Sorry for the delay folks! Waffled on editing + revising this essay for like a month, finally decided against it except for a few editorials. Enjoy the unsourced text brick under the cut.
A disclaimer first: For clarity of reference, given the many names he operates under, I will be referring to Dragon’s partner by the name he uses in the latter section of Worm – swap out all uses of the name Defiant for Colin or Armsmaster, to taste.
So, my supporting thesis here is that Dragon is coded as a trans woman. I’d like to get the obvious out of the way first – there is no earthly way that this was an intentional decision on the part of Wildbow. This also isn’t to say, to paraphrase Patricia Taxxon on the subject of allegory, that the metaphor is singular, complete, or literal. That said, Dragon as both a character and a narrative object ties well to transfeminity. Most obvious is that she was born a blank slate with no preconceived notion of gender and, despite that, chose to be a woman (this response will leave the theoretical field transitioning to being a Newfoundlander largely untouched). Following from this is one of Dragon’s primary motivators - to self actualize. This self-actualization is tied to her independence which is in turn tied to her ability to acquire a functioning, female, body (note that Dragon’s more overt coding is that of a disabled woman, and I don’t mean to ignore that by focusing only on acquisition-of-body-as-transition).
More relevant to our reading is that Dragon’s female form is atypically sexual in the text, the Defiant interlude includes him briefly focusing on (but curiously, not dwelling upon) the fact that they do not and cannot have traditional intercourse. Instead they engage in a process referred to by the text as a “ten by ten” which “involved some interplay between him and her android self, physical contact”. This matches well with what I’m fairly confident in generalizing as a trans relationship to sexuality, wherein Dragon experiences arousal and pleasure with her body in ways which either do not involve or explicitly preclude her genitals. Put a pin in this, we’re going to come back to it when we address the Chaser Allegations.
Dragon’s mechanism of relating to the world via screens, technology, and (modulated) voice also fits a less generalizable but definitely noticeable trend in (especially white, USAmerican) transfeminine circles, and not just in the sense that she is a literalization of someone who is Terminally Online. These trends arise (in my estimate) from a motivation of disgust with the self and the ease by which an online persona allows one to live in stealth, both of which are motivators for Dragon’s decision to keep her identity hidden. The decision that your body, especially your body as it may undefine people’s perception of your personhood/womanhood, must be kept hidden behind chat clients and profile photos is a recurring theme in transfeminine art for good reason. It’s also of note that when people (namely, the Dragonslayers) learn that Dragon is an AI they respond almost word for word like the worst case scenario for an outed trans woman: hostility, disbelief, and a desire to deperson her and deny her agency. In the most telling of these exchanges Saint – who regularly refuses to use Dragon’s pronouns and instead defaults to “it” - actually goes so far as to call Defiant’s attraction to her a “fetish” and a “self-delusion”. Dragon also states during her interlude that being outed as an AI was what lead to the Dragonslayers exploiting that nature for material gain – she specifically uses the word “violated” to describe the way in which she was exploited. While this last point might be somewhat spurious not to elaborate on, I am hoping it’s self evident (if a bit tenuous) how this lines up with a history of abuse (especially sexual abuse) against trans women due to the way it is both enabled via a relationship to societal hegemons (that is, total powerlessness against) and is presented as a social justice (or at least a socially neutral act) after the fact.
So we have now spent one single-spaced paper’s worth of words proving Dragon is trans! What of the Colin “Defiant” Armsmaster chaser allegations?
Let’s start with a clarification of what is meant by “chaser”. I would love to cite literature here, and if I wasn’t writing this for a discord chat channel [Ed. - and now a Tumblr post] I absolutely would, but we’re going to assume that you all will accept whatever working definition I provide. A chaser is someone, typically but not exclusively a man, who pursues trans women such that the woman in question is fetishized either by having her personhood denied in favor of being exclusively a sexual novelty, or is viewed with a para-personhood which places her on a pedestal above people who are not trans women (again, denying her a certain level of agency or reality beyond her transness). While in some cases it is possible to define someone as being objectively a chaser, it’s also something that can be apparent only when a number of qualities are taken in context. Defiant belongs to the latter class of both of these binaries – he places Dragon above others, and possesses several traits which indicate (but do not in and of themselves define him as) possessing chaser tendencies. Note I am leaving out a lot of subtlety here for the sake of brevity. We will not be discussing lesbian chasers, or if there is such a thing as a “trans chaser”, because settling either of those discussions would require me to wade into the second and third greatest threads in the history of forums, and defining Defiant as a lesbian or a trans man accounts for the fourth and fifth.
In fact, let’s begin this section with a statement: Defiant is a cisgendered man. This is less of an analysis and more of a fiat, but I hope the court of public opinion is kind to me about this. He is a man, he has never thought about gender, to borrow my friend Charlie’s thoughts on Carmen from The Bear he is simply too overworked to consider clocking out of being a Hero and clocking in to being transgender. [Ed. - I am so sorry to the transfem Defiant truthers such as @hopeinpithos which I have since learned are out here. You're doing something wonderful.]
