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I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.
For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.
But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".
This has, in fact, been done well.
Let's talk about that.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.
Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.
Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.
(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)
(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)
But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.
Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!
There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.
But while we're on the subject . . .
. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.
A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.
Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?
Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.
Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.
Specifically, let's talk about allegories.
There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.
(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)
Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.
It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!
I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".
And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
And it's goddamn impossible.
The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.
Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.
So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?
How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?
Honestly? I don't know.
My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.
I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.
Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.
I don't really have an ending to this post.
I don't think this has been proposed yet, in this exact form: you can do a trick by having a cis person trapped in a trans body, as a result of an unfortunate polyjuice potion mishap or teleportation incident or whatever "easy way to change gender" the setting allows, but with a twist that they can't easily change it back for whatever reason--some extra spell stabilizing the body or a booby trap in a sci-fi setting or like some info they can't risk being destroyed.
Make sure to firmly establish their original gender, so there's no doubt that when they keep behaving and dressing etc the same way after the incident that happens half the game in, that's their true self. Have explicit quests trying to change them back and explicit evidence of them trying to ameliorate their dysphoria at least partially.
This is going to be neatly subversive, because on the one hand it's sort of gender essentialist and everyone knows that the character really started as their original gender and there's no mystery about what happened to them, but on the other hand, all right, what do we do now that their genitalia don't match their gender? And what if some people are actually born with such a mismatch in our world? Kind of like, since I know that I'm definitely right-handed, I'm open to the possibility that definitely left-handed people exist.
An interesting question is what to make their original gender: male would be more relatable for the intended audience (but you have to play it completely straight, never once veering into the fetish territory), originally-female would be more CW-salient.
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I realize this is late and you may not have been actually asking for 'have you tried this?', but heck a friend and I brainstormed various trans-character concepts when we were scoffing at ham-fisted character insertions, and it feels a waste not to put some of the points.
One of the basic premise we agreed on is that if you want a character who is trans to not have their trans-ness be the thing, it's not enough for the writer not to focus on it- other characters need to not focus on it to, even if made aware. And one of the best character roles to do this is when antagonists- not sympathetic characters- didn't make a deal of it. In a hamfisted approach that could be a 'even evil has standards' trope, but a more thematic way would be for utilitarians in the setting not to find utility in it. When even disagreeable antagonists don't bother to jump on, then it's truly Just A Thing.
For us, since one of the premise here was that a successfully passing trans person should be, well, passing to casual inspection, that made inspections with ulterior motives a primary venue. As in, someone goes looking into the person for dirt... and doesn't find the transness the most relevant point. At which point, since transitioning persons often make breaks with the past as part of the transition, the narrative hook that could be tugged is those gaps in missing years / continuous contacts before/after transition.
One example was a mystery setup, where the antagonists/players are both chasing a (secretly/passing Trans) person of some repute/influence who has a Mysterious Past. For reasons the someone who is assumed to have a fake identity... because none of the public records / school book photos / etc. show the post-transition person during their pre-transition youth. As the person's post transition identity is assumed to be 'fake', the question of the miniplot was 'why?'- with various theories being witness protection programs, identity theft, etc. When the person's pre-transition name is discovered, it was even framed as a case of a family scandal being shushed up, with speculation like the current persona being a once-illegitimate child legitimized after the 'death' of their dead-name 'sibling,' a case of someone hiding gender to escape the notice of the law for some mysterious crime, or so on.
The antagonist's- and thus the protagonist's- motives for finding out the past weren't about the gender per see, but for the implications of what a mystery box sort of answer might allow them to do to influence the person. Say they're looking to blackmail to force the trans-leader's cooperation, to protect the reputation of the (completely unrelated to trans) cause they trans-person is aligned with, or whatever.
The kick in the plot concept was that the antagonist could find the secret... but then not find it worth exploiting/insufficient leverage, to the point that they give it up rather than try and exploit it, and go on to something else instead. By having the antagonist with utilitarian motivations dismiss that part of the trans-person's identity as relevant, it was signalled to the audience that in the setting, being trans wasn't some overwhelming thing. What made the person relevant wasn't their transition, but what they were in a position to do- and the society was such where the insinuations of misconduct conflated with the transition overwhelmed the social relevance of the transition itself.
That's a really cool analysis and idea. I have no idea what to do with it right now but I'm gonna be thinking about that one.
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Hmm. I would start with some kind of painful condition that leads people with it to cluster together and often pursue ineffective but homemade treatments in adolescence and early adulthood. There is a completely effective treatment that is known, but it is still somewhat risky and beyond the budget of most young people. The culture they are in strongly discourages use of the effective treatment before adulthood as they believe that people must have adult insight and judgment before being able to make the decision about the treatment, and the painful condition frequently remits or lessens during late adolescence. Have some kind of plot centered around treating this condition, not fitting in, not being believed...
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I don't have anything great on the trans depiction thing. But a looked-over aspect I did want to note. So Uhura is black in Star Trek Original. (I haven't seen much of it to be honest, so I'm going on a few assumptions, but I could be completely wrong about her depiction). This is shown as a neutral thing in 2 ways. 1 is the obvious, that nobody treats her differently or as less than equal because they see that she is black, or female. The equally important IMO but more subtle way is 2, that she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder about it, i.e. constantly (mis)interpreting every minor mistake or social faux-paus as somebody being racist against her, every bureaucratic snafu as the system being systematically racist, being automatically more trusting of any other black person she encounters no matter what their official position is, etc.
Both of these serve as a social message, to non-blacks that blacks are perfectly fine ordinary people who deserve equal treatment, and to blacks to get over obsessing about historical injustices and just be a regular part of the team.
On a grand strategy decades-long view, our society has done an excellent job at drilling point 1 into the majority of white people. We don't seem to have done so great and are arguably regressing on point 2.
I suppose this does also apply to all other maybe-political minority depictions, including trans-ness - it says something whether or not that person correctly or incorrectly interprets bad things that happen to them as being done due to their minority status.
There is actually a display of this where the form of Abraham Lincoln (the show could be silly at times) refers to her as a "negress" and he immediately apologizes, at which point she just brushes it aside instead of making an impassioned stand against his awful bigotry, saying "in our century, we've learned not to fear words." A fine goal which has utterly fallen out of favor.
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Another example of a minority group present in the story where it's explicit but not really called attention to as "queer" is in The Last of Us, with Bill and Frank's relationship. In the game it's never explicit that they were lovers, but heavily implied. In the show, its explicit but never considered a big deal.
On your issue: have you looked into anime and/or Japanese/Asian media? It's almost a trope to have a crossdressing character, usually male, that identifies and dresses as female. Perhaps how those characters are treated can give you some inspiration.
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I don't know how much of this was intentional on your part, but the major problem I see with your approach is how many unacknowledged assumptions you're glossing over. It all starts with what you're assuming [trait] to be. For example with race, we can boil it down to "difference in skin pigmentation" combined with "difference in societal hierarchy" and so this gives you relatively easy galaxy-brain template to play with if you were transporting this idea to another setting (e.g. "what if societal hierarchy was determined by another arbitrary aesthetic trait? Really makes you think"). To repeat what @WhiningCoil asks:
So yeah, what is trans? You're not explicit about it but you take it as a given that trans people are just people who happen to be somehow saddled with the wrong "birth gender" (I find this terminology extremely grating but I'll set that aside for now). You're implicitly accepting a mountain of implied assumptions here (people have a "birth gender", people can feel 'misaligned' with their "birth gender", people who feel this misalignment feel distress if they don't "fix" it, etc etc) and inevitably this will color how you approach the rest of your implementation.
On the other hand, if you believe that trans people don't exist, or rather if you believe that trans people are really just people who have fallen prey to a rigid expectation of gender stereotypes, well then that really changes things does it not?
I can think of a slew of examples of how I'd implement my understanding of transness into a fictional world. For example, let's say a world has a respected monk caste that relies on a moderately-difficult entrance exam that tests people's psychic defense abilities. As a way to designate membership within this caste, the monks get an ochre-colored glove (something something about the color used as a medium for psychic abilities). Here's Barbara, someone who has long been desperate to join the monk caste but continues to fail the entrance exam. After so many repeated failures, Barbara eventually just adopts the habit of wearing an ochre glove around town, with the goal of hoping that the people she encounters (erroneously) assume that she is part of the psychic monk caste.
There's a range of interesting dynamics that could occur which would perfectly be analogous to what we understand the contemporary trans experience to be. For example some people will see through Barbara's attempts and just humor her purely out of politeness, or maybe someone gets attacked by a mindflaying octupus and breathes a sigh of relief when they see Barbara's ochre glove only to then realize that her psychic defense abilities are actually worthless, etc etc.
You can't really start to implement these dynamics into a fictional world without a precise understanding of what it is you're implementing. And this is especially difficult with transness given the obfuscation combined with the myriad of competing theories (it's a gendered soul, it's boy brain/girl body, it's a hormone imbalance, it's just the patriarchy, etc etc)
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While I basically agree with YE_GUILTY, your trans Uhura may exist, and be on the cutting room floor of The Matrix (1999).
Folklore has it that the character "Switch" in the Matrix was written with their "residual self image" when inside the Matrix being the opposite sex to the person they are introduced as in the real world, but this was dropped from the movie out of concern that audiences would be confused and not understand that they were the same person. Worrying that the audience wouldn't make the connection suggests to me an intent to not spell it out, call attention to it, or make more of a thing of it than the alias.
Some of what the Wachowskis would later say about The Matrix feels a bit 'Dumbledore is gay', but I believe their story about Switch: the name, the androgynous look with masculine touches inside the Matrix, the Wachowskis themselves transitioning, the elegance of this version of Switch, and other nice things we couldn't have for fear of confusing the audience.
I haven't seen the new matrix, perhaps they revisited the character.
For certain definitions of trans, having a trans Uhura may just require a world which shows some kind of window inside all the characters.
That's a shame. A !trans Switch would have to have an interesting relationship towards the Matrix, since it's the only place where she could live as the person she feels on the inside... and yet she chose to join the rebellion. It would also make a very interesting contrast to Cipher. Plus, when the studio came knocking on their doors to milk more money out of the franchise, they'd actually have story to tell, if they decided to make a prequel about her.
Maybe it would ruin the tone of the film but you can explain it in two lines:
Huh?! You're Switch? You looked different inside the Matrix...
Yeah, imagine my surprise when I woke up on this side!
Didn't she die in the first one?
Well that's embarrassing, yes... I even knew this
Not like this … not like this
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The problem is of course that the moment you put those two sentences together it becomes a statement that would only be made by a small group of people in a small group of countries post 2016. In short, it is an explicitly political statement about the way you see the world that will realistically affect the opinions of at least a few people on a contentious subject and therefore your game becomes prime culture war fodder. Personally I am sick to death of hearing about trans issues and if I notice a game bringing it up in literally any manner I will react negatively.
I would say:
If you want to make a political statement, decide what it is.
The presence of something unusual is, even today, usually more of a statement than its absence.
If you aren’t going for mass appeal your job becomes a lot easier. Both because your niche audience ultimately cares more about getting good niche content than about the political statements in it, and because you can target more effectively.
