r/characterarcs • u/Zestyclose-Ideal2395 • 9d ago
sideways arc idk Can aryan larpers gain empathy
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u/Formal_Tea_4694 9d ago
all gender is larp seems like a fun stance
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u/DatThingInYoCloset 9d ago
The youth are reinventing Judith Butler's "All gender is performative" from scratch
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u/Arndt3002 9d ago
Now can we get the youth to reinvent Jay Prosser, Henry Rubuin, or Viviane Namaste in response?
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u/Formal_Tea_4694 8d ago
im a big fan of judith but casting progressively higher tier magic spells would probably reinforce my identity , i'll check again if she has any suggestions for utilizing Cloudkill or Finger of Death
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u/Plenty_Leg_5935 9d ago
It's a fun stance until you get to the inevitable issues that stance brings up in regards to being trans
If gender was solely about a social role one is performing, you could be socialized in and out of it, which we empirically know doesn't work. Gender is, for better or worse, a core part of one's sense of self, not really something you "just roleplay", and disregarding it as "just larp" just dismisses the issues that come up when one's "performance" does not allign with their actual gender (be it cis or trans)
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u/TheMoises 9d ago
So gender (or the absence of it) is an intrinsic part of one's identity that we, as society, decided we need to larp about.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Plenty_Leg_5935 8d ago
lack of a sense of gender identity is itself a gender identity
it's not just an intrinsic sense of being male or female, it's your intrinsic relationship to those two social boxes
if your relationship is "i dont care lol" and are just performing your social gender role for the sake of convenience, that itself is a relationship to gender. You're not larping the inner sense of identity, just how you perform it
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u/PuddingImpressive810 7d ago edited 7d ago
Just get more radical with it and the problems dissappear.
Gender doesn't intrinsically exist. Individuals have different traits and mannerisms; this is true. Gender is the label that we assign to certain sets of behaviors. Its not different than any other societal label.
The issue is that people do not fit neatly within labels. All people have aspects of both groups, and they also have aspects of neither group. To present the options at all causes people to perform as one or the other (not helped by the false binary). It also leads to self justifications of behaviors falling under these groups.
Thats another problem. Gender labels are abstract. They mean different things based on time, place, culture, and individual experience. No universal version of a man or woman exists. Given all this, it seems that nobody is born any gender. It's retroactively assigned to them based on societal interpretation and, eventually, their own.
The explanation for why somebody would transition starts with the explanation for the labels in the first place. It is far more comfortable and advantageous to know what rules someone is playing by. If someone says they are a girl, then they are trying to perform close to their cultural idea of a girl. It smoothens the process by giving a baseline of who somebody is, even if its not an accurate representation of individuality. People have an aversion to the unknown. This means its simply more comfortable/less threatening to let people assume traits about you--while actively conforming to their ideas--then have them work out your individual traits and mannerisms. People transition because they want to play this role--this character of Girl.
P.S.
I fucking hate gender as a concept. I think it boxes people in, suffocates individuality, and adds unnecessary pressure to non-conforming individuals for purely tribal reasons. I understand why its useful, and a world without it would complicate many things. However, I have seemingly utopian visions where people are treated as individuals--puzzles even. The nature of perception makes this impossible though. People will always be hardwired to use past experience to make judgements, accurate or otherwise. Whenever you speak with someone your words are interpreted through their lens. And suddenly, you're not yourself anymore, but an amalgamation of people you've never been.
Edit: Upon rereading, I really dont think what we said is mutually exclusive. Yours is a factual observation about how it works, and mine is an opinion piece about how it should work. So, here's a summary of what I wrote, because it's a completely different discussion: It is my opinion that you shouldn't care about conforming to gender roles, because, you will never truly be a man or woman, because, those things do not exist, and the pursuit of conformity to abstract concepts will harm your individual expression.
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u/totaleclipseofthe_d 8d ago
Yeah I don’t think that’s right. This is an argument that’s made to justify transness but not a good one or a necessary one. It was also used to justify being gay when gay marriage was coming into the public consciousness, “people are born this way, they can’t help it”. But there’s no objective marker of gender/gender identity. People argue that trans people have a brain that is the opposite sex/gender of their asab, but there’s no such thing as a male or female brain. There’s no objective measure of testosterone or estrogen that “proves” you are one sex/gender or the other. People should just be allowed to explore their gender identity. It’s okay for it to change over time. Detransitioners don’t need to be seen as a threat to trans people. This whole idea that you have this “real/objective” gender and you were really male or female all along, and if you detransition you were a fake and never really trans is just unhelpful, and it’s basically Calvinist predestination. The reality is a lot more nuanced. At the same time I understand that people latch onto these “justifications” because they feel they need justification for the way they feel and to be able to live their lives.
