Subject: Disability is absolutely part of Pride!
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Posted on: 2021-06-09 18:45:22 UTC
Especially since a lot of Pride and related activities aren't always accessible to the disabled community. "The intersectionality committee is meeting on Thursday? Great! I'd love to attend... oh, it's on the third floor, there isn't a lift, and the building isn't wheelchair accessible anyway. Welp, guess I'll go somewhere else then..."
...Geez, I'm a whole week late. I meant to write this earlier but Events Eventuated.
Anyways, it's pride month! Yay! I'm pretty introverted so I never actually attend anything, but hey, still awesome. And the PPC has been a huge part of making it that way. This was one of the first places where I felt comfortable exploring my identity and just... being me. So that's a huge deal. Hence my writing this post.
And because it's pride month, we get to talk about Awesome Representation in Things! Or at least, I am. Please provide your own awesome examples of representation, or whatever other pride stuff you like. I'm gonna talk about videogames because quite frankly I've been pretty burnt out which has kept me from reading things as much as I might want to, so it's what I've been experiencing lately.
First off, for some very real life representation. Every Pride, I like to take some time to commemorate Danielle Bunten Berry, who deserves to be better known not only as an influential LGBT figure in the development of videogames as a medium, but as an important figure in the history of gaming. She died too soon, but her legacy is a series of games which, while obscure, predicted and shaped the future of gaming. Seven Cities of Gold was one of the earliest 4X games, attempted (with mixed success) to teach about history and the very real atrocities of its period, and influenced a young Sid Meier towards developing games like Pirates! and Civilization. Modem Wars was a real-time tactics game (not Real Time Strategy as we know it, I should note) that could be played against other players over a modem link and supported distributeable replay files (letting you share your match with other players on bulletin boards)... in 1988. Berry's work was characterized by a real interest in gaming as a social pasttime, and this manifests in the fact that most of her games were designed around multiplayer --- long before most others were even seriously considering multiplayer computer games. And this shows most plainly in her most influential design, M.U.L.E. A four-player turn-based real-time (your turns are played in real-time with a time limit) economic strategy game originally released all the way back in 1983, M.U.L.E. is widely considered one of the greatest games period by people who are old, and has influenced and been referenced by countless videogames. M.U.L.E units appear in Starcraft II, M.U.L.E is a very direct and obvious influence on the considerably more cynical real-time economic strategy game Offworld Trading Company, and famously Shigeru Miyamoto cited M.U.L.E as an influence on Pikmin. Will Wright dedicated the very first version of The Sims to Danielle's memory soon after her death, but so, so few people are aware of or have experienced her work.
Now onto the fun stuff, and while everything here is decidedly PG-13, I should warn you that I'll necessarily be talking about sex and sexuality. So things might get a little bit risque.
