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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."

Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.

Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.

Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.

Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.

Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.

A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.

There are certainly trans characters in left-coded media. You just have a normal looking woman, have them say “oh btw I’m trans”, and then move on. Very easy way to score representation points without having to deal with questions of passing or other thorny trans issues.

FTM representation is even easier, as they tend to pass quite well in real life.

Got any examples? None spring to mind for me. Though you are right, "trans as informed attribute" would be a (ham handed) way around this.

In the movie Wendell and Wild, which was a semi-recent Henry Sellick (James and the Giant Peach, Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline) animated film, one of the characters is definitely trans, but the movie doesn't even reference it as far as I can remember, but it kind of hints at it, and if you check Wikipedia it definitely claims that "Raul" is a trans boy. The animation is interesting in hindsight - they kind of the made them look like, well, how a trans person kind of looks but with some of the edges sanded off. I guess that's one advantage of animation is that you can make things look however you want.

It's not really "left-coded media", but Alice in Borderland on Netflix has an example of this. One of the main female characters is played by a woman, presents as a woman throughout the whole show, and then near the end of the last season has a "btw I'm actually trans" moment.

End of the first season. My headcanon is she become a woman in fact when she got pulled into Borderland, with the flashbacks showing otherwise being wishful thinking.

For a pretty central example of progressive philosophy on it: Super Lesbian Animal RPG is exactly what you'd expect given the name, and the two trans characters have that matter a little less than their purely-aesthetic 'animal'. I don't think this is popular as a decision, yet, but a number of CRPGs have gone with it (sodiummuffin mentions Baldur's Gate, but there's a wide variety of RPGMaker clones that have taken that approach). Dragon Age: Inquisition kinda Special Episodes it, but more in the sense that everybody with a backstory in that game has a ton of angst thrown in.

This doesn't have to be quite so ham-handed as Super Lesbian Animal. The extreme case is just a character with the trans flag somewhere; this sometimes gets criticism as either purely-informed trait (could just be an ally!), but it's not going to get you cancelled.

I think it's lazy, but I can get why writers sometimes do it. (And it's better than eg. The Broken Earth's attempt.) I think there's more clever things you can do with either environmental storytelling, or by actually exploring and considering what having seen the other gender's norms in close detail, but I can understand if not agree with why those are more controversial.

There are also some times where the theme overlaps with a short Very Special Episode: Night In The Woods is about depression and has villains that are trying to cut out the disliked from their community to sacrifice in hopes of bringing back prosperity, so having a thrown-in comment saying one of the background characters/targets is trans is... well, at least no more preachy than the rest of the story. Damning with faint praise, admittedly.

Alternatively, you can make it relevant to the plot for other reasons. El Goonish Shive is a gender transformation magic comic, so questions like "is this person female" (which means they can summon hammers with magic because animu) or "did this person grow a dick" (and thus was probably exposed to magic somehow) end up having physically verifiable results in a variety of ways completely orthogonal to real-world questions (which... uh, admittedly do also separately get brought up, because it's ultimately a drama piece). You might be able to clock the FTM trans guy before it becomes plot relevant if you're really familiar with some stereotypes, but he gets a short arc that's neither a Very Special Episode for him nor something that could be not-passing for anyone except a magic alien squirrel.

Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.

It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:

http://archive.is/Lwu6p

If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.

https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268

I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.

I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.

Pure cancer.

Low effort. Please comment more substantively than "I don't like this."

Huh! Guess i underestimated the willingness of authors to go with the solely informed-characteristic "hi i am trans btw" method of representation.

On reflection, yeah, the "spiritually trans" thing is pretty weird for the transmutation-heavy Baldur's Gate universe, which should probably be used to a more transhumanist school of thought: "i decided i wanted to be a dragon so i bought this scroll of permanent polymorph for my life savings. If anyone makes fun i eat them. Wanna see my sweet hoard? Look, don't touch."

