very tmi about me but it's also related to why da4 hit that bad to me.
thing is my mental health is in tatters and it has been for a long while and i'm going to be blunt, i was hard suicidal when the game was announced.
Thing is, DA was always special to me because of the timing in which it entered my life. I mentioned it before but it was a time where i had genuinely no control over my life left, was in an abusive environment that would need micromanaging just to avoid the worst situations, and where the stress had triggered so many health issues i was physically disabled, unable to use my left hand, and had to drop out of school because i couldnt manage both that and the Home's level of stress (and not being able to use my hands kinda doomed me from the art school i was doing at the time).
DA was really the first time i could find myself some agency again, having the feeling that me micromanaging how people reacted to what i said was for something more positive than "being screamed at a little less today" (so when it's to hear the characters say they value your friendship so much by the end? bawling), and it hits on a lot of storybeats i really always was driven to (as i often joke about when i mention my fav band from when i was 13 has so many songs fitting Solas). It indulged so well on my background as an analyst too, it really just hit all the good spots.
And it gave me hope, too. Because there's a lot of stories of abuse in DA that, in the trilogy, all ends with "and you can get out of it". The world of DA is bleak and horrible but there's hope for recovery. there's hope for things to get fixed. You don't have to always be living in a broken state. Yeah the DA setting sucks, but you progressively can make it better with your choices. There's hope in that. In knowing you can have agency, power, to escape from abuse, to find yourself more than who you were twisted into for survival, to make things better. That coming from a broken life doesn't mean you can go on into a less broken future.
(and i'll bring up again how DAI especially destroyed me as a Chronic Pain On Left Hand Killing Me person. The fact i'm still haunted by Sera's codex where she's horrified about it just...)
So honestly my relationship with DA at the time especially was pretty much like being rescued from constant drowning. Sure it doesn't solve everything, my lungs are still aflame, but it really got me out of the water until i could finally leave this place. To me it's a major reason i stayed afloat. There's hope in that.
Waiting for the follow up had been a huge source of reasons why i held on for years. Just the idea i could tune in for da4 and get back to the universe kept me going. I would genuinely tell myself i can't die before it. I held on to my fav characters like a lifeboat, especially to DAI's characters who had come to mean a lot to me.
And you all know how normal I am about Solas (and can imagine that after saying I was isolated and constantly micromanaging how i talked to never trigger a crisis, I definitely related a lot to this sense of loneliness and this feeling of, he can't actually talk about the things he knows because he expects violence (like the one he received meeting the Dalish clans he mentions early on) so he has to be careful with every of his words to get an outcome that will cause the least of damages. While also remaining calm because anger isn't an option. Adding to the general vibe that my parents always made clear i shouldn't talk about a lot of things that happened in my life, but i don't like lying, so i've spent my life dancing around topics without fully lying, i'm like. I get him.)
But yeah the problem with that is that eventually we had no news for years and i have up lol. I followed everything that came out after DAI came out -- i watched Absolution on its release day, i read Tevinter Nights multiple times, i tuned in for every single comics despite not finding them that interesting. I read and caught up on *everything* ever attached to the DA IP. I even read halfway through the TTRPG book just to see if there was more to take from it. I read the cookbook for crying out loud. Who read the fucking cookbook.
but eventually there were no news anymore and i was tired.
Life is both easier than it used to be and have more challenges, and I have massive CPTSD that i've only been able to fully start to treat last year, and according to my therapists i'm in full "Post" of the Post stress disorder that is to say, that when you're too busy trying to survive you don't process everything that happened fully, and now that after nearly three decades I finally am no longer in survival mode, my brain came completely crashing down with all the stuff i have never dealt with when i was busy surviving.
So the last year have been extremely difficult. On another hand, i'm medicated, i have weekly therapist appointment and monthly psychiatrist appointment, i've been considered a case in crisis because i'm on a dangerous edge. I'm doing better, there's a lot of things I actually managed to fix in my life, the fact i'm medicated helps a lot, therapy helped me fix my relationship with my sister which i never thought was possible...
But on the other, it's still so damn hard. Family is still its constant problems. I don't have proper restful nights because of CPTSD indulced nightmares. It's just hard.
When DA4 was announced last summer, i was genuinely doing so. so bad. I had given up on waiting.
But once the trailer dropped and we had the date i just knew I Had To Live, For This. That i was lucky i managed to keep myself alive for so long now, just so i could play DA4. silly, but it's a reason to keep going.
So i worked harder on my therapy. A few months later is when i fixed my relationship with my sister. I was so excited i was finally motivated to do things. The few months that led to DA4 were some I was the most motivated to stay alive i've ever been since perhaps when i first played the DA games.
There were many discussions with my therapists then of "and after?" and "and what if the game is bad?" but i refused to think about it because my god for once i had something to keep me going, yaknow.
That's also why i tried so hard to be positive playing the game. So hard to see the bright sides, so hard to find things that would make me appreciate it more. I would be in denial everytime something didn't go my way.
But eventually the ending happened. I played all of act 3 in one day and i just thought. That's such a stupid game.