Isn't this unfair to the game's creator? I can understand being tired of hamfisted political insertions, but there are surely scenarios where a trans character's identity can serve the story.
Imagine a space game where the terrifying Xenos, believing themselves to be benevolent uplifters and not understanding the concept of human individuality, begin abducting and converting humans en-masse into biological-machine hybrids.
Maybe you capture a group of these mecha-humans and interrogate them, one of whom used to be trans. I could see that providing interesting narrative insight.
I want to play that same game without the trans bit. I don’t remember encountering any trans characters prior to 2015 and nothing was lost thereby.
As per my above post, you cannot ignore the context here. The trans movement is real, it is insane (in my opinion), it is incredibly damaging to society and to the poor individuals who get caught up in it (in my opinion). I would like the trans movement to be starved of attention while the core of people with serious gender dysphoria are given the psychiatric help they need. In the meantime, it doesn’t matter how hamfisted or subtle your propaganda is, it’s propaganda and I refuse to give it my eyeballs or my money.
It’s worth noting that artistic merit used to be considered an aggravating factor in obscenity trials because interesting, engaging propaganda for a bad cause is much more dangerous than hamfisted, irritating propaganda.
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The easiest way out would be an out-of-universe nod. Like, have the character be designed by a trans designer or voiced by a trans VA. Or a subtle in-universe nod, like a color palette or a throwaway line in the bio. Hell, fans have pattern matched Gwen Stefani or whatever the Spidergirl's name is, just because she's wearing pastels.
The trans character in Sleepless Domain is written well, but that's helped by the fact that the cast is a bunch of pre-pubescent and early-pubescent magical girls, so she passes about just as well as James II and the question of dangly bits is never raised. Plus, the fact that she is a magical girl (there are no magical boys) reinforces the whole "it's not biology that matters" idea.
I wonder how The Rapture of the Nerds would be received if it was published this year. It's a novel by Doctorow and Stross where the protagonist's sex is completely changed several times by various technologies and he/she/he doesn't really worry about it. On one hand, it's a wonderful image of the possible future for people with gender dysphoria. On the other hand, by showing only two people who undergo this procedure: one that loves flipping their sex based on their mood and the protagonist that takes it well, the authors kinda imply that gender dysphoria is not real and that people can just get used to any body they have.
This kinda leads me to the next suggestion: flip the situation. If the setting allows it, have sex change potions or nanotech that can flip someone's sex completely. This would mean that trans people are invisible other than throwaway references ("no, thanks, I've already drank one"), but there still might be people suffering from gender dysphoria: those that have changed their sex by mistake or by trickery and now cannot turn back because the cure is locally or temporally unavailable.
Yeah, having those sex change potions/nanotech/applied phlebotinum be expensive and risky and imperfect would be a pretty damn good allegory.
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And why must you have an allegory for that in your game? Can your universe not be reasonably alive and your characters not interesting without you fretting about including this one particular variant?
Oh, absolutely. I'm thinking about it because I want the option to do so, not because I think doing so is mandatory.
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I think that if you want trans people in a game you should look at pre 00s representation of trans. Drag Queens, Pricila Queen of the desert, Mulan, sitcoms - MtF - bold over the top in your face and everybody just shrugging. And FtM - mostly kinda feminine men that do blend in.
Edit: Bad phrasing on Mulan. Also you can check Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment.
I despair when Mulan is really properly thought of as trans representation
Of course she is not trans. Trans icon or whatever trans adjacent (at least the animation version not brave or stupid enough to watch the live action). But she did the whole passing thing flawlessly.
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A transhumanist setting doesn't mean that bodies are free, or that body swap surgery has zero recovery time.
You can probably come up with something by working with those frictions.
Maybe, if in that universe, transgender is just another accepted thing, then everybody does some body/gender swapping at some time and it doesn't mean you're trans or not-trans. So you could have one character being asked by others "what do you mean you've never swapped?" and introduce the notion that way - not by having Visibly Trans Guy Or Gal, but Visibly Never Transed Character (the same way we might ask someone 'what do you mean you've never tried alcohol?' today).
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I have some experience with this, in that I tried incorporating a trans woman into a novel I wrote and ended up never developing her character/plotline that far due to prioritizing the more important bits. In the final book, there is the tiniest, tiniest hint (if you can even call it that) as to her being unusual.
This is to say, I went with the "super invisible" approach, A.K.A. the classic J.K. Rowling approach of having to say "by the way" in an extra-texual way. So far, though, I've never actually had to come out and say "this character is trans," and I might only ever do it if I write a complete lore bible for said book.
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Why not turn to history for examples of wildly different attitudes to sexuality? Base your work on the ancient world and have homosexuality carry no stigma whatsoever, whereas submissive behaviour is considered incredibly shameful. Break the chains of chronocentrism and chuck a sci-fi equivalent to the Sacred Band of Thebes in there, throw in a Submissive Rights Activist who is trying to change societal views to make it acceptable to be a bottom or give women oral sex. Make it so that absolutely nobody cares about race at all, but height is one of the key sources of discrimination. You've got so many possibilities to actually be creative and give people a piece of work that doesn't let them just go "Ok that's the trans-coded character, I understand how this work expresses The Message now, time to stop thinking."
I do honestly like that. I don't generally want to make a game that's about discrimination, but if I decide I do, I think that's a really good way to do it.
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The example that comes to mind immediately for me is Midsomer Murders, with the main character couple of DCI Tom Barnaby and his wife Joyce (in the first half of the series), and later DCI John Barnaby and his wife Sarah (in the 2nd half of the series). I recall an interview with the actor who played Tom Barnaby about how much he liked, and how unusual it was, that he played a detective who was a happily married man and not, you know, some lonely dysfunctional wreck who spent most of his off hours in a bottle or something.
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I've not watched the episode, although I'm familiar enough with it in outline.
The reason the lesson can be about hate is because racism was viewed, in the 1960's, as about hate. Race hate was one of the parts of the contemporary definition of racism. In the same way pre-21st century ideas about racism might say something to the effect of, "It's judging someone on the basis of their race", people in the 1960's would understand racism to mean -- at least in part -- hating someone on the basis of their race. That is to say, the lesson of the episode is 100% about racism, just not as we know it.
I think the conception of racism as "hate" was still present to a strong degree even into the 90's and 2000's, where only then did it start to be about mere sensitivity (i.e. not making casual race jokes). For some reason, I'm thinking about the Static Shock episode where Virgil gets thrown back in time to the 50's/60's and brings MLK to his time (before having to put him back because MLK not being around in his own time caused racism to still be strong).
In the UK I would say it flipped (or rather was flipped by American activists and British imitators) in about 2015. I grew up in the 90s and I remember feeling a very strong reaction in the mid 10s of “what? Racism means hate or disdain, not an interested query into where your family comes from.”.
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If I were making a science fiction game set in a future where bodies can be changed with ease and I was convinced by modern day gender theory I think I'd want to be confident enough in my beliefs that I would not need to have a transgendered character, or at least that any major body change being not considered a big deal would explain all an intelligent player needs to have explained. Including trans people in a world they'd be easily cured strikes me as like including lepers as well on the grounds that they were once marginalized, the action of someone who has thoroughly forgotten the reason they wanted to include them in the first place. I guess the question is would the inclusion be because you want to explore questions of gender theory or just as a flag to modern day culture. I generally find flags to modern day culture tacky.
In a future world with easy, 100% effective sex changes, then transgenderism would no longer be the signal that it is today.
Consider that, in the 1970s or whatever, having any tattoo was edgy and cool. By the 1990s, you had to have full arm sleeves to fill that same niche. And nowadays, of course, sleeves are meh and to be really transgressive you have to go full Post Malone with neck and face tattoos.
Powerful signals of group belonging and transgression need to be hard. Perhaps a Star Trek character filling the same niche would belong to an ascetic religious order. The audience could gasp at their naked back, deeply scarred from flagellation. Sure the person in question could use a TriCorder to erase the scars any time, but the scars would be a meaningful signal of deep devotion to a cause.
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Ghost in the Shell kind of barely dealt with this. Stand Alone Complex Season 1 Episode 1 focused on a politician who liked to drink and swap artificial bodies with women. The strangeness of that sort of behavior is tangentially mentioned in a couple lines of dialogue. They are the first generation of people with easy body swapping so this is a secret worthy of an eyebrow raise.
It's also regularly questioned why The Major uses a female chassis, with even other members of her own team spelling out that a male chassis allows for greater muscular strength. Her counterpoint is to beat Batou with his own fists. For a while, fan theories thought she might have been AMAB before cyberization, although 2nd Gig very heavily implies that she was the "little girl" that was a fellow plane crash survivor to Kuze (though diehard fans of trans Makoto suggest she'd started IDing as female at that age).
In a future where the (upper?) middle class and above can afford artificial bodies, what would it even mean to be trans? They choose body aesthetics the way we choose car styling. Picking a generic hot girl body from a catalog as the major did would be as easy for a guy as a girl. Those fans are silly, I would have thought officially wrong and better yet totally irrelevant the premise of pure brain-body disconnect.
Perhaps relevant is Batou's choice of a purely functional body. They animate him head and shoulders taller than everyone else and with expressionless metal eyes that can sort of see through active camouflage. And in one episode he admits to having no penis. He's a huge jacked expressionless cyborg spec ops Ken doll. High speed low drag enabled by sci fi technology.
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There's also her apparent surprise and amusement at being accidentally installed in a male chassis by Batou at the end of the original manga.
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I think it's worth considering that one of the most well-written games, by a considerable margin by my estimation, is the nigh-literary Disco Elysium. It's a game that doesn't shy away from ideological conflict, hell, ideological conflict is the game; it's the mechanics, it's the setting, it's the engine under the internal and external dialogue trees and conflicts. Hell, the pale functions less well as a climate change allegory than it functions as a manifestation of nation utterly drowning in ideology, until it all becomes static, noise, meaningless.
The characters are 'diverse' to be sure, but they're too real/inhabited to read as cynical box-ticking, so maybe the answer is just to create good art. If create good art and the characters are in honest service of that art, the internal narrative for their inclusion will be so compelling and self-evident that shoehorning them into culture war narratives will seem silly and reductive. It's when you don't have any reason for your cast choices that you invite a bit more scrutiny.
To sum up the options you've given here it seems pretty obvious based on what kind of game you want to make:
There are ways to develop sub-themes out of larger themes without making them full-blown allegories, too, e.g. there's room to explore transgender issues within transhumanist Deus Ex settings, that just add some colour/complexity/dimensionality to it with out going all the way.
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Could you elaborate on if the trans-ness going away is kind of like a mental category thing, where onlookers know they are trans but it is as unremarkable as knowing someone's blood type; or if trans-ness going away refers to empirical predictions, where onlookers can't tell if they are trans?
Defining sex and gender as separate implies that someone can be obviously male and obviously a woman, I think. And there is not a woke consensus that trans people should pass as cis gender.
As for your trans allegory, what about the Matrix, or plastic surgery, or dyeing ones hair? Are these too mundane to be trans allegories?
I think the problem is the requirement for Virtue Signalling. A game or a book or a movie where 'it is the far-flung year of 2005 and transgender isn't even an issue anymore' and trans people don't stand out, or if they do, it's because non-binary, agender, gender-queer and all the rest of it exist and are socially acceptable so the people of that universe don't blink at someone with a bald head, full beard, breasts, and dressing femme, but it stands out to us isn't good enough for Representation Purposes.
