DAVRIN Dragon Age: The Veilguard October 31, 2024

Hello again. I decided to write another post on Sabine with additional points as well as taking into consideration people’s replies. My original post is here. Since this is a bit of a long one here is an outline of this post and I'll put the rest of it under a readmore:

Personal response to previous post

Sabine

Update on her scar

SSO is diversifying all their characters

Various "what ifs"

Sexualisation of Sabine by fandom

Dark riders

Redesigns of Katja and Jessica (Jay)

Released image of the new Dark Riders

First, I’d like to address why I’m bringing this up. I’ve had it proposed to me that, as a white person, it’s not my place to talk about this as I’m talking over people of colour. As said in my last point this isn’t my intention at all. I’ve spoken with people of colour about the points in these posts. (Thank you to them for taking time to do so) However none of the points in my posts are new ideas by me and have been brought up by people of colour as being harmful stereotypes. I think it should also be noted that I wasn’t copying another post I’d seen by a POC about Sabine and ignored theirs, I wrote the post because I had not seen anyone speak about it. I do also think that putting the burden on people of colour for calling out racism/harmful stereotyping and such is completely unfair and unjust. White people have a responsibility to tackle this. This is not the same as speaking over people of colour, but amplifying their points and their right to exist without discrimination. I don’t feel like I should have to put this disclaimer but I’d also like to make it clear that not every POC/masculine woman/disabled person will agree with my statements. This is just my opinion that I’ve done my best to fact check with various academic sources and speaking with people affected by these issues.

Her scar

A correction on my last post, the reason behind her scar was discussed in the Star Stable book “The Legend Awakens” (thank you @mudpuddlenll ) Her scar is from falling headfirst off a bridge. However the passage raises more points by saying Sabine isn’t even human which is why she survived the fall. I’ll go into detail later about why saying Sabine and the other Dark riders aren’t human could potentially be harmful. But for now to focus on her scar, if Sabine isn’t human and therefore has the physical capability to survive such a fall – how come her face can scar? Is it just to help signal that she’s a villain? I’m aware Star Stable has weak logic behind a lot of things so I’m not particularly interested in trying to justify her scar being there – the point still stands that is it there.

An additional point brought up in the discussion of my first post is that Anne’s scar, the other character in the game with a facial scar, is a lot more feminine as well as being unrealistic.

Oh but SSO’s diversifying ALL their characters! Sabine isn’t a problem!

If this was the case and also the be-all and end-all of my argument: where are all the “good” brown butch women in SSO? Why aren’t they redesigning “good” female characters to be muscular? Why don’t they have non-violent butch women? Diversity in characters is a good thing, but you still need to make sure those characters aren’t negative stereotypes.

“What if she’s just tan!”

Then Star Stable is trying to make it seem like they’re increasing diversity by redesigning characters as ethnically ambiguous/darkening their skintones and not putting actual meaningful representations of people of colour into their video game. I don’t think I need to explain why this is a bad thing. Additionally if this is the case, then many of my points about female characters of colour still apply to Jay’s redesign which I further discuss below.

“But she’s going to become a good character/have a redemption arc!”

I do not care for hypotheticals. Even if she does redeem herself, the point still stands that SSO has a villain that looks and acts like her and no “good” characters that look like her. The game portrays her as a villain.

The continual sexualisation of Sabine by fandom

It is in bad taste to brush off the issues people have with the Sabine redesign by saying things along the lines of “but she’s hot though”. Even more than that, it adds to the over sexualisation of women of colour in media. I am not saying SSO is sexualising Sabine, let me make that clear. I am merely commenting on the reactions of many players of the game which I have seen online. There is an abundance of people thirsting over Sabine. I am not saying this itself is an issue. I’m a lesbian, women are great. But I think that is important to be careful of the ways we talk about female characters of colour, especially compared to how the same people talk about white female characters. If all you can take away from a character design, especially when pointed out potential issues in it, is that the character is sexually attractive – are you simply treating that character as a sexual object? And how does that reflect your treatment of real people with these characteristics? An additional sub point to this is comments similar to “Sabine can step on me”, “I wish Sabine would crush me” which is also prevalent in fandoms when aimed at women of colour and butch women. This enforces the idea that WOC and/or GNC women are inherently violent, are incapable of non-violent romantic actions, and also serves to masculinise them further.

