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transrevolutions · 11 months

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sdv gender and sexuality headcanons based off their appearances and the very little I know about them:

alex: straightest straight boy energy. cisgender man. big jock but not homophobic about it. he/him.

elliot: gnc gay man. probably writes love poetry. he/they.

harvey: cis bisexual man. he/him.

sam: pansexual and very loud and proud. super into queer history. cis man. he/him.

sebastian: panromantic asexual trans boy, he/they.

shane: says he's straight but ~dabbles~. cis man, he/him.

abigail: lesbian, trans girl, she/her.

emily: bisexual, nonbinary demigirl, she/they.

hayley: same boat as shane, says she's straight but ~~is she?? cis girl, she/her.

leah: trans girl, she/they. biromantic with a preference for guys. asexual.

maru: technically cis gnc girl who collects pronouns like hairties. she/they/xe/ze. bisexual with a preference for girls.

penny: cis girl, questioning her sexuality

caroline: lesbian cis woman in an unhappy comphet relationship (pierre doesn't know), she/her

pierre: gay cis man in an unhappy comphet relationship (caroline doesn't know), he/him

clint: heteroromantic asexual cis man, he/him

krobus: aromantic asexual ???? gendered (he's a shadow monster) any/all

leo: gender???? sexuality??? what are those? he/him but really doesn't care.

demetrius: bisexual cis man, he/him

evelyn: straight cis woman, will bake rainbow cookies for pride tho, she/her

george: trans elder, he/him, straight.

gus: pansexual cis guy, he/him

jodi: trans woman, pansexual, she/her (kent doesn't know about the pansexuality)

kent: the picture of internalized homophobia (military guy), bisexual if he'd admit it to himself. he/him.

linus: aromantic asexual, cis guy, he/him

lewis: straight cis guy, you'd expect him to be homophobic but he's not. he/him.

marnie: cis woman, lesbian, she/her

pam: lesbian who grew up in a super conservative household, never has long term relationships because she's scared she'll go to hell. hooked up with marnie once, has avoided her ever since.

robin: bisexual, cis butch woman, she/her.

sandy: lesbian cis woman, she/her

willy: gay, cis man, he/him

rasmodius the wizard: genderfluid aromantic pansexual. caroline will occasionally hook up with her on days she's a girl (pierre doesn't know).

birdie: bisexual femme nonbinary person, likes being called 'wife' tho. she/they.

gil: gay cis man, he/him. marlon's longtime partner.

gunther: bisexual gnc cis man, he/him. drag queen.

marlon: gay trans man, he/him. gil's longtime partner.

morris: has a homoerotic rivalry with pierre. he/him.

mr qi: gender is a mystery. nobody knows mr qi's gender, least of all mr qi. any/all. has a thing with the ghost of the pc's grandpa.

professor snail: gay gnc man, he/him.

#sdv #headcanon #just in time for pride month #stardew valley #stardew valley npcs #pigeon.txt

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jojaqualityheadcanons · 3 years

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SDV's 1.5 update contains content that plays into racist, colonialist, and imperialist myths and beliefs.

Disclaimer: I loved SDV (which is a given, considering I have an SDV sideblog lol?), and I'm not writing this post to get people to boycott the game or stop liking it or whatever. I just want people to understand why this content is harmful, how it might be affecting your biases and beliefs, and think of how they can engage with this media without exacerbating the harm that it does. I'm Filipino, and I don't speak for all POC or all brown people, but I felt deeply hurt and betrayed by the content update. Please keep that in mind before you interact with this post. Explanation under the cut because of 1.5 spoilers (obviously) and because this got long.

(I will block people who clown on this post. Keep your opinions to yourself unless you also have firsthand experience with the issues I describe.)

Background

I was already wary of the 1.5 content update because of how the previews featured ~tropical~ and ~exotic~ stuff, but I decided to give it a shot because maybe I was being too hasty with my judgment.

I wasn't. I made a new save to play with the 1.5 content update, and at first, I was having a great time! The new special orders made gameplay more exciting and varied! I could finally get rid of the nursery from my house without mods! The remixed junimo bundles made me change my usual game strategy. And then, I finally unlocked Ginger Island.

