This is a post about Dragon Age: The Veilguard that is DATV-critical.
(If you don't want to read that, please scroll past the post.)
I was messaging with someone today about Dragon Age Topics TM and the subject of media literacy came up, and subsequently I brought up my formal training as a historian in the context of, like, formal training to assess sources and assemble narratives, which generated the following comment from the person I was conversing with:
"me and my friend were just ranting abt how veilguard is so unconcerned with the past and history in both a gameplay sense of no worldstates and also in the thematic sense of how the message is "forget the past :D""
I replied that this was something that had been bothering me so much regarding DATV. My thing about history, what makes it so interesting to me and what I think a lot of people who teach history kinda fail to really impart, is that it's fundamentally a form of storytelling, right? It's the story of people, the story of culture, the story of the world. The story of life.And they're stories we tell each other about these things to explain where we came from, how we came to be, why we are the way we are, and to give The Now meaning. Obviously they don't have a narrative structure the way a novel or video game might, and we're not going to have tropes, or character archetypes, or genre story beats, because it's not that kind of story. But it's like... the fundamental connective tissue that gives shape and form and feel to the world we occupy, the depths that spiral around and within us, which we bring forward with us to give context and meaning to who we are and why we are and where we are.
What made DAO feel so good was how lived in the world felt; and it wasn't just the people, but the people's connections to their culture, the way these things manifested in dialogue and politics, and the way the histories of the people (both lived and told) shaped the world we navigated and the people we interacted with. It's the opening of the very premise of Dragon Age as a setting, with a excerpt from the Chant of Light and the very first piece of spoken word being:
"The Chantry teaches us that it is the hubris of men that first brought the darkspawn to our world."
I've said before and I'll say again -- one of the setting's strengths was always that we were navigating a world of unreliable narrators, with many, many different stories, overlapping and overlaying each other -- venn diagrams of context and meaning.
Without writing a really long essay all over again, DATV just feels... really bad in this regard, because it's all presented as Absolute Truth, while also failing to really connect with the previous games (our lived history as players) as well as the previous games (our storyworld's lived history for the characters) and the history that has been told and told and told again, in all the many, myriad ways that confound and confuse and console the people who live within the storyworld.
I wrote a while back that I have something rattling inside me about the way DATV treated The Truth TM as a thought-terminating endpoint of storytelling, juxtaposed with Flemythal telling us that truth is not an end but a beginning and with Solas constantly challenging us to rethink what what it means for something to be true and real, and I think I'm still chewing on this, but particularly from a history-storytelling standpoint, there is no absolute truth of history; we will never know the absolute truth of all experiences of all people for all time, ever. Merely we have the story of the truth we can tell as we are able, where new information arises All The Fucking Time. Truth is an on-going dialogue.
I wrote this about The Second Sin TM and how it fits in the storyworld -- the way Corypheus fits into the storyworld as a villain, and why he is still successful in his immersion to the setting despite having his failings as a narrative villain. Despite even the devs having admitted that they biffed it, he still feels fundamentally and intrinsically connected to the storyworld and to the lives and realities of the characters around us.
And the reason I (and probably others, altho idk how much they lean into this specific point like I do) harp on the importance of religion in a setting like this that has been built on religious truths and historical truths (and the unreliability of both in the face of layered narrations) is that religion isn't *just* faith; what people believe is THEIR truth. It's THEIR reality. A religious studies approach takes seriously that the people believe these things to be true, so it is true for them, and not just a stand in for something else.
So if you have a storyworld setting that is steeped in history and steeped in religion, and your central conflicts of the storyworld are wrapped around these things, and your main antagonists are consistently tied to these things, and then you make a 4th installment to a series that has been building on these elements as we progressively peel back the veil (hue hue hue) of layers of truth and reality :: it's a/ gonna fall really flat if you just unceremoniously present everything happening in this game as The Absolute Truth Of How It Really happened TM ; and b/ it's gonna feel really fucking hollow if you strip the storyworld of its connections of the storyworld history ; and c/ it's gonna feel Really Fucking Bad TM if you just homogenize religious experiences and funnel everyone toward experiencing the same religious truth.
