Hex Is Hare

is it pathetic for a captor to need her captive like she needs oxygen? Is it pathetic that I need it to love me more than it has ever loved anyone? I need to be everything to it. I need to be its whole life. I need it to forget everything else, forget who it was without me, forget everyone else. I need to be its one and only.

You have no idea how many RPGs I pick up where I end up thinking, “Man, you came up with a really weird way to do a less interesting dungeon crawl.” Worse, I’m not even sure the designer is AWARE they made a dungeon crawl game.

They view transness (the actual reality which makes up a person) as a foreign agent which infects children (a nonexistent phantasm) and hate the transness while coveting the nonexistent child. The more trans their child becomes, the more of their child they hate. They do not really view the child as a little girl. They view the little girl as something that has been destroyed and replaced with something they don't love. In a lot of cases, they probably never even loved the "girl" child that they suddenly have beautiful, perfect, feminine memories of. They probably constantly felt this encroaching threat (reality) stopping them from liking their child unconditionally. The ad hoc explanations transphobes give for their feelings should never be taken for granted as their actual motivation.

Another thing thats relevant to cases like Irreversible Damage is that anti-trans texts tend to present two forms of transmasculine person. The "groomed victim" and the "recruiter." The recruiter is hated and considered to be ontologically evil and trans and manipulative and does not get any of the grace of the hypothetical victim. It's the same thing as old panics around gay men. There's an innocent (nonexistent) formerly straight boy and an evil Queer Guy who is in some way different. They're often both children, but the recruiter is adultified. We might expect that they would cast trans women as the recruiters if they really view trans men as corrupted girls who are all actually innocent, but its usually another transmasculine person who is the Contagious Trans Freak. This makes sense because trans communities tend to be pretty segregated along assigned sex, and trans girls don't have much social influence to exert over anyone, so most parents don't see a transfem educating their transmasc kid about transness. Plus, it gives them more outlet to communicate how they hate their child without admitting they hate their child. Their child is just corrupted by a suspiciously Their Child shaped force. I think most transphobic (and queerphobic) rhetoric functions this way. There is a theoretical cis child which eventually reaches a point of no return where they are fully a nefarious trans recruiter.

BANG!! POW! Thecatamites is joining me on my interview series! Got any questions for this legendary developer? Ask them in the replies below.