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chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

I think there’s room for our version having Aech as trans, but yeah the original text doesn’t have that. Aech pretty clearly explains that creating a straight white male persona is a way to avoid racism and sexism from the world at large and homophobia from people like her mother. Wade continues to use male pronouns in the game because Cline made the ridiculously offensive choice of “Well her avatar is still a dude so...”

So it’s a matter of whether we follow the original character and improve on it or if we reinterpret Aech as trans.

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Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



chitoryu12 posted:

I think there’s room for our version having Aech as trans, but yeah the original text doesn’t have that. Aech pretty clearly explains that creating a straight white male persona is a way to avoid racism and sexism from the world at large and homophobia from people like her mother. Wade continues to use male pronouns in the game because Cline made the ridiculously offensive choice of “Well her avatar is still a dude so...”

So it’s a matter of whether we follow the original character and improve on it or if we reinterpret Aech as trans.

To be honest, Cline has pretty much given us blank slates when it comes to characterization.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Also regardless of how Aech actually identifies, I think their avatar should be the absolute prettiest dude possible. Either from a trans man creating an idealized self or a black lesbian going “If I’m faking this, I’m doing this bullshit so right people will cry.”

Spark That Bled
Jan 29, 2010

Hungry for responsibility. Horny for teamwork.

And ready to
BUST A NUT
up in this job!

Skills include:
EIGHT-FOOT VERTICAL LEAP
There's also the question of Art3mis, too. I'm pondering her as trans because that would be more plausible for why she doesn't want Wade to take their relationship further, because of some bad experiences in the past. Though it would probably ask the question of how much more progressive trans issues are here, or how Wade might feel about it.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Whatever we pick, I think we should have Wade not care by the time he finds out the truth of Art3mis or Aech. The book picked a rather benign flaw for Art3mis to be ashamed of and kept her otherwise gorgeous, so Wade had no real potential to reject her appearance and didn’t really get to “love her for herself”. And having Wade get mad at Aech for not being a white dude (even if it was only temporary) is just bad.

The_White_Crane
May 10, 2008
I... actually quite like the idea of making Artemis trans, then having Wade get together with her anyway. Just because I really like the idea of having a major queer character where it's not an aspect of them that gets really harped on about for the whole book. The only problem is that doing that means we should probably make Aech's avatar not genderflipped, which means we need Wade to have some other reaction when they meet... On the other hand, actually, if we make Aech simply have a white avatar and a black body, we can then have Wade simply not react at all to this, which avoids the whole scene where he comes off as a weirdly betrayed rear end in a top hat, which makes him significantly more likeable.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

I don’t see why we can’t have a trans character and a lesbian character. Speaking as someone with that kind of friend group, queer people are more common than expected and tend to congregate even if only by accident.

It would also be an interesting flip, with Wade being the only white dude in his whole friend group. That’s what my office is like.

iospace
Jan 19, 2038


chitoryu12 posted:

I don’t see why we can’t have a trans character and a lesbian character. Speaking as someone with that kind of friend group, queer people are more common than expected and tend to congregate even if only by accident.

Case in point, these forums.

BravestOfTheLamps
Oct 12, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Lipstick Apathy
The problem with this discussion is, again, that it only concerns plot content. How will the theme of queerness be handled in form?

DC Murderverse posted:

everyone knows the beginning of that song and it would be really funny to start a chapter with George Michael's cheerful voice saying

quote:

"Jitterbug!"

Wade's eyes immediately shot open. a quick series of notes that had become all too familiar elicited a pavlovian response of jumping out of bed before he heard-

"Jitterbug!"

again. Wade had realized that he had been isolated from humanity more than he ever was in the Stacks since moving to his hideout in Columbus, and often getting out of bed was the hardest part of the day. So he took his least favorite song and set it to play through every speaker in his apartment every morning at exactly 9:42 AM as encouragement.

"You put the boom-boom into m-"

Not today, Andrew Ridgely, Wade thought. There was no room in his heart for boom-boom, not while he was feeling so alone.

much better than

quote:

My computer woke me up just before sundown, and I began my daily ritual.

“I’m up!” I shouted at the darkness. In the weeks since Art3mis had dumped me, I’d had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. So I’d disabled my alarm’s snooze feature and instructed the computer to blast “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham! I loathed that song with every fiber of my being, and getting up was the only way to silence it. It wasn’t the most pleasant way to start my day, but it got me moving.

