I want to talk about that article that wrote about Dragon Age: The Veilguard and used the title, "This Game Kills Facists." If you've seen it, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't. Well.
I think before I dig into this, I want to put forth a few caveats. This won't be a formal essay, but I'll do my best to cite my sources and previous argumentation. I also don't have any real animosity toward the author of this article, I'd never actually even heard of her until someone directed me to this article, and I don't think the problems with this article are unique to the author. But. As I said in a different post late last night, I think the article itself such a textbook example of this kind of left-liberal politics that doesn't actually understand the terms they're mobilizing about, stakes their identity on their consumerism habits, and seems to think that vibes-based opinions are in any way, shape, or form equivalent to critical analysis that interrogates the text and the meta of the media they're engaging with.
The analysis in this article is bad, I'm sorry to say. Just from a structural standpoint, it fails to understand how the structure of rhetorical argumentation functions, and doesn't bother to provide any concrete support for its claims. It highlights an inability to formulate an argument that I think is rampant among fandom discourse and I would perhaps argue is a common issue with liberal political argumentation in general, although that's another essay and isn't central to what I want to dig at today. I also fundamentally do not think this author understands what fascism is, which is frustrating at best, and I find it irresponsible although I don't think the intent is malicious. I'm also not convinced that the author really has a good grasp of media analysis or how to interrogate the thema of the stories she's talking about, but I'll leave that for you to determine.
So. What is the thesis of this article, which purports that this game "kills fascists"? I had to chew on it for a hot minute while reading, and as best as I can tell, the thesis is "Wokeness is the point of Dragon Age."
It takes the author three paragraphs to read this point:
"But I do want to call out the choo-choo hate train triggered by Veilguard’s [weary sigh] “wokeness,” because, of course, the wokeness is the point of Dragon Age. It always has been."
"And yes, Veilguard is the wokest, queerest Dragon Age yet."
And it is reiterated again in the concluding paragraph:
"So we’re back to the wokeness. I told you it was the point. Empathy and community building, kids. It’s not only the point of Veilguard, but the prevailing lesson of the Dragon Age series, where, again, stunning, ideologically-driven betrayals drive each narrative and make the unintended and the least of us suffer, only for a hero to pick themselves up and start figuring out how to go on and who can help."
"This game kills fascists. Literally, in the course of the game, yes–I will leave it up to you and your ending what that means for Solas****–but more importantly, its soul is pure fascist bane, centering empathy, intimacy, heroism, community. Multiple overarching storylines intersect to highlight the ways history and faith can be twisted to alienate and control people, as well as how the best way to fight fascism is always with each other."
Okay, great, that's at least a decent starting point.
Except we have a real problem. If we are making an argument that a game like, say, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is woke, and therefore its very character of wokeness is "fascist bane," base bare minimum, we have to define what makes something 'woke' and what makes something 'fascist.' Words mean things, and especially words like these, which have specific political definitions that are frequently pulled out of the hat and used colloquially as short-hand for... whatever it is that someone wants it to mean, and for what it is meant to mean within a community.
She kind, sort of, gives us an idea of what she means when she says the game, and indeed the storyworld of the Dragon Age series, is woke. Wokeness, which she equivocates as anti-fascism, carries the character of being compassionate. Wokeness is when you center collaboration. If we are are woke, if we are combating fascism, we are empathetic and vulnerable and intimate and we interested in building communities and we are trying to help each other. Apparently, being anti-fascist is when your story is queer, or at the very least, allowing space for queer identities. And apparently, being "a hero" requires that you be woke / anti-fascist
There are two problems with this:
The first is that, unfortunately, examples aren't definitions. Examples are meant to exist as part of the supporting body of your arguments; they're the rhetorical illustration in the encyclopedia on the page next to the definition.
The second is that while we're receiving an attempt to qualify what fascism is indirectly by qualifying what stands in opposition to it - in this case, 'wokeness,' which is itself never clearly defined and instead relies on a definition of woke that literally just relies on the negation of whatever being not-woke, or 'anti-woke', means.
