Choice of the Deathless (Spoilers)

I wanted to like that post again but I couldn’t. Max Gladstone is a treasure

3 Likes

It’s also a really interesting question. How does gender influence our interpretation of characters? Say, @anon86661845, would you mind if I linked to your post to make a thread about that?

2 Likes

Of course! Here’s a link to the tweet too in case you want it https://twitter.com/maxgladstone/status/887081229031485441

Posting this here instead of in the Gender and Characterization thread because it’s mostly about Deathless and Wakefield’s characterization rather than specificly gender and characterization.

So I’ve been thinking about what @anon86661845 said in this post about the different ways a different-gender-identity Wakefield might have experienced/developed/resulted in their actions and personality, and so this led me to the question: what does this mean for a nonbinary MC, and for their interactions/romance/relationship with Wakefield?

It’s interesting that Wakefield seems, in both princecatling’s and my interpretation, to have kind of a simultaneously real sort of confidence and disaffectedness, and to not (we see this in their confession scene, as well as in a moment during the first dinner) (that is to say, that this aforementioned “coolness” is a result of a facade or socialization, or a defense–be it their real personality/feelings or not).

So if we look at the story from the perspective of a genderfluid/nonbinary Wakefield and a cis MC, that’s what we’ve covered before. But now consider the additional layer of interaction with the toxic masculinity/general desirability of certain traits of agressiveness and detatchedness in the Craft community when the MC is also nonbinary.

Now, what’s interesting here is that the game itself doesn’t give an explicit option for a nonbinary character, but the effect this creates with a nonbinary reading of the MC (accomplished by interpreting the MC as someone who uses she/her and related forms of address or he/him and related forms of address while also not identifying with either binary gender–I particularly relate to this reading because for a long time, I did the former while simultaneously identifying as agender, and though I don’t use those pronouns anymore, I was no less agender then and no more agender now, and both states were equal expressions of that) is that they have sort of made complete peace with their identity and live as if it were unquestionable–this actually very much brings to mind one potential scene you get if you respond to Wakefield’s leading question at the conference with the literal (I’m here to do craft things) truth–Wakefield is amused by your directness and the way you sort of (intentionally or not) missed their point.

Whereas I see the nonbinary Wakefield as someone who is much more aware of those conflicts and such (princecatling’s interpretation of their line upon seeing a skeletonized MC comes to mind). And perhaps this contrast between the nonbinary Wakefield’s relation to gender and the nonbinary MC’s relation to gender can change our interpretation of how Wakefield relates to the MC and the things they say…

But I’ll leave that for someone else to pick at, because I’m tired and not very coherent right now.

(also interesting to consider: Ace Wakefield (esp. with Ace MC))

2 Likes

I’m also very tired and possibly incoherent at the moment and I have my attention split four…ish ways so unfortunately I don’t have anything to really add at the moment to this exactly (I’m at that point where very basic math and remembering what I’m supposed to be doing right now are getting rather difficult)

But I went to one of Max Gladstone’s signings for the release of Ruin of Angels last month and he mentioned wanting to create another game. Now that I think about it, it’s a bit unclear if he meant he wants to add more to the Choice of the Deathless series or make another game unrelated to the Craft Sequence but in the style of Choice of the Deathless. I wonder if in that there will be an nonbinary option?

I was way too shy at the Q&A but I really wanted to ask about trans people in the Craft Sequence universe. One of the main characters, Kai is trans and there are a few other minor trans characters in Full Fathom Five (I’ve heard there’s also a few in Ruin of Angels but I’m not very far into the book yet)

Kai is post-op kinda (if you can call it that??) but did it through Kavekana’s priesthood initiation thing and the other trans characters in Full Fathom Five were also involved in the priesthood, so I want to know what people outside Kavekana would do if they wanted to do anything transition-wise (since it’s said by one of Kai’s higher ups that she could’ve been initiated and then leave the priesthood basically right after if she wanted to) I imagine it probably involves craftwork since what Kai did was involved in theology and stuff (there is an actual word for using God/religion-type magic used in the series but I don’t remember what it is right now). Craftspeople could possibly do it on their own? Since they can bend reality and stay alive without their flesh, changing body things doesn’t sound like it would be that big a deal for them. Or if not, or at least for people who can’t use the craft (or aren’t very skilled in it), I feel like it would probably involve very expensive procedures (much like in real life…)

My main MC is a trans man and I imagined his voice cracking a lot early on in his college days when he was still just starting to learn the craft (among other things, but changing his voice was the first thing he did while also only knowing half of what he was doing so it was the most “glitchy”) Since there’s stuff like demons and I’ve seen two, maybe three, mentions of presumably human women with scales instead of skin, I don’t imagine many people in the Craft-dominated part of the world would really bat an eye at that, but I wonder about non-op trans people or nonbinary people or just about anyone who is gender nonconforming, but mainly gender nonconforming trans people. I don’t remember anyone explicitly nonbinary in the first part of the series (but I still haven’t read Last First Snow yet) and I’m only about a third into Ruin of Angels, so I haven’t met all the characters yet, so I don’t really have much info to go off on there

Since there’s so many scaled women running around in the Craft Sequence, I wonder if it’s some sort of fashion trend

Oh, and R’ok has an appearance in Ruin of Angels and his art exhibit sounds beautiful and it involves a glowy death ball! :smiley:

2 Likes

Oh, wow, it’s so cool that you got to meet Max Gladstone! I really do hope he makes another CoD game, and hopefully there’ll be a nb option.

Regarding the Craft-based transition, I think that’s definitely probably what a lot of Craftspeople would do—because there are probably medical professional Craft users who can do the same thing, but because of what the Craft is, it makes sense that the person themselves (who has the best understanding of what they want) can do transitioning things themselves with the same or greater effectiveness.

And to figure out how this would work, I think we can look at what happens if you choose to use the craft to separate Ashleigh and John Smith: you imagine a situation in which the distance you observe is not the distance in reality, impose that new reality upon the world with the Craft, and let the threads snap back into place, with the result that as the reality you argue and the former reality try to coexist, the two people are thrown apart (because it’s not that they were always far apart, it’s that you’ve convinced reality they were, and now it has to correct itself to match your argument).

So I imagine a similar process would be involved in transitioning—take voice, for example—you could say “there are situations where a voice sounds higher/lower than it actually is, for example [sound related physics I am not qualified to explain]” then assert, with the Craft, the reality that your voice isn’t the pitch it appears, it’s actually a different pitch, and reality would probably try to resolve the conflict by changing the structure of your vocal cords. Which, given what we’ve seen of Craft healing in Two Serpents Rise, is likely to be pretty painful, but that is how a lot of medical transition-related procedures are in real life, requiring rest and recovery time.

And probably an inexperienced Craftsperson might not assert the right things or with the right methodology, and make some mistakes and end up with a different voice than they wanted and have to try again.

I have the ebook of Ruin of Angels, actually, and I’m pretty excited to read it. Can’t wait to see R’ok!

2 Likes

So I was supposed to be doing some homework but instead I drew a little thing (well I copied and pasted some things but I’m busy and don’t have the time to do it all by hand so whatever)

I know Wakefield was wearing a suit during the party but I really needed to draw Wakefield in a cocktail dress

Based off of this

10 Likes