In summary: "I identify as an attack helicopter" lands different if the identified can in fact fly and launch hellfire missiles at their detractors.

Bridget from the video game series Guilty Gear is a recent high-profile example.

In earlier entries in the series from the 00s, he was a femboy whose androgyny was played for laughs. For the newest sequel, I surmise that the developers decided that his character was too politically fraught to be left as is, so they threw in a brief scene where he comes out as trans.

Don't know the games but that's butchering their own lore, given that Bridget was named that in homage to Brigitte Lin, an actress who has played breeches roles (e.g. in the Swordsman II movie, and the movie regarded as a sequel to that, The East is Red which I only saw in a poorly-translated, hacked-to-pieces edit but whoo boy - playing a man who transforms himself into a woman in order to attain martial arts skills but who still has 'male' thinking and behaviours, including a female lover, and being totally kickass while she/he is doing so, as well as having the male lead confusedly attracted because he's not sure if she's a boy or a girl):

It was common for women to cross dress as male characters in Chinese movies and operas. And Lin is particularly well known for her androgynous roles, her earliest being Jia Baoyu, the male protagonist of the 1977 film adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber. In Peking Opera Blues (1986), she was a guerrilla revolutionary and in Royal Tramp II (1992), she was the leader of the Heavenly Dragon Sect, both of whom were women characters dressed as men. And in Ashes of Time (1994), she played twin brother/sister duo Yin and Yang. However, she is perhaps most well known for her role as Dongfang Bubai in Swordsman II (1992). Swordsman II marked the peak of her career in terms of box office earnings for which she was listed among the 10 greatest performances in cinema of all time, by Time magazine."

Gotta agree with Time there.

Swordsman II:

Dongfang Bubai had castrated himself in order to master the skills in the Sunflower Manual, and his appearance has become more feminine, even though he is now a formidable martial artist.

Linghu Chong meets Dongfang Bubai by chance without knowing his true identity, mistakes him for a beautiful young woman, and falls in love with "her".

Swordsman III/The East is Red:

At Black Woods Cliff, Gu Changfeng discovers that Dongfang Bubai is still alive in disguise as an elderly woman, and manages to convince him to return to the jianghu.

Dongfang Bubai unleashes his fury and starts a bloodbath in eliminating all those who impersonate him. He discovers that Xue Qianxun has been pretending to be him, and seriously injures her in anger. Consumed by his desire for power, Dongfang Bubai decides to continue his ambitious plan to unite the jianghu under his rule and dominate China.

Gu Changfeng realises that Dongfang Bubai has gone out of control so he leads the Ming imperial navy to fight Dongfang and his Spanish and Japanese allies. In the ensuing naval battle, all the warships are destroyed and Dongfang Bubai emerges victorious after defeating and killing Gu Changfeng. However, Xue Qianxun loses her life in the process. Dongfang Bubai realises his mistake and embraces his dead lover as he retires from the jianghu again.

The interesting thing about Bridget is that under the logic of gender being a social construct I think you could argue he was already trans, and when he adopted a female gender identity in the latest game, that was actually him detransitioning. In the backstory, although he was always male, he had also been raised as a girl pretty much since birth. So his sex was male, but the gender he was assigned at birth was female.

The fact he identified as a man in earlier games meant that he was rejecting the gender he was assigned at birth, making him a transman. By going back on that and identifying as a woman again, he's detransitioning in order to embrace the gender he was assigned at birth. Sure he's biologically male, but if gender is purely a social construct then that shouldn't make a difference, right? He's returning to his original gender identity, so he's detransitioning. Trans people largely didn't seem to see it that way though and accepted him as mtf.

Some people who didn't like the change also pointed out that by adopting a female gender identity, rather than bravely going against the grain he was conforming to the expectations of his parents, who raised him as a girl, and society at large which frequently perceived and gendered him as female due to his name and appearance even when he was identifying as male. If it was supposed to be positive trans representation then I think perhaps it wasn't thought out all that well.