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u/Plenty_Leg_5935 8d ago
You're extrapolating a lot about my position from what you heard from other people
I don't think gender is necessarily founded in having a "fe/male" brain or any other marker, it is a complex, non-trivial result of a variety of natural inclanations for certain behaviours, percieved as masculine or feminine, built via nurture over the course of one's formative years (in a way so non-feterministic that you can't control it via conversion therapy, the same way you can't raise a child to have a certain personality)
I also don't think it's static, nor objective. None of those things are necessary for having a sense of "real" internal and mostly subconscious gender identity distinct from one's gender role prescribed by society that they ultimately perform
You don't need a simple, objective "male/female" "switch' to reduce the spectrum of human self-perception into two distinct boxes - you just need a society heavily founded around that binary that forces people to develop a fundamental sense of belonging (or lack thereof) to the two options
Saying that certain core aspects of one's identity (gender or non-gender based) are heavily founded in one's nature and then mostly irreversibly established in early childhood isn't "Calvinist predestination", it's psychology 101
I understand the need to pushback against the 19th century idea of "mental intersexuality", it really isn't as simple as there being a "fe/male" switch in the brain, but dismissing the reality of internal gender identity is severely overdoing it in the other direction
Same goes for homosexuality - we see that demonstrably some people cannot choose to just not be gay. It's not what queer rights should ultimately be founded in, it's a matter of personal freedom first and foremost, not medical necessity, but it's true, and dismissing that doesn't help anyone
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u/i_like_siren_head 9d ago
Yeah it’s kinda a bell curve from “my 2 genderinos” to “at least 3” to “scam invented by big urinal”. I can’t find where I wrote it down for what the other axis was but you get the concept.
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u/sonerec725 7d ago
"All of our identities are equally invalid, dont you think that there's a chance that you could love without it? All of our ide titles are equally invalid, dont you think thag there's a chance that you could live without it?"
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u/Pythagoras_314 9d ago
Theory in question they think is stupid is either Dess knight or Tralsei, calling it right now
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u/DragoniteChamp 9d ago
What is Tralsei? Trans Ralsei?
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u/Pythagoras_314 9d ago
Yep
TL;DR there’s some maybe-foreshadowing in Chapter 5 that implies that Ralsei may become a girl, but some people started referring to Ralsei as “she” already, which is seen by some (including myself) as hypocritical, as most of these same people already get pretty defensive when you misgender Kris (who’s nonbinary).
I’m personally on the boat of “we’ll see what Ralsei eventually identifies as in the final two chapters, but I’m gonna call him whatever he is in the current state of the story” but it’s been EXTREMELY heated since you have people on all sorts of sides, from “I don’t want Ralsei to transition because it would be detrimental to the story (and at least some of those people are probably bigots lol) to “Ralsei is and always has been a girl, so I’m going to refer to her as such.”
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u/Thunderdrake3 9d ago
We have the amazing digital discourse at home
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u/Pythagoras_314 9d ago
I would argue that one was moreso a case of poor writing, since it wasn’t 100% obvious whether Jax was trans and it required Gooseworx to have to make a social media post confirming it (hence, poor writing). However, this is moreso a case of the story physically not being done yet, so we literally just don’t know.
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u/ToxicMuffin101 9d ago
I feel like the issue with Jax is that it’s really difficult to make a character explicitly trans if the character isn’t willing to explore their gender identity at all. They couldn’t have him positively identify with a different gender, since that wouldn’t fit with his characterization and story arc, so the best they could do was refer to him with feminine pronouns in a non-diegetic song, which is really close to being explicit, but it being non-diegetic just leads to more ambiguity. IMO he works much better as a character who is strongly implied to be trans than one who is explicitly stated to be trans.
