Before the year of January 1, 2015, most of the content floating around my blog consisted of various posts by a majority of white people posted around the world who were really into anime and maybe a few video games here and there. In 2014, I was two years out of high school and in my sophomore year of college. I was still consuming mostly slash fic, but more specifically, mlm slash fic. I lurked around Tumblr in 2012, saw that embarrassment of a phase in its entirety, but two years after all of that, I was mostly into comic books and anime.

During the month of January 2015, I was going to be bedridden for a month as I recovered from an intense surgery on my hip. I had seen a long time black mutual of mine posting up a few things about Dragon Age here and there, but I wouldn’t be fully invested in purchasing and playing the game until I saw Vivienne de Her in one of the trailers for Dragon Age: Inquisition. I had never seen an unambiguously black woman in a fantasy setting until I saw Vivienne. She was on the forefront of the marketing campaign and she was so elegant. I loved her and I didn’t even know her. But seeing that trailer made me want to get to know her and the Dragon Age series better.

So, in December of 2014, one month before my surgery, I bought all three Dragon Age games and prepared myself for a month of gaming.

I fell in love with the series immediately. For most of 2015, I followed people that were in the Dragon Age fandom and, yes, most of them were BNFs. A lot of them were writing fic with my favorite LIs and they were reblogging and boosting other, mostly white, fans’ posts, gifs, and memes relating to Dragon Age. I loved it. There were talking about my favorite characters and I thought it was quality content!

Then that thing with the Anders stans happened…..

To this day, I don’t know who did it, but when I saw a post talking about DA fans appropriating the #blacklivesmatter and using #magelivesmatter as a parody to fictional oppression faced by people that aren’t real. I was pissed off. Very pissed off. Because thing about it. Somebody took a hashtag started by black people talking about the very real oppression we were facing, literally right on the heels of Mike Brown’s death, Tamir Rice’s death, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, all of these people who have been essentially forgotten outside of the black community, and they made a fucking joke parody account about fictional people.

I went off. I went off hard. It pissed me off so bad. I just couldn’t fathom how somebody could look at my people suffering and clinging to what methods we had to cope and reach out to each other and turn it into a joke like it was nothing.

I was pissed for a long time but things eventually simmered down again.

Reading fanfiction was really great because there are a lot of creative people who put out phenomenal works. I couldn’t stop scrolling through the pages trying to find more fic that I could read. It’s funny how much a person can actually change in a year because if I could tell 2015 me about what 2016 me knows, I would’ve told her to leave before she got traumatized the way she did.

So, reading fanfiction is great, up until you realize that all the protagonists look the same. Platinum blonde hair, average looking but is actually conventionally attractive, perky titties, and a little spitfire. Red-haired with freckles and green eyes, average looking but is actually conventionally attractive, perky titties, and a little spitfire until her man pleases her with an anal rape fantasy. Brunette hair with blue-grey eyes, average looking but is actually conventionally attractive, perky titties, and a little spitfire that is sought after even though she has the flattest and most non-existent personality every.

Wait! What’s that?

Brown hair…. yes…..

Light colored eyes….. okay…..

Dark skin……. okay!!…….

*author posts a pic*

Dark skin = passes the paper bag test.

If you aren’t white, you really don’t understand how fucking dehumanizing it is to not see yourself in fanfiction. There were no dark-skinned women with fros and thick lips being sought after by two dudes just because. There were no nonwhite women being loved all over the way these white women OCs were. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t allowed to insert myself into the OC’s place because the author would be sure to describe her skin as pale and creamy, the polar opposite of me who was dark and black.

And around this time, I started noticing some strange things I hadn’t noticed at that point– where were the other black people in DA fandom?

I saw a bunch of white people reblogging from white people their white OCs that all looked the same and loved the same characters I did, but like?? No black people?? Whatsoever?? There had to be someone black in some aspect of the fandom. Someone that liked the characters I liked and wrote about them. There had to be!

And that’s when I found her. Right there under the “female character of color” tag within my favorite’s tag: @mirabai0821

She was such a breath of fresh air. I started with Lover’s AppCove and burned through the entirety of it in a weekend. Evelyn “B” Trevelyan had dreadlocks, dark skin, and a beautiful spirit. She was passionate and vibrant. Her personality was so well developed and put together. She didn’t just exist for the sake of being someone’s love interest, she was her own person, and most importantly,

She looked like me.

Actually like me.

I could see me being loved and cherished the way Evelyn was loved and cherished. I could picture myself and not feel the shame and othering I experienced reading all those other fics with the same white girls over and over again. I could be proud of my black girl OCs again. I could see myself again.

So I went to her blog and looked at who she was following:

I found @belowbedlam

@casijaz

@cassandrashipsit

And Someone who was about to spark a major change in me, @osunism.

It wasn’t until I started following @osunism that I was about to hear the most important thing I could ever hear in my young life. I can’t remember the exact words but she talked about the importance of her black OCs and how seeing them grow, experience life, and fall in love was so important to herself and other black women because we don’t often get to see wholesome depictions of ourselves doing any of those things.

It was like a switch clicked in my head.