I've been playing Dragon Age Inquisition (the Second Worst One™), and that is a great game for LGBT representation. Well, by the low standards of AAA gaming at least. It helps that Dragon Age's lead writer, David Gaider, is himself gay. Which is... something you can kinda notice. Not only in that it's common for gay characters to get a little bit better of a romance arc than lesbian characters (or so sayeth by Rabid Dragon Age Fan Friend, who would know) but also there's something... a little bit more real about the way gay characters get portrayed than you often see in these sorts of games. I think a part of it is that sexuality is actually considered seriously by the team when these characters are getting written. A lot of games, Elder Scrolls, for example, go the "PC-sexual" route of just making every single character who can be romanced romanceable by every possible PC with essentially no change in the writing. When a Dragon Age character is bisexual (two of the four romance options in the first Dragon Age, everyone in DA2, some percentage I don't remember for DAI...) they are bisexual. It's part of how they are written, and whether or not it comes up, that informs their character. Some of them have dated and slept with the same sex before, some of them might not have. As I recall, Zevran from DA1 dabbled with polyamory. The relationships and sexuality of these characters are written with same the care and attention that made Bioware the defining Western RPG studio for a solid 15 years (that's not a typo, Bioware had a huge hand in defining what we expect from an RPG over the course of the late 90s and 2000s). And I think their willingness to write sexuality with some deliberacy really shines in the case of My Maybe Favorite Character from Inquisition and the first actual gay (not bisexual) character in the series, Dorian. It's pretty obvious why Dorian is written as exclusively gay---he left home when his father actually attempted to forcibly make him straight, a conflict that began because Dorian rejected an arranged marriage in a society obsessed with breeding and lineage. This (sans the magic elements) is not a new story beat. In fact, it's a very old one. What makes it different is what Dorian's arc actually is, which is the part where I think that it shows that someone involved in this was actually gay and had these experiences. In most media where you see this kind of story happen, the character's arc is about accepting their own sexuality, about working through their own self-loathing. But while Dorian has self-loathing to spare, he's not uncomfortable with his sexuality. In fact, he takes refuge in it, very deliberately exaggerating those aspects of himself to provoke as a sort of defense mechanism. Because what Dorian actually is is lonely. Painfully so. Before joining the party he has few friends, and while he's sexually experienced, he comes from a world where you're either in the closet, at least keeping up appearances, or you came out as transgender, married a dwarf for love, and now are agitating for social reform inside the Wizard Senate and thus fending off five political assassinations before breakfast (Maevaris Tilani is awesome, but sadly she only really appears in side materials, not in the game per se). And one thing people forget (or, if the film is PG, deliberately omit) about societies that closeted is that any kind of intimate encounters are very much sexual in nature. Dorian wants emotional intimacy but he's so used to getting denied or rejected that he's deliberately walled off that aspect of himself. If you romance him, his ensuing arc will be about learning to believe that kind of connection is possible. If you don't, he'll develop a friendship with you, for a similar sort of growth. Either way he will flirt with you shamelessly, male or female, because that's just how he is.
I left a lot about Dorian's character out of that because I'm talking about representation and not talking up my favorite Dragon Age characters, and there's more to a character than Gay. I'll leave that discussion for once I've finished the game. But that theme of loneliness, of the inability to connect with someone they way you want to because they or you are trying to hide who they are from the people around them, shows up a lot in gay media. You might have noticed it in the year's most sexually explicit and offensive-to-conservatives hit song of the year so far, Lil Nas X's "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)", which is one of the most awkwardly parenthesized titles of the year as well. I... have not listened to this song much, but I kinda love it? Everyone talks about the music video, which was probably intentional, but I'm gonna say that the song is actually better without it. Because quite frankly it doesn't need an eye-catching video to be interesting. This is a song about sex with a guy, and it hit the top of the charts. But it's also explicitly about sex with a guy who is in the closet, and as much as Lil Nas says he's "not fazed" and "only here to sin", the song doesn't end with more casual sex and drugs, it ends with pleading. "Tell me you love me in private". "I do not care of you lyin'". That's not what you say when you're emotionally uninvested in someone you're hooking up with. I mean, maybe it is, I certainly can't speak with authority on the subject, but at the very least that's not how it reads to me. It reads like a song about being romantically interested in someone who's only willing to be with you sexually. And that hurts. Or I assume it does.
