Anna and the Bunches

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Trigger Warning: this entry contains discussion of cissexist slurs, in particular the T-word. If you want to skip that, start reading below the ‘End of Trigger Warning’ message

Also, Spoiler Warning

I’m going to start in the most obvious place: the subtitles in this episode use the word ‘tranny’. In fact, the word gets used several times in the series, but this is the first occurrence. So, let’s talk about language.

When I read that subtitle, I winced; I’m particularly sensitive to the term, and even hearing it used in a reclamatory sense makes me cringe. I’m just not a fan of this word at all. It offends me. But more importantly, it is a slur - actively harmful language. To understand my perspective on this, I actually recommend something written by someone else - Kinsey Hope’s excellent post on words and offense. In fact, for the purposes of this discussion I’m assuming you’ve clicked that link and read her post.

So, Kinsey has hopefully established to your satisfaction that slurs are bad. If not, well, the rest of this discussion probably won’t do much for you, and I’m honestly surprised you’re reading my blog in the first place. However, in a fictional story designed to be roughly representational of reality, slurs can have a function. If slurs are used in contexts that demonstrate the bigotry of the speaker or challenge their usage, then they have a place in the story. And, of course, words used in a reclamatory context are as acceptable in fiction as they are in reality.

Before we can consider how the word is used in Wandering Son, though, we need to consider that this is a translated work. So, let’s investigate the Japanese world being used here, and see whether the translation is accurate. The Japanese word that is being translated as ’tranny’ is ‘okama’ (おかま). Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, an all-around excellent Japanese language resource for English speakers, has this to say about the word ‘okama’ (only the relevant part of the definition is provided):

(n) (colloquial, often derogatory) male homosexual; effeminate man; male transvestite

While gay men and transvestites are certainly insulted using the word ‘tranny’, as a slur its function is to attack trans women. As a result, this definition and the translation chosen didn’t really sit well for me. So I did some more research, and found this book, which discusses the use of ‘okama’ and gay male culture in Japan. The overall sense I got from this book’s treatment of the term is that the dominant cultural elements in Japan often conflate gender identity and sexual orientation (this is unsurprising, as it is true of straight culture in the US as well), and while GLBT culture in Japan distinguishes between the two more accurately, there is still some degree of conflation between the two. I suggest reading the excerpts available from the book for a more detailed look at this.

The upshot of all of this is that I get the impression that the translation here is accurate in context; at least, it is accurate enough for our purposes. Given the target and the speaker of the word each time it is used, I believe it was always translated so that it is accurate after adjusting for American cultural expectations. I am by no means an expert on Japanese language or culture, however, so I acknowledge that this argument may be flawed. At any rate, I’m proceeding with the understanding that the translation can be taken at face value.

With that said, I think the usage here is fair, narratively speaking. The first usage we see is of a somewhat confused boy using it in disgust; another use is by a character who is well-established as cissexist and bigoted. The word is also used reclamatively, and almost accusatively, by Yuki (more on that in a later post). These instances of the word serve to present cisnormative reactions to the idea of transsexuality, and so help establish the narrative of the broader culture in which Shūichi is struggling to define himself.

End of Trigger Warning

The episode as a whole was pretty uneventful. It almost feels like an intermission. A couple of things do happen that I want to talk about, though.

First, this episode finally touches on the subject of ‘outing’: Shūichi is outed to all of his friends as a cross-dresser (which, while not necessarily accurate, is typical of the tendency to conflate all gender variance). While shocked at the time, Shūichi later seems to be somewhat relieved at having the truth (or an approximation of the truth) presented by someone else. Yoshino, on the other hand, responds to the person who outs Shūichi with hostility. This leads Shūichi to realize (via internal monologue) that Yoshino is willing to get angry on his behalf. Later, while talking to Mako, he says “People laughed at me. In grade school, they said I was girly. But you and Takatsuki understood me, so I knew everything would be okay.”

Watching those scenes, I realized something that hit me pretty hard: I never had anyone like Yoshino and Mako. Throughout my childhood, I had friends, but I was never close enough with anyone to tell them about my gender confusion. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I would find someone I was really comfortable being myself around. If I had had friends like that, I may have come to understand myself years earlier. Those years feel wasted in hindsight - years spent not being true to myself.

This kind of regret is common amongst trans people - at least, it is common amongst the trans people that I know. I transitioned at the age of 27. Looking at average life expectancies, that means I spent one third of my life lying to myself and to everyone else. Being in pain, and depressed, and not even understanding why for most of it. It is hard not to feel regret over that.

Wandering Son, of course, doesn’t really touch this particular problem; Shūichi is still very young, and the story (in the anime, at least), doesn’t progress far enough to deal with the actual issues of transition. But it drudges up those feelings just the same.

Also in this episode, the students are assigned their roles for the upcoming play. Notably, they are assigned the roles by lots; Mako ends up being Juliet, while Saorin gets the role of Romeo. This is certainly an interesting plot development, since the normal Western narrative structure here would be to give Shūichi and Yoshino those roles (as that would parallel the overall theme of the show, and set up the classic Happily Ever After ending). Instead, we get Mako, who has some gender confusion of his own, and Saorin, who certainly wanted to be Romeo, but only because she wanted to use it as a platform to profess her love for Shūichi.

And Saorin, for her part, remains as unsympathetic as ever. She broods, whines, and is unselfconsciously self-absorbed throughout the episode, and ends the episode by asking Shūichi (out of earshot) “Why art thou Juliet?”. While this certainly serves to underscore the play-within-a-play structure* that the Romeo & Juliet play represents, it serves even better to underscore Saorin’s selfish, cissexist attitude towards Shūichi. Instead of wanting Shūichi to be happy, she wants him to be hers, and her heterosexual identity means that, as a consequence, she wants him to deny his gender identity for her benefit.

This is another narrative that is common in the transgender experience. Spouses and lovers of trans people often struggle to accept their partners’ transitions. This frequently leads to divorce, and is frequently accompanied by a selfish desire for the trans person to be cisgender. Some trans people choose to suppress their trans identity to keep their marriages together. Speaking partially from personal experience, I suspect that this rarely solves the problem, instead leading to resentment and depression. Saorin, here, seems to want to found a relationship on this dynamic.


* The extended homage to Shakespeare built into the first half of Wandering Son deserves analysis, but is outside the scope of this series’ focus. I’ll just leave it at ‘obviously, an extended homage to Shakespeare is going on here’.

As ever, Spoilers.

There are only two episodes of Doctor Who that have ever made me cry. The first one was Forest of the Dead - River’s death scene was amazing, Alex Kingston sold the idea of a woman who had loved the Doctor so well that I couldn’t help but feel that the Doctor had lost something tremendous. It remains one of my very favourite scenes in the show.

