The biggest fumble of Dragon Age: Veilguard was that it turned Dragon Age from a series with lots of religion but not a lot of gods into one with a lot of gods, but not a lot of religion.

Very difficult to see it is just an extreme form of all of the worse elements of conservative and reactionary thinking, isolated from actual policy questions. It’s the hate and power without any functional governmental system or ideals.

Fascism is just the same stuff, concentrated for maximum hate.

Finally, treating fascists as unique, inhuman monsters actually helps Right Wing ideology. When fascism is treated as some utterly unique phenomenon, unrelated to the dominant ideology of everyday authoritarianism, corporatism, and - especially - racism, heterocissexism, and ableism, it becomes…

Third, I suspect generational trauma may have skewed your understanding of these issues. Your grandfather was right to make sure you understood the true risk of fascism, and its persistence, but showing a young child the unfiltered horrors of war is not effective pedagogy. It’s just traumatizing.

Art isn’t war, isn’t education in history, isn’t a “how to” for running a resistance unit, and isn’t an ideological argument for antifascism. Elements of these (and so much else) can appear in art, but it isn’t what art is or does. Attempts to combine them tend to be bad art and bad education.

i put a finger on it

Game that tries to teach you new ways of thinking about the world and acting in your day to day life? Cool, based, rad

game that pretends you're throwing bricks at cops (you are sitting around a table)? kinda cringe bro

It's one of those things where if you step outside between AC to non-AC, it just FEELS like you're spiting nature, I get why people think it has to cost a ton of energy. Like, it just FEELS like it should guzzle a bazillion volts to do it. Learning it's actually fairly efficient is a huge relief!

I think the nexus of pain is when they try to do both