Introducing a week of LGBT+ stories on Eurogamer.
Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins was charming, funny, disarmingly oblivious, and hot.
He looked sexy in over-the-top pauldrons.
And like every one of my teenage crushes, he was straight.
A win for my nineteen-year-old spank bank.
He’s right of course.
But it’s not just about that is it?
“This is a world we recognise, but without the boundaries on our desires.”
It was a fantasy of romance, not just sex.
Romance as a genre has a complicated and contentious history, of course.
In the fiction world, romance and by extension, the romance readership is often derided and scorned.
To the fanfiction community, as long as it’s well-labelled, no scenario is too taboo.
Enthusiastic fans itch to explore it themselves.
If that doesn’t illuminate something about contemporary queer politics, I’m not sure what will.
In a sense, every act of gaming is an act of fan creation.
Each player creates their own version of the story, something unique to their playstyle and rhythms.
Watching a streamed game can be seen in a sense as reading fanfiction.
And as inevitable as these fan-creations are, perhaps we can draw power from them.
Perhaps sharing our queer fantasies can help improve our reality?