Cline's excerpt, while not good, is better than your "improved" sample.

I might point out some things, like how your sample is clearly written with the short-term in mind. It's too self-conscious about being funny, too immediate and front-loaded. Stuff like this reads like rejected entries from the Bulwer-Lytton contest:

quote:

a quick series of notes that had become all too familiar elicited a pavlovian response of jumping out of bed before he heard-

"Jitterbug!"

quote:

There was no room in his heart for boom-boom, not while he was feeling so alone.

The shift to third-person is also undermined by the dip into internal narration. The strength of a third-person viewpoint is viewing characters from the "outside," so why immediately abandon that? This brand of limited, subjective third-person viewpoint is horrendously overused in modern genre fiction, so it only serves to make the writing more generic.

BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Apr 6, 2018

DC Murderverse
Nov 10, 2016

"Tell that to Zod's snapped neck!"

Yeah I’m not a writer by any stretch, I just thought that the naming of the song without actually capturing it was another example of an empty reference and that an opening as familiar as that bass voice saying “jitterbug” could elicit more of a response than just “yes that is a song I know”

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

chitoryu12 posted:

I don’t see why we can’t have a trans character and a lesbian character. Speaking as someone with that kind of friend group, queer people are more common than expected and tend to congregate even if only by accident.

It would also be an interesting flip, with Wade being the only white dude in his whole friend group. That’s what my office is like.

So, you are white privileged cishet scum then?

Renaissance Spam
Jun 5, 2010

Can it wait a for a bit? I'm in the middle of some *gyrations*


So on the subject of Aech, does she have to be white in the OASIS? I absolutely understand the thought process but so much of our issues stem from the literal whitewashing of her character; maybe as part of her rejection of her mother is a statement of "I will not hide my history, unlike you" while being blinded to her own subsumation of identity to fit in?

I have been told I'm over thinking things but I thought I'd run this up the flag pole just for feedback.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Renaissance Spam posted:

So on the subject of Aech, does she have to be white in the OASIS? I absolutely understand the thought process but so much of our issues stem from the literal whitewashing of her character; maybe as part of her rejection of her mother is a statement of "I will not hide my history, unlike you" while being blinded to her own subsumation of identity to fit in?

I have been told I'm over thinking things but I thought I'd run this up the flag pole just for feedback.

On its surface, Cline had a good idea. A woman and minority in two different categories uses the anonymity of the Internet to avoid bigotry. That's not exactly unrealistic or something that should go uncommented on. The problem is that Cline massively mishandled it, first by having Wade express anger at the thought of his best friend not being a straight white man and then by having Aech continue to use her false avatar while Wade insists on using male pronouns despite knowing Aech's true identity. A much smoother way to handle it would be having Wade not give a poo poo about his best friend's identity, and then Aech switching her avatar to resemble herself for the final battle so she can finally be confident in her own identity.

Also, I've finished the first draft of the plot outline. It's a good deal longer than the original 39 chapter book, so tell me what you think. We've now got the first draft of every part of the preliminary work, so all that's left to do before we start writing is hash out the details and come to a consensus on how the book in general will feel.

I definitely want some feedback on my initial decision for Og. He's the only character that I'm explicitly excising by having him dead before the events of the book. I found him too much of a deus ex machina Big Good in the original story, and I simply couldn't think of a good idea for incorporating him in our rewrite. If you can think of a good idea, I'd love to hear it.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Also if we rewrite Aech to actually be trans instead of a black lesbian, I vote that his avatar look like Andy Biersack for maximum androgynous prettiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEoWA9Vz3A

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004


Out here, everything hurts.




chitoryu12 posted:

* Aech is afraid to be who she really is because she could face bigotry on several levels, so she crafts the least offensive and most attractive fictional persona possible and sticks to it even with her closest friends. In the final battle, she sheds her disguise and reveals herself to the world at large, accepting her own identity and ready to face whatever challenges it may cause.


I like this, especially if someone gives her a hint of poo poo and she just smokes them offhandeldy as a demonstration that the skills haven't changed, just the mask.

DJPON3Vinyl
Apr 22, 2015
On the topic of giant robots, it seems like it'd be only fitting for the sixers to immediately just google which of the options looks the most powerful and take that.