The second episode that made me cry aired a few days ago, and I just got around to watching it last night. The tone of The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe is like the last three scenes of Forest of the Dead stretched out over an entire episode. To be clear, and to keep from burying the lead: if you didn’t think this episode was good, you are wrong. You must have watched it wrong. Maybe your TV was broken.

Claire Skinner and Matt Smith absolutely shine in their scenes together. The emotional pitches that they hit are simply stunning, and Moffat’s dialogue is some of the best it’s ever been. Moffat’s stories often have sentimental notes, but here it is turned all the way up. And Skinner sells her grief so well, it is impossible not to empathize with her.

The title is an obvious reference to C.S. Lewis, of course, and the episode certainly contains thematic parallels: a father lost to the war, a family staying in the country to get away from the bombing, an old house and a strange box that leads to another world (and a snowy one, at that). But where it gets interesting is where the story deviates from, and especially where it actively rejects and subverts, the ideas of Lewis. In the title, the Doctor takes the place of Aslan/Jesus, and Madge is in place of the witch. The TARDIS, of course, is the wardrobe - it’s even lampshaded as such. But while the Doctor could conceivably be a Christ figure (even if he makes a better Odinic warrior), he doesn’t serve that role in the narrative here. Instead, he instigates the adventure and serves as a sort of tour guide / expository force. The action is centered around the Arwell family, and rightly so. Smith is channelling Troughton again here, lingering around the edges of the story and never taking center stage.

As for the other titular character, Madge is far from a bitter antagonist - she is the heroine of the story. And that leads us to what I’m going to call a tie for the best refutation of C.S. Lewis’ sexism that I’ve ever found (the other is The Problem of Susan). Lewis made it clear that women existed to support men - this motif is played out repeatedly between the brothers and sisters in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Of course, women have another option: they can be evil, literally frigid bitches. In other words, women are either weak or they are abhorrent.

Moffat, on the other hand, explicitly rejects this; the forest calls men ‘weak’ and women ‘strong’, and both female characters are at the center of the action, with Cyril, the son, playing the role of peril monkey. Lily gets the crucial scenes where she and the Doctor are looking for Cyril, and Madge gets… well, everything else. Coming to the rescue in a giant mech, running through acid rain, saving the population of a planet. And backing all of her actions is the distinctly feminine concept of motherhood. This is made explicit repeatedly, with the Doctor even making the inevitable ‘mothership’ pun. Madge draws her motivation and her power to the story from aspects of her identity that are intrinsically tied up with being female. This is Feminism in the tradition of the Female Mysteries of modern Paganism (and without even the biologically essentialist attitudes that are unfortunately common there). And speaking of Paganism, the carved/grown tree-people (and accompanying tower) have a distinctly Anglo-Saxon Pagan feel to them, which serves to make the story an even stronger counterpoint to Lewis’ work.

So, we have a very Pagan Christmas story with a theme of the fundamental power of womanhood. But the real focus of the story is on the importance of family, of celebrating life with people you love. It’s the sort of feel-good, heartwarming message that you might find on ABC Family. But we are saved from Seventh Heaven with Druids (Seventh Ogham?) by the superlative writing and acting. At no point does the theme feel heavy-handed or contrived; it flows naturally from the narrative.

But this is identifiably a holiday story, in the sense that it is themed along traditional holiday motifs. And, in that tradition, the Arwell family gets their presumed-dead father back. Frankly, I’m torn about this choice - I was annoyed when the very touching scene where A Mother Explains to Her Children About Their Father’s Death is interrupted for “oh, he’s not dead after all”. On the other hand, the subsequent scene is just as touching, with Skinner once again rising to the acting challenge and effectively conveying the amazed joy of someone who finds their lover isn’t dead after all.

No, I take that back. I’m not torn. Let the Arwell family have their father back. Maybe leaving him to die would be a stronger narrative, more raw and emotionally evocative. But it’s Christmas. Let’s embrace the aesthetic of Happily Ever After, at least this time. Just this once, everybody can live.

And now, about the Doctor. I said before that Smith was channelling Troughton in this episode. But his other seeming muse, Sylvester McCoy, is completely absent from this one. The Doctor has no great scheme here - he is simply trying to do something nice for a sad family. But significantly, the Doctor is shown to be much more human here than McCoy’s Doctor. Which isn’t surprising - one of Moffat’s key themes (and Tennant before him) is humanizing the Doctor. We have watched the Doctor learn how to love through the course of the new series. This is a sharp contrast to, well, all of the classic Doctors to some degree. But McCoy’s Doctor was the real cornerstone of this mode of being. Perhaps the best expression of the difference is from Human Nature, by Paul Cornell (the New Adventures novel, not the new series episode):

‘I hope that one day, when I’m old, when my travels are over, and history has no more need of me, then I can be just a man again. And then, perhaps I’ll find those things in me that I’d need to love, also. not love like I do, a big love for big things, but that more dangerous love. The one that makes and kills human beings… It’s a dream I have.’

The new series answers this quote by having the Doctor fall in love without ending his travels. This takes the form of romantic love twice, obviously. But this episode shows a distinctly platonic love towards Amy and Rory. The Doctor repeatedly talks about ‘happy crying’ as a human trait, and then does it himself when he realizes how much Amy and Rory care about him. This is the sort of emotional investment in a companion that we haven’t seen since Rose, and really didn’t see before that at all (sure, there was Susan, but frankly I have a hard time believing Hartnell’s Doctor loved anyone). Even Ace, who the Doctor seemed very paternal toward at times, was used by the Doctor as a pawn repeatedly.

The point is that the Doctor is a lot less Time Lord and a lot more Human than he used to be. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing - he’s still a mythic figure, and subject to the narrative and aesthetic rules of mythic figures. But he also has the capacity to enjoy Christmas dinner with his family. Let’s let him have that, too. It’s Christmas, after all.

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This is the first episode that made me cry.

Sure, each of the other episodes made me get teary-eyed at least once, but this one actually gave me a need-a-tissue, tears-streaming-down-my-cheeks crying fit. It did this by being painfully sweet. But we’ll get to the scene that made me cry a bit later. First, I want to talk about swimming.

I fondly remember the days when throwing on a bathing suit and going swimming was straightforward, or even possible. As my gender dysphoria increased, and I started shaving the hair from areas that gave me the greatest bodily dissonance, swimming slowly became more and more awkward, until it was basically impossible for me to comfortably go swimming in public. Now that I have transitioned, swimming is still awkward. It is difficult for me to find a bathing suit that doesn’t make me feel exposed, and even then my body’s shape makes me feel very uncomfortable when it is that obvious. So when this episode opened with the cast swimming at school, I winced inwardly.

