The Curious Case of Lucanis Dellamorte from Dragon Age - An Aspec Mystery

 

Image description: Lucanis Dellamorte from the video game series Dragon Age: The Veilguard. There's been a lot of talk about this game and this character - especially when it comes to the topic of his aspec identity - and I have a lot of questions that I think bear exploring, which is exactly what I plan to do today.

In most cases, when people fall in love with a piece of media, it’s because they experience it firsthand. This is especially true when that piece of media becomes deeply important to them and when they launch themselves headfirst into the characters, the world, and the story. However, my first experience with one of my favorite pieces of media ever – the video game series Dragon Age – went a little differently. I was introduced primarily to the third game in the series, 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, thanks to my good friend Laura and got hooked on it while beta-reading her fanfic about the game.

From there, I did a little research on my own. Within weeks, I was so invested in the story that I began writing fanfic too – even though I’d never played a single game in the then-trilogy. Somehow, even without having experienced the games firsthand, they became extremely dear to me. Even nowadays, as someone who engages primarily with Dragon Age through writing and reading fanfic, I’ve only played Inquisition, and I’ve only played through it once. For me, Dragon Age is only partially about the gaming experience itself and is more predominantly about the story, its characters, and its lore.

Once again, I find myself in a similar situation as I look at the latest game in the series – Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Released on October 31st, 2024, the game was highly anticipated after the decade-long (and highly messy – more on that in a minute) development cycle that plagued it. Like many fans, I was eager to see how the game would answer many of the questions at the core of Dragon Age lore and wanted to encounter the world and its characters again. But unlike most fans, I already planned to experience this all via YouTube videos and entries on the fan-run Wiki site before I decided if I was going to invest in the actual game.

Of course, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that my feelings on this game became complicated very quickly. Some of my waning excitement came thanks to decisions I disagreed with, or in-game focuses that did not hold my attention; but some of my lack of enthusiasm came about because of the game’s attitude towards aspec characters. In fact, this is something I did a whole post on before the game’s release and something which I planned on exploring again in more detail after the game’s launch, during which I had plans to scour the internet and find out for myself how the game handled its characters.

During that time, however, two major things happened – chief among them being that the game underperformed significantly and met with negative reviews from fans and critics alike; the other thing was that I stumbled upon something of an aspec mystery when one of the game’s writers, Mary Kirby, said on social media that she specifically wrote companion character Lucanis Dellamorte to be panromantic demisexual.

Image description: Mary Kirby's BlueSky post in response to a fan asking if interpreting Lucanis as on the asexual spectrum was an accurate take. Screenshot was obtained from Tumblr and does not belong to me.

Normally, this wouldn’t exactly be a mystery, and I would in fact be ecstatic to hear this, but the question of Lucanis’s identity is not so simply and easily answered, nor is it so easily accepted. So today, I want to dive deep into the question of if Lucanis is aspec and what the implications of this are for the Dragon Age fandom, a fandom which has suffered its fair share of drama in the aftermath of Veilguard’s release.

Full disclaimer upfront: Like I said, I have not played Dragon Age: The Veilguard and, much like when I first became a Dragon Age fan years ago, all of my knowledge of it is secondhand. Most of it comes to me from hearing my best friend describe it, as she completed her own playthrough shortly after the game’s release. The rest of the information I have comes from YouTube videos, Tumblr posts, and entries on the Dragon Age wiki. I think it’s important for me to be clear that I have not directly experienced the things that fans online are discussing and have not been an active part of these conversations. However, I also think it’s important to discuss this drama and its implications, so that is exactly what I plan to do to the best of my ability.

Spoiler warning! 

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (particularly Lucanis' personal quests and romance)

Content warning: Discussions of Aphobia and other discrimination

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The Background (as best as I can explain it)

As we dive into this topic, I feel we need to take a quick look at the road which led to Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s less-than-stellar release. While normally that wouldn’t have much bearing on the reveal that a character was intended to be aspec, a lot of the fandom has had their doubts about the timing of this announcement in a way that bears examination.

To put it mildly, Dragon Age: The Veilguard had an incredibly troubled development cycle and its developer, BioWare, went through several troubled years. The game went through multiple iterations, including being mandated into a live service multi-player game by Electronic Arts, who has owned BioWare since 2007. This was a complete departure from the regular lifeblood and identity of a Dragon Age game, and a deep concern to many fans.

