"Bad Rep" Is Just as Boring

I’ve been a part of a tabletop group running multiple interconnected campaigns based on the themes and mechanics of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for 4 years. Pictured above is the “love bowtie” my character Josefa is currently at the center of. The story takes place at a Catholic orphanage on a small island in the Canary Islands at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Josefa is 19, and returned to the orphanage where she grew up after a few years on the mainland. While Josefa herself aligns with the anarchist factions of the Republicans, I didn’t go into the story planning on her being a part of a complex web of as a symbol of that. Josefa being queer, in the story of our campaign, is rather banal. A good majority of the cast, in every time period we’ve explored, are queer. Whether in Sengoku era Japan or 1908 England, characters fall in and out of love, sleep around, or just exist in a variety of different genders and sexualities without needing to strictly label them. My character Erika Mercury ended up (as a distraction I swear) sleeping with nearly the entire group of villains of all genders, not even including the ones fellow PC Deanna kissed instead. 

It’s not that sex and gender are ignored, far from it.

My Sengoku character, Mitsuyo, was transmasculine and intersex, and his non-conforming identity was an important theme for himself and for his alchemist adoptive mother. But everyone’s story is about their gender. Mitsuyo’s siblings were also adopted, in part, for their gender. The men of the story had to give up their long time relationships with men to marry women, and the women had less social power in every aspect of life. But queer characters, women, and other marginalized groups exist in our stories across every possible role. Erika’s closest mentor and her evil ex-boyfriend were both black men. There are as many queer allies as queer villains, queers with power as queers trapped at the bottom of society. That doesn’t mean that bigotry ceases to exist in the story. Colonial violence, anti-immigrant systems, and union busting drive the conflicts of the Wild West campaign Rhinestone Cowboyz, but that doesn’t stop our most powerful and respected PC from being a disabled Japanese woman. It’s not necessarily historically accurate, but it’s also not historically inaccurate. Throughout these historical periods, people of all races, genders, and identities existed. There are so many individual stories we can never know, and can let our imaginations and speculations run wild about. 

I reject many assumptions that “representation” brings, and want to present how we can imagine much more creative worlds. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to argue the obvious that queer and marginalized characters do not exist to educate or explain queerness to a cis straight white and/or male audience. They exist because marginalized people exist. Even in the pursuit of advocacy, research shows there’s a direct correlation between simply knowing a queer person and increased sympathy with queer people. 

If you’re not as chronically online as myself, you might be unaware of the debate around “good” and “bad” representation. Good representation is stereotyped with the example of Heartstopper, a series about an MLM romance that is aggressively wholesome, desexualized, and safe for cishet viewing. Bad representation is often stereotyped as problematic or downright offensive representations, like old Disney villains who prey on innocent women or men. I think we don’t need more “messy” or more “clean” representation. We need more worlds where all of that exists at once. Queers are good, they’re bad, they’re neutral, they’re antiheroes. All at once in the same space. Worlds where everyone is queer and no one is queer.

My upcoming tabletop roleplaying game called [SPLASH ELLA CINDER], is about two women living in an extreme warmongering dystopia who crash into the woods and need to find and kill each other within a week. Of course, their complicated, unhealthy dynamic turns into something romantic and sexual. It is a story about love and violence and war and being a kinky lesbian, but I’ve cherry picked what baggage of lesbianness comes with it, and also left it up to the players what baggage they bring in themselves. Why be bound by the real world? Imagine a new one. So much of our world is arbitrary rules and nonsense we’ve enforced because it benefits the powerful. Let’s make worlds far beyond those boundaries.