E3 is happening and I’m… disinterested.
E3 imagery and whatnot does not belong to me.
For those not aware, E3 (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo) is a yearly conference that covers the developments from the biggest studios in the video gaming industry. It’s a trade’s fair meant to announce and build interest in upcoming products from the major players (Ubisoft, Microsoft, EA, Sony and Nintendo). As a young, modern individual, I naturally have an interest in video games as they’re becoming one of the largest mediums of entertainment. Unfortunately, my interest lies in PC (personal computer) gaming whereas this conference mostly focuses around the home entertainment consoles. All I have to look forward to is the glimpse of the multiplatform releases which will inevitably arrive to the PC space some three to six months after they’re console launch.
So, while others are pumped for the exposition, I really can not get into all the hype. That said, I tried and turned on the stream for a few minutes to see how the conference is going. In prior years they had been really embarrassing for the members of the more enthusiast portion of the hobby with a greater focus on gimmick and generic titles that often involved presenters dancing or waving foolishly on stage as they tried to peddle the next motion sensor device as the hottest new thing. So, in one way, this E3 seems to be off to a better start. With the recent release of a new generation of consoles the focus is back to announcing and promoting games. The major studios have taken a more traditional, trailer focussed approach too which is a step above the antics of yesteryear.
What does this have to do with my title? That’s a good question as I’ve three paragraphs in and haven’t touched anything writing or speculative fiction related. So here’s the bridge!
One of the first trailers shown during EA’s presentation was for the upcoming Dragon Age 3 by BioWare. I’m a little surprised my colleague has not written about Dragon Age as he is the one to have played its most recent release. I used to be a great fan of BioWare when I was younger. They produced the nostalgia inducing, widely acclaimed Baldur’s Gate Trilogy which stands, if I may be so bold, as the single most influential western role-playing game in the entire industry.
Dragon Age Inquisition, outside of representing BioWare’s disdain for orderly naming in their titles, belongs to EA and Bioware and not me.
Sadly, their output after that has been lackluster at best. Part of that may have been a problem of coming out the gate too strong. Inevitably, all their newest work is going to get compared to that magnum opus and draw up short. Part of its problem, I think, is that BioWare was working with a proprietary intellectual property. Baldur’s Gate was set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons. This world has had years and years of development and re-iteration by the time the company picked it up. It had a lengthy history which the writers could tap into and the different regions they set the story across were pre-created with interesting and connected cultures. The process of world building is a long and involved one and when they adopted the world for their first games, all they had to focus on was the narrative they wished to tell and the components of creating a video game.
Of course, the downside with licencing is that you have to pay the owner a sizable fee. It’s reasonable any successful studio would want to create their own free of the constraints of licencing and adhering to established works. It gives them the freedom to develop their own world filled with its own peoples and histories and stories.
The downside is they have to make all this.
And the downside of that is we get racism.
I have come to loathe fantasy and its handling of races. I complained about this before when I felt that most writers essentially are rehashing the work Tolkien did with his re-envisioning of mythological creatures into a cohesive and internally consistent world. He established the repetitive trope of dwarves being incurable alcoholics obsessed with mining wealth and loathing elves. Elves, likewise, have morphed in the collective unconsciousness to become these tall, elegant and beautiful peoples with pointy ears and a dying culture. Orcs are a shorthand for middle easterners.
Sten as he appears in Dragon Age: Origins. He is a member of the Qunari who are both a race, religion and culture all in one!
And that’s, unfortunately, become the issue. So often when I see fantasy races in fiction it’s as a cultural shorthand for a real life peoples. It creates a rather uncomfortable situation especially given the rampant racism that erupts in these stories because now these peoples are actual different races. I feel there’s an issue when you conflate real cultures with fantastical peoples as it almost dehumanizes or “others” these cultures from which you borrow.
For example, Dragon Age features the Qunari instead of your standard orc. When we were first introduced to them in Dragon Age: Origins, the only member you met was a man named Sten. He was, by all appearances, a human with darker skin and lighter hair. I welcomed this as the shorthand for culture=race, I feel, has a tendency to draw upon and highlight differences between peoples rather than commonalities. Sten carried the appearance as being the same as the player (assuming a non-dwarf or elf background) with the biggest difference in his personality and beliefs being the cultural heritage of his distant upbringing.
Qunari concept art re-envisioning them for Dragon Age 2 so they’re clearly not human.
