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Too Much/Not Enough
I've been spamming some friends with messages recently, trying to get my head around some of my ongoing problems with Inquisition. Why the game can feel tedious to play. Why I don't like most of the companions, they're just kind of... there. Why I always feel unsettled and alone even in the big fancy castle I'm supposed to be in charge of. And then I hit on it (more than a week ago, but I needed some time to organize my thoughts and write this post).
My two inquisitors, thus far, have been a qunari (vashoth) warrior and an elven mage. And the game does not hesitate to tell you that whatever you are, you're doing it wrong. Iron Bull, the other qunari (a capital-Q qunari, a follower of the Qun), denies outright that he has anything in common with an Adaar inquisitor. As though culturally, you take nothing from the place you came from just because you decided to leave it behind. Does he still think that way when he himself leaves the Qun? I don't know. There's no chance to follow up.
Elven protagonists have it worse. Minaeve denies her heritage as a Dalish elf and scorns your attempts to reach out. Solas and Sera deny being elves and decry your elven nature - the same thing from two different directions. Varric Tethras is the least dwarfy dwarf in existence, and Harding isn't much better. I haven't played a dwarf Inquisitor yet, but if I close my eyes, I can hear Valta telling me I'm a surfacer, I don't have stone sense, and I don't count. Because that's how this game and the characters in it work. It's practically a motif. No matter where you go, you're too alien for the humans (too tall, too short, too elfy) and too human for the rest (vashoth, surfacer, flat-ear).
And it's not handled with the least bit of nuance. There's no chance for change, no opportunity for reconnection and rediscovery. It's always either unwanted or impossible. I'm a monolingual Taiwanese-American from white suburbia. I've been the token non-white kid in my class, the other, the model minority. I've been the big-nose banana, just another American, unable to communicate fluently with my own grandparents or read anything more complicated than a board book. And I still take pieces of my culture with me, and I still care about learning more, and this is a very very personal struggle for me. It's not some fluff in the background chatter of a game. It's my life. I can - and do - add all the counterpoints I can in my protagonists. But I'm still fighting against the rest of the world, and that's a lot.
The funny thing, except it's not that funny really - I know they're trying. I know that the devs wanted to be inclusive and expansive. They tried to include more chances to look different, to acknowledge difference and diversity and give more people the opportunity to see themselves in the mirror. But what I saw was a slit-eyed caricature in the character creator, with sickly yellow skin like the jaundice the nurse thought I had at birth because she'd never seen an Asian baby in her life. And unexpectedly, it hurt worse than any number of failures to make my own self-insert in another game. It is one thing to be overlooked. It is another to look at the token options they give and the perspectives they tried to write and ask - "is this how you see me?"
So thanks, I guess, Inquisition, for reminding me there's worse feelings than being merely invisible.
My two inquisitors, thus far, have been a qunari (vashoth) warrior and an elven mage. And the game does not hesitate to tell you that whatever you are, you're doing it wrong. Iron Bull, the other qunari (a capital-Q qunari, a follower of the Qun), denies outright that he has anything in common with an Adaar inquisitor. As though culturally, you take nothing from the place you came from just because you decided to leave it behind. Does he still think that way when he himself leaves the Qun? I don't know. There's no chance to follow up.
Elven protagonists have it worse. Minaeve denies her heritage as a Dalish elf and scorns your attempts to reach out. Solas and Sera deny being elves and decry your elven nature - the same thing from two different directions. Varric Tethras is the least dwarfy dwarf in existence, and Harding isn't much better. I haven't played a dwarf Inquisitor yet, but if I close my eyes, I can hear Valta telling me I'm a surfacer, I don't have stone sense, and I don't count. Because that's how this game and the characters in it work. It's practically a motif. No matter where you go, you're too alien for the humans (too tall, too short, too elfy) and too human for the rest (vashoth, surfacer, flat-ear).
And it's not handled with the least bit of nuance. There's no chance for change, no opportunity for reconnection and rediscovery. It's always either unwanted or impossible. I'm a monolingual Taiwanese-American from white suburbia. I've been the token non-white kid in my class, the other, the model minority. I've been the big-nose banana, just another American, unable to communicate fluently with my own grandparents or read anything more complicated than a board book. And I still take pieces of my culture with me, and I still care about learning more, and this is a very very personal struggle for me. It's not some fluff in the background chatter of a game. It's my life. I can - and do - add all the counterpoints I can in my protagonists. But I'm still fighting against the rest of the world, and that's a lot.
The funny thing, except it's not that funny really - I know they're trying. I know that the devs wanted to be inclusive and expansive. They tried to include more chances to look different, to acknowledge difference and diversity and give more people the opportunity to see themselves in the mirror. But what I saw was a slit-eyed caricature in the character creator, with sickly yellow skin like the jaundice the nurse thought I had at birth because she'd never seen an Asian baby in her life. And unexpectedly, it hurt worse than any number of failures to make my own self-insert in another game. It is one thing to be overlooked. It is another to look at the token options they give and the perspectives they tried to write and ask - "is this how you see me?"
So thanks, I guess, Inquisition, for reminding me there's worse feelings than being merely invisible.