Dragon Age, Rape and Women’s Stories

So let’s start this off by saying that I will be lightly touching on the issue of rape. If that’s going to be difficult for you, please skip this piece of opinion since it is only mine and in the grand scheme of things, not that important. Second, if you feel the need to respond in an inflamitory way on the issue of rape as a result of this opinion piece, don’t bother. I’m sure you have better things to do with your time and I won’t be responding to anything clearly cruel, ignorant, or inflamitory because rape is a sensitive issue for many.

Clear? Good, moving on.

Bioware is not my favorite video game company. They’ve done some neat games, some stinkers and a few things here and there that  drove me up a wall. (Wait, so, I have sex with an NPC in Mass Effect, and suddenly they have nothing else to add to the story? Yeah, that’s awesome.) So as I heard more and more about Dragon Age I had both high hopes and low expectations at the same time. I’d heard a few things that left me hopeful. (Your character can be gay! Yippie!) But I wasn’t holding my breath for anything miraculious as I recognize social conscience in games tends to take a while.

That trepidation in mind, I started playing. I started playing a female elf from the city because I wanted to see the ‘elf as second class citizen’ story line for myself. Frankly, I’m glad I did. First, I get told that I’m getting married today. Neat! There’s a variety of responses to my coming wedding, I can be pissed, planning to escape, happy about it. All in all, I like to see family life being recognized in a video game even if I KNOW there’s no way this ‘dark fantasy’ video game is going to go along the ‘happily ever after’ ending.

I was not surprised when you get to the wedding and, low and behold, a bad guy shows up to break up the festivities. It’s a Braveheart kind of intruption. Son of a local human noble wants to come and grab some elf tail before the wedding. The villain is a little ‘mwah ha ha’ mustush twirling evil for my tastes, but this is a video game, so I let it go. I’m also not entirly sure why I can’t take this chump in a fight, but whatever.

So, now me and a few other elf lasses are taken back to the noble’s house, apparently to be raped within an inch of our lives, but I plan an escape. One of the women is slaughted outright, but I still manage to break out and start saving myself while my beloved male cousin and my betrothed are trying to save us from the outside in. Neat how that works out, heroics from the fellas as well as a little feminist liberation. I can dig it, and while I’m dealing with the threat of rape, it isn’t thrown in my face as much as I might fear. No ‘avoid being rape’ mini game or anything grotesgue like that. Further, my character is never really in direct danger of actually being raped, it’s a thing that might be happening off screen to the NPCs so that me, as a player, doesn’t have to face it directly. That would have been too much in a game like this, a line I don’t think Bioware would be willing to cross. (At least, I hope not.)

Now, my best friend does, apparently get raped, though it’s only indrectly suggested by dialouge and I do get to kill the dude who did it. What really blew me away when all was said and done about the story is the victim’s response to her asualt.

She is not destroyed. She is not left a quivering shell of herself with no personality left beyond ‘victim.’ She tells you that she’s chosen to keep the detail to herself, that she’s upset, but she’ll be okay and that she has support from her new husband. (My favored cousin, point of fact.) She’s facing it as a reality, but isn’t destroyed. That’s a strong message to be sending out. It isn’t dismissive of what happened to her, but it doesn’t ‘ruin her’ as comes up in stories with rape from time to time.

I’ve had some people ask me what a woman’s story is. In this case, I would say that this is a woman’s story, not just for my character but for her best friend as well. It’s heavy, when you reflect on the implications, but it becomes just a part of the character development instead of the whole and total motivation for everything she does. (She is an elf rouge off to save the world who was nearly raped, not just a rape victim. See the difference?)

Now clearly, this is just my opinion. I can see where other women, more sensitive to the subject might have a harder time, find it distasteful or wish they had been warned. I’d say Dragon Age did a good job of indicating that this was a very dark game, (maybe more so then it actually is, but that’s another review,) so I don’t feel as if it was out of place or inappropriate, which is really what I’m looking for when playing games with heavy content.

I’d love to hear what you think, play nice!