We Were Never Violent

An Introduction

This story starts with my arrival in a classroom in the universally loathed Building 5D, a part of UTS’s Haymarket campus. Tutorials for one of my mandatory courses, Digital Media Industries, were held in this building, and in my degree of Animation Production this subject is one that is not well liked. The readings were tedious, and the lectures difficult to understand. That’s not to say I dislike the subject per say, I have a rather complicated relationship with it. The content is fascinating, but the timeframe in which we have to examine it is not nearly long enough. 

For our final assignment, we had been tasked to write an eighteen-hundred-word essay on a topic within the realm of digital media industry studies, pertaining to society, culture, economy and or politics. After a few dead ends, I found my topic: representations of women in video games, and this is where the story gets interesting, and also becomes more personal to me, as someone socialised as the eldest of three girls.

In 1996, the first of the Tomb Raider games was released. This game was not only revolutionary in terms of its developments in 3D graphics in video games, but also in its utilisation of a female protagonist (Lara Croft) in a time period where women were seldom represented in games. This however was a double-edged sword, as Lara’s appearance (with large, exaggerated low-poly breasts described aptly as ‘razor sharp’ by my sister) was divisive, to say the least. 

In my research on this topic, I came across an article by Anne-Marie Schleiner (2001), exploring various ‘gender-subject configurations’ of Lara Croft, and this fascinated me, especially since much of the literature on this subject merely regarded Lara as a female fetish object. Schleiner’s configuration of Lara as a Female Frankenstein Monster, for example, as an extension of her existing as a fetish object, was revolutionary to me. I think this reading spoke to me and my own distorted connection to my gender, how I often feel like a monster living in a body that feels like it just exists to serve the male gaze, not my own wants or needs or perceptions of myself. 

Then Schleiner really sold this concept of ‘gender-subject configurations’ to me when she introduced the configuration of Lara as a Drag Queen. It makes perfect sense, after all. When an extension of a male player, she is a performance of femininity, or what H.W Kennedy (2002) considers as a mode of ‘transgendering’ the male player. Schleiner also explores Lara in other configurations, including as a Vehicle for the Queer Female Gaze. I think there’s a lot of power in that, queer women taking a concept so clearly crafted by men for a male audience and reclaiming that. I think there’s something within that to take away and apply to my own personal life. 

 Greet the Reaper for Me

Going back in time, last year my partner had convinced me to play a game called Divinity: Original Sin 2 by a game studio you may have heard of: Larian Studios. If you haven’t been living under a rock, then you would probably recognise that name as the studio behind the wildly successful game, Baldur’s Gate 3. But Divinity: Original Sin 2 was a successful, award-winning game in its own right, and will largely be the subject of this discussion. 

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from this game, as someone relatively new to video games. Yet I think this is my favourite game to date. The world of Rivellon thoroughly captured my interest, and the turn-based combat system was much more accessible to me as an autistic person, and had some really fun mechanics (lighting poison on fire is a genius mechanic I wish carried over to Baldurs Gate 3). But what I love the most about this game is the characters. 

Think of Rivellon, the game’s setting, as being similar to other fantasy worlds, where you have humans, elves, dwarves, lizards, demons and more. Magic is a fact of life and there’s a pantheon of seven gods. You play as a sourcerer, (intentionally spelt this way in reference to the magic you yield), a practitioner of highly illegal Source magic, who is being shipped off to a remote island prison known as Fort Joy. Your goal is to escape, simple as that. But the plot thickens when one of the Seven Gods marks you as their chosen and orders you to ascend and become the next Divine. 

Whilst it seems like a simple chosen one plot on the tin, it is so much more than that. The six origin companions truly make the world so much richer, and the implementation of their stories is wonderful. You can choose to either play as one of them or recruit them as a party member to assist you on assent to godhood.

I only recently finished my first playthrough of this masterpiece of a game, and I will be discussing two of the three companions I brought along, Lohse and Sebille, due to their connection to topics I have researched in my studies. Some spoilers for their individual questlines as well as the overarching plot will be mentioned. 

The One Rose Lost in the Forest of Daggers

When you first meet Sebille on the boat to Fort Joy, she’s rolling dice on a wooden barrel, smirking about deciding fates. Once you get off the boat, however, she’s poised to kill. Her eyes are on a target, and she immediately puts her knife to your throat as soon as you approach her. The characterisation here is clear: Sebille is incredibly upfront about who she is and what she’s about, and her path is one filled with violence.

Sebille is a victim-survivor of slavery and human trafficking, kidnapped and forcibly trained into becoming an assassin for her slave master. Her cheek was branded with a magical scar that binds her to The Master, as she calls him, who kept Sebille in a crate devoid of light, only releasing her at night to hunt down targets. Now that she’s free, she is determined to kill every person responsible for her enslavement.