However, BioWare’s other major live service multi-player game, 2019’s Anthem, eventually flopped, leading to a change in direction for DATV again, turning it back into the single-player RPG experience the series was known for. Not only did this necessitate a major pivot, but this was during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced all facets of the collaborative game development process to have to adapt. Therefore, despite the 10-year gap between the previous Dragon Age title and this one, the actual development time for DATV as we know it was actually more like 3 to 4 years.

Image description: A promo image for Dragon Age: The Veilguard

To make matters worse, much of the game’s development cycle was plagued with immense staff turnover. In some cases, long-time veterans of the series and BioWare as a whole left to find other jobs of their own accord; however, there are several instances of high-profile talent at the studio being unceremoniously laid off and not given proper benefits. Given that many of these long-time developers – including Mary Kirby herself – worked on DATV as well as many other iconic moments and characters in the series, this was destined to leave a bad taste in many fans’ mouths as they played through the game.

All of this painted a worrying picture even before the game came out and I think many fans were rightfully apprehensive about what the finished product of the game would look like. Coupled with what I believe were some bad decisions about the impact previous player decisions would have on the world, some questionable writing choices, and other such issues, this all led to the game massively underselling despite its hype, and led to divisive reactions from fans.

Fast forward to “Dragon Age Day” 2024, an unofficial “holiday” on December 4th celebrating the game, its characters, and everything about the series we all love so dearly. On this day, the development team released a thorough “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit. The entire AMA thread is VERY long and it would be impossible to really unpack the whole thing; however, like most things related to The Veilguard, it’s clear it didn’t go quite as planned and somehow managed to further divide the fandom and anger a lot of people.

From poor defenses of unpopular writing choices, to what many felt was wholesale erasure and disrespect of characters, and everything in between, the responses of the developers seemed to upset absolutely every corner of the fandom in some way. Some of the AMA’s negative impact was also due to the timing of an IGN deep-dive article, which not only corroborated many of the points made in the AMA, but actually dove even deeper into them, making it clear just how pervasive some of these attitudes were in the game’s development.

At this point, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with the reveal of Lucanis being aspec, and it all can be chalked up to the timing. In fact, many of Mary Kirby’s statements on the social media site BlueSky were actually happening in the days immediately following Dragon Age Day, some as early as December 5th. This was a somewhat important part of the mystery, as people began to wonder if this reveal of Lucanis’s supposed identity was legitimate or if it was being used as a smokescreen to distract from the AMA and IGN article fiascos. However, beyond just these instances of convenient timing, I have further questions and concerns related to this reveal that Lucanis was intended to be aspec.

Is Lucanis Aspec?

Lucanis Dellamorte, a professional assassin and a member of the Veilguard, as well as a potential love interest for your player character, is a character I found interesting from the get-go. Although the game has justifiably taken hits for the quality of its writing and endless debates rage on as to whether or not its tone is too lighthearted, I’ve enjoyed the tidbits I’ve seen about Lucanis – from his love of coffee to his ability to cook. As such, I would have loved to see him be an aspec character and to see his romance path explore those options in substantial and meaningful ways. However, DATV has left me with an intense amount of skepticism, thanks in no small part to how they addressed the idea of aspec characters on the onset.

If you’ve read my previous post on the subject, then you’ll probably recall that the game’s director, Corinne Busche, confirmed in a Q&A that there are no aspec companions in the game. As such, I had by and large given up the idea of there being aspec characters at all. And yet, a mere month after the game’s launch, we have Lucanis’s writer confirming that she intended him to be on the asexual spectrum (demisexual specifically).

Image description (Top): Mary Kirby on BlueSky, confirming that Lucanis never had a relationship before the potential romance with Rook. (Bottom): Mary Kirby confirms she intended for Lucanis to likewise be a virgin. Both of these screenshots were found on Tumblr and do not belong to me.

Putting aside the frustrating fact that this was only confirmed on social media rather than in the game and thus cannot be anything other than “word of God representation” at best, this information presents us with the mystery of today’s post: If both Busche and Kirby can be believed, what happened in between Kirby’s writing of Lucanis and the game’s launch? If Lucanis was written to be aspec, why were we told that there was no canon aspec representation in the game?

