#their queerness does not provide any extra dimension to their story or character

[piromantic]

its like. it seems a little silly to me when people can fully recognize methods of queerbaiting in bbc sherlock or whatever but when it comes to the gacha game space its either like 'wow, i can't believe they didn't realize that they were making this kind of gay!' or 'wow, i can't believe Evil Asian Censorship prevented these characters from being queer!' or like maybe the game was produced by people who made intentional creative decisions aimed towards making people spend money. just like how all mainstream media works. sorry

[c-is-for-circinate]

So here’s the thing:  I really, honestly do not get the appeal in Widojest.  I don’t entirely see the appeal in Caleb Widogast.  And I’m okay with that; I have other faves who I pay more attention to; I get to do that, because my show is 3-5 hours long every goddamn week that it airs and there is plenty of time for literally everyone.  And I do not have to be a Caleb stan to understand at a really fundamental level that, hey, even if he isn’t important to me?  He is very clearly very important to a lot of actual real-live people.

There will always, always be stories that aren’t for you.  Maybe they just don’t speak to you at all.  Maybe they hit buttons in your brain that remind you of real hurts.  It’s always going to happen.  In a perfect world, with perfect representation where there are stories for you everywhere, there will still be stories that aren’t.

And it hurts, I know it does, when you feel like the story you want for you doesn’t exist anywhere, but here’s one more story that isn’t it.  It hurts when there’s a story that you thought was for you and then it turns out not to care about you at all.  There should be more stories for all of us, especially the stories that feel like they’re not getting told.

That is a real, valid pain.  We all clear on that?

Good.  Because this next part is also absolutely true:

The story that is not for you is very important to someone else.  And particularly in fandom spaces, there is a very good chance that the someone else in question has experienced marginalization on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, disability, mental illness, or general trauma.

The story that is not for you has worth.

People who find worth in stories that are not for you--even if your story is underrepresented and their story really has been told one hundred billion times before, even then--ARE NOT INHERENTLY BAD PEOPLE for finding worth in those stories.

There’s this extra dimension to this particular ship war, where I think a lot of Beaujester shippers are so angry not because of what’s actually happened, but because of what years of pattern recognition has taught them (taught us?) must inevitably be coming next.  When a leading man in a fantasy series, on an arc of learning to better himself and maybe even value or forgive himself, repeatedly expresses unrequited love for a girl who he believes is too good for him, the narrative will give her to him in the end.  This is a pattern and it’s real and its existence hurts, outside of Widojest, just in general in the world.

And on one hand: that has not happened yet with Widojest, and there is a very good chance, for a million reasons, that it won’t!  And on the other hand: even if it did happen, that would not be an excuse for violent or abusive behavior, or to dismiss the worth that story might have to other people!  And on the third hand: yes, I totally see why it feels like that’s the trope being invoked here, and why that is scary, and why it hurts!

We know about Caleb’s feelings in this one specific way and we don’t know about Jester’s.  In theory that means that Jester’s feelings could be ANYTHING, and this could go ANYWHERE, and of course Caleb and Liam would respect Jester and Laura’s ‘no’, and there is plenty of agency all around and that’s great.  In practice, it can feel like another reminder of that old trope, where the male lead character’s emotions are given to the audience like something important, and the female lead character’s feelings are generally passed off as vague platonic affection until the final romantic reveal, and we have to extrapolate what was going through her head the whole time.

We know that Critical Role cares about representation and queer visibility, and without a network to fight, they get to make the show as gay as they want.  In theory this means that we can trust them to give us the rep we’re craving.  In practice, we worry, because in an ad-libbed show where you don’t have to plan ahead or deliberately fight for representation, it’s easy to accidentally slip into old familiar patterns and biases without even noticing they’re there.

We know that Laura’s agency and Jester’s agency matter here, that of course it’s not just about Caleb, and in theory that should make ANY romantic ending better and good and right and fine, but in practice--well, what does it mean, when you’ve got agency over a story, and use it to choose to tell what feels like the same old story all over again?

And right, let me say it again: none of this has happened yet.  QUITE LIKELY NONE OF IT EVER WILL.  We don’t know!!!  Not even the players know!!!

