.

It's not the first time they've done this exact same thing, either. Mass Effect's Quarians live in exile, they're treated badly by other species, they created robots (golems?) to protect and work for them that went out of control, their home system is named Tikkun ("Repairing, Healing" in Hebrew), Tali's name is Hebrew ("dew"), and they literally begin an admiralty board meeting in ME2 with the shehechiyanu prayer, with "ancestors" subbed in for G-d. And then in ME3 it's revealed that the Quarians started a war to exterminate the Geth after the Geth maybe wanted to be treated as sapient beings so perhaps they deserved being exiled... So, I do think Dragon Age did it intentionally because it seems to be a pattern at Bioware, and the "maybe they deserved it" thing is also a pattern which is what annoys me so much.

And the reason I brought it up originally is that I think without those extremely-direct parallels to our history, it'd be harder for fans to identify so much with Thedas elves. There would be still be some, because elves have a pretty strong hold over the popular imagination, but I don't think there would be as much.

[prixmium]

I think I agree with your overall point when it comes to how Jewish fans might react. Nevertheless, my issue is that people who aren't Jewish are adopting this oppression of elves as a way to flex their social justice muscles without committing to doing anything in the real world while making people who don't fall in love with Solas, or whatever, the bad guy.

I just... am not equipped to tell you if your position is completely on point or not. It just wasn't... my point.

[dorchadas]

I just think that the tendency of some people to do that and the close parallels between Thedas elves and real-world oppressed peoples are intertwined.

[prixmium]

I understand that, and I literally disclaimed that I was not talking about how communities from whom said inspiration was drawn and their response to the story in the original post. This is about a fannish phenomenon that I know extends well beyond Jewish fans (or people who don't like DA for this reason), and I only ventured to talk about the "Elvhen" fandom.