Of course, just because Lucanis’s writer created him this way doesn’t mean he counts as actual representation. If there’s anything I can attest to time and time again on the blog, it’s that a character having aspec vibes doesn’t automatically mean they’re aspec or that the larger narrative will treat them as such. In that sense, Busche’s statement may have just been true on a technicality. But even if that is the case, this makes me once again ask the question I asked in that previous post: why was it decided that aspec representation wasn’t worth it?

At the time of my first post, I tried to cut the developers some slack and acknowledge that perhaps an aspec character really did not fit into the narrative. However, if Mary Kirby intended Lucanis to be demisexual and/or demiromantic all along, then I can no longer extend the developers the benefit of the doubt. If Lucanis was always intended to be demi, or at least was written to have very strong hints of it, then there was a perfectly good opportunity to include aspec representation all along and the choice to exclude it was deliberate. In my opinion, the idea of not including aspec representation is disappointing, but completely understandable; however, the choice to deliberately exclude representation that might have already been there is neither understandable nor acceptable.

You may notice that I am being careful to say “if” this was intentional. This is not only a case of me hedging my bets because, as stated in the introduction of this post, I haven’t played the game and thus am getting all of this information indirectly; it’s also a way to hedge my bets because there are several people in the fandom who are less certain about the intentions behind Lucanis’s character. This comes about thanks to the issues I discussed in the first section, in which people are convinced Lucanis being aspec is a weak attempt at a smokescreen, but this is also thanks to pernicious issues within the fandom.

Can the Fandom Handle an Aspec Character?

Dragon Age as a franchise and as a fandom has always had a bit of a rocky relationship with the idea of aspec characters, especially aspec love interests. In the case of Lucanis, I have seen many people who romanced the character who are adamant that him being aspec not only makes sense, but is obvious; however, unsurprisingly, there has not been wholesale acceptance of this idea, despite Mary Kirby’s confirmations on BlueSky. As mentioned before, some of this skepticism is understandable – for example, I can’t disagree with the people who think the announcement represents some very convenient timing, or who point out how it contradicts previous statements, such as the idea of Lucanis embodying the trope of the “bisexual mess,” a Tweet which came out months before the game did.

Image description: Mary Kirby on Twitter in June 2024, replying to a fan that asked who among the companions could be considered a hot mess.

Furthermore, other fans have pointed out that Lucanis’s story centers on having been unwillingly bound to a demon, and thus it is all too easy to look at his romance path as being an example not of aspec tendencies, but reactions to trauma. While trauma and aspec identities can of course exist beside one another, it is a common misconception that aspec identities arise solely from trauma. Again, while that certainly can be the case for some people, it’s not the case for everyone. Thus, having the only aspec character’s story almost always rooted in trauma might conflate aspec-ness with trauma in a way that is often hurtfully stereotypical.

Of course, there are fans who reject the idea of Lucanis being aspec for less valid reasons. One of the most common objections I’ve seen comes primarily because people who romanced him wanted more content. I think some of this is rooted in a persistent issue I’ve discussed before on the blog – the idea that fandoms will see an attractive character or person and automatically assume their attractiveness suggests sexual availability. In a roleplaying game like Dragon Age, this can manifest as some fans acting like they are owed a certain amount of romantic and/or sexual content from a character or their romance path, ignoring the idea of representation in favor of player wish fulfillment.

In other instances, I have seen plenty of criticism regarding how the Lucanis romance itself plays out in game that I believe has led to some of this backlash. For example, I think a lot more people would be open to the idea of an aspec Lucanis if it weren’t for the fact that he and another companion character, Neve, can potentially get into a relationship. The fact that Neve and Lucanis’s romance seems to have more content than Lucanis and the player do has rubbed many people the wrong way, especially when it’s possible for Lucanis’s romance to lock out if the player makes certain choices, but he can still romance Neve.

