[i]Blog: https://www.autostraddle.com/how-my-badass-butch-skyrim-character-saved-my-life/[/i] [quote]It was probably late afternoon by the time I woke up — I typically got out of bed around three those days. I started drinking immediately. I ate a piece of toast for breakfast, then replaced the rest of my meals with cigarettes. At 9:40 p.m. I wrote in my journal, in tiny crabbed letters that list across the page, “I want to see blood.” Less than an hour later, I skirted past my father, who was asleep on the living room couch, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and disappeared into the bathroom. About a month earlier — June 2015 — I’d crash-landed at my parents’ house in New York after weeks of gallivanting around the Midwest with friends, celebrating our graduation from college with endless rounds of drinks, joints and a few harder drugs. The hangover hit like a closed fist. I think I slept for a few days straight before I even spoke to my parents. While I was still in school, I’d considered this my worst-case scenario: returning to a bedroom so small it would horrify Harry Potter, with no job, no money and no plan. Suddenly, most of my friends had scattered across the country, started jobs or vacations, moved on to the next chapter of their lives. But I was stuck. Stuck at home and stuck with the memories of the girl I’d wasted my senior year chasing, the girl who preferred femmes, the girl who would never feel for me what I felt for her. Maybe living at home made me nostalgic, or maybe my fear of the future left me craving something familiar and safe, a world I could control. Maybe I just needed something to do when I was high — I must’ve been smoking a blunt before every meal those days. I can’t say for sure why I returned to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, an already outdated game I’d played as a teenager, but I started a new game shortly after I moved back home and ended up spending many hours in its mythical world of mages, elves and anthropomorphic cat-people that summer. Skyrim is an open world role-playing game, the kind that lets you create a character and run amok. It’s set in a massive country of snow-covered mountains and vaguely pre-industrial cities populated by semi-believable shopkeepers, thieves, mercenaries, and, of course, copious enemies of every shape and size, from scrappy little rats to gigantic fire-breathing dragons. (I should also mention that it’s an excellent game, widely considered to be one of the best ever made. If you’re a gamer and you somehow haven’t already played it, I highly recommend giving it a try.) There is a main storyline that I assume involves your character harnessing their power to absorb the dragons’ souls, and therefore their abilities, but I never bothered to complete it. I wasn’t interested in the story the game’s developers had written for me — I wanted to create my own narrative. The star I created for my private show was a dark-skinned warrior woman with a dreadlocked mohawk named Syd. I gave her a skin tone and face that roughly resembled my own, but our similarities ended there. She began her story as every Skyrim protagonist does: as a prisoner, about to be executed after being mistaken for a member of the rebel army. Just as she lowered her head onto the chopping block, a dragon attacked and she escaped in the ensuing chaos. For a while, she played at being the hero the prophecies foretold her to be. She spread the news of the dragon attack she witnessed, slayed another dragon and consumed its soul, travelled to the monastery at the top of the world’s highest mountain and learned from the monks about her destiny to defeat the dragons and save the world. But Syd, like me, was never one to be concerned with destiny. She preferred to forge her own path. Rather than submit to the tutelage of the monks, she made her way to the massive mead hall at the center of the city of Whiterun to join a band of fighters she’d spotted wrangling with a giant in her travels. After proving her worth by roughing up a local troublemaker, wiping out a horde of goblin-like Falmer at Shimmermist Cave, and retrieving a shard of the shattered battle-axe Wuuthrad — said to have been forged from the tears of the first leader of the Companions — from Dustman’s Cairn, she was finally instructed to appear at the Companions’ underground chamber at midnight.[/quote] [quote]She became a werewolf, able to take the form of a beast at will, whenever faced with a large group of foes or one particularly annoying adversary. Eventually, she pieced together the fragments of Wuuthrad and carried the legendary axe into battle once more. Any enemy that could not be dispatched by the axe’s blade would surely fall beneath the monstrous claw of the werewolf. She became Syd Skullsplitter, the terror of men. I didn’t have to make Syd a warrior. Skyrim offers a choice of essentially three combat styles: magic, stealth (my usual preference, because I am a coward), and brute force. I chose the latter for Syd because I wanted to know what it felt like to be strong. When I was still trying, and largely failing, to present as feminine, I spent hours scouring Tumblr and Instagram for pictures of butch women. They were almost always white, stylishly dressed and sporting trendy haircuts. Often, they stood smirking in front of bathroom mirrors, topless aside from a sports bra or binder, flexing to enhance the definition of their six-pack abs and toned, muscled arms. Black women, when they did appear, were almost invariably shirtless and more cut than a personal trainer. I understood these women to be the epitome of female masculinity: strong, confident, effortlessly sexy. I, on the other hand, am so malnourished-looking that friends’ parents pull me aside at dinner parties to ask in a stage-whisper if I might be suffering from an eating disorder. (I am not, and even if I was, I surely wouldn’t discuss it with my friend’s drunk mother, however well-meaning she may be.) I knew I could never meet the standard of masculinity I’d internalized from those images. In the mirror, I saw a scrawny, hollow-eyed girl dressed in ill-fitting boys’ clothes, a parody of a parody of masculinity, someone who had failed for so long to be feminine only to find that she couldn’t succeed at masculinity either. But in the screen, I saw myself made strong, confident, fearless, perfect. I saw a woman whose masculinity was only ever questioned by those who hadn’t yet felt the crushing blow of her mighty battle-axe. I’ve spent most of my life slipping in and out of depression — I got my first taste of it when I was twelve, after one of my classmates died of leukemia — but the night I cut myself in my parents’ bathroom was the closest I’ve come to making my frequent fantasies of suicide a reality. It was my crush’s birthday, and I whittled away the hours scrolling through pictures of the two of us from college — we were close friends then, despite my painfully obvious crush on her, or maybe because of it. Sometimes I wished she was straight, because that might’ve made it easier to explain to myself why she didn’t want me. But she was a lesbian too, and I knew her type: high femmes with light eyes and dark hair, white or white-passing women who wore dresses and makeup, women who were beautiful in a way I could never be. I couldn’t stop wondering if she would’ve liked me if she’d known me before I shaved my head, stopped wearing makeup, got rid of all my girl clothes and amassed a new wardrobe of jeans, button-downs and blazers made for teenage boys. What if I were a real girl, a girl who dressed and acted the way girls are supposed to? Would that make her love me? After much toil, Syd became the leader of the Companions, but she soon tired of slaying beasts and werewolf hunters on their behalf. She joined the Dark Brotherhood, a mysterious and cult-like guild of assassins, and quickly became one of its deadliest weapons. Many of her fellow assassins chose to dispatch their targets stealthily, with silent arrows shot from shadowy corners or poisoned apples planted on dinner tables, but Syd preferred to tell her targets she had come to kill them and give them the opportunity to fight for their lives — not because she had any moral qualms concerning murder (she did not), but because she craved a challenging battle. Those who fought and lost died with dignity, and those who chose to cower or flee deserved the ignominious death she provided.[/quote]