The scene is used to show more of Shūichi and Yoshino’s dysphoria. Shūichi is visibly envious of Yoshino’s figure, and Yohsino is distinctly self-conscious when she is complimented as looking ‘womanly’. And this leads us to another aspect of trans experience that this show portrays very correctly - the unknowingly harmful comment.

Speaking for myself, as always, I know that as I began transitioning, offhand comments directed at me while I was dressed as a boy could often hurt, even when there is no ill intent (or special knowledge) on the part of the speaker. A good example occurred when I was at the bank. The teller attempted to compliment me by saying “Your hair is so cute! Girls must be jealous of it.” While it is good to know my hair is cute, the way the comment put me solidly on the ‘boy’ side of the line stung. (Edit: Luckily, this is no longer a problem for me. It remains, however, an experience common to many trans people.)

The episode gives us another example of this, too. When Shūichi gets out of the bath, his sister comments “A boy shouldn’t take such long baths.” In this case, though, it is possible the comment may be more intentional. Even given only the evidence seen so far in the series, Maho would have to be pretty oblivious not to suspect that her brother is gender variant at this point. However, the show hasn’t really given us any indication that she is aware of Shūichi’s struggles, and actually implies an active lack of empathy towards him. When Maho’s friend Anna* makes Shūichi cry, Maho’s response is “It’s fine, he does that all the time.” This is both callous and suggests that Shūichi is suffering from depression, likely caused by dysphoria.

We also see a little more of the show’s fourth trans character, Yuki, in this episode. Yuki is a grown trans woman who has befriended Yoshino. She has a boyfriend (Shi), whom she has known since childhood, and he was “the only one who never bullied [her].” Yuki comes across as a very warm and genuine person, as well as being pragmatic. She also represents a trans success story - she is a successful, confident, attractive woman who survived being teased and bullied. She’s a representation of the It Gets Better narrative, which has been criticized (rightly) for being naive. But where the It Gets Better campaign feels like it is encouraging a complacent ‘just wait, and everything will be alright’ attitude, Yuki’s character doesn’t bear that connotation (she doesn’t strongly oppose it, either - we simply don’t know enough details about her story for that to be any part of the narrative here).

The touching scene in this episode (the one that made me cry) comes when Yoshino and Shūichi are alone and talking to each other. Yoshino offers Shūichi her name, in exchange for his. The impact of this hinges on another thing that is fairly unique to the trans experience. Names are important things for a lot of trans people. We cast off our birth-assigned names when we cast off our birth-assigned genders. This is a deliberate act, and choosing a new name also has to be a deliberate act. Here, Yoshino is offering Shūichi a name. I have been in something similar to Shūichi’s place, here; my name was given to me by someone I hold dear (although it was not offered as an exchange). Even so, Yoshino’s actions here made me realize just how precious that gift really is. I felt like I had taken it for granted, when I should be treasuring it.

So, that scene made me cry, for deeply personal reasons. And now that I was good and tearful, though, the next part of the scene just fed the cry fest. So, moving on…

Shūichi tells Yoshino that he wants her to be Romeo in the play, and for him to be Juliet. He says “I want you to see me as a girl… because I see you as a boy.” This seems to be both his way of giving Yoshino a gift in exchange, as well as an attempt to tell her how he feels. “I see you as a boy.” I remember the first time someone said to me, “You are a girl.” The words came at exactly the time I needed them. Simple words; to cisgender women, it is a statement so obvious as to be not even worth saying or hearing. But every time I feel bad, every time I feel too much dysphoria and I’m trying not to hate myself, I remember those words. “I am a girl” is easy, for me. But knowing that someone else sees me the way I see myself… that helped immeasurably. That simple second person pronoun makes all the difference.

When Shūichi returns home, he repeats to himself “Boku no namae wa Yoshino.” He is still using the masculine pronoun ‘boku’, despite the fact that he is clearly starting to come to terms with his identity as a girl. This makes sense, though - it takes time to clear all of culture’s gender essentialism out of your brain. I still misgendered myself, in my own thoughts, for quite a while when I began to transition.

The other scene worth commenting on from this episode is a meeting between Saorin and Shūichi. Saorin asks him to come over, ostensibly to talk about the play. That is where it starts; Shūichi added to the play the idea that Romeo and Juliet could give each other their names, and Saorin offers Shūichi her own name. On learning the origin of the scene in the play, Saorin feels slighted, but Shūichi explains to her that he doesn’t want to become a girl for Yoshino’s sake, but for his own. Saorin responds with a selfish tirade that includes a lot of gender essentialism. She equates GRS with gender, saying “[without an operation], becoming a girl is impossible… It’s all just an act.” She also says that she doesn’t want Shuuichi to become a girl, because she is in love with him (presumably as a boy).

At this point, Saorin has very little to redeem her character. She contradicts herself a lot (and this seems intentional, as she seems very confused about her own feelings). She is consistently portrayed as selfish. She seems to fetishize Shūichi’s gender variance on the one hand, and be terrified of it on the other. She seems, in short, to be deeply cissexist, but her feelings for Shūichi make her willing to encourage his dressing as a girl. When the idea of it being more than that, however - when the idea of Shūichi actually being a girl comes up - she reacts with defensive hostility.


* So, as a character shares my own name in the show, I feel obliged to comment on that. I really want Anna to be a good character! She seems to have the potential to be; at least, she felt remorse after making Shūichi cry.

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

In this episode, it feels like the show is finally reaching its stride. It combines the strengths of the previous episodes; the pacing is as good as the second episode, and the overall emotional impact and thematic cohesion is on the same level as the first episode.

So, like the episode, let’s start by talking about bras. For a young and not-so-budding trans girl, bras occupied an odd position in my mental landscape. I was consciously envious of the cis girls around me that were developing breasts. At the same time, though, I had already developed a knee-jerk defense mechanism against anything with a feminine connotations (at least in public). We’ll come back to this in a bit.

In the episode, though, the character contemplating supportive undergarments is Yoshino, who expresses terror at the thought of having to wear one, and asks Shūichi if he has ever wanted to wear one. This leads to both of them admitting envy of each other’s bodies. This is a touching scene, and seems to me to be deeply insightful about a very particular part of trans experience. Here the characters deal with it awkwardly, but that makes sense - the characters are still very unsure of themselves and still discovering their identities.

Near the end of the episode is another scene where Yoshino tries on the bra she bought. It ends with her throwing it off in disgust, and hugging her boy’s uniform to her chest, sobbing. This is an utterly heartbreaking moment, and it is so well portrayed that I felt slightly embarrassed, as if I had accidentally walked in on someone at a private moment. It is also a very powerful scene, and it nearly made me cry. As a trans woman (as opposed to a trans man), I can’t pretend to understand exactly what that moment is like, but the show succeeds in evoking empathy, which is quickly becoming its basic mode of operation.