It seems even more fitting to have Halliday have programmed the bots to gain stat buffs based on how well you act like the pilots, or embody the spirit of the series it's from. So the sixers end up putting TTGL in space and it just does nothing because you've got some corporate drone running it who doesn't understand that in order to make the robot go, you need to scream a lot.

Renaissance Spam
Jun 5, 2010

Can it wait a for a bit? I'm in the middle of some *gyrations*


chitoryu12 posted:

Also if we rewrite Aech to actually be trans instead of a black lesbian, I vote that his avatar look like Andy Biersack for maximum androgynous prettiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEoWA9Vz3A

Won't deny he's gorgeous, for shits and giggles of gushing over beautiful androgynous men I'm gonna suggest R. Kelly Clipperton of Kelly & The Kellygirls.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTPD7RZFaw8

*Edit

Also with

37. Wade uses his purchased passwords to break into the intranet from his bunk's entertainment console. As he scours the files, he finds that Sorrento has already gotten the Crystal Key but is clueless about how to proceed without the hint from behind the waterfall. He also finds that Sorrento has gathered files on him and his friends with plans for forcibly recruiting them, allowing him to finally see Art3mis in real life. While she isn't as gorgeous as her avatar, Wade finds himself not really caring after getting to know her so well. Finally, he finds internal documentation detailing the execution order for Daito. Sneaking everything onto a flash drive, he makes a narrow escape.

I think with the progression and narrative you're thinking of, yeah, I support Art3mis as Trans. I like the idea of Wade despite any initial nerd cis BS realizing he loves Artie for who she is and how she inspires him and any hangups about gender being effectively meaningless.

Renaissance Spam fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Apr 7, 2018

Paingod556
Nov 8, 2011

Not a problem, sir

DJPON3Vinyl posted:

On the topic of giant robots, it seems like it'd be only fitting for the sixers to immediately just google which of the options looks the most powerful and take that.

It seems even more fitting to have Halliday have programmed the bots to gain stat buffs based on how well you act like the pilots, or embody the spirit of the series it's from. So the sixers end up putting TTGL in space and it just does nothing because you've got some corporate drone running it who doesn't understand that in order to make the robot go, you need to scream a lot.

I was thinking that i-r0x or whoever should get Gurren, thinking it's the soul of TTGL and thus the most powerful. Goons help him fit it out.

First time using it again Wade and Aech, he stumbles and gets chumped on, since canonically it (and Kamina) were the weakest in the series. Prompting some guys who gave him a ride to mention 'we gave him the bad robot on purpose, as a joke'. Then either the same fight, or a different one, dunno which works best, he gets pissed off enough that he becomes a monster to take down. Starting with the Goons laughing at him getting wiped, then being an actual challenge for whichever MC he's fighting.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

Liquid Communism posted:

I like this, especially if someone gives her a hint of poo poo and she just smokes them offhandeldy as a demonstration that the skills haven't changed, just the mask.

I agree.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Renaissance Spam posted:

I think with the progression and narrative you're thinking of, yeah, I support Art3mis as Trans. I like the idea of Wade despite any initial nerd cis BS realizing he loves Artie for who she is and how she inspires him and any hangups about gender being effectively meaningless.

Turns out Wade is a little bit gay after all.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

chitoryu12 posted:

Also if we rewrite Aech to actually be trans instead of a black lesbian, I vote that his avatar look like Andy Biersack for maximum androgynous prettiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEoWA9Vz3A

Never heard the band, but a quick GIS leads me to agree, but I think I would stay with the PoC aspect. Pretty much the whole cast skews pretty drat Wonder Bread.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

So let's take a quick vote.

Should Art3mis or Aech be trans, or stick to the book characterization?

loquacius
Oct 21, 2008

I vote yes on Aech no on Art3mis

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
One thing I was thinking about was motivation. If we want Wade to be egg-hunting as a job and slowly, reluctantly fall in love with the nostalgic nerdery he’s immersed in, then we should give him a compelling reason for diving into the hunt in the first place, and for forming his various relationships with the rest of the gang. Luckily, Cline already laid some of the groundwork for us, and I’ve got a few ideas.

When Wade was a child, his father told him stories of the man he’d been named after. Like him, he’d been born dirt-poor on an Oklahoma mountainside, dehumanised and belittled by the rich white folks who couldn’t be bothered to give him a real place in their world. He told little Wade about the time the original Wade Watts had gone round to a white friend’s house and been served a meal, only to discover he’d been eating out of the dog’s bowl. More often, though, he told him about what Wade Watts had become - a man who stared down the Klan, reintegrated public schools, and had audiences with presidents. They were nice stories, and Wade liked to remember them when things got bad.