Suddenly, it made sense why I was getting frustrated browsing AO3. It made sense why I started caring less and less about white BNFs. It started making sense why I was so attached to these black women who were writing, drawing, and investing in their black OCs– because I was boxed in a corner. I wasn’t allowed to see myself and see myself as worthy of that kind of love. I had my OCs, but I made the mistake of relying on fandom to provide some way for me to feel included.

And like, I didn’t need to?

I could write my own stuff. Interact with my own characters. I could build them up myself and just?? Ignore the white girls who kept investing in the same white girl over and over again?

And so I did.

I set up my AO3.

I set up my writing blog.

My fanfic from back then is so terrible. But It was stuff by me, about my OCs, being in love and being loved by people that cared about them. I was much happier then I had been in a minute.

Then the next thing happened.

Someone tried to do an open forum discussion about the racism, homophobia, and blatant bigoted shit that was going on in the Dragon Age fandom. I had only seen a few things here or there related to in game stuff, save for the #magelivesmatter fiasco. This person, one of those well-meaning white people that doesn’t know how to step back and let people of color handle shit, wanted to give equal standing to people that supported homophobic mods for Dorian and Sera, and…

The banner had a picture of a white Vivienne.

I really don’t know how to describe the panic attack I had when I saw that. I freaked out. I started crying. I couldn’t believe someone would do that to her and just plaster it all over Tumblr, that someone would be so heinous to traumatize other black women like that. Because that’s what it was. Traumatic. It hurt so much to see that and to see someone just not believe us when we say that things like that hurt. Not only that, they wanted to let people who already hated Vivienne for having black skin and people who made homophobic mods for canonical gay characters be able to say why they have the right to be as blatantly violent towards marginalized people.

You know, kinda like the liberals that want me to hold hands with Nazi supporters and the literal KKK.

I was floored by that. I really was. I internalized it for a long time but I kept going nonetheless.

The year closes out with me starting to post my fic to my AO3, the first time I’ve ever posted fic for consumption. It goes pretty well. People like what I write but of course, I’m just starting out so I don’t really know exactly what I’m doing. I’m happy with it though. Black girls being in love and being loved by other people. It felt good to invest myself completely in what I was doing.

Little did I know, early 2016 was about to be a ride.

It starts with what appears to be an innocuous fanart but comes with a description that ends with someone claiming that dark skinned people did not exist in Thedas until a major character made a mistake. This was the first time I had ever encountered what would be later named Brown Paper Dolls™. A white person in this fandom made a dark skinned elf that romanced Solas and gave her a backstory in which her skin color was a curse created by Solas. A punishment for locking up the Evanuris. It was slathered in language that looked like it had been lifted from some black person’s blog only they didn’t know how to put the words together right. A fake ally trying to garner notes for making a black OC and she treats her the same way white people have always treated black people.

Like we’re a blight.

A curse.

A freakish mutation.

Then this person tried to explain how what they did wasn’t racist and that she made her OC dark skinned because there were no other dark skinned elves in Dragon Age.

She… really expected people to be grateful for this botched attempt at diversity. She thought people would love her idea and just eat it up. Granted. A bunch of other white women most certainly did. And a lot of them came to her defense even though black people were pulling their hair out trying to explain why what she did was racist.

That was really fucking hard, actually seeing someone portray my skin color as a mutation.

I kept going.

Now, this is the part where I can definitely tell you the exact date that the Dragon Age Fandom’s racist bullshit finally stopped everyone in their tracks.

In March of 2016, @mirabai0821 wrote a very concise and polite post warning white writers to not use food as descriptors of skin color in anticipation for Civil War’s release in May.

A white she-devil by the name of replicajester came onto that post and went on a tirade. She shouted down everything that Ash was saying. Wrote a fetishizing paragraph doing the exact thing Ash had politely asked her not to do. She told us, the descendants of slaves, that we should get over the slavery that happened to our people and tried to police our language regarding our reasonable anger. Her other white she-devil friend, boticella89, went on and backed her up.

It was a back and forth fight where replicajester was essentially harassing Ash for the entirety of three days. She kept insisting that Ash was somehow responsible for the harassment she was initiating, talking about how Ash shouldn’t parade around her blackness. She was vicious and she was mean. But the straw that broke the camel’s back?

This white woman calling her own children a racial slur.

She referred to her kids as “mulatto.” Just dropped it right then and there.

I had to sing negro spirituals in my head for a day just to distract myself from that.

This incident is when I think I really noticed how fucking racist the Dragon Age fandom was.

But then, the breaking point.

Looking through my posts to mark all the incidents of fandom fuckery that happened within the Dragon Age fandom was hard, but the hardest part was that one day in the month of April. On that day, I reblogged a bunch of pictures, headcanons, and some fic about Vivienne. I’m struggling to keep it together at the time I am writing this. On this day in April, someone posted a fanfic in which their white Garrett Hawke kidnapped Vivienne and gave her over to someone who was going to torture and rape her for her views on the Circle.

