In a haze of events involving my recent fascination with
Greg Ellis, I stumbled upon a blog belonging to someone even more obsessed with
Cullen Rutherford of Inquisition fame than I am.
As I wound my way through this blog, including a myriad of
pictures and drawings from around the Internet that indicated high-levels of
obsession, I was only mildly surprised to find the occasional piece of
fanfiction. I’ve never been one for the
practice myself, but I do like to read and I certainly do love Cullen, so I
decided to give it a shot. Why not,
right?
What a glorious mistake that was!
Within minutes I was scrolling through this blog as fast as
I could, looking for the next post about her version of the Inquisitor x Cullen
relationship. Within hours I was on a
fanfiction site called Archive of Our Own, a beta entirely devoted to the craft,
and digging through DA:I tagged stories for more. And within days, I not only
had my own account on AO3, but I also had poured hours of my life into reading
multiple novel-length stories, each creating their own imagined worlds of what
Inquisition looks like when the game isn’t running.
I’ve had such specific, negative ideas about fanfiction for
so long that I’m experiencing quite a bit of guilt and/or shame as I read. And enjoy
myself, to my surprise.
I love to read. I do
it voraciously, endlessly, lost in whatever story I’ve found. And in the past year, I haven’t done it
nearly enough.
Instead, I’ve been playing video games.
It’s not a change I regret, per se. I’m not upset I’ve embraced gaming, nor am I
unsatisfied by the games I’ve played.
It’s just... all the time I’ve been playing games (we’re talking
hundreds of hours here), I could have been reading. I could have made that choice, but I
didn’t.
It’s not like I haven’t read at all; hell, in 2014 I read 42
books, so I’m not slacking! But how many more could I have read with an extra
300 hours to spare?
In a way, fanfiction has revived this love – I’ve still been
reading, of course, but now I’ve read something like 15 novel-length pieces in
less than a month, and I didn’t even turn Inquisition ON between roughly March
7th and April 10th.
I know that’s only a few weeks, but it feels like a lifetime when you
compare just how much time I’d played it between Jan 2nd and now (~160
hours…).
I have thrown myself into this world with abandon, and I
have no regrets.
I have, however, discovered just how cruel a place the
Internet can be.
Sure, the Internet isn’t necessary the most warm, fuzzy
community. But if you steer clear of
certain conversations and sites, you’re usually in the clear – I blog here, but
I’m not really involved in many online communities.
The fanfiction community, however, is one I’m getting on
board with, and my god! The cruelty of cliffhangers is absolutely horrific!
Since most of these stories are Works in Progress, I am
constantly on edge about what’s going to happen next – we’re talking probably
14 out of the 17 stories I’m currently reading are finished, and there are even
more novel-length ones (50K words or more) that I’ve just had to give up on
them ever updating. Some of them I’ve
been stalking, reading through comments or notes or finding other stuff they’ve
written to see if they’re *ever* going to come back to whatever version of
Thedas or Mass Effect or others they’ve created. And when they are straight up discontinued,
as has happened… ugh, it’s awful. I have
so many emotions wrapped up in these characters already, and then to find that
the story that was JUST HEATING UP will NEVER AGAIN UPDATE??? I can’t deal with
it. *deep breaths till I feel better*
It’s easy to tell that all these fanfic writers are reading
each other’s work, so at least we’re all suffering cliffhangers together. Too many repeated verbs or phrases across
stories gives that poorly-kept secret away: fingers ‘rasping’ across skin or
armor, desire ‘pooling’ in bellies as things turn slutty, callouses or fingers
discussed at length, and so on. (Sometimes
those word choices are hilariously mis-used; the phrase “Cullen fisted his hand
into the Inquisitor’s hair” shows up in TONS of stories where things start to
get heated, and every time, I can’t help but laugh. That is SO not what people think when they
hear that verb, I’m sorry. I don’t care how innocent your mind -- that word
means one thing, and it ain’t hands in hair.)
There’s more of a community than I ever expected. When late nights of reading finally started
to catch up with me and I could barely keep my eyes open, I started searching
tumblr for these same authors, these writers with similar DA:I/Cullenite
tendencies. Before long, my brain was
wide awake again, flooded with every conceivable type of drawing, painting,
gif, you name it, about Cullen and the artist’s Inquisitor. Flooded with images is hardly the phrase for
what I encountered – more like a tsunami – and there, that connection these
people had was easy to see. I started to
recognize tags, names, drawings that had accompanied stories on AO3. Soon, I noticed collaborations and
commissions, all delving into this rich Bioware creation and the subsequent
ideas that people have developed around him (him being Cullen Rutherford, in
case that wasn’t clear).
It was a community I never expected, and one that I’m happy
to explore. In a life where few of my
friends play games, and even fewer understand the obsessions I develop over
them (or anything else, really), I’m excited to have a place to venture too and
continue the Inquisition’s adventures.
I have yet to try my own hand at this, but Bishop insists
it’s coming. I’ve already realized (in a
moment of shame) that *MY* version of Cullen would definitely smoke (and he’d
get the cigarettes from Varric, because duh!)…
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