This is bad logic, regardless of your opinions of the writing of The Veilguard. If you cannot tell me what fascism is, then you cannot tell me what it is not, and you certainly cannot tell me how something like being 'woke' is in opposition to fascism. The fact that the author fails to do this, that they assume you will understand exactly what they mean because it is somehow inherently self-evident, brings into question what exactly they mean.
I've tried to interrogate what she means by fascism, and the closest we really get is:
"And again, these stories are no fantasies and there are still no easy questions, no right answers. Except fighting the fascists. This game kills fascists. That one is a gimme."
"...accidentally releasing the two other remaining elven gods onto the world. Unlike Solas, who rationalizes a greater good, these gods are purely malevolent enslavers. They, too, want to turn the clock back, but to the days of their unlimited rule before Solas overthrew them. Not much ambiguity there, but good contrast. Solas is sidelined by events, relegated to advising Rook as they seek to defeat two sadistic gods and their Super PAC of bad guys rising across the nations of northern Thedas. But you’re not only fighting the gods and their allies, all of whom are explicitly fascist."
"You can also see how those thorny Dragon Age companion relationships are the They Live glasses all of us need at one time or another, teaching us how to empathize with someone you never even wanted to know, or maybe to forgive someone you thought beyond redemption. Or how beliefs are often flawed, but no one’s rights are negotiable. Or how no one is free until everyone is free. This game kills fascists. Literally, in the course of the game, yes–I will leave it up to you and your ending what that means for Solas****–but more importantly, its soul is pure fascist bane, centering empathy, intimacy, heroism, community. Multiple overarching storylines intersect to highlight the ways history and faith can be twisted to alienate and control people, as well as how the best way to fight fascism is always with each other."
Fascists are when you are sadistic. When you are malevolent. When you are enslavers. When you seek to regress society. When you lack empathy, when you destroy communities, when you hold things against people, when you believe [human] rights are negotiable (depending on who you cosnider [human], perhaps?) when you weaponize history and faith "to alienate and control people." Fascists do genocides.
These are, again, examples. Not definitions. And I think beneath that the author is using what they believe is a "true" or "commonly accepted" meaning of fascism that falls under what we might consider a persuasive definition logical fallacy; except the definitions are not even definitions, but vibes, and they aren't even vibes that correspond with any of the most commonly accepted frameworks of how to identify fascism.
To some extent, I might be willing to cut the author some slack because fascism is pretty infamously a loaded term that gets thrown around with a colloquial usage that absolutely does not adhere to the generally accepted parameters of fascism - and even within academic discussion circles, there's debate on what exactly does and does not constitute a definition of fascism, made in part difficult because one of the key characters of fascists seems to be their mutability, their willingness to adapt to populist beliefs and weaponize said populist sentiment toward their own goals, as a way to muddy the water on who they actually are and what they actually stand for.
In this vein, I think I'll recommend a couple of books here.
THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM by Robert Paxton is always a good starting point. [link to online Internet Archive copy].
Stanley Payne's A HISTORY OF FASCISM 1914-1945 is also a good baseline. [link to online Internet Archive copy].
SPAIN AT WAR: THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN CONTEXT 1931-1939 by Shubert and Esenwein [link to online Internet Archive copy].
EUROPE BETWEEN THE WARS: A POLITICAL HISTORY by Martin Kitchner [link to online Internet Archive copy].
FASCISM by Roger Griffin.
Umberto Eco and UR-FASCISM.
I actually very specifically think the issue we all tend run into is that fascism is less a coherent ideology than it is extremely opportunistic and has a myriad of commonalities but very few exclusive traits, which is exacerbated by the inherent limitations and rigid nature of definitions. I tend to stick with a blend of Griffin and Paxton's definitions that I added a few things to but always have to put up a disclaimer that it's a bare bones definition that doesn't encompass the ideology but rather points out the few core ideals and its general manifestation, and even then, I think fascism pre- and post- neoliberalism are also incredibly distinct even if you put all fascism under one umbrella and separate them just by those two eras. Griffin I think is mostly useful for a layman's overview of fascism, and I also think that Alexander Reid Ross has a fairly functional definition, although I don't wholly agree with it, either:
"Fascism relies on the perception of a constituency producing, and produced by, an inherently natural process of hierarchy manifested by warrior elites embedded in the spiritual myths of the nation. In short, fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual palingenesis ("rebirth") of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and natural tradition."
