By: Basel Eren

Edited by: Lillianne Elkady

I didn’t expect Dragon Age: Inquisition to have such a profound impact on me. I knew there were non-heterosexual romance options, but I wasn’t aware there was a trans character (Krem). My protagonist was a human woman, with a gender-neutral name “Eren” – the name I went by in my questioning phase. Despite my yearning to be a more masculine person or a man, I used to only play female characters and give them a neutral or non-feminine design. Perhaps I was afraid that playing a male character would awaken something in me, or I liked seeing women in media generally (I was not aware I felt attraction either)

I first met Krem when going to hire the mercenary group of The Iron bull. I dislike admitting this, but I was very interested in him as a character from the start because I couldn’t “tell” what gender he was. I considered his appearance and voice androgynous (which I like), and thought for a moment if he was trans. Then I told myself he probably wasn’t, since I had no knowledge of trans characters in mainstream games, and that he was likely a masculine woman like Cassandra. I was happy that Krem would be available in camp and I explored all his dialogue options. Looking back, it’s nice to see Krem’s introduction was not as a joke or shock factor, and his backstory as a soldier on the run is intriguing. His story reflects the reality of many trans people, who fear being “outed”, experience difficulty working and are in danger because of their gender

Later, when Krem remarks that the Iron Bull’s harness looks like a binder and offering to help, a lightbulb went off in my head. I didn’t want to get my hopes up until I know for sure…but then the dialogue options came up. I decided to choose “why pass as a man” and I loved Krem’s confident answer that he’s simply being himself not imitating something. This was something I really needed to hear during my fearful questioning phase. I liked all his replies to the other dialogue options as well; it is revealed that Krem also dealt with an additional class disadvantage and mocks the idea that you can recognize if someone’s trans or not by their appearance. It was sweet that Iron Bull is a good ally to him and validates him as a real man and a moral character, and scoffs at deciding what’s “normal” or not – a stigma that trans and LGB people deal with. Moreover, Krem was threatened by being labelled something along the lines of a “crazy girl, sick in the head”, which is a very common mistreatment and abuse we deal with

I felt a need for others to see me as a guy and refer to me with he/him pronouns, I found myself confused as to why I felt very attached to Krem, almost as if I was jealous. Cole, the spirit, also says that Krem’s “armor is right, but the body isn’t, but it doesn’t hurt him anymore, you make it better”. I myself feel major physical dysphoria, but Krem says that he has no interest in changing his body with any magic, that an armor and a “well-placed sock” makes him happy. It demonstrates that trans people’s desires and transitions aren’t a uniform path, some need social transition, some need physical transition, and of course, acceptance and respect from others is very important

Krem is decently written because he doesn’t tell the protagonist that he’s trans the moment he’s on screen or outed against his will. He shares personal memories, such as his dysphoria of wearing a dress, and pretending to shave like his father, only when you have progressed enough and conversed with him. He further says that he didn’t “decide” to be a man, it’s just who he always was. I found myself reflecting on all the “signs” and gender-related things I did that gave me a comfort I could not explain, things that I have tried so hard to ignore and suppress. I have always wondered why I drowned out my feelings, my dysphoria, all this time. Aside from lacking the terminology, and the vague understanding that this was unacceptable to others, why didn’t I privately acknowledge that I was trans? Most likely I was afraid to face these feelings, because after I do so, I will be left with the ultimate question – what now

Would I have accepted my gender without the representation of Krem? Of course, eventually, but this was the push, the support I desperately needed to address my feelings and feel confident in myself. Despite him being a side character, it made me feel less alone because we rarely get good representation in mainstream gaming, and hopefully, it’s just the start. Ever since then, I have started playing videogames with male characters, and have changed my pronouns to he/him on social media. On a concluding note, the Dragon Age series is great, play it

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Cosplay by: Harry Grace

لقراءة النص بالعربية