Continuing on the theme of approaching puberty, Mako (Ariga Makoto) points out to Shūichi that their voices are going to change soon, which is upsetting to both of them. He further suggests that they record their voices “before it is too late.” This is also used as a pretext for them to dress up as girls together. This solidifies the subtle hints in the last episode that Mako is also gender variant. He seems much more excited to dress up, and seems to view it as a social activity, a way to bond with Shuuichi over a shared experience.

Anyway, I am describing this scene because it gives me a chance to talk about Japanese language and gender. When Shūichi begins recording his voice, he begins “Boku no namae o…” (My name is…). Mako stops him, saying “be more feminine.” He starts over, this time saying “Watashi no namae o…” (My name is…). The difference here is in the first person pronoun used, and it is something English doesn’t have an equivalent construct for. ‘Boku’ is an example of a masculine word - not masculine in the sense that words in some languages have gender (the Romance languages being readily available examples), but in the sense that it is a word typically only used by men. ‘Watashi’ is considered gender-neutral, but my suspicion is that, since ‘boku’ is used so predominantly amongst boys, ‘watashi’ is probably viewed as feminine by comparison. Unfortunately, this distinction is not caught in the subtitling.

Everything I’ve discussed so far are the sub-plots of the episode, and the episode’s core is worth remarking on as well, which centers around a play that the characters’ class is planning for the school’s cultural festival. Saorin suggests that the class do a ‘genderbender play’, or a play in which the boys play the girls’ roles, and vice versa. This idea is enthusiastically accepted by the rest of the class.

Saorin submits a script idea that is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, while Shūichi comes up with the idea of writing about boys who want to be girls, and girls who want to be boys. This seems to be a huge leap forward in Shūichi’s thought process - he is, in a way, openly admitting that he wants to be a girl, not just dress like one. Whether or not he will eventually consider the distinction between wanting to be a girl and the idea that he might already be a girl remains to be seen; so far, the show has kept to the potentially gender essentialist language of “a boy who wants to be a girl”**. Shūichi’s words here mirrors my feelings and understanding of myself at his age, actually; having never really encountered the idea of gender variance, that was the way I framed the thought, when I wasn’t running away from it at full speed.

After the play is announced, there is a scene where the girls from the class are talking excitedly about the idea. They see it as a simple way to break social rules, and talk animatedly about it. The three trans characters, however, are all visibly uncomfortable. Here we have yet another interesting insight into trans experience. When I was a teenager, whenever someone mentioned cross-dressing, or any kind of gender variance, I felt a mixture of embarrassment and shame. This even extended to topics that were stereotypically feminine but without the gender variance context - any conversation that mentioned makeup, nail polish, or women’s shoes was likely to make me blush. As a result, I spent a long time actively avoiding anything feminine, even to the point of harboring a deep aversion to the color pink.

At the time, I didn’t even know why I felt embarrassed. I recognize now that it was the same thing I see in the characters in this scene - they are afraid that if they show too much enthusiasm, someone will know. That they will see into your soul and find the truth you’ve tried to hide from both them and yourself.

Shūichi and Saorin’s teacher suggests they combine their scripts, and at Shūichi’s suggestion, the play becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet with the lead characters both being trans. What is more interesting, though, is Saorin’s behavior while they work on the script together. She invites Shūichi to come work on it at her house, and he agrees after she promises “not to do anything weird this time.” However, she immediately breaks her promise, and gets very excited about the idea of Shūichi wearing one of her dresses.

Saorin’s behavior here feels very creepy, and it certainly borders on chaser behavior. What’s more, it is clear that she has done this before. Shūichi is obviously uncomfortable with her taking such an enthusiastic interest in his gender identity, and yet she persists. Whether this behavior is an attempt to create a bond similar to the one Shūichi has with Yoshino, or whether the behavior drove Shūichi away from Saorin (and towards Yoshino) in the first place is uncertain.

Saorin also notes the parallel between their play’s Romeo and Juliet, and Shūichi and Yoshino. She suggests casting Shūichi as Juliet, and Yoshino as Romeo. Her suggestion is tinged with bitterness, but she seems to have a moment of genuinely wishing for Shūichi’s happiness. Interestingly, this casting upholds the original point of the play (which was to reverse the gender roles of the actors relative to their characters) in a surprising way: it casts Shūichi as a trans man, and Yoshino as a trans woman, so that they are still playing, functionally, the opposite gender.

The translation ‘genderbender play’ didn’t really sit well with me, so I did some checking. Luckily, Shūichi writes down the phrase during the episode, so I was able to find the kanji: 倒錯劇 (tousaku geki). The dictionary meaning of this phrase would be ‘inversion play’ or ‘perversion play’, which don’t really convey the subtitled meaning at all. My assumption was that this is a particular phenomenon in Japan, but the only results I can make any sense of on a google search for the phrase are related to Wandering Son. If anyone with more knowledge of Japanese culture can confirm whether this is a cultural thing I am missing, I would be grateful.

** I am aware that some trans people see themselves as having been their birth-assigned gender before transitioning, and this complicates the language I use when I talk about this element of the show’s dialogue choices. My personal experience is that I was always a girl. Society’s gender essentialist memes convinced me otherwise for a very long time, and this leaves me with an unfortunate reflex reaction that tries to categorize phrases such as ‘I am a boy who wants to be a girl’ as cissexist. However, giving in to this reflex would be erasing of trans people whose experiences do not match my own, so I am trying my best here to use language that doesn’t do that.

It’s been quite a while since I actually worked on TreeWars. Various things have distracted me, including some other programming projects. But I actually made some progress way back in July, before I shelved the project temporarily. So, let’s talk about circles.