It seemed cool at first, but I had a sinking feeling growing in the pit of my stomach as I kept playing. It got to the point that I started nursing a stomach ache and lots of anger that took me days to shake off. I know SDV has never been a shining example of racial/ethnic diversity and sensitivity (I mean... there's a reason why mods like Diverse Stardew Valley and a bunch of other diversity mods exist lol). But while the lack of diversity in the pre-1.5 content is more of a missed opportunity, the 1.5 content is just... actively harmful and hurtful, imo. Here's a breakdown of the issues with the setting and the characters:

The Setting

Ginger Island, along with the Fern Islands in general, is a tropical island that is clearly based on islands in the Pacific. Its features include fertile soil and an abundance of natural, foragable resources. And for some unknown reason, it has no native human population.

Many islands in the world are uninhabited by humans, and there's always a good reason why. The island's environment may be too hostile, it could be too small to sustain human life, it could be sacred or otherwise culturally unacceptable to live there, or some disaster may have occurred to wipe out the local population or cause them to flee. Some uninhabited islands are nature reserves or privately owned. The point is that if an island is habitable, people are bound to call it home.

Writing Ginger Island as an uninhabited "tropical paradise" feels like a copout. It's as if the game is saying, "don't worry, you're not colonizing this land because no one really lives here! You're not stealing this land or anything because it's up for grabs and is just waiting for the right person to come along to develop it and turn it into a resort for other people who don't live here!" But that claim rings hollow when there are so many signs of civilization there, such as literal computers and ancient structures. And the canon reason for the existence of these things is that dwarves, non-human creatures, lived there once. I just think it's ridiculous and harmful that the game completely ignores and erases the existence of the people who lived and still live in the places that Ginger Island is based on and goes even further to use non-human creatures as stand-ins. I don’t think I have to explain why this isn’t good, considering that people of color have been compared to animals and treated like animals to dehumanize us and justify our oppression for ages.

To really hammer in my point about whitewashing and erasure, all the human labor on the island is done by a flock of parrots that you pay with golden walnuts (i. e., resources that you get for free from the island they live on). There's even an anthropomorphized bird who's a shopkeep! I get that creating a whole cast of human NPCs to fill a town would have been way too much work for a content update, but CA didn't need to use a bunch of animals as stand-ins for non-white human characters. There’s a troubling trend of creators prioritizing animal characters over characters of color, and CA plays right into it. He seriously chose to create more anthro characters instead of adding characters of color to the game in a setting that in real life has populations that are primarily made up of brown people. The game includes brown people's land and cultures, but it draws the line at brown people themselves.

The erasure of brown people and the portrayal of our lands as wild and untamed have been used to sanitize the narrative of colonialism for centuries. Pretending that our lands were wild tropical paradises that were ripe for the taking is pretending that colonizing forces didn't use violent, dehumanizing means to subjugate or wipe out countless peoples and cultures in order to make these lands available. Ginger Island's erasure of brown people just perpetuates this colonialist myth, and the context in which it does so disgusts me: the farmer, who already runs a successful farm that was inherited from their grandfather, goes off to a tropical island they have no personal connection to and uses its natural resources to expand their business further. They also open up a resort on the island for the enjoyment of other privileged people from their homeland, and going there is treated as a luxury. This is a classic colonizer narrative, and I cannot believe the game forces players to colonize an island in order to win.

The Characters

I'm honestly amazed that the amount of feedback about the lack of diversity in SDV didn't prompt CA to create characters of color. I'm amazed that he chose the setting he did and still didn't bother to create any characters of color. The fact that all three of the new human characters who live on this tropical island are white makes me go a little apeshit, to be honest! I hate all three of them for a variety of reasons, so I'll go over them one by one:

Birdie

My reasons for not liking Birdie are primarily related to misogyny (lady spent literal decades in isolation on this island moping over her dead husband?) and ageism (if you tell her to live her own life, she tells you that she's too old to???). Sooo they're not really related to the rest of my discussion here, and I won't get into them further. Moving on!

Professor Snail

White historians, archaeologists, and paleontologists have been stealing and plundering artifacts, relics, and fossils from colonized lands for centuries. These white scientists would send their “discoveries” back to their homelands with little regard for the people they stole from. I’ll acknowledge that Professor Snail doesn’t bring the bones and fossils off the island, so his character isn’t as awful as it could be, but he still canonically has this line:

I really just don’t understand why it was necessary to make this character white when making him a character of color could have easily prevented the uncomfortable real-world implications of a white man coming to a foreign land to plunder fossils without asking anybody for permission. If he he’d been created as someone who traced his ancestry to Ginger Island and wanted to study the island’s biological history, his character could have been so sympathetic and even admirable to me! But his character as it is just makes me think of this meme:

Here are some links for further reading about colonialism in paleontology and other social sciences: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Leo

I had a hard time figuring out how to write about this character because the way CA wrote him is arguably one of the most racist parts of SDV. So many aspects of his character left me speechless and appalled because I cannot believe people are still writing shit like this in the 2020s.