I don’t think I had ever felt so afraid, humiliated, and angry in my entire life. I love Vivienne. I saw myself in Vivienne. She was everything I had wanted in a black female fantasy character and I related to her so much. She was my mother that pulled herself up by her bootstraps after my dad left her for another woman. She was my aunt that always knew what she wanted to do in her life and chased that dream. She was me when I was 18 back in 2012 waiting on my acceptance letter for my #1 pick for college. She was me. She was me.

And someone wanted to rape her for not being agreeable. They wanted to hurt her because she was her own person. They wanted to break her spirit, poison her soul, they wanted her to suffer for daring to be black and ambitious and unbowed

Like my mother

My aunt

And me.

Black women have been abused and assaulted for so long. Our bodies don’t belong to us, not the way we want them to. If we don’t do what white supremacy tells us, they hurt us. If we do what white supremacy tells us, they still hurt us. Slave women would be whipped across the back for talking back to the masters. We would be raped at their whim too. Black women’s bodies have been associated with pain, pain, pain since the moment we touched down in the US, and someone in this fandom really dove right into that mindset– the white master physically torturing the black woman who refused to be pushed by anyone.

Words cannot physically describe how traumatic that experience was. I’m using that word a lot, I know, but this fucked me up worse than anything else would ever fuck me up. I almost died once, you know. I remember what that was like. I remember when that time was over how emotional I was to remember being on the brink of death like that. I barely remember it but I felt it. I felt my family hovering over me and my mother starving herself with worry because she had never seen me like this. I remember my father breaking down and being consumed with guilt over his past mistakes. I remember talking to my family afterwards and hearing them say, with honesty, that they didn’t know if they needed to plan for my recovery or my funeral until after I was brought out of my medically induced coma.

This felt worse than that.

It was a wound that cut deep and hasn’t properly healed since then. We were still in the middle of celebrating Beyonce’s release of Lemonade when this whole thing happened. I was hurt. I think I was broken. I think I wished I had died instead.

Here’s the honest to goodness truth about the Dragon Age fandom: it’s filled with people who would condone bigotry if it meant that they could live in a fantasy world. No one white wants this fandom to be inclusive, they want people to let them do whatever they want without repercussion.

kinkyfenris, redhawke, and lyriumbee tried to paint themselves as the foremost progressive allies in DA fandom. Kinkyfenris used racist language to try and defend the reasoning behind why Cullen was only romanceable to elves and humans. Redhawke, for all the ass pats they love giving themselves regarding fandom racism, made a color swatch post with the main characters of color in the Dragon Age fandom but somehow left off Sebastian and Alistair, two people they had been fighting with fandom about regarding their status as men of color. In addition, they made a meta that reeks of colorism and othering claiming that Sebastian is a man of color because his family is interested in fostering relations with Antivans. Lyriumbee was along for the ride with both of them, hanging out with kinkyfenris despite their racism and redhawke despite their progressiveness being mostly for show. I never forgot the way that went down. Never.

cullenstairsheningans was still following replicajester at least up until a few months ago. She gifted that woman with a pic drawn by an artist of color until that artist was informed about the things replicajester had done. She sat through that time when replicajester called her own children a racial slur, watched her bully a black woman out of DA fandom and off of Tumblr, and still stayed behind her during the most recent fuckery of a few months ago when replicajester claimed it was vandalism that some folks would give Alistair and Fiona their correct skin tones.

swevani is a white woman whose name you might recognize from their most recent Donald Trump post. This woman has a brown OC that she, by request of a follower, expanded upon a slave au for and tried to claim she had the right to claim use of slave narratives because she felt like she could relate to slavery.

atherisz is the orchestrator behind the bi Dorian and Sera mods.

andrasteshaircurlers set up a blog claiming that the Dragon Age fandom was being gagged by us, creators and fans of color, who were speaking out against the things that were going on in the Dragon Age fandom. The first ask they answered saw them literally excuse blackface/brownface/yellowface.

lemonwicky defended the person that wrote that Vivienne torture fic and then tried to harass Asian fans to get someone to green light their fetishizing mess of a fic idea.

destinyapostasy is a white woman that uses black bodies to generate monetary funds and capitalize on a BNF status while boosting exactly 0 creators of color. She got upset at fans of color, queer fans, and neurodivergent fans taking offense with being equated with racists, homophobes, and ableists just because a few people don’t really care much for Solas. She then got even more flagrant when her friend got called out for writing bad BDSM fic and then deleted because she didn’t want to take responsibility for her words.

geeky-jez wrote a fic in which she dug up the bones of those who were victims of the Paris bombing and of Sandra Bland for her Brown Paper Doll OC’s bakery shop au to prop up Solas as a white savior and villify Briala.

There are a lot more of these people, all of which I cannot recall at this time but they were there. They did all of this and they are part of a huge recurring problem across fandom space in regards to white women. They are not the only ones that made this fandom experience hard as hell for me, for every single person that followed them, defended them, and continue supporting them despite everything that they have down are selling a clear message to me– your privileged feelings matter more to you than the safety of marginalized people in this fandom. Your ability to get away with doing the most matters more to you than cultivating a safe space for fandom.

This was my first experience with participating with a fandom at a large scale. This is why I’ll never do it again.