OpenGL gives us a few different ways to draw things, which I’ve talked about before. When we were using the fixed-pipeline functions (glBegin(), glEnd(), etc), I could draw a circle the same way I drew it in SDL: draw a bunch of same-sized rectangles, shifting the coordinates around a central point so that they overlap. Do enough of them (using small enough increments), and it makes a very smooth-looking circle. I never did this in OpenGL, but the SDL code looked like this:

[sourcecode language=“cpp” gutter=“false”]
void DrawUtils::draw_circle_filled(SDL_Surface* dest, Sint16 int_x, Sint16 int_y, Uint16 int_r, Uint32 colour)
{
float x = static_cast<float> (int_x);
float y = static_cast<float> (int_y);
float r = static_cast<float> (int_r);

SDL_Rect pen;
float i;

for (i=0; i < 6.28318531; i += 0.0034906585)
{
pen.x = static_cast<int> (x + cos(i) * r);
pen.y = static_cast<int> (y + sin(i) * r);
int w = static_cast<int> (x - pen.x);
int h = static_cast<int> (y - pen.y);

if (w == 0) pen.w = 1;
else if (w < 0)
{
pen.x = x;
pen.w = abs(w);
}
else pen.w = w;

if (h == 0) pen.h = 1;
else if (h < 0)
{
pen.y = y;
pen.h = abs(h);
}
else pen.h = h;
if (pen.x >= dest->clip_rect.x &&
pen.y >= dest->clip_rect.y &&
pen.x + pen.w <= dest->clip_rect.w &&
pen.y + pen.h <= dest->clip_rect.h)
SDL_FillRect(dest, &pen,
SDL_MapRGBA(dest->format,
(colour >> 16) & 0xff,
(colour >> 8) & 0xff,
colour & 0xff, 1));
}
}
[/sourcecode]

I was pretty proud of this code when I wrote it. The magic is at the top of the for loop: from 0 to 2π, it increments a tiny bit and finds a new rectangle that has one vertex at the center of the circle, and the opposing vertex at some point along the circle. It does this 1800 times per circle, which isn’t terribly efficient, but it got the job done.

With OpenGL and the shader pipeline, we could still do that. We could do the following in a loop, 1800 times:

[sourcecode lang=“cpp” gutter=“false”]
GLushort Quad::rect_elements[] = {0, 1, 2, 3};
GLfloat buffer_data[] = {x1f, y1f, x2f, y1f, x1f, y2f, x2f, y2f};

GLuint vertex_buffer;
glGenBuffers(1, &vertex_buffer);
glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertex_buffer);
glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(buffer_data), buffer_data, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

GLuint element_buffer;
glGenBuffers(1, &element_buffer);
glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_BUFFER, element_buffer);
glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_BUFFER, sizeof(rect_elements), rect_elements, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

glUseProgram(program); // the shader program, created earlier
glUniform4f(shader->uniforms.colour,
GLUtils::convert_colour((colour >> 16) & 0xff),
GLUtils::convert_colour((colour >> 8) & 0xff),
GLUtils::convert_colour(colour & 0xff), 1.0);

// Put the vertices in an attribute
glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertex_buffer);
glVertexAttribPointer(shader->attributes.position, 2, GL_FLOAT,
GL_FALSE, sizeof(GLfloat)2, (void)0);
glEnableVertexAttribArray(shader->attributes.position);

glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, element_buffer);
glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, (void*)0);

// Clean up the GL state machine
glDisableVertexAttribArray(shader->attributes.position);
[/sourcecode]


Now, that’s a lot of fairly hairy OpenGL code. In my actual program, that’s abstracted out into several function calls within several different classes - a Quad object inherits from Drawable, and uses a GLUtils library to create the vertex and element buffers. The actual render code is in Drawable, but it calls a subclassable sub_render function that helps it know how to draw a rectangle specifically.

But we don’t want to call that code 1800 times for a single circle - where it was a bit inefficient in SDL, here we’re making 1800 separate calls to the OpenGL hardware system (well, actually more as we copy data into GPU buffers and such, but 1800 glDrawElements() calls). That’s 1800 different writes into GPU memory. It’s ugly. It’d be a horrible idea.

Luckily, we can draw a circle with a single call to glDrawElements(). The secret is in ‘GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP’. OpenGL defines several different methods it can use to interpret the vertex data we send to it. In ‘Triangle Strip’, it uses the first three vertexes to draw a triangle. The next vertex you add creates a triangle from it and the previous two vertexes (the last two of the previous triangle). If you 6 vertices in your vertex buffer, and the element buffer was just 0-5, it might look something like this:



We could use THAT to draw a circle too, but it would be cumbersome. Instead, we’ll use GL_TRIANGLE_FAN. Like GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, the first three vertices are used to make a triangle. Subsequent vertices, however, use the previous vertex and the first vertex to form the next triangle. In effect, this gives you a ‘center point’ and lets you draw triangles outward from it. Its drawing pattern looks like this:



This lets us do some really elegant, simple drawing of curved shapes.

Of course, we still need some trigonometry here:

[sourcecode lang=“cpp” gutter=“false”]
for (unsigned int i = 2; i < 122; i+=2)
{
unsigned int j = i/2;
float rad = j * 0.104719755; // 2*Pi / 60
buffer_data[i] = x + (cos(rad) * rx);
buffer_data[i+1] = y + (sin(rad) * ry);
element_data[j] = j;
}
[/sourcecode]


But that logic is much more concise and easy to understand than any of the previous approaches. I’ve chosen to use 60 points around the circle somewhat arbitrarily - using more of these will the circle look smoother, but cost more in terms of rendering power. Even 1800 points would probably be pretty trivial for the program in its current state, but better to form good optimization habits now, I suppose. Also, the circles look pretty perfectly smooth at 60 points.

And most importantly, it works!




Of course, this still doesn’t look quite the same (or as good) as the SDL version. I have some positioning issues to work out, and a lot of stuff still isn’t implemented that I had there. But I’m definitely on the right track.

Of course, as I said at the top of this post, I’ve had this project shelved since July. There may be some new updates in the future, but this is probably the last Project TreeWars post for a while.

This was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially here.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This episode switches gears and focuses mostly on Saorin. It also gives us a much-needed flashback that provides the backstory on the relationship between Shūichi, Yoshino, and Saorin.

Near the end of the previous episode, Shūichi runs out of his house, distressed, after an encounter with his sister. I didn’t get around to talking about that scene in that entry, so let’s touch on it here. When I was still struggling to understand my gender identity, I mis-identified the desire to be a girl with the concept of cross-dressing (as did a number of other trans people that I know). So, for years, I cross-dressed when no one was around (the fact that this is an amusing phrase in light of my current understanding of my gender identity does not escape me - I eventually realized that ‘cross-dressing’ was what I was doing when everyone was looking at me). And like Shū, fear of discovery was a huge thing. I waited, always, until I was home alone, or the rest of my family was asleep. I always feared a sudden knock on my door. I think Shūichi’s flight is best viewed in that context, in the mixture of shame and fear that is hard to escape when you feel like you are doing something deviant, something that your loved ones would disapprove of.

In his haste to escape his sister, Shūichi leaves half-dressed in only an undershirt and a skirt, and runs into Yoshino on a bridge. Yoshino offers her hoodie, commenting that Shūichi looks like a girl with a hoodie and a skirt on. This marks a reparation of their friendship. Which leads us to Saorin.

