Un.Am.Biguous

"AIIIEEEEE! ... Uh. Sorry. That was inexcusably girly."

"That's... okay."

 

I'd criticized Kaspall last November intending to follow up with how the author's newer project, Spare Keys for Strange Doors, improved in conciseness, impact, nuance, pacing, etc. For one thing, where the older series naively played up female characters' power per standard "our sexism is cooler" dogma, the newer urban fantasy tales keep both (male/female) leads capable yet imperfect and wasn't afraid to turn turnabout into fair play. I got a good hearty chuckle out of the otherwise no-nonsense, hands-on problem solver Marion impulsively shrieking and huddling against her boyfriend when startled awake by a monster in the middle of the night, and Toby reassuring her that yes, it's okay, nobody's rescinding your tough chick card for a moment of girliness in that situation. Like Fry and Leela's sniff check, the exchange subtly underscored the characters' trust in each other.

Because drawings must be deliberately feminized / masculinized with every shade and contour, comics' comparative simplicity makes them apt to hop back and forth across the dividing line of androgyny. Except it's always back. Very slightly back. Spare Keys' "eek a (giant mutant scaly) mouse" moment, for simply having a female character openly acknowledge such incongruity, reminded me that for all women have declared superiority over men in all masculine things they have never surrendered the prerogative to be as girly as they like; conversely men are still mocked and condemned for presuming to encroach upon the protections of femininity while masculinity itself (in men) has been branded toxic.

So are characters introduced as either hermaphrodytic or andronygous all that ambiguous? I'm thinking of four examples in particular.

Questionable Content once introduced a character calling itself a "they" and given it was meant as fan service to its respective cultural fad, made it a plucky young female with a marginally masculine haircut, filled its dialogue bubbles with helpful, energetic, endearing cutesiness and called it a day.

Forward goes one better with an entire future society of theyses where instant cheap plastic surgery allows anyone to alter outward appearance from male to female or whatever on a whim. The protagonist, Lee, sports the standard "tits 'n dick" shemale package and his main internal conflict is being a worthless waste of oxygen doing nothing with his life in a post-scarcity society supplied by robot labor.

El Goonish Shive created its character Tedd as a stock effeminate / beta male / pervert / nerd then gradually redeemed him by rebranding him as "gender fluid" and having him spend some days as female. He did retain nerdiness as a character flaw, thinking too much about abstractions and not giving his girlfriend enough attention.

Vaarsuvius from The Order of the Stick quickly became the butt of jokes about his effeminacy, being both elvish and a wizard. The author later decided to run with it, making his gender officially indistinguishable, even as he confronted his pursuit of magical power as a character flaw.

As for why I'm quite comfortable appending gender to these characters, TOOTS can supply a nice illustration:

 

"It's weird, no matter how many people he kills, the audience still thinks he's lovable."

 

Actually it's not weird at all. In a comic whose stick figures' perfectly round heads already make them look baby-ish, Thog the orc barbarian is further neotenized through speech patterns, and his tusks instead of threatening even look like an infant teething. Faced with something adorable and murderous, the audience fixated on adorableness. Feminine, cute features draw instinctive sympathy. (For another bald-headed reference point, see the good gnome / bad gnome juxtaposition in Baldur's Gate 3.) Back in the '80s when androgyny was portrayed as creepy, such characters would be crossdressing two-meter-tall bruisers with five o'clock shadows. Once it became a badge of moral and social superiority, the image flipped to waifish ingenues to draw audience sympathy. (Right around the time "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" mutated into "we're here, we're queer, bow down and worship us you lowly breeder plebs".) It's hardly accidental that QC's "they" turned out to be shoulder-tall with giant eyes and stubby limbs.

 

You can't portray gender ambiguously if you can only conceive of one gender being right and the other wrong!

 

Vaarsuvius is stoic, formal and focused on practical knowledge and overt power rather than interpersonal manipulation, and faulted as too wrapped up in ideas instead of considerate toward teammates / wife / raven familiar.

(Crystal the assassin might've worked better as a mix of male and female qualities (e.g. vanity/aggression) but the author was never very comfortable with her and made her ultimate downfall the fault of men, twice over.)

If Lee Caldavera had been female, the rest of the world would be blamed for driving her to isolation. Women are not expected to take on the world. When's the last time you've seen a female character accused of cowardice or had her shyness mocked and abused to audience applause instead of cooed over and coddled?

When's the last time you saw a female character condemned for not being ingratiating enough toward others? Even Edith Bunker was set up as an unambitious pushover specifically to prompt the audience to sympathize with her selflessness. When Dr. Cox kept calling the spindly blonde "Barbie" on Scrubs it was specifically to feed his image as a jackass.

 

So, yes, regardless of the authors' official stance, Vaarsuvius is written as male, and Lee is written as male, because writers cannot conceive character flaws or general wrongness as anything but a man's faults. We're a long way away from seeing women embarrassed by their own girliness.