When Victor Frankenstein created life, he was unprepared for the consequences of it. The monster he created needed a parent, a teacher, a caregiver, but instead he abandoned it. The monster, learning to fear and hate through the necessities of survival, dedicates its life to vengeance upon its creator. But what if the doctor hadn’t left his creation to fend for itself? Would it have been better? Or would it have brought up a host of other uncomfortable issues and power dynamics?
In the last site news, I talked about how simply including people of various identities in your work isn’t enough. Creators have an increasing awareness that representation of marginalized identities in fiction is important, but lacking good examples, many don’t know what good representation actually looks like. This leads to an effect where creators fill their work with as many different identities as possible without giving those experiences the depth of treatment or culturally competent touch they deserve. Such works can feel like they were cast by checklist: “Okay, we’ve got a lesbian character, a trans woman, and a trans man, we just need a gay guy and a bisexual. Flip a coin for the bisexual’s gender.”
I’m getting back on track with regular mail bags this week, and there are plenty of messages to post! There’s also been a huge positive response to my latest post, and I’m glad so many people are finding it helpful. But first, I’ve made a change to the site that might seem minor, but I think is important.
One of the terrific things about the webcomic renaissance of the past five or so years is that more and more stories are being told that include trans characters as central players. But it seems like writers, lacking good examples to follow in other media, still have some difficulty handling their transness within the narrative. Today I’m going to examine some different webcomics with trans representation, the different approaches they use to reveal to the audience that a character is trans, and what the best (and worst) applications of each method are.
Here’s the rest of the reader messages I accumulated in the past couple months.