If you have a trans character who looks (say) perfectly female and is accepted as such and is referred to as a woman (without the qualifier 'trans') so that they are indistinguishable from a cis woman, then that will not be good enough for a set of people. If they can't tell This Character Is Trans, they'll assume you are being transphobic or whatever by only having (presumed) cis men and women in the future.
So the creator needs to be able to signal "I'm fine with transgender, look here is my diverse and inclusive cast of characters, here are the trans ones" in order to be able to ward off such accusations. The problem is that this then conflicts with "in the far-flung future everyone is equal and accepted" because to be internally consistent, it has to be "we don't notice trans people, they're just treated like everyone else" but that conflicts with showing obviously "see, see how onboard I am with the right side of history? here's my trans non-binary queer differently-abled neurodivergent poly multiracial characters!"
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I think, with the Ideal Trans Model, it's "onlookers can't tell if they are trans". I think the sort of archetypical trans person wishes they were born in their chosen gender and they never experienced the other gender in the first place; showing up in the wrong body was a bug in the genetic code and they would rather that bug never have existed.
I guess I'm not sure how this ends up practically working out. I don't think hair dye works; it's just too common. Plastic surgery isn't a bad allegory but it has similar issues, in that you can't tell someone got plastic surgery unless it's really obvious.
The Matrix is a pretty big plot thing to pin a game around, although there have been some cool ideas regarding that in this thread.
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Very few people are going to have a problem with you having a young Achilles type character who is male but raised as a girl for contrived reasons, but absolutely rejects it at puberty.
You should have seen what happened with Guilty Gear Strive.
Bridget was raised as a girl for contrived, twin-superstition reasons. Initially, this included lots of insistence on manliness and proving his hometown wrong. Come the latest game, turns out he really is a she, and she isn’t going back.
The fandom lost their minds, either out of hatred at muh woke pandering, or pure oversaturated tucutes. Both sides were incredibly horny on main.
well, everyone is gay for Bridget.
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Make that trans person an actor, so there's ambiguity in what he's up to. There is this youtube channel that I like very much and one person plays every single character, it's incredibly entertaining Bistro Huddy. It just feels to me that passing or not is superseded by the "vibe" of the person.
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Some random ideas. Take, adapt, or reject as you see fit:
Idea 1: Husband and wife team are doing something or other. They come under attack, husband gets blasted through his chest trying to protect his wife who gets her brain scrambled in a psi attack. Magic of sci fi, they manage to save his brain by implanting it in her body. Now he's trying to hunt down his wife's killers in her body. No one ever comments on the gender politics of the situation.
Idea 2: The character creation process is set in a kind of gene clinic where you specify how you want your character to look, then you hope in a vat, and it dissolves and regrows you to look that. And then you go out and play the game, but the gene clinic stays there and you can go and change your character at any time. At some point a character in the game decides to go to the gene clinic to change sex for whatever reason (a disguise to infiltrate somewhere?). And then they just stay in that new body.
Idea 3: Villain character is revealed to be in fact a hologram projection. The real body is plugged into a big computer thingy - and you need to fight through all the villain's robot defences to get at the vulnerable meat and bones-self. Of course, once you get there the villain is different to how they portrayed themselves.
Idea 4: You play Susie McGirl, valiantly fighting for truth and justice against the forces of evil. But TWIST halfway through the game you discover that you have been brainwashed and mind controlled this whole time, and you are actually Johnny McMale who has been used by the forces of bad and not-good! Now you need to turn on your evil controllers and bring them down!
Idea 5: You are investigating the past actions of Past Character, finding their journals or logs or whatever to try to piece together the mystery you're trying to solve. But then things click into place when it is revealed that Past Character is actually the same person as Differently Gendered Current Character! This revelation sends the game hurtling towards its third act.
Will a cairn terrier be instrumental revealing the projection?
I read the parent post as trying to navigate character diversity without it being allegorical, but from the trans-allegorical perspective there are a few games that have already attempted something in that space, with the allegory being varyingly central/subtext. Celeste for example is canonically a trans narrative but is broadly more universal than that: climbing a mountain as allegory overcoming internal conflict and self-hatreds, first as running away and then as conquest/achievement.
I'm guessing from context that something like this has been done previously?
Edit: Oh, I just looked up the breed and realised you're talking about Wizard of Oz. Duh.
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Spoilers for a 21 year old anime but in .hack//SIGN,which takes place almost entirely inside a video game, in the final episode, it's revealed that the male main character who is stuck inside the video game and has amnesia and is actually female. This is partially played as surprising because there's a romance subplot between him and a female character, so surprise same-sex relationship. But also, it's just shown in the final scene, there's no follow-up. May even be after the last dialog in the show.
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Eh... I don't know how much that reals, rather than operates as the spherical-cow frictionless-plane comparison. To whatever extent that platonic ideal might be possible in a kinda world, we're often not making media about those.
Like, as an example plucked from nowhere, if Rimworld was going to implement trans characters, it'd actually have a pretty significant impact on play!
Trans_humanist_ characters used to suffer a -4 mood until body modded, which wasn't a huge deal but could make low-tech runs or early play a lot more fragile. After the Ideology update made transhumanism require a handful of precepts that maxed out around -16 mood if pawns couldn't get their desired therapies, which was often enough to tantrum spiral a base.
That's probably not exactly where you'd want to aim for, but as someone without that great an understanding of the game's balance, I could see something like a -2 or -4 for cis or trans characters wearing clothes that don't match their gender identity or don't match their ideology's expected wear for their gender identity, -6 for a trans character not receiving gender therapy, and some +2-+6 range for having resolved that. And there's be other mechanical impacts like ability to be pregnant/impregnate another pawn, or some of the lower-tech-tier gender therapies could have medical ramifications (cfe real-world transmen being advised to have hysterectomies if they stay on testosterone long), which could be mitigated with some of the higher-tech research levels and eventually archanotech just being the magic gender pill. ((Yes, there are problems with this modeling, not least of all that. Tbf, the problems with Rimworld's original romance system were far from limited to just sexual orientation.))
Okay, so Rimworld's a little bit of a cheat, because colony sims generally require you have a lot of relatively deep information about all of your characters, and even pawns opposed to your faction you want to have a lot of detail because you might try to
kidnap and brainwashrecruit them.What about CRPGs, which Bioware is at least aping towards? There's some controversy over when, if ever, trans people should disclose to romantic partners, and that's a fun question on its own. And despite some recent confusion about what "bear" means in the gay community, chances are pretty good you're not going to have every character in a game be romancable. But a lot of the constraints above apply. People surprised by an external disaster might have complications getting access to even common medications. Privacy can be limited in a lot of ways, especially at lower-incomes or going further back in history
And, conversely, other constraints might not. In a more trans-friendly environment -- indeed, in many trans-heavy spaces today -- a lot of trans people will make off-the-cuff jokes about parents applying expectations, because they don't necessarily mean full disclosure but even if someone picks up on the hints it's not going to be that big a deal.
Have you seen Brand New Animal? It's not a great series -- the central mystery feels a little rushed, despite or perhaps because of a good few early episodes being a little filler-like -- but the way it handles a lot of these problems is interesting.
Trans stuff is not the only read, and many others are brought forward for individual episodes. Sometimes much more explicit and very specific ones: there's a full episode that's partly about Michiru learning her powers, but also about the then-whites-only-league Black Sox scandal, which is hilariously specific). But it's a very plausible read for the broader story, and it points to the sort of design space that's possible.
A little bit of that is because of the trappings -- graduating high school, suddenly feeling massively different from everyone around you, going to a festival where you can be finally yourself in public, gradually going from denial to recognition, and then trying to figure out how (and if) you actually fit into this new community or what extent you could be comfortable going back to your previous one are all very common across LG and B and T communities -- but they're not actually about taking estrogen or crushing on another girl (as much as shippers might go nuts over a few scenes).
In this case, the plot is about something, but it's not necessarily about any one thing. That's not true representation in the strict sense, but it leaves it possible for a work to have applicability for environments or people the authors may never have been familiar with; better yet, you can have reason for people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds to feel sympathy to your metaphor.
((Star Trek's Let That Be Your Last Battlefield touches on this a little bit, if probably more intentionally for deniability: Lokai and Bele butt heads the most over slavery and revolution, but Bele is also the chief officer of the Commission on Political Traitors, which makes a lot more sense in entirely different contexts than racial politics.))
That said, it's usually easier with an understanding, and often a pretty deep understanding, of what sort of broad sensations that feel relevant and common for the represented group.
Of course, this vagueness or openness has its costs. FLCL's main gimmick is "NO", the power to summon robots and energy creatures, described in-universe as tension between the right and left hemispheres of the brain but actually about interpersonal tension and self-concealed interests, and no matter how explicitly the media makes it some one will misread it. Or for a more concrete example, over on Tumblr StormingTheIvory loved My Little Pony for a lot of its applicability for trans-related stuff despite not actually featuring any trans character because she found resonance with Big Macintosh... until the show put him in a dress as a punchline.
Regarding FLCL: I can’t tell which parts of the linked comments you’re saying are wrong. I really did think the robots were fueled by something like sexual tension.
When I watched the show, it was a pirated, bitcrushed mess, which made it even more incomprehensible. But I was also coming off an Eva rewatch, which has its own obvious messaging, especially regarding predatory/broken authority figures. So I may be missing a lot.
From prokopetz:
The climactic moment of last episode of FLCL proper -- the very next sentence from Naota's mouth after he takes the power of the Pirate King, defeats (more accurately 'effortlessly obliterates') the evil robots, and confronts Haruko -- is to explicitly to pull his attack and to tell Haruko "I love you".
It's not a healthy love in any way, or a reciprocated one, or one compatible with The Pirate King's powers (while not out at the time, FLCL Progressive would eventually spend two and a half hours working its way up to joke that Atomysk cock-blocks Haruko; you can wince at the pun). Haruko turns Naota down the very next two sentences: he is, after all, just a kid. But the very point of the story depends on Naota loving Haruko enough that her rejection is unpleasant and something he's been unwilling to risk. The 'NO' metaphor is all of that something awful can and indeed likely will happen when you try, whether for a game or to seek romance. A different NO activation, when Naota confronts Mamimi knowing that she does not love him, does not just cause Mamimi to reject him, but it nearly causes the end of the world!
But Naota learns to do it anyway, because it was only festering otherwise, and because it was important to do on its own (hence the satellite weapon episode, even as Naota tried and failed there).
((And this is still a work-in-progress even as the story ends: I think prokopetz overstates how well Naota is responding to Ninamori in the closing scene.))
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I think a huge issue here is that there are so few who understand narratives and the ideas of metaphors and allegorical language well enough to get it. Most of the media critics I’ve read seem to take everything they see and read absolutely literally— orcs have dreadlocks and are therefore a stereotype of black people and therefore racist. If you don’t present your story literally and bop them over the head with it, they can’t see aliens as stand ins for earthbound culture topics. I got nearly banned from a subreddit defending a nazi planet trek episode that pretty much is anti Nazi in every conceivable way and taken down in short order (by two characters played by Jews no less). They couldn’t get that a story needs a beginning and an answer to the question of why the situation exists in the first place. In the case the alien Nazis were started by a rogue star fleet captain. The people I was talking to just couldn’t quite grasp that characters in a story can do things that the author doesn’t agree with. I don’t know how to create a story with deeper meanings for people who can’t grasp very basic ideas about fiction and storytelling.