Saorin, up to this point, has only been seen briefly, and was then depicted as mostly quiet but emotionally unstable and prone to violent outbursts. In the first episode, she assaulted a classmate who insinuated that Shūichi and Yoshino had a relationship at one point. In this episode, we learn that she harbors a lot of resentment toward Shuuichi and Yoshino because of a love triangle that imploded at some point before the narrative picks up. Some time ago, Saorin expressed interest in Shūichi, only to find that Shūichi had already expressed interest in Yoshino. Saorin confronted Yoshino about it, and they both ended by expressing hatred for each other. Your basic love triangle story. I’d suggest maybe this is poly-fixable, but I’m pretty sure Saorin is way too unstable for that. More implicitly (and more importantly for our purposes), Saorin also seems to feel that she had already been left out because Shūichi and Yoshino had their trans experiences in common, and had bonded over them until Saorin felt like a third wheel.

Saorin comes across, in this episode, as fundamentally unsympathetic to the viewer. At the beginning of the episode she calls Shūichi and Yoshino ‘filth’ as she passes them in the hall. She also nearly assaults Chii’s friend Shirai Momoko (Momo), and when Yoshino expresses that they should perhaps set their differences aside, Saorin refuses.

Despite this, the episode ends with Saorin tentatively making peace with the rest of the group, after Sasa Kanako (Sasa), who has been trying to remain friends with both Saorin and the others, gets angry at their bickering and refuses to speak to them. So, it requires the coercion of her only remaining friend for her to stop being an asshole to the rest of her former friends. Like I said: unsympathetic.

The premise of the episode, though, seems to be that we should sympathize with Saorin. Ariga Makoto (Ariga) sums it up thus: “She’s got a rough life”. However, when juxtaposed to the issues the other characters are facing, Saorin (as portrayed so far, at least) comes across as whiny and privileged by comparison.

So, enough about Saorin, then. We don’t have time for whiny privileged girls who hold grudges. Let’s talk about Ariga, whom we just mentioned for the first time. He plays a slightly more prominent role in this episode, and seems to be Shūichi’s only (or at least closest) male friend. We also get a suggestion that he is also gender variant; Shūichi gives him a clover hairpin to match the one he bought in the first episode. In the same scene, they spend time chatting about private matters - notably, about the fact that Ariga feels he may be attracted to boys. This is the first explicit mention of sexual orientation on the show. Leaving aside gender variance (since all of the gender variant characters are still discovering their identities in this regard), Ariga thinks he might be gay. The line is a throwaway - we don’t dwell on it at all, but rather move on. Presumably, we will return to this later in the series.

On the subject of Shūichi and gender, the first relevant moment in this episode comes when Shūichi is called ‘a little girl’ as an insult by one of his male classmates; his response (unnoticed by everyone except Ariga) is to blush and then smile broadly. A similar scene happens when he takes his lunch to his older sister; one of her classmates says “he looks like a girl”, leading Shūichi to repeat the phrase, “I look like a girl”, with a happy look on his face.

These scenes, more than anything we’ve seen before, really work to differentiate Shūichi as being solidly transgender (as opposed to, say, a cross-dresser in the common understanding of the term). His response to being called a girl is joy, and I suspect it is stemming from a sense that it is the correct thing for him to be called.

On the whole, this episode is much more solidly put together than the first one - it has more cohesion between scenes, and the pacing is better. However, emotionally, it comes across as weaker. The first episode used a effective narrative repetition, with the ‘What are little girls/boys made of’ motif repeated through the episode, and the scene early on where Shūichi and Yoshino each narrate the phrase ‘I/we have a secret’.* The music and the dialogue are still top notch, but the overall narrative feel of this episode did not have as powerful an impact on me.

* The subtitles translate the phrase ‘We have a secret’, but since pronouns don’t indicate number in Japanese, it could potentially be translated ‘I have a secret’ as well. Or ‘I/we have secrets’, for that matter. I certainly think the translators chose well here, though.

This was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially here.

Spoiler Warning, and possible Trigger Warning for description of internalized transphobia

After watching the first two episodes of Hōrō Musuko (放浪息子, “Wandering Son”), I have decided to start a running review/commentary of the series here. This post will review the first episode. You can watch the episode online at crunchryroll, and I highly recommend watching the episodes before reading the review, because otherwise you’re likely to be a bit lost. They’re about 22 minutes each.

First, personal background - I’ve long been a fan of anime. However, my understanding of the nuances of Japanese culture is somewhat lacking. I am white. I am native to the US. So, while I will try to avoid ethnocentric creep, there may be some in these reviews. If anyone sees problematic spots and wants to point them out to me, I will be most appreciative.

I am also a trans woman, currently in the midst of transition (edit: I completed transitioning socially in April 2011). So, this story is very relevant to my interests, and I am particularly interested in the way that gender variance is presented.

A note on pronouns: I am defaulting to masculine pronouns for Shūichi and feminine pronouns for Yoshino. The characters themselves, as they are still struggling with their identities, probably still associate with these pronouns (it has not come up so far). At any rate, the characters in the show consistently give them these pronouns, so it is also a concession for ease of mapping the review to the story.

The title of the episode, “Onna no Kotte, Nande Dekiteru?”, translates to “What are little girls made of?” So, right from the beginning, we’re not pulling any punches. The title echoes the struggle with identity in the face of gender essentialist preconceptions that I (and, I am certain, many other trans people) have to deal with both internally and from others. What is gender? What does it mean to be a boy or a girl? The series jumps straight into these questions with very little build-up.

The episode opens with a voiceover from a character we will shortly know as Nitori Shūichi*, who delivers the title line. This line will be repeated several times throughout the episode at introspective moments. We then move on to a scene with a still camera pointed at Shūichi, while he shifts uncomfortably in his seat and describes the discomfort he feels in his new school uniform. He is clearly trying to look happy, even though he is out of sorts. This is all delivered over a haunting, melancholy piano piece.

At the beginning of the episode, we have powerful, evocative storytelling. Visually, this is very compelling, and the narration is characterization at its best; I am already getting a strong sense of who this person is, and I am starting to empathize deeply with him. The music is stirring, and precisely on-point for the emotions the show is trying to evoke. It underscores the fact that this character (and, subsequently, all of these characters) are less happy than they are trying to seem.

The next sequence felt a bit jumbled to me the first time I watched it. We are introduced to most of the characters as they head to their first day of school (6th grade for most of the characters). Even before we have enough exposure with the characters to identify them readily, we establish that most of these characters already have relationships with each other. The show gives us the feeling that we’ve been dropped right into the middle of their lives with no exposition. Which, of course, is exactly what has happened, both diegetically and in a production sense (more on that in a moment). Several past events are alluded to, including a close friendship between Shūichi, Takatsuki Yoshino, and Chiba Saori (Saorin), that ended abruptly after some sort of unspecified romantic drama occurred.

