{"id":656,"date":"2015-03-26T00:40:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T04:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/?p=656"},"modified":"2015-03-26T00:42:21","modified_gmt":"2015-03-26T04:42:21","slug":"from-purgatory-poison-birdo-and-trans-character-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chaoticblue.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/from-purgatory-poison-birdo-and-trans-character-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"From Purgatory: Poison, Birdo, and Trans Character Discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I was looking through my blog drafts folder and noticed a few blog posts that I never actually finished, but had started writing at some point. I don’t have significant time to finish most of them, but since Twitter expressed some interest in seeing them, I figured I’d do my best to bring them to a natural concluding point and just throw ’em out there.<\/p>\n

I want to emphasize that though I’ve put in some work to make these post-able, they are very much still Really Rough Drafts. Please treat them with a bit of indulgence and kindness if I end up sailing off the edge of the map.<\/p>\n

This first one was originally part of my post about Kotaku’s Tingle story<\/a>, but I cut it when I realized it needed to be a post all its own (and that it went on a tangent that didn’t add a lot to\u00a0that<\/em> story).<\/p>\n

Also, if you want some further reading on this topic I would highly recommend Aevee Bee’s “The Story is a Spell.”<\/a><\/p>\n

So, without further ado, take your peek into draft folder purgatory after the cut.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Something that came up in my discussion of the Tingle story was the notion of the “character that everyone throws into the conversation” when characters of [x] type in games are mentioned. There’s a handful of them for basically every type of diverse character (except perhaps the disabled, at least with regards to AAA spaces, which says something right there). When people ask for a good woman of color, most leap to Jade from\u00a0Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>, for example. There’s always The One that gets pulled out for evidence.<\/p>\n

Tingle isn’t necessarily that, but he’s certainly one of the range of go-tos when people — particularly straight people — start thinking and\/or talking about authored gay characters in games. This is symptomatic of a broader problem I see with discourse in gaming culture about queer characters that are not “explicit” in some way (e.g. the game content itself makes a distinct reference to the character’s sexuality or gender identity). You can definitely see this with gaming culture’s two favorite “look at these though!” characters in the form of Birdo and Poison.<\/p>\n