The Elves are Revolting
Bioware set out to create an unique, fully realised fantasy world with Dragon Age Origins and it’s sequels, 2 & Inquisition.
They ultimately succeeded too well. This is the tale of a fabrication of a race, and the abuse of that fabrication.
In 2009 Bioware released a new fantasy franchise. Dragon Age prided itself on its old school roots, making D&D cool well before Stranger Things brought it to the Netflix crowd. But it was also built on the developer’s deep understanding of lore and need for ever character to be relatable enough to bone, even as the setting used the genre conventions to quickly communicate the feel of a mud drenched, magic blighted, muddy, ancient fantasy, more mud, medieval influenced, mudtastic land.
One of the twists away from convention were the elves. Typically the elves in fantasy are the holier than thou walkers you want to punch. In Dragon Age, they are the guys who have received centuries of being punched.
A proud race made slaves by humanity, torn down and divided between wild elves that delve into blood magic and the dangerous sorcery you hear about from the pulpit on a Sunday or is used in TV shows as an excuse to dress a nerdy character a hell of a lot more scantily, and city elves, subject to slavery and racial taunts like “knife ears" and, um, “elf nose".
The Elves presented a chance to comment on racism and prejudice. But in subjecting the race to such a narrow set of ideas Bioware ignored the rich history they created for the elves, filled with previous golden ages, a unique set of gods for the elves, and more diversity amongst the “faery haired" than you could shake a dialogue tree at.
Bioware created a beautiful, diverse race, and then appropriated the parts of that race that suited them, in order to create a set of stereotypes and cliches that let’s your protagonist feel better than the common NPCs, because they are less racist.
Indeed, Bioware spend more time communicating the in game racism than they do setting up their bow and ancient magic wielding, err, tree hugging race.
Which is a shame, as the hints that are dropped over the course of the trilogy, while your character predominately spends their time on fetch quests to level up enough to save the world (“sorry Inquisitor, if only you’d found that farmer five more sheep you would have been powerful enough to stop me.”), boning their companions, and feeling superior about being less racist than the scripted NPCs, are tantalising. The fictional religion of the elves is equal in lore to our real world fictional religion.
Side bar: In Dragon Age races have their own religion which is non racist because the different races’ gods literally fight each other.
In ignoring the created depth of the fictional elves in order to wield a racism stick, Bioware are themselves fictional racists. And for masters of make believe settings, their can be no greater false condemnation.
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