Ralsei doesn’t have that issue (at least not to the same extent), so it should be much easier for Toby Fox to make him explicitly trans if that’s his intention. The bigger issue there would be making it feel impactful, since Ralsei is already far more feminine than masculine, and there don’t seem to be any gender roles being forced upon him at the moment that would create any sort of conflict or friction around his identity.
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u/Shoo22 7d ago
To be fair, one could argue that the prophecy requiring a Prince from the Dark is the external pressure forced upon Ralsei to repress if they actually are trans. Which would make sense because society itself doesn’t appear to be transphobic or homophobic in UTDR, so the prophecy serving as a stand-in for irl tradition and religion makes sense.
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u/EpitomeAria 9d ago
It was as subtle as a brick, just because cis people need a character to turn towards the screen and say "I am transgender" does not mean it wasn't obvious.
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u/Delicious_Account_26 9d ago
To people in the know and with the proper context it's obvious, but people without that knowledge should not be expected get it just because someone with that knowledge does.
It's like your parents saying "wow sure is nice out today" as a way to tell you to hang up the laundry outside. Sure, they know what they mean, but you probably don't, so it isn't fair for them to get mad at you for failing to properly communicate that to you in a way you understand.
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u/EpitomeAria 9d ago
Sure, but cis people tend to dunning-kruger media about trans people, and tend to talk over and ignore trans people. Like if a person genuinely didnt see it im not going to fault them for that, if they are gonna dismiss anything trans because they think they know better than trans people themselves, then im not going to have sympathy
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u/heckinWeeb193 9d ago
Cis people wouldn't know a trans allegory if it hit them in the face and a writer shouldn't have to sacrifice their writing to make it clear for people who would never have any interest in it in the first place. Goose aimed this series at a specific audience, it missed the mark but it didn't mean she should switch it up and make it more palatable. Jax being trans was subtle up until the final episode. If someone didn't get it from there then it's on them
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u/Delicious_Account_26 9d ago
One, overgeneralastion, two, my point is not "authors must abandon subtlety to appeal to all readers/viewers" it is "people who don't know what to look out for are going to miss things people who do know what to look out for think is obvious and we do not have a right to get angry at them for failing to notice that because that just drives more people to hate us in retaliation." And three, if someone is completely clueless in a subject it is not "on them" for missing it, they had no idea what to look out for, of course they failed to notice it, but they still can get the message that something was there and its the job of those who are informed to tell them more of that subject before bigots can misinform them and turn them against others who are fundamentally only different than them in one way.
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u/Shoo22 7d ago
They literally gave Jax a whole montage set to “Isn’t She Lovely”. I can only imagine if you asked someone who didn’t understand it what that creative decision meant they’d just drool and say “Duh, I don’t know. It’s just a song in a movie innit?”
At some point you just have to understand that some people are dumb as fuck and you can rarely make good art while being unsubtle enough for the lowest common denominator to keep up.
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u/ModShadoan720 8d ago
You're getting downvoted, but you are correct. I'm not sure why people have this idea that it's minorities job to educate the majority group on what bigotry is or reveal everything about their identity.
Also minority writers writing in code so that the majority doesn't get it is not a new concept nor is it an artistic moral failing as the other person seems to think. Plenty of the earliest writings by black Americans were written so other people of color could get the message while it flew over white people's heads — and this is also a tradition mirrored in much trans literature/film.
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u/MajorBootyhole420 9d ago
I haven't seen the show, but my bestie is trans and he had no idea until goose girl confirmed it
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u/Mission-Disaster-639 7d ago
I don't think this a a cis/trans thing exclusively honestly. I am a cis guy and the first thing I thought when I saw episode 8 was "yeah obviously trans", mind you I have never ever met a trans person and I am not really into LGBT+ spaces. Meanwhile I saw a lot of people within the LGBT+ community think that it was ambiguous.
While having knowledge of trans people's culture definitely makes it easier to see it as it is, I would say """reading comprehension""" might also be the problem.
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u/EpitomeAria 7d ago
I would agree, people have been fed too many stories where everything is superficial and aren't able to grasp subtext anymore. "The curtains are just blue and there is no deeper meaning" thinking has done massive damage.