These are all good starting points, but I think the major takeaway is that fascism is not ideologically coherent. It is somewhat of a non-ideology, and furthermore I think any decent fascist scholar will point out its opportunism and lack of actual ideological foundation, which is why it's so difficult to really define it coherently beyond "here's some general traits, here's how they manifest in this situation." To this point, I would probably direct you to Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", where he lists fourteen general properties of fascist ideology and further argues that it is not possible to organize these into a coherent system, but that "it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it". But with the caveat that it's easy to fall into the trap of "commonalities" while still serving as a useful checklist for identifying red flags.
I think it's also important to keep in mind that part of the reason that fascism is not a coherent ideology is because fascism has historically and continues to contemporaneously adopt a lot different types of tactics to gain popular support. They frequently employ socialist rhetoric, engage in aesthetic appeal, turn minor things regarding a specific group into major ploys against the dominant structure, etc. They're so successful that to this day I am arguing with people who say "socialism is bad because the Nazis were Socialists because they were called National Socialists" which is just. A stunningly bad grasp of the politics of fascism and socialism and the history of the Nazi party while also being an incredibly pervasive issue in the discourse of this subject. Fascist rhetoric lies on appealing to nationalism that most people will have ingrained throughout their childhood (regardless of political system) and claiming the woes and struggles people face are due to a cultural backsliding brought about by some group or groups, and they use a variety of tactics to make that more digestible and appealing until it becomes more mainstream and they can actually say what they mean -- to become mask off once. We're watching it happen in real time in the United States. The shit being said about LGBTQ+ people rightly could not be openly said even 5 years ago, let alone 10 years ago. They had to lace it in all sorts of rhetoric and dog whistles whereas now they can be blatant about it, and now we're watching the United States erode into a fascist state.
There exists another problem with defining fascism -- which I think is an issue even with the identifying frameworks I like to work with -- and that is that the framing of specifically the role of capitalism tends to be either overemphasized or not emphasized enough (or at all). This is problematic because fascism is specifically a capitalist development, but the commonalities trap of Eco leads to, for example, Marxist arguments that "fascism is the immune system of capitalism" or is a "last ditch effort by the bourgeoise" -- arguments that are both ahistoric to the early 20th century era of fascism (as a glittering generality, the main rich conservative element that disliked the Nazis were the prussian nationalists, conservatives and military leaders, who ended up trying to appropriate the Nazis. And well, we know how that turned out) as well as the era of neoliberalism, wherein the latter there are still 'roots' present but the fascistic relationship with capitalism is foundationally different than it was in the early 20th century. And this is how we end up with analyses that attempt to position concepts like racism and transphobia to capitalism rather than understanding how they are adopted by and employed by capitalism, and therefore failing to contextualize their roles within fascism.
People often equate concepts/phenomena like genocide, authoritarianism, militarism, fetishism of aesthetics, etc. exclusively with fascism but the reality is that liberals and state socialists routinely have committed (for example) genocide and they're not fascists. They are liberals. And it is also true that fascism is a descendant of that liberal genocidal violence. United States and European white supremacy, for instance, were not developed under a fascist regime and in fact existed long before fascism reared its ugly head. A preoccupation with population control will likely be present in any regime, and historically concepts like population reduction or eugenicist spins on natalism are a common appearance in the nation myths they nations make for themselves. I would argue that population control specifically predates not only fascism but also capitalism and has been the backbone of liberal democracies, but that's another thing altogether for a different essay. The point is, an ideology does not need to be fascist to do heinous things, and further, fascism isn't definable as "any evil act." Using fascism as a shorthand for evil is both incorrect and also helps obscure how other forms of evil work.
The problem I have, therefore, with the author of this essay "This Game Kills Fascists" is that she doesn't even seek to employ a working framework of fascism. The enemies are "explicitly fascist" but she doesn't really tell us how, she just provides examples that might conceivably fit into a framework, were she to utilize one.