Which, maybe that’s the scariest thing of all.  When I’m watching a scripted show, I usually know what to expect out of the formula.  I know when a show is going to be queerbaity and then quit gay chicken at the last second.  I expect it.  I can feel out how trustworthy the showrunners are in a few episodes, and while sometimes there’s a long slow decline or a short sharp surprise, after 20-30 years of media engagement, I know what I’m going to get.

I suspect that CR feels like it should be more “trustworthy,” to many Beaujester shippers, in terms of providing the kind of story they’re craving--but it’s so hard to know for sure.  It’s so hard to know whether to brace for disappointment, or be resigned, or ragequit and be done with it, or most terrifyingly at all, to be hopeful.

It’s hard.  I do get that it’s hard.

And it’s really easy, isn’t it, to go on twitter and tumblr and into the comments sections on critrole.com and fuck knows where else, I’m assuming there’s a Discord somewhere that I’m not cool enough to know about, and be furious.  To be mean.  To blame the fear of not getting the story that will mean something to me, again, on anyone else.  To make fucking death threats, I don’t even know why that seems acceptable or easy to anyone, but it’s just words typed on a keyboard, so yeah, I guess it’s easy.

Do not fucking do that!  Don’t do it!  Whether you identify with everything I’ve said here or you have a completely different reason to be full of rage and fury, don’t do the furious threats thing!  Just don’t!  That, also, is easy!!!  And doing absolutely nothing is at least as effective as being violently angry at strangers on the internet, so it has that going for it as well.

There are a lot of feelings to be had here, and I’m sure not going to sum them all up or solve the problem of representation in fiction in one tumblr post, but maybe we can change this discussion a little.  Maybe we can redirect.

I started this post by saying that I’m not the world’s biggest Caleb fan.  I don’t mind him, but his story doesn’t particularly speak to me.  I don’t love the amount of space he takes up in the ongoing fandom discussion.  I particularly don’t love that every single time he comes up, the volume of discussion doubles because of people vociferously objecting to every single thing about him.

So I find the parts of the story that are for me.  I let the people who want to have Caleb discussions have their Caleb discussions, because they are enjoying a thing they like and I’m glad for him, and then I host a discussion about Beau or Fjord or Caduceus or whoever, because I WANT TO HAVE FUN TOO.  I am watching this show because it is full to the brim with things I like and have thoughts about.  There is SO MUCH OF THAT TO GO AROUND.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Closed Captions Available. Transcript Below. 

What IS a video game, how do we define them, and how do they overlap with things like puzzles and art? So Let's talk about Gone Home and Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return.

Hello, everyone! Sorry about the long delay between videos. The year has been a bit hectic. Today I want us to talk about something a little different than a  lot of my previous videos- video games. Specifically: what IS a video game, how do we define them, and how do they overlap with things like puzzles and art?

Even more specifically, we’re going to be talking about Gone Home and Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return.

So, a little background. I’m not a HUGE gamer. I tend to stick to Nintendo games, especially Pokemon and party games, games that are heavily story based, like Mass Effect, and weird little indie titles like Tacoma and Firewatch. So, I have a pretty...loose definition about what makes a video game a video game compared to more serious gamers. -

Let’s talk definitions real fast. In the broadest terms, a game is a structured form of play. It is a form of play that has some kind of rules to it. So while playing with your stuffed animals is just play (there’s no incorrect way to do it), things like hide and seek and checkers ARE games, as there are simple rules that govern HOW you play.

This can get tricky with things like puzzles, since there are...technically ways in which you could interact with a puzzle incorrectly. Throwing all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on the ground isn’t correct, but most of us wouldn’t consider it a GAME regardless. In a related point, sports are an even more structured form of games- they are games that involve competition and  physical activity (mostly? E-sports makes this iffy)

Video games are most broadly defined as GAMES that use electronic and visual interfaces to function. They can be on consoles, computers, arcade cabinets, even phones. -

Now, of course, not ALL electronic-visual interfaces are games. Microsoft Word isn’t a game. Facebook isn’t a game. Youtube isn’t a game. But, what about something like Gone Home? (Note, I’m gona talk about Gone Home for a little bit and I will do my best to describe it without many spoilers)

Released in 2013, and set in 1995, Gone Home is a first person exploration “game” (put a pin in the word game. We’ll come back to it.) Your character has been studying overseas for a year. While you were gone, your family has moved into a new house, one that your great uncle used to own before he died. When you arrive in the middle of the night, no one is home.

