it’s funny, i keep saying how much more street fighter 6 feels like an snk or a sega game than what i associate with capcom
and city of the wolves—though the thematic lineage is clear, maybe real bout more than mark of the wolves, the physical vibe is… off, somehow, and in some ways reminds me more of cps1/2-era capcom than mvs-era snk
the play dynamics have more of those “mean” teeth that i used to avoid so much, in favor of snk’s more slippery texture and freewheeling dynamics
every move has such a narrow input window, such a huge punish window, and 2/3 the range i expect; every mistake is so costly yet so difficult to avoid
although in theory cotw retains much of that snk mobility, in practice it feels way more nailed-down and confrontational than sf6; it’s harder to get the opponent to fuck off and give you space to figure things out
the stress of which exacerbates the narrow margin of error to decisions and inputs
it’s kind of discouraging to engage with, like it shuts down every attempt to hold a conversation and tells you to mind your business (says the famous social butterfly azurelore), compared to the transparency and flexibility and radical effort toward diverse and confident inclusion practiced by sf6
none of this is necessarily bad; it’s just kind of alienating by comparison, toward anyone who falls outside a kind of narrow specific attitude about what sort of conversation they want to entertain
and that’s a conversation i personally am not hard-coded to entertain with ease or enthusiasm
there’s much about cotw that does fascinate me, that feeds the parts of me that push me toward the media that i enjoy
it’s just, i find it a little frustrating that the central design of the thing seems to keep looking at me oddly and asking what i’m doing there, like i strayed into the wrong turf
his character is downbeat, soft-spoken, almost resigned. gently sardonic sense of humor. matter-of-fact about his occupation. generally open and honest and respectful to others, when he’s not killing them.
did he and preecha go to school together?
at a glance, everything about him says “insufferable edgelord,” but he seems like an okay, relatively well-adjusted guy aside from the murders.
doesn’t hurt that maybe he has the best english-language voice acting in the game, ahead of even billy and terry and rock
those four in particular are really killing it here
it’s curious how reasonable everyone is in this game. there’s conflict, but there aren’t really any bad guys beyond inner demons and lingering ghosts of the past
and mr. big, i guess, whose petty shittiness put two games’ worth of story in motion, but his role is sidelined for the most part
it’s mostly just a bunch of people being thoughtful and melancholy at each other, while treating each other with respect
kind of like sonic adventure (a game i’m starting to reference as a touchstone for a certain vibe as much as i do the original release of riven)
there’s this sadness throughout
it’s also very clear to me that mr big, the closest thing to a real antagonist in this web of fates, was supposed to be in the base roster until very very close to release,
while dong hwan was going to be held back as dlc for the first season
and that ronaldo was also crammed in at the last minute
i don’t know what possessed them to swap big for dong
(big dong big dong big dong)
but dong is just not prepared here. no home stage (same as ronaldo), one of the last characters credited, and—i thought initially, missing from the intro, but no, he’s right there…
you see that explosion of silhouettes over the transition with the jin scrolls?
dong is actually the first character we see in the game, beyond terry and geese—or at least, the shape of him,
followed by the darkened forms of joe, andy, ken, and chun—
five extra mystery characters, clearly all dlc
(with fuckin ronaldo “fuck-you” tacked onto the end of the sequence, as if edited in after they thought the animation was all locked down—and even then with some confusion as to whether he would be dlc or not, like his fate was in flux even as they scrambled to shoehorn him in)
by comparison ganacci is pretty securely established, seemingly a later addition but one they had more time and will to work into events as a minor side character—and to allot a spotlight beat with some actual animation alongside everyone else, not just an unflattering static portrait jump-scare
unlike mr. big, who is conspicuous by his absence despite playing such a pivotal role, dong hwan really doesn’t have much to do in the story—
which makes sense if he wasn’t meant to be on the base roster, but part of a first dose of “oh, also these guys” alongside the likes of andy and joe
i’m further guessing that jae hoon was planned to lead a second season of dlc, and freeman a third—going along with their stated commitment to do at least three seasons. each of the three narratively less-important motw characters would have gotten their own little party as they joined the gang.