Like of course we can get on board with the idea that there are elves (particularly Dalish elves) who learn that their pantheon of Creators -- who they already knew were locked away by Fen'harel and who they already knew were assholes -- were really just asshole mage-king would-be gods ; and that they might decide to shift their own reality, their religious truth. But you have to show your work. And like many things, in DATV we are presented with conclusions and expected to accept them as-is, which is very stinky and unpalatable for a LOT of reasons. When the AMA happened, I was flabbergasted by how disconnected from the history of Thedas Epler's claims were. And this is ultimately the root of why I feel the Evanuris are extremely weak villains in DATV.
A friend of mine from the Mass Effect fandom (who had been privately watching me process this game in real time) asked if I would call this game "slop" and my honest answer was no, and that I felt it was worse than slop. Because not only does it come into a series that has, for better or for worse, however clumsily, in the past at least somewhat earnestly engaged with these very difficult topics, and, as @mythalism so eloquently stated, asked us to engage seriously with these difficult topics. Not only do we get hints of actually really incredible shit underneath what they presented to us (the concept art for Joplin and the cut content from DATV are both painting a bleak picture in this regard), but also the final product in our hands was very carefully crafted to be what it ultimately ended up being.
I think we should be very careful to embrace media like this, because how we engage with media does not exist in a vacuum - it isn't merely just entertainment. I actually really fucking HATE the "let people enjoy things" meme because it's often used as a thought-terminating cliche that manifests from disinclination to employ critical media literacy â where critical means not ânegative,â but rather âjudgmentâ or âanalysis.â Such people will opt to look at media as a form of entertainment, and refuse to engage with it except as a form of escapism or amusement, where content is enjoyable up until it is not â typically when the consumer is forced to think about what they had consumed and how it relates to real life.
I really liked the questions Ursula K. Le Guin asked regarding escapism: namely, what does âescapeâ mean? What are we escaping from? A prison? Of what? And what are we escaping to? Freedom? From what? Her defense of escapism came from a perspective you don't usually see employed -- that escapism is the duty of all people:
âThere is an area where SF has most often failed to judge itself, and where it has been most harshly judged by its nonpartisans. It is an area where we badly need intelligent criticism and discussion. The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist.
This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesnât deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesnât fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, thatâs not criticism; itâs bigotry. If itâs worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, donât we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if weâre partisans of liberty, then itâs our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.â
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
Tolkein's take on escapism, referenced above:
âI have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which âEscapeâ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. [...] Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.â
- J. R. R. Tolkein, "On Fairy Stories"
Escapism does not have be a âhead emptyâ endeavor, either. There are dimensions of escape that grant us access to experiences that we currently do not âreallyâ have. In fiction, we can try on new selves and test solutions to problems we are struggling with. Fiction can also help us see reality from a fresher perspective and reveal truths about our own world which we are unable to see until we encounter them in a different setting. Che Guevara once said, "Dream and you'll be free in spirit. Fight, and you'll be free in life." A prisoner escaping a prison and a prisoner dreaming of escaping a prison are not the same thing. The opposite thing, in fact. So, first we read about being outside of the prison, so we remember how good it feels. Then we read about prisons and others who have struggled with escaping them. Then we escape. Thus, in escaping, we are practicing making hypothetical changes to ourselves and to our world, before we make them actual.