So I don’t think it’s the toolkit, the issue is that at the moment there’s a good number of people who just aren’t literate enough to allow anything other than a literal version of the story they want to hear. And I suspect that this is why movies and tv are so bad. You cannot do anything but the literal without toddlers toss their toys out of their playpens in protest. So writers for mainstream content are stuck writing (to quote Critical Drinker) “wonderfully diverse female space Jesus” — a woman who can do nothing wrong and always saves the day. If that woman is ever shown weak, or needing to learn, or needing help, or some mere man saves the day, the literalists in the audience will call the writers sexist.
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You start out talking about not writing a political statement but then end up talking about how to write political propaganda that, unlike most political propaganda, isn't poorly-written or obnoxious. Those are different goals that involve going down diverging pathways. In particular, if you're going to spend time and effort thinking about this sort of thing, how about spending it thinking about the ideologies that exist within your fictional world? Not as an allegory, not as an insertion of current issues with or without commentary, but as part of the worldbuilding. And then instead of deciding ahead of time whether an ideology or political faction is "right" or "wrong" or "it's complicated" based on how it maps to the civil-rights movement or transgenderism or whatever, evaluate it (and let your audience evaluate it) on its own terms, as an outgrowth of relevant issues in the world you have created.
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software talks about something similar:
Instead of looking to contemporary political controversies for your inspiration, you can try looking elsewhere. You can look to history, to political conflicts where every side and even the issues they consider important are likely to be one or both of "alien" or "timeless" to modern perspectives. Similarly you can look to old political philosophy. Or to fiction that is at least old enough to not be part of the current political zeitgeist. You can look to science and technology, to the sorts of things that societies could theoretically be doing if they had different values or structures. You can look at all the setting elements you have for other reasons, for game mechanics or because they're cool or because they're part of the genre or because you had to make some sort of map/factions/history, and seriously think through how people in that world would relate to them.
Think about questions like what views are functional, whether functional for society or the individual or for some subgroup. For a recent example imagine if, before the invention of AI art, you wrote a setting where AI art was possible. I think you probably could have predicted the backlash from some artists, on grounds like economic self-interest and their self-conception, and predicted a lot of the specific rhetoric. Or, if it was invented a while ago, there's other questions like what sort of economic role it ends up fitting into long-term. I don't think this would necessarily be the most compelling setting element, it probably wouldn't be central, but I think it would probably be more interesting than inserting either contemporary politics or a metaphor for them. Maybe some reviewer would interpret it as you criticizing real-world automation as stripping meaning from work, but I don't think it would benefit from you approaching the writing as a metaphor, except perhaps by using history as a reference for how these conflicts can play out.
You don't have to do this, not every work (especially videogames) needs to have ideologies and political conflicts invented for its worldbuilding. The Law of Conservation of Detail is a very real concern, though it can enhance even briefly-mentioned details if you've put more thought into them than the audience expects. But if you don't want to do this you probably shouldn't be wasting your time and the audience's attention-span on contemporary politics either. In that case just use the superficial details that seem to match your setting/genre/aesthetic and don't do anything more. It is unlikely anyone will care. Yes there have been cases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance (targeted by Tumblr psuedohistorian medievalpoc and then game journalists for not having "POC" in their piece of medieval europe) but there are too many games coming out for people to create controversies like that about a meaningful fraction. Especially if you're not dumb enough to respond on social media or release a statement/apology.
One reason transgenderism tends to be particularly badly written in fiction, particularly fiction not set in a western country in 2023, is because it entails an ideological framework that is highly specific and restricted to a particular place and time. People will write a medieval fantasy setting and give characters views popularized on the internet less than a decade ago. Even people who don't think they're writing fiction, like Wikipedia editors writing about historical women who disguised themselves as men, will try to fit it into the trans framework (sometimes resulting in the Wikipedia article having male pronouns). Historical eunuchs and the ideological viewpoints regarding them are more genuinely alien than "what if aliens had...4 genders" or "what if aliens were genderfluid shapeshifters", because neither eunuchs nor the viewpoints regarding them were based on contemporary ideas like gender identity to begin with.
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Generally special interest group characters fail since they take power away from the player.
The super special trans character can't be seen, as you point out, as anything negative. Now you, as a character in the game, have to contend with, to use old terminology, a special snowflake in your game world. A Mary Sue of sorts. You know this character is not going to betray you or anything like that. You are supposed to like them. That's the sole reason they are there. Because of that they will always lord over your world.
It's made even worse by the fact that since the trans character is almost always a self insert of some trans author, they get an elaborate backstory. They are painted out as being perfect and sympathetic. They are now contending with you as a main character in the story. This is bad and stupid.
To borrow from the old Diversity Propaganda playbook on how blacks were integrated: When you want to normalize something and integrate it into the ingroup of others, make it passive, harmless and subservient. When that has been established, make them valuable and endearing.
The ultimate version of this is making the trans person a love interest for the main character. Not that the MC needs to reciprocate. It might even be better to not give the player a choice to reciprocate. But making it clear that the trans character desires the MC gives the MC all the power they need to feel responsible for that character. Which is very powerful.
To that end you need to make the character look more like a trans persons anime profile pic on twitter than what a trans person who cares a lot about trans representation in gaming actually looks like in real life.
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You should read The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing. It has a trans character in it who only reveals she's trans like 30 issues after she first appears. It's in a way that kind of makes you think they might have just come up with it that issue, but if you go back through the previous books you see some hints have been there the whole time, for those looking.
After that it's mentioned a couple of times, but it felt reasonably organic to me, and I am pretty tightly wound about CW shit - I can't play remnant 2 because you start off with that annoying black chick "saving" you and audibly rolling her eyes at the founder being a white guy. I know she doesn't matter after the opening, I've played it for a couple of hours, but when the monsters attack they all surrounded her while I stood off to the side picking them off in safety, and then it cuts to a cut scene where she's saving me, and it instantly shattered the illusion. My suspension of disbelief fell apart and from that moment on I wasn't exploring the Remnant 2 universe, I was operating a computer program in which various systems interact and can be exploited.
Every time I tried to let go of that and get back into it, I'd think about her scoffing at the old white guy and lose it again immediately. That line destroys the illusion worse than being "saved", because I assume the "saving" issue was a glitch, or me playing on a lower difficulty than I should have - and in most people's games they would be too busy dodging monsters and trying to save their own ass to notice her getting overwhelmed, and so the cutscene would actually be saving you and we could transfer those feelings to the character.
But that droll line about the founder being an old white guy was meant, from the get go, to be understood outside of the game. It was gasfire games pandering to the woke, saying "uh we know the first game (which was full of diversity by the way) had the temerity to have a heroic old white man in it, but we started this game off with a black woman! And we made the player her sidekick to start! Please don't eat our faces!"
In universe it doesn't make a single jot of sense. In universe you are one of the last humans alive travelling through a terrifying universe that wants you and every other human dead. In universe it doesn't matter at all who actually saved the last dregs of humanity, it only matters that someone did, and anyone petty enough to be concerned with the configuration of their dangly bits or the colour of their skin is closer to a monster than a fellow survivor. So every time I'd think about that line I'd be pulled from the game again, unable to see it as anything other than a big skinner box with rng elements.
Also it's (The Immortal Hulk) got some great body horror set pieces if you like that kind of thing and can ignore the zoomer eco-pandering.
You might appreciate this sketch, so 😁
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I don't think it's that difficult to drop Hammerlock-style hints and not treat it as a big deal, especially if it wouldn't be a big deal in-universe.
Example, minor spoilers for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, also tagging @TowardsPanna , who asked about it in the Friday thread.
There's a NPC character who is a "trans" woman. I put that in quotes because this is a universe where you can literally take a magic potion and permanently transform into the opposite sex (or, presumably, like, a giant spider if that's more your style). You only find out if you pick up some random junk item, then ask the character's spouse about it (spouse wants to keep it private and won't tell you the details), then ask the character about it again much later in the game. You could easily finish the game and not come across that detail.
That seemed totally fine? It respects the worldbuilding and doesn't come off as unrealistic, or in your face.
Contrast with the Hogwarts Legacy character that stood out like a sore thumb, not so much because she was a non-passing transwoman, but because the HP universe has transformation magic, and if that exists, why would any transwoman not avail themselves of it?
You could also do ambiguously-trans, like this character in the recent pokemon games. When I saw this market, I was pretty baffled - hadn't even considered that when playing through the games - but reading the evidence, it does seem plausible.
Huh, that is NOT the character I thought it would be! I assumed Jacq, the home room/biology teacher.
Pokemon handles things well enough. During character creation you choose to be a boy or girl, but none of the hairstyles or clothing are gender locked. There's lots of NPC's who have a femme appearance and masc pronouns or vice-versa. NPC's commonly get gender-swapped between versions, I seem to recall one in a previous generation kept the same appearance but used different pronouns.
I don't think Penny is intended to be trans-coded, though.There's some gender-bending and misdirection around her two alter-egos Big Boss and Cassiopeia. The statements "Penny is pretending to be a boy" and "Penny is pretending to be a girl" are both literally true, we don't need to posit another layer! Also, I know two Eevee-obsessed little girls who would be devastated if their hero turned out to secretly be a boy...
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I've had one game in mind for a while that plays some kind of dangerous games with gender and race, in that there are random events where the racial makeup of the character's party is actually kinda important on a gameplay level. I think this is doable without it being a complete nightmare!
I was never able to work sexuality or trans into the mix, though. At least for sexuality, I was going to say "look, they are all afraid for their lives, there is not time to get naked, that's just never going to come up".
For trans, though, I figured my best answer was "yeah, trans people exist in this world. medical science is really good though, you just go get a shot, then you have, like, a really bad flu for like a week, it sucks, it's miserable. once it's done you've just changed sex. not a big deal. nobody brings it up because it's not relevant."
I seem to recall there was a weird issue like that in the Baldur's Gate remix, where you can literally get a girdle of gender change, but for some reason you can't just give it to the trans person to solve their problem. I admit it's extra-weird when games try to make it a Political Thing when it isn't even compatible with the universe.
Yes. Also from what I heard (not having reached that character on any recent playthroughs), unlike almost every other NPC in the game, you can only respond positively in dialogue. You don't get the choice to dislike, or be snarky or mean, just accepting.
Honestly, I think a simple quest where they want you to get "a girdle that this ogre bandit has", without telling you why (and then after completion if you press them they tell you, or maybe they show up again later wearing the girdle and thank you) would have been the way to go, but I'm sure there would have been complaints all the same.
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But why? I genuinely don't see a reason to try and have a trans person in your videogame that isn't really calling attention to their transness, and also, I suppose making them seem portrayed in a positive(ish?) manner. I suppose if you are doing something very scifi you could introduce something similar to the Mixmasters, but in a non-sci-fi world it doesn't make sense to try and depict transness in a positive light.