Sadism is not inherent to fascism. Slavery is not inherent to fascism. Social regression is not inherent to fascism. Social regression, or a return to tradition, certainly can be a red flag to watch for, but isn't exclusive to fascism and isn't enough to stand on its own. The author argues that community and disparate peoples coming together is a feature of the game and the series, and this is ultimately antithetical to fascist movements, so I could certainly grant her this.
On the other hand, the linkage of heroism as anti-fascist is an interesting choice because, if we refer to Eco's 14 Points:
"In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
We would of course never argue that Rook is intended to be fascistic as a hero. Nor would we argue this for our companion Davrin, who as a Grey Warden is essentially in a death cult and who does manifest through the game a desire to die heroically because that is what he is supposed to do (Grey Wardens are meant to die slaying the archdemon and stopping the blight!) But: this is an adequate illustration of the type of commonalities that we must watch for.
Or if we borrow tumblr user Mythalism's point about the types of literature that were permitted by the Nazi state under its fascist regime, it's generally understood that there were four categories of topics in literature (we'll apply this more broadly to media) that met the Nazi criterion.
The first was ‘Front Experience’. This was to promote the camaraderie and good times that would be found in time of war on the front line. The most famous author in this category was Werner Bumelburg.
The second category was ‘World View’. Books on this promoted the views of Hitler and Rosenberg. Hans Grimm wrote ‘People Without Space’ in 1926 and it was heavily publicised once the Nazis gained power. The book gave the Nazis one of their most famous slogans: “The Germans: the cleanest, most honest people, most efficient and most industrious.”
The third category was ‘Regional Novels’. These books emphasised the excellence of the various regions of Germany. The most famous authors in this category were Agnes Miegel, Rudolf Binding and Börries von Münchhausen.
The final category was ‘Racial Doctrine’. Books in this category emphasised the greatness of the Aryan race when compared to Jews, Slavs and anyone labelled ‘untermenschen’. The most famous author in this category was Gottfried Benn who based his work on the “ancestral vitality” of the German people.
Literally nobody who is reasonable is going to argue that The Veilguard is a fascistic piece of media, but if you were to stretch the framework to make an argument for something like that, Mythalism points out that it wouldn't be too difficult to find commonalities between elements of the game and the criterion outlined immediately above:
camaraderie and good times found in war
simplistic world view with good vs. bad people
emphasized excellence of the countries represented and erasure of their flaws
we could probably swing the last one with how it frames elves as the source of literally all evil in the world
Voila, fascist game! (This is not serious.)
What we seem to have here is a simplistic view of "fascists = bad" and therefore the elements that are woke (aka good) are inherently the opposite of facist, therefore, anti-fascist. Here we must return to the fact that woke / wokeness were never clearly defined, and to the history of woke as a concept in Black communities in the United States. While I am not a scholar of the phenomona of how woke as a concept got mainstreamed into US politics, I'm generally given to understand that it came about in the Black Lives Matter movement and specifically with the sensationalization of the slaying of Michael Brown, which has since been appropriated into the Culture War as a shorthand for supposed political progressiveness by the left and as a denigration of so-called leftist culture by the right. (If this needs to be corrected or clarified, please feel free to let me know, but it appears to be the general gist of it as applies to how the author of the inciting article mobilizes the term.)
At the end of the day, you can't say 'this game kills fascists' and then not only fail to define what fascism is or what makes someone fascist but then also fail to illustrate why this game is anti-fascist and directly combats fascism. The definition of woke in this article simply hinges on just negating what being anti-woke means, and it's a manifestation of how the right co-opted woke to mean "anything that deviates in any way, perceived or actual, from established hierarchies" and then liberals and left-liberals responded to this with "let's go with that definition and be anti-anti-woke!" It's not a coherent interrogation of the politics of these terms, nor is the article able to coherently grapple with its core thesis.
I might write more about this at a later date and return more to some of the specifics of what she says about hope and the framing of the story (which is... inconsistent at best and deliberately disingenuous at worst), particularly because the essay is, in my opinion, extremely liberal in its construction, and in response to a game that was developed within a white, centrist, neoliberal political framework. The essay is attempting to moralize the game with pot shots in the dark and political buzzwords that ultimately mean nothing because she does not put in the introspection or effort to ensure that they mean something. And I think we need to move beyond the simplistic "i only like things that are not problematic and therefore if i like this thing it is not problematic and therefore if you are criticizing this thing you are problematic and also making a personal attack against me." I also think we need to return to the very basic rhetorical construction of "claim -> supporting evidence -> conclusion" until people learn how to actually structure an argument.
