#in a general thing about the trans waa

[gumdefense]

You ever get sad over how few transfem headcanons there are. I love trans Phoenix trans Apollo trans Edgeworth but where’s trans Franziska. Where’s trans Maya. Where is trans Athena

#ace attorney #trans attorney #general my post tag #Athena is genuinely like. the transest character in the games for me #every day I’m confused at how little trans Athena stuff there is #99% of trans Athena stuff I see is like #included in a group #in a general thing about the trans waa #not complaining about any of those I love them to bits but like I see trans phoenix specific and trans apollo specific stuff.. #not as often as there should be #but definitely more often than trans Athena specific stuff #I don’t get it #well I think we know partly why. but still

[semper-legens]

134. The Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman

Owned?: Yes Page count: Unknown, not numbered My summary: Barbie is not having a good time. Her boyfriend Ken was cheating on her, she’s broke, and she’s stopped dreaming. But just because a person won’t dream, it doesn’t mean her dreams are gone. And when her dreams start bleeding into reality, will Barbie be sucked into the nightmare? My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

Halfway through! This volume’s a personal favourite of mine - I tend to like the narratives that focus on the humans of this world and their problems, especially in these longer arcs. In this one, we see Barbie learning her dreams were real and travelling into him, with her neighbours - witchy Thessaly and couple Hazel and Foxglove - coming in to help her, with her friend Wanda protecting her body from harm. It’s about dream-worlds, but specifically one dream-world, Barbie’s, with most of the action taking place within.

First, Barbie. She showed up first in volume three, and was a creepy Stepford wife kind of person, with little individual personality. Here, this is shown to be the result of her unhappy relationship with Ken, and she’s a lot more fleshed out. She’s a compelling character, struggling to find her place within her apocalyptic dream-world, contrasting the fantastic adventures she had there when she waas younger with the dangerous reality. It’s very much like Prince Caspian, except if Trumpkin got eaten by eldritch abominations. I like the balance in her character between scepticism and buying into the reality of what she sees and experiences.

Let’s talk about Wanda for a second. Wanda is Barbie’s friend. She’s snarky, brash, protective, and generally wonderful. She’s also a trans woman, and a fairly nuanced example of a trans woman for the late 80s/early 90s. She’s on hormones and has had electrolysis, but she doesn’t want surgery because she’s scared of it. The writing falls into a few pitfalls early on - she gives Barbie her birth name offhand, though granted they are good friends and it was semi-relevant to the conversation, and she has a very on-the-nose dream about her fears around transitioning that feels painfully real, but I wish they hadn’t shown her with a ‘masculine’ form. My major issue with how Wanda is portrayed comes later, as she is barred from going into Barbie’s dream because the moon allegedly does not see her as a woman, and dies because of it. It feels very bury-your-trans in a series that has already introduced a serial killer preying on trans women, and implies that trans women’s gender identities are not validated by higher powers. Granted, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the people saying that are both antagonists and unlikeable, while Wanda is written to be very likeable, and when we see her with Death at the end she’s shown to be validated as a woman by Death, but still. She’s a pretty good portrayal of a trans woman for the 80s/90s, but I wish she had lived, and I wish her gender was never questioned.

Barbie’s dream itself...I describe it as being Narnia-esque, because it is, almost self-conciously. Words and ideas are thrown out without ever being explained, giving the reader a sense of a larger world that they are just looking into. It’s mostly seen through Barbie’s eyes, and her slow recollections of what all this is and what it means, which doesn’t necessarily help the reader as Barbie has more context than we do. Not that that’s a bad thing - we learn what we need to know, the rest left implied.

This framing also gives us a look at Dream through mortal eyes. He’s all-powerful in Barbie’s dreamworld, and is also not particularly nice. He sees nothing wrong with leaving Hazel, Foxglove, and Thessaly for dead in the dream because they trespassed there, and only grants Barbie a boon out of obligation rather than helping her for its own sake. He unmakes a world so casually. He’s terrifying, and it’s an interesting outsider perspective on him.

Next up, join me tomorrow for volume six, and another walk through history and mythology.

#The Sandman #Neil Gaiman #bookblr #book blog #book blogging #4