they announced dong just three days before halloween, a month after the first vague weird cr7 teaser, which in turn was two days after they announced the street fighter collab—which we know they leapt to announce before the ink was dry, lest details of the deal leak before they could do anything
a month earlier than that, in late august, they loudly announced (alongside mai) a 17-character base roster with five dlc characters, sounding like they were confident and had things finalized and were now just focused in on cranking through the last stages of development to meet a meetable deadline
so it looks like last october, six months before the game had to be ready to ship, is when things started to shift around
after tweaking, the intro animation must have been locked in by early october, under the assumption that the base cast was settled aside from maybe a question mark over ronaldo
so what happened in those few weeks to make them suddenly bump up dong and announce him next?
they had rapidly announced eleven of the seventeen base characters, then there was a long gap after mai in august—with the collabs teased halfway through—before suddenly dong was in, and no longer as dlc
clearly ganacci was already quietly happening before the shakeup, though i’m gonna guess he was the final character settled on in the “original” version of the game as it sat prior to late september.
so by late september that leaves gato, kain, ganacci, hokutomaru, and mr. big to finalize by april
realistically they had six months left before they had to tidy things up for initial release, and five characters they still needed to complete—with a single character taking about two months to finish, drawing board to locked code.
of course this isn’t sequential, and they’re spinning many plates.
before late september, i’m guessing the devs felt despite the late-ish addition of ganacci they had things pretty well under control; they knew what work they had left, and had it all scheduled out and allocated and accounted for
then after the collab announcements, it would seem, late-stage chaos
it strongly appears to me, over just a few weeks there was this abrupt pressure to make ronaldo happen for launch if they could, which they didn’t have room to worry about this close to release with this much still left to complete.
so given what they had already promised, they had to reprioritize.
i think they realized that to add this fucker at this point meant they needed to look at what was now physically possible to do, to meet the letter of what they had publicly committed to.
mr. big, i guess, they had yet to really work on much—but for whatever reason, dong was closer to complete.
like, maybe someone was getting a head start on the dlc characters since they thought they knew how much time and work they had left. whatever the reason, he happened to be further along than others so they must have chosen to finish him up next because they had no more time to fuck around
realistically they needed to cut a character to squeeze in this surprise soccer fucker, but they couldn’t cut a character because they had just announced how many characters the game would have.
so they must have stealth-cut mr. big right then, and pushed back everything else that wasn’t crucial.
by mid-february—four-and-a-half months after chaos hit—it feels like they had reached a new security over what they could crank out before an april launch, as they stopped vaguely gesturing at blank spaces and publicly committed to the full season 1 dlc roster, same day as they announced kain.
a month later they first showed off ronaldo’s rough-as-fuck make-do character model, so basically by mid-february they must have concluded that, yeah, they technically can fit this guy in without making themselves into liars about either the release date or number of playable characters at launch.
notably, after dong hwan was rushed down the assembly line without time to figure out a custom stage or anything, the last few characters took absolute ages to announce, almost like the work pipeline devoted to the rest of the game as planned had been halved since october.
gato trailer around christmas, kain about two months later, and hokutomaru only two weeks before launch, within days of salvatore ganacci 😬
assuming they were contractually required to have ganacci complete for launch, it must have been up in the air for a hot minute who else they could manage.
like, maybe it wasn’t immediately clear that mr. big in particular had to go, since it looks like gato, kain, and hoku were all a ways off when the bomb dropped in late september, early october. maybe it was simply obvious that raw numbers were now more important than specifically who made the cut.
so with dong incidentally far enough along for them to rush him out the door, i expect that meant a choice on which of the other planned four was the right balance of less immediately crucial and in need of the most work.
gato is probably the least important—but also probably needed the least work.
that narrows it down to kain, hoku, and mr. big. kain is kind of difficult to manage without here, and though big is central to everything that’s going on in the story, i imagine hoku was just deemed more appealing in a direct comparison, and probably had at least some work already in progress.
i think it’s probable the final decision on which of hokutomaru and mr. big they ultimately would focus on came sometime between finishing up gato around christmas, and the season 1 dlc announcement that came alongside kain.
well, obviously before the latter—but i get the sense, not that far before
terry bogard may be the only main character of any fighting game whom i’ll gladly spend a significant time playing.
ryu? lol, no. akira yui? the kazamas, sophitia alexandra, kasumi mugen tenshin, haohmaru, amongst my last choices.