Where LGBT representation is most common in videogames is, of course, indie games. Last year's Hades, in addition to being one of the best hack and slashes and the best roguelites of the entire decade, as well the moment when the world at large seemed to suddenly discover what I and many others had known for a long time--that Supergiant Games, the company behind Hades, does exceptional work and has some of the best writing, art, and music in the whole industry. But it also let you enter a polyamorous relationship with a fury and the God of Death. I... don't have as much to say here, other than to once again reiterate how awesome Hades is. In part because it's actually kind of hard/time-consuming to get into a relationship in Hades so despite 100 hours on record (and more like 80 in game if I'm being honest), I still haven't completed the romantic arcs. But, also because as well-developed as Zagreus is as a character, I don't think his sexuality is ever all that deeply delved into. Which... makes a lot of sense. This game isn't really about that (as much as it's joked that Hades is the year's best dating sim...), but also nobody cares. This is an ancient-Greece inspired setting. Bisexuality is, to some extent, a sort of default (yeah, I know, sexuality in Ancient Greece was a little more complex than that but I said "inspired"). So of course there's not a lot of focus on it or angst. And as much as I just praised Bioware for the opposite, there's a lot to be said for that. If you're LGBT, you get enough angst in your daily life. Sometimes, escapism is fun. Also, it helps that, like Dragon Age and every other game I will mention in a positive light here, Hades puts in the work to make its characters feel fully realized and relatable.
The other place LGBT representation happens is in adventure games and in visual novels. "Walking simulators", games like the famously gay Gone Home (which I haven't played and thus won't talk about), are known for their artsier aspirations, but their more gamey cousins share the sort of low-budget development (or are even lower budget), making it easier for small, underfunded developers to get interesting games that tell more experimental interactive stories out into the open. Interactive Fiction (text adventures and such), have been known for being a great space for queer work for a long time, with highlights like Brendan Patrick Hennessy's very queer teenage mystery/romance Twine trilogy composed of Bell Park, Youth Detective; Birdland; and Known Unknowns... oh hey he made a new also gay game called BOAT PROM I should probably play that. Adventure games are probably a bit less into the whole representation thing because of their historical ties to places like LucasArts and other less experimental companies (although Sierra did make the insanely risque for the time Phantasmagoria 2, a horror game that did actually have a gay plot thing going on). And then Visual novels are... weird. Visual novels have ties to Japan, which has a really regressive attitude towards homosexuality... but also has an entire division of NitroPlus, one of the largest Visual Novel studios in the country, called Nitro+CHIRAL, dedicated to writing BL/Yaoi visual novels directed towards a female audience. And some of them are actually even kinda good? Like, I enjoyed the parts of DRAMAtical Murder that I played, even if it was kinda trashy (for those who are unaware, I despise roughly 99% of Yaoi). Meanwhile, western developers use the visual novel as a format for generally queer, specifically lesbian, gay, or gay and also furry narratives all the time. Although the most famous case of a gay furry visual novel actually came out of Japan---Morenatsu, a perpetually-unfinshed game about coming home to your small town on summer vacation and dating your best friends who are all anthropomorphic animals, originally started on Japan's legendarily volatile 2chan message board (imagine if 4chan was somehow worse...). Over here, itch.io is the visual novel central, and games vary from entirely explicit to sweet romances and coming of age stories to somewhere in between. My personal guilty pleasure is the recently-made-SFW Minotaur Hotel, but there's a lot of good and... deeply questionable content to choose from.
Sorry I couldn't talk about more, but I have an actual job now and this has already taken me something like an hour to write. So I must leave further talk about good representation and such to all of you. Please let me know what your favorite good representation is because I love a good recommendation and I don't just talk to hear the sound of my own voice.
Getting the obligatory shoutout out of the way to Alex Fierro of the Magnus Chase series. While not a perfect representation, she was the first instance of a genderfluid character I saw while questioning my own gender, and she was a huge help in getting my parents to understand me—so she'll always have a special place in my heart.
I'd also like to point at Asra Alnazar, magician extraordinaire of the mobile visual novel The Arcana. There's a growing rise in nonbinary representation in fiction, but along with them, well—it seems the only pronouns used are they/them, which while excellent, also leaves out those of us who are comfortable being called by gendered pronouns, let alone our assigned pronouns at birth. The language used with Asra is subtle, but what really stood out to me is the way his parents refer to him exclusively as "my child" rather than "my son". It's such a small detail, but such an important one, and I love the VN all the more for it.
