We understand that Broodmother is a reflection of the brutality of Orzammar and its use of women’s bodies explicitly for breeding, right?
In Orzammar women are always already broodmothers.
Broodmother is a narrative reflection of that use and that reality, a use of women which is justified in Orzammar as having to replenish the Warrior and upper castes due to the constant pressure of Darkspawn, but in the deep roads is stripped away of all its social pretence.
Orzammar’s narratives are entirely about people being used, abused and consumed in the service of caste and necessity, and how this particularly effects people who are assumed to be able to give birth, how it creates not just sex work but pregnancy work, and the coercive ways necessity operates on people.
It’s not at all a subtle parallel. The darkspawn do not defeat House Branka; Branka- Paragon, Noble, highest caste and most powerful woman in Orzammar- feeds her lessers to the darkspawn.
She has all her story reasons for doing it, but at the base and inescapable level, she (like all the other Dwarves of Orzammar) use and discard lower Castes because they can, because they have the power to, because the caste system organises them to be able to.
I honestly absolutely hate with a spitting seething passion the kind of analysis that sees horror, especially horror against women, being committed in a narrative and immediately becomes incapable of saying anything about media other than “it’s just edgy/gritty/grimdark” and dismissing it.
Life is edgy gritty and grimdark for a lot of us. I was a teenage sex worker. My life was edgy gritty and grimdark. I experienced some of the most vulgar expressions of how gender works in my society, and I experienced them bluntly.
And to dismiss depictions of sexual, gendered violence as “purely for shock” when they are not, when they have something to say about gender and power and violence in a setting, is to assign stories like my real life as “shock value”.
There is more feminist shit to say about Orzammar alone than anything in Veilguard, because Orzammar is actually interested in gender and in the social roles and violences that create, reinforce and are a consequence of gender systems*.
And personally, I will pick a story that clumsily tries to say something about power and violence and society over a smooth story that says nothing about those things every single time; but that doesn’t mean Broodmother isn’t worthy and deserving of criticism (it is!) but can we please at least start from a place of criticising it for what it actually is and what it is actually doing in the game? The work and text that is the game?
*I am not saying Orzammar is feminist or is doing feminism, but you can analyse it from a feminist standpoint because the cloying weight of Gender and Gender In Society as a faucet of the setting is inescapable.
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