(weirdly, morrigan isn’t the central darkstalker until game 3. 🦇🤓)
even kyo kusanagi, i enjoy his shitty personality and the bleary antagonism he bounces off everyone in his life—iori, chizuru, shingo, saisyu, even yuki. it’s fun for a long-suffering central character to actually be a total asshole who needs to be dragged into doing anything that could look heroic.
i like how drastically his moveset and play archetype have changed over time. i kind of like the overly complicated, distinctive core of his move list since 1996. i like his changing outfits. the musical evolution of “esaka” is one of my very favorite Video Game Things to go back and fuss over .
i like how deep kyo’s original actor masahiro nonaka’s voice slowly grew, year after year. i liked seeing his character teeter toward totally losing himself over the course of the nests saga; how he began to borrow iori’s moves, a darkness would fall across his face, and his animations grew alarming
as with morrigan and darkstalkers, kyo’s popularity has long been eclipsed by his rival iori—and iori is my precious grumpy snarling gumdrop, who first got me interested in kof, snk, and fighting games in general back in the neogeo pocket/dreamcast days. i absolutely will play iori.
but kyo? ih. 🤷🏻♀️
i’m all over his successor kaydash, and take a fae sort of delight in ash crimson, both of whom technically count as central characters even as kyo, like ryu, remains squarely in the middle of things, anchoring each new era in familiarity and kind of taking the steam away from whoever it up for lead
it’s like, “main character energy” tends to exert on me this unconscious magnetic repulsion. why on sub-con would i pick mario, when the princess and toad are *right frickin there*, you know.
it’s not a thing i think about or intend; it’s just, my mind bounces right off any sort of guided decision.
terry, though?
he’s terry. he’s the guy. why would i not want to hang with such a good bro? one with such a strange yet effective playstyle, at that.
he’s just wander around, doing his thing, and we can come along if we want. or not. no biggie.
bit by tiny bit i continue to organize and clean and tidy and claim this tiny space where i have spent most of the last year holed up, overwhelmed by misery and pain
as one does
so far i’ve:
cleared away a year of depressive detritus
rotated the bed 90° and slotted it to the far corner
created space by tetrising around the endtables and other surfaces
measured space to move my (fortunately tiny, if heavy) computer desk in here
organized the electrical sockets
moved my yoga mat and other neglected self-care tools in here
provisionally organized what-goes-where with my makeup, jewelry, accessories, perfumes, meds, vitamins, effects
gotten all my roommate’s clothes out of my closet
found a functional place for, and gathered up dirty clothes into, a hamper
compiled a list of big and little room-tasks to gradually check off when i have the energy
though not part of my bedroom, today i scrubbed the absolutely gross bathroom sink—then i brought the supplies in here and cleaned about half the hard surfaces before i was wheezing and sweating like rain
next i’ll finish with the rest of the surfaces, then hang or otherwise put away all the loose clothes flopped on the ugly wire racks that my roommate for some reason put in here
then i’ll hand-wash my panties and socks and other “simple” articles in the bathtub and hang them to dry on those racks
that’s end of phase two, i think—phase one being roughly the second skeet above
stage three involves beating out the throw rugs, vacuuming the floor, finding somewhere else to put those ugly racks (maybe the back of the closet, if they fit), and seeing if i can move my bookshelves and desk in here
wave four will be about the nuance; all the little functional and atmospheric tweaks that help to sculpt this space into an environment that helps to support my personal manners and methods and structural needs again
so that i no longer feel like i’m drowning, totally lacking in agency, as i have this last year
that flash, that explosion that takes away all thought, all other sensation, all agency while your body catches up to the shock
i’ve always had audio, speech processing difficulty, and it’s gotten so much worse the last two years. it takes more than everything i have, to process unsolicited speech or environmental sounds
and it hits me exactly like getting kicked in the stomach
it is so hard for me to manage, brings me literally close to blacking out. the vertigo, the nausea, the fading tunnelvision, this buzz like tinnitus in the center of my brain
azure, feeling ancient and calcified and decrepit: “oogh ack urrrg, i am turrrning to dussst…”
the Internet (clickthru):
i swear someone has their thumb on the scale, because this shit feels so incorrect to me
…
thinking again of how my then-spouse didn’t allow me to shave my scraggle that made me so unhappy, because when i did, i “looked like a girl,” which filled them with disgust and sexual uncertainty, which instead of processing they would turn into rage and take out on me for making them feel that way
and it’s like,
you’re the one who married a girl
you have always had a type
you knew what you were getting before i even did
your fears and your desires were there decades before i came along
i have no say over your emotions; i can’t make you feel anything
it’s not my fault that you’re ashamed of who you are; that’s no reason to shame me for who i am
it’s more than the shame, though; it’s the one guiding terror behind every choice a narcissist makes:
what might the people you’ve been manipulating your whole life think of you, if the web came unwound and they ever saw you for real?