Because of this, it’s hard to look at the discourse in the fandom and not blame BioWare on some level. While I don’t want to blame the writers undeservedly and of course individual fans have to be accountable for their own reactions, there are several instances where I believe BioWare dropped the ball when it comes to this character. For instance, when asked about why Lucanis can break up with the player but can still romance Neve in that infamous AMA, Corinne Busche refers to Lucanis as being a “passionate individual” whose “passion has not dimmed.” This is strangely in contrast with how he actually acts in game, and some fans have even pointed out that this response has strange shades of the stereotypical “Latin lover” trope. [Warning! Spoilers in image]

Image description: A screenshot of Corinne's answer from the AMA. As with the other screenshots in this post, it was obtained from Tumblr and is not mine. Beware of spoilers.

To be honest, some of these choices are frankly baffling to me. Quotes such as Busche’s leave me feeling like the writers never actually communicated their thoughts and opinions on the subject matter to one another, leading to such wildly out of sync ideas as these. Perhaps this is an inevitable symptom of production in the game having to go remote during COVID, or a leftover side effect of the pivot from live service to single player. It could be due to the layoffs, such as the one that claimed Mary Kirby, or it could be, as many people say, simply a result of bad writing.

To me, this only adds to the frustrating mystery of how this seemingly aspec character got dropped into a game with “no aspec companions.” Did the other writers override Mary Kirby because they wanted Lucanis to be a “Latin lover”? Did they tell her they didn’t want an aspec character and so there were no overt references to it in game, but they were still present in how she wrote the DNA of the character? Can we even really consider Lucanis a win for aspec representation? While I don’t think these things have concrete answers, I can’t help but feel strongly about my own answers to these questions.

My Own Thoughts

Having not played the game, I acknowledge that I can’t possibly give a fully informed answer to the question of whether or not Lucanis is legitimately aspec or what happened that prevented him from being treated as such in the game. All I can really say is that I have watched Lucanis’s romance path on YouTube and can absolutely see why people would have headcanoned him as demisexual/demiromantic even before the seeming confirmation, and that it’s entirely possible that I might have done likewise had I played the game, despite Busche’s Q&A answer.

Lucanis’s romance contains only one intimate scene, and even this scene is far more tender than passionate or “spicy.” In fact, it’s actually very sweet, with him asking Rook to spend the evening talking with him to keep him feeling safe and calm. In some instances, the tone of his romance reminds me of the romance path for Cullen Rutherford in Dragon Age: Inquisition – a character who long time readers of the blog may remember I have headcanoned as demisexual and demiromantic for years now. It represents the type of romance that I think more games should have and one that I would have enjoyed.

Image description: An image of Lucanis, obtained from the Dragon Age Wiki

Unfortunately, as much as I would love for Lucanis to be an aspec character – even if he is only an example of “word of God” representation – there seem to be no good outcomes to this mystery. One option is that he was always intended to be aspec representation and, although that writing choice shines through and people can still headcanon him as such, the other developers decided to suppress that element of his character for reasons we can only begin to guess at. Another option is that he was never actually intended to be aspec, and throwing out the idea of him being demisexual is being used to cover up those mistakes and scandals.

While I don’t know if Mary Kirby would be quick to bail out the company that fired her, I suppose it is conceivable that she would try to defend the game she worked on with this revelation. Don’t get me wrong, I am inclined to believe her when she said this is how she intended to write the character and I will always be eternally grateful that she conceived of the character in this manner – as someone else online pointed out, she didn’t have to confirm these things, but she did, and I deeply admire that. But at the same time, I have to take it from the people who actually experienced the game firsthand and believe them when they say Lucanis’s romance is “severely lacking in connective tissue,” as I saw one Tumblr user put it. I also have to believe them when they say that his romance with Neve is much more defined and, not only that, but much more physical.

As I mentioned earlier, I can’t help but look at these facts with some serious scrutiny and a whole lot of questions given this latter-day aspec revelation. I can’t even fall back on my usual excuse that perhaps the developers didn’t know enough about aspec identities, because DATV explicitly includes (for better or for worse) several instances of actual, defined terminology through dialogue and codex entries for other identities. Beyond that, Corinne Busche herself identifies as grey-ace, making it even more baffling that a game helmed by this team would have had an aspec character waiting in the wings and would have chosen to ignore him, his identity, or the chance to highlight it. For all these reasons and more, the idea that making Lucanis aspec was intended as a cover up sounds hauntingly plausible to me.

