stormdog | Entries tagged with queer

While looking through the plethora of indie queer games on itch.io, I had an idea about how to fight isolation-imposed loneliness. I'm going to try streaming a few games that look fun and gay. The more silly and the more gay the better! I know there are some pretty serious ones that look worthwhile as well, and maybe I'll try some of them later on.

I'm also going to try vtubing this with an avatar I created, possibly poorly, in VRoid Studio.

I'm going to start with "Why is this dragon so fucking cute??" by Nadia Nova. Maybe you'd like to join me as I search for the one true end with cute trans lesbians? I'm not sure when, but I'll let you know. Maybe this weekend if I can get things to work.

From the description:

----

you're tasked to hunt a dragon... but she is so cute?!

game features about 4000 words, so it can be comfortably played in one sitting!
four different endings including the one true end with cute trans lesbians!!

🌟 content warnings 🌟

written violence, gay shit, a lot of swearing

---

Click here for the game's page!

I'm feeling sad at the moment about this response to a recent post I made.

"I am committed enough to queer freedom to be available to random passing people as I am my own beloved friends and family."

It makes me feel like people see me as someone who doesn't care. Who isn't committed to wanting things to be better.

Do you see me that way? Am I making things worse somehow when I want to make them better? That thought hurts me too.

I feel like maybe I'm bad at this stuff. When, in various situations, I upset someone by asking them their pronouns, and I'm dismissed and rejected for expressing my concerns about trans-phobic language, and am seen as uncommitted to queer people's well-being, and when I never seem to have any feedback from people saying saying things like 'I see what you're doing and you're helping, or at least trying to help, and that means something to me...it makes me wonder if I'm helping at all. Maybe the care I feel isn't being expressed in actions that make a difference for anyone and I need to rethink them.

Maybe that's the kind of feedback people get from memes and that just whooshes, unheeding, past me.

I'd just...like to know that I'm helping, at least a little.

(Please don't say anything negative about anybody else, including anyone who I'm referring to here. I know that we're all trying to help in our own ways and that's important.)

----

I had so many reassuring comments to this on Facebook from people I care about and respect. That really helps. I wish I could share them all here.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1318894.html

A Facebook post of mine from a few days ago:

I get uncomfortable when any kind of group-thinky memes start proliferating, but even more so when they are about terms that I feel apply to me and whose use I disagree with, or make statements that directly address thoughts I have and choices I make in ways that I think are wrong.

So I feel extra-uncomfortable with a number of pride month memes like that. Some of them have a clear 'if you don't agree with this you are the enemy' vibe, and that makes it really hard to point out problems I see with them without being seen as the enemy.

At the same time, this past weekend I pointed out some unintentionally trans-phobic language in a silly Facebook post and and had several negative responses and no support from people I know who are mutual friends.

These sorts of things makes me feel like advocating for myself and people I care about doesn't seem to do any good and I shouldn't try. These things make me think that I'll never be able to overcome my aversion to group-think enough to be accepted by wider queer community, or any community of shared identity of that sort. They make me want to give up on Facebook entirely. It's a balance between the interactions that give me joy vs. the interactions that take it away. Sometimes, I'm not sure which side of the scale has more weight.

One part of Facebook that *is* giving me a lot of joy is the Poly Geekery community. While there are a few posts describing hard situations and looking for advice (which the community there is happy to provide), the majority of posts about relationships are celebrating happiness in people's lives. A woman writing about how excited she is that her husband found a boyfriend. A man talking about his personal growth in learning to let jealousy go and sharing the joy his girlfriend's partner(s) give her. Happy stories about other human beings sharing joy. Maybe a lot of us need more of that.

Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1315427.html

In my last therepy visit, I talked a lot about gender.

In writing about that here, I am confronting the difficulty of sorting these thoughts out in my head, let alone putting them on paper. This is not everything; it is what I can figure out how to try to express.

As a cis-straight-passing male, I have a lot of privilege. That makes me feel like a phony when I wear feminine clothing. Lots of trans folks have to deal with discrimination and violence every day. Maybe they would feel scorn for me. Maybe they'd be right to. It feels shallow for me to take on external trappings of femininity for a short time and then go back to being cis and straight. It feels like cultural appropriation. For lack of a better term, I said, I worry it will seem like I'm not being "serious" about gender. I talked about not wanting to shave my face, and feeling like I'm in a double-bind. If I don't, then I'll look ridiculous, or maybe even like I'm making fun of trans people. If I do, then not only will I be self-conscious about the way my face looks, but shaving just long enough to be feminine for a while then growing it back is another way that my choice of appearance may seem shallow.

They (my therapist), in gentle amusement, said that they do not want to dismiss my fears, but what would it even mean to be 'serious' about gender? Am I a frivolous juggler because I can only juggle three balls and haven't managed to get a solid five ball pattern down? While that is not a perfect comparison, I guess it's a valid one.

If I made choices about my appearance in a vacuum, I'd wear skirts and leggings all the time, and have my hair in pretty braids with ribbons or in pigtails, and have a mustache and beard. But I keep hitting this wall of trying to reconcile that image with how I believe that image would be read by other people, both in the queer community and outside of it. Confused. Incoherent. Shallow. Inconsistent. Inappropriate.

This was all making it very difficult for me to decide how I wanted to dress to march in the pride parade. I'd been thinking about these things all the way home and decided to look around the internet for some crazy search phrases like 'feminine beard' and similar. Soon, I found pictures of Conchita Wurst.