Sebille only refers to her enslaver by his epithet, The Master. Epithets are inherently dehumanising, reducing a person to a singular characteristic. Through her dialogue, Sebille reduces the Master to her singular experience of him: as her enslaver, turning his own weapon of dehumanisation back towards him.

This is not the only weapon of her former master’s that she turns back on him, however, as her weapon of choice is the same that The Master gifted her whilst in captivity. Sebille is poetic, she’s a well read and intelligent scholar who often speaks in prose, going very much against the (quite frankly, racist) stereotype of slaves being uneducated and stupid. When talking about how she escaped slavery, she tells a story of how the smallest crack of light was what gave her enough strength to break out of captivity. Her true weapon is poetic justice. 

Sebille’s character has the potential for various readings. At a cursory glance she appears to meet the ‘Femme Fatale’ gender-subject configuration that Schleiner applies to Lara Croft. Sebille’s armour in some of her concept art has this bizarre halter top situation that I absolutely despise. It reminds me of the often loathed ‘bikini armour’, which illustrates a common double standard for female video game character design. But I don’t think a Femme Fatale reading of Sebille would fully encapsulate the depth this character has, and that’s where other readings become relevant. 

A key theme with Sebille’s character is an exploration of her identity. Who is she outside of her status as a slave? When she is forced to face her past before her enslavement, should she try to run away from it? Or should she embrace it?

In an intersectional feminist reading, one must consider that in Rivellon, Sebille is racialised because she’s an elf. I think there is space here for criticism about how Larian does not have enough racial diversity in their origin characters, and personally, it feels a bit jarring to analyse issues of racial oppression through the portrayal of a character who looks white. However, as a white passing POC (person of colour), this kind of representation feels strangely resonate to me.

The racialisation of Sebille is integral to her character. Her race is weaponised by strangers and abusers alike. Conversely, Sebille is also prejudiced herself against lizards, as multiple of the key figures in her abuse (including The Master himself) are lizards. But much like structural racism in our world, lizards do not face the same systemic racism that elves do in Rivellon. Additionally, Sebille’s enslavement alienates her from her own culture, echoing the very real displacement that people have experienced and continue to experience in the real world. 

Prior to the game’s events, the Elven homeland was destroyed using deathfog (Rivellon’s equivalent to an atomic bomb), resulting in the genocide of the Elven race. Sebille has no home, so she proclaims the world as such. Certain choices Sebille faces impact the future of the entirety of her people, and Sebille’s displacement and suffering echo the very real suffering of actual people in our world. It is more important now than ever to discuss this considering the atrocities that Israel is carrying out against Palestinians. At the time of this article’s revision, Israel’s genocide against Palestine has only gotten worse, along with strikes being carried out against Lebanon (my ancestral homeland) and Syria too. Genocide continues to shape world we live and breathe in, and though a story about genocide won’t fix what is happening in our world, it is important to discuss this for the sake of those who suffer at the hands of these atrocities.

Ultimately, I think the defining theme of Sebille’s character is freedom. Her experiences have seeped into the very fabric of her character. She will always be a former slave, and the evidence of that goes beyond the mark of ownership on her face. When killing her abusers, she questions if she’s the same as they are; a monster who takes joy in ending lives. What makes her different to them? 

In my opinion, I don’t think it matters. Sure, on the surface the differences seem obvious: Sebille is a victim who was forced to kill many of her victims, but there were others she actively chose to kill as acts of revenge, and she took pleasure in those acts. Ultimately, I don’t think Sebille’s morality is black or white, and it doesn’t need to be. Her morality doesn’t change what happened to her, and she doesn’t have to be a good person. In fact, I find Sebille refreshing in a sea of lawful good protagonists. Larian allows her to do bad things unapologetically and yet also be more than that. Sebille has a goal, and once she’s reached it, she’s willing to end her crusade. 

“Beyond the blood hides nothing but a desire to be happy,” she says. “I can only hope that is not too terrible a crime.”

Isn’t that what we all want, at the end of the day?

A Gold Star Inn for the Disembodied

In many ways, Lohse is Sebille’s polar opposite. She’s a natural performer, renowned bard, incredibly charismatic and personable, and a bit of a jokester. Unfortunately for Lohse, she is dealing with a slight demon problem which is making life harder for her. This isn’t apparent when you first meet her, entertaining a group of children. She’s flirtatious, though not too forward, yet it is obvious that something is off. Her eyes are unnaturally dark, and something is inside her head, but Lohse isn’t sure what it is.

