The Haunting of Billie Lurk: Queer Spectrality in the Dishonored Franchise
I resisted playing Arkane Studios’ Dishonored series for several years. I dislike playing games in the first person — I prefer a little distance. In 2018, I do a favour for a friend, and make an attempt anyway.
Here’s a fact about Dishonored: it really, really thinks I should care about straight people. Here’s another fact about Dishonored: it really, really wants me to invest, in the first person, in an aristocratic revenge story. Corvo Attano takes revenge for the death of his lover, Empress Jessamine Kaldwin. Empress Emily Kaldwin fights to retake her throne.
Dishonored and Dishonored 2 are, on the whole, pretty straightforward and often uncomfortable power fantasies. I read myself instead into the gaps, into all the liminal places left by the sorcery that powers the games’ action. I feel, intensely, that I’m reading against the narrative. I think of the Outsider, the human representation of the void beyond Dishonored’s world, as a queer figure, unknowable, acting in ways that feel arbitrary when looked at straight on.
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a stand-alone expansion for Dishonored 2, represents a radical departure from the politics of the franchise. Its protagonist is Billie Lurk: Queer and black and barely scraping by. What she seeks isn’t personal power or to straighten things out, but resolution and absolution: to remove from existence the figure of the Outsider himself, and with it the magic that people like Emily and Corvo have used to uphold the status quo, and that she and her mentor Daud, too, have used to pass judgement on the world. It tells a story about people in the margins, about the abuse of power, the exploitation of the poor. It looks at these things from the perspective of the marginalised, rather than as a problem to be fixed from above. But it’s also something else: it’s a story about hauntings, on several levels. And as recent scholars of the gothic have observed, hauntings are often terribly queer.
Haunting One: Deirdre In My Dreams
By the time queerness actually begins to reveal itself in the Dishonored franchise, late in the day, I half-believe I’m still inventing it. I can hardly see myself. Mining baron Aramis Stilton longs for the deceased Duke Theodanis Abele, his lover, and I believe for a while that I’m reading too much into things. But then, I often feel like a spectral thing myself — a thing of uncertain temporality and spatiality, slipping in and out of sight. Queer and gone again. Visible only in a certain light.
For Paulina Palmer, writing about queerness in gothic fiction (The Queer Uncanny, 2012), queer spectrality may be about the sort of conditional social visibility I’ve ascribed to myself here. The queer author in straight society is a ghost writer, ambiguously positioned as speaking and silent, visible and invisible. I have been trying to make myself appear in the story of Dishonored, exercising my queer authorship to rewrite the text, but my influence is always ephemeral, limited to metanarrative. Now we shift that thought inward, into the fiction of the game.
I find it notable that the majority of queer content in Dishonored is presented in the form of a written or spoken record rather than in direct interactions: Aramis Stilton keeps letters from his lover and speaks only to himself of “the obvious” which others miss in audiograph recordings. Even the letters are addressed to a dear friend — a queer strategy of plausible deniability, rendering oneself deliberately spectral.
Billie Lurk writes out the details of her dreams of Deirdre, her first and greatest love, and then balls them up and throws them away — comments on Deirdre out loud only to herself, never in dialogue with others. In one of the only moments when another character’s awareness of someone’s queerness is implied, the current Duke speaks disdainfully of Aramis: “I should never have kept him on just because my father was — fond of him.”
Who else speaks their queerness? A witch in a prison cell, meeting Billie but speaking past her, unseeing, to a ghost: “I came here with you, my love, and now they peer into your corpse…” Queerness in Dishonored speaks, but it doesn’t generally hold discussions. It’s spoken by the mad and to the dead. It returns and haunts: Billie dreams again and again of Deirdre, long dead, and feels it as an omen of a coming loss.
Haunting Two: The World Breaks Against the Void
There is a moment when the world fractures. The moment has already happened — it happened three years before the events of Dishonored 2, with a séance in the home of an unwilling Aramis Stilton which summoned Dishonored 2’s villain Delilah from the void to the physical world. In Dishonored 2, the player character travels back and forth in time to uncover the truth of that night — and maybe to change the future. In a world where you choose not to touch causality, Aramis Stilton is driven mad by what he sees. But maybe you kill him. Or maybe you save him.
Choice is, after all, a central conceit of the Dishonored franchise: play your way, as the Dishonored 2 tutorial puts it. Will you be indifferent, vicious or merciful? The fabric of the world will be damaged no matter your choice, but the details will vary. Save Aramis Stilton, and Billie Lurk/Meagan Foster keeps her eye and her arm, presumably kept out of harm’s way by his influence. Leave him to his fate, and she’ll stay wounded as she has been throughout Dishonored 2.
