TWIBS: Digital Dragon Age Scars Upset Losers
Video games! The nerds (pejorative) are upset about woke again, this time because an upcoming RPG lets you slap some top surgery scars on your player character. How WILL they survive?!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Oh, this is exciting! It’s so rare that my personal love of video games and my professional love of slam dunking transphobic weirdos intersect this neatly.
Have you heard of the critically acclaimed roleplaying game franchise Dragon Age, created by BioWare (of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect fame, too) and published by Electronic Arts? Surely in passing, at least. It’s a lovely trilogy of high fantasy sword-and-sorcery video games that have a very rich and complex narrative driven by interesting and personable characters… many of whom, it must be said, are extremely queer. In Dragon Age: Origins, the characters Leliana and Zevran can be romanced by a male or female player character; in Dragon Age II, all but one romanceable companion can fall for a male or female player character; and in Dragon Age: Inquisition there are two bisexual companions, one gay man and a lesbian in your party.
Suffice to say, Dragon Age as a series has been openly LGBTQ+ from the start… but steel your resolve, dear reader, because the latest in hedonistic pro-queer evil from BioWare may just shock you to your very core:
In the upcoming fourth entry in the Dragon Age series, you will be able to give your player character… top surgery scars. I know, it’s brave and bold and we must celebrate it, but some people aren’t acting normal about the Dragon Age top surgery scars. No, they aren’t acting normal about the Dragon Age top surgery scars at all!
Now, Grummz is a shovelware-producing “game dev” who used to work for Blizzard Entertainment, famous for games like StarCraft, World of WarCraft, and Diablo, who has spent the last few months shoring up an anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter crusade in hopes of causing a second GamerGate. If you weren’t around for the first GamerGate and have no idea what I’m talking about, I beg you, do not look it up. Do not learn this cursed knowledge. Simply know that it was awful, it shouldn’t happen again, and Grummz is a very strange man whose personal proclivities I simply do not have time to get into.
The two big gripes I see about this are, obviously, total nonsense:
First, they will say, “Why wouldn’t they simply use magic to remove people’s breasts?” This reveals a total lack of knowledge about the series’ underlying narrative conceit, which is that people really do not like it when you do magic. This fact is hugely important in the second and third games, and anybody who had played through the trilogy even once would know this. That is to say, an insufferable dweeb, like me.
Second, they will say, “How could they have the technology to perform a mastectomy in this period of history?” This one is more dire, because it reveals that the doofus in question doesn’t know the difference between real life and fiction. That’s no good! But if we must talk about real life, mastectomies were first documented by Greek physician Leonidas… in the first century CE. They may not have looked identical to modern procedures for a double mastectomy performed on a transgender patient, but it doesn’t change the fact that chest surgery as a concept is extremely old.
So, let’s call this what it is: transphobia! Obvious bigotry! They don’t like the idea of people who have had top surgery being able to see themselves represented in a video game. It makes their skin crawl, to think of a queer person being happy.
To that I say: Shut up! Shut your mouths! Quit flapping your gums! Nobody cares what you think! PS, I really hope Veilguard is good. If you also hope Veilguard is good, please tell me on Twitter, that you hope Veilguard is good!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