C.S. Lewis, a contemporary and friend of Tolkein most popularly known for his work The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote in his essay âThe Dethronement of Powerâ a similar thought:
â"But why," some ask, "why if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?" Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. [...] The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.â
This is the dispelling of the mundane, fighting back that "veil of familiarity" â runs along similar tracks as where Le Guin writes on the plausibility of fantasy and the central idea of: imaginative fiction can and must be incoherent to our perceptions of reality. Rather than a realistic allegory, it is an abstraction grounded in its own reality, where escapism is about finding something different from our reality, and where this âincoherentâ world teaches us something new anyways, and made us think of things we didn't before. In his essay âThe Dethronement of Power,â Lewis was not saying that Tolkien intentionally put direct parallels between the real world and Middle Earth. Perhaps some authors create stories with allegorical intent; there are others who certainly do not. Yet the intent may not even matter. Time and time again, we as humans cannot help but find parallels, applications, in the stories we love, where we bring back whatever we learned into our reality, whether it's done consciously or not.
Tolkein made a salient point, earlier - that disenfranchised people should not be subjected in all areas of life, including the fiction they consume as a form of escapism or entertainment, to the conditions which disenfranchise them. It is unfair to expect people who experience oppression every day to think constantly about their oppression, and thus it is unfair to relegate those who are disenfranchised to think about their disenfranchisement with every form of media they interact with.
But also. We live in a society. And in this society, fiction is actually really important. How we engage with fiction is important. How we tell stories is important.
There is a fundamental fallacy of thinking you can wholly escape the real world with fiction, rooted in the fact that the media one consumes does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot. No media produced is divorced from our reality; it does not exist outside of space and time. It is created by people in our world with their own experiences, perspectives, and intents. Art by definition has intention and implications. Art by function is inherently a transfer of ideas through visual medium, and is a language all its own. It is part of a cultural conversation that, while not necessarily partisan in nature, is political, where âpoliticsâ is derived from the more classical sense of âthe cityâ or perhaps more modernly âthe societyâ â that is, the social dimension of human existence, and the stories we tell about it. All art is therefore political â all of it â and what must be understood is that while not all art is created with political intent, nevertheless, as Alexander Avila states, â...all art is created within a cultural context, and that cultural meaning is always the site of social/political struggle.â
In this vein, as David Graeber put it, âPolitics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them.â Stories in particular are a powerful extension of this: storytelling is itself an inherently collaborative endeavor: one cannot tell a story unless there is someone to tell the story to. And like like history (the story of our past) and like science (the story of the world around us), politics are a story about our societies and how we relate to each other.
Ignoring this, or otherwise failing to understand this, leads to consumers who lack the analytical capacity to interpret the media they consume, where they view said media as strictly an artifact of entertainment rather than something that can be and often is a way to either explore reality through a creative lens free from real world constraints or as something that reproduces cultural hegemony and/or feeds reaction. If one is critical in their consumption, they may be able to discern which they are being exposed to.
On a more microlevel, Dragon Age has not historically been the sort of media for the particular "let people enjoy things" brand of escapism. As the person I was discussing this with stated: "...no one even made this argument in regard to dragon age pre-veilguard because it was understood that dragon age was not the right series to play if you wanted a witch looking for her cat in the alps..." This was not, in fact, a cozy series with a cozy story. The fact that I have personally seen people refer to DATV as a cozy game is. Frankly appalling. But very on brand with the kind of head empty construction this game has, and the influence drawn from the Sims 4 as a result of Busche's influence as a Project Director. :: (nb: I have a vague recollection of Corinne Busche calling DATV "cozy" in one of her Veilguard interviews at one point, but I do not for the life of me remember where, or if that really happened. If anyone can source that, please feel free to DM me or reply to this post with it.)
If you like Veilguard, that's fine, that's absolutely 100% your prerogative. I just personally find the game disrespectful, and incredibly unserious as a piece of media when taken into the context of both the series as a piece of fiction and the canon of the storyworld. I'm so serious when I say it actively retroactively makes the previous games worse for its existence, and as much of a miracle as it is that this game was ever made (and it IS a miracle, and the context of the dev story stacked against it ever being made DOES make its release an incredible achievement from that context alone), I really wish it hadn't been made.
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