Dragon Age 2, however, made sure to clarify that this was not the case. Sten and the Qunari were shunted into the fantastical race segregation giving this air that culture and beliefs are tied to some bizarre genetic composition. We see this with the other races – all dwarves and elves essentially struggle beneath the expectations of their physical appearance intimately connecting behaviour and potential with one’s birthright. Of course, given this expectation from the audience one would imagine that fantasy would be a ripe area to undermine racist beliefs and tendencies. However, invariably, the narratives reinforce the core separation of racial thinking even if they attempt to express that racist behaviour is bad at the same time. Which is, of course, reasonable given the world’s creation in that these two entities are separate along racial lines.
So fantasy basically writes a creator into a corner. They have, biologically speaking, separate races but these races invariably take the cultural shorthands and iconographies of real life peoples. Even if the author attempts to argue that discrimination based along these lines they’ve created themselves is bad it does not ignore the problem that they’ve fallen into the trapped thinking these people fundamentally are different. Course, there are ways around this. For one, Dungeons and Dragons breaks down the different races into even more variable culture groups disassociating the race with any real world analogy. In the Forgotten Realms alone we have the High Elves, Moon Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Elves and just about any other permutation you could require. And though the difference between the factions is often represented physically with their bodily attributes (like the black skin of a Dark Elf or the golden skin of a High Elf) the biggest separation is their cultural and philosophical heritage. Furthermore, you generally do not have a genetic incompatibility with these different groups thus reinforcing their differences are not tied to inherent characteristics.
Unfortunately for new worlds like Dragon Age, they do not have the development to portray this distinction. There are only one group of humans, elves, dwarves and qunari which leads one to assume their differences are tied to genetic inheritance as it is to cultural education.
Sten updated to appear in the sequel’s design for his race. Personally, I feel it detracts from his story and the character in general. Mod can be found at: http://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage/mods/3803/?
The long and the short of it is I hate the Qunari’s stupid horns. I’d rather fantasy focus on creating unique peoples and beliefs without taking the lazy shortcut of highlighting people’s differences through physical characteristics. Take humanity in its entirety and there is a staggering breath of variety amongst our own race – we don’t need to put funny horns or ears on their heads in order to experience it.
A big problem with your article is a factual error. You blame Dragon Age II for “changing” the Qunari. This is not so. It has been known to us for years that Sten was always supposed to be portrayed as a big, hulking, horned non-human. Technical limitations of the time forced him to be designed like he was. Dragon Age II simply took advantage of the advance in hardware and showed Qunari as they were always meant to be.
One of the more interesting things about Dragon Age is the degree to which various fragmented sub-groups of the four races are losing their original cultural identity and developing a new one in a new context. For instance, Qunari who left or were never part of the Qun, finding whatever fringe existence they can in human lands. These are a marginalized people, but not because they cannot adapt. In fact, to survive at all they must be quite adaptable.
Your point about the longer, richer history in the Forgotten Realms universe is interesting; I believe that running the clock on the basic DA framing with more writers/storytellers involved would further draw out these sub- and cross-cultural groups. Still, in DA I see acknowledgement of adaptability in sentient beings, of humanity and nuance. To me, Dragon Age’s writers explicitly indicate that stark “racial” differences are actually cultural, not inherent. In fact, while I can’t hold any of the DA games up to the level of storytelling in Baldur’s Gate, I like both series for this reason.
While the Qunari definitely channel historic Persian states during the crusades, they are not cast as mindless barbarians. They are technologically advanced. They have (harsh) rule of law. While their quasi-religious Marxist Borg philosophy is definitely alien, from a humanist perspective it is no worse than any of the more recognizable but incredibly fucked up Human, Elven, or Dwarven cultures.
Further, the Qunari are are not aligned with evil, in the sense that Tolkien’s orcs are. Even the orcs of DA, the darkspawn, are not minions of some overriding evil intelligence, are not hordes of others spilling over the border. Darkspawn are created by the corruption of the four sentient races of Thedas; dark mirrors of familiar things. The blight cycle itself is strongly hinted to be the result of ambitious magical tinkering, now cast by various religions as a fall from Eden event or a Lucifer-like nemesis. But the world’s history tells us the blight is a disruptive, alien ecological process caused by the magical equivalent of genetic engineering.