i’m pretty sure my bipolar college roommate roofied me one evening, for reasons i can only guess
was it a prank? was he doing a test run?
he was a really charming guy, and we got along well—which made an impression, because that version of me was very hard to get along with
but that semester was very strange
he also bought me expensive things, some of them kind of personal, which confused me at the time and puzzles me more all these years later
after thanksgiving break, he returned to our room for a moment then i guess had some kind of manic episode, left all his stuff behind, and disappeared
there was a whole todo, his parents and police got involved
days later he turned up on the canadian border, in bad shape, without shoes, his feet almost frostbitten off
he had suddenly decided to go camping alone deep in the canadian wilderness, the night of a major blizzard
no wallet or room key
he put on a cheery face the rest of the year, that the person i was didn’t understand enough to see through, even as he hobbled around on crutches, both his feet and lower legs in cartoonishly thick casts
i met his parents—his mom, dramatic and overbearing; his dad must have sucked all the lemons
there was something going on with him, that i wasn’t the right person to see
it comes back to me sometimes, always with more questions than before; always something else to kick myself for missing, even though i never could have caught it back then; i just wasn’t cooked enough
mentally i tend to lump in the first season of sf6 dlc with the starting roster, in part because i didn’t pick up the game until after ed hit; in part, because they are all part of the original plan for the game
like, capcom had only announced four characters when the other 18 leaked in one lump
structurally much of the base game is clearly built around the knowledge that at least rashid, aki, and ed are meant to be there—they’re just delayed a bit, for reasons
same as kofxv with its first season, or what’s happening with cotw, talking about 22 base characters—albeit five of them being dlc
emotionally the sf6 roster also kinda feels weird without the energy of rashid, aki, and ed—they feel like core characters as much as the other seven new guys, plus juri, deejay, and cammy
i get the sense that, like kofxv, they lightly carved out the least-crucial characters to hit the launch date
i mean, akuma is easy to push back because of the way he’s always served as a sort of elite post-game bonus element—but i can see figuring they needed all eight original world warriors on day one as a security blanket, and wanting to show off as many of their new creations as possible…
so it’s mostly that zone between sfii:tww and the new cast, where there was room to trim
i can see keeping in cammy and deejay again for familiarity, even as they have been totally redesigned—leaving just akuma and the three select sfiv-v characters
and then i can see swapping out aki for juri
like, if we’re talking an 18-character launch roster, and feel constrained to use eight of those slots on the sfii cast in order to reassure the easily-stressed and elder Gamers, to balance off and provide symmetry for the eight new guys, that just leaves two other “wild card” slots—which, if we go with the super sfii guys again serve to defer to relative familiarity, while showcasing the game’s ability to make the old altogether new again
i can then see that same totally justified “we need people to accept this immediately” impulse to pivot with a frown and say, “okay, juri is probably our single most popular character of the last 20 years; how can we squeeze her in at launch?”
and if we’re gonna tinker with the symmetry to make sure foot-girl is there on day one, then aki makes a natural sacrifice. even if she’s an important new character, there’s so much conceptual overlap, right?
like, juri has always been dlc until now and i can see how at first thought she likely was a strong candidate to hold back along with akuma and the two sfv characters—but she’s just that strong a draw, swapping her into the launch roster makes that much stronger a first impression and sales pitch
anyway, the season 1 dlc is clearly all scrambled up in the initial development of the game. it’s not extraneous tacked-on content, it’s the rest of the game as originally planned.
season 2 is where shit starts to get wild, as they start to build and riff off the now-established base
there’s this clear “act break” of sorts between [launch+s1] and s2, and the energy is so different, so much more confident as of last summer, just a few months after i finally got on-board
it’s almost like a soft reboot of a now-proven success, restating the original pitch with new flair and spark
so, long way of saying, i tend to kinda forget that rashid, ed, and aki technically aren’t launch roster. since they are so clearly of a part with the rest of the game and elements of its *core* roster. it’s just, part of that base core had to be held back a bit to get the game out the door at all 🤷🏻♀️
dull reminder that sexuality isn’t about sex; it’s about attraction
a gay man isn’t necessarily out fucking dudes all day every day
a bisexual woman isn’t necessarily bonking everyone she meets
an ace enby doesn’t necessarily dislike sex or lack a libido; they just don’t see other people that way
in fact it’s super common for aces to be polyamorous, because attraction is not a factor or a barrier—it’s simply not a consideration, making friendship and shared interests far more of a comprehensible path to the bed
it’s entirely possible to be ace and also a total slut
case in point: azurelore
imagine being an autistic weirdo who realizes they can just share with close friends an intense special interest in and expressive fascination for sex
just explore and embrace and openly muse and discuss and theorize and philosophize about this endlessly curious topic, like any other friend stuff
it’s not about—well, whatever it is that allo people feel; this mystical quality of sexual attraction that makes “normal” people behave absolutely insane to my eyes
it’s not about power dynamics or transactions or possession or any of that scary toxic mess
it’s just, “hey, this is neat! ya wanna?”