This sequence also alludes to the fact that Yoshino is also transgender. She is clearly uncomfortable when someone says she looks cute in her uniform, and envious of the fact that Chii (who we will come back to in a minute) is wearing a boy’s uniform. Now, these factors could easily be observational bias on my part, but the show validates my theories: as the episode progresses, a friend buys Yoshino a boy’s uniform, which makes her ecstatically happy.

So, the show begins with interpersonal tensions already in place, but it leaves it up to the viewer to infer more information about those tensions. This is unsurprising, since the manga actually begins with the characters in 5th grade; the anime has chosen to start later, but include all of the omitted story as part of its background (as far as I can tell - actually, after reading the manga I think it may just include some of the broad strokes, and rework some of that material into its own plot). This is an interesting choice from a storytelling standpoint, and has the opportunity to fail miserably. I certainly felt a bit lost during the first half of the episode or so. But this seems to be intentional; as a dramatic piece with a fairly serious tone, this sudden burst of information makes us feel like we are intruding on someone’s life, and left to pick up the context ourselves. By the end of the episode, it is clear who all of the characters are, and most of their relationships are established. As a slice of life piece, it works very well; we really get the impression that we’ve just come in at an arbitrary point in the characters’ lives.

As the episode progresses, we meet Sarashina Chizuru (Chii), an extroverted and impulsive girl who wears a boy’s uniform to school just ‘because she feels like it’. In a story about gender identity, it is interesting to see that we also have a character clearly treating gender as presentation. Unlike Shūichi, Chii has the privilege to do this without the nervousness, shame, guilt, and embarrassment that often accompanies actually struggling with a transgender identity. Whether and how the series will treat with this privilege disparity remains to be seen.

The episode had a few stand-out moments for me. The first came during a scene where Shūichi dresses in a girl’s uniform after school, and spends some time wandering around town on his own. Narration by Shūichi establishes that he has never done this before, and usually only dresses up at home. During this outing, a girl in a shop suggests Shūichi buy a hairpin because, she says, “You’re cute, and this will flatter you”. This scene depicts such a small thing - having someone treat you as the gender that feels right to you. This is something that cisgender people experience every time they interact with someone - it is so commonplace that it goes completely unnoticed. But if you’re trans, this is often something you have gone large portions of your life without ever experiencing.

I clearly remember the first time that I was treated like a woman by a stranger, completely and without hesitation. It was a wonderful moment for me, validating and uplifting. I may have been projecting, but it seemed to me that Shūichi’s reaction was similar. It is important to note here that the writer of the original manga, Shimura Takako, is a cisgender woman (to the best of my knowledge). But (and this is assuming the anime follows the manga fairly closely) she has written an amazingly accurate and empathetic portrayal of what it feels like to live as a trans girl. She gets the little details right, and the animators and voice actors deliver here too - Shūichi’s character is imminently believable to me.

The other stand-out moment in this episode is at the end. Shūichi wakes up from sleep with a shock, to discover he has had a wet dream. He delivers in voiceover - “What are little boys made of? Snakes and snails…”, a bitter refrain of the episode’s title. The story is set as the characters enter puberty, and this is a visceral example of how puberty, for many trans people, is a time when our bodies turn against us. I know that puberty, for me, felt like my very physiology was denying a truth that I already felt ashamed of. I was constantly disgusted by my body, and it was the only time in my life I thought seriously about suicide. I didn’t really understand all of that at the time; that is, I didn’t connect the feelings that I should be a girl with the disgust I felt about my body. Mostly, I think, because I had buried the former as deeply as I could, and thought about it as little as possible.

This conflict of gender identity with puberty is a thematic trend I expect will be fundamental to the show as it progresses. I remain hopeful about this show - it is a narrative with a lot of potential to help cisgender people understand the perspective of trans people a little better.

* a hopefully correct extended footnote on Japanese names: Japanese names are written (and spoken) surname first, given name second. It is common for someone to be referred to by their surname by everyone except their closest friends and family. For the purpose of clarity here, especially since the show has multiple members of the Nitori family represented, I will introduce characters with their full name, and then only use their given name unless the show gives them a clearly more recognizable nickname. Confusingly, this conflicts with how the names are presented in the show. Anime subtitles are inconsistent from one show to the next about how they choose to translate names. Some shows get subtitled with the given name always used, others with the surname always used, and that’s not even getting in to honorifics. I believe Wandering Son has been providing the name as spoken (sans honorific) instead of converting consistently to the given name. Also, the subtitling is inverting full names when they are spoken, so if someone says “Nitori Shŭichi-san”, it gets subtitled as “Shūichi Nitori”. Which is fair enough, but it forces me to make a decision about how to transliterate here. So, there it is.

When I started this blog, it was with the intention of posting technical content - posts about programming projects and Linux tutorials and the like. Over time, my focus has grown to generally include ’things that interest me’, which includes rambling about video games and Doctor Who. I’ve also been including more Feminist and Activist content, mostly because talking about Doctor Who and Duke Nukem Forever invites that sort of discussion.

So, at this point, I think I’ll state it more or less officially: this blog is about anything that can be broadly classed as ‘geeky’. I’ll post on any subjects where I feel like I have sufficiently interesting things to say.

I will also likely be pulling more personal (and by extension, more Feminist and Activist, given the maxim that The Personal is Political) material into this blog. In particular, I have a personal-reflection-heavy review series of Wandering Son in the works. Since Phil Sandifer recently described me as a Feminist blogger and this a Feminist blog, this seems fair enough.

Don’t worry, I’ll try to keep posting sufficiently interesting material to match my current level of ‘interesting’, whatever you think that happens to be.

Being a geek and a girl is tough. As geeks, we have to put up with the things every geek is familiar with: the bullying and derision from people who think we’re weird. As girls, we have to put up with the sexism that is so deeply entrenched in our culture that many petiole can’t even see it when you point right at it and say “Here it is. This. Look at it."

Geek guys perpetuate this sexism, too. Every time we see “tits or gtfo” in a forum our multiplayer game, every rape threat we get in our xbox live inboxes (trigger warning), and every “are you looking for something for your boyfriend” from a comic book store employee sends a message: geek boys don’t want us in their clubhouse.

And the creators of (for lack of a better term) geek-targeted content perpetuate the problem. Every time a game assumes a masculine gender onto an unseen protagonist, that pushes women a little farther away. Sure, we can roll our eyes and move on, but it all contributes to a culture that delivers a resounding message of “we don’t want you here.” Really, it’s been one long chain of Marios rescuing Peaches for decades. And notably, when Peach finally got her own game, it had to fall back on the tired trope of women being overly emotional.

Even Braid, which is a fantastic game and worthy of heaps of praise, is fundamentally about a man and his obsession with a princess, albeit a metaphorical one. And Portal, a game with literally no male characters (the companion cube seemed to have a distinctly feminine presentation to me, gods rest her soul), managed to bring fat shaming into its sequel.