Wade grew up in the stacks, the trailer-park labyrinths created after the first of the great economic crashes, along with thousands upon thousands of others who America didn’t have room for any more - or, at least, that was how the party in government put it at the time. The first white face he saw in person was when an IOI security team broke in a neighbour’s door for running an unlicensed haptic rig. He’d been raised by his aunt and uncle. His father had died during a food riot when he was ten, and he never knew his mother, only her photographs - a pretty white girl with dark, empty eyes. His father had told him that she went into the OASIS one day and never came back. His aunt and uncle were kind enough to him, but he wasn’t theirs, only another mouth to feed that they could barely afford, and they all knew it.

Like nearly all of his generation, Wade spent much of his life in the OASIS, when he wasn’t running errands for his family or playing football with the other kids from his neighbourhood. He’d been smart enough and lucky enough to get a scholarship to a good online school, and he applied himself well to his studies, but he never felt like there was much a place for him there - his fellow pupils weren’t terribly inclined to socialise with a kid from the stacks. His only real online friend was Aech, a boy in the same year who’d been the first to walk up and say hi when he transferred in. Aech was a cheerfully unabashed nerd, a disciple of the OASIS’s eccentric creator James Halliday with a sincere love of the ancient pop-culture the massive virtual universe was built on. He called himself a ‘gunter’, a quester for the holy grail Halliday had supposedly hidden somewhere within the OASIS’s depths. Wade didn’t honestly have much interest in all that quasi-mystical rubbish, only in getting the grades he needed to get one of the few decent jobs still going, but Aech’s sheer enthusiasm made him fun to be around.

Then the posters went up.

Stacks were questionably legal and definitely eyesores, which meant that when a company wanted to build over them, they didn’t have much difficulty. Wade’s neighbourhood was up in the hills, and IOI wanted to take advantage of the stunning views of the valley below for a new executive resort. The residents fought the impending demolition as hard as they could, even attracting the endorsement of the OASIS celebrity and social-justice campaigner Art3mis, but Wade knew that it would be only a matter of time until the megacorp got its way. Several of his neighbours had been relocated before, and he’d heard their stories. He knew that there were folks in his stacks who were too old or sick to survive it.

He obsessed over ways to save his neighbourhood, to get revenge on IOI, to stop this hellish system altogether, but kept coming back to one - the Easter egg, the prize left by a madman in a maze of children’s toys that was rumoured to have the power to upend the world. One day, he bottled up his courage placed a few orders on OASIS’s online marketplace, and sent a message to his best friend.

“Hey, Aech. What was all that you were telling me about the Tomb of Horrors?”

Proteus Jones
Feb 28, 2013



loquacius posted:

I vote yes on Aech no on Art3mis

:same:

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
I think I prefer Aech being a cis lesbian because I don’t like the assumption that having masculine hobbies and being into ladies necessarily means you’re trans. Seems a bit... uhh... Iranian. ‘Sides, I legit can’t remember the last time I saw a positively-portrayed butch lesbian in a story who made it to the end without dying unpleasantly.

Art3mis being trans is an interesting idea, but I’m not wedded to it if we wanna skip it.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Do we want to keep the stacks the stacks, or do we want a more traditional shantytown or trailer park sprawl?

I talked to a friend about this project and she suggested inspiration from shipping containers converted into vertical apartments in Europe if we wanted to stick with unusual vertical housing without having people just piling Airstream trailers and cars on top of each other.

loquacius
Oct 21, 2008

Darth Walrus posted:

‘Sides, I legit can’t remember the last time I saw a positively-portrayed butch lesbian in a story who made it to the end without dying unpleasantly.

There was exactly one on Orange Is The New Black

I dunno whether that has an "end" to make it to yet though because I gave up on it partway through season 3

chitoryu12 posted:

Do we want to keep the stacks the stacks, or do we want a more traditional shantytown or trailer park sprawl?

I talked to a friend about this project and she suggested inspiration from shipping containers converted into vertical apartments in Europe if we wanted to stick with unusual vertical housing without having people just piling Airstream trailers and cars on top of each other.

I like that idea a lot more because (a) there's existing precedent for it and (b) shipping containers are fundamentally a thing people have a reason for stacking on top of each other

Spark That Bled
Jan 29, 2010

Hungry for responsibility. Horny for teamwork.