You then explore the house, reading journals and letters, looking at objects, trying to piece together what has happened. In some truly first rate environmental storytelling, you piece together what has happened in the year you were gone, and why your family isn’t home now.

-

Is this a game?

In a lot of ways, it doesn’t FEEL like a game. There’s no real puzzles to solve, no bad guys, no monsters, no platforming, or story decisions. You just walk around a house, look at stuff, and do some inferencing. You “finish” the game when you’ve been through the whole house and found the final “clues.” But there’s nothing to track your progress, no achievements or collectibles. The only thing forcing SOME linear structure on the experience is a few padlock codes you have to find to move deeper into the house.

So, is Gone Home structured enough for us to call it a video game? A video game rather than a puzzle or art or like...interactive story experience?

I think most people would say yes, though it’s kind of an odd artsy video game. The fact that you have to obey the programming, that you are interacting with the world in the ways the programmers allow is A structure, though a fairly weak one, compared to most video games, all things considered. You can’t like, leave the house, or fly, or start hunting ghosts. You can only “finish” the game by working through the whole story.

Most people would look at they keyboard or controller interface, and say “Oh, yeah, this is a video game.”  Wikipedia even refers to this as an “Exploration Video Game” and categorizes it as a subset of “Adventure Games” for whatever that’s worth.

-

However, this brings me to a weird point of comparison- Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return.

Background: Meow Wolf is an art collective of 200 artists based in Sante Fe, New Mexico. In 2016, with funding provided primarily by Game of Thrones Author GRR Martin, they created what is called The House of Eternal Return in Sante Fe. It’s a permanent art installation experience (put a pin in that description, we’ll come back to it.)

How it works is simple. After you pay (and definitely throw down the extra dollar for the color enhancing glasses) You watch a short video about how the people in the house you are about to enter disappeared. Very spooky. You go through a door, and there is a whole house inside this giant space.

Inside the house, things seem pretty normal at first. There is a story hidden in the objects though. Journals, emails, books, diaries, letters pinned to the fridge, videos on the TV all piece together what happened to this family and where they have gone. In as few spoilers as possible, the Grandfather, uncle, and young son of the family have been experimenting with portals to other dimensions and stuff. It goes poorly. The full story is much more complicated and interesting, but it’s more fun to discover it on your own.

As you move through the house, there are places where you seemingly can “enter” these portals. A secret garden under the stairs, a passage through the fire place, a hallway inside the fridge, a slide out of the washer. Beyond the house is a twisting, trippy maze of electronic art that you can spend hours in (this is where those color enhancing glasses are really worth it.)

-

So, when my husband and I went into The House of Eternal Return, we quickly thought “Holy crumbs, this is like...a real life version of Gone Home.” The environmental storytelling, piecing together the events of a missing family by finding clues left in the house, the very loose and mostly nonlinear structure of how you can discover the clues.  All of it.

So….if Gone Home is a video game….is Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return….a game? Like...chess or hide and seek or D&D?

This is where it breaks down for me a little. My first instinct is to call this installation art, but its similarities to Gone Home are really strong.

I would argue that Meow Wolf has far less structure on this experience here though. While ALL you can really do in Gone Home is move around the space to discover the story because of the programming, in Meow Wolf, discovering the story is far more optional. Many of the other people there, especially the ones with small children, seemed to move through the house itself very quickly, not stopping and inspecting letters and emails and journals, so they and their children could play in the electronic “portals” section (which is super fun.) But they didn’t spend any time figuring out the story the way that you would in Gone Home.

Is it a game, but the game aspect is optional? Is it a game, and those people and their 3 year olds are just playing it wrong? Is it not a game at all, but just weird, trippy art with a loose narrative so all the pieces fit together?

