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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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They’re like 1% of the population, although probably overrepresented among the sorts of people who make decisions about what characters are in video games. Unless your video game has 100 named characters, it’s not conspicuous that they aren’t there:

Well, in some ways, that's sorta the point, right? Imagine I decide I'm going to turn 1% of my NPCs trans, and I end up with "that weapon shopkeeper in the third village". How do I make them trans without making a big deal out of it? Is there a way?

Going back to Borderlands 2, which I honestly think did a marvelous job of gay characters, there's an audio tape you can find where a female character casually refers to her wife. Again, it's not emphasized, it's just sorta dropped in there and the world moves on. I can do that in a video game by having some characters be married and having this one character married to a same-sex partner. But what's the equivalent of this for trans people?

How do I make them trans without making a big deal out of it? Is there a way?

The Emperor's New Clothes defence. Don't include any trans people at all, and when questioned...

"Of course our game has trans people in it - what, you didn't recognise them? Thinking you could identify a passing trans person by sight alone is kind of transphobic, buddy..."

I mean, I get the joke, but that doesn't really solve the issue, it just sort of snarkily bypasses it.

How do I make them trans without making a big deal out of it? Is there a way?

There is a way, but it would get you cancelled.

Depict a small,very depressed, woman with a short haircut and removed breasts.

Make him a 5’1 dude with a trans pride flag hidden in his shop somewhere and endorse the fan theory.

Is there a way?

There is not.

You can paint a picture all you want, but you can't ignore the canvas. Fiction nowadays trying to include such elements just come across as obnoxious political screeds that after a certain point makes me throw them in the trash.

Just because I can read Eclipse Phase doesn't mean I don't roll my eyes at some of the elements they include, and despite my initial interest in the webcomic 'O Human Star', once I realized the analogy they were going with some of the setting elements made me severely pull back in my interest in seeing where it was going to go.

I'm sick a tired of people trying to force obvious modern age propaganda down my throat, and it's gotten to the point with most modern fiction that I default assume they'll include it until I learn otherwise.

But what's the equivalent of this for trans people?

I suppose the hoary old device of pronouns? Your weapons shopkeeper looks like a guy, but everyone refers to them as "she/her" and she has a husband, refers to him as her husband, and the spouse refers to them as my wife? Nobody makes a big deal out of it in-game because hey, trans is just how we roll round here.

It's an older book now, but it still makes a huge difference with pronoun use in Samuel Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" where the default pronoun for everyone is "she"; there are important historical characters who are only referred to as "she/her" and you have literally no idea is this a woman, is this a man, what? Delany is a good enough writer to get away with that, and it does make you more aware of default attitudes and assumptions when you go along unconsciously thinking 'oh yeah, this is a woman' and then hit up against 'wait a minute, maybe they're a man!'

In Morgre, every person, including evelmi, is labelled a woman and the use of the pronouns ‘she/her’ are most common. For those of whom one finds to be sexually desirable, one uses the pronouns ‘he/him’. When Korga remarks that on Rhyanon, people spoke of both women and men, Marq replies, 'I know the word "man"...It's an archaic term. Sometimes you'll read over it in some old piece or other.' However, humans are referred to as male or female, depending on their sex organs, even though most of the time, the reader is left without an explanation of whether a human is male or female.

I do have a story I'm tinkering with that has an alien species who use gendered pronouns for indications of authority. Biologically, their males are mobile tool-users, their females are mammoth sessile immobile creatures who are used as housing and who act as leaders. This particular hierarchy hasn't remained intact through spaceflight, but the terminology has stuck; every member of their species uses "she" to refer to superiors, to homes, and to leaders, while every member uses "he" to refer to subordinates, tools, and workers. This also means that gender is contextual; the captain of a scout ship refers to their ship as "she", the commander of the fleet refers to their ship as "he".

None of this even has anything to do with the story, I was just staying up late and writing paragraphs about random aliens that didn't mean much to the plot. It just sorta happened.

(part of this is also so I can punt on figuring out what the hell gender the other species are; the story takes place from the captain's perspective, and this lets me just use "he" for everyone, even the insectoid hivemind and the sentient dimensional rift.)

I don't think there is one, which is why attempts at implementing trans characters in media feels so conspicuous.

Gays and lesbians can be outwardly identified by their behaviors - who they flirt with, like to hump, or get married to. A female NPC sharing an abode with their wife is self-explanatory.* 'Transness', at least as modernly conceptualized, has fully anchored itself to self-identification. The jocky bro who lifts and the uber-feminine waif in a cocktail dress could both conceivably identify as the gender opposite of what their visual markers would have you assume, hence why it's polite to ask their pronouns instead of assuming - such is argued. And trans-women can still prefer natural-born women as partners since the self-ID is apparently disconnected from sexual orientation in addition to the commonly understood gender signifiers. Thus you get the "Hi! I'm trans" meme, since there is nothing inherently communicable about this condition short of probing their minds.

There's no simple trick or shortcut to indicate a character's transness without making it a significant part of the story or hamfisting it. And I think this just attests to the impossibility of dealing or negotiating with trans ideology. Celeste and The Matrix need to rely on metaphor to explore or acknowledge the subject matter. When you don't have that, but you're insistent on doing something any way, you're left with odd people who stick out like sore thumbs ala ME Andromeda, Hogwarts Legacy, and Siege of Dragonspear.

*Even this gets obnoxious when overdone or becomes pervasive enough. When every game dev, author, and showrunner justifies including non-hetero relationships because "it's reflective of the real world", we get an ocean of (often token) lesbian couples that are extremely over-represented relative to what the average person ever sees in real life.

How about "questgiver sends PC on a mission to pick up a collection of several different drugs, some already familiar to the character, some not, and later on the character can find out more info about the drugs, a few of which are sex-linked hormones"?

This premise could spiderweb into several plotlines (someone later gets poisoned by an overdose of one of the other drugs--did questgiver do it?), most of which shouldn't be linked to trans-ness. Both of the fictional series that I can think of that handled trans-ish characters well gave the characters a whole lot more plot and drama to focus on that wasn't just one-note trans angst (Safehold series by David Weber; TWI by pirateaba).

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