Dark riders

I’ve been told that since Sabine is only one of the villains/Dark Riders so therefore my points don’t stand since there’s a diverse range of villains. So I shall discuss all of them.

While it’s true Sabine is the only redesigned Dark Rider released in game, SSE has released the new designs of 3 other Dark Riders on their development blog here. They are:

Katja, who has appeared in SSO and earlier games before. She has always been a white woman.

Jay, who has appeared in SSO and earlier games before. However this was under the name of Jessica and appearing as a white woman.

Chiyo, a new character to Star Stable. She appears to be a young East Asian character. This post by @yasminewestbank goes over some of the issues people have with her character, which I agree with.

While I have less to say about Katja, I find it interesting that the only white woman of the group is portrayed (as a general rule) as the most polite/self-controlled /”well-behaved”.

Jay’s redesign shares many of the same points as I have with Sabine. She is now darker skinned, has an androgynous name, and dresses more masculine. Again, I am not saying these are bad things or that a villain can’t have these traits.

SSE also released this group image of them on the same development blog post.

It makes me uncomfortable for several reasons. It reinforces the idea that Sabine is violent and brutal – literally holding Chiyo up by the neck – even towards the characters that are meant to be her allies. It shows that she is much larger and physically intimidating than the others, which as I stated before isn’t really a great thing having the most masculine woman being the most violent.

It additionally reinforces the stereotypes outlined in @yasminewestbanks post about Chiyo’s character as an East Asian woman. She appears much more childlike and infantilised than the other characters in being much smaller and picked up in that way by another character. My points about Chiyo are less concrete as we know little about her character – she may in fact be a child (which is then a point to be said about having the game’s main East Asian character be a young “cutesy” girl), but something just seems “off” about it all to me.

Of course I agree it is a good thing that Star Stable is creating more diverse characters. But I think there is a need to be careful when redesigning characters that were originally three white women into two more masculine women of colour and a white woman, and then adding an additional woman of colour that you do not fall into using negative stereotypes for them. Especially when you add in the fact that they are the major villains to the game – the antithesis of the player character(s) – and are not even human. As mentioned before in this post and my previous, it is common rhetoric from bigots that certain minorities are “lesser” than them, often to the point of them not being deemed human.  Therefore it should be taken into consideration when designing villains that look human but aren’t, who are also minorities.

To summarise, I am not accusing Star Stable of doing or even intending everything I said in my posts. I simply wished to highlight issues I found with some of their character redesigns, and then, with how fandom tended to brush off things like this or ignore them. This post is long enough as it is so I shall post my sources in an additional post, but if anyone’s wanting specific reading/resources on a point feel free to ask. Thank you.

Never posted this one here, so it's now time.

My comic for the 2017 MegOp Zine, "Equinox". It was a project I really loved and I'm humbled that so many great artists participated on it. Forever grateful! The edition turned our pretty neat and I still cherish it on my bookshelf :>

horses have been made into the ideal worker over thousands of years of breeding and domestication and yet now are made to race to the point of exhaustion and injury and sometimes death to entertain the rich if they fail they are killed and if they succeed they are spared until they stop succeeding and then they are killed

even the most successful racehorses often end up beaten and starving in kill pens despite spending their lives earning millions of dollars for their stables their owners and thousands of sports betters

humans and horses are alike in our struggle under the boot of uncaring aristocracy

do not forget the love that fuels you in your anger do not let them break you and make you into their idea of animals they do not know that animals too have love and courage and reason and camaraderie they do not know that we have always been animals and animals feel so much more than their beloved hate and fear

so are you guys the "jorvik is such a place of wonder" kinda person or are you the "imagine the amount of carnage and angst that is actually occurring in jorvik that sse is just not gonna put in their game because they want to market it to kids" type of person?

just wondering stares

It's the first day of June aka pride month!!

I summon the queers 🗣🗣🗣❗❗❗

the way its been TWO YEARS since i first wrote those posts about sabine's design. sooooo where are all those other butch female characters youse insisted would appear and it wasnt just going to be the evil scary brown woman? where are all the "good" characters with realistic facial scars? or will SSO just continue to oversexualise her and see no issue with it because "haha hot woman!! step on me!!"

I'm about to go get drunk if Ao3 isn't back up in 5 minutes

Alright 5th batch of CONSxSSO and today we have some of Soundwave's children

We have SlugFest OverKill LaserBeak (the fav) BuzzSaw and thing (AutoScout)