And does our evaluation of Meow Wolf make us re-evaluate how we feel about Gone Home, and other games like it (such as Tacoma, Firewatch, and the Stanley Parable?) Maybe? I don’t particularly have an answer to that, so I’m actually excited to hear all of yalls thoughts down in the comments!

Thanks for listening to this queer millennial feminist rant about things I like for a few minutes. If you want to be notified when I make more of these, you know the drill, subscribe! And let me know what you think about this question of games and video games vs art and experiences down in the comments

[whovianfeminism]

Whovian Feminism Reviews “The Pilot”

This reviews contains SPOILERS for “The Pilot.”

After a very, very long year, Doctor Who has finally returned to us with an episode that was well worth the wait. “The Pilot” was billed to us a reboot, of sorts. And while it’s not completely clear of baggage, it was a refreshing reintroduction to a world we think we already know so well. Peter Capaldi charms, as he always does. But the heart and soul of this episode belongs entirely to new companion Bill Potts, portrayed magnificently by Pearl Mackie. If you’ve fallen off the wagon and haven’t watched Doctor Who in a while, this is the series to return to.

“The Pilot” is purposefully light on plot, giving us plenty of time to get to know Bill. She’s got the classic companion traits -- she thrives on a challenge, she’s curious, and she’s got a hunger for adventure. She’s sweet and compassionate, but firmly establishes boundaries with the Doctor. And despite her complete inability to get a date, she’s truly a romantic at heart.

And yes, Bill is gay! It’s one of the first things we learn about her, it’s a fundamental part of her character, and she defends that identity against anyone who even casually erases it. 

Overall, I felt that her sexuality was very well handled. I’ve had many problems with Steven Moffat’s portrayal of queer women over the years. Either they’ve felt like titillation for a male audience (Vastra and Jenny in their early Doctor Who stories, or Irene Adler in Sherlock), or their queerness has been erased so they can be romantic or sexual interests for the male protagonists (again, Irene Adler). But with Bill, it seems like Moffat is trying exceptionally hard to learn from past criticisms. There isn’t even a hint of romance with other male characters, and Bill firmly shuts down any implication there might be something between her and the Doctor. And her crush on the ill-fated Heather is treated just as seriously as any of the heterosexual companions’ one-off crushes.  

There is, however, one sour note in the scene that establishes Bill's sexuality. In a short anecdote that provides absolutely nothing useful to the story, Bill reveals that she was attracted to a woman who ate at her canteen, and that she tried so hard to get her attention by serving her extra chips that she “fatted her.” It’s a bad joke, made worse by the way you can feel Moffat trying to write his way around what he seems to recognize is a bad joke. Bill’s dialogue takes extra pains to imply she sees nothing wrong with her crush getting fat on chips, and Bill and the unnamed fat woman later wink at each other in the canteen, just to prove that Bill’s still attracted to her. After working so hard to mitigate the damage of her comment, why not just cut the damn joke?

There’s also a part of me that worries whether Bill’s sexuality will be something that’s seen in future episodes. In “The Pilot” her mutual crush with Heather is a fundamental part of the plot. But ultimately, Heather dies (...maybe, it’s a little ambivalent). I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is an example of the “Bury Your Gays” trope. Their mutual attraction is actually the only thing that nearly saves Heather’s life and helps her retain her humanity. And while very few relationships end happily in Doctor Who, I’d hate for Bill’s only relationship to end so gruesomely. I hope her attraction to women remains a fundamental part of her character and remains as present in future episodes as, say, Rose’s or Amy’s attraction to men.

Now, don’t think I’ve forgotten Peter Capaldi. Though “The Pilot” is Bill’s story, Capaldi absolutely shines as the Doctor. He’s perfected the balance between Series 8′s grouch and Series 9′s punk magician, mixing just the right amount of aloofness with enigmatic charm. And even though he’s in hiding (or exile, or on a mission), he’s right in his element as a professor. This Doctor was made for the off-beat, grandiose lectures about life and the universe, and now he’s got a captive audience and all the chalkboards he could want. And his monologue about time and space and life will surely go down as one of the best Doctor Who speeches ever.

