#enzel.txt

[pyjamaenzel]

ok i have to say it. Fictional Guy who likes to wear nicely tailored slightly fancy (masculine) clothing and style his (traditionally masc haircut) hair is not femme. This is not to say you can't draw him femme or wearing a dress, that is your right to make transformative works and do whatever the hell you want, but he is not "femme" as presented. "Femme" does not mean "would get called metro in 2005".

[enzelffxiv]

something that remains one of my favorite worldbuilding touches is how people on the First call you/others "sinner" as a casual appellation. Idk why it just speaks to me. it's the dark sarcasm of people who are still living in an apocalypse. the implication of "we don't deserve this, but we're all being punished anyway". and a sort of solidarity, "we're all in [this bullshit] together".

[pyjamaenzel]

been working on a sci fi setting where transition is more attainable bc they have babymaking tech so they're not so concerned with the gender binary in that way but there is a social gap between people who figure it out 'late' (i.e. after puberty) and those who got to go on puberty blockers. and nonbinary people are seen as sort of frivolous. There would be cultural assumptions!! They are "humans" but they don't come from our Earth, they have their own cultural baggage and different built in gender stereotypes (women are supposed to be hardworking and stoic for example) and I'm always trying to think about how all the social expectations intertwine.

I feel like often in speculative fiction the social friction of Gender either gets glossed over entirely for the sake of inclusion (which is either mostly fine and boring, or has unfortunate unconsidered implications) or the author just uno reverses our current social structure and doesn't think about it deeply enough...so you get these sort of shallow surface level stories that could have been good but you dig a little and there's nothing under there. You can tell they didn't think about it past a certain point. I dunno!

I feel like characters being "just trans" or "just gay" have their place in the broader context for the sake of normalization, but for me personally it feels like set dressing. I'm not compelled by it, it's just sorta like...oh, that's nice.

When I made Keten, I poured a lot of other feelings into them that weren't just gender but were intertwined in a way that can't be separated out. My sense that I "disappointed" my parents by not turning out to be a perfect, ordinary child is about my gender as much as it is about my neurodivergence as much as it is about being the only person in my immediate family who is fat. The reason I keep revisiting the clone/double/alternate universe theme in my work is because I always struggled with the feeling that there was an ultimate ideal of "me" that other people expected me to be and i constantly failed to be it. I am just an imperfect copy of what they wanted.

I am not a woman, I am not a man, I cannot function without medication, I'll never meet societal standards for looks, I am the amalgamation of what came before me but I am not bound to it, I was shaped by expectations that stunted me instead of lifting me up, I found myself in the mess despite all of that. I don't consider any of those traits flaws anymore but it's very clear when the people around me do.

More and more I've noticed people adhering to this mentality that their experience with gender can only be felt and understood by people who are exactly like them, so they see a character they relate to and assume the character must be exactly like them. And it's like...no, the human experience is so vast and varied and there is overlap! I have seen people look at an adopted or disabled character feeling alienated and trying to claim it's a metaphor for transness but you know. People are adopted and disabled in real life and they feel that way! It's not bad to relate your own experience to it, to feel that kinship.

Anyway, I don't think "incidental" LGBT rep is bad, but it's just a random character trait like hair color in that sense. It doesn't grip me, it's just sorta there.

[pyjamaenzel]

It's hard to deconstruct what it is exactly about deterministic time travel stuff in fiction that I hate so much bc there's so much going on there but I'm going to make an attempt.

First off: people tend to treat neat time loops as a foregone and satisfying conclusion and not like. Existentially horrifying? If everything has to happen a certain way Or Else then no one is actually making choices. Ergo why even bother holding anyone accountable for their actions! The unknowable force of fate said it had to be so!

second: A piece of media establishes a multiverse with branching timelines and then turns around and does something incongruent with it. So I guess there are two big intertwined issues: Time travel to the past making a neat loop is just. Determinism. Which is incongruent with an ever changing branching universe. And IMHO, lazy storytelling. And also the idea that people in alternate universes somehow aren't people and worthy of life and can just be waved off to disappear because "that's how it's supposed to be, there's only one 'correct' timeline" instead of treating it with the gravity it deserves (billions of people being wiped from existence because of a single Main Character's choices) is FUCKED. (spoilers for some stuff that's been out for a while below the cut)

In Tales of Xillia 2 (major spoilers ahead), the main plot revolves around the spirit Origin (God) cursing a family line with the power to destroy alternate universes. Why? Well, he decided humans were evil and would only ever destroy the world so he told this one lady she and her descendants had to prove him wrong by uhh (checks notes) becoming mass murderers.

