A pretty heavy question: do you think there’s room in this game to tackle trans themes and narratives at all? I know transmisogyny is a different experience in many regards to the experiences a cis woman faces, but a part of me wants to tackle what I know personally in play.
A pretty heavy question: do you think there’s room in this game to tackle trans themes and narratives at all?
A pretty heavy question: do you think there’s room in this game to tackle trans themes and narratives at all?
Good question, I hope to hear what folks think. Cis woman here, have only played it once.
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I don’t have enough experience in this topic to talk about it, but Andrew Gillis is writing a super cool hack of Blades about the experience of Queer people. Which I know is not the same, but I though you may be interested in checking it out:
docs.google.com – Girl by Moonlight Playtest
Lex Permann – The tools in the game are used to explore a fairly large breadth of issues surrounding the patriarchy. There’s nothing that says that excludes exploring trans experiences through the game, and certainly transmisogyny is part of that patriarchal system. Let us know how it goes!
I think it’s a theme I’d want to have right out of the game and explicitly stated, ideally with a mostly or entirely trans group.
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There’s absolutely room. Bluebeard is scouring the countryside like a chauvinistic Diogenes, and the women he picks don’t have a say in the matter, so he could conceivably pick anyone who catches his eye, for whatever reason. How deep you want to get into that “anyone” (and that reason, for that matter) is subject to the individual player group and how they collectively embody the Bride.
Magpie Games Question: does the book explicitly say that it is for trans women, too? I referred to this post in my own thread and one of my friends brought up that distinction. I think it matters.
My main thinking is that a lot of what the mansion can hit at is insecurities over appearance, and dysphoria is a pretty powerful twist on that theme beyond just feeling ugly.
Lex Permann one of the nastiest villains I’ve read in a while is a TERF in April Daniels’ Sovereign novel. Most of what that witch says to the protagonist to abuse and misgender her could fit right into a horror story.
I think a trans hack can be done; I’ve pondered doing something like that at some point, but I think it cuts too close to the bone of my own insecurities. I…I don’t know. There is a lot of issues that come up in BB that are very grounded in a certain kind of female biology. I don’t want to take that away from anything. But…yes, it could be translated. It might end up looking fairly different.
One idea I had was exploring a pre-transition mindset, with the Sisters as the internal representation of the character but that not aligning with the societal gendering of the character. That would be a really powerful, really painful vision and hooooo boy am I not ready to write it 🙂
The mansion provoking a trans Bride about her inability to get pregnant is incredibly in-theme and entirely too painful for me to think about beyond typing this.