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canonical momentum
@canmom
// game dev (subtype: technical artist) // animator (subtype: 3dcg + anime) // former physicist // trans woman // anarchist // art blog: @canmom-art // main site
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as fun as it is to draw up little lists, characters are tools. the character exists to advance the aims of the artwork. of course, that aim may just be to 'explore' a character, so it's kind of reciprocal with it. but what is 'a character'? a vessel, or mirror, for experiences, emotions, possibilities... in the writer and reader. a model of the ways people can be. making a character legibly occupy a particular social position, like 'being trans', can be a very good way to do that, especially if that facet of life is depicted rarely. we write about all this 'trans' shit because that's the world we inhabit and love, and we wish to reflect that.
but the point isn't really to just build a big database query over fiction, or tick off a checklist. the point is to get something real in there, isn't it? a fictional character who's fucked up in a way that lets you say oh shit, that is exactly how it is, or a character who opens a door for you to become or understand something you could not previously imagine, is so much more than a character who legibly ticks off an identity box and gets an iso standard happy ending.
discussions of 'representation' are kind of whatever. we all need different things at different times. the stories we latched desperately on to ten years ago might now feel boring; the stories that speak most forcefully to us now might be inconceivably infuriating and upsetting in the frame of the creature that lived back then. characters who serve some vital role - a memorable depiction of grief, perhaps - may or may not tick the boxes. a certain amount of openness to interpretation is a good thing. and tbh, if you try and write a trans character (whatever kind of character) and 'screw it up' by the rubrics of this time, but you manage to successfully channel something of your very specific experience of the world and the meanings you've built to comprehend it, then i want to see that.
so do try, do recognise what you don't know. but also recognise the act of writing is a chance to encounter something. it motivates you, and gives you a means, to reach across the chasm between you and another being. i would ask only that you pursue it sincerely, far more than that you memorise a list of bad tropes. we know plenty about how society at large views us, but we don't know how you view us, the hopefully thoughtful, hopefully observant, hopefully kind creature reading this text on the internet. do we have a role in your world?
1. Many of the characters listed aren't canonically trans (some of them are characters I know about for sure, others could just be the result of wikis being misleading)
2. Trans women have wildly different standards for what is "good" transfem rep than everyone else
3. There is a character named "Cancer Death Toll" in Saint Seiya. This made research hell.
a few. please bear in mind that we mostly like stories about brainweird people having a bad time ;p
Abraxa, Sash, Lilith - A/S/L, Jeanne Thornton (Jeanne is just ludicrously good at character work)
Gala, Diane - Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton (an interesting interplay here; everything we know about Diane is filtered through Gala, so both get characterised at once)
Annie, Amy - Persona, Aoife Josie Clements (each so beautifully fucked up in different ways)
Michaela 'Traps' Sinclair - Castration Movie, Louise Weard (most other characters in this series are also memorable, but Traps is truly a creation, perhaps the most cursed character on this whole list lmao)
Kate 'Coagula' Godwin - Doom Patrol, Rachel Pollack's run (kind of a flat character tbh, like she's mostly a vehicle for Rachel to talk about trans shit, but historically significant)
Annie-O, Temporary Agency, Rachel Pollack (a very minor character but she completely steals the scenes she's in)
Katherine - Ranked Competitive Breast Growth, Beth Leigh-Ann & Talia Bhatt (another book full of distinctive characters but this is the standout)
Vikki - What Happens Next, Max Graves (a few other solid trans girl characters in this one, but Vikki is the most prominent and interesting)
Paige - The Silt Verses, Jon Ware and Muna Hussen, played by Lucille Valentine (excellent character, though her transness is kind of incidental; for such a dystopian setting it's amusingly trans-positive)
White Chain - Kill Six Billion Demons, Tom Bloom (we daren't speculate what's going on with tom, but it's delightful how gleefully trans this character's storyline turned out after everyone thought it wouldn't go there)
Vellus, Isidol - Psycho Nymph Exile, Porpentine Charity Heartscape (both kind of trauma-vessel characters; the book gets you into their heads like few things can, so they are quite sticky in memory.)
Hana, Tokyo Godfathers, Satoshi Kon (this one's borderline viewed in light of trans depictions, Kon writes Hana a lot closer to the ways he writes men than the ways he writes women, but she's a fun character and on balance the movie works)
Aealacreatrananda - Jennifer Diane Reitz (she doesn't actually appear in any of Jenn's works to my knowledge, but honestly. what an icon)
trans women are the most likely people to write compelling trans women, of course, but i certainly don't want to make out like we're just too inscrutable to write if you aren't in the game already. in fact, you should try! maybe you'll discover something :p
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last week we showed up to the shader jam while in a very altered state, and tried to express something rather inscrutable as a shader (sphere = blahaj = memdmp = transfemininity = recursion... it made sense at the time).
well the idea was sound?? this week i got the thing working and damn, we were onto something!
