What’s it like voicing May Marigold?
What’s it like voicing May Marigold?
It’s a blast. I love her energy. I love the intensity that she has that simmers beneath every line. I love how she does her best to be friendly to new people but still keeps them at a distance, which shows she’s healing but not healed. I love how connected she is to the other Happy Huntresses and how much she cares about people. I love her fiery passion that explodes when she’s bottled it up for too long.
I love how unapologetically trans she is and how it’s part of her story but not the ONLY part of her story.
May is such a wonderful character, and I love her.
What’s it like voicing RWBY’s first openly trans character?
I was so excited to bring this character to life, I was waiting patiently for V8 so we could let May announce her being a trans woman herself, I hoped everyone would be as happy and excited as I was.
But then fan theories of “who could be trans” exploded (a lot of them initially well meaning at first) and spread a massive amount of miscommunication, then the decision to put the truth out there early was made, and thus began a tightrope walk of “this is still exciting” while my happiness for everything dangled over a bit of lava.
Lots of people, both inside the company/industry and from the fandom, made something that started as a dream into a nightmare.
Hate threads on Twitter. long transphobic videos on YouTube, “it should have been this character instead” or “your character is bad rep, we should have had (INSERT SHIP HERE) as queer rep instead” messages on Tumblr, people claiming “May’s coming out was so CONFUSING I had no idea what she even said”, and some people just straight up ignoring her all together because “she’s useless and serves no purpose” … this was just some of the publicly viewable stuff I had to deal with.
I’m not even going to go into the things I had to deal with that you all didn’t see happening because it wasn’t on social media and was behind closed doors.
What was supposed to be something wonderful turned into me getting harassed, made fun of, threatened, and left me ultimately horribly depressed and my heart and soul crushed.
I hope she made any kind of difference to people. Both outside and inside the industry. I hope her existing makes any kind of change for anyone.
I love May very much, I love playing her, and I’ll be happy to play her forever if given the chance!
But every other aspect of it was like walking on broken glass and having to keep smiling through it all.
