Today in Dragon Age Fandom
Jul. 15th, 2020 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010The long version is more nuanced, perhaps. Not less angry though.
It started with Greg Ellis. To deny that or pretend it isn’t, at its heart, about him and his behaviour and the hurt he has caused to individuals in our community and to our community as a whole is to minimise those harms and perpetuate them. We are blessed in Dragon Age fandom with many wonderful voice actors who’ve done incredible work to bring the characters we love to life, and in their real lives represent the values of the franchise. Loyalty, inclusivity, equality, Compassion and Justice are what we’ve stood by from Origins onwards. We are a diverse fandom, although I will acknowledge that the representation does not always meet the standards we hope for and that our inclusion of black and ethnic minority fans does not always meet the standards we hope for..
However, there is also Greg Ellis. It’s possible to excuse his comments as clumsiness or a lack of context, but that excuse only washes so many times, and many of us have passed that point. For me it was when he equated lesbian parenting with child abuse, but it should probably have been sooner. There I plead ignorance on my part; I’d long since unfollowed him for minor annoyances, so only saw the trash when it properly exploded onto my feed. On that occasion he’d tweeted about ‘All Lives Matter’ and doubled down when fans tried, patiently, to try to explain why that phrasing was harmful – the comments about lesbian parenting came when he was told that the photograph he used to represent his argument was not of a black child voluntarily mending bridges with law enforcement, but of a child abused and eventually murdered by his white mothers. His response to being told this was not ‘Oh shit, I had no idea, that poor kid’, but to blame it on the fact that he had two mothers. This is all rooted in his personal issues, which I don’t know enough about to comment but do know enough to say that his putting the blame on his ex-wife’s mental health issues is probably bullshit.
The most recent incident was similar to the previous one. A seemingly innocuous tweet endorsing a letter that condemns ‘cancel culture’ was the surface of a very murky lake. The letter itself was spearheaded by the signature of JK Rowling, who has progressed from “beloved children’s author” to “Anti-trans ringleader”. At the time I’m writing this, several signatories have already withdrawn from it, claiming that they were not made aware of who else would be on there apart from a handful of choice, respectable names, and JK Rowling has cosied up on Twitter with a literal neo-Nazi. It’s at this point that Ellis threw his hat into the ring to support JK Rowling’s defence of free speech, and even then it’s possible to assume he didn’t know any of the context above and was just sticking his oar in. That possibility was swiftly dispensed with, as, yet again, he responded to polite criticism by doubling down, blocking his critics, and posting self-righteous subtweets depicting his critics as enemies of free speech and occasionally screenshotting their tweets to his audience hoping to be backed up – spoiler, he did a lot of blocking of people telling him he was being an ass.
Most of the fandom were in the ‘ho shit, what are you doing?’ camp, but not all. Whilst many Cullenites discussed how he could be recast and whether Cullen even needed to return for a fourth game, and how to reconcile their love for the character with their desire to distance themselves from his voice, some backed him up. One even said that anyone who didn’t want to see Ellis back in any new game was being unreasonable, overreacting, and, surprise surprise, an enemy of free speech. I don’t have citation for this because I blocked her, but if you do I’d appreciate screencaps or verbatim quotes. She wasn’t alone in her support of Ellis, but certainly the most explicit about it.
This descended into fighting within the fandom, with queer fans trying to explain why the support for his stance hurt them, allies backing them up and explaining why the wording, plausible deniability and all, was harmful. It eventually turned to personal insults and mud-slinging, and whilst I want, and want, to be able to say “Don’t, they’re not worth it”, I also want to tell them to fuck off, so whatever.
By now we’re approaching the weekend, though, and the fandom cycle moves on. People who haven’t seen Ellis’s tweets, either because they’ve blocked him or because they just weren’t online at the right time, are now walking into Twitter like that gif from the TV show. The one with the guy holding pizzas and the room on fire around him. And on one side you have people claiming that they’re being attacked for liking Cullen at all, and on the other you have people who are really, really pissed off.
I’d like to make clear at this point that I never saw anyone attacked for liking Cullen. This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. However, I did see people being attacked for liking Cullen to such an extent that they would rather see other people hurt by Ellis’s behaviour than even consider him being recast. And as an Anders fan, I can assure you that you absolutely can cope with a voice change, even if you really, really love the voice acting. Even if his voice changes and he goes and blows up the chantry, you can still love the character. If your enjoyment of the game would be so damaged by his absence that you think it’s more important than trans fans feeling like they’re not safe in the community, you need to have a serious think about your priorities. And that’s before we get to today.
This is the second account I’ve seen like this. It’s vicious personal abuse of a fan, of a member of our community, and regardless of how you feel about her personally, she does not deserve it. No one does. And at this stage, we have no idea who they’ll go for next. If you’re at all on the fence about this, spend 10 seconds wondering what about you they’d put in the bio and get back to me. The account followed me this morning, and within 2 minutes I’d blocked and reported it. But the worst part is the following list – I had a look, before the account was restricted and, by the looks of it, binned completely, and there was a pattern. They followed Elfy’s friends. This wasn’t an in-joke never intended to escape, this was deliberate and targeted and intended to hurt. And I suspect it won’t be the last.
This is not an argument about pixel boyfriends that’s got out of hand. This is an argument about real people and our place in the community, and someone has decided to take it into their own hands to show some of us that we aren’t welcome. And quite frankly they can get fucked.