it's a quadtree marcher, building on the flower shader. every time a ray hits a sphere it takes the point on the sphere for new 'screen' UV coordinates, bonks the camera somewhere else, multiplies the colour, and the calculation anew. so each sphere is a view into another universe of spheres.
not bad for something we dreamed up during a trip i reckon
been teaching @nechronica (<3) programming after nefariously drawing her in with demoscene stuff. with our shared interests, this has led to thinking even more than usual about the conceptual overlaps with 'magic'... and this has resolved somehow into a new series tentatively called the 'wizard's guide to programming'.
the idea is: a guide to the conceptual frame of programming, and writing Rust in particular, in a slightly perverse and unconventional way with a lot of philosophical digressions. if we're lucky, maybe it can interest people who already know a thing or two about programming, as well as people who don't want to program anything but want to know how computers work a little better.
part 0 is a little discussion of the concept of "magic" and the history of "science", of course...
Before we talk about computers, we must talk about the world that contains computers.
part 1 discusses what a program even is, and whether they're real, which is probably important to know for writing them.
When we say a program is running on a computer, what are we even talking about?
part 2 introduces the act of creating things by naming them:
We introduce the most fundamental magical act.
and part 3 gets us started on our main magical tools, "functions" and "types", as we start on building a little micro-roguelike dungeon game.
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the world's most erratic umineko liveblog updates again. an absolute monster chapter this time around, as we go to court to establish whether Natsuhi ダニット (dunnit) or not. let's see which, screenshot do we wanna go with...
oh yeah that'll do it
gigantic chapter, but lots of fun opportunities to theorise in this one. and uh... hm! we seem to have lost our... well, you'll see.
the world's most erratic umineko liveblog updates again. an absolute monster chapter this time around, as we go to court to establish whether Natsuhi ダニット (dunnit) or not. let's see which, screenshot do we wanna go with...
oh yeah that'll do it
gigantic chapter, but lots of fun opportunities to theorise in this one. and uh... hm! we seem to have lost our... well, you'll see.
glitch felt weirdly unconfident navigating the 'theatrical finale movie' format. after sitting through the mandatory 20 minutes of ads and trailers, the humorous warning not to give spoilers (which isn't doing much, from a quick survey of this website) and series recap seemed a bit of an awkward way to start. the "exclusive" merch plug at the end even more so; obviously merch is glitch's main business model but 'hey, buy our plush dax in the maid dress' seemed a little tonally off, considering. 'tv show + theatrical movie' is by now a well established model in anime, with the most popular (kimetsu no yaiba, chainsaw man and the like) setting records, so it was a little surprising.
i would say that for me, TADC got more interesting over its run; the writing and performances broadly became more confident and it got clearer what goose was doing, so while part of this was just the amusing absurdity of showing up at a cinema for a web series, i was broadly looking forward to this. episode 8 is of course already out, and it did feel like half a movie with a cliffhanger at the end, although they do actually run a version of the title song at the break into episode 9 so it's not just like one big movie.
and as for episode 9... well, I'm going to assume you've seen it, so there will be spoilers.
there are two real arcs to it. the first concerns jax; perhaps like me you had heard certain rumours going in. the second concerns more the lingering questions about the premise (like how the characters relate to the outside world) and resolving the core conflict between caine and the rest.
the former is definitely stronger. it felt increasingly apparent that jax was a character whose conflict goose is particularly interested in. the sequence in question calls back, at least visually, to the surreal abstract sequences in her earlier works like the elain the bounty hunter series and little runmo, and it has some lovely abstract visuals that got pretty demo-y at times; i appreciate that when it comes to depicting jax's hostile shield persona to push everyone away it does not pull its punches.
of course you probably care more about whether jax is officially a girl, right? the show certainly offers material on this front but stops short of declaring it outright (though the visual language in the bow scene is hard to mistake). I'm sure people will be arguing about it forever. the reading is easy to make; the story also seems quite personal, tho i am not going to speculate more than that; goose has a right to leave this open to interpretation, god knows the girl has enough eyes on her right now.
given abstraction has been set up as a metaphor for suicide and is played very explicitly that way in the film, the story can't really walk it back without undercutting the metaphor. you don't get to get people back from a suicide. unfortunately, having pomni get rescued at the last minute after insisting on embracing jax does instead end up somewhat undercut her choice to pursue jax even at risk of her own abstraction. that, however, is nothing compared to caine inexplicably coming back, reformed somehow by his time alone in the void, completely negating the twist at the end of episode 8. it felt like they spent the last few episodes setting up for this scene but afterwards were painted into a bit of a narrative corner.
so it ends up a sweet enough fan serving happy(ish) ending; we learn about the 'irl' versions of the cast, and they make peace with being uploads living in this world that they now more or less control. there are some cool sequences, like the match-cut staircase scene, but it is a pretty low-key ending and honestly the questions that were answered still leave a lot more that are also not very thematically important, like how all these random people got brain scanned.
but yeah, turns out the biggest problem was less the existential void of a pointlessly cycling existence of meaningless activities and more the annoying flying bastard fucking with them all the time. it's pretty chill after he gets his shit together.
