More on the whole Aerannis thing
If you’re not sick of it.
Yesterday I made an angry post after learning that what had sounded like a promising game with a trans girl protagonist was apparently a mess of anti-feminist reactionary politics. I quoted the review in full; it got spread around some parts of trans woman tumblr as we warned each other about the game, and later on found its way onto the dashes of boring edgelord men. Following that, it reached the developer himself, who was sarcastically derisive - I responded in kind.
So it’s kind of grown a bit out of control.
For example, there’s a 15-year-old trans girl in my notes, with the protag as her url and icon, defending the game :(
And like. i really do not want to be going up to other trans women and saying ‘that thing you like is bad. you’re a bad person for liking it’? Like, the edgelord men I don’t give a shit about, but if trans women have found something comforting in this miserable world, I’m glad. I just hope she doesn’t get hurt too badly by the crowd around it.
But I still think making what sounds like it amounts to a reactionary game about the evils of feminism in this context, and co-opting trans liberation in order to do so - which sounds like is the result, even if it was intended as a banal point about ~extremism~ and black-and-white thinking - is pretty gross, and I don’t think I’m willing to let it go just bc a few trans women found some value in it.
I’m kind of unhappy this has turned into a dispute between me and fans of the game (including the dev), though in retrospect I should have done more to hide it from search if I wanted to prevent that happening.
I’m disappointed the dev chose to get involved, actually. I generally think it is a very bad idea for authors to dispute the reception of their work.
But like to be honest I can’t really argue this further without playing the game myself so i can comment in detail. Which I’m probably going to do.
I’ll talk a bit more about what I’ve picked up from the reviews first. I do not expect, if I play the game, I will differ all that much from the detailed review quoted in the original post; at the same time, I can’t really argue with fans about the content of the game based on a second-hand source.
The other reviews on the Steam page are mostly banal gameplay reviews which do not engage with the politics; where they do, they seem to mention in passing details that sound pretty damning on their own.
For example here’s a positive review’s description of the premise:
The story takes place in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv where men have been eliminated, a revolution somehow forcing all men to undergo hormone replacement therapy, and relegating them to second class citizenship. "Snowflakes" as they're called are reviled by society, treated as little more than potentially violent pretenders only good for reproduction.
The idea of a “post-gender world where feminists have made men an underclass forced to take HRT” can’t really be read as anything more than an traditionally transmisogynist scare fantasy over ~emasculation~ and if the game is supposed to be a dystopian challenge to TWE|F politics, the idea that HRT would be made mandatory rather than shameful is pretty silly. not to mention that idea of men as a reproductive underclass is wildly inconsistent with all men taking HRT, since estrogen/anti-androgen HRT frequently (though not always) has a sterilising effect.
Combing the reviews for discussion of the trans politics, there is one review by a trans woman that considers the protagonist a positive representation of trans women:
Ceyda Farhi is to trans representation what Samus Aran was to female representation before 2010. She's a capable badass who I would honestly love to be if not for the whole assassin thing. More than that, she's tired and angry from a world that either hates her or ignores her, and is on the verge of losing her mind confronting something larger than she can imagine. And yet she persists, she keeps going, just because she wants to see what's next.
I love Aerannis because it finally gave me a character I can relate to on a personal level, and didn't just give me a trans character, it captured the feeling that comes with it, from the discrimination to the dysphoria. It let me see myself in a game, on a fundamental level. If you're trans, especially trans female, get this game. You'll have a character that you can, if not look up to, at least project a bit of yourself on.
(Samus Aran was at one point said to be a trans woman in game-external lore. 2010 is the year of the release of the infamous Metroid: Other M.)
I am dying for good trans woman characters; that’s why I was interested in this game. And it sounds like there is more to her character than ‘badass’; the feelings described here are quite relatable (ironically in this case prompted by the actions of the creator of this character!) But this does not really engage with the broader context, because if you’re going to make a game about the nasty relationship between cis feminism and trans women, you have to do so very carefully.
Like for example if the review quoted in the original post was accurate, this game does not take aim at the ideological contortions used by TWE|Fs to pretend that persecuting trans women will in any way bring forward the end of patriarchy, but casual jokes and valid criticisms from entirely mainstream liberal feminism such as ‘manspreading’ and ‘mansplaining’. The review argued that the game attempts to present entirely reasonable principles, such as listening to oppressed classes of people talk about their oppression, or in terms less likely to be dismissed as ‘sjw talk’ or whatever, listening to people about their own experiences, as containing the seeds of violent suppression.
It’s entirely true that just about any radical concept or system can and will be coopted to enable abuse. But at the same time, in the context where there is a widespread reactionary movement trying very hard to argue that present feminist movements are some terrible threat to men and organising (in a decentralised fashion) enormous mass harassment campaigns against arbitrary women who’ve dared to have any sort of prominence in previously male-dominated hobby spheres and fandoms (e.g. videogames, science fiction fandom), it’s at best extremely irresponsible and ignorant of how the dialogue is actually taking place.
There is a huge difference between looking at how feminism mobilises other oppressions to advance the situations of white, cis women at the expense of other classes of women, or a game trying to examine how abuse takes place in activist communities, than a narrative about a feminist conspiracy to oppress men with a side-order of shallow engagement with the politics of TWE|Fs.
To be clear, I’m not against unlikely premises or dystopian fiction. Porpentine’s work, for example, engages with transmisogyny and abuse enacted by women, including other trans women, through compelling metaphors that are shaped by experiences of abuse; it has a lot to say and does so with subtlety and complexity. Most of porp’s stories take place in dystopias. Through all the beautiful fucked up imagery, porp’s work has an enormous amount to say about being a neurodivergent trans woman. So yes, it would be possible to talk about transmisogyny by way of a dystopian setting.
Likewise, the idea of trying to imagine a world not shaped by the current constructs of gender is something challenging and important, because that’s ultimately - even if in our lifetimes it’s only a dream - what we’re trying to achieve (as well as lessening the suffering of oppressed people in our current society). And in trying to imagine how that could fail, the idea that trans women would still be considered a threat even after a revolution in which women seize control is depressingly entirely plausible. It’s not the premise of the game that I’m skeptical of - it’s the execution, as it’s been described to me.
Aerannis is only £1 on Steam, so it won’t cost me very much to get a copy and see exactly what it does, though it will be a pretty painful experience I expect. And there’s a good chance I will be just as scathing as the original review that kicked off this pair of posts.
(And regardless of what’s in the game, I still think the dev’s an arsehole.)