The conclusion to Solas' story upsetted me so much because of *waves hand* that all my therapists heard about it in depth now 😭 save me i'm a parody of myself.
But joking aside. It did genuinely feel like a blow to me.
A character defined for being lonely being mocked and punished with an eternity of loneliness to fix a mess left behind by his abuser who coerced him into being part of it. His careful wording retconned into full lying, and none of his words or suffering ever taken seriously. 3 stories of Abuse in the game and all of them ends with "actually Mother knew best, so don't fight against her."
And then more things upon reflection, like the lack of actual agency in the game, of no choice really mattering, of realizing Rook barely feels like a friend to this "found family", that you are accomplishing nothing because the story is set on a path of "everything will be good to you promise" that in the end it has no value whatsoever.
Nothing to believe in. No future to look forward to. Just restoring the old world like it has always been, as cruel as you remember it, because change to heal this wound would be too devastating otherwise.
Like staying into a survival mode to not experience the brutal way your brain will crash once you're finally alive for the first time in your life.
And the ending was framed as a good thing. As healing Solas from his regrets. To have his abuser tell him he needed to stop everything he started doing rebelling against her, and instead he should go be locked up to clean her mess.
It was devastating to me. It was so anti-thetical to the things that made connect into this plot on a personal level. It felt suffocating. It felt like being punished for fighting back. for hoping for a better future.
I genuinely did spend two weeks laying on my sofa, unable to do anything but staring at the ceiling, thinking about DA. I cried myself to sleep over how frustrated i was about it.
It feels so silly to say all of that over a video game. But i was purely in a state of shock.
such a shock that i admit i was wavering between killing myself and not even thinking about doing so because i felt too hollow to even feel alive enough to think there was anything left to kill.
I started to read other people being mad at the game to at least feel less crazy about it. Like i'm not the only one to think it fumbled itself so hard, right? right? I needed to find opinions that matched mine, somehow.
I was mutual with someone in the da fandom who really loved da4 and hated people bad talking it. I didn't want to post negativity for their sake, but eventually i posted something a little more cutting about the ending... and i realized i got blocked. And when i visited the blog just to be sure it was because i was blocked and not because they deleted or something,
i found posts saying "if you don't like da4 you really need to check out for therapy, and i'm serious, because there must be something seriously wrong with you to not realize that the theme of the story is about healing from grief and moving on, and you probably never felt true grief before so you don't understand why it's a good thing."
and like. Not lying, this is still haunting me LMAO. I spent months trying to hold back my complains because i didn't want to rain on anyone's parade, but then a person blocked me for being mildly negative (it was a throwaway joke too about just "Solas should have tore down the veil and probably will do so in a few years when Rook is dead. trust." it wasn't even a serious complain???) and when i go to check in because i'm legit worried I read this shit.
(blocking people you disagree with, esp when they follow you, is fine! this wasn't part of the problem! if i hadn't seen this post i would have just shrugged like "oh well, i get it.". It's seeing this specific post that made it feel insulting.)
Kinda radicalize you into going "don't hold back on your bad feelings because the people who will look down on you for them are likely not even worth it.".
SO. ANYWAY. this is when i started to complain a lot more freely ngl lol.
But my point is... i'm not feeling good either. It's still hard to figure out why i'm still alive. I'm holding on to my anger and spite because it's all i have left, and it at least helps reminding me of why the first three games worked on me so much, and it still makes DAI a sanctuary i can safely return to.
For now at least my anger is fuelling me enough that complaining means i think less about Bad Things because at least i can properly process my emotions.
And many stuff happened in my life which means i have external reasons not to die. not exactly emotional motivation but like... so my sister is pregnant, since she's worried for her health i'm petsitting her cat until the end of the pregnancy, so it means my sister relies on me and if i die tomorrow it'll be very unconveniant for her. And her relationship is unstable atm so there's also the whole "my sister will need support when the baby is born so i have to be alive for her.". and it's what is keeping me going atm.
One of the first thing i thought when i finished DA4, and that i think about regularly, is that it would have been better if i died before the game came out. This way I wouldn't have had to dealt with this whole mess and still would have my heart full for this.
I feel like i missed my window in a way because i was really hopeful about this game. It's very frustrating.
and of course like. I know if you're reading this you're probably thinking it is a good thing, and it is, and maybe in years i'll also look fondly back on how it kept me going in some way.
But if anything i am so frustrated that it locked me into this thoughtpattern.
because i believed in the game and i wanted it to be good so damn bad, man. And now i feel like i would have been better not playing it and it made me lose my shot.
So there's a lot of personal frustration going on in all of this. I wish i could say it's just a game and i can move on, but unfortunately i have Issues and this game pressed exactly on those.
Now at least complaining about it does help ease the wound a little, and i just started a supplementary medication so hey, maybe i'll be more emotionally stable sooner than later enough and it will all look like a bad dream.
But as for now, well. Turns out keeping on bitching can be reason enough to hold on in life. That's what matters.
But that's why i'm extra spiteful about DA4. for the Extra Personal Lore that isn't focusing fully on the text, but instead focusing on my feelings as a person, for a change.
