While her friends are by and large accepting of her, there’s occasional slippage in their language with her that belies a long-term familiarity with her prior to her transition. Secondly, Erica faces interpersonal turmoil among her friend group. Body hair, a deep voice, what’s between your legs… dysphoria comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and in Catherine’s case, the nightmare could be a metaphor for any universally “male” experience that invalidates Erica on an internal level. In this case, it’s a citywide nightmare, but that can easily be a stand-in for anything that causes trans women dysphoria – the agonizing mental disconnect between physical appearance and self-identified gender. No matter how much she’s able to live a content life as a woman, no matter how much she’s validated in her daily existence by her employer and by total strangers, there’s always something present that reminds Erica of her previous life. This moment encapsulates into Erica’s two largest conflicts in the narrative.įirstly, the recurring nightmares are a grim reminder of her status as an AMAB (Assigned Male At Birth, or “biologically male,” if you’re emphatic about these things) woman. She muses that gender must not matter when it comes to these dreams, which leads to a major character to retort, “I’m not so sure…” At some point in the game, Erica reveals to Vincent that she’s also been having these dreams – much to her own confusion. In these dreams, men are turned into sheep and relentlessly pursued by overtly feminine monstrosities – forced to climb a collapsing tower of precarious death traps in order to survive. The most obvious one relates to the game’s main narrative arc, which concerns a series of recurring nightmares that haunt the majority of a city’s men. It’s wild to me that this sort of characterization can be pegged as negative and turned into such a controversial talking point, let alone “evidence” that the writers are somehow bigoted.įrom start to finish, Erica’s given the chance to lead a fulfilling, fun life doing something she loves and living on her own terms – a rarity for trans narratives. She makes me feel like her kind of life is maybe attainable, one day, somehow. In a world where I can speak to being harassed more frequently than I used to, Erica is comfort food for me. She “passes” perfectly, freely explores her sexuality on her own terms, and is respected as a woman by the world at large. In many ways, she’s actually the exact kind of trans character that the transgender community needs more of, with a lot of mainstream depictions (like Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Orange Is The New Black, Girl, and even Assassination Nation) offering little in the way of respite from our occasionally fraught and frequently frustrating existences.Įrica’s daily life seems barely affected by her existence as a trans woman. Her depiction is very adjacent to the titular trans character in 1981’s Stop, Hibari-kun! in that sense. Players aren’t privy to harassment she faces in her day-to-day life, nor do they see any form of intense suffering or bodily harm inflicted upon her, nor do they ever get a glimpse of what she was like “as a boy.” Instead, Erica is plainly presented as Erica – with one offhand mention of her birth name delivered by Toby near the end of the game. But I digress.Įrica is a character who very much isn’t defined by any kind of trauma – other than her aforementioned breakup. A lot of the time, this is done with white characters, which is disingenuous when you stop to consider that the predominant victims of transphobic violence are black and Latino. So much media deals in transgender suffering – dwelling on just how horrible it is to exist, and how oppressed we all are. The thing that immediately sticks out about Erica, to me, is how little overt oppression she seems to face in her day-to-day existence. Fun! But it’s necessary for me to say this, because I feel the need to push back against the widespread vitriol surrounding Erica and her characterization, and to a lesser extent, Vincent’s deliberately flawed depiction. Full disclosure – I’m a trans woman myself, which means I’m opening up a whole new avenue for harassment with this article. Yet something hasn’t ever sat right with me about any of this. The transgender antichrist was coming back, it seemed, and only the hottest of takes could stop it. When a remaster of the game was announced, critics were quick to draft up longwinded think pieces (like this one,) angry tweet threads, and in some cases, wild speculation regarding the remaster’s perceived worsening of its trans representation. Prominent peers in the industry often point to Erica as one of the most toxic portrayals of trans women to exist, period, full stop. Now, before we go any further, it’s worth pointing out that Erica has been made out to be a pariah by much of the more progressive sphere of the internet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |