It’s been strange over the last year and a half realizing that my love for Dragon Age has slowly faded. There wasn’t one singular moment that caused the shift. It was more like a series of events that coalesced until one day I realized things had changed.
And there’s a sadness (dare I say grief) to that acceptance. I started playing Dragon Age back in 2009 after my dad was gifted the game for his birthday. I remember watching him play it on the PS3 and immediately wanting a turn myself. Eventually, when I moved across the country for college, I “borrowed” DAO and DA2, and the PS3 when I left home.
I was obsessed with this game. When I wasn’t playing volleyball or studying, I was playing Dragon Age. It carried me through my first year of college.
After that year, I moved back home and transferred to an in-state school instead. Then Dragon Age: Inquisition came out about a month before I graduated, and the obsession only deepened from there. At one point, I could practically recite all three games and the novels from memory.
Don’t get me wrong. I was part of other fandoms too, and I wrote fanfic for plenty of them. But none of them ever came close to Dragon Age.
When I started graduate school, I was still actively writing fanfic. Even after graduating and starting my internship, I kept writing Dragon Age fic. I remember coming home from work on Fridays just to participate in DA Drunk Writing.
But with the next game constantly being delayed and my internship turning into a hot fucking mess, to put it lightly, I reached a point where I couldn’t even think about Dragon Age without feeling angsty over the wait to find out what was going to happen with Solas.
Then, when Veilguard finally got a release date, I let myself fall back into the obsession again. I started digging through my old fics, editing and rewriting them, replaying the games, etc. Just slipping back into that world like no time had passed at all. I had so much joy in rewriting my old fics.
While rewriting them, I realized something I never understood at the time I originally wrote them: I had unknowingly written Isera as autistic because I gave her the some of the same struggles I was dealing with myself. Back then, I had no fucking clue that I was autistic.
Knowing that now has made Isera’s stories feel even more personal to me. They hold such a deeply special place in my heart because, in so many ways, they were me trying to understand myself before I even had the words for it.
For the first time, I was in a completely different place in my life. I wasn’t in school anymore. I wasn’t a broke intern working 60+ hours a week for fucking pennies. I worked for myself. I controlled my own schedule. I work around 15 – 25 hours a week.
Younger Vir would have killed to be in a position like this! One where I finally had the time (so much fucking time) and freedom to write as much as I wanted. To be able to throw myself back into the fandom. (AND, I WAS MEDICATED FOR MY ADHD THAT WAS UNDIAGNOSED FOR SO MANY YEARS!)
But then Veilguard happened, and it became so unbelievably divisive.
Within a few months of the release, my love for Dragon Age and my desire to write for the fandom started to languish. I can tell you exactly when it began: as I was writing The Herald and the Wolf (THATW). I knew it then. I just fucking knew it was going to be the last fanfic I wrote that I truly loved. But I didn’t want to accept that. I tried so hard to push through it because I still wanted to tell stories.
Nothing worked.
I had a choice to make. I could keep trying to force myself to fall back in love with Dragon Age, I could stop writing altogether, or… I could try writing my own story.
With encouragement from friends, I started writing my own story.
And I am so fucking glad I did. Writing my first book and working with professional editors has taught me so much. I’ve already been working on Book 2 for the last couple of months, and even while self-editing, I can already see how much my writing has improved compared to Book 1.
My outlining process has improved. I’m significantly better at catching my own wordiness now. I spot my echoes faster. My prose feels tighter. My pacing still needs work, though. But I do think I handled it better this time around.
…granted, I haven’t sent Book 2 to my developmental editor yet, so there’s still a very real chance I’ll end up eating those words.
I say all of this to explain why, when I think about going back to edit my old fics now… the joy just isn’t there anymore. I don’t feel excitement at the idea of revisiting them and sharing them with the fandom again. The feeling that used to be there… the obsession, the eagerness, the need to create within that world has faded.