I've realized that there were two components of the author's inciting article on what makes this game "fascist bane" that I didn't really follow up on, and I wanted to do that (with thanks to the girlies in the group chat for helping me clarify ideas and ) in an informal shortform while continuing to talk about fascism. The first is the idea that this is the queerest BioWare Game yet [and therefore it is antithetical to fascism] and the second is the attempt to frame the heroism of this game as unique and also antithetical to fascism.
The problem is, neither of these concepts are objectively anti-fascist.
As far as queerness goes, what I will grant this author is that BioWare and particularly this game, have come under fire for being 'woke' as a shorthand for depicting or otherwise endorsing more quote unquote progressive social positions, although it's certainly not a new experience for the studio -- older fans may remember when BioWare and Dragon Age: Origins came under fire on Fox News because you could play a man who has [insert church whisper] gay sex with another man (who happens to be an elf, which somehow made it worse. idk I'm not going to get into that.) And I will grant that anti-woke (while imo not really a concrete ideology) is generally aligned with the sorts of ideologies, positionalities, and subjectivities (or perspectives) that modern fascism in US/CAN appears to appeal to as a form of safety. Transgender people at this time are at the forefront of this "culture war" which is being mobilized.
But. You can't just say that something is queer and therefore is antifascist. This just straight up is not a true statement inherently, and it's both ahistoric as well as a mischaracterization of the relationship fascism has with cultural mores and politics. It also wouldn't be outside the realm of reasonable speculation to suspect that this kind of neat little box of identities (you're queer vs you're fascist) might be demonstrative of a wider issue with the tendency towards packaging people within rigid hierarchies of identity that is so pervasive within liberal politics, which itself underpins the development of fascist movements that thrive on being inconsistent and opportunistic.
As I wrote above in what I suppose I can call Part One, fascism is opportunistic and it lacks an ideological foundation. Queerness, therefore, is not an absolutist opposition to fascistic ideology because at any point in time, fascism can adopt whatever it wants and/or needs to in order to manifest a fascist system.
Leopards eating faces / voting against their own interests is frequently used by liberal and left-liberal people as a sort of 'gotcha' that evinces a kind of intellectual and moral superiority over the people that goes nowhere very quickly, because while they are busy feeling better and smarter and righteous for having identified the apparent hypocrisy of the people they contend against, they fail abjectly to engage with the fact that this hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.
Let me explain it another way. A friend of mine recently used the (albeit somewhat corny, we agreed, but still effective) metaphor of fascism being kind of like The Thing (from the 1982 film The Thing) in that it can co-opt identity in a bastardized form which cannot be easily explained/recognized (i.e. without rigorous critical theory that grapples with the foundations of hierarchical power and the outcomes that produces) to allow for it to gain social and political purchase until it is actually capable of achieving a fascist system.
I don't think you can actually generate a coherent or meaningful analysis if you analyze fascism in isolation from a total analysis that involves both the structure and its subjects (which is where I think understanding phenomenology is so critical). Frankly, it's why we see such incoherent as well as ultimately extremely superficial anti-fascist politics -- for example, liberals going on and on about "leopards eating faces" and trying to point out objective hypocrisy without accounting for ideology/positionality/subjectivity (perspective) of, like, any right-leaning ideology or hegemonic identity for whom fascism presents itself as safety.
And ultimately you can't actually be anti-fascist without being anti-kyriarchy and anti-capitalist because it is on the foundation of hierarchy, nationalism, and capitalism (and the nation-state) which fascism is built.
I resist calling this kind of analysis intersectionality, because I feel intersectionality does something a little different with axes of experiences within the context of feminist theory, but I do think it's a similar kind of methodology of examining the psychology/sociology relationship through like.... observation and more empirical data rather than any theory being read.