This is the first of Defiant’s chaserlike qualities. He is also emotionally distant from other people, and has created a personal mythology around himself which leaves no space for actual intimacy or empathy; this is a fact Taylor repeatedly notes, and Defiant’s own musings on the nature of home for him confirm a kind of detachment from others. There are people and there is him and Dragon. This kind of codependency predisposes him to prioritize Dragon above other people, not in the way one prioritizes a human lover but in the way one prioritizes a mission or a religious figure.
The Defiant interlude digs further into that para-humanity (pardon the pun) that he bestows on Dragon, as he claims they are uniquely suited to one another due to Dragon’s AI nature. It is the act of her outing herself as an artificial intelligence, already established above to be at some level comparable to outing oneself as trans, that is the foundation of their relationship. Defiant uses Dragon’s AI nature to define her as better than others both generally and for him, and he uses that fact almost exclusively to further their codependence, while spending his discussions with her focused on the tasks which occupy their figuratively (and - given that Defiant is more than once responsible for recoding Dragon’s mind to a mutually agreed upon point - literally) shared mind. One draws to mind any number of “I want a trans gf” posts off 4chan, which posit trans women as a kind of pet, accessible to and dependent on the desires of a cisgendered man. This framework suggests dating a trans woman is uniquely healing for a dependent shut-in who is uninterested in the emotional and physical labor of relating to a real, human woman with wants beyond achieving mutual goals. This same framework holds up the relationship between Defiant and Dragon, though one may speculate on if it would be the extent of their relationship in less pressing circumstances than the events of Worm. [Ed. - I wrote this before finishing the epilogues. I'd argue my point stands, as by that point Defiant has spent years coming to terms with himself and Dragon and admits this has altered their relationship from how it was in Worm proper.]
Their mutual dependence is echoed in that pin we’re returning to, which is how Defiant engages with Dragon sexually. The sexual aspect of chasing is in many ways its crux – the orthodox definition of a chaser requires them to only view a trans woman as a sex object, and even the more liberal definition I’ve provided requires some level of fixation on either engagement with or negation of the bodies of trans women. Defiant and Dragon’s sexual relationship is ambiguous to some degree, but the aforementioned ten by ten game, as well as their general personalities, narrows the possibilities to one of two options.
The less likely option is that he does not view her as a sexual object and refuses to engage with her on this level. This is not totally unlikely, as the Defiant interlude confirms he has, to put it academically, “zero game” and has never previously pursued a relationship due to his career-oriented “grindset” (another academic term), but the idea of their relationship being non-physical appears contradictory to other parts of the interlude [Ed. - And epilogue] as well as his general behavior towards Dragon, both of which indicate some level of physical attraction to her. I mention this, then, to point out that even an outside reading of their relationship as asexual still contains chaser elements on Defiant’s side, as it would indicate that he is willing to engage with Dragon intellectually and, perhaps, emotionally as a woman, but is not willing to extend that acknowledgement to her actual body, thus denying her sexual autonomy as a woman. I’d like to acknowledge that it is not inherently bad to engage in a relationship this way, it’s kind of textbook asexuality, but taken in context it indicates a mechanism by which Defiant can sidestep acknowledging Dragon as a woman in any concrete manner while still preserving the parts of their relationship which are beneficial to him and dependent on his superficial acknowledgement of her identity.
The much more likely option is that Defiant acknowledges Dragon’s unique approach to sexuality and actively prefers it. The only person we see him express physical affection towards is Dragon, and the only time he is presented as becoming flustered at the subject of sex is when Imp needles him about having had sex with Dragon. He appears most comfortable when he is able to frame their sexual interaction through a lens which does not implicate him in the actual act of sex – ten by ten is referred to as calibration mechanism, and Defiant appears to be in no hurry to ensure Dragon is fit for traditional intercourse. Whether we read this as a rhetorical tool Defiant deploys to satiate a desire to engage with his sexual tastes without acknowledging them (the classic “it’s not gay if it’s a trap” argument) or as an intentional choice where the pleasure is in the novelty (a calibration system between two mechanical beings is an exclusive sexual experience in this setting, which would reinforce Defiant’s preconceived notions that Dragon is uniquely fit for a relationship with him) it is clear that Defiant prefers and enforces his preference of the modes of sex which can uniquely be had with Dragon, as opposed to those which could be had between nearly any two consenting adults. This is chasing in its purest form, an obsession with the novelty of the trans woman as a sex/service object, to the exclusion of any mundane or shared experiences that do not fit the chaser’s notion of themselves as especially good or especially served by the relationship.
None of this is to present a definitive reading of Defiant, or to like “cancel” him or something (at least not for this), but rather to explain why I’ve spent the past three months doing chaser jokes about him. It is just as possible to read Defiant and Dragon’s relationship as a typical, if novel due to the setting, codependency. But whether intentionally or not, Wildbow has stumbled into writing a relationship that absolutely can read as a chaser pursuing a trans woman, and that jumped out to me because I rarely see that written except as a rhetorical point arguing against chasing or as an expression of the author’s repressed views on trans women. Perhaps, if Wildbow was to try on a skirt, she would be able to shed more light on the situation. Alas.
By the way, I looked up references for this response because I typed it in a word document. You are all so, so lucky that Chicago footnotes do not translate to a Discord message. [Ed. - and you on tumblr suffer for it. Sorry!]