Every time someone makes a choice that deviates from the "main timeline" their world becomes a "fractured dimension" with them at the center of it, and if you kill them the whole dimension collapses, killing everyone in it and returning their souls to the main timeline. Why? Well there's a finite amount of energy for making souls so every time an alternate universe is created it puts strain on the system. So there's a finite amount of dimensions that can be created before the whole system collapses. Meaning the moral and ethical dilemma is between "killing billions of people repeatedly" and "letting everyone die".

Now you would think a game which is the direct sequel to "there are no acceptable sacrifices, I'm going to punch Maxwell (God) in the face" the RPG would carry that spirit over and the characters from the first game would be like hey, this is fucked, we should go punch Origin (God) in the face. But no. They just sort of go along with the mass murder. Oh well! What can you do! Can you tell I've been salty about this for over a decade?

My beef with ToX2 is not with the worldbuilding, which *is* coherent, but with the weird tonal shift from a series that has a lot of Punching God In The Face to Correct Injustice, and the unwillingness to do anything interesting with its premise beyond wallow in the tragedy it contrived. If there is a "main timeline", who decided which choices deviate from it? I would assume the god who created the whole mess? Why doesn't anyone blame him? Why does everyone else in the world have to get punished with nonexistence because one person made an arbitrary decision? Fucking hell. (Loved the game. Don't play it.)

This segues into FFXIV. (Spoilers for Shadowbringers and beyond.)

So in Final Fantasy XIV's third (fourth? idk if ARR counts) expansion we find out there was an alternate timeline where your player character, the big damn hero, dies horribly, there's an apocalypse, blah blah. And this guy you were friends with who went into a sort of sleep stasis wakes up in this ruined future, meets the descendants of your surviving friends and they all get together to try to make a time machine to go back in time and try to save the PC's life. Only it turns out you can't travel in time: he gets sent to an alternate universe (yours) that's in the past relative to his timeline. He says he assumed that once he saved your life and altered the future, his timeline would disappear, and him as well. Only it's not time travel, it's a multiverse, so he sticks around. And the timeline he left behind sticks around too.

Then in the next expansion they walk this back by having you use the *same technology* which was established to be *multiverse travel* and *not time travel* to send you to the past and do a neat little time loop where you meet the person who ends up picking you to be the hero and everyone else who you meet in that past have their memories of you conveniently erased and--

it would have been so easy for them to be like. yeah this is an alternate universe! You can't change the past of your own universe but maybe you can give these people some hope for their future! But no. Time loop.

The problem is, if you've already established that alternate universes exist, because they showcase different paths people took, you have this problem where if you go into the past of your own universe you've removed all your own agency up until that point, because it *had* to happen. If everything is a fixed point in time then everything has already happened and there are no choices left to make! Which to me is just. fucking. BORING. why are we even telling the story then? Can you tell I've been salty about this for 4 years.

Homestuck: it kind of poked this concept with a stick but was ultimately unsatisfying along with the rest of the ending. Are the people in doomed timelines not people too? Hello? Anyone? (I give it a pass for actually trying to tackle the question, even if the ending was just mean spirited.)

Arcane is one of the few pieces of media I've seen handle a multiverse correctly, though only if you look at the Z-Drive as not time travel but recreating the universe branch a few seconds in the past, which is existentially horrifying in a fun way (every time Ekko uses it he makes a new universe, the one he left behind may or may not be doomed)

Unfortunately a lot of the Arcane *fandom* hasn't gotten the memo and keeps applying Back to the Future-style time travel rules to it and it drives me up the wall. Please...help. Multiverse. MULTIVERSE.

[pyjamaenzel]

I'm absolutely guilty about making snap judgments about characters, but man. Is there anything more frustrating than seeing someone complain about a character they don't like and their criticisms make it very clear they've never engaged with or thought about the character on a more than superficial level?

You get this in basically every fandom but I feel like BG3 can be somehow worse in this regard because if people don't like a character they won't put them in their party or will kill them off, therefore solidifying their one dimensional view of the character because they never get to see them open up or grow...

[pyjamaenzel]

ever since my geology kick i keep trying to analyze rock formations in video games like they are real. This is of course an exercise in futility because I doubt environment designers think about the implications of the rock formations on the local geography & past and present volcanic activity...erosion...etc. Now I want to see a real geologist analyze video game rocks for accuracy.

[enzelffxiv]

something that's been bumping around in my head since DT is how in the Eng version, unless people are specifically addressing one of them, the Blessed Siblings are referred to with a singular pronoun as if they're one person. I kept wondering if they were going to address it in the text as a cultural thing but they never did. (unless I missed it in side content I've never done yet.)

But the implications are just an extra layer of fucked up on top of their origins, you know? They don't get their own names, they have the same name with different epithets.

[pyjamaenzel]

i still have no idea by which logic tumblr operates in terms of having me accidentally follow/unfollow people