A genuine question I mean absolutely no harm with, please don't hate me: is it so wrong to have trans characters be bad people? I get wanting to have good rep (speaking as an enby) but not all trans men are UwU soft bois. Or is this more of a case of "they're the only rep we've got so them being bad people brings real trans people into a negative light as well"? Again, there's no malice or ill will behind my asking, I'm just still a baby when it comes to these things.
It’s okay! I’m more than happy to answer a question like this - I’m by no degree upset, mad, etc... at all.
Having trans characters that are bad people isn’t inherently bad, no; wanting good rep is great, and it’s always nice to have a hero be trans, but it doesn’t necessarily mean having them be perfect. You still want them to be human - to fuck up, to make mistakes, to have feelings and emotions and motivations, even those that are questionable - and you still want them to be 3 dimensional enough to be interesting. So having them be bad people? That’s engaging!
For instance, Vriska could be decent trans rep. Yeah, she does a lot of absolutely awful shit, and she is genuinely a terrible person; but her reasons behind it, the moments when she is genuinely nice, how she feels about people and about herself - they even her out and make her more believable as a person and more interesting as a character. Like, you can’t deny that Vriska is a victim on her society to some degree - but you also can’t deny that she thrives in that society as well.
That’s not the inherent problem with her. She still has experience that transwomen associate with, and a lot of her past - especially in Pesterquest - can absolutely hit home with transwomen. Even her actions and maneurisms can make her amazing rep for transwomen, regardless of how good or bad she is as a person.
The actual issue is how the writers treat her, and how they use her being trans to erase all her wrongs. To them - especially to Kate - Vriska being trans excludes her from taking any and all blame for the horrible things she’s done. She’s trans, so she can get away with paralysing one kid, blinding another, and outright killing a third. In this light, she represents every anti-transfem sentiment and stereotype I’ve ever seen. That is NOT the sort of representation we want. This isn’t what we want to be associated with; this supposition that abusive trans people don’t exist, simply because they’re trans and apparently free of blame.
It’s also a tiny bit suspect to me that, out of every character they could have canonised on the main cast first, they went with the one that people are abuse apologists the most for.
On the other spectrum of things, it’s very much the latter point you gave; that we don’t want all of our trans rep to be negative, and so far, that’s... all we really have. It’s either that, or trans people so badly written that they just don’t come across as trans or could be read as absolute stereotypes (such as Roxy, who is just badly written transmasc, and Lanque, which I’ve gone over before having my own issues with).
If they made Dirk trans on top of that, we’d have an actual, outright villain who’s gone back to toxic abusive behaviour as our transmasc rep. As much as I’d love Dirk to be transmasc, I don’t want him to be transmasc now. If the other trans rep we had was better then I’d likely be happier with it, but at the moment we’ve got no genuine, actual, acceptable representation that doesn’t make me internally cringe or infuriate me to some degree.
Trans characters can be bad people, but if you only ever portray them as bad people - and rely on stereotypes or struggle to write them well when they’re not bad - then that’s when we get an issue.
If you only ever canonise the bad people as trans, that’s also a huge issue. You’re indirectly saying that you could only ever see trans people as bad, abusive, and toxic.
Characters in representation don’t specifically need to be good people, but you desperately want to avoid falling into stereotypes that could harm the groups you’re trying to represent . You desperately want to avoid putting characters into boxes of “interesting but horrid” and “boring but good”.
Though I’m several months late, I feel like I should bring this post back considering recent events.
We still live in a society where people like J.K.Rowling will write a murder mystery story about a cis man dressing up as a muslim woman in order to murder cis women. We still live in a society where this is considered acceptable fiction. We still live in a society where this concept can be published, filled to the brim with transmisogynistic, islamophobic ideology, and mass-marketed to the world - and where it can be done so craftily that only those who are being actively harmed and targeted by it will notice it and speak out.
It’s what she did with the goblins in the bank for Harry Potter, with their big, hooked noses and ineffable greed. It’s what she did with Reeter Skeeter, who is “mannish for a woman” and borderline pedophilic.
We still live in a society where minority groups are written as villains and monsters, stereotyped to hell and back, and slated, brutalised, and “rightly punished” for their horrific misdeeds. We still live in a society where the correct response is to hate the Jewish greedy goblins, to hate the transwoman brutish, pedophilic reporter, to despise the transwoman man in a dress slaughtering “real women”.
We still live in a society where charactures are used to incite violence against real people and real groups.
In this society, where big, vocal, and well-known authors are actively against us, harming us, hating us, we have to rely on smaller creators - on fandom groups, on cartoons, on comics, on fiction that they have very little to no hand in - to provide us with counter-representation.
We need them to show us characters who are trans and well written, but not villains. We need them to show us characters who are Jewish and well written, but not monsters. We need them to show us characters who are Muslim and well written, but not killers.
Having villains be non-cis, non-white, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, neurotypical, and non-male is acceptable, yeah, and sometimes it can be interesting, and fun, and if they’re well written they are more sympathetic than could ever have been imagined -
But as our world stands, most of the villains we see are us. We are their villains. And the cis, white, heterosexual, neurotypical Christian man? He is still the hero, still slaughtering us, or locking us away, or inciting “righteous violence” against us.
So, when it comes to Homestuck^2, at the moment? The representation is awful, and damaging, and hurtful, because it’s just playing to the same tune as the big voices we’re trying to escape, trying to fight back against.
What they’re saying to us, what they’ve told us from their characterisation so far, is barely different to J.K.R. Neurodivergent men are violent, controlling monsters - and if they’re black, they’re pedophilic and drug abusers (Gamzee). Transwoman are violent, murderous sex offenders (Vriska). Bi woman cheat and abuse their children (Jade). Gay men are manipulative, borderline-incestuous, and abusive to their partners (Dirk).
This really isn’t what we need right now. We don’t need more hatred. We don’t need more characters representing us who are violent, volatile, stereotypes.
We don’t need characters like us to be perfect. We don’t need them to be infalliable. They can fuck up, they can make mistakes, they can do bad things. They can be three dimensional. We WANT them to be like that.
But they can be that and not be a harmful stereotype, and that’s what we’re not getting. And we’re tired of it.
This is a lot of the reason why I’ve stopped reading HS^2. I’m tired of seeing the stereotypes. I’m tired of seeing the hurtful representation, and tired of it being passed off as something good. I’m tired of being told that we’re just “too sensitive” when we’re getting no reprieve from the daily fucking hatred of our existence.
We don’t want representation if all it does is hurt us more. Especially from a series that is so imbued with fandom culture - that made fandom culture as we know it today - that it’s personal in a way a lot of media just isn’t.
I suppose, really, the TL;DR is: we can have villains who represent us. That’s okay. But right now, villains representing us are being used to incite violence against us. Right now, characters like us who are categorised as bad people are being used to make people hate us. To perpetuate stereotypes. We don’t need that right now. What we need is three dimensional characters who counteract the negative stereotypes. We need representation that isn’t perfect, but that isn’t harmful, that doesn’t turn people against us. We need interesting, engaging, human characters - to remind us, in the face of big media, that we’re seen, heard, and loved, to remind us that we’re seen as human, and to show other people that we’re human, too.
