Loki: The Queer Alien Problem
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Let's look at Sylvie, Loki, and a deep dive into the Non-Human Non-Binary Trope!
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Can you explain the way Fear Street made homophobia and discrimination the villain in a video? I've seen ppl talk about it and I loved the trilogy I'd love your take on it.
Great video! (I’m non-binary and thought it was so well-balanced), and this is the first time I’ve signed up for something based on a sponsorship. More stuff like this that has a positive impact would be great! Thank you.
On different note, have you heard of The 🦉 House it’s a show on Disney Channel XD and Disney+! It’s like Gravity Falls, meets Harry Potter. Also it’s got great 🏳️🌈 representation!
Please, could you talk about endgame/wandavision as they pertain to captain marvel and her partner/child, please?
I just received an ad from adflegal.org which uses religion as a shield to explain their dislike and discrimination against same-sex marriage. I’ve reported the ad, but I wanted to let you know and encourage others to report this ad too.
When I write and consume media I sometimes want to forget about all the trauma that comes with being queer and nonbinary, and just witness or create queer characters experiencing joy, but more than that I want nuanced representation that feels grounded in reality whilst also not just being about pain
Oof I feel that
That's what i'm doing too. It also helps being autistic when writing autistic characters.
Same! (Just consuming in my case though).
I know it’s important for the struggle and pain to be represented, but for me that’s a theoretical importance; in practice I love nothing more than representation where everything is normal and true except queer-phobia is silently absent. I really enjoyed that aspect in schitts creek, they dealt with sexuality in the sense of exploration and family/ relationship dynamics, but completely skipped over the concept of someone having a problem with it.
I have a few non binary characters and one of them is genderfluid she isn't human and can shape-shift, into an animal not a different gender, and does experience a lot of dysphoria when he identifies with masculinity. This video helped a lot about how to handle them without it being unrealistic representation, with me being a cis person.
Oh shut up you do not experience "trauma" being 'queer and nonbinary'. There are literally children in Africa in mines right now getting cobalt for your newest cell phone. Shut up.
The only correct answer to "Have you ever met a female Loki?" should have been for all of them to change into a female form and go "You mean like this??"
"Have you ever met a female Loki?"
"...I don't understand the question"
This. ❤
(Alligator Loki turns into a crocodile.)
next time someone asks me what my gender is im gonna say "a mystery wrapped in layers of rumours" cause i vibe with that
Same. And being multiracial I think it would also come in handy for questions about my ethnicity
Enigma/enigmaself
To be fair they did released a short that did show more of bloodhounds face, like a but some face paint and goggles
My one friend is essentially gender void and they say witty lines like that whenever someone at work asks what their gender is. My favorite of theirs is "I am the human embodiment of room-temperature coffee"
My pronouns are “It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods” and “It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods self”
Yeah, the fact that Alligator Loki and Female Loki are basically considered equally strange by the other Lokis made that whole thing make a lot less sense. That whole Loki war sequence should have had a few females mixed in. What made Sylvie unique wasn't that she was a she, but that her life experiences and outlook were so drastically different.
Holy shit, I didn't see that, she's like the April O'Neil of the Loki gang. "The Chick" trope strikes again.
This scene also fully hit me, I just kept on hoping female and androgynous Loki variants but they never came
I wasn't paying attention to that I'll admit but I'm still mad about that scene because the one black Loki is the one that betrayed them.
I also disliked their choice to make it "weird" that a female variant would exist. But at the same time, I think there may be an explanation to this. Have you ever seen concept art of Loki variants in the void? I saw one that really did seem to feature Lokis that looked like they might be female. I wonder whether the creators had that intention, initially, but decided not to do it for some reason.
I think the reason why they decided to have only one female variant, is that maybe, Sylvie needed to be somehow "unique", but unlike you, I DO think her gender was fundamental to the uniqueness of her life experiences. She's the ONLY Loki who really broke the loop and escaped her destiny (at least...until the finale). But we still don't know WHY she was pruned in the first place, and like many others, I strongly suspect it was because she diverted from the set "path" for Lokis by beginning to turn into a hero, not a villain. And I think that this was the direct result of her being a girl. As a female in a patriarcal monarchy, she wouldn't have dreamt of becoming "king", but she was apparently dreaming of becoming a Valkyrie, which, in fact... was absolutely possible. So she wouldn't have grown up with that jealousy and bitterness that characterised all the male Lokis. In other words, Sylvie's story would be a way to highlight the role of patriarchy and toxic masculinity in turning all Lokis into "villains". If you make female Loki variants a common thing, it kind of diminishes the power of Sylvie's story.