And ready to
BUST A NUT
up in this job!

Skills include:
EIGHT-FOOT VERTICAL LEAP
I vote no on Aech being trans, yes for Art3mis.

I like the shipping containers idea, too. Repurposing those seems to be a growing trend in a lot of the big cities.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Also in the canon bible, I tried to work out some of the discrepancies Cline created and make the world a little less mind-blowingly awful. For one, multiple cities have not been destroyed by nuclear bombs.

The flight from rural to urban areas is already well documented, so it's not unreasonable to assume this trend continuing by 2095 if there's a recession for a long period of time that kills jobs in poor rural towns. Since we're expanding the timeline by 50 years, there's no longer a need for stacks to grow in such a haphazard way by having people pile up ridiculous junk towers over a 20 year period. Modern solutions like shantytowns, trailer parks, and vertical apartments made from converted shipping containers are a lot more understandable and not at risk of toppling over like dominoes.

Because so much of rural America has been left abandoned, the government and major agricultural corporations like Monsanto have tons of land to convert to automated farms. Self-driving trucks and farm equipment means agriculture requires a relative skeleton crew to keep operating, so you can still have cheap government-subsidized food while most of the world is loving around in OASIS.

Renewable energy can also be reasonably assumed to have advanced tremendously 80 years from now, so you've got huge solar farms, wind farms, and hydroelectric dams supplemented by individual solar panels on homes. Cars are mostly electric or hydrogen fuel cells, but people still don't get out as much as they used to because of the relative lack of wealth.

Paingod556
Nov 8, 2011

Not a problem, sir

chitoryu12 posted:

Do we want to keep the stacks the stacks, or do we want a more traditional shantytown or trailer park sprawl?

I talked to a friend about this project and she suggested inspiration from shipping containers converted into vertical apartments in Europe if we wanted to stick with unusual vertical housing without having people just piling Airstream trailers and cars on top of each other.

I'd say they're the failed result of an experiment to make extremely cheap housing using the tens of thousands of repossessed RV's, in order to house all those people swarming into the cities which lacked the space to house them all. Someone figured out how to make cheap frames to hold stacks of them, with rudimentary plumbing, to be built outside city limits on land useless for agriculture. Turns out they were less space efficient compared to proper apartment housing, had terrible insulation (any built in extreme cold or heat proved unlivable) and quickly became the absolute bottom of the barrel for the homeless and destitute.

By the time the story starts, there are still a large number scattered across America, though the government is slowly working on replacing them with high density housing. Wade, having his father die while young, his mother barely scrape by before OD'ing, and now living with his druggy aunt, has only known life in the Stacks. The fact he's one of the tiny, tiny percentage of Americans living in these shanty towns is perfect ammunition for bullying, from the one time he let it slip.


EDIT- Also it lets us retain the reference to Johnny Mnemonic, though maybe it can go. I'm cool with shipping containers instead.

Paingod556 fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Apr 7, 2018

BravestOfTheLamps
Oct 12, 2012

by FactsAreUseless
Lipstick Apathy

chitoryu12 posted:

So let's take a quick vote.

Should Art3mis or Aech be trans, or stick to the book characterization?

Wouldn't it just be easier to write the story instead of crowd-sourcing characterization? Art demands creative vision, not creative consensus. Just decide yourself.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

chitoryu12 posted:

So let's take a quick vote.

Should Art3mis or Aech be trans, or stick to the book characterization?

I'd say just stick with the book characterization; it'd be really easy to gently caress up and a gently caress up would be super distracting from everything else.

killer crane
Dec 30, 2006

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2019

chitoryu12 posted:

So let's take a quick vote.

Should Art3mis or Aech be trans, or stick to the book characterization?

Because of their relationship with Wade, I think Aech still needs a hyper-masculine Avatar; someone he admires, and kind of relates to. It wouldn't be much of a reveal if Aech was a trans man, since Wade can still relate with the desire to be what Aech wants to be.

Aech being a trans woman makes more sense. Her avatar is a hold over from her younger, denial filled days, and maybe her last obstacle to self acceptance. Having Wade accept her, and encourage her to be who she is would be better character development for both of them.

Artemis's reveal should be shocking. An explosion/acid attack/accident when she was young left the side of her face burned. The doctors amputated her hand and she lost sight in one eye. Everyone IRL is horrified by her disfigurement, and she's sure Wade will be too, and he probably would be when the book starts.