And yes, there are exceptions. We have Buffy, and Samus, and Ellen fucking Ripley. And of these examples that sprang to my mind, 2 of the 4 have scenes that seriously compromise the strength of the character in ways that are flatly uncharacteristic: Samus in the entirety of “Other M” and Buffy in the pointlessly rapey scene in The Pack in which she is suddenly incapable of fighting back the moment the situation becomes slightly sexualized (by contrast, the much later scene in Seeing Red handles sexual assault and its aftermath much more impressively, with the actual ramifications of the scene explored in detail. But that gets into the oddly difficult to navigate world of Buffy’s feminist politics, which is too large in scope to deal with here).

And even more often, we just get male characters, with the female characters in minor or supporting roles. The argument goes like this: men are the target audience, so protagonists have to be male or the audience won’t identify with them. This argument, of course, is broken on at least two levels: male geeks loved the Alien trilogy, and a very large portion of geeks are, in fact, women.

Which brings me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, a children’s television show that underestimated its target audience by about a decade. It was a great show, with humor that worked well for both children and adults, serious themes that were not sugar-coated, beautiful artwork and a well-researched, interesting and unique setting. If we are very lucky, Avatar will do for western animation what Birth (by Ōshima Yumiko) did for shoujo manga - present it as a serious storytelling medium that deserves recognition alongside other visual arts.

And one of the core characters was a strong female character, portrayed with depth and nuance. Several minor female characters were likewise independently motivated, steering women. Of course, the protagonist was still a boy. Because this is a show with martial arts and fireballs and armies, so it’s obviously for boys, right? There’s no way a girl would be interested in an epic struggle against impossible odds, right? The best we can hope for is to inject a little feminist thought as a side issue.

Except now, we have a sequel series: The Legend of Korra. A story by the same team, with a female protagonist. Here’s a trailer. There are several promising things about the trailer: the music, artistic direction, action sequences and the little hints we get about the story and setting are right in line with what we expect from the team that brought us The Last Airbender - this is going to be quality. But the thing that really strikes me is how practical her outfits are: they actually look like clothes someone might fight in. And, despite Korra being visibly several years older than the main characters of The Last Airbender (she looks closer in age to Zuko), the artists have resisted the urge to (consciously or otherwise) sexualize her appearance. Visually speaking, she is clearly a girl, but being a girl is clearly not her sole defining attribute. She is also strong and athletic, and dresses practically. From the (admittedly a bit emo-looking) scenes of her sitting alone, she is also torn or driven by something. And apparently she’s not averse to knocking someone through a shop window. All in all, she looks pretty bad-ass. A Strong Female Character in the Ellen Ripley tradition.

This is something we need more of: female role models in geek media. It lets young, potential geek girls know that it is okay to enjoy this stuff; that it is for them, too. And it gives those of us who have struggled to carve a place for ourselves a sense that we’re finally being heard.

And if anyone reading this doubts that sexism in the geek community is a real problem (that is, if you still can’t see it), let me share with you this youtube comment from the above trailer:

chicks with muscles are just creepyyy. i take it that you’re a girl, and if you like “women muscle" then get some muscle for yourself and see how many guys like it. i mean for me i like when a girls body is nice and soft, not hard and strong. don’t you understand that that’s a turnoff for most guys?

See, what fanime1 has done here is to assume that the central purpose of women is to be ’nice and soft’, to be appealing to men. A vast majority of our media supports this idea - most women in media, geek media included, fall into a pretty narrow band of ‘conventionally attractive’ body types, because they are written (and cast) primarily for men (more specifically, for the Male Gaze). And girls absorb this idea: that women have to be attractive to have worth.

This is what I mean when I say we need more things like The Legend of Korra. Korra is a rarity: a character for us.

I like Steam. In a gaming world of ubiquitous DRM, Steam strikes a nice balance between functionality and nuisance. That is, Steam makes it dead simple to install and launch games, and the trade-off is that it does some fairly unobtrusive DRM. This is a good model, although I can think of several ways in which it could provide a better end-user experience.

At the very top of my personal list of improvements to Steam would be “native Linux support”. And I know, I know, I’ve heard all of the conventional wisdom: There isn’t a big enough market to justify porting it. Even if there was, there aren’t enough Linux-native games to make the service very useful. Everybody knows Windows is the OS for gaming.

But sitting here staring down that conventional wisdom is Desura. I’ve known that Desura existed for a while - the Frozenbyte Bundle and the Humble Bundle 3 both had options to acquire ‘Desura keys’, so it was obviously a Steam competitor. Until recently, though, I had just dismissed the product - obviously, I thought, any Steam competitor is going to lag far behind in available games and basic feature set, given Steam’s popularity. Faulty logic, but there it is.

So when a friend told me that Desura works in Linux, I was pretty stunned. I had gotten used to not being the ’target audience’ for game companies. And now, a few hours later, I’ve got Desura installed, my humble bundle keys redeemed, and I’ve purchased Amnesia: The Dark Descent (which was on sale at the time, and I’ve been meaning to buy for some time anyway).

Desura’s (native Linux!) install is smooth and painless, and its (native Linux!) interface is pretty nice. It has some rough edges, to be fair: most of what it does is load websites that are skinned to feel like part of the interface (much like Steam does), and some of those pages are still obviously works in progress. On the other hand, everything works quickly and smoothly. The main options menu is accessed by clicking the Desura logo, which doesn’t look obviously like a button. So that’s a design flaw, but it didn’t take too long to work out. Redeeming gift keys is more streamlined than in Steam (once you find where to do it!).

Now, Desura certainly isn’t perfect, and it lacks very useful features that Steam has had for some time. One problem I noticed is that it lacks Steam’s resume-after-closing feature; I started to install Amnesia, absent-mindedly closed the client later, and it didn’t auto-resume after I opened Desura again. Desura doesn’t track how much time you’ve sunk into a given game. It also doesn’t have any way to access your save games from multiple locations (a la Steam’s cloud sync), and while their developer info mentions achievements, I haven’t seen any games implement Desura-specific achievements, nor would I even know where to look to find them.

Another feature that both Steam and Desura need are tags, or some sort of organizational system for your games. Right now all Desura has are ‘all games’ and ‘favorite games’. Steam has a categories system, but it doesn’t always save that information across accounts, and you can’t tag games with multiple categories. A proper tagging-based sorting system would be great.

So, Desura has a spartan interface, but it’s also still very young. And more importantly, it runs flawlessly in Linux, which makes it very appealing to me. If you game in Linux at all, check out Desura. It’s already a great service, and it looks like it’s only going to get better.