The Ballot or the Barret: On Blerddom and Protest

Lately, when someone asks “how are you,” I no longer answer in two different languages. One language, the clean language, as it were, got a simple “I’m fine”. The other language, the language of dirt and reality, gets “I’m so tired. I’m so fucking tired.” Paradoxically, both of these are true at the same time. However, now everyone gets the dirty answer because the world has been a dirty place to me and people that look like me. It is a world that has forced me to give the clean answer and then pretended I didn’t want to fight despite that. (Spoilers for The Last of Us and The Final Fantasy VII Remake Up Ahead)

I was eight years old when Final Fantasy VII was released on the PlayStation. Before this, sporadically, I had seen Black folk in video games – Balrog and Jax come to mind. However, like Balrog and Jax, the characters I saw weren’t really characters at all. They were avatars painted brown. They were voiceless and so they were allowed to become mainstays in their respective franchises. The Start of something new. Not pictured: the Black character. Barret Wallace has a voice. He has always had a voice. He is brash and comical and fighting for what he believes in. His planet, his home, his child and her future. He believes in a world that is better than an artificial sun and a dilapidated bar. And he knew and knows that this world is made, not born, even if it should have been born. Everything I know about fighting, I learned first from video games. Even with no real cha…