I’ll start off with his storyline: this white child gets stranded on an island and is raised by animals. When the farmer meets him, he speaks in broken English to show how “wild” he is:

As the farmer continues to interact with him, he begins to speak more “proper” English:

Wow... he’s becoming more “civilized” because of the farmer’s influence!

As his story progresses, he reveals that he’s lonely because he doesn’t fit in among the other birds. Eventually, he leaves behind his non-human family and assimilates into a primarily white, Western-coded society because that’s supposedly where he belongs.

This whole storyline is made possible by the problems with the setting that I mentioned earlier. Leo wouldn’t feel so lonely and out of place if there were people on the island. He wouldn’t be depicted as wild and animal-like if he had an adoptive family made up of humans instead of parrots. But because CA chose not to have native human characters on this island, Leo can only be around other people if he leaves his home and family behind. As a result, Leo’s story has very uncomfortable parallels with how colonizers have historically separated indigenous children from their families and cultures and forced them to assimilate into the dominant colonizer culture because they considered indigenous cultures to be savage and barbaric (1) (2).

Leo’s whole narrative unintentionally implies that a good life in a good community can only be had in civilized white Western societies. I’m honestly having trouble with further explaining why Leo’s whole character makes me feel so gross, so just read up on the White Man’s Burden, The Jungle Book and other works by Rudyard Kipling (1) (2) (3) (4) (5, PDF download link), and even Tarzan (1) (2).

Leo’s character is also used to further whitewash non-white cultures:

Poi is a Polynesian dish. Mango sticky rice, which is also a recipe that Leo teaches you in-game, is a Thai dish. In the letter, Leo says that the dish is from his home and enjoyed by his non-human family. Considering that he probably learned these recipes on Ginger Island, and that the only “people” who could have taught him this recipe are literal animals, including these recipes in the game in this way just reinforces the equation of brown people to animals. I’m not Polynesian or Thai, but I know that if CA had included a Filipino recipe in the game and not only had it taught to players by a white character, but also passed off as something from the white character’s culture, I’d be angry. I’ll repeat myself: The game features brown people's food and cultures, but it draws the line at brown people themselves.

I don’t think there’s any way to tweak or edit Leo’s character to fix the issues I described. No matter how we change things, he’s still an orphan raised by animals coded as indigenous people, and he assimilates into the dominant white Western culture. The only way to address these issues is to completely redo his character and even the setting of Ginger Island. Here are some options that I’ve thought of:

Leo is related to someone in the Valley and stays with them for part of the year.

Leo lives with his human family and community on Ginger Island.

Leo’s parents are specifically from Stardew Valley/Pelican Town and he wants to visit in order to reconnect with his heritage.

This list isn’t comprehensive, but it does show that there are so many alternatives to having yet another Mowgli story in Stardew Valley.

Conclusion

I don’t think that CA had bad intentions when he made this content, but the fact is that he did create this content. I’m not calling him a bad person. However, he does have a lot of racist, imperialist, and colonialist biases that he has yet to unlearn. Considering the setting and subject matter of the new 1.5 content, he really should have hired some sensitivity readers to avoid creating harmful content. The man’s sold over ten million copies of his game, and he certainly has the resources to put together a sensitivity team.

I can’t look at Stardew Valley the same way I did before 1.5, but I’m not going to condemn the game as a whole. I might play the game again someday, but I absolutely won’t be going back to Ginger Island. If you’ve enjoyed the Ginger Island content, then good for you! Please just keep all that I’ve written here in mind and accept that that content hurts some people like me.

If you’re a content creator, I urge you to get sensitivity readers if you’re featuring cultures that you’re not a part of to avoid making the same mistakes that I’ve discussed here. Creating from a place of understanding and respect can only make your work better and more accessible to a wider audience, especially to the people whose culture you’re borrowing.

#stardew valley #sdv #sdv leo #sdv birdie #sdv professor snail #racism cw #imperialism #colonialism #blabbering #ids for images are in alt text btw!

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