we should really talk about why it is that mhawke has reached memedom status while femhawke is left alone in the shadow of her male counterpart
like we should really sit
and wonder why everything is mhawke and his LIs all the time. why mhawke is the quirky obnoxious boyfriend depicted in redraws of parks and rec andy/april stuff. why fhawke is nowhere to be seen, why fhawke/merrill and fhawke/isabela have nowhere near the same amount of vast content that mhawke/anders and mhawke/fenris get and why that’s a big problem regardless of it being m/m
we should talk about it but nobody’s gonna.
mhawke is ‘iconic’ because it is in our nature to paint men as iconic and stick them as default. it’s not about gay representation. mhawke’s prominence in fandom is rarely about gay representation. it’s about assigning a stock male character into the usual stock male role.
the prominence of mhawke is because fandom is still uncomfortable with the idea of a woman being at the forefront. the prominence of mhawke erases the visibility of women in the second game because rarely are the female romance interests acknowledged. fenris gains meme status. anders gain meme status.
merrill and isabela sit quietly in the background ignored for the same reason why fhawke is hidden and swept aside.
we won’t get constant streams of art as merrill as the loveable puppydog and her long-suffering girlfriend hawke. we won’t even get ‘won’t say i’m in love’ references in regards to isabela bemoaning her love of fhawke.
we won’t get that because women are reduced as secondary figures in fiction. we do not know how to fit women into our hypermasculine mindset of easily rebloggable humour.
women aren’t funny ergo we only have funny hawke and his long-suffering boyfriends.
