Annotated 38-7
Syr’gg ship teases aside, Guilded Age did not do much with the open portrayal of lesbian relationships. For a while, I kind of avoided the topic because I didn’t want to get pigeonholed after Penny and Aggie. But by this point, I was starting to feel like we should show a lesbian couple more actively, somewhere. Although Gastonia is definitely not less prejudiced than present-day advanced societies, its prejudices are different. Sexism is certainly a thing, but the same society that cracks jokes about stuffing a pie with avians is actually pretty tolerant of all humans who find love with other humans.
So that’s the reason for the blonde in the dress and the raven-haired soldier here, who were drinking together in the center of the bar where everyone could see. It’s a somewhat cliched “femme-butch” dynamic they’ve got going on, still beholden to traditional gender roles in its way and arguably stereotypical. But it feels right for Gastonia, and I was worried that they wouldn’t come across as a couple if we did anything else. As it was…I’m not sure any readers got they were supposed to be a couple anyway. We couldn’t do too much more with them without sucking focus away from Sundar, but a little “Behind me, dear” line from our soldier in panel 1 might’ve been a good addition.
Sundar’s life philosophy in panels 3 and 4 is borne out by his own experience. He’s been a disgraced child-seller drugged in a gutter and the regent of his own country, with a few other highs and lows rounding out his story. You’re up, you’re down, but one never knows what tomorrow will bring!
I asked John to play a little trick on the reader with E-Merl in the last frame. You see E-Merl’s face and pose first and you think maybe, just maybe, he’s getting over his pain. Then you read his words and realize, oh no, wait, he’s definitely getting worse.
“I felt we should actively show this thing that… Really didn’t have anything to do with the story, but is majorly important to some people and gosh dorn, we want a slice of that pie… I mean action as well.” :D
It’s kinda silly how nowadays a story can’t be a story. It can’t have things the way they are just for the story’s sake.
You have to include certain aspects, you have to have certain checklist when building a story and check more out of it than not, otherwise you’re a bad person.
And then you have another checklist that your story JUST PLAIN CAN’T HAVE. At all. You are simply not allowed to touch on certain topics. Or even topics of previous checklist if you’re not doing them “right” or in most cases, don’t exactly represent the topics themselves yourself, thus earning you the right to write about them at all.
But that is, even if you aren’t a member of the topic and thus have no right to write about them, ‘cose you’re absolutely unable to write about them…
You’re still bad person if you didn’t check enough from the list.
Meaning, if you’re not at least something from the list, why are you even writing? You’re taking important room from those who should be represented as writers themselves.
You should not write because there are other’s who weren’t suppose to right either that really should write. But not you.
…
And if you’re confused by that whole thing, you understood it perfectly. XD
Just… Write the story how you feel like writing. Make “mistakes”, don’t feel that you “have to include”, just let it happen if it is to happen. It’s much more important to not fight back, than fight for. Teach others not to fight back as well, don’t try to beat them to agree with you. You won’t agree with someone fighting you over something, so why should they?
We might disagree on specifics, but I see a lot of where you’re coming from. These issues can be complex, and I’m not too big on self-blame and impossible standards, either. A lot of my projects have cishet white guys at or near their center, partly because I’m one of those. And while I do feel it’s important for other demographics to have voices (love me some Ms. Marvel by her original creator), I don’t support the argument that my mere presence displaces some minority creator and thus the only responsible thing to do is end my career immediately.
But Guilded Age was a long-running series with roughly 200 named characters and lots more incidental extras: the possibilities for representation in a series of that scope are a little different than in a ten-page comedy about that one time I played D&D with my friends. Representation does matter, to me and not just to others, because humanity in all its shades and variations is what my stories are about.
And sometimes, too, it’s about finding fresh challenges for yourself. John and I are, at this writing, working on a character in a demo I’ve never touched before, partly because it’s taken me some time to feel like I understand how to do it right. You’ve got to hit that sweet spot between being way too anxious and being complacent.
It’s a whole bag of snakes covered in pissed off cats taped on the back of a hungry polar bear…
And both you and Zak raise very good points, in much more civil manner even than I, which is more than I might even deserve. XD
I’m just absolutely tired of these (like dreadfully many others). We are just so warlike creatures the lot of us. Many an artist, writer or illustrator getting so much flack for “not doing something”, “doing something totally wrong” or the mentioned best “not being the right type to do something”.