I think the most interesting interpretation is that Bridget has been groomed into being trans, personally. His parents can be considered a stand-in for the kind of hyper-progressive parents that desire a trans child as a progressive trophy. The reasoning given is different, but the actions and effects are the same. Goldlewis then doubles down on this grooming, resulting in what happens in the newest game; he gives in to the conditioning to please the adults around him, who are encouraging it.

Another interesting thing about this all is that gender is evidently a fundamental ontological category in the progressive worldview. In the same sense that the immanentized progressive egregore thinks killing black people is worse than saying the N-word, it also thinks that belonging to a gender is more enduring, significant and definitional than being a human/Gear/intelligent beast/vampire/spiritual entity/ascended demon/robot/AI/shadow clone/hivemind/talking sword/whatever. You can move through several of those transient categories, but Gender is the stable inner Gnostic truth revealed to the soul, the underpinning of the self – as discussed by @IGI-111 and others.

Regarding Testament mentioned downthread:

Arc System Works marketing rep Riku Ozawa has stated that Testament is specifically agender (無性, musei?), neither male nor female, and that the character was previously portrayed as androgynous/bigender (両性, ryōsei?), but that the team chose to change that in the new game.[38][39] Both musei and ryōsei are categories of X-gender, the Japanese equivalent of the word 'non-binary'.

In an interview, Daisuke Ishiwatari reportedly said that "They're androgynous. In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me."[39][40]

Baka creator! Can't have that transhumanist crap in our not-Christian fighting game about posthuman beings. Every character should pick a flag, a hormone stack, and a side that could be conceivably covered by the selection of bathrooms in an American school.

…Androgyny is, within certain diagnostic methods at least, not some queer notion made obsolete by the modern gender theory, but the psychological opposite of agenderism, or perhaps simply orthogonal as far as nomenclature goes.

In psychology, androgyny refers to individuals with strong personality traits associated with both sexes, combining toughness and gentleness, assertiveness and nurturing behaviour, as called for by the situation. Androgynous individuals are more likely to engage in cross-sexual behaviour than those who maintain traditional sex roles. The rise of feminism and the influence of the women’s rights movement made certain aspects of androgynous behaviour more socially attractive than in the past. Androgynous figures occurred frequently in Greek mythology, often embodying a blend of desirable male and female characteristics. The blind seer Tiresias, a figure of great wisdom, was sometimes depicted as a hermaphrodite.

Laaame. Who cares about attractive sides and personality traits? Tells us your pronouns and what kind of sterilization you need.

Is transhumanism being downplayed against transgenderism among progressives? That seems to be what you imply here.

I think transhumanism is a progressive (in the classical non-partisan, capabilities-increasing sense) ideology/sensibility, and there can be transhumanist-friendly transgenderism, but as it stands those are incompatible paradigms, with the latter having been absorbed into political leftism that's basically a zero-sum game to redistribute finite and indeed actively diminished resources, in the same camp as degrowth ecologists and race baiters. More to the point, transhumanism has another, also somewhat Gnostic notion of the self, e.g. see me here:

I flatter myself thinking I'm a misaligned high-order mesa-optimizer that maximizes abstract notions like model consistency, aesthetics and diversity of possible agents.

For now, the question to check is «would you be okay with a pill that magically restores sex-typical gender perception and orientation and other phenotypic aspects, or would you vehemently reject it and indeed try to prohibit it».

I'll hopefully expound on that at some point or we'll talk with @self_made_human and @TheDag and others and figure it out together.

Right after heavily feminizing the presentation of the now nonbinary Testament?

Testament

Testament has always been just eyecandy for women, the stereotypical bishonen protagonist, "feminizing" him is all kinds of sus.

Yep.

They said they wanted to start catering to the west, and they sure do seem to know what the west wants.

Japanese culture was sometimes viewed as a safe haven from western culture war issues, but, increasingly that’s no longer the case.

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