Why not?
There exists some fraction of the population which experiences gender weirdness. Trans or at least nonconforming. Making a modern-era game where they’re conspicuously absent would be…editorial. Not reflective of the world around us. Like making a medieval game without religion, or a Wild West game without rifles. It’s something that happens, but I can see why one would prefer to be accurate instead.
Because of the huge quantity of transpeople or because of them being the flavour of the month minority and therefore temporarily very culturally salient? If the latter, calling their "conspicuous" would be kind of circular.
Even if you mean the former, I would see leaving them out more like not mentioning people sick with leprosy in a medieval game, instead of leaving out knights. They exist in some quantity, but are very concentrated in specific areas.
A little of both?
Cultural salience is the main reason. A medieval peasant knew about leprosy, even if they didn’t see lepers on a daily or even yearly basis. I can’t blame a game for not including lepers or even writing relevant dialogue, because dev resources are limited. But when one does include a throwaway mention, I think it’s fair to call it slightly more true-to-life.
I also don’t think they’re as concentrated as it might seem. Again, I’m in a red industry in a red city in a red state, and I know several trans people. About half of them from college.
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I have met literally one trans person in my entire life. And that was at a university so not exactly in neutral territory.
Lucky. I've got a handful work in my building.
The problem is that they don’t even slightly pass and you know you’re going to slip up eventually. If you’re interacting closely with them in public you’ve got that hanging over your head constantly.
Plus all the usual issues with compelled speech, of course.
Eh, this really depends on the person. About ten years ago one of my co-workers announced they were trans and asked us to use new pronouns and names for them, but acknowledged that we'd been working together for years and we'd slip up occasionally. So we did our best, but we slipped up occasionally, and she corrected us when we did, and we said "shucks, sorry", and she laughed and said "don't worry about it", and we gradually got better at it.
There's definitely people who are dicks about this but there's also people who are not dicks about this.
This was in a university context. Even if the person in question had been more accommodating than she in fact was, the fact is that a bystander would very likely have reported it to HR.
In short, in that context there was no way of making it a request rather than an order even if she’d wanted to. I was forced to lie every single day. I hated it then and I still resent it now.
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This sorta rubs me the wrong way, but I find it difficult to articulate why. I've had similar encounters with a trans worker in my office, and my occasional slip-up with their pronouns never raised to the level of being harangued about it or being threatened with HR. I did indeed "get better at it", and we continued to work together as well as anybody else until one of us transitioned to other projects.
But what precisely did I get better at? Being polite about something that I think is frankly ridiculous. And while there are many beliefs or opinions I find ridiculous wether religious or political, they never come up in a professional context or require an update to my language model. I have a lot of negative things to say about Islam, but that's neither here nor there when I'm working shoulder to shoulder with a Muslim peer. It just doesn't come up, and neither of us can make any demands of each other.
No matter how much it was prettied up, a falsehood (IMO) was being imposed on me, and there is no escaping or ignoring the sword hanging over my head if I were to continue to misstep, or politely respond that this preferred pronoun business is not my bag, but I still fully respect you as a fellow coworker. Basically, I reject the idea that I am 'slipping up' at all when I refer to them with the pronouns that historically correspond with their birth sex. Even a well-intentioned "No foul! You'll get the hang of it in time" gets my hackles up, as if there is a deficiency on my end requiring shoring up.
I wouldn't say they were being dicks - that's far too strong a word. But I don't think "not being a dick about it" lets them off the hook for what they're doing, because it still boils down "do it or else" in the end. No amount of smiles or soft chuckles about my faux pas changes that.
My coworker seemed fine in all other respects. We could crack jokes about other topics, talk vidya, bitch about work. But I never stopped being on the backfoot about their pronouns, because continued absentmindedness or deliberate refusal would be a road to catastrophe. I could say I used their pronouns because I respected them, but it was also inseparable from the motive of self-preservation. And when the motives are mixed up like that, I don't know if I'm being fully honest with myself regarding my intentions.
Thinking it over, I think part of the reason I don't have an issue with it is, ironically, because of the close working relationship. If there's someone I'm interacting with in a professional capacity every day or two, yeah, I don't have any problem making a little room in my brain for pronoun and name; hell, I'm already making some room in my brain for their name, I've just got to change which name is stored in there. (And for what it's worth, they passed reasonably well, so the pronoun wasn't a big deal either aside from the transition period.)
Whereas if it's someone I only intereacted with every few months and every time I talked to them they had a new pronoun/name, my answer would be "dude, pick one and stick with it, or at least stop bugging me about it". And I can kinda understand if someone who hadn't worked with her more closely had more trouble with the transition.
I think nicknames work the same way. There's a few people I've worked with who, quite frankly, I never found out the "real" name of, because they kept using a nickname. But that's okay! As far as I'm concerned, that was their name, so, hey, no sweat.
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Drawing from this anecdote, it's worth examining what other groups get to impose this sort of compelled cooperation with their mental idiosyncrasies. I recall people really, really not liking public prayer, for an example. It's hard to imagine any level of enforced cooperation with Christian preferences under our current norms, for example.
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It's the "some fraction". At the moment, for all the figures we can get which are not particularly great, the transgender etc. percentage of the world population is estimated anywhere from 0.1% to 5%.
So that is more like "making a game without Zoroastrinians it it would be editorial". Yeah, if I'm setting the work in the Middle East in classical times, it would be, but not if I'm setting it in 13th century Florence.
Certainly "if you set something in San Francisco and have no trans people" that's 'not reflective of the world around us', but for a lot of places "maybe somebody is trans but the population here is likely to be 98% cis" so it wouldn't be editorial. That's the problem with adaptations of books for TV fantasy, it's been pointed out that the small village in Wheel of Time which is noted to be isolated and off the beaten track was put on screen with a racial mixture more akin to 21st century New York.
That's where the pick-n-mix approach to "make sure you have Representation" falls down, because you're ticking off "do I have at least one of each racial, sexual, and gender minority?" boxes instead of developing the characters organically, and you have to make sure you have your characters labelled for easy identification so the critical hordes don't descend to scream about -phobia and -ism. We've already had this kind of kerfuffle in YA publishing.
I'm aware of this issue and have heard about it extensively from other people; but do you happen to know of any good write-ups about it?
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I tried to be careful about that with the qualifier, “modern-era.” Yeah, if someone goes for modern trans dynamics in a Jane Austen setting, they are definitely making a political move. It was jarring enough that HogLeg imported modern tropes, and I can’t even tell how serious they were being.
But OP was talking about anything that wasn’t sci-fi. For modern, urban, American settings, I think it’s justifiable. As @Hyperion correctly points out, that constitutes a lot of today’s media.
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I think Razib Khan said it best when he said they cast these shows like they are demographically the same as a major midwestern city. Even if it's in fields like medicine that are overwhelmingly south/east Asian. It feels like people think casting in major films is just a jobs program for whatever demographics are common in Hollywood and New York at the time, without regard for how they actually contribute to the final product.
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Is your contention that the vast majority of all creative output prior to the mid 2000s fails to be reflective of the world around us due to the paucity of trans representation? You're right when you say that some fraction of the population experiences gender weirdness, but there's no actual justification for assuming that this weirdness will manifest as a trans identity throughout all of time and space (it certainly didn't for the majority of recorded history, and for large portions of the world today).
I think the vast majority of content set in $CURRENT_YEAR got it a little wrong, yeah.
There are perfectly good reasons for this. I don’t blame the average dev for not wasting time on modeling every niche detail of today’s culture.
It’s like raytracing for mirrors, or other graphical improvements. I don’t judge a game for using screen-space reflections or the old “copy your stuff behind the mirror” trick. I’m also not going to complain when someone adds the feature. Some fan will no doubt have a wonderful time posting screenshots to Reddit and marveling at the inclusion.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your first post and missed the "modern-era". I still disagree, but this is now a matter of personal preference so there's no point discussing it.
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Because the kind of trans person he is describing doesn't exist in the real world. So its not representative, if you were to do it that way it would be "editorial" to use your word. It would be a form of extreme pro-trans-ideology propaganda.
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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?
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.
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There is a way, but it would get you cancelled.
Depict a small,very depressed, woman with a short haircut and removed breasts.
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Make him a 5’1 dude with a trans pride flag hidden in his shop somewhere and endorse the fan theory.
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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.
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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!'
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.)
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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.
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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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Some thoughts:
One way to kill two birds with one stone: A happily married couple with multiple genetic kids. The parents are of the same apparent gender, but it is made clear in some way that the kids are the exclusive results of a genetic pairing of the two parents. You know there is a male and there is a female. But you can't plausibly tell which is which.
The problem with Trans in our society is that we don't really have the technology to do a successful gender transition. I'm not sure what degree of controversy would still exist if you could press a button, and it would change you at the genetic level to the other gender, and reverse any effects of your previous gender on your body.
If aliens are in the game, please don't be boring. One of the fun things about Dr. Who is that some of the episodes with aliens involved are actually ya know, alien. Not just humans in lame skin suits like most of star trek and star wars.
Gender trans people might be super boring in the future. The real controversy is around species trans. What to do with the people that want to transition into a reptile form? They basking in the sun on busy roads, laying their eggs in hospitals meant for human babies, and insisting on eating meat like the consummate carnivores they've transition into.
Creating contrast with aliens might be useful, but to avoid accusations of "you are calling trans people aliens" you can always make the aliens the stodgy ones stuck in their ways. That is what the Star Trek episode did with the halfy faces people. Maybe have an alien race that is unwilling to undergo the slightest amount of body modification. No haircuts for aliens! Or no dyeing their hair. Or no tatoos. Etc. The trick here is just finding some reason why that thing needs to be important to the aliens. Or maybe their gender roles are just much more solid and unswitcheable. The female warrior is not just unlikely, it is forbidden. The male caretaker is forbidden. Etc. Make it a matter of survival to have flexible gender roles.
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I mean, the problem is nobody knows what trans people are. Are they born that way? Is it a social contagion? Is it a fetish? A mental illness?
You could try to go the Uhura route and just calmly show that trans people exists and are like other people. But even Uhura can't be done these days. Nu-Trek is all about being as on the nose as possible, because subtlety doesn't work on fascist. A person screamed this in my face when I complained I didn't like new Star Trek, in front of our families and everything at 10 AM at a farmers market. So, even assuming a Uhura type character was an option with trans people, which you seem to believe it isn't by their nature, I'm not sure it's the sort of option you think it is. It's not enough to just not be racist, you have to be explicitly anti-racist. That's the new state of the art, and the bar you must clear to not get smeared.
That leaves allegory, but like I said, if we don't even know what trans people are, how you choose to do the allegory matters a great deal. You fixate a lot on that famous ST:TOS episode. However there was a particularly based episode of Star Trek: Voyager where Nelix feels sorry for this convict who is telling all these sob stories about how oppressed his people are.
ChadTom Paris states the obvious about them as a matter of record actually committing more crime. The story ends with Nelix trying to help this sad oppressed minority, and getting stabbed in the back for it, and endangering the entire ship when they proceed to crime them.There was another rather based episode of DS9 where the station happens upon an infant Jem'Hadar. I believe it was Doctor Bashir who attempts to raise this fast growing genetically engineers shock trooper into a well adjusted member of society. Unfortunately for everyone, it just can't fight it's violent genetic programming and begins attacking people seemingly at random across the station. In the end it's returned to The Dominion where they can care for it better.
