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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.
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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