something that's been pissing me off about burda lately is the way that its fandom treats artemy. like obviously there are so many fantastic female characters who get ignored, flattened, or demeaned (as well as other dynamics that get ignored, including m/m, m/f, and f/f) in favor of further increasing the glut of predictable yaoi with very little to say about anything at all, and that's endlessly frustrating. but also there is a complex and compelling indigenous & mixed race character, a father and friend and son and community leader with a story about love (not romantic!) and alienation and progress and change who seems to be becoming little more than an accessory to a skinny white guy who, canonically, does not fucking like him very much but i digress. it's understandable that there's a lot of focus on daniil in anticipation of his route coming out soon, but the extent to which artemy is becoming an afterthought who only comes up in context of burda is unbelievably frustrating. and the way daniil is centered in context of burda is even more frustrating! daniil gets his thanatica-- even before thanatica was a real place, fandom gave him this whole internal world with baggage, expanded on a hobby mentioned offhandedly in tmn, & lavishes him with gay readings, trans readings, jewish readings, feminist readings, etc etc etc; while artemy is reduced to a classically masculine fatherhusband &/or big brown fetish bait. his dynamic with his family, his kids, gets shifted to focus on daniil interacting with artemy's kids, daniil adopting artemy's kids, cute domestic scenes of daniil and artemy and "their" kids (they are artemy's kids. they are artemy's kids. artemy is literally extremely clear IN HIS OWN WORDS that he is not interested in co-parenting and makes a statement of choosing to be a single dad and expressing that he doesn't intend to parent his kids in a normative style), turning it into an imitation of a nuclear family. his dynamic with his community, his faith, and his traditions, is also shifted to focus on daniil-- introducing daniil to kin culture, steppe weddings, invented traditions forcing artemy and daniil into an arranged marriage, using artemy's relationship with his faith as set dressing, even the dreaded herb bride!daniil. even threefold bullet content (some guys daniil met last week in p1) outnumbers apple basket (artemy's lifelong best friends and an essential part of his arc in p2) by orders of magnitude. does it ever just make you feel tired do you ever just want to stop. i got this note today
as if artemy's masculinity isn't one of the most interesting and nuanced masculinities of any video game protagonist ever. as if it isn't an intentional relationship he's constantly engaging with. as if his relationship to western concepts of gender as an indigenous person in a community in turmoil isn't probably extremely complicated and worth exploration. i cannot tell you how many "transgender daniil" "hot takes" i've gotten. this is the ONLY one that has suggested artemy, and this is how it did so. artemy is not daniil's boyfriend or husband. he's literally just not either of those things. if you want to imagine he is that, fine, but ask yourself whether he still gets to be everything else he already is.
if you are into burda and don't do this, great. then this post isn't about you. look around you though!!! notice when it's happening!!! be different!!! even if you don't think you do this, search your soul. ask yourself why you believe what you believe and romanticize what you romanticize. if you're gonna make burda content at least try to do something fucking interesting god i'm so tired
