CotD has been out for a long time now but I’m still gonna put spoiler blurs anyway just in case. I replayed twice for this and I find it a bit funny how a lot of other people seem to have trouble not becoming a skeleton while I try to become a skeleton and somehow manage to fail and stay fleshy in the end (by funny I mean annoying because I need skeletons). Also just a bit of Craft Sequence meta
At first I kind of just felt like ‘Wakefield is rich, white, and conventionally attractive, of course they’d be a jerk regardless of gender’ but then I started thinking more about Wakefield’s psyche but I couldn’t really put my thoughts down in the right words until I read the beginning of this post on Max Gladstone’s blog last night and things finally started to click together (things about m!romanced!Wakefield first really and then I managed to figure out the other stuff after)
I feel like Wakefield’s behavior could be read for any gender but the reasoning for it would be different depending on what gender Wakefield is
For a male Wakefield, I feel it’s a toxic masculinity thing, especially when paired with a romanced male MC (which I’ll also touch on in a bit)
For a female Wakefield, I feel like it could be a combination of internal stuff and external (possibly workplace) pressure. The wizard lawyers as a whole are always called Craftsmen, not Craftspeople or even possibly Craftswomen. This probably wasn’t the intention, but it makes it feel like it might be a male dominated field. Through examples like Elayne Keverian (at least in Three Parts Dead anyway, I haven’t finished Last First Snow yet), Madeline Ramp, Tara’s former classmate Daphne, and Wakefield themself, ambition and disaffectedness seem to be desirable traits in Craftsmen, and those traits are also typically masculine coded. Since there’s pressure for real world women to act in certain male-coded ways but ‘not too much’ in those ways and the Craft Sequence mirrors reality in many ways, I’d imagine a female Wakefield (and Craftswomen in general) to have pretty similar pressures
For a nonbinary Wakefield, I’m not entirely sure how they’d experience the outside world because I haven’t put as much thought into it and also because I feel like a lot would depend on what gender they are specifically whether it’s genderfluid, agender, bigender, or something else (for clarification if anyone needs it, nonbinary is both an identity itself and an umbrella term. I consider myself male-aligned nonbinary/a nonbinary trans man and have friends who are genderfluid, more female-aligned, genderqueer, etc and, while there are some similarities, we have very different experiences with gender and how people perceive us)
Back to male Wakefield being romanced with a male MC, in the scene where you’re asked what Wakefield is to you exactly and you choose the option of being attracted to them, is says “You’re pretty sure the attraction’s mutual, but neither of you have done anything about it. Anything either of you said would amount to an admission of weakness, and he’s the last person in front of whom you’d dare show weakness.” This could be read in a lot of different ways, but, because of personal experiences, I read it as a combination of toxic masculinity and possibly internalized homophobia because of the typical societal expectations of weakness =
not masculine and attraction to men = not masculine. Even without the attraction to men bit, there’s also showing emotion = not masculine therefore showing emotion = weakness
Also, in the end if you both fail to save Wakefield and become a skeleton and you ask “You don’t mind what I’ve become?” Wakefield replies “People stare at you in the street. But, if you’ll pardon the language, fuck them.” Not something that appears explicitly in canon, but, while they’re talking about being partly skeletonized, I feel like if you interpret Wakefield as trans and/or nonbinary, that answer kind of has another level to it
Also, I share a lot of @HomingPidgeon’s views on Black Magic. As for Lucky, I never really got into their character enough to form much of an opinion so I didn’t see much difference in them between male and female. However, I read the interaction between Lucky and Black Magic in The Hero Project specifically as masculine. It’s been a while since I last played, but that interaction felt a bit like a contest between them on who can out-macho the other (not exactly the best description, but I at least felt like the situation (at least on BM’s end anyway) was more to prove something to themselves than about the MC) and get the romantic interest. I’ve also seen a lot more love triangles where two guys are fighting over a girl than vice versa in mainstream media so that also probably plays a part in how I interpreted it