Unscripted Dragon Age Trailer (funny)

And what exactly did this video criticize about DAVe?

You're right that i didn't laugh. The video is dumb and unoriginal, nothing funny about it. Well, maybe aside from dragon screaming. However, i didn't ask because i saw this video as criticism. I asked because you said that it's possible to be a fan of something and still be critical about it, hence my question. Also, satire is a form of criticism, so i'm now confused what you meant by "I see it as satire, you see it as critic".

Shallow corporate tokenism is indeed a thing, but I don't think we have to look that hard for reasons for the Dragon Age games have always been 'woke'. There's a weird assumption that video game companies only put female protagonists, people of colour or disabled or LGBT+ characters and other groups that have historically been discriminated against in their games because someone forced them to. Like creative people in any medium, video game developers want to see themselves and their audience reflected in their work, and as both the dev pool and the audience have gotten broader so have the contents of the games.

Dorian's not gay because some executive somewhere decided DAI needed a gay character. He's gay because David Gaider wanted him that way. BioWare were smart enough to get out of his way (they didn't when he wanted Zevran to be gay a few years earlier) but the impetus to do that story came from the lead writer. Krem is trans because Patrick Weekes needed some kind of angle on the character to make him more interesting and that's the one they went with. The Dragon Age writer's pit has always been half women, their first lead writer was a gay man and the current one is a pansexual enby. The game design director is a trans woman. Why would they not want to see people like themselves in games? Why would they not also be inclinded to think that Black and Asian people or amputees and whatever other groups are represented by Veilguard will get a kick out of seeing people like them in the game? I've already seen one Black cosplayer working on a Davrin outfit.

I'm in my mid-forties, I've been playing games since I was six. I'm old enough to remember when every game I played seemed to assume I was a man (or a boy) and a straight white one at that. Things are so much better now. And it's not like any RPG with character creation is stopping anyone from playing a heterosexual white man if that's what they want to do!

In a few months I am going to boot up Veilguard, make the fattest purple-haired Qunari Rook I can and go romance Harding . So mark me down as cheerfully 'woke', I guess, or whatever the next buzzword is.

I just don't find comedy predicated on punching down particularly funny.

The issue I have with the phrase “comedy shouldn’t punch down” is that few people can actually agree on which direction is down.

Let’s take for example the “Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay” joke from South Park. That’s a good joke about how recent Star Wars and Disney products have been declining in quality in recent years and it only really “punches” Kathleen Kennedy, a rich executive who has more money than you or I will ever see. And yet, some people would argue that nobody should attack Kennedy because she’s a woman in a male-dominated field.

The Saint’s Row remake went the direction of trying to avoid any humour that would “punch down” and the end result was a toothless and spectacularly unfunny failure that killed the studio.

While you should try to avoid being malicious, ultimately comedy has to “punch” someone, whether that’s a person, a group or the joke-teller.