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OSPod 117 After-After Show-Show!
🕑 Added 2025-04-16 13:00:34 +0000 UTCThe gang briefly relitigates the "is spicy food mouth BDSM" question and then chats about Blue's Daredevil rewatch, before moving on to the subject of how characters can sometimes talk so Normal And Modern that it becomes completely incongruous with the extremely Not Normal And Modern fictional setting they inhabit, how speculative fiction can explore queer identities, and how storytellers have variously approached integrating elements that they personally see as quite unusual or noteworthy into completely normalized elements of their fictional setting!
Comments
Veelofar
I’ll put forward I Hate the conlang route for queer identities. It feels very “Here’s this weird fantasy thing that has no real name irl! We use lots of words that weren’t used at the historical equivalent, but we’ll call a trans person a Vitagol! It makes it way more comfortable for people who think those things are weird” A queer person in a story Will be controversial at some level, and the more someone is capable of “Well actually” their way into a queer erasure the worse off the representation is. The easiest and least intrusive way to do that without reducing the character to just how “different” they are is to simply use real words.
Marcel Mellor Hutchings
I was shocked to hear anyone other than me read the Chrestomanci books, also the same author who wrote Howl’s Moving Castle.
Susaga
Taash is a Qunari. Qunari society in particular should be REALLY easy to explain non-binary in. Their society has rigid gender roles, but three categories instead of two. Arishok is the warrior branch filled with men, Arigena is the domestic branch filled with women, and Ariqun is the religious branch filled with basically anyone. Like Indigo said, there is a term for someone whose birth sex is not their gender (Aqun-athlok), and basically any trans woman is accepted so long as she's willing to get in the kitchen. So surely there would be a term for someone who became Ariqun because they are neither Arishok or Arigena. Or, at the very least, call it non-trinary.
Syl Eldritch
As a nonbinary person that writes urban fantasy, I'm very much on the side of let queer or otherwise marginalized characters exist explicitly without being hidden by metaphor. With the way Indigo described it, yeah probably don't need to say it every other line, but they should definitely say it.