Even if this is what Kirby always intended, I can’t shake the feeling that she, Lucanis, and all of the fandom’s aspec fans are being used at least in some part. In my eyes, there is no way we can go from the Q&A in June 2024 in which we are told in no uncertain terms that it was not the right time to include aspec characters to having Lucanis be inherently aspec by December of that same year. The only thing that happened in that six-month time period was the game’s release and subsequent backlash, and that’s too suspicious for me to ignore. If I were a detective like Neve herself, this evidence would leave me with a reasonable doubt, and it’s one that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake.

Overall, Lucanis may be a small win for a series that has otherwise been utterly deprived of aspec representation – a topic which I will be unpacking more fully a few weeks from now – but the biggest problem with anything regarding him being aspec is that it lacks any type of real power. While some of us will always be able to glory in the idea that at least one of the writers had our back, we have no real ability to hold Lucanis up in the fandom. Even worse, he will unfortunately always serve as a permanent example of how even something as simple as including an aspec character becomes rife with discourse.

I find it deeply frustrating that there will always be this loophole where people are allowed to ignore what Mary Kirby said because it never actually made it into the game. I find it equally frustrating that aspec fans like me will forever have to doubt the sincerity of this representation, wondering if instead our identities are being used to explain away plotlines that might have otherwise been hastily planned or poorly executed. And more than anything, I find it disappointing that what could have been a serious victory for aspec representation has turned into this eternal unsolvable mystery with an otherwise great character caught in the middle.

When I talk about aspec representation in media, I don’t want to see aspec identities being thrown around hastily and without any real planning or forethought. I don’t want to see them be used as something easily discarded – some element of a character that can be adopted when its convenient and abandoned when not. Aspec fans deserve more than being told to wait unendingly for their chance to identify with a character, only to have the vague idea of representation dangled above their head, forever out of reach. And aspec fans especially don’t deserve to have this single scrap of representation tossed into the arena where they now have to defend their headcanons and can always be shot down by allosexual fans who were expecting more of a romance than they got.

The fact that Lucanis’s aspec identity is forever “unconfirmed” and can forever be dismissed by “well, it only happened on social media, not in the game” and is still only looked at as a headcanon is a huge letdown. While I’m thrilled that aspec fans have this, I am perhaps equally disappointed that aspec fans have only this. And unfortunately, given the way things have played out – not only with DATV, but with Dragon Age’s troubled history of representation and fandom in general – I can’t even say I’m particularly surprised that we managed to arrive at an even worse place than before.

Image description: A promo image of Lucanis

While the substance of this post may seem very downbeat – and, undoubtedly, a great deal of it is – I do still love Dragon Age with all my heart. Over the years, I have really struggled with the idea that many of my favorite pieces of media don’t love me nearly as much as I love them, and am constantly forced to grapple with the way aspec identities are either unrepresented or misrepresented in both the media itself and in their respective fandoms. But even at its worst, Dragon Age is a franchise I love and that will always be deeply special to me, and I know I’m not alone in that.

Maybe Dragon Age will never love aspec fans as much as we love it; in fact, it seems very likely we’ll never get that representation that Corinne Busche told us to wait for. In late January, it was announced that the studio was shifting its focus to its next Mass Effect game, essentially gutting the Dragon Age team in the process, and a lot of fans began mourning the idea that this all but guarantees that the Dragon Age franchise as we know it is done. While of course that breaks my heart, there’s also something strangely freeing about it. In my eyes, Dragon Age belongs to the fans now – a sentiment I’ve seen expressed by other fans too – and those of us who love it will keep celebrating the amazing world of Thedas with its equally amazing characters.

To me, Dragon Age is not just a video game. As I stated in my introduction, it really has never just been that, and has always been so much more. The world of Thedas has allowed me to carve out unique places just for myself, and I am deeply comforted to know I will always have that space where I can create the things I otherwise don’t have. I hope that fans who felt deeply connected to Lucanis and to the idea of him being aspec are able to do the same thing. And I hope they know that, although there will always be people who give them a hard time, there will always be people who support them and uplift their work, perhaps now more than ever. If the only representation we get in this series is the representation we make ourselves, I think I can be okay with that.