(That, and just about everyone in said VN is explicitly bisexual, and it's not just in the sense that the romanceable characters are 'playersexual'; their different storylines sees the non-romanced characters experiencing their own stories in the background and forming relationships with each other.)
Right now, the big one that made me have to put the book down and cry for how well done it was, was Avatar Kyoshi (and Rangi!) from the Kyoshi novels. Set 300 years before Aang's time, Kyoshi is implicitly bisexual (having crushes on male characters, but the text doesn't clarify where under the bi umbrella she falls since it isn't relevant) and falls in love with the female Fire Nation soldier Rangi. The two of them don't suffer the ambiguous ending get-together that Korra and Asami were given; their romance blooms relatively early in the first book, it's believable, it's wholesome, both characters are so fleshed out and rounded—and they don't just ignore the inherent issues their society will have with the relationship.
While yes, it is very comforting to read about worlds where homophobia (and transphobia) don't exist, it's also very comforting to read about characters similar to ourselves. It's like sinking into an embrace with the characters there to reassure you that you are not alone.
...while also giving no fuvgs about anything in her way, up to and including entire continents going by ATLA's portrayal of her.
I recently read the book Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff, which is a take on the Arthurian legend with more than the usual basis in the historical facts of post-Roman Britain being besieged regularly by Saxon invaders. This Arthur (who mainly goes by Artos) is a half-Welsh bastard son of a Roman from the Imperial line, but mostly he's a beloved war leader whose band of cavalry are responsible for several significant victories that keep Britain free from invaders for just a little bit longer than it would have been otherwise, before Events Eventuate and it all comes crashing down around his kingly ears.
This book surprised me with its open acknowledgement and acceptance of gay relationships among soldiers. There's an explicitly gay, loving couple among Artos' companions. Both of them, and their relationship, are treated with utmost respect even in death (look, they're soldiers, most of them die on-page eventually), and it's delightful to see in a book published in 1963.
Furthermore, if you ask me, there's a bit of subtext between Artos himself and closest companion Bedwyr, who takes the Lancelot role in the tragedy. For spoilery plot reasons, Artos is sexually stunted when it comes to women, which makes things rather difficult between him and his bride Guenhumara. It's possible that his trauma also rules out any sexual connection between himself and another man—but then again, it's possible that it doesn't. At the very least, I think Bedwyr's bi and into him, and all three of them should have just come to an arrangement together, but alas, that's not the story. {= P
Also worth noting: Sir Cei (second-closest companion) is a flamboyant straight man, Guenhumara is a badass with a mind of her own and a relatively active part in shaping her life considering society is still male-dominated, and a race known as the Little Dark People play a significant role and are also treated with respect, at least by Artos.
Overall, this is a very good book, and I recommend it highly.
~Neshomeh
Trying to remember if there's other instances of unexpected representation in the whole Eagle of the Ninth saga*...
*Sword at Sunset is part of a loose series, starting with Eagle of the Ninth. Eagle introduces Marcus Aquila, who during the book retrieves his father's emerald ring; every other book features one of his descendants still wearing that ring. Sword at Sunset is kind of off to the side: the ring-wearers (father and son) are soldiers under Artos, but not the focus of the story.
I think it's outside the Pride scope, but Sutcliff does have a number of disabled (usually "crippled") characters. Marcus, the protagonist of Eagle of the Ninth itself, is invalided out of the army and limps for the rest of his life - which is directly relevant to the plot at times. I can't remember any others specifically... similarly, I think there's a fair number of soldiers enjoying each other's company across the series, but don't remember specifics.
I dunno, I covered most of my actual thoughts in the subject line, this is just me justifying the existence of the post. :D
hS
Especially since a lot of Pride and related activities aren't always accessible to the disabled community. "The intersectionality committee is meeting on Thursday? Great! I'd love to attend... oh, it's on the third floor, there isn't a lift, and the building isn't wheelchair accessible anyway. Welp, guess I'll go somewhere else then..."
