Confession time!

flutiebear:

So, it seems like a lot of the confessions that get reblogged are the negative, gross, fandom-ur-doin-it-wrong ones. Which is fine, I guess. But I kinda just wanted to toss out some positivity there, too. So here’s some happy ones:

My List of Happy, Positive, Hopefully-Not-Shamey-At-All Dragon Age Confessions:

• You know the Circle-Fade-Circle sequence in Origins? The one everyone hates so much? That’s my favorite part of the entire game. FUCK YEAH SLOTH DEMONS. FUCK YEAH SHAPESHIFTING. FUCK YEAH FADE.
• Dragon Age made me re-examine my sexuality. For real. It sounds so obvious to me when I hear it now, but I remember first listening to Anders’s line about “I’ve always believed people fall in love with a whole person, not just a body” and feeling it was a fucking revelation. The discussions I see on my dash every day have only reinforced this. I am a more open-minded person than I once was specifically because of Dragon Age 2.

• Along similar lines, I feel like Dragon Age — specifically Feynriel & Isabela’s storylines — has really helped me come to terms with how I felt about my mother’s outing, her leaving when I was a kid, and how I feel about her as a person now. (More on that here and here.)
• I joke about 30 Seconds To Mars’s This is War album being a Dragon Age concept album—except I’m kind of not really joking.
• Also: Florence & The Machine. “Never Let Me Go”, I swear to god this is about Orsino. It even has his word-for-word line about not giving up, but giving in, and the idea of blood magic as an ocean you can drown in wait why are you backing away from me where are you going I have so much more—
• I specifically looked up how to make sure Alistair wouldn’t dump me before the endgame, because after the way Anders treated me post-“Justice” in Act 3, I couldn’t bear to have another NPC break my heart. Oh, that should get its own confession—
• Yes, Anders broke my heart. Like, I had random crying jags over the whole end of DA2 for days. I even bought some Ben & Jerry’s and wrote angsty poetry over it. For a week, I was 14 again. It was pathetic.
• I never once considered making Alistair king. Actually, while I was playing Origins, I thought that was the writers intended me to take away from the whole storyline: That our choices, not our blood, make us who we are.
• I love, love, love Nicholas Boulton’s voice, but Jennifer Hale’s (Jo Wyatt, of course. STUPID FINGERS ARE STUPID) voice work on Aggro!Female Hawke is the greatest voicework of all time. OF ALL TIME. When I’m feeling a little blue, I’ve tried visualizing what makes me sad and saying “shut up” to it, just as she says here:

  

  It never fails to make me giggle.

• I stopped writing about games professionally in part because I found myself writing and talking about Dragon Age 2 all the time, and I didn’t want to turn what I loved into work.
• Once I tried to explain to someone why I loved Dragon Age 2 so much. “So, okay, there’s this hooker, right?” I said. “And he’s really busted up about his missing girlfriend. So then, if you like, you can sleep with him. And afterward, you can steal the toe of a dwarven god he secretly keeps in his nightstand.” Yeah, sounds like cheap laughs, right? But the thing is: I meant it completely seriously.

  Write Jethann’s story in your head — why he offers to sleep with you (his body’s the only thing he has of value), why he vanishes so quickly afterward (because Hawke basically exploits Jethann’s grief for his own momentary gain), why he keeps a Paragon’s Toe in his nightstand (a city elf with no history of his own keeping safe the relics of another race’s past) — and tell me that doesn’t break your heart, even just a little. 

  So, basically, that’s reason #457 why I love DA2: You can play this same game with every NPC ever. What you see on the surface can go as deep as you let it, and I can’t tell you how much I love all the wonderful stories people come up with for even the minorest of the minor NPCs.

• I can’t play any of Saemus Dumar’s quests anymore without immediately thinking of “Wayward Son”. And Kansas.
• These days, when I’m staring off into space, I’m usually either thinking about sex, Dragon Age 2, or both at once. Don’t tell my husband.
• I don’t think I’ll ever love another game quite as much as I love Dragon Age 2.

Wow. That got… kind of long. Anyway, feel add your own in the replies/reblogs!

I am so glad I discovered this corner of the DA fandom on Tumblr. I, too, am more open-minded because of DA2 discussions. I can now celebrate other people’s acceptance and confidence in their own bodies even as I still work at accepting my own.

And seeing positive discussion of Sebastian’s chastity as a valid life choice has also made me feel better about my own current life choice of not dating and not having sex when so much of the media says that that makes me either a prude or abnormal.