So, if we take as a given that those Star Trek episodes are allegories for race, they say vastly different things than your TOS episode. Likewise, any allegory you choose for trans people will broadcast loud and clear where you come down on what trans people fundamentally are.
While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.
Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.
IMHO, Voyager beats the pants off anything that came after. When I binged TNG, DS9 and Voyager in a row, I found myself really enjoying Voyager in a way similar to how I enjoyed TNG. DS9 was good, but Voyager was a return to form for me. None of the cast really had the swagger or the gravitas to really elevate it, but they put out some remarkably solid Trek stories. Even if they did start leaning into Jeri Ryan's assets.
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So…what did you think about celeste?
This is a game about getting thrown down a mountain by, then learning to cooperate with, your alter ego. It is a Rorschach blot of a concept, matching to gender, to puberty, to whatever. It’s also attached to what is apparently one of the best platformers of the decade. I have no doubt that a lot of people played the whole thing without scanning it as a trans allegory. Others surely felt like it was a heartfelt, personal message. Some of them were trans, and as it would later turn out, their interpretation was correct.
How does one make a respectful allegory?
Choose the conflict carefully. We like stories that make us feel strong emotions, empathy, sympathy, spite. We also like to feel that it’s genuine. Trek managed it by capturing a very particular zeitgeist. A more timeless approach is to make it personal, drawing from authorial experience. Something you know evokes strong emotions, because you’ve felt them. Getting personal also means getting niche, and reduces the chance your audience has already seen the same story, executed better.
Hollywood is not optimized for this. Neither is AAA gaming. When you’re already on the right side of the cultural-awareness bell curve, you have a lot more to lose by going for a niche appeal. Thus it converges on easier appeals. Coming-of-age and hero’s-journey stories. Tokenism and audience pandering.
Yeah, I believe that this story is really about being trans just as much as I believe that The Matrix is really about being trans. That is, not at all. The ability of people to mold their memories to reflect a new identity narrative is amazing.
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Yeah, Celeste is a tough example for exactly that reason, and while I didn't mention it in the above post, I did have it in mind. It's kind of an example of how you can be about as careful as possible and still make it turn into a Big Political Thing. I'm not really sure how to do better than that with humans.
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The Star Trek episode with the men who are black on one side and white on the other works first time through, but then it makes things worse. A black man watches the episode, gets the anti-racist religion, and invites a white man onto his basket ball team. The team starts losing matches because white men cannot jump. He gets two wake up calls.
The first is that racial differences are real.
The second is about TV shows pushing messages. The message was that racism is wrong because racial differences are illusory. The reasoning turns out to be invalid. Is racism right or wrong? Technically, an invalid argument sheds no light on the matter because it is invalid. Now what?
The unsuccessful message-push invites an adverse inference. Perhaps the adverse inference is that the script writers went with a "racial differences are illusory" narrative because they are naive people who have lead sheltered lives. Perhaps the adverse inference is that the script writers are aware of racial differences, but realized that an artistically truthful story may encourage racism, so went with false story to suit their ideology.
The second wake up call could stimulate more than one concern. Viewed narrowly it could make viewers think: that was a bad argument against racism, maybe racists are right. Viewed more broadly it could make viewers question all the teaching stories that they have learned from. As a child, one longs to grow up, yet the grown up world is complicated and confusing. One hopes that shows such as Star Trek are not irresponsible entertainments, but teach good and true lessons about the adult world.
The allegory for racism is implicitly claiming that racial differences are illusory. Worse than that, the screen writers assume that the audience will not notice that this is false. Should one look for a Straussian reading? Perhaps the script writers want to warn their audience that racism is true, but are not allowed to do so. They construct a parable: different races are merely mirror images of each other, not really different at all, therefore racism is bad. The script writers hope that their audience will notice for themselves that racial differences are real and important, and then the true, racist message will be revealed. Err, no. I'm over thinking Star Trek.
A more realistic concern goes like this. One rather hopes that the Philosopher-King has convened a council of philosophers to chose age appropriate wisdom to be embedded in shows for children. Philosophers aren't screen writers. Screen writers aren't philosophers. Yet the team effort does the trick. The screen writers write entertaining children's shows and the embedded messages are truly wise. One's hopes are dashed. The screen writers write an anti-racist allegory that is stupid and maybe ends up discrediting the anti-racist message. There is no Philosopher-King, no council of philosophers, just advertisers demanding high viewing figures and TV executives demanding low production costs. The screen writers do their best to be productive and churn out passable product as quickly as they can. Uncontroversial scripts in line with conventional wisdom. Perhaps poor life lessons, but the merchandising is profitable.
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You know, I sort of wonder. The human brain is known to be asymmetrical; we have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere that function differently.
Which means that it's entirely possible that someone who is white on the right half of their body and black on the left half is actually importantly different from someone who's white on the left half and black on the right half.
Oh no
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For now, I would recommend against trying to make an allegory about transness, because the trans movement appears to me to be still far too much in philosophical flux for me to have any confidence that an acceptable, compassionate understanding arrived at today will still be considered so a few years from now. Because some pretty basic questions still seem to be actively controversial:
What is transness, exactly? How does it relate to gender dysphoria? What is gender, for that matter, and how is it related to sex? And I could go on, but that's probably enough already to ignite a firestorm of controversy, perhaps from participants who would all insist that there is no controversy.
Can you be confident that an answer you give today will not be seen as either the bigoted hooting of a backwards troglodyte, or a preposterous strawman that nobody serious ever really believed, by the time your game comes out? (Or, in fact, that won't be seen as both at once by equally legitimate-seeming camps today?) Cardinal Richelieu once said that he could find a capital crime in no more than six lines written by the most honest of men; on this topic I'd expect it's closer to six words. Progress on the trans movement, more than anything else today, can move at breakneck speeds, and if you don't want to risk it breaking your neck, I recommend standing clear until it has arrived at its destination.
If you are confident that you see a coherent philosophy undergirding the present state of the trans movement, I would like to hear what it is, though I personally don't think I'm likely to expect it to hold.
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I'd go with a (truly) genderfluid shapeshifter. Modify the exterior, and keep a somewhat consistent interior, and you can even play the interior across type -- where the hyperfemale body is balanced by a somewhat male personalty.
That brings up the same issues as "what if we had easy sex change?":
if you take the claims of trans supporters seriously, a trans-like shapeshifter would claim to be one particular sex regardless of what body they are in at the moment, like someone who insists on being referred to as long-haired even after shaving their hair.
If it's possible for the shapeshifter to have a personality of a specific sex, that means that it's possible to be wrong about being trans, since it would also be possible to be wrong about what sex your personality is.
This is sort of getting off the hypothetical, but from my perspective I think it's kind of unarguable that not everyone approaches sex the same way. Some people think it's vitally important, some people think it's largely irrelevant and pointless. I say this as someone who considers themselves agender, in the "why do all of you care about this anyway, sheesh" sense, married to someone who feels very strongly that she's female.
I think (sorry in advance, this sentence is going to be a trainwreck) that anyone who thinks that everyone feels the same way on any subject should really rethink their position. Diversity is a third rail of a word right now, but regardless, I truly do believe that part of the beauty of humanity is our intellectual diversity.
But everyone who's in charge of the discourse does approach sex the same way (or pretends to). The set of acceptable pro-trans opinions is smaller than the set of pro-trans opinions.
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But even this is a culture war move--this is the classically liberal "color blind" approach. I think it's a great approach! But I am assured by the badly-named "anti-racism" crowd that the "color blind" approach is bad. We get this in the recent "Secret Invasion" scene where Fury leans on Rhodes for some color-based solidarity--using aliens as a stand-in wasn't enough, we had to get some explicit discussion of segregation so everyone knows that the only message that matters is (as Scott recently put it) "re-enacting the 60s civil rights struggle."
Sometimes, yes, but I remember someone in the last ten years (Yudkowsky?) pithily observing that it is almost impossible to write an engaging story about mature individuals making responsible choices. Without conflict, where is the catharsis? In fact I have seen (and personally very much enjoyed) a growing number of counterexamples in recent years, mostly in anime, indie games, and Nintendo titles (especially stuff like Animal Crossing)--a sort of "comfort food" genre that (for probably obvious reasons) attracts more women to traditionally masculine media. I note that even, say, Stardew Valley does not quite meet this mark, given the pressure imposed by the clock and the calendar. But many "overpowered protagonist" anime titles do seem to hit this mark--Farming Life in Another World, for example.
I think Key & Peele's "Office Homophobe" helpfully illustrates the difference--except that there are real, fairly serious disagreements about this, often discussed under the heading of "visibility." The point of "Pride Parades" is often explicitly articulated as visibility. During the "sexual revolution," the winning legal argument for pornography as "free speech" was that pornography is a special kind of argument for a different kind of world--a world where people are less perplexed and uptight about sex.
I feel like you make some good observations here but you only seem to be thinking about one half of the discussion, namely, the half where you want to know how you are supposed to "decide what [human characters should] look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color." The other half of the discussion is, why do you need to decide that? Not in the trivial sense (you have to decide that because, if you're going to have human characters at all, they must be plausibly human), but in the deeper sense of how your artistic choices are going to be driven. Do you "need to decide so your game is marketable?" That will give you a different answer than if you "need to decide so you don't offend your development team," or "so your plot makes any sense," or "so your game meets your/someone else's threshold of realism," or whatever.
So if you want to include a "trans" character in a game, my first question is, "okay, why?" And to be clear--"I just feel like it" is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, if all you care about is art for the sake of art. But in most contexts, either your "trans" character is going to be "invisible" in just the sense you observe, or they are going to be so visible that your cultural milieu makes it a "thing." For it to not be a thing would require a world (either the one we live in, or the one in the game) where "gender markers" are slim-to-nonexistent. Feminist scholar Sally Haslanger once wrote, "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." She (and many feminists) seem to really believe that the biological differences between men and women can be of no particular moment in an egalitarian world, to the point where we don't even have language to distinguish such things. Gender eliminativism, however, runs strongly counter to the gender essentialism expressed by most transsexuals today. To create a fictional universe where being trans is not noticeable, and yet trans characters are also not invisible, you can't create a universe where some characters are trans, you have to create a universe where there are no socially constructed gender norms.
I guess what I'm bringing myself around to is the idea that transsexuality just is a political identity, as surely as "Republican" or "Democrat." Either a trans character is noticeably violating gender norms (in which case, they are calling attention to themselves) or they are living up to gender norms (in which case, they are invisible). Just as you'll never know whether that background character is a Catholic or a monarchist or a /b/tard unless it comes up in the storyline, you'll never know a video game character is trans unless it gets advertised in some way.