Absolutely not saying there aren’t any cases that such wouldn’t be warranted, but not even remotely as much as is going on now.
And when it gets to such ridiculous lengths…
But as you both mentioned, there is definitely room for more varied casts in MANY a thing. And in near every media in general. It’s just… It’s done so horribly wrong nowadays. They’re really forcing the issue in so many places and at worst they are just trying to send a message completely heedless to what story they’re supposed to be telling.
It just makes me so tired of it. It makes people like me tired. Even to the point that I launch into a rant from mere mention of it, as seen. And I’m actually trying to be good. I don’t rightly care what people do with their lives as long as it doesn’t harm any other’s (feelings not included, you just can’t make everyone happy). Heck, through my friend I’ve been in touch with gays and people of colour who even they are for most parts sick and tired of this all (granted, they’re “suffering” from white privilege too or are just “wrong type of queer” as they’ve been said…)
It’s just… You really, really “should” not do something. You really don’t “have to” do something. But I’m thankful you did, ‘cose you can.
‘Cose like Zak put it, people need more heroes (and villains for that matter).
It’s just so tiresome to see so many heroes become villains these days.
»It’s just… It’s done so horribly wrong nowadays. «
I try to see it this way: 80% of everything is crap. No idea who came up with that, but it’s remarkably correct (except if the statement itself was always accurate, that would disprove it…)
So no matter whether it’s some hot new style of music, making movies, technological gadgets … if you pay enough attention, you will find that much of them aren’t done very well, and their makers probably just went along because that’s what people want these days, without quite understanding what it’s about or for.
So this is something you could hold against any new development, but it becomes more obvious when it’s in a field you know or care about more, or of course when it’s an overall unwelcome/hard to understand development.
Inclusion done badly can break a story, but then maybe the author wasn’t that good to begin with. And if we want it done well, we have to accept the crappy 80% … *shrug* … better that way than not at all, I guess.
(And for what it’s worth, I’m too dumb or stubborn to know which topics I “can’t” touch on. But in a world where everyone tweets their hot take after a five-second glance, I do take some care in crafting the first impression a story leaves.)
I think it’s important, especially when it comes to inclusion, to know the difference between “should” and “must”.
Stories matter, because they help define and expand the space of possibilities in everyone’s minds. Loads of women used to believe that they must become housewives because that’s what “all the women” did. That was not true, but that’s what you could see on TV every evening, because almost none of the men making stuff for TV had bothered to think twice when coming up with occupations for women in their stories. And of course there was never anything wrong with being a housewife. It’s just that if *every single woman* is a housewife on TV, it gives a very skewed image of reality, which makes it boring — and it sends a very unhealthy message to girls who may then force themselves to accept their fate more willingly.
Now, let’s say it was the 1960s, and you had a little niece who’s super into being a pilot, but gets super sad because that’s for boys. Wouldn’t you *want* there to be some role model to let her know that she can totally become a pilot if she wants? Wouldn’t you hope that she came across a story with a female pilot?
There is no sinister agency anywhere who secretly disappears authors if they don’t include their alotted quota of minorities in their stories, because that would be stupid. But any author who cares about representation *should*, every now and then, check if they’re unconsciously omitting some fraction of the population from their work. It’s a good thing to do, and I’m happy to see that T cares enough to do so, and I don’t see why anyone would object. We all need to get used to seeing queer folk(*) more. That makes it much easier to stay calm when it turns out that that hypothetical niece of yours maybe also has different romantic attractions than what “everyone” expected…
Also, if T hadn’t mentioned the couple, I’d have totally overlooked the whole thing.
(*): “Queer” as placeholder for any acronym starting with LGBT… because there’ll always be some group missing from that acronym, or some gender/sexual preference that nobody’s aware of. Maybe that’s not the best word, but you gotta start somewhere.
“You have to include certain aspects, you have to have certain checklist when building a story and check more out of it than not, otherwise you’re a bad person.”
This is entirely your assumption and the main issue with your position and that of everybody who ever has spouted the nonsense that the term “virtue-signaling” is: You genuinely believe that people like T does things such as this lesbian representation here out of a desire for some sort of internet cookie points or self-validation as a “good” person.