@LottieTalkie
... the idea that Sylvie rejected the path of power early in her life, and was thus able to explore a female identity, makes a lot of sense. It would also explain why they seemed to think she would be particularly dangerous; A Loki hungry for power would only be headed towards a few possible goals, which makes them somewhat predictable, while a Loki that didn't care about power could be putting all that ambition towards literally ANYTHING.
I have no idea if that was the writer's intention, but it's a genius interpretation!
I sometimes also worry about othering when it comes to pansexual characters. I love deadpool and Rick Sanches, but I do worry that the idea of pansexual characters is " they're so crazy, they don't even care about gender"
What’s interesting to me about those examples is that they’re both almost always paired up with women (if we’re talking about film deadpool) - so they’re pansexual because they’re crazy, but they are also functionally straight
Luckily there's David from Schitt's Creek, who actually self-IDs as pansexual on TV, and is just a really great character on general
@@notcorry I mean film deadpool spends like an entire movie hitting on colossus so that's not entirely true
@@butasimpleidiotwizard his main motivation for both films is a (fridged) girlfriend. the “flirting” could very easily be written off as his humour rather than actual attraction. my point still stands, they’re both almost always paired up with women & are functionally straight.
@@notcorry I'm aware that his fridged girlfriend exists but she's also fridged and is only one woman, and I really think you'd have to be extremely in denial to not see deadpool's flirting as queer even though it is funny, the only reason straight men would flirt like that is if they're playing a character and deadpool never is, that's just what he's like. Like I just strongly disagree that deadpool is functionally straight because that reeks of biphobia particularly given that bi and pan men are usually percieved as "in denial gay" and their relationships with women are very frequently invalidated in the media, to show a pansexual man in a committed long term healthy relationship with a woman is not bad bi/pan representation it just doesn't double as gay representation, but that's okay because bi/pan people aren't gay. Pansexual people in long term relationships with the opposite sex are not "functionally heterosexual" and we have really got to stop saying stuff like that. I agree about Rick because I wouldn't have even known he's supposed to be pan if I hadn't seen this comment and from my understanding he sleeps around a lot which is a harmful stereotype, but deadpool? Cmon
I think that non-human nonbinary representation also comes about because it "makes sense".
Like "of course this alien doesn't have a binary gender. They don't even know about human genders" or "it just wouldn't make sense for this robot to have a gender".
Which is all true and fine. But it also says that gender has to make sense. Which it just doesn't. And that you basically need a reason to be nonbinary.
Like, that kind of representation would be fine if it wasn't basically the only kind we get.
my only non-binary original character is an alien
I can also see how alien genders, binary or otherwise, might be a thing in some contexts. Sex differences have evolved on Earth tons of times due to their practical utility, and gender might be seen as a consequence of sex + higher intelligence. A lot of intelligent aliens are conceptualized as being pretty human-like in other ways. Maybe some aliens would have a different number of sexes and genders than we do, or they could have gone through a gendered stage in their development before advancing to a point where gender was no longer useful.
@@bananawitchcraft my only Non-binary OC is an alien is that bad?
@@annelisekubecka5829 No buddy is not bad, more representation is a plus but not a must, there's no quota of character types you need to meet when writing. Plus as OP said it's pretty normal to make alien characters non-binary in sci-fi scenarios since it just makes sense, there's no reason for creatures from a completely different system to develop gender the same as on Earth.
@@Myikoroo they're from Andromeda. They're actually from a planet of NBs called Nombius.
As a very feminine-presenting nonbinary person, despite Janet being an example of a "nonhuman nonbinary" character, her character helped me initially explain to my mom why I was accepting of certain feminine pronouns or titles, but not all of them, and that the words and clothes I use don't always align with my actual identity.
One more thing about Loki, is how they kind of used the army of other lol-random Lokis to downplay the noteworthyness of a female Loki.
There is an alligator Loki, which just seems to undermine that there is something innate about Loki personally, that makes him sometimes be a woman. No, it's just how the timeline works, a person can sometimes be an alligator in another reality, or an old guy in pajamas, or running for president, or the Hulk, or whatever, it's so whacky, he might as well be a woman.
It's a bit like when people are so desperate to argue that they are not racist, that they immediately start talking about how they don't mind if anyone is "black or white or green or blue or whatever". It's this knee-jerk downplaying of the real, with the absurd.
My reaction also
Well said.
I completely disagree with you. That's... not what that scene was about and I genuinely don't understand how you reached that conclusion. Because Loki identifying as a man or woman or neither while "sometimes be(ing) an alligator in another reality, or an old guy in pyjamas, or running for president, or the Hulk, or whatever" is the issue, not Loki being those things in a vacuum regardless of his gender identity.
What does Loki being president or wearing a bicycle or being an alligator have to do with gender identity, and how does a Loki being any of those things diminish the noteworthiness of a Loki being a woman or identifying as a woman.