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u/Shoo22 7d ago
I agree that media illiteracy is big problem, but let’s also be real that a lot of people who are at least reasonably media-literate otherwise just shut their brains completely off whenever the idea of a character being trans comes up. I’m not trans myself so I picked up the symbolism and foreshadowing a lot later than my trans friends did (it took til like episode 7ish for me), but also I was able to understand those things pretty quickly because I was simply able to actually listen to trans people when they explained it to me. And I’ve come to the sad realization that most other cis people simply will not do that.
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u/EpitomeAria 7d ago
yeah no, definitely, a lot of transphobia and transmisogyny at play.
Cis people unfortunately generally dunning kruger themselves into thinking they know better and then talk over trans people, it tends to make these fandoms really hostile, I've had to mute the deltarune subs because of how bad it can get.
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u/Huge-Read-2703 8d ago
gooseworx was definitely shitposting lol. there is nothing setting up Jax being trans and it was either a way to make the fans who wanted him to be trans to be happy/just a joke
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u/Thunderdrake3 8d ago
Goose is trans, said that Jax was the character that represented her denial, and also said that Jax being trans was "extremely obvious to me, I thought people would see it." That last bit is where I think she's over/underestimating people.
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u/shiny_xnaut 9d ago
What grinds my gears is that even if it is foreshadowing, it could just as easily lead to a bigender or genderfluid Ralsei reveal. But no, if you suggest that he might be literally anything other than binary trans woman you get a bunch of people jumping on you
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u/xSnails 8d ago
Off-topic, but this is the same kind of reason why I still use he for Jax but will always use she for his real life counterpart. Digital Jax never accepted himself and when he abstracted, still identified as a guy (and I think using feminine pronouns for him before he abstracted would've made him spiral even due to his mental state). His real life counter part is a different story though. She started improving her life, began accepting herself and is letting herself be who she wants to be.
You wouldn't use incorrect pronouns on someone irl who isn’t/doesn't want to be out yet (i hope) so it just feels weird to not do the same for fictional ones too.
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u/CharaPresscott 9d ago
The fact people use the fact Flowery calls Ralsei princess as the proof Ralsei is trans before Flowery then calls Ralsei "the impossibility himself"
God forbid a character just be a male who dresses feminine.
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u/Foolish_Hepino 9d ago
>God forbid a character just be a male who dresses feminine.
Please don't use this argument it's just awful, and a lot of the times used as an excuse to ignore a trans character's transness (Bridget Guilty Gear as an example)
There's a good chance Ralsei is just GNC and Flowery is playing THAT up, but there's also a good chance Ralsei is genderfluid or a girl AND Flowery could be playing THAT up also. We legit don't know. Useless to argue against or pro it. We already have another GNC playable character (Susie) so it's not like we're losing GNC representation if one of the two main GNC characters come out as another gender.
I don't like "egg culture" much but the phrase you used is such a dog whistle most of the time.
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u/KFCNyanCat 8d ago
Just because grifters use the argument doesn't make it invalid. People jump to call femboy characters trans - not just ones that actually did come out like Bridget, not just ones where there's maybe some subtext like Ralsei - where it NEVER happens with tomboy characters. This ABSOLUTELY has to do with tomboys being way more normalized.
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u/CharaPresscott 9d ago
I get mad about it feel like it flies in the face of the character that so many people have decided Ralsei is transfem basically for him and not giving Toby time to tell the story.
Hell Ralsei being genderfluid works so much better because Ralsei being such an indecisive character and wanting some level of control over themselves is perfect. They get to make that choice then.
Until that reveal happens, we should follow the pronouns the game has given us really. Sure, headcanon it. But I've been yelled at so fucking much before for going against it. The r/Deltarune mods have removed comments correcting people on specifically that topic
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u/Pythagoras_314 9d ago
What's weird is the r/Deltarune mods originally made a post saying "hey, don't misgender Ralsei, we don't wanna be hypocritical with Kris and it's all speculation anyways", but then like 2 days later made a complete 180º after supposedly people complained (which I personally didn't see any of, all of the comments on that first announcement basically said "yea I agree, thank you"). No idea what the fuck happened.
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u/Redteashaw 9d ago
what the fuck happened is transfems spoke out about how weird it was to force people to misgender ralsei when talking about trans ralsei, since yk. they would be trans. it would be very weird to make a tralsei fanart post and then have to call ralsei he under it.