But probably you should care about that approximately as much, and for approximately the same reasons, as you care about making sure there are enough Muslims or women or incels in your game (which, depending on your game, might matter anywhere from "not at all" to "a whole damn lot"). Depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about race is pretty easy, given the medium of video games; you see characters who look wildly different, and you see that nobody cares. Forget Uhura; check out the friendship between Han Solo and Chewbacca! But depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about gender requires you to build an in-game society where nobody cares about gender, which like... as long as we're a sexually dimorphic species for whom pair-bonding is (at least temporarily) necessary for procreation, that's probably flatly impossible. But in a transhumanist society where body-swapping is feasible and the act of sex has been obsoleted by an infinite variety of pleasure-generating technologies, basically everyone is going to be "trans" by contemporary standards.
In short: why? If you want to make propaganda, make some propaganda. If you don't want to make propaganda, then either non-attention-called trans people or an allegory for trans people will be varying shades of possible depending entirely on what else you're demanding from your game. A realistic 1920s noir thriller where one character happens to be openly and noticeably trans and nobody cares will fail to be authentic, and this will invite totally understandable criticism (in fact, it will obviously be propaganda, even if you prefer it not to be propaganda). A cyberpunk RPG where you can give your character breasts and a penis, by contrast, is unlikely to attract the same kind of attention (even though it will still probably attract some complaints).
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
Because it's a challenge.
So, to be sure I'm understanding: when you say "prove it can/'t be done," it seems like "it" here refers, not to including a trans character in a game--since you already know that trans characters have been included in games--but to creating either "trans characters that are never called attention to" or "characters that are an allegory for trans people."
In the case of the former, you are stuck on the "invisibility" problem: "The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's 'obviously successfully trans' - it's contradictory!" To this I can only respond that contradiction is the beating heart of transsexuality. If gender essentialism is true, then a male who is wired to pursue the Platonic Feminine will always fall short in some way (until we unlock transhumanist body-swapping in the tech tree); because males cannot bear children, there is no such thing as being "successfully" trans, only varying degrees of failure.
(Note that this is also true for infertile women, many of whom struggle emotionally with infertility and regard themselves at some level as failures as women. I observe in passing: how many pregnant women have you seen in video games? Conversely, does infertility strike you as like transsexuality in terms of how difficult it would be to depict in a video game "without calling attention to it?")
But if gender essentialism is false, then it's not even clear what being "successfully trans" can possibly mean, because there is no Platonic Feminine--there are only varying degrees of conformity or nonconformity to socially constructed gender expectations. Either a male who perfectly presents as feminine just is a woman by definition (if gender is inessential and divorced from sex, then there is no such thing as a "transwoman," just people behaving in ways that society arbitrarily dubs masculine or feminine) or there is no gender binary at all, no "men" or "women" in truth but only a whole bunch of people behaving in a diverse array of ways.
The contemporary practice of transsexuality can only even exist in a society that maintains a fairly strict gender binary but also makes sociolinguistic accommodations for people who transgress that binary. For a trans character to be a trans character, you either have to commit to gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to eschew gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to situate your character within a game setting where transsexuality is as explicitly noticeable as race but also never remarked upon. (This might be done, for example, through widespread use of neopronouns, or trans flags, or ubiquitous nudity.) But here I'm basically repeating myself: the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding.
Allegories I think should be much easier, in part because queer theory is absolutely drowning in them. An intimately-told story of a woman's struggle with infertility could very easily be an allegory for transsexuality. There are also many, many stories of gender-norm violation throughout history, including women sneaking into Plato's Academy, women dressing as men in Shakespeare's plays, and so forth. "Are these characters actually trans?" is a common topic in writing in the humanities.
Whether any of this rises to the level of showing people "how to politics better" I leave an open question.
This seems like a bit of a motte to me, along the lines of "putting black people in a game (or movie) is not propaganda." Well, no, not all by itself. But there are settings where it makes more and less sense to do, and ways it can seem more or less like propaganda. Including a "successfully trans" character in your 21st century horror RPG is a very different thing than including a similarly-situated trans character in your 16th century open world samurai simulator (Uhura would also not go well in such a game!). Incongruously imposing 21st century American notions of sex and gender on historical settings is propaganda no matter how you might care to protest the contrary. Imposing those same ideas on a fantasy world of your own devising, much less so.
Again--if I've understood you--the "challenge" you have in mind does not seem to be the mere inclusion of trans characters in games, but the presentation of trans characters at the level of Uhura: visible, but unremarkable. What I think I am trying to suggest to you is that Roddenberry's artistic success in this regard (as distinct from his strategic success in the world we inhabit) was not his inclusion of the black Uhura character, but in his construction of a world where it makes sense for her blackness to pass unremarked. You have asked a character-crafting question when you are actually facing a worldbuilding problem.
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I'm unaware of any particular importance asssigned to hair color aside from a couple of jokes and maybe a few genuinely obsolete beliefs about gingers, yet we still have language to distinguish hair colors.
Well, I certainly don't endorse Haslanger's argument, but I think the most charitable interpretation is probably that we would still have words like "male" and "female" (and still use them in most of the contexts where we tend to use those particular words today) but that the words "man" and "woman" (and in racial contexts, the words "white" and "black") are packed with social meaning we must discard if we're ever going to live in an egalitarian society.
And to be blunt: I think this is absurd, and Haslanger's having written the words I quoted substantially decreases my ability to take her seriously in other ways. But this is the kind of thing you find when you dig into all the "critical theory" schools, be that gender or sexuality or race or whatever. The best I can do to steelman such arguments is to acknowledge that if we ever do have the technology to move our minds into manufactured bodies, then concepts like "race" and "gender" and "sexuality" are likely to in fact face annihilation. But since we do not have such technology, almost nothing said by these people makes any sense if their goal is to apply it to the world we actually inhabit.
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Oh my goodness, you read my mind! I recently read a horror short story and okay, it's horror, bad things are going to happen, but the main couple were so horrible. I asked myself "why doesn't anyone write people who are married who actually like each other?" She was awful, he was awful, I had no idea why they got married or stayed married and I didn't care by the time the bad things happened because frankly they both deserved it.
Is it because marriage is supposed to be one of the Bad Patriarchal Things? Is the influence of literary fiction still casting a shadow over the entire topic? I know the general idea is that tragedies are more interesting and if you are going to have horrible things happen to your characters, they should deserve those things, but for once I'd really like to read "married couple who are decent people and like each other and aren't secretly hating and despising their spouse".
Emperor's New Groove?
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In the preface to Speaker for the Dead Orson Scott Card writes about "adolescent" vs "adult" main characters. He doesn't deal with it in those terms, but in effect what he is saying is that the Campbellian hero can't be someone who is already playing a fully realised adult role in his community (in his worldview as well as mine, this is approximately synonymous with "married with kids") because the hero arc doesn't make sense. So to write a heroic story with "adult" main characters (OSC's goal in Speaker/Xenocide/Children of the Mind) you have to do something else.
In my view, OSC fails - but I still love the books for HFY/superversive type reasons. Speaker and Children are both carried off by "adolescent" heroes - the still-single Ender in Speaker with a number of pequinino "brother" pigs (who we later learn are literal adolescents when the pequinino life-cycle is revealed) as supporting characters; and young Peter, Si Wang-Mu and Jane-as-young-Val in Children. Xenocide is a relative stinker because it doesn't have this - the central plot conceit is that Ender's struggle to bring harmony to the Ribiera family as stepfather turns into a metaphor for the broader struggle to restore harmony on Lusitania and in the wider galaxy. It almost, but not quite, works.
As a separate point, in last week's thread we had the Barbie discourse which talked about the idea of the fundamental male (hero's journey) and female (abandon your demons and embrace your inner fabulousness) character development arcs as being about SMV increase. A happily married man who goes on a hero's journey is not going to develop into a man who gets the girl, he is going to develop into a man whose wife loves him less than the man she married. This works well as the apotheosis arc where the hero who we saw complete the journey and get the girl in series 1 is called away from "happily ever after" to perform one last act of heroism to pull out the good guys win in series 2, and normally gets himself killed in the process. (Think Tony Stark in *Avengers: Endgame). But it doesn't work well as a regular hero story.
Funnily enough, that reminds me of the Druss the Legend stories. A happily married man has his village invaded and his wife captured by slavers, so he goes off to rescue her and in the process changes so drastically from who he used to be, that when he finally finds his wife again (who has since remarried to a guy who treats her decently), the story doesn't give us a simple resolution to this.
I was more impressed by the series than I expected to be; I read the first book looking for something fun but stupid, just popcorn entertainment, and it sounded like it would fit the bill, but then the characters insisted on having (at least a little) depth!
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The best part about How I Met Your Mother was Lily and Marshall's relationship, for this exact reason. Barney was funny, but he was a one-joke character that you couldn't actually invest in or care about (and the show's efforts right at the end to turn him into an actual person were just awkward and bad). Ted and Robin's endless strings of failed romances deadened the viewer to the point that by the time they finally end up together as the happily ever after, all you can do is roll your eyes and say "yeah, I give it 3 months". Lily and Marshall, just by being a couple that fell in love, got married, and stayed together, felt fresh and exciting even though this is one of the most well travelled storylines in real life history.
Lily and marshall are in a long term relationship at the start of the show, and they still have a whole thing where Lily bails on marshal to run away to the west coast to do art. Sure, she regrets it. But the show still uses breaking them up as a source of drama.
Not as bad as the endless on again off again thing done by most sitcoms (and done in HImYm with ted and robin) but not as good as Parks and rec where the couples that the writers actually want to have be together never have temporary break ups used as a cheap source of drama.
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Way of the Househusband has a very happy marriage, for one. And many of the couples in Lark Rise to Candleford, for all their arguments, genuinely care for and love each other. I'm sure I know other properties, but not off the top of my head.
It must be more common outside the US. Downton Abbey and Parasite are another two that I can think of.
But yeah I'm shocked at how hard this is. Looking through the top movies on IMDB the only other one after 2016 that jumps out as having a happy family at the center of the story is Coco. The rest are either no families, dysfunctional families or widows/widowers.
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It wasn't by Laird Barron was it?
How did you guess? Is this a trope of his, because these were anthologies and there were a couple of his stories in them and one of them had me going "yeah, congratulations, I know this is meant to be a shitty world but you just couldn't resist giving that tiny little extra tweak to make it even shittier, even though it doesn't do anything for the story, could you?"
Lol no, Barron does rely heavily on the crapsack world trope, but the reason I guessed is because I remember thinking the same thing after reading that story - as soon as you said "She was awful, he was awful, I had no idea why they got married or stayed married and I didn't care by the time the bad things happened because frankly they both deserved it." I thought of that short story, it encapsulates it perfectly.
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I was talking with my wife about this a few nights ago. I literally strain to remember the last bit of pop culture I consumed with a happy married couple raising children. The most recent I could come up with was Jim and Pam from The Office.
Anyone who thinks being happily married and raising children has no interesting fodder for story telling has clearly never been meaningfully involved in the effort. I think most of the writers, editors and producers of our pop culture are still exorcising their trauma over their own parents bitter divorce. And it shows in how they depict very nearly every "traditional" man/woman relationship as ending in profound existential tragedy.
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Allegedly they were going to push the Jim & Pam marital troubles even further, realized nobody wanted that, and backtracked hard. At least, I saw that once in a youtube video.
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Looking at Schur's other shows, he has a pattern.
Leslie and Ben, and April and Andy, from Parks and Recreation.