a pomni cosplayer i overheard talking after the movie said it was cute but she wished it was more depressing, and honestly, fair lmao. I'm not sure exactly how i would have ended it, but this definitely feels like playing it pretty safe.
nevertheless, overall I'm glad goose and the rest of the team got the chance to make this show seemingly without much compromise besides yknow having to be a vehicle to move merch, and I hope that whatever she makes next can be a less stressful experience than this seems like it turned out to be. in particular, there's a lot of really fantastic character animation throughout the series, and of course it's gonna cast a long shadow on web animation to come; this one took glitch onto an entirely different scale. we'll have to see how long their formula works. and on another level, i look forward to the wave of people surely inspired by tadc to get into animation - it's nice to see a model like this working.
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some scattered notes of major themes from recent pretty intense acid experience revolving around recursion and hyperbolic space. it was interesting, soon as it hit we went straight into 'we-moded' state, like instead of all this prevaricating seemed silly to think we might be anything other than plural, of course we are a cluster of things. and notably we seem to be a lot more comfortable using 'we' in everyday life now (though that's partly just like. meeting more plural systems that do that and seem to get along fine)
during the trip we got very chatty about all sorts of stuff as usual, at the same time space got very stretchy like in hyperrogue. the same kind of happened to concepts: we had a sense of concepts memories associated with a thing or place being stored inside triangles which we could open or close to spread out the space of concepts around them. thinking felt very geometric.
the following was written late at night while coming down from it, nine poles of interesting things which formed some kind of structure. and there's a shader in it
more tidy and worked out version may hit the main site at some point
oki first up subdivision surfaces in computer graphics. you take some piece of geometry, like a quad (four-sided shape), and replace it with four quads. this allows the mesh to hold more complex details. and you can do this recursively. with catmull-clarke you also smooth the positions towards a limit surface but you could do all kinds of things.
this is one very visualisable example of a rewriting rule, which is often used to generate structures like fractals. it's also, in the form of a context-free grammar, how a programming language is defined: you have a set of symbols that can resolve to one of a few other symbols and by recursively expanding that out you can in principle generate all syntactically valid expressions in that language.
that's one pole…
for a second pole, this weekend we played a roleplaying game about creating a language for an isolated group. we would take turns to create a word based on prompt cards and play out a scene to show how that word would be used. and while there were various provisions in the prompts for how that language would evolve, we also very quickly developed our own ways of using the jargon we had created, e.g. sarcasm, using the word to represent the people that use that word, etc.
and it was very interesting to observe how ideas contributed early in the game would expand out and shape the sorts of ideas we would come up with of where to take the story next. related to 'fictional positioning' in emily care boss/vincent baker language, but more abstract: by creating a word we created a space of possible expansions on that word and directed the flow of the game. so it's kind of a similar process of recursive expansion
ok, so then pole 3 is the lambda calculus. this is basically an algorithm that recursively transforms statements into other statements, and it's equivalent to a turing machine. it's the basis of functional programming and a huge foundation of computer science.
and thinking about how in the lambda calculus, one path of continuous rewriting from the same expression might terminate, while another might not.
pole 4 is our subjective experience of time and space stretching out hyperbolically (compare hyperrogue). a corner could expand in associations to become a mini universe but it's still all contained in that 'triangle'
pole 5 is still a bit unformed but it's in projective geometry and the idea of projecting that triangle through other concepts
pole 6 is the ability to observe the recursion from outside and stop the recursive expansion if necessary. analogy: mrna transcription and the various functional units that do things like 'locate a relevant section of DNA' and 'produce a string of precursor mRNA' and 'snip it up according to cell environment to produce different combinations of protein segments'; all of these little functional units eagerly running around in the cell grabbing onto anything that has the right type to fit into their active site. and then various regulators and signalling systems to indicate when all of that should go ahead and when it should rein it in
every cell is a computation process
pole 7 is the deleuzian body without organs so far as we understand it; the capacity to create functional structures out of something previously formless. a silicon wafer superposes every possible circuit it could hold, and then particular circuits are etched in; but we are a process that can etch itself new functionality out of its capacity to just give things names
so then pole 8 is our recognition of our existence as a system of generating functions; kind of a foundation to understand the different personas we can construct both internally and externally
and then pole 9 is i guess making a visual expression of this in a recursive shader (we showed up to the fieldfx shader jam and managed to livecode to some degree lmao) where the spheres represent the roundness of blahaj which now signifies nora memdmp, and also through it transfeminity and being a creature and so forth; and each sphere recursively expands into another view of the spheres
(more specifically, it raymarches through a quadtree grid of spheres, derived from this shader with the flowers; then when it hits a sphere, it takes the polar coordinates on the sphere as UV coordinates to re-run the whole shader down to about recursion depth 3.)
(nb: had real performance issues running this shader on what is supposed to be a better computer, so do not have a video currently, will upload it later)
dededos
blakekathryn
stormborns
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