I like that the Qunari are significantly divergent from the physiology of the other three races and that their culture is alien. I don’t see them as any more barbaric than the humans, elves, or dwarves. Everyone in Thedas has slaves, and I can’t make an ethical or personal judgement on whether a rigid cast system is any worse than a feudal barony. Playing as a Qunari mage is, for me, a great exercise in storytelling. I have to put a lot of thought into how my character would reasonably interpret their place in the world given the juxtaposition of their outward appearance and the stereotyping of those around them against their inner, adaptable humanity. I like to think that, in that context, I would learn to guardedly approach those around me without any assumptions as to how they actually think. So that gives me a character story and motivation that has nothing to do with inherent racial mentalities, and I think that is how the writers intend for players to approach the world.
On a final note, the mechanics of racial stats in DA:I largely undermine the notion of inherent racial mindsets. The Dwarves, Elves, and Qunari all get racial bonuses based on their physiological characteristics; Qunari are very physically robust, Elves are slender and quick, and Dwarves have some resistance to magic due to their proximity to lyrium. This says nothing about ingrained mentality or intellectual abilities. It does hint at divergent or parallel evolution, but I don’t think physiological differences in fantasy races channel real-world racism like the idea of racially ingrained intellectual disposition does. There *are* some interesting questions as to how evolutionary processes could match to fantasy races, for instance whether the four races have a monophyletic or polyphyletic taxonomical relationship or are maybe completely alien to each other.
Only humans have a racial bonus that suggest some difference in cognition; the frankly lame choice of giving them an extra skill to reflect some level of exceptional adaptability. Instead, humans might gain some additional endurance to reflect that while they are not particularly robust, strong, or lithe compared to other races, their generalist builds give them more running/moving endurance. Elves could also be endurance athletes, but maybe they have musculature adapted to short bursts of acrobatic activity or they have no calorie reserves. Or, maybe humans should instead be completely physically mediocre, instead gaining a bonus on commerce and conversation in regions where they are culturally ascendant, which account for most locales in the games. On balance, games like Skyrim are actually much worse at suggesting some inherent differences and limitations in cognition.
I do have to say that the entire plotline regarding the Qunari in DA:2 was moronic and started to cast the Qunari more in the light you are suggesting here. I could not finish DA:2 because of that and the boring combat. I wish Bioware could consistently stay on their game. I love DA:O and DA:I, I pretend that Dragon Age 2 never existed.
In other words, we should remove the plastic foreheads from the plastic forehead aliens so that they’re all human, because plastic foreheads imply that differences are race based rather than culture based. You need a little more faith in the players, readers, and writers.
Note: Even a carefully constructed multiracial mono-culture carries with it its own views of cultural superiority and often sweeps real issues under the rug (fantasy often mirrors reality). Everything isn’t going to be solved by making fantasy races less alien or cultures more monotonous.
Alternatively, a writer could take those funny plastic foreheads and tie it into the creation of an alien culture and way of thinking. It’s precisely that most fantasy races are just people with plastic foreheads that I find disheartening.
And more peculiarly, I find that it’s a trap that crops up in the fantasy genre more often than in science fiction. I’m not entirely certain why that occurs but if I had to hazard a guess it’s because science fiction often pulls on philosophical concepts as the base of the story whereas fantasy is near universally “good vs evil” in as simplistic shades as possible to bring it to the moralising level of mythology.
To BioWare’s credit, they have attempted to look into fantasy races a bit more thoroughly than most fantasy fiction. The “twist” on the elves as being a discriminated diaspora peoples and the often harsh views held between their city, slum-dwelling kin and the roaming nomadic ones was interesting. Sadly, it took backseat to werewolves and zombie hordes.
Anywho, it’s a minor gripe which I’ve been told is a personal preference than anything else. Certainly my friends continue to read their fantasy novels and they do seem, on a whole, more drawn to fantastically racially diverse worlds than not. I think for the most part, it’s just escapist window dressing and most readers simply don’t read much more into it than that.
Claiming racism in Tolkien’s work is quite an egregious error and puts your whole essay in jeopardy. If you conducted proper research you would find that despite him being Eurocentric, he would be considered progressive when it came to races. And of course, as someone pointed out, the Qunari were always meant to have horns. There’s also the fact that equating Qunari with West Asians is kinky. The Qunari’s real-world cultural counterpart(s) have not been confirmed, at least as far as I’ve seen.
The fact that its based off them looking different is the exact same as me saying we segragate monkeys because they are dumb yet we all walk on two legs.😕