So-- I find it useful to cite bell hooks, who wrote FEMINIST THEORY FROM MARGIN TO CENTER in 1984 [PDF of the first chapter], which (and i am oversimplifying here) argued "that women's liberation has failed to become a mass movement because feminist theories have not accounted for the diversity of women." hooks identified that there was an issue with feminist theory and literature: it was written BY predominantly college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women who were housewives and mothers ABOUT college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women who were housewives and mothers FOR college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women who were housewives and mothers.
You can perhaps see how this might have presented an issue with a complete lack of inclusion of the lived experiences and interests for poor women and non-white women. Considering only a very specific subset of women's experiences meant, for example, that feminist theory at the time was proliferated with racism and which reinforced white supremacy. And you can perhaps understand how using a benchmark a statement like "all women are oppressed" -- the great unifying identity of being "woman" -- utilizing a narrow definition of womanhood and women's experiences and women's needs, is inadequate and leads to poor analysis.
hooks also points out that there is no universal experience of "womanhood" that all women everywhere, experience, regardless of sexuality, racism, class, religion, etc inform the diversity of experiences a woman might have. Sexism is a form of domination that may be institutionalized, but it is not an absolute experience for all women. From this, hooks drives at the idea that the reason the women's liberation movement has failed to be organized into a multi-voiced coalition and exists rather as a large, if incohesive identity-group, is because of the -- to borrow a turn of phrase -- identify-fication of experiences, a brand of identity politics.
"I am a Feminist*!"
hooks' points here applied specifically to women's liberation, but we can broaden this to feminisim in general, and the intersectionality of experiences when we talk about concepts like race, gender, sexuality, class, and more. The problem with this sort of identity politics, bell hooks says, is that we see people kind of start to metaphorically 'lose the plot' in terms of what their politics actually are: that is, with respect to feminism, the emergence of an identity (I A Feminist) rather being a person who is part of a political movement with a clear goal (feminism is part of my social advocacy.) And the problem with that is that it means that if someone calls themselves a Feminist, feminism is whatever they want it to be. Anyone can be a feminist, then, because we are no longer identifying feminism by its actions and its politics, but by the identity.
Is this a foregone conclusion? Does everyone who calls themselves a feminist fall into this trap? No, and no. There is, one would hope, a difference between person who uses it at a shorthand for praxis and the person who uses it to virtue signal that they're a good person. The temptation to think of oneself as a good person who does good things is strong -- specially in the US/CAN where we deal with Christianity as a significant influence on dominant culture, and therefore are influenced by a moral frame of the question of whether or not you are a good person, and how your actions influence this.
A contemporary of hooks, Mary Louise Adams wrote of her experience in her essay There's No Place like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics [jstor link] on her experience with identity politics:
"Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre [...] As the 'exercise' progressed, each women spoke in turn: 'I am a white, working-class, heterosexual woman'; 'I am a white, middle-class, lesbian Jew'; 'I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual woman and a mother'. The more politically astute would add further categories -'I am a white, middle-class, ablebodied, Anglophone lesbian' - and the facilitator would nod her approval at each innovation. We were meant to be learning about the complex matrix of oppression and privilege and about our individual relationships to it. We were in fact learning a brand of identity politics [...] Together we ascribed a moral significance to our individual litanies of oppression and privilege [...]
There's certainly something to be said about the marriage of experiences and advocacy as identities and the subsequent moralization of these identities. When we operate within the parameters of identity politics, the measure of your moral standing as a "good person" becomes rooted in your identity, rather than your actions. In the calculus of this framework oppression has positive points, privilege has negative points, and how good a person you are depends on your identity points.
A screenshot from the TV show The Good Place depicting and action and the point values ascribed to it as a pop-culture reference to point system morality. Spoilers for the show: the system didn't work.
I am quoting bell hooks in quoting Benjamin Barber from LIBERATING FEMINISM, where he wrote:
"Suffering is not necessarily a fixed and universal experience that can be measured by a single rod: it is related to situations, needs, and aspirations. But there must be some historical and political parameters for the use of the term so that political priorities can be established and different forms and degrees of suffering can be given the most attention."