Death of the Outsider assumes mercy. Two arms, two eyes, a silvergraph of Billie and Aramis on the shelf. But it doesn’t take it as a given. Billie dreams at night of her arm cut off and her eye gouged out. The pain stays with her when she wakes. Something is closing in. What approaches is not a moment of fracture but a moment of revelation: the Outsider showing her the break already created. “I will return to you what you’ve lost,” he tells her, and strips away the coherent veneer of the world. Her eye and her arm are no longer her own, but they’re not gone either — they’re half void, barely in her control.
Out in the ship, the silvergraph can’t decide where to sit on a shelf or whether to sit there at all. It can’t decide who it depicts. Does Billie Lurk stand next to Aramis Stilton, or does she stand alone? Does she have a missing eye and a missing arm? Does she not? The image flickers back and forth. Here and there and gone. If Aramis Stilton was already symbolically spectral, his uncertain fate renders him visually as a ghost now too. The scarring of reality is written on queer bodies in Dishonored, placing them in an oddly destabilising and destabilised position. Queerness as sexuality gets tangled up with queerness as uncanny — queerness as disorientation.
And what about that disorientation, then? Disorientation is created when things fail to cohere. Body parts, silvergraphs, posters on the wall — in Death of the Outsider, these things are all in a state of disorientation. We lose our sense of direction. When the Outsider talks about “returning” to Billie what she’s “lost,” is he returning a lost thing — or returning a moment of loss? Giving and taking become ambiguous concepts.
From a queer point of view, these moments of failure of meaning are also the moments when a (haunting) potential exists for something new to appear. Queer theorist Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, 2006) asks us to consider these moments and what we do with them. Do we bring things back in line, or do we let them slip and take on new forms? Do we straighten them out and find level ground again, or do we deviate?
The Things Taken From Us
Like Paulina Palmer, Carla Freccero is invested in the concept of queer spectrality, but this time it’s a tool for writing history (“Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past”, 2008). Instead of history as a line drawn from then to now, she writes, “[the] past and the present are neither discrete nor sequential. The borderline between them wavers, wobbles, and does not hold still.” Metaphorically speaking, the outcome is never assured, and the lines are blurred by the act of our engaging with the past: we are dealing in ghosts, but we’re also haunting the past with our own not-yet-present gaze, our ideas and perspectives and questions. Queerness shifts depending on how we look at it. Disorientation is never far away.
The Outsider also makes this metaphor literal, inserting himself into moments of uncertainty and interrogating them. In Death of the Outsider, he steps out of the role of observer and commentator and into a furious presence in Billie Lurk’s life. Ghosts demand, Freccero reminds us. What the Outsider demands is that Billie see all of the fractures and secrets and cruelties hidden below the surface, and not look away. Queerness in Dishonored is strange and tenuous, as is the Outsider himself.
Billie, running for years, has called herself Meagan Foster, lived a separate life, kept the relics of herself hidden away in chests. Billie Lurk and her actions have been haunting Meagan Foster, until they demand, at the end of Dishonored 2, to be confessed. Now she steps back into herself. Meagan Foster dies. We can try to fit ourselves into shapes not our own, but we will find ourselves haunted.
I read the Outsider as a queer figure initially out of pure self-preservation, but now I look at him from another angle and find a potential queerness there too. Explaining his nature to Billie in visitations he underlines, again and again, that the two of them have lived lives that mirror each other. A moment where they could have been the same, the future-to-be suspended: “You and I were both abandoned to uncertain futures on dangerous streets, and taken in by murderers.” He was human, once, and murdered by cultists for power, transformed against his will into a god. The murderer Billie was taken in by spared her, although she was transformed into a killer herself. “Time repeats in the same unending patterns,” the Outsider says. “We are all made by the things that are taken from us.”
By the end of the game, the Outsider will be dead.
Here is the final moment of choice: will you give the Outsider his name back, pushing against your mentor Daud’s protests and against the expected outcome, allowing him a uncertain future existence as a living being? Or will you give him an ending, following the established line of violence and accepting your inheritance within it?
“To inherit the past in this world for queers,” Ahmed writes, “would be to inherit one’s own disappearance.” Freccero, following Derrida, urges us to allow our ghosts to return, leaving ourselves open to the demands of “the uncanny and the unknown but somehow strangely familiar.”
I pushed back against the world.
“I can’t undo what was done to you, all those years ago,” Billie Lurk says, pulling the Outsider into the world, living and breathing. “But now you have a chance to be something new.”
Eli Dobromylskyj (they/them) is a queer writer, artist & escaped academic living in Sweden. They can be found on twitter at @tidaldissonance, where they talk about ttrpgs, writing, art, and weird things they’ve googled today.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Spring Quarterly has been funded by readers like you.
