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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.
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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