Identity politics runs into the issue of, rather than contextualizing oppression within the systems that institutionalize them and how these forms of oppression can and do look different depending on how they intersect with other experiences, we see a sliding scale of 'least oppressed' to 'most privileged' that creates a framework which Elizabeth Martínez coined in 1993, the "Oppression Olympics." A simplified definition for this is the practice of comparing and ranking the experiences of oppression of various groups to determine who is The Most Oppressed, with an accompanying sort of metaphorical "race to the minority" that sees people collecting marginalized identities that might negate their privilege and afford them a leg-up in the race to be A Good Person.
(and white) :: If I am queer and disabled and leftist and mentally ill, the combined power of my oppression points negate my privilege points! :: Well. No. :: Sidebar, what's so annoying about making these kinds of critiques is that it kind of makes me sound like a neocon if taken out of context, which I think makes this as good a time as any to remember that contextualization is an important part of how you pull together your analyses.
This is how you see white women who think they're more oppressed than black men by virtue of both demographics existing underneath patriarchy. And this is how you see gay men who think they cannot be misogynistic because they're gay -- looking at you, David Gaider. (If you are not familiar with David Gaider's brand of misogyny and his many, many dismissive responses to such accusations over the years, well. This isn't part of the scope of the essay but I'm sure someone has collected examples of this, somewhere.)
It's worth consideration that this kind of parcelization of identity is pretty rampant in online spaces and especially in online fandom spaces. While this is anecdotal, I remember when The Veilguard was being developed and there was a lot of fandom buzz over the creators of the game. Corinne Busche, the project director, was a sapphic trans woman. John Epler, the creative director, was a bisexual man. Trick Weekes, the lead writer, was nonbinary. Karin Weekes-West, the lead editor, is a two-spirited biracial indigenous woman. One of the writers, Sheryl Chee, isn't white! Many of the voice actors for Rook and the companions are POC and/or queer! And depending on who you were and what your situation was informed what your response was going to be:
And now the game is woke. And queer. And antifacist. And there are pansexual companions. And you can be nonbinary. And Taash is nonbinary. And This Game Kills Fascists!
BioWare devs have long been deeply enmeshed with fandom, from the official BioWare Social Network forums to Twitter to what we now see on BlueSky, and they also tend to exist in same social and political climates as everyone else, because we do live in a society and game developers do not exist in isolation. Thus, it would certainly behoove us to ask the following question: is it possible that the terminally online character of these creators as they interacted with a fandom that also broadly mobilized this kind of identity politics shaped the decision-making framework of the creators as they made a game, where they were concerned with identity politics (of themselves and the game they made)?
The logical 'it follows' is that this game (and the reception to it) is in a good many ways a piece of media that is reflective of the mainstream politics we're being subjected to in US/CAN. It is made by people who have the oppression points that make them a Good Person and they made sure it contained and centered around characters with Identities that net them oppression points, and therefore identifier of being a "woke" game is what makes it a good game. Nevermind the actual writing itself -- this is, ultimately, inconsequential and subservient.
What makes the assertation that the game being BioWare's queerest game ever is also what makes it "fascist bane" so strange is that we see being queer positioned as a primary axis of analysis. The queerness (and specifically, I think, the depiction of and endorsement of transgender experiences) within The Veilguard is the loudest linchpin of contention between the anti-woke and anti-anti-woke noise we're seeing.
And through it, what we're seeing is that being queer, or advocating for queer experiences, in this framework, ends up being the 'race to the minority' concept mentioned earlier -- both from queer but predominantly white, liberal, middle-class creators and from the consumers. Centering queerness in your understanding of oppression (and potentially thereby limiting your understanding of oppression) is also what shapes your concept of liberation, and harks back to bell hooks and the problem with only examining the world through the lens of the college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women who were housewives and mothers.
Like "white feminism," mainstream queerness is out of touch. Mainstream queerness does not remember its roots in race and class based activism and it centers on whiteness, which has been negated or minimized by having a queer identity (or two) (or three).
And this is how we have a game that is "woke" for being "unapologetically queer" while being at the same time is extremely racist, both in the portrayal of the Antaam as a people based broadly on Islamic Arab peoples and in the absence of any meaningful sociopolitical treatment of the elves (particularly the Dalish) as a people based on Indigenous peoples of America with diasporic similarities to both Jewish and Rromani people. Race is not an important factor in this story that earns serious treatment, class is not an important factor in this story that earns serious treatment, and we do not engage with the canonical oppression of mages in this game.
