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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 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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