celene/briala and epic f/f romance
I want to talk about why a romance nobody has heard about from the video game Dragon Age: Inquisition is actually one of my favorite canon F/F romances of all time.
I like “romance as social conflict” as I’ve explained in full here. Where the lead romance is between people who represent a bigger social conflict and the narrative of their growth and happily ever after “resolves” that in microcosm and implies or directly shows that the healing between them represents hope for a bigger social healing and transformation.
Celene and Briala are born into the fictional medieval nation of Orlais. Basically it’s Game of Thrones but they take more baths, okay? It’s a fundamentally corrupt society: elves like Briala are oppressed. Nobles like Celene operate within this vicious “Great Game” of politics. As children, they’re both acculturated into this. Bri is Celene’s servant.
As they grow into adulthood, they fall in love. Celene rises to the highest position in the land, as Empress of Orlais. She achieves this by sinning more and more, adhering to the cruel logic of the Great Game. Both of them think this situation is working for them: Celene loves power in this corrupt society more than Bri, but she does favors for Bri and helps her elven subjects have more rights and opportunities like her human subjects do bit by bit. She thinks that makes the things she’s done for power okay; she thinks she can love the throne first and Bri second and it will somehow work. Bri believes the secret influence she wields in her secret relationship is enough. They’re both mistaken, of course: they’ve hit the walls of how far even love can reach within a fundamentally corrupt system. They just don’t know it yet.
Pressure is applied, in the form Gaspard, of a jerkwad who wants to either take Celene’s throne or force her (a lesbian) into marriage with him. Celene keeps reaching for the illusion of success within this system; keeps sinning and compromising and sinning, trying to keep up with Gaspard’s attacks. She loses Bri, who’s appalled by the lengths she’d go to.
All of this is in the pre-game book. Now - the person who wrote the book has a penchant for being kind of OTT in their writing (IMO) and I disagree with some of the specifics of how they chose to depict this part of the relationship. I think it could have been handled better; I think the writer could have been more delicate.
It’s highly interpretable though. And there isn’t enough canon F/F to my tastes for me to just bow my head to controversy over narrative choices and throw them away like that.
And even in my ideal world where it’s better executed/don’t differently there would still be (a) the evidence that they’re born into this sinful system as children shown through their behavior and (b) Celene becoming more and more apart of that system until (c) the intensification to the breaking point of the lies they’re telling themselves as adults, leading to a breakup. All of those things are necessary if we take the “happily ever after” ending available in the game for them, because it puts the conflict of Orlais at the very heart of their love.
In the game, time has passed. Celene has come to regret bitterly her choices; Br/iala has built her own power base. If you help reunite them, Celene doesn’t do things the way she has: she gives Briala the title of Marquisa, which is a huge move, giving a noble title to an elf. Then she asserts all of this in the most blatant way possible; within the context of Orlias society she basically announces that this is her life partner and second in command.
Briala steps forward and delivers a beautiful speech about how they’re all going to go forward together now, human and elf. She is no longer hiding in the shadows, she is no longer Celene’s secret. They’re going to go forward and try to make this a better society for everyone in it, because they’ve healed the wound between themselves - the wound which symbolized in microcosm the whole society’s sins. And if two people can manage to change, then perhaps an entire nation can. Heart by heart, choice by choice.
As the leader of her nation, Celene changing and loving Briala more than power, to the point of risking everything to lift Briala up into a position of open power and force her people to acknowledge her? That is such a point of hope. And it is a point of hope that Briala, with her own power base, chooses to give this a chance.
I think that is epic and beautiful and precisely the kind of epic arc I want for an F/F romance. They’re just one part of a huge game and one side-novel... but I adore them. I’ve thought about them for years now, since the game came out in 2014. And I’ve been saddened by the blatant hate (openly posted in the ship tag and Celene’s tag). But I’ve thought about it for years. And how it fits within the overall way that people bully each other to ship F/F in exclusively “pure” ways.
But there it is. Flawed in its execution? Oh, yes. Sure. A little more delicacy was needed here. But, again... I’m not going to pitch a structure/narrative I love in the trash. The overall structure and point is gorgeous. And even if I had my ideal version, it would contain a lot more conflict and sin than I think we’re supposed to be “allowed” in F/F ships.
update 1/19/2020: this was written before patrick weekes came out as nonbinary. text has been altered to reflect their preferred gender pronouns and identity.
