#Also using the colours of the nonbinary flag for John

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"I am entirely my own. I have been, and will always be." Malevolent Part 43

[simpforsix]

what i think the garde and co’s pronouns/gender identities are

sorry i didn’t include five i don’t have any strong headcanons for him

John: He/him. He’s a trans man, and his shapeshifting gives him the opportunity to be stealth. Henri also helped him get testosterone when he started puberty. He still got top surgery though, because when he’s not shapeshifting it gives him the most dysphoria and he thinks the scars are kinda cool. Very few people know he’s trans, it’s mainly just the Garde, Sam, Adam, Sarah, and Malcolm who know. He figures that they don’t need to add transphobia to the hatred towards the Garde and Human-Garde, so he doesn't tell anyone. 

Six: She/they, and she’s nonbinary. They also identify as somewhat feminine. They’ve always preferred more gender-neutral clothes, and once they found out about the nonbinary spectrum everything clicked. She came out to everyone by texting them in the groupchat, and also loves braiding their hair with different pride flag colours.

Marina: She/her. She’s a trans woman, who came out pretty young. Her Cepan Adelina was forging all the documents anyways, so adding an F to her birth certificate was easy. She came out to the Garde after seeing their reactions to Six coming out, since she was scared they wouldn’t accept her. Having been raised in an all girls Catholic school, she has a lot of complicated feelings about being trans, but being a woman is one of the few things that makes her happy so she tries to ignore her religious guilt about it. Her and John also both healed each other after their surgeries.

Eight: Any pronouns. They’re genderfluid (because all shapeshifters are) and use their shapeshifting to reflect how they feel most comfortable that day. 

Nine: He/they, he identifies as nonbinary. He kept ignoring everything they felt about gender, and over-compensating by leaning into toxic masculinity. When Six came out, everything they felt boiled over. He spent hours researching, and Six was the first person they came out to, since he thought they’d understand. Once they were comfortable in their identity, they came out to the rest of the Garde. Then, because Nine is a dramatic bitch, they came out to everyone living in New Lorien by hanging posters and announcing it over the intercom. 

Ella: They/them. They identify as nonbinary, more specifically genderqueer or agender. They’d identified that way for a while, and didn’t formally come out to the Garde. Instead, they would just wear pride flag pins and pronoun pins until someone asked, and then they would explain. 

Sam: He/him, and he’s just generally confused about his gender identity. He has been experimenting with neopronouns though. 

Adam: He/they. He identifies as agender, and he’s enjoyed learning about the vast number of labels humans have for genders. Like John, they’re out to very few people and try to avoid coming out. He’s scared of not being accepted, because they’ve only just found a group of people that cares about them and they don’t want to lose that. 

[ardenttheories]

A random thought, but I think a lot of us are using the word “coded” wrong.

Typically, “coded” means that the character was intentionally written to read as a specific race/gender/culture/religion/sexuality, but was not allowed to be - or was not in a position to be - presented that way.

An example of this are the gems from Steven Universe. Garnet, for instance, is heavily black coded. She’s voiced by a black woman, has hair similar in style and shape, has similar body proportions, has similar speech patterns - you couldn’t look at Garnet and claim that she’s white, because she’s clearly coded to be black. The only reason she isn’t black is because she’s an alien with skin the same colour as her gem. 

It was an intentional effort on the writers’ part to make her black coded. They put thought and effort into presenting her in this specific way, to offer representation for black women - especially sapphic black women - even when the main character is nonhuman. To make it obvious that, yes, this character is meant to be you.

What isn’t coding, however, is when writers accidentally write a character one way when they completely intended to write them another.

The most recent thing I can think of for this is Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot. There’s so many hints towards her being trans - the scene where she’s getting all dolled up, a scene where what looks like a trans flag is on the wall, the general way she behaves especially about traditionally feminine things - that the fandom read into but weren’t actually there.

The writer/creator confirmed this. Jenny isn’t trans. That doesn’t mean that we can’t view her as trans, or that we can’t headcanon her as such, and the writer himself has encouraged that reading with pride that she could be something for the trans community - but she was never written or intended to be trans. It’s not the same as genuine representation. 

Being able to read into a character isn’t the same as them genuinely being coded that way. This is why, for instance, people can read John as both transmasc and transfem; he was only ever written as your typical cishet American kid, but some of his experiences and actions are reminiscent of what trans people experience. It’s just enough to read into, but not coded to a point of confirmation one way or another. 

This is also why it’s harder to read Roxy as transmasc. Roxy is inherently written as a cis woman. Hussie admittedly got better about his writing and it’s therefore easier to read her as a trans woman, but even she’s not coded enough that you can say with absolute certainty that the specific reading is what Hussie intended. It’s even less viable that Hussie actually wrote her from the start as transmasc. 