Related to this is the concept of homonationalism, which can be extremely simplistically defined as "Homonationalism describes how nationalist actors and ideologies selectively incorporate LGBTQ+ people or their rights to reinforce racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies." Jasbir Puar coined this term to describe how, "...in the context of Western modernity, liberal power structures co-opt certain LGBTQ+ rights discourses to construct a national identity that is portrayed as progressive and tolerant, while simultaneously justifying racist, xenophobic and aporophobic policies, particularly against Muslim communities. As a result, sexual diversity and LGBTQ+ rights are sometimes used to support political positions opposing immigration, a strategy that has become increasingly common among far-right parties." Thus, for example, we see people unironically argue that argue that Palestine deserves genocide because Israel is more “gay friendly” than Palestine.
I think if you are advocated for genocide, you have perhaps lost the plot entirely.
All this is to say, when we talk about queerness and fascism, we must contend with the fact that queerness, or rather, queer people, have historically been aligned with fascism and there is nothing truly stopping queerness and queer people from aligning with fascism again. For a great primer on the history of homosexuality in the Weimar Era and the Nazi Party, see author Laurie Marhoefer (who wrote the book Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis) [ink to blog post that provides a reader's digest overview.]
I've just realized this post is getting enormous and so I'm going to call this Part 2 and hope it's as coherent as it feels in my brain.
So, people keep saying Veilguard is "sanitizing" Dragon Age because it’s not letting random NPCs hurl slurs at your character anymore, and listen. I get it. There’s a real fear that the game is smoothing over the sharp edges that made Dragon Age’s world feel raw and oppressive. But here’s the thing: oppression in storytelling isn’t just about how much overt cruelty a game throws at you. It’s about how a world is structured, how power moves, and what choices the player is given to respond to that.
Veilguard isn’t getting rid of trauma or struggle—it’s just shifting the focus. Instead of telling a story where the PC is explicitly victimized because of their race or status, it’s exploring grief, loss, and the way people hold onto each other through suffering. And yeah, maybe that’s not the same power fantasy as "you called me a slur so I’m going to stab you in the town square," but does that automatically mean it’s bad.. What it does mean is that Veilguard is asking different questions.
Origins threw you into a world where the first thing you did was fight back against the system that tried to break you. Veilguard is looking at something else: what happens when fighting back isn’t an option? When your world has already fallen apart? How do you rebuild? How do you find strength in kindness instead of just revenge?
veilguard recognises that oppression isn’t just big, dramatic acts of cruelty; it’s also the slow erosion of hope, the systems that make resistance feel impossible, the way grief isolates people and makes them vulnerable. And what Veilguard seems to be doing is giving the player a different set of tools to push back.
Because let’s talk about mechanics for a second. Veilguard is letting you build alliances, resolve conflicts, and use emotional intelligence as a tool and that’s not a weak approach to oppression. That’s a different kind of power fantasy. One that says, hey, maybe dismantling oppression isn’t just about vengeance. Maybe it’s about survival. Maybe it’s about finding people who won’t let you fall apart. Maybe it’s about healing.
Like, yes, I understand why people loved the City Elf origin. It was cathartic! It was painful and messy and let you tear down the people who hurt you. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only valid way to explore oppression in a game. Power isn’t just swinging a sword—it’s also choosing to be kind in a world that tells you kindness is useless.
Veilguard isn’t saying "oppression isn’t real." It’s saying, "What if we looked at the ways people actually survive it?" And if the idea of a game that values understanding and emotional resilience as forms of resistance makes you uncomfortable, maybe ask yourself why you think the only valid response to oppression is cruelty in return.
can’t stop thinking about davrin spending the weeks that rook was lost in the fade carving them over and over again, finding his blade mapping out the curves of their face no matter how many times he tries to carve anything else, almost like he’s testing himself to remember every detail of their eyes and their smile and the way their hair falls, like he’s afraid that if he stops for a single second he’ll forget it all entirely. Ouch !
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