Did Zevran make your Cousland’s heart go pitter-pat?
Did your Hawke swoon for Merrill?
Did your Trevelyan fall head over heels for Sera?
Did your Lavellan have a fling with the Champion of Kirkwall?
Then my friend, this is the event for you! February 10th-14th, we will be celebrating all our favorite human/elf Dragon Age ships! Submit fics, art, and playlists of your human/elf ships, both canon and non-canon (OC ships and rare pairs both welcomed and encouraged!), fluff or smut, with the hashtag #shemtits, and share the interracial DA love!
So dust off that Surana x Cullen, Fenris x Isabela, Carver x Merrill, or Trevelyan x Solas fic you’ve been working on, and let’s have ourselves a ball just in time for Valentine’s Day!
OMG, you guys, are you ready for this weekend? I’m sitting here waiting for all your wonderful elf/human fanworks like
This is all kinds of uncomfortable IMO, TBH.
I just want to clarify that I am biraical. I need to clarify this because it’s important to what I’m going to try and say. And also please remember that I am speaking personally, as in, this is on my behalf and my behalf alone.
For starters, I really am curious where the tag idea “shemtits” came from. It seems kind of in poor taste.
Second, here’s the thing…. There are tons of human/elf ships I love. Especially Merribela; I have made it no secret that I absolutely adore Merrill x Isabela. And I’ve written a fic myself. What makes this thing uncomfortable for me, is not that it’s about human/elf ships. But that it’s only about human/elf ships.
“The problem is that any old representation is not always good representation. There are a number of problems with this trope, but the first & more glaringly obvious one being: it’s super common for gentiles to write about Jews marrying out. (This may be applicable for other minorities too btw, but I see it for Jews all the time.) You’ve all seen it. The two star crossed lovers: Julia McEnglish & Aaron Jewson. Aaron’s Jewish parents don’t like that he’s dating a goy, Julia can’t imagine giving up Christmas, but they just love each other anyway. Nearly always the minority character’s (although, sometimes it’s both characters as minorities) entire culture is eroticised and Orientalised. It’s their culture that throws up boundaries and difficulties to the relationship. And the tensions and upheaval of the stories are all found in the Jew’s culture being in the way.”
Bolding that last part because it’s also very much in relation to what I want to say re: the connection to First Nations in a minute.
I don’t think white people can really realize what it’s like to be in a constant battle to keep your identity alive. And a there is a very common mindset on reserves that if you marry a nonnative person, you are betraying your people. Is this right? IMO, no, but I do understand the emotions behind it. I also think a lot of it comes down to blood quantum, which comes from the government’s bullshit way of defining Status. Without getting too much into that because I could write a ten page essay on the troubles with how Status works, the short of it is, if you want your possible children to have the same rights as you do to their culture, getting together with a nonnative may insure they don’t. This is another very subliminal way the government is enforcing assimilation.
We are put in a place where we are the ones who are supposed to give up our cultural backgrounds. Our culture is, as said above, seen as in the way. And in the extremely thin existing examples I can think of where we’re love interests, it’s usually between a white man and a beautiful “exotic” native trophy wife, for the lulz, or the Aboriginal person has parted themselves with their culture. (Or any combination of the three.)
This is why human/elf ships are tricky. The brutal history the humans have put the elves through is not something to be just forgotten. There are way too many “You’re not like the other elves” fics out there. Please people, stop other-ing characters from their race. Or what drives me even madder, people who write their elven characters as apologizing for being elven. All this is way to similar to the trope spoken about above.
I mean not to say it can’t be done, because it can. (Again, Merribela. OTP.) But this event doesn’t seem to be supporting this, but rather a “free for all.”
The last thing we need is to be encouraging fics about “shameboners.”
Screencap courtesy of @saarebitch from this thread.
If the event was all about celebrating interracial relationships, why is it only about humans and elves? Why them specifically? Because that is why it feels targeted. And why it feels uncomfortable, to me. And why some people may easily take it as fetishistic.
This whole concept is so, so, so ugly.
So ugly.
Thank you @dalish-ious for examining it so well, because my reaction was basically just “fuck everything” table flipping.
I am the product of a bi-racial relationship between a black man and a white woman. I am IN a bi-racial relationship and married to a white man. And I absolutely 100% guarantee that people who write shit like “shameboner” do not have a fucking INKLING of how complicated an interracial relationship involving racial power imbalance is.
Do you know what it’s like to spend a day hearing about extrajudicial killings of black people by white men and then go to bed with one? There are days I can barely look at a man I love with all my heart. There are days where I feel the distance between me and my white mother is impassable. But you all want to take the same kind of power imbalance and fetishize it to get your communal panties wet, or because you think it’s “cute.” Fuck. That. Noise.
The elf/human relationships are the ultimate in oppressed/oppressor relationships, and while they can be beautiful and well handled… well Klandom has proven they usually are just there to be gross, tawdry, and degrading. This is no different, and I certainly shouldn’t be surprised that anything Geeky-Jizz is involved in would be racist, fetishistic and vile.
Good job y’all, way to prove you continue to suck.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 