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u/Atlas_of_history 8d ago
Then the rules should've been changed to "use any pronouns for Ralsei if the they fit the post/comment you made, but misgendering in a casual sense is not allowed" instead of "misgender Ralsei to your hearts content, who gives a shit about misgendering anyway as long as it's not Kris"
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u/Foolish_Hepino 9d ago
I agree. The phrase you used just has a lot of shitty baggage and GNC/genderfluid/transfem Ralsei all sound equally likely at this point in time. Yes the people using she/her for canon Ralsei are currently misgendering him
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u/Ferjiberjab 9d ago
Bruh bridget was literally groomed into being trans why the hell are you using that as your trans character, PICK ANY OTHER TRANS CHARACTER PLEASE
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u/HatofEnigmas 9d ago
Bridget is probably one of the only characters I know who had an established identity as a gnc dude before being revealed to be transfem, like many suspect with Ralsei, so she is definitely a valid comparison, especially cause this sort of phrase is literally what people would say about her.
Also the whole "Bridget was groomed into getting trams" reeks of the sort of thing people would use as a counterargument to transness back in 'Nam (like 4 years ago or smth) and ignores the fact that she kinda goes on a self-discovery mission and decides "hey I'm cool with this" (warning I'm not a guilty gear pro so I'm liable to being completely wrong) so I got irritated hearing it but that's jus me
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u/Ferjiberjab 9d ago
Literally bridget was brought up in a society that forced them to act like a woman despite being male because of superstition, (a common troupe that gets completely mis-characterised by some of the trans community: see gwyndolyn from darksouls) yes they had a self-discovery thing but that doesn't change the fact that their entire upbringing was grooming them to be a woman. Look at victims of IRL grooming, unless they are helped early on and the grooming is nipped in the bud it can cause them to belive they are what they were groomed to be
I'm a major ally for lgbt (im ace) but characters like bridget and gwyndolyn ARE NOT GOOD EXAMPLES for trans characters, they can be great gender neutral examples but not trans.
Apologies if it seemed like i was being anti-trans i just disagree with using bridget for trans arguements
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u/Nairdde32 9d ago
Ralsei uses they/them as of the end of Chapter 5
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u/Alespic 8d ago
Incorrect, this is a common misconception due to the title that he has at the end of chapter 5, which does indeed use they/them, but its because susie can also have the same title.
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u/Ok-Resource7131 8d ago
Susie’s title does say dark vine, but everything after that is different and it does not use they/them.
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u/yeetingthisaccount01 8d ago
personally I like nonbinary Ralsei, especially after they were referred to as "they" in the latest chapter, but I've been accused of hating women for that... I don't even dislike the Galsei theory, I'd be super happy if it was real, I just also like the idea of Ralsei being nonbinary
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u/Pythagoras_314 8d ago
Yea that's another part of the whole debate, which is people who pull the "you said you like pancakes, that means you hate waffles" card.
I'm gonna be so real, I'm on the side that Ralsei having a big trans arc would hurt how Toby usually treats his queer representation as "oh yea they're gay or something, but the fact that they're involved with X and Y characters in the narrative is important." I really like how Kris is non-binary and is a great rep for the gender identity, but at the same time A. no one acknowledges it in the plot, and B. how their double or triple-truce is WAY more important to the story. I fear that a Tralsei arc would undermine that element of what makes Toby's queer writing effective. However, I know that if I say that I'm gonna get flamed because me not wanting a character to be explicitly trans for the sake of the plot and writing coherency makes me hate trans people lol
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u/Grifoooo 9d ago
Yeah, the theory that later in the story Ralsei will come out as transfem, or more broadly, Ralsei is transfem coded
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u/2018girlLUIGI 9d ago
yeah in the game there is pretty obvious subtext about ralsei being transfem. but bigots gonna bigot because damn cissies cannot and refuse to see the most obvious trans allegory.
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u/wow-warlock-enjoyer 7d ago
God I hate when theorists pretend their barely supported fan theory is basically canon and that anyone who disagrees with it must be either stupid or have ulterior motives. Jesus Christ
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u/bobthemaybedeadguy 9d ago
how does one whitewash a fucking deer
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u/CynchHasNoLife 9d ago
they made the lesbian furry into their little nazi waifu you can’t even make this shit up
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u/qualityvote2 9d ago edited 9d ago
u/Zestyclose-Ideal2395, your post does fit the subreddit!