Homestuck-era characters are inherently cis. It’s an unfortunate fact that will never change. Hussie never introduced the concept of gender identity and revelations - such as he did with gender identities, which were a big fucking part of character progression throughout the story - because he never wrote the characters to require them. I deeply suspect that he waited till Homestuck was over to save the integrity of his characters as cis, and only now, in his non-canonical post-canon, are we seeing him begin to change his cis coding. 

Except he’s still using the same cis coded characters and randomly slapping on labels. However we read them isn’t how he wrote them, and they aren’t experiences he (or his team, for that matter) are all that good at capturing. This is going to be a big issue for him as HS2 goes on. Case in point, transmasc Roxy instead of transfem Roxy, and the already-neglected attempt to canonise nonbinary Calliope - alongside the inherent cisery of Ultimate Dirk when he’s predominantly read as transmasc. 

Or, it would be, if he even cared enough to remain on the HS2 writing team to begin with. 

Basically, what we need is more coded characters in Homestuck. We need characters that were always intentionally written as trans to be our trans representation. Our identities shouldn’t be afterthoughts or products of fandom vocality only. 

We have the chance to code the Omega Kids as something other than cis, and to write genuine trans identities with trans people on the writing team from the beginning. Of course we’ve had issues in the past (re: Lanque as transmasc rep and Vriska as transfem rep), but this is their chance to do it right.  

[estercity]

11, 24, 36

Do you like your flag(s)?

i do!! i use the trans flag over the nonbinary one though because i prefer the colours

Favorite LGBT+ canon character?

john constantine <33 my little meow meow. my stupid motherfucker. i stand by the fact john can't be good rep qoute unqoute, he has to always be a bit questionable... tbh i do think john started out as the 'oh of course he also fucks men because he's a degenerate' type of Bisexual Rep but as a bisexual person i think that kind of rocks.

Do you align with any gay subcategories? (Butch/femme, bear/twink, etc.)

nnnot really i identify as both wlw and mlm so i never thought i fit solidly into any subcategories. not that other people who identify as both can't, i just personally don't for that reason

[entergamingxp]

Pride Week: Final Fantasy 7

Hello! All this week we’ll be celebrating Pride and the power of positive representations in games. Every day we’ll be bringing you stories and insights from different parts of the LGBT+ community. You can also help support Pride with Eurogamer’s newly redesigned t-shirt – all profits from which will be going to charity.

In the midst of a recent replay of the original Final Fantasy 7, I found myself welling up. Not because I’d reached that bit – the mandatory, number-one entry in every ‘gaming’s top ten saddest moments’ list from now till the Lifestream runs dry. No. The tears were rising much earlier in my playthrough than that. And those tears were accompanied by a big goofy grin. What in this gloriously janky PS1 classic that I hadn’t picked up in almost fifteen years could have had such an effect on me?

I was in Wall Market – Midgar’s gleefully ungentrified equivalent of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, or London’s Soho, a century ago – and the game’s taciturn, hyper-masculine, ex-mercenary protagonist, Cloud, had just donned an extremely pretty silk dress. Not only that, but he’d put on a blonde wig he’d won from a body-builder at a local gym, splashed on some sexy cologne, and had just had his make-up done by a burlesque dancer. And, to top it all, upon emerging from the dressing-room to reveal his transformation, he had been greeted with utter delight by the friend, ally, and (though it pains the Clifa stan in me to say it) love interest who had accompanied him there.

The reason I was crying was because, here, in chunky polygonal miniature, was my entire experience of coming out as a non-binary trans person.

No, you’re crying!

Okay, maybe not my entire experience. I didn’t start wearing make-up and femme clothing as part of an elaborate plan to rescue my childhood sweet-heart from the clutches of a local sex criminal, and Cloud’s family weren’t around to worry about what the neighbours might think. But, the key components were all there: the thrill of a new wardrobe; the unforeseen generosity of strangers; the relief that comes from the support and acceptance of friends and loved-ones; and, above all, the quiet euphoria of suddenly looking the way you’d never even realised you wanted (or needed) to look before. Heck, even the frantic squat-driven glow-up at the local gym was present and correct.

Don Corneo (trans. ‘Lord Horny’), slum-lord sex pest, in action.

I concede, I may have been projecting just a little. But, if there is one thing that queer culture and, indeed, gaming culture, have taught me, it’s that queer people find representation wherever they can, and that, often, those discoveries occur in the most unexpected of places. And here was an echo of the moment at which my gender identity suddenly ‘clicked’ for me, captured in a game I had played and replayed as a kid. It was uncanny.

Admittedly, the fact that I had the uncanny feeling of suddenly finding my queerness so clearly reflected in a game I had loved as a child while playing Final Fantasy 7 should, perhaps, have come as no surprise. To paraphrase Paris is Burning: it is a known fact that Final Fantasy 7 do be as camp as a row of tents and as queer as a ten-bob note.

A reminder: We played this. As children.