I've never really been influenced by, or even been aware of, pop culture. When I was a kid, in fact, I reacted to my ostracism by my peers by deciding anything popular was uninteresting or worse. I was vaguely aware of the existence of something called Eurovision, but had never seen any of it.

So the way I reacted to seeing and reading about Wurst continues to confuse me. Why does a pop culture figure have the power to make me feel better about myself and about looking the way I want to look? I have no answer to that question, but somehow it really does. I still have all those doubts and fears, but I have something that I previously did not; belief that that someone with that particular kind of mixed masculine and feminine trappings can potentially be seen as a valid social actor: as a legitimate, consistent, coherent person.

I've never had this experience before; finding validation of myself in someone else's existence in this way.

---

I think anger has helped motivate me as well. I'm so angry all the time when I look at the news and think about current events. This is why I've mostly stopped lookikng at Facebook; I honestly can't deal with it and continue to be a functioning adult right now. But anger is also motivation to be visible, even if that's the least, and most, I can do.

I'm going to march in the parade, dressed in a way I think is cute and queer. I'll have my rainbow shirt from work on that all the marchers will have, of course. The rainbow is a symbol of joy to me. Personally, the pink triange feels like the other side of the same coin, taken as it was from the Nazi persecution of sexual nonconformity. I have printed (and laminated!) a bumper sticker sized pink triange above the ACT-UP "SILENCE = DEATH" logo and will have that on the crown of my Tilley hat in the parade.

The context now is different, of course. We're not facing government hostility and indifference in the face of a dangerous pandemic, nor is that something that affected me the way it did queer folks during that span of time. But we *are* facing government hostility and indifference. It's not direct action against the problem, but I'm mad as hell and I want to invoke the confrontational legacy of queer rights movements and offer a reminder that silence about oppression can and does result in deaths of the oppressed.

Current Mood: determined
Crossposts: https://stormdog.livejournal.com/1221196.html

Despite getting more sleep last night, I'm still tired. I need to make it an early night again.

I was sorely, sorely tempted to stay up too late playing the game my dad bought me over the holidays. Have any of you played any interactive fiction? I started out when I was little with Infocom games like Wishbringer, Enchanter, or even HHGttG on the Commodore 64. These are adventure roleplaying games, but entirely in text. No graphics whatsoever.

I was probably hooked by watching my mother making maps on notebook paper as she navigated her way around the world of Wishbringer, collecting scrolls to learn spells, exploring the lonely mountain and the enchanted castle, trying to ensure she had enough food and water to keep from starving. Ever since, I've loved the whole genre of text adventure games. Zork is probably the most famous one, though to my chagrin I've barely scratched the surface of that one.

Of course the interface was a little clunky in the older ones. Every action had to be a typed command. "Go east." "Pick up scroll." "Fill jug" you type. "Fill jug with what?" asks the game, ignoring the presence of the sprightly babbling brook nearby. You get used to it though, and your commands reward you with marvelous word-pictures that your mind fills in to your own taste and imaginings. Eventually, I think the interface becomes nearly as transparent as any point-and-click game could be, and the mental images can be even better than the digitally-created ones.

My dad, knowing my love of the genre, saw a work of modern interactive fiction for sale on Steam and bought it for me. I played about an hour and a half of it last night and I adore it! The interface is updated in some ways, and simply changed in others. Rather than typing out comments, you point and click one of several options in each scene. There's no user-directed walking about; you encounter scenes as they come and tell the program what you're doing. You don't get to decide you'd rather be at some other place and leave. In this way, it's more like an interactive novel than a fantasy role-playing game, and I do miss some elements of games that allow freer movement and interaction with the virtual space.

Regardless, this is a wonderful game. It adds a lot of social maneuvering and moral decision-making that reminds me a bit of Dragon Age. I found myself angsting over the proper choices to make to solve the problems at hand, sure. But I angsted just as much, or more, over the proper way to react to an overture of friendship from someone I felt sympathy for but discomfort with, or to a surprise declaration of love from someone I didn't want to disappoint. Another difficult choice to make is whether to direct my energy toward academics to earn a scholarship so that my parents, who worry about being able to afford my college tuition, don't have to stress so much on my behalf; toward solving the mysteries that are cropping up around the school; or toward social and romantic relationships that might end up distracting me from the former two choices, as such things often do! The game really draws me into the high-school student protagonist's life.

Another thing that reminds me of Dragon Age is the diversity and inclusiveness. Is your character gay? Female? Bisexual? Male? Straight? These are all options. I'm playing a somewhat shy, bi boy (raise your hand if you're surprised....) and have gotten attention from members of both genders, including the amazingly cute boy in one of my classes who I get so nervously tongue-tied around that I ran away from my first conversation with him. Adorable!

I may actually do a couple of play-throughs of this game. Maybe I'll go in the other direction and be a socially confident athletic girl next time who's aiming for a sports scholarship. There seem to be a lot of paths to walk. And for later, the maker, Choice of Games, has produced a number of games of this variety that sound appealing. For instance, they wanted create a swashbuckling 19th century British Navy setting, but include gender diversity and equality, which is very important to the team. The game's navy is much as might be expected if you are a male protagonist. If you play as a female though, the navy is still all one sex, but that sex is female, and you exist in a matriarchal society where peacock-pretty men vie for the attention of powerful female officers. How fun is that?

These may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm really happy I was introduced not only to modern interactive fiction, but to a company that's trying really hard to make queer and non cis-male gamers feel welcome and even empowered. I didn't mean to start writing a big long review, but I guess I did. It's because I like this game so much! If this sounds interesting, please go check them out. It looks like most of their games are $5 or so.

https://www.choiceofgames.com/