do the flipline studios gamerias have better transfem rep than a given piece of media?

the bar is in hell to the point where the following really just is the baseline for halfway decent transfem representation in media. not that i think it's bad necessarily- we'll get to that.

liezel has been one of the customer characters since papa's pancakeria to go, which released in 2018. while playing the games, you learn absolutely nothing about the sort of lives these characters live, because they're just grounded, charming, and sometimes zany-looking npcs you serve at your restaurant, nothing more nothing less.

regardless, they all have lore if you go looking for it, which mostly consists of fun facts that fans of the game can take into consideration when voting for who the selectable chef characters will be in their newest game. liezel was selected for papa's paleteria, for example. it's usually pretty basic and bare-bones, but it's another thing to add to the charm of the games.

anyways, here's liezel's story:

so it's pretty clear she was meant to be a trans woman based on this blurb alone, and this has been confirmed by the creators. and as i said before, the bar is in hell, so this right here means that these originally flash-based cooking games have better transfem representation than a LOT of "queer media" that's meant to be taken more seriously than this. it fits the following criteria:

1) there is a trans woman in the piece of media

2) her trans identity is given some sort of acknowledgement by the media's canon

3) the media in question portrays the transfem character with a baseline level of respect for her and her transness

which is, to say, it really is that easy. yes, even in media made for kids. and yet even a lot of "queer media" so consistently shies away from actually having transfem characters that transfem representation within them becomes genuinely hard to find. and when it is there and noticable, it's often in the form of a grotesque caricature that clearly isn't meant to actually be respected (eg. rocky horror picture show, a movie often treated as quintessential queer media to the point where some people look at you funny if you say you don't like it)

the point of this thought experiment isn't even really to say that liezel is anything groundbreaking in terms of representation. it's a basic trans woman's backstory given to a character whose personality we otherwise would learn nothing about, because she exists entirely in a simplistic restaurant tycoon game. she is a blank canvas, but provides a basic skeleton for what a respectable portrayal of trans women looks like in any piece of fictional media.

of course i would much prefer to see more complex transfem characters in more nuanced projects than this. not just in the background and easy to ignore, but truly fleshed-out people we get to know and love. transfem characters don't have to be perfect, and the media itself doesn't have to be good to have decent transfem representation.

but most critically acclaimed queer media either has no transfem representation, or really really shitty transfem representation. and it stings just a little, knowing that the bare minimum effort put into a character like liezel feels like a breath of fresh air in the midst of it all

stenographer: well her bio says she/her...

me: better play it safe anyway [writes "it"]

the ghost of marie curie: [appears out of thin air] ivy... you're the first person to ever correctly gender me in a hundred and eighty-two years. from the bottom of my cold dead heart, thank you.

me: [dies of radiation poisoning]

But why not simply call it socialism, rather than adding the ‘Chinese characteristics’? History is important: the desire to express this reality dates back to the Zunyi Conference of January 1935. Held at the early stages of the Long March, the expanded conference of the Politburo finally brought to a head simmering tensions between Mao’s circle and the Moscow-appointed leadership’s effort to impose the model of the Russian Revolution on China. In light of recent military disasters resulting in the need to evacuate the Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet, the former were removed by popular vote and replaced with Mao and other comrades. At last, they were able to enact a revolutionary approach that was sensitive to the specific conditions in China. Not long after this crucial event, Mao began to speak of China’s ‘own laws of development’ and ‘its own national characteristics’. In fact, there is ‘no such thing as abstract Marxism, but only concrete Marxism [juti de makesizhuyi]’, by which Mao meant Marxism that is ‘applied to the concrete struggle in the concrete conditions [juti huanjing] prevailing in China, and not Marxism abstractly used’. Mao urged that the whole Party needed to address the question of ‘the sinification of Marxism [Makesizhuyi zhongguohua]—that is to say, making certain that in all its manifestations it is imbued with Chinese characteristics [Zhongguo de texing], using it according to Chinese peculiarities [Zhongguo de tedian]’ (Mao 1938a, 658–659; 1938b, 538–539; see also 1944, 191–192; 1959, 109). Or, as Mao put it somewhat more poetically a few years later: ‘The “target” is the Chinese revolution, the “arrow” is Marxism-Leninism’ (Mao 1941a, 801; 1941b, 22).

This emphasis on Chinese conditions runs all the way from the strategy of ‘using the countryside to surround the cities [nongcun baowei chengshi]’ to the socialist market economy of the Reform and Opening-Up. Alongside these historical realities are specific philosophical developments in light of dialectical materialism, with which I engage in more detail in Chapter 3. But there is an important consequence of this emphasis on China’s specific conditions for the development of socialism. In the same way that the development of a ‘China Model’ for a proletarian revolution and the subsequent construction of socialism is not dependent on foreign templates or models, so also does China not seek to impose its approach on others. I will have more to say on this question in later chapters, but the fundamental approach of the ‘China Model [Zhongguo moshi]’ is that China will lead by example and urge others to develop approaches suitable to their own conditions (Xu 2010). But is it really socialism? Stress too much the specific characteristics and one risks losing touch with the core Marxist principles and methods. Thus, it always needs to be remembered that socialism with Chinese characteristics ‘is socialism, and not some other -ism’ (Xi 2013a, 22; 2019b, 1).

This is real footage of what happens when I try to sit quietly with my thoughts. I had a lot of fun designing this monster; there's a very strong Silent Hill inspiration in its design.

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