of course aces can also be sex-averse for any number of reasons, and that’s cool too and needs to be respected
but you know who else can be sex-averse for any reason and deserves respect? bi people. gays. lesbians. pansexuals. straights.
i also was very averse until i learned to love myself.
where they locked me when i cried or melted down from overstimulation and fear, where i sat still and quiet and listened to all the screams, hoping they would continue to just forget i existed
it strikes me, in her other relationships K— is used to always being the older, smarter, more self-assured and sophisticated party—and in absence of any real grasp on this “emotion” thing, her whole way of engaging with others involves memorized or workshopped playbooks that control the crowd in any situation, ensuring that everyone sees how impressive she is before she selectively allows them to engage with her and receive her depths of wisdom and experience.
problem is, with me basically none of that applies. the statistical factors all are flipped, and i have zero interest in social manipulation or following obvious cues or messing around with superficial displays. i just want to sit and have meaningful conversations and be open and enjoy in each other as people.
and i think that sits so outside of her carefully structured theater of social performance that she has never known what the fuck to do with me. like, her bullshit doesn’t work here and instead i’m casually asking all this unreasonable ad-hoc stuff of her, like to read the poetry i write her or acknowledge the random thoughts i share, or to spend actual time with me or discuss our feelings or maybe sometimes once in a green moon tell me something nice about myself—literally any aspect of me that she genuinely likes, just once.
and i think that scared her. or intimidated her. or irritated, or triggered some kind of envy or feeling like i was showing her up somehow—even more annoyingly, without my trying and in apparent total innocence toward any kind of game even happening around me.
she frequently expressed bewilderment at her inability to predict how i would behave or react to literally anything. which makes more sense to me now if we flip that around and extrapolate that she was continually trying to get ahead of me and predict my behavior so she would know what script to follow in order to get control of the situation.
i’m only just seeing these shapes now—but i think on some level K— always kept me at arm’s length because it freaked her out that i was largely immune to her games and that she had no clue how to just relate to me directly as a real person. i think i made her feel self-conscious, defensive, uncomfortable in my lack of a facade or any apparent understanding of or interest in the social cues she spent so many years gaming and mastering to her material advantage. as if my existence was a living criticism and counter-example to her life’s work, nullifying and invalidating without even having the decency to see or acknowledge what i was stepping over on way to have a fond unguarded conversation about whatever.
how dare i not even have the decency to compete against or criticize or argue and debate the merits of her careful manipulation. i didn’t even leave her an opening to make a case or get angry for judging her. i just skipped right to direct honest vulnerable human intimacy. which, i’m not sure that she even fully realized was a thing before she met me.
so for around ten months after her visit to see me and slowly realize i actually just was exactly what i represented myself to be, every time that i tried to interact with her she would become guarded and behave like i was doing something to her by engaging with her at all. she would go to weird, frankly hurtful lengths to avoid or discourage conversation. refuse to schedule any of her precious time to spend with me. get angry if i tried to talk to her unsolicited. refuse to include me in anything, and act weird and tense if i involved myself anyway. actively discourage me from paying my girlfriend any romantic or sexual attention, and pointedly i don’t think ever once initiating anything with me.
and she just constantly took shit out on me that felt like it came out of nowhere. but it kind of makes sense if she thought of me as some kind of continual low-key existential threat or dismissal, to her mind both showing her up and challenging her to relate to me in a way that she had no tools to understand, didn’t begin to know how to approach. all she knew was that despite and maybe in part because of all the fondness i showed her, i made her question herself—and she not like what i called to her attention. it’s like i made her feel inadequate and icky in ways she didn’t have words or framework to articulate to herself, and i think she just projected that all back at me, resenting me more and more as the hurt she was causing me grew more and more obvious. how dare i further implicitly criticize her, just by passively existing for her to compare herself to?