You assume, with prejudice, that it is not possible that someone can honestly care about these sort of things, that someone is truly attempting to do good in the world and it’s all a self-serving pretense. I’m of the belief that people who think this way are themselves profoundly self-serving and devoid of virtue, and as such, the very idea of someone being selfless is worse than a fallacy: it’s pure posturing, the most hypocritical of all kinds of selfishness.
Lastly, you don’t seem to know much about literature. Do you think that Tolstoi just went full stream of consciousness when he wrote War and Peace or Victor Hugo when he wrote Les Miserables? Or is it rather that artists and creators often have something to say to the world at large and they intently use their art to say it. Including political themes in these sorts of narratives is not some sort of artificially sprinkled politicizing but rather, the very reason why these stories were conceived for.
Your assumption is then in turn being that my beef if with T and the way he handled this?
Then I’m afraid you’re mistaken. My beef is with the “need” in general and how it has been made a virtue on its own above all else.
That it was ranted in such length here was not warranted, but brought about my exhaustion of the idea and for that I admit my poor tact.
It would be a topic best talked in more specific arenas, but to do so in them would be almost as futile as it is done here if not even more so. For those arenas are almost always polarized to one face of the subject and would not bring forth any new dialogue in the matter.
And I operate under no illusion that the writers, artists and illustrators wouldn’t work in the realm they live in. I simply don’t accept the stand that a creator is made bad or even evil by what they’ve done or left undone, or even by what they choose to add or leave from their works, until they’ve proven to having done so with express malice towards other. A creator never “has to” nor “should” do something just because others view it as “right”.
And if Tolstoi or Hugo did such, I would call them the fools just the same.
Never let it be said though that a creator should leave something undone either if they feel they want to do otherwise.
That T added a gay couple is just that. Sure, the story didn’t need them and their love is not something the plot asked for, but there they are. It’s the matter of T feeling felt they “should” do it and that it “had to” be done. That’s just wrong.
I think it might be helpful to try looking at it through the lense of another, less controversial, inclusion: time of day
Sure, a shorter, tightly focused story where everything seems to happen when it’s some ambiguous time during the day is fine, but once the story gets past a certain length, it starts to become more and more noticeable that morning and evening don’t seem to really exist in the story. Having the author comment offhand that they felt they “had to” set a scene at night isn’t the best way to address it, but it’s better than nothing (ideally, variety in the time of day would be baked in from the start, and organically included).
Same thing with queer representation, the absence starts to feel really weird after a while, and an author feeling they should fix that doesn’t have to mean anything other than they noticed a flaw in their world building and felt a patch job was all they were up for.
I really like that analogy.
The difference to the actual theme is of course that everyone notices morning and evening every night, but for non-normative gender roles/preferences, perception varies extremely.
Some people only “know” gay people from that one guy in “Beverly Hills Cop”, and are surprised when so many of them show up on TV(*), while others maybe go to different bars and casually run into trans and non-binary people on a regular basis.
I moved from the first state to the second a few years ago but my parents didn’t, and boy did we have difficult discussions on this topic. Then someone in my family came out as non-binary, and suddenly it’s all a bit more real :o)
(*) I think they probably know more than they think, but in circles where it’s seen as very unusual, non-cishet people will often just stay quiet and try to blend in, and the others won’t notice the subtler signs.
The difference, then, lies in a difference of perspective. If T looks at his ouvre and at the world and he sees a disparity, a needling feeling of incongruence that translates as a “need” to do something however little it might be, and you don’t see or feel evidence for this need, it may be simply that you are not looking in the same metaphorical direction as he.
I can’t really speak for T but I can speak for myself as I have felt that pressure myself. It comes from seeing a group of people fighting for recognition against a hostile system. A system where a not-insignificant amount of people strongly believe that this group either shouldn’t exist or, at best, should exist quietly and away from the public eye where cruel discrimination and abuse can be enacted on them to ensure that they remain that way. When I see that plight and I see that the only power I possess to change the system that presses these groups is voting for politicians who promise to help AND adding my voice and whatever visibility the products of my daily efforts give me to erode the narrative that causes so many common people to support that oppression. This action is called “normalization through representation”.
In other words, if I (or T & Flo here), can do a teensy bit to help represent people from this group in a positive way (or even just in a neutral way, as fallible but mostly well-intending human beings) to counteract the demonization they suffer, doing so feels as a consuming need, a duty, in the same sense that you would feel pressed to share your bread with someone who is starving in front of you. It is in our human nature to do so.