Though Moffat presented “The Pilot” as a reboot for the show -- a new ‘pilot episode,’ if you will -- it doesn’t quite manage to shake off enough baggage that I would recommend it as a good jumping-on point for new viewers. Nardole is still clunking along in the background. While Matt Lucas does his best to make the character as charming and endearing as possible, I still don’t understand how this character has justified a place in the TARDIS. And while I’m always a sucker for continuity references, they were prominent enough that I’m sure they would’ve tripped up new viewers. I loved seeing Susan and River Songs’s photographs, but they were so prominently featured during critical moments that I know new viewers would recognize they were missing crucial details. 

Where this episode truly shines is when we get to experience the Doctor’s world through fresh eyes. And in Bill Potts’ first adventure, she sees everything that traveling through time and space has to offer -- from it’s wonder and adventure to it’s terror and heartbreaking despair. 

Oddly enough, this episode’s most compelling moment happens before Bill ever steps foot in the TARDIS. 

“If someone’s gone, do pictures really help?” Bill asks the Doctor after revealing that her mother died when Bill was a baby and that she hardly has any photographs of her.

It’s a question you wonder whether Bill really wants answered. Perhaps having no photos of her mother makes the pain of that absence seem a little less sharp. Without them, Bill can invent a woman who she’d like to be her mother. She can make up little sayings her mother might have told her.

But when the Doctor travels back in time and creates a new collection of photographs for Bill, she can’t take her eyes off of them. There’s her mother, more real and tangible than she’s ever been before. And when Bill started crying, so did I.

My father passed away this February. When we were preparing for the funeral, I was put in charge of collecting photographs from his far flung family and friends. I know what it feels like to sort through each of those frozen moments, piecing them back together frame by frame to mark out the space left in our lives by someone we loved. Even photos taken of my father from before I was born made his absence feel sharper, because they represented frozen moments in time we could never get back. 

Time and relative dimension in space. It means life.

And the Doctor brings Bill’s mother back to life for her. It’s the turning point in their relationship. He starts to shed his role as Bill’s tutor and put himself back in the role of the Doctor. He breaks the rules he’d set for himself and uses the TARDIS for the first time during his exile at the university, just to let Bill see her mother.

To see someone and be seen by them is this episode’s most compelling theme.

Bill craves being noticed by the women she likes. But she struggles to see them for who they are, rather than who she’d like them to be. When she first meets Heather, she recognizes Heather’s distress, but she focuses her attention on romanticizing the star shaped discoloration in her eye. When Heather disappears, Bill starts ascribing more nefarious meanings to the star in her eye.

But Heather doesn’t want to be romanticized. She’s firm on the fact that the star is a meaningless defect, a discoloration she wants to have fixed. Bill and Heather flirt about Heather’s desire to leave, but only the sentient creature in the puddle truly sees how desperate Heather’s desire is. And it uses that to consume her and make her a part of it.

And yet, the brief connection between Heather and Bill is enough to tie them across all of time and space. And when Heather offers Bill the opportunity to see the universe as she sees it, Bill can’t deny her. They are both nearly consumed, but that moment of recognition saves them both. For the first time, instead of being forced to mimic Bill, Heather can finally say Bill’s name and releases her.

Even the Doctor, who spends so much of his time trying to expand his companions’ perspectives, needs to be reminded to see Bill as her own person and not just an accessory to his adventures. He is the one who sees Bill sneaking into his lectures, who sees that she smiles when she’s confused, and who sees the potential companion in her. But even after everything they go through, he tries to erase her memories. Bill challenges him, asking him to imagine how he would feel if someone did this to him. And as the faint notes of Clara’s theme echo in the background, the Doctor reconsiders. He knows all too well what it feels like to be in her place, and he decides not to inflict that pain on her. 

Having recognized each other for who they are, Bill and the Doctor begin their adventures on equal footing. After years of the Doctor knowing more about his companion’s lives than they did, it’s nice to see a more balanced relationship. And I’m so excited to see where they go from here.