This is a story about fear and anxiety.

It’s also about Taash, the fire-breathing qunari companion in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. When I was playing through the game for my review, they were one of my favorite folks to have along on missions. There are various reasons why and some are just practical: I was playing a mage, so having a warrior on hand for Warrior Stuff™ was useful, but I also enjoyed Taash’s snarky and practical approach to the world. Every time another party member would get lost in their own head about something, Taash’s “That’s vashedan!” would inevitably yank them back out in a fun way.

Taash is also nonbinary, which is one of two axes their character conflict and development rotate around. The other is that they were born in the lands of the Qun, a religious and deeply stratified society, but they were raised in Rivain, a close-enough Mediterranean analog with a sharply contrasting culture. In both respects, Taash is presented to us as a character who feels pulled between opposing poles by these forces in their life. Taash’s mother, Shathann, is an expert in Qun history and a stern and lecturing type who seems to disapprove of everything “nontraditional” her child does, including both not being feminine enough and not following the Qun enough.

My moment of fear about Taash came when I encountered a specific in-game codex entry: Taash Notes: Meeting Shadow Dragons to Talk Gender Stuff. A hefty number of codex entries involving Taash are framed as notes they take on various subjects (including one on how to set traps in the Lighthouse, which I enjoyed). Their notes on gender unlock after a conversation with Neve and Rook about Taash’s discomfort with their gender identity; the implication is that Neve hooked Taash up with trans folks in the Shadow Dragons faction who might have useful information on the subject.

Unfortunately, this codex entry feels both awkward and out of place. Not necessarily harmful — there’s nothing in it that made me go “that’s obviously untrue” or anything of the sort. That said, if this were a Mass Effect game and not a Dragon Age one, it would be extremely easy to paint this codex entry as Taash’s net search history. It has extremely strong “baby queer person googling what ‘queer’ means and writing it down” energy, because that’s basically what it is. Without an in-game internet, Taash has to rely on speaking to actual people; without in-game social media, they get their thoughts out on paper to make sense of them.

Taash’s notes cover everything from what dysphoria is, to struggling with the definition of the term “nonbinary,” to uplifting testimonials from said trans NPCs about what gender means, to the literally stated “Trans woman IS woman.” Speaking from experience, and as someone who was working out their sexuality at a time when the internet was not even remotely as widely available as it is today, these are the kind of notes and scribbles I would have written, it’s true, but in the process they can come across in a very “here’s Taash’s Being Genderqueer 101 blog post” kind of way.

Since Taash’s way of speaking is already relatively informal and........

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