One of The Toll's main characters (or main-ish) is a genderfluid and, at the beginning, relies on whether or not the sun/moon is covered or uncovered for what gender they are (I forgot which gender is associated with which phase in the sky because it's been forever since I've read it oops). They grew up in a society where the children are genderless until 18, when they can choose their gender. The captain decided to be genderfluid, as they felt that was the right identity for them.
-kA
This is a bullet hell shmup that was released way back in 2003, and one of the characters(the game has an all-male cast, by the way), Lloyd Evansman, is strongly implied to have a male love interest.
More on the backstory: It's the year 2054, and global warming has caused the rise of sea levels all over the world, leading to territorial conflicts and eventually WW3. The four leading characters are part of a UN strike team tasked with destroying the evil EVAC Industries, which has been keeping the war going by selling weapons to every side of the conflict just so that they can sit on fat wads of cash. The problem is that the UN is not allowed to use military power to take down a private corporation, so the entire mission has to be kept a secret, which means the attack helicopters used in the mission, as well as its pilots and gunners, have to be destroyed to eliminate all evidence. The four characters who signed up for the mission will each be granted a single wish in exchange for their lives.
Tiger Schwert(Type A, Spread shot, slow moving speed and fast lock-on speed)
Alice Blackbarn(Pilot) -Yes, Alice is a guy. He infiltrated EVAC Industries as a UN spy and stole the blueprints for the two helicopters that you use throughout the game. Because of the battle that had ensued as he escaped EVAC Industries claimed the lives of many civilians, he decided to leave his brother Yuma Nanase in order to protect him from further danger. It's strongly implied that his wish was for Yuma's life to be spared.
Lloyd Evansman(Gunner) -Lloyd is a cold, ruthless man that does not care for the safety of his subordinates as long as the mission is a success. He loved another man, but the guy rejected/didn't realize Lloyd's love towards him. His last wish was for his love interest to be isolated for the rest of his life so that nobody else could have him.
Panzer Jaeger(Type B, Linear shot, fast moving speed and slow lock-on speed)
Steele Yurek(Pilot) -Steele is good with people and acts as a mentor figure to Yuma, but doesn't get along well with Evansman. He also doesn't believe in wearing shirts. He grew up in a country ravaged by war, and participated in guerilla activities as a child soldier, watching many of his companions die right before his eyes. He wished for his country to be liberated, so that everyone there could live peacefully.
Yuma Nanase(Gunner) -He's still a teenager, but was allowed to participate in the mission for his spirit and hardworking personality. However, he loathes his brother, believing that Alice abandoned him. He joined the military in order to 'get revenge' by surpassing his brother, even if it meant throwing away his life. He finally understands Alice's motives in the ending(which you'll probably need more than a few coins to see, considering the notorious difficulty level of the game), but it's obviously too late.
Yeah...Lloyd was something of a dick, but personally I like the game for the scoring system and the story. I also find it interesting that three of the characters' names were taken from the movie Black Hawk Down(Probably because of all the helicopters).
Apex Legends started out with a small cast roster. It was incredibly diverse when it started, with an openly gay Gibraltar, and a very questioning Mirage, but my favorite is Bloodhound. An honest to god, NONBINARY MAIN CHARACTER. I cannot name a SINGLE nonbinary human character in any game. All the nonbinary/genderqueer/agender rep is either aliens or robots, which feels like a cop-out! Either way, they've added new characters to the game, who are also canonically LGBT. In no particular order, the list is...
Bloodhound: Nonbinary
Fuse: Pansexual
Gibraltar: Gay
Mirage: Questioning
Valkyrie: Lesbian
Loba: Bisexual
.
That's out of a cast of 17. That's a HUGE amount of rep from a triple A game, and it makes me so, so happy. I'm really happy about the first NB rep in a triple A game.
What's underneath the mask? A hunter. What's in your pants? A machete, various knives, spare rations, and birdseed. It makes me very happy.
~Helsinki