In Rivellon, some people are naturally more susceptible to possession. It’s just something that happens, apparently. Lohse describes herself as being like a friendly roadside inn, attracting rogue spirits to make her head their new home. Lohse’s current visitor, however, is not so friendly. She soon discovers that this creature is a demon that she must exorcise. Whilst seemingly straight forward, Lohse’s case is more dire than it seems.

In her 1998 article, Tracy L. Dietz noticed a commonality in female video game characters: the dominance of the ‘damsel in distress’ archetype, and on the surface, Lohse seems like a much darker version of this trope. She asks you to promise to kill her if the demon takes over her mind, a question which is reiterated by other characters in the game, and you must help search for a cure to her spiritual possession. However, what may appear to be one thing often is the opposite in practice. 

It would be amiss to ignore the obvious allegory for mental illness present in Lohse’s predicament. Samantha Greer notes this parallel as well, even pointing out how you have the option to use a grounding exercise to try maintain control over the demon if you play as Lohse. Lohse’s writer, Sarah Baylus, explains that ‘while I wasn't actively trying to write her storyline as a particular allegory, I was actively trying to write something that felt real to the labyrinth of my internal life.’ 

Baylus’ writing is raw and visceral, improving on the shockingly atrocious representation that mental illness has had in the media. So much of Lohse’s character is resonant with my own experiences of mental illness. Lohse is a character who is easy to root for, yet she’s also utterly terrifying. Like Lohse’s demon, mental illness can be all consuming, taking away everything that makes a person themselves. In my own life, my mental illness causes me to see myself saying and doing things that I would never do in my rational state. It feels like someone else is piloting my body. Yet like how Lohse must take her control back and defeat her demon, I am responsible for my actions, and I must learn how to effectively respond to my emotions. 

Whilst two in five Australians experience mental illness according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, platitudes like ‘you are not alone’ have never truly sat right with me. Logically, I know this fact, that I am not the first or last person to experience mental illness, yet the irony in these conditions is that they are inherently isolating. 

In Lohse’s case, the demon intentionally manipulates her into believing that all she has is him. Like a coercive partner, he tells her that he chose her because she is special, that she doesn’t need anyone else. That he’s proud of her, that he loves her. Yet in the same breath, he belittles her, diminishes her to just being a ‘stupid girl’. I think this dialogue is also highly resonate with an abusive relationship, linking back to how Baylus didn’t write Lohse as an allegory for any one specific experience. We live in a world where femicide is alive and well, with one woman being killed every four days in Australia, and this is an experience that thousands of women are forced to endure.

Lohse isn’t belittled or infantilised by her companions, and she’s a powerful force in her own right. However, if she were to become the Divine whilst still possessed, the demon inside of her would become all powerful instead of her. When the other Godwoken meet with their gods, all she sees is him, the demon. Threatening her, taunting her, treating her like a mere object. He tries to convince her to ascend and tempts her with the false promise of power. 

Typically, the bard fills a comedic, supporting role, and serves as a source of inspiration. One of a bard’s key abilities in Dungeons and Dragons is literally called ‘Bardic Inspiration’. The irony in Lohse’s situation is that she tries to be her usual, upbeat self and support her fellow companions, yet she has such a strong force of negativity and destruction existing within herself. Lohse’s subversion is successful because the distortion of the bardic trope has consequences. What I appreciate about Lohse is her rawness and authenticity, her honesty and compassion, her vulnerability and determination. 

Lohse is a doomed protagonist through and through. This is a rather Lovecraftian concept, as Leo Doulton points out in his article about Lovecraftian characters. He asks, “What's wrong with loving something, just because it will end?” Even if Lohse defeats the demon, there’s no guarantee that something like this won’t happen again, due to her susceptibility to possession, and if she doesn’t, imminent death or loss of her soul is the consequence. 

“I would’ve preferred not to know how dark the night can get. How close you can stand at the edge of oblivion and feel… nothing.”

Darkness is all consuming, as Lohse rightly points out. But perhaps it is possible to walk away from that edge, to return to oneself despite nearly losing everything.

Put Some Poison in His Salad

I’m not the first nor the last person who has noticed the parallels in Lohse and Sebille’s stories, in fact Samantha Greer points out this same parallel in her article. Both are women trying to escape the control of their abusers, both are individuals who require support to this, so it would make sense if they both leaned on each other as their support systems. 

