The Morning Realms Dispatch No. 8
Dragon Age, or It doesn't always have to be grim
This is the free monthly edition of The Morning Realms Dispatch, in which I share with my lovely readers some behind-the-scenes content and teasers for GUARDIANS OF DAWN: ZHARA, the first book in the Guardians of Dawn series, forthcoming AUGUST 2023. If you would like even more secrets, why don’t you consider becoming one of my ì ˆì¹œ?
The best thing about Dragon Age the franchise is how unserious it is.
This isn’t to say that the games aren’t full of darker themes and subject matter, only that the lightness of touch with which the topics are handled are probably the reason I even play these games at all. (Well that, and the romance.) I’m not much of a gamer, or rather, I’m not really into combat mechanics or strategy when it comes to video games; I’m here for the story.
These days I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my tastes and sensibilities when it comes the media I consume and create, mostly because I’m struggling (as I think many of us are) to find things that I actually connect with. There are a lot of things out there that I enjoy on an intellectual level, but finding something that hooks me on an emotional one has taken far too much effort for my liking.
It could be, of course, that my personal tastes are not currently en vogue. I like art that is sincere, but not serious. I don’t mean art that doesn’t take its subject or themes seriously, but art that doesn’t take itself seriously. In my mind, a perfect recent example of this would be Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film that takes its themes of generational trauma, nihilism, and grief very seriously, but also contains a scene where people fight with butt plugs hanging out their asses. There’s not a lot of art in the vein of the Daniels’ oeuvre out in the moment, more’s the pity.
The Dragon Age franchise is not nearly so, well, silly as Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it’s a franchise that can poke fun at both itself and the genres it’s drawing inspiration from. As far as games go, it’s a fairly standard action role-playing game series (with Origins being the closest to a tabletop game), set in a fairly generic European-inspired fantasy setting. In the first and third games, there is an enormous, world-ending evil that must be defeated while you play as the hero. In the second, you and a crew of disaster queers try to hold an entire city together with some gumption and duct tape while the world falls apart around you due to an increasingly violent semi-religious schism surrounding magic.
There are a lot of really heavy topics and themes Dragon Age touches on, especially in the matter of magic, of consent, of ethics, of personal freedom vs. collective responsibility, etc. but there are no right or wrong answers, nor are the games about these ideas. Instead, you are surrounded by characters that provide you with a spectrum of opinions, and how you win their approval and become friends (or romance them) depends on how you decide to play your hero. Do you believe in state-enforced order, or do you believe in unregulated individuality? The former might come at the cost of freedom, but the latter comes at the cost of safety.
The games also come with dialogue like this:
BETHANY: That book you were reading this morning, Hessarian's Spear, I don't think he had a spear in the legends.
ISABELA: He does in this one. Read the description.
BETHANY: Andraste knelt before no man but her Maker, but she hadn't counted on the archon Hessarian. Can Hessarian penetrate the tight-knit defenses of the warrior-prophetess? Will she be prepared to face the full blast of his... power? Wait a minute... Isabela! This is a vulgar thing!
ISABELA: You want to borrow it?
BETHANY: No!
ISABELA: You sure? It has pictures!
The real joy of playing the Dragon Age games is getting to know your companions. Party banter is the reason I’ve poured hours into this franchise; you can get insight into your companions’ worldviews about the broader philosophical concepts the series touches on, but you can also just get moments of lightness and levity. And because you have so many companions and so many outcomes with your companions, you could theoretically play an entirely new game hundreds of times.
Not that I do; I make the same 2 or 3 choices whenever I play.
And that’s what Dragon Age feels like most of the time. Play. Having fun, horsing around, joking with friends, and also maybe killing a few zombies or demons along the way. But at the same time, the fact that we’re being playful and fun doesn’t take away from the very real emotional stakes of the story and characters; in fact, the playfulness only strengthens the sincerity.
A lot of media out these days is very...earnest. On the nose. I like things that are sincere, but not earnest. For me, the difference lies in the seriousness. Sincere works engage with the more emotional parts of a story in good faith, even if it pokes fun at or plays around with the form or substance. Earnest work cannot abide any criticism — however, good-natured — of itself, for to engage with it would be to break the serious world view it’s constructed as armor.
I like to think of myself as sincere, but not earnest, and I like to believe that my art follows suit as well.
My previous duology is far more serious than Guardians of Dawn in tone, and Shadowsong in particular is just...serious all around. Wintersong wears its playfulness a little bit more obviously on her sleeve; she’s not very subtly inspired by and having fun with Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Shadowsong was...well, let’s just say that Shadowsong is playful the way a depressive episode of bipolar disorder is.
In the marketing materials for Guardians of Dawn: Zhara, Sailor Moon gets named as one of the first pieces of inspiration, but in all honesty, it was Dragon Age that first lit the spark. I first started playing the game right after I turned in the final draft of Shadowsong, and before I sold my next series to my publisher. The writing of my second book had been incredibly difficult for different reasons than writing Zhara had been, but what had been the most difficult was figuring out where I wanted to go next. I was burned out on dark, romantic fantasy; it was a cold, ashy wasteland where my creative torch had been.
Then came a game with dragons, darkspawn, and dating.
And I realized it didn’t always have to be so grim.
There are a lot of Easter Eggs referencing Dragon Age scattered throughout Zhara — abominations, the Sunburst Throne — but I think it’s the tone of the series is where you can see the games’ influence the most.
Party banter is my favorite thing to listen to, and it turns out it’s my favorite thing to write as well.
That’s all for this month’s issue of The Morning Realms Dispatch! Next month I’ll talk about the Dragon Age video games, himbos, and ensemble casts and the influence they had on Guardians of Dawn: Zhara, so be on the lookout for that. I will also be talking about limbos and Alistair Theirin for my ì ˆì¹œ only in The Guardians Gazette, so if you would like to check out that, why don’t you consider subscribing?