Terry and Sharon, then Jake and Amy from Brooklyn 99.
Happy couples that get together and stay together for the duration of the show.
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I would guess it’s because we already have a stable of tropes ready to go for dysfunctional marriages. It’s not like Gone With the Wind was fighting the Patriarchy.
All the most fundamental conflicts are internecine. Cain and Abel, Kronos eating his children, Oedipus Rex.
I wonder if it's because the traditional tropes were the 'happily married couple raising a family' or at least the social pressure was the perception of such, so to depict unhappy marriages or divorces or single parenthood was fresh and daring and revolutionary. And then critiquing mainstream society and the model of marriage and family got taken up in the 70s political struggles of feminism and gay rights and the rest of it, so deconstructing marriage as "that 50s model of Mom in heels and pearls as the happy homemaker is wrong, in fact it was Mom zoned out on legal drugs hating her life" was the new paradigm.
Then they got stuck in the rut of "of course all marriages are awful, with people ending up hating each other, women being trapped and men being exploitative" and that was the pattern set, so that now "happy couple" is the fresh and revolutionary concept.
I think part of the issue is that SJ to a fair degree hasn't actually realised that it isn't a counterculture anymore, so it still thinks SJ is fresh/daring/revolutionary.
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reminds me of this now impossible to find Horace and Pete episode by Louis CK.
It runs through Louis CK's obvious discomfort of having fucked a 'likely' trans person. What I love about the exchange is that nothing Louis says is wrong. He is trying, but there is an obvious elephant in the room. There is clearly something off. And no matter how much the 'likely' trans person tries to articulate her side and no matter how accepting and subservient Louis CK shows himself as, the tension never goes away. It's still in the air, the unanswered question.
The 2 lines that I think comes closest to asking the right question is :
Yes, almost there. (I don't mean this as snark. I can sense a certain proximity to the crux of the argument, but I too haven't been able to phrase it properly)
In that sense, Trans women are very much women in that they feel 'entitled' to things, entitled to sex with a certain type of 'normal hot' man. Life sucks and a random drastic step didn't fix it ? Yeah, get in line.
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Cyberpunk kind of managed to squeeze in a Trans character without calling any attention to it: the bartender at the Afterlife bar was trans, but the only way you know is because the truck she drives has a trans flag on it (IIRC). Their transness isn't remotely important to their questline, it's just a thing that's there.
She also mentioned offhand that her dead husband helped her with transition, but yeah, attention was given to dead husband rather than trans topic.
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Well for me I can think of three ways of trying to do it interesting and natural: Star Trek:DS9 has the Trills which for me always has worked as perfect way of sneaking various aspects of trans concepts right under our noses, but not being about trans. Further looking a specific subgenre of transhumanist sci-fi literature we have things like the Culture series by Iain M Banks where humans are so advanced in technology that changing back and forth human physoilogy between genders isn't an obstacle anymore. And there is a scene in the Netflix Series Altered Carbon(haven't gotten around to read the books yet) where a womans mind was transfered into a male body. The thing all of the three have in common is the identity/mind/soul transcending the physical body in some way and making the transcending of the physical limits not about gender but a feature and possibility of it.
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I don't know that you can do it (easily) without acknowledging the character's past. Legends of Runeterra does a decent job with one of the characters (since the cards can represent the same character at different points in their life) who goes on a magical/spiritual journey, and upon completion, is a different gender. Nothing calling attention to the switch, but it you remember the character from the other card, you know that things have changed.
I wonder if you could do something similar with a sequel or time skip? Just have the post-transition character appear and be accepted, but without commentary (since the in-game characters would already know, even if the player hadn't been informed). You'd probably have to use a gender-neutral or nicknamable method, though... perhaps have them use their preferred nickname (but still not overtly gendered of a name) as the first game progresses/the character opens up, so then in the sequel, when they exclusively use that name, it doesn't confuse the player?
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So, I'm working on a game where an NPC is probably trans. I say probably, because I had the character's design and the mission they're part of and other interactions mostly worked out before realizing that it kinda made sense in context.
The context is a sort of pastoralist style Utopia sponsored by fully automated luxury space communism. Clarketech abounds, but the exact limits are only defined in so much as they are plot/gameplay-relevant. The antagonist is a bio-engineer who thinks that this civilization has gotten stuck in a local maximum, and is way more transhumanist than most people in the setting (most people the player interacts with, anyway). Oh, and he thinks that whole capitalism thing isn't quite so out-dated as everyone else, but he keeps his shady dealings with extragalactic warlords to himself.
The original idea for this sidestory was based around the idea that the boss's bio-engineered minions were scowering the region for the player's party, and this NPC happened to be the local misfit who first notices disturbances the local miniboss causes. As I expanded way more on the worldbuilding and backstories for other characters, it occurred to me that the boss would totally have offered body modification services to the people with the rarest issues, especially if he could learn how to improve on longevity-extending treatments in the process, and some of the other miniboss encounters fit perfectly with said minions keeping tabs on the boss's most unique clients. Since this NPC was established as having an unsure time fitting in locally, and just happens to live within sidequest distance of one of the miniboss encounters...
Actually, what made me realize it was when I noticed that the local species had sexual dimorphic qualities, and I accidentally hinted at a mismatch with this character, and all of the above pointed toward their being trans as an explanation. FWIW, the people of this world have feathers, with males having bigger, more flamboyant plumage. This NPC was supposed to be female, but I gave her a rooster-esque red streak without considering the implications (I was aiming for evoking the image of a ponytail). So, I figure her comb must be reduced, else it'd be dysphoria-triggering, but could still have distinct coloration, and she could still have the habit of compulsively smoothing it, especially when stressed. The clarketech is very likely strong enough to enable her to pass perfectly otherwise, but after the player finds the boss's former clients/victims near all the other minibosses, and the only things that stick out about this character is her awkward relations to her community and her nervous tick, people wanting to read into it could probably draw the conclusion.
... Maybe. If that can be improved, I'd love to hear suggestions as to how. I'm not super confident about it. But it accidentally fit perfectly, so eh.
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In fact, it does come up in one episode, the one with Space Lincoln; "The Savage Curtain":
There are a couple of fleeting references, as in "The Naked Time" where Sulu thinks he's d'Artagnan and refers to Uhura with "I'll protect you, fair maiden" and she replies "Sorry, neither".
Or the quoting from Byron's poem "She walks in beauty, like the night" in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"
About women in general serving on spaceships of the future, from "Tomorrow Is Yesterday":
But yeah, the main lecture episode about this was the one with the black and white faces.
EDIT: And I think you're right about the wrong way to do it; the TNG episode with Riker and the alien who wants to be a woman, but on their planet everybody is non-binary or gender-neutral or androgynous or hermaphrodite or something, it's not made clear because this was back in the 90s and at that time it was An Obvious Allegory About Gayness but today it would be An Obvious Allegory About Transness. The episode is called The Outcast:
The actress playing the character is, well, an actress. A cis female. Which is a choice for several reasons, but I think one large reason would be that if they had cast an actor in the part of the alien having a romantic relationship with Riker it would have been Too Gay, ironically for the episode, and wouldn't have got past the network censors. (As an aside, Riker? Of all people? Nothing against Jonathan Frakes but I never found the character of Will Riker interesting or attractive in any sense right from the start - I did like when Picard slapped him down on the bridge in the first episode - and every time they tried to develop his character by giving him quirks or hobbies it made me want to shove that bloody trombone right up his - okay, what was I talking about, again?)
The second example of handling it badly is from DS9 and again, it's An Obvious Allegory About Gayness (Lesbian Version) in an episode called Rejoined, except all it did for me was convince me the Trill were right about the dangers of re-association and who cares about if it's two women or two men or one of each, the Trill don't as hosts are all genders and the Dax symbiote has been in male and female hosts. I think most people remember it for the lesbian kiss scene:
Hah, I like how Uhura doesn't even take offense there.
These all feel like really good examples of doing it right, honestly. Yes, if you're pulling a character in from ancient times, they're going to have some confusion about a black woman serving on board the bridge, of course they are! But that doesn't need to be the thing the episode is about, and in fact probably shouldn't be. Allegory, not sledgehammer.
. . . also that's a pretty funny line in response to Sulu.
It's a great line, it's almost like an ad-lib, and it isn't a big point but they did manage to sneak in that, uh, Uhura isn't married and is sexually active, which would have been a Big Deal in the 60s for family TV show viewing.
Also the inter-racial kiss from what is a not-great episode (good idea, execution is a bit ropey, honestly the fanfiction of it is a lot better, it's a season three episode which explains a lot as the show was pretty much being wound down) Plato's Stepchildren which really was a Big Deal.
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I'm reminded of Digimon World 3, where the characters are briefly, at the start of the game, shown in the real world, before going to play the Digimon Online game (which lasts most of the rest of the game). As part of this they have to create accounts and avatars; Teddy stays as Teddy, Junior the protagonist sets his account name to whatever name you choose (and the game can't really draw attention to this because you COULD just leave it as Junior) and Ivy decides to rename herself Kail. After a brief discussion about it, she clarifies that she just felt like it, and the rest of the game goes on and everyone calls her Kail because that's her name in this world.
Why couldn't you do something like that? A character's cyberspace self is the opposite gender, and their only explanation for it is "this is just what I wanted to make" and then nobody ever brings it up again. iirc this happened by force in the most recent remake of Jumanji? Making it voluntary would signal better. You don't even really have to mention the character's meatspace name or confirm their meatspace sex, just make them look a touch ambiguous.
I actually think that's clever and I like that. And then of course nobody really brings it up, it's just "hey, yeah, go for it."
(One of the things that was in my notes for that post that didn't make it in was my then-4-year-old daughter deciding she wanted to play Monster Hunter World, and in character creation, decided to make a middle-aged black man, which I admit I thought was kind of funny. But I also don't think it meant anything, she just thought he looked cool, which, in fairness, he did. So, hey, go for it kid, have fun.)
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I guess the Uhura equivalent would be to have a 6'2'' stubble-wearing transwoman who passes very very poorly (think "it's ma'am!" guy) but then nobody thinks that this is noteworthy and it just never comes up?
Unlikely to assist you in avoiding CW flak from either side, but could be hilarious and inclusive at the same time, would that we lived in a better world.
But that's kinda the problem, that isn't even a good equivalent. Uhura is a good example of a reasonable-but-not-exaggerated-either-positively-or-negatively black woman (at least, not exaggerated any more than anyone in the series was), whereas the hypothetical stubble-wearing transwoman is a negative exaggeration. The neutral-or-normal-TV-exaggeration of a trans person just looks like an attractive member of their preferred gender.
On a (possibly) more helpful note, if you are open to timefucks you could try something like Gibson does with Inspector Lowbeer in his Jackpot novels -- have a character who's a different gender depending where you are on their timeline, and it's NBD. (or not called out at all, with some ambiguity as to whether it's the same character at all or not -- IIRC Gibson pulled this off somewhat successfully in the books, while Amazon OFC wanted to wallop you over the head with it, to the detriment of their show)
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<Waggles eyebrows suggestively yet unhelpfully>
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Never Have I Ever on Netflix has a very clearly trans but fine looking college counselor, and I do not believe this is ever once commented on.
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