In the horror genre of rape revenge exists the concept of the monstrous woman. The titular character from Jennifer’s Body (2009) is a perfect example of this. What is interesting is how it is made abundantly clear that, despite her nature, Jennifer is not the true monster, rather, the men who killed and violated her are. This is echoed in Lohse and Sebille’s stories. Lohse is a conduit for demonic entities, capable of superhuman feats and harnessing incredibly powerful magic. However, this occurs non-consensually, and when she does use this magic herself, it is out of necessity for survival, and for the reclamation of her own personhood. Whilst not luxuriating in the act of the kill, she still does not shy away from the idea of doing what is necessary. 

Sebille, on the other hand, very much resembles Jennifer in her motivations for her killings. Sebille’s acts of violence are premeditated lessons, a recreation of the humiliation that she once experienced. She goads and belittles her victims, reversing the power structure that has been thrust upon her. When confronting her trafficker once again, he sexually harasses her, crassly throwing innuendo into his threats. She responds by stabbing his hand and further twisting her knife in to force him to comply, reversing the dynamic by calling him a ‘good boy’ once she is finished. 

Lohse and Sebille both have their own complicated connections to music as well. Lohse can no longer sing or play music under the demon’s control. If she attempts to play her lute, the demon will destroy it. As for Sebille, her scar gives The Master the ability to control her through music, specifically through her ‘scar song’, which allows The Master to control her like a puppet. If you romance Sebille, she will teach you this song to stop The Master from controlling her. Romancing Sebille as Lohse adds further depth to this interaction. Greer sees it as ‘a moment of closeness, a validation of Lohse's talents and a sign of trust that she's often been denied due to her demon.’

I love music. I played various instruments growing up and listen to my fair share of it in my spare time. I recently stumbled across Salad by the Los Angeles based artist Sabrina Teitelbaum, who goes by the moniker Blondshell. The dissonant guitar and visceral lyrics immediately captured my attention, and I think this song perfectly epitomises female rage. Salad tells the story of supporting a friend after they experience sexual assault and trying to navigate a broken justice system. Teitelbaum exclaims her fury at the perpetrator’s heartlessness, pointing out that he has ‘a stone in (his) chest cavity’. She states that violence is not typical for her, being a pacifist. She laments that ‘within the framework’, she cannot achieve justice.  

The song concludes with Teitelbaum repeatedly shouting ‘(be)cause we were never violent’. That lyric is stuck in my mind to this day. Victims, women especially, are left with nothing after being subjugated to the violence and manipulation of men. All we have are our fists.

This lyric to me is emblematic of the journey of Lohse and Sebille’s lives. In a discussion with my friend, I mentioned how I found it powerful that both the main female characters in this story are victims of the actions of men, and both are on journeys to kill their abusers and live their lives free from them. Neither one of these characters were originally violent people, but their experiences of trauma and the abuse they have been subjugated to have forced them to become violent. Yet both of them learn to accept help in their journeys to become free. There’s canonical basis for a connection between the two, Sebille has a voice line pointing out how Lohse looks at her ‘lovingly’ one night, and there is so much power in the concept of two women learning to love again whilst helping each other defeat their (metaphorical and literal) demons.  

 I Yield to None

At the time this article was originally written, I was in hospital for five weeks. I crammed in writing sessions around therapy and doctors’ appointments. I replayed the game when I could, and funnily enough, I was retraumatised during this hospital stay at the hands of a male doctor who seemingly didn’t believe me. It got worse after I sent off the original version of the article.  

I reported that doctor during and after my stay. I was terrified. I wasn’t the perfect victim. I retaliated, I wouldn’t comply, and I said and did a lot of things that I regret. But that doesn’t justify what happened to me. I still struggle to believe myself because of the gaslighting I faced, and a particular diagnosis of mine was weaponised to make me seem less credible. I laughed at the bitter irony of the situation, and how the very things I wrote about came back around to bite me.

When questioning why this article mattered, I struggled. It’s a tricky question to answer due to my own personal investment in these characters and this game, and how much it has taught me. I played this game a lot through a difficult period in my life, one which I was fixated on revenge. A lot of my pain and suffering goes unseen. It is internalised so that it may not burden others. 

In my final essay for Digital Media Industries, my discussion Lohse and Sebille’s stories comprised a total of forty words. Yet those forty words represent a journey of me unravelling my own psyche and trauma through the medium of video games. I don’t think forty words could truly do this game justice; let alone the hundreds of words I have written here. Perhaps I am biased, for this game is not perfect. But it truly touched me in a way that matters. 

Finally, dear reader, I will leave you with this sentiment. A voice line associated with this game is one that the characters proclaim in battle, “I yield to none.” What is so powerful about both Lohse and Sebille is that neither one of them yield, they keep fighting back against those who chose to hurt them. We all fight our own battles, write our own stories. I choose not to yield in my own life, to persist despite the rocky paths I may encounter. 

That is the point of all this.