#neither character is without flaws especially given how shitty bioware is

[the-eldritch-it-gay]

Spare explanation of fandom zev and fenris for the da layman 👀 ?

Honestly it's not like, the whole fandom i guess, but i feel like both of them in the fandom tend to be boiled down to very one dimensional. Also I feel both get sexualized a lot in a way that's uncomfortable (and unfortunately on par for any fandom's treatment of men of colour).

Zevran tends to be boiled down to like, you know, sexy and flirty and exotic and a bit dumb (at least in the sense of lockpicking, which i think the joke of zev not being able to pick locks is overplayed, its not a skill he starts with, as leliana does. but you can make him good at lock picking, i know, because my first playthrough i didn't have leliana so the only rogue in the group was zev).

And like, to be fair, in canon he is flirty, but like, also very kind, smart, and loyal. And also dealing with a bunch of trauma and depression. He states outright he was sold to the Crows when he was a child, tortured during training in order to become heartless and a killer. He also tells the warden (when revealing about Taliesen and Rinna) that he wanted to die, which is why he took on what he thought was a suicide mission. He's a kind and warm person who's been through so much. But I see lots of just seeing him as just the latin lover, as well as always drawing and associating him with the Crows, despite how he left the Crows and the Crows literally bought and tortured him.

With regards to Fenris, he really tends to be boiled down to like, angry hot-headed mage hating borderline alcoholic. Plus people are SUPER weird with regards to how he was a slave, there's way too many people who write smut fics with slavery.

Fenris can be a bit angry, like, definitely understandable and proportionate to what he's been through. He's not like, hot headed, really. He's like anyone else most of the time, he laughs and makes jokes and smiles. His stance on mages is genuinely introduced as far more nuanced than "all mages are evil", I went into DA2 blind with a mage Hawke and ended with Fenris joining my Hawke in siding with the mages without having to referance approval guides. Genuinely, Fenris is only angry when things related to his trauma come up. I know there's lots of hostility in his banter but like, it genuinely seems more like poor writing choices rather than something about his character. And wrt to drinking, he's really only shown drinking wine on special occasions such as the anniversary of his freedom iirc.

I really love both Fenris and Zevran, and I'm basically incapable of not romancing them, but I almost go out of my way to avoid fandom content of them due to how fandom often treats them (which is inextricable from the rampant racism within the DA fandom).

Anyways the long story short is both Zevran and Fenris are both traumatized men of colour with a lot of depth and character beyond being just sexy or angry, but fandom (especially white fandom) tends to ignore that depth in a way that's deeply uncomfortable for me to see, especially given my own traumatic experiences and the racism I've faced both online and in the fandom and everywhere irl.