Rightly described by Eurogamer’s Aoife Wilson as a ‘bi thirst-trap‘, Final Fantasy 7 buzzes with enough queer energy to power a thousand Sister Rays. Whether it be Cloud’s journey of self-denial and self-discovery (coming-out story much?), Tifa’s status as the living embodiment of soft-butch energy, Reno’s status as a chaotic bisexual pinball (you just know he and Rude met on Grindr), Jessie’s omnidirectional flirtation, the way everyone talks about Cloud’s eyes, the fact that everyone is wearing a harness, or Sephiroth’s, like, entire deal (if you ever thought a twink couldn’t also be a leather daddy, he’s here to prove you wrong), the game is, if you’ll pardon the expression, queer af.

Everyone’s favourite chaotic bisexual makes a graceful exit…

But, aside from being almost impossibly horny with virtually no concern for the gender of the parties involved – a feature the recent Remake has turned up to 11 – the game is also queer in deeper, more meaningful ways; ways that resonates strongly with the origins of Pride month, and its roots in a tradition of anti-assimilationist political protest.

A key figure in this regard is Barret (or, as he may be known to some of you, ‘Gunny’). In terms of representation, the game’s off-beat tone and broad-brush-strokes story-telling sometimes leave it seeming… unnuanced. At its worst, Barrett’s characterization in the original game comes off feeling like the production team watched a couple of re-runs of The A-Team and that music video where B.A. Baracus told us all to be nice to our mums and decided that they had learned all they needed to know about Black people (a serious problem in an industry as White-washed as gaming). But, without wishing to downplay these problematic elements, it is worth taking stock of who we ultimately discover Barret to be across the course of the game: a Black, physically-impaired adoptive father and climate activist, whose lost hand forms the basis for a narrative not of disability, but of empowerment, as he engages in a liberationary struggle to protect his local community and the planet at large from the toxic influence of a militarised form of corporate capitalism.

Barrett Wallace: Queer Big-Shot.

Like so many queer people who find themselves at the intersection of multiple forms of violence and oppression, Barret surrounds himself with a diverse team of like-minded individuals, united not by externally imposed categories of identity, but by a shared set of values and a desire to change the world for the better. This chosen family – for, what is the ‘party’ in an RPG if not a version of the ‘chosen family‘ of friends, partners, and allies upon which so many queer people rely? – comes to include not just a former member of SOLDIER like Cloud, who turns his skills and training against the oppressive forces he once served, but a figure like Nananki / Red XIII, a character whose story parallels those of many Indigenous and First Nations people whose lives, land, and heritage have been devastated by corporate imperialism. Like the Stonewall rioters, the Gay Liberation Front, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Lesbians and Gays support the Miners, the AIDS Coalition to Unlock Power, or the queer activists currently taking to the streets to support Black Lives Matter, AVALANCHE – the revolutionary band of eco-warriors Barret founds and leads – take a stand against a society, culture, and political system that seek to oppress them and exploit the planet they inhabit.

Barrett tells it like it is.

This is not to claim that everyone in AVALANCHE or Final Fantasy 7 at large is ‘queer’ in the same-sex attraction / gender non-conformity sense of the word (though, again, does anyone really believe that the Turks aren’t living together in a gloriously messy, pansexual polycule?) But, if, as one influential theorist has it, ‘queer’ refers to ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’, then Barret and AVALANCHE are about as queer as they come.

It is for that reason that, with Covid-19 necessitating the cancellation of in-person gatherings across the globe, I recommend Final Fantasy 7 to you as the perfect way to bring the spirit of Pride month to life in your living room. Whether you think Pride should be a protest or a party (hint: it should be the former), Final Fantasy 7 is both, and, in its depiction of a radically inclusive chosen family squaring off against a militarised, corporate police state to protect marginalised communities and the environment, it has never been more timely.

So, do yourself a favour, unfurl your rainbow flag, boot up the game, and try to decide which character you fancy the most. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see a body-builder about a wig…

For a fun and accessible introduction to queer theory and queer history, check out Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele’s gorgeously illustrated Queer: A Graphic History (2016). If you are interested in thinking about gaming from a queer perspective, Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (2014) and Queer Games Studies (2017), edited Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, are a great place to start. To learn more about the history of Pride and the queer liberation struggle more generally, you may wish to explore some of the books listed here. For some beautifully written reflections on the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and disability, take a look at the work of Audre Lorde, particularly her essay collection Sister Outsider (1984). Two books I have found particularly resonant in my own gender journey have been C.N. Lester’s Trans Like Me (2017) and Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (2019), edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane. To support QITPOC (Queer, Trans, Intersex, People of Colour) charities and organisations in your area, check out this list for the UK, or this list for the US. Also, everyone go watch Paris is Burning (1990). Right now. I’ll wait.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/pride-week-final-fantasy-7/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pride-week-final-fantasy-7

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AAAAAAAAAAA

"I am entirely my own. I have been, and will always be." Malevolent Part 43