i made everything so complicated for her, by being so uncomplicated. so she spent the best part of a year doing her best to ignore me and projecting on me all her doubts and insecurities. treating me like that one girl in class who actually did her homework, bringing down everyone else’s grade in the process, but who was so sweet and clueless that being overtly mean to her just made you feel even worse about yourself.
everybody be like azurelore! see the quality of her work? see how far her attitude goes? class, make sure you study her example.
but i’m just over here, in love with her so that i’m bursting, wondering why she refuses to tell me that she likes me, wondering why she pivots and leaves a room the moment she sees me standing there, why she snaps at me for telling her about my day when she didn’t ask, wondering what i ever did to her. wondering why despite the odd sterile memorized self-contained statement, she so clearly doesn’t love me back—not love as i understand it. how clearly she has zero interest in me, and so much less than zero concern for my feelings that she responds with hostility when i express them, seemingly no matter what they may be.
… i should have left her months ago. i almost did, once—until she harassed me to tears, spent hours yelling at me, giving me a full-fledged panic attack over the phone, until i agreed to stay. i thought about leaving several more times, but i didn’t want to get on that side of her again if i could avoid it. and, well, i was so deeply in love. i didn’t really want to leave; i adored her unconditionally. she was amazing. i just wanted to not feel like that, all the time. i kept thinking maybe after this or that rough patch, everything would be fine and we would figure things out together, learn how to communicate clearly, and she wouldn’t make me cry every other time she spoke to me.
but, yeah.
i think she just genuinely didn’t know how to reciprocate my feelings for her. i think she felt weird about herself because of how counter i stood to her whole meticulously playtested self-published role-playing game called “grown-up love & dating for the gifted & talented.” and with her absence of real emotional development, she wound up taking out her discomfort on me day after day, month after month, instead of challenging her own systems of understanding that had successfully led to so many dozens of shallow relationships that gave her the results she wanted without her needing to learn how to actually connect with another human being, or acknowledge that maybe she has never once done this in her life and would have zero idea how to go about it—leaving her vulnerable for once, unable to shape every element of the situation to her favor. unable to guarantee that she would win.
“you win,” she kept telling me in that final conversation. even as there was nothing to win. there was no game. there was just one person trying to have an important conversation, and another shouting at her about how unfair it was to them for her to express her feelings or explain to them her perspective on her own life experiences. did she not think of how doing so might make them feel?
but no, apparently i won. just this once i was permitted my own emotion about my own life, but that meant the game was over. she couldn’t play with a person who so adamantly refused to be told what to think and feel, who refused to be managed, who so insisted on an open conversation where two people just listen to and validate and care for and trust in each other. what kind of a fucked-up game even is that? it’s nothing but a trap she was “guaranteed to fail,” as she put it.
so by fiat, azure wins. fine, be that way. insist on basic consideration. insist on your own validity. insist on me showing you the same vulnerability and patience you show me. insist all you want, but this is my game and i’m taking it home with me. so if you think about it, who really wins in the end? haha, got you there!
Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.
There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”
I see what he’s doing, but—😅
It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.
I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.
Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.
Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.
I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.
I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.
Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?
I find it so surreal when friends I thought I knew turn out to have biological family, that they talk to and get along with and willingly spend time around. It’s like, surely this is a bit, right? It’s so hard to envision living that way; to me it feels like something that surely only exists in out-of-touch hollywood scripts that serve to show us a conservative cultural mythology rather than the genuine empirical shape of life.
It’s like hearing that someone believes in the tooth fairy or went to their senior prom or is heterosexual or something: “Really, you’re not serious are you? Hahaha, how… sweet. Well, have fun with that I guess?”
They will talk about needing to go vacation with their mom, and my immediate thought is “What, why? What sort of hold does she have over you? Are you safe, are you okay?”
This commentary isn’t meant as shade; it’s in response to a cohost thread on how society is structured to prevent people escaping from a static defined biological family unit, and serves to ensure those who do are eternal outcasts from the basic benefits of society.
And my response to that is sort of the opposite of the typical shock and incredulity about having no family. To me, learning that someone—especially another queer—does have assigned family is like learning that they still maintain open contact with the cult that I thought they had successfully escaped from. Or like hearing a recovering addict is about to go hang around with that old acquaintance again. I feel like, how worried should I be? 😧