E: I don't think Artemis should be trans. I forgot that was part of your question.

killer crane fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Apr 7, 2018

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Because of their relationship with Wade, I think Aech still needs a hyper-masculine Avatar; someone he admires, and kind of relates to. It wouldn't be much of a reveal if Aech was a trans man, since Wade can still relate with the desire to be what Aech wants to be.

Aech being a trans woman makes more sense. Her avatar is a hold over from her younger, denial filled days, and maybe her last obstacle to self acceptance. Having Wade accept her, and encourage her to be who she is would be better character development for both of them.

Artemis's reveal should be shocking. An explosion/acid attack/accident when she was young left the side of her face burned. The doctors amputated her hand and she lost sight in one eye. Everyone IRL is horrified by her disfigurement, and she's sure Wade will be too, and he probably would be when the book starts.

E: I don't think Artemis should be trans. I forgot that was part of your question.

I’m not sure on Aech as a trans woman with a masculine avatar. As someone who knows a ton of trans people (including my brother), the avatar would have been the first thing to change.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Ottermotive Insanity posted:

Because of their relationship with Wade, I think Aech still needs a hyper-masculine Avatar; someone he admires, and kind of relates to. It wouldn't be much of a reveal if Aech was a trans man, since Wade can still relate with the desire to be what Aech wants to be.

Aech being a trans woman makes more sense. Her avatar is a hold over from her younger, denial filled days, and maybe her last obstacle to self acceptance. Having Wade accept her, and encourage her to be who she is would be better character development for both of them.

Artemis's reveal should be shocking. An explosion/acid attack/accident when she was young left the side of her face burned. The doctors amputated her hand and she lost sight in one eye. Everyone IRL is horrified by her disfigurement, and she's sure Wade will be too, and he probably would be when the book starts.

I think the only issue with giving Art3mis a massive, serious disfigurement is that it leans into the book’s whole thing of ‘seemingly-perfect girl turns out to be secretly flawed, putting her within the league of lovable loser who Accepts Her For Who She Is’. That’s a pretty creepy approach to relationships. If we’re going to have a romance, I think that we should make absolutely, positively sure that it isn’t about Wade and Art3mis ending up together because he’s the one dude who’ll settle for her real self.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
I think Art3mis being trans is interesting because it puts her as a contrast to Aech - while one is using OASIS to hide her true self so she can do what she wants and enjoy what she wants without getting a shitload of harassment for it, the other is using it as a way to express her true self and try out an exciting new life as she transitions in the real world. One’s operating out of fear, the other is doing so out of aspiration. If we decide to make Wade black (and I mean, it would give that name a less uncomfortable purpose) with a basic, unmodded avatar that looks pretty much like he does (maybe taken from his school, because he can’t afford a personal account?), then he’d occupy a third role - someone who can’t disguise himself and has to deal with the standard background unpleasantness of the Internet head-on.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

My reason for picking Art3mis being overweight is because it's a flaw that's not a tremendous disfigurement that drives people away, but has serious potential to cause Art3mis to have a negative self-image. I think the way she needs to be portrayed is someone who needs to stop hating her real appearance because she's perfectly lovable regardless of what she thinks of herself, even if she's not a perfect model. Some kind of severe problem like missing limbs or looking like Two-Face would make it about Wade as the one man who will gallantly look past her hideous exterior.

Tunicate
May 15, 2012

chitoryu12 posted:

My reason for picking Art3mis being overweight is because it's a flaw that's not a tremendous disfigurement that drives people away, but has serious potential to cause Art3mis to have a negative self-image. I think the way she needs to be portrayed is someone who needs to stop hating her real appearance because she's perfectly lovable regardless of what she thinks of herself, even if she's not a perfect model. Some kind of severe problem like missing limbs or looking like Two-Face would make it about Wade as the one man who will gallantly look past her hideous exterior.

Consider that people are already suffering from body image insecurities due to photoshopped magazines.


Now assume that the baseline for the Oasis is inhumanly sculpted avatars

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Samizdata
May 14, 2007

chitoryu12 posted:

So let's take a quick vote.

Should Art3mis or Aech be trans, or stick to the book characterization?

I am going to vote sticking with bookAech as canon (although an avvie redesign would be fine), and Art3mis would be fine either way, as she appears body dysmorphic anyway.

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