I mean there was one line that implied there were no other female Lokis but that's also not great
@@olisam9732 I don't think you're right to say that Loki's variants couldn't have that effect just because their differences aren't in their gender identity, because the implication of the variants is that Loki can functionally be anyone in a different timeline and his appearance is not fixed, so since Loki can physically be an alligator or a black guy it diminishes the impact of a Loki being physically female. That said I don't think you're wrong that the variants weren't really the problem or even part of the problem because if they had explicitly stated anything about Loki's gender identity the variants and Sylvie wouldn't have been an issue, the issue isn't that they implied it wrong it's that they implied it in the first place
When it comes to Disney/Marvel I always set my expectations very low,
I wish I had you wisdom to not step on a same rakes each time lol
I’m starting to do that too. I’ve been disappointed by them too many times
Hot take: queer writers see themselves as alien/other due to societal perceptions and now they're running with it.
I'm an androgynous bisexual and I've always felt a deep connection to aliens 🤔🤷♀️
it's all a never ending circle
“Alien” means “from somewhere else.” If Thor was nonbinary or genderfluid, he’d still be an alien to other places. Thor and Loki are both aliens when they’re on earth as they are not from here.
Also in Norse mythology, the character of Loki is fluid, and that goes back millennia. This isn’t something the show writers came up with.
Yeah like i love neopronouns often times because my gender feels like "wizard" or "fey" or "clown".
There are also a lot of autistic people in the queer community, and plenty of us feel alienated and othered because of communication differences, and relate to non-human characters
i (aroace enby) literally called myself Alien online for a while. irl i have two names, both of which are birds. can't dehumanize me if i get there first, i guess?
I’m very happy that more non-binary characters like Raine from the owl house are being written/animated. It’s awesome that everyone in the show accepts their pronouns, and they are among some of the strongest and most prestigious people on the boiling isles because they’ve practiced music magic so much and is considered the best at it. It’s a really good show with lots of good LGBTQ+ representation, a good storyline, and lots of fun and unique characters!
(I’m not sure if it’s been confirmed, but I think that Raine is the first non-binary Disney cartoon character? Idk if that’s true though, I just heard the quote being thrown around)
yes it’s so amazing 😭😭❤️❤️
@@no1legobatmanfan Not only that but I think rain is the one of the first amab but no binary characters I’ve ever seen. You generally don’t get a lot of masculine presenting enby characters. Granted I haven’t seen the show so I could be way off base but it’s still really nice to see
@@ramble4395 this seems like a very odd thing (to say the least) to say about a non binary character... why exactly is their agab relevant? what makes you think that this animated fictional character for a fantasy kids show is assigned male at birth...? non-binary people don’t exist to be recategorized into binaries. i’m sure you mean well and are sensitive to these issues, but i’d strongly encourage you to stop perceiving non-binary people through a binary lens and especially to stop using language about assigned gender at birth when referring to non-binary people/characters.
@@wynoxium Culturally, exploration of gender and sexuality is "permitted" "for" "girls". We even see this with bisexuality, where it's fine for Katy Perry to "kiss a girl" and 'like it' while still having a boyfriend who she "hope(s) (he) don't mind it".
Hell, it's even a trope in and of itself to have a gender-nonconforming AFAB character still identify as a "cis" "girl" under the archetype of the "Tomboy". Meanwhile, for AMAB characters any portrayal of femininity...I mean, even something as intuitively and explicitly bisexual as "High School Musical" had macho-masc Chad the sports-guy hide behind the franchise-icon metaphor of "dancing" as homosexual attraction. Because a genuine cis-het AMAB guy doesn't do 'girly' things like 'dance'.
Thus there's a public refusal for AMAB nonbinary existence. Even/especially in real-life. In media, where features are exaggerated, AMAB are thus overwhelmingly either cis-masc or trans-fem...rarely any intermediate, and even more rarely any realistic portrayal. And characters who start out nonbinary within the human gender binary are written largely as AFAB comfortable with masculinity...while analogous AMAB characters must learn to become accustomed to femininity so as to conclude as non-binary.
I'll also chime in and say, as a Bigender/genderfluid person, there's a greater societal stigma on AMAB people than AFAB people in expressing your fluid gender identity. Particularly because it's wrapped up in images of the deviant crossdresser or the pervert, or even bloody serial killers! Never mind that toxic masculinity is usually the culprit in the latter case...
So really, in a world that's prone to misunderstand me in the worst possible way, it's easier to just not make the effort, especially as I lack the skills/knowledge of how to truly express myself in a way that validates me (or deals with my crippling dysphoria). Honestly, I'd welcome some good genderfluid representation, especially as I only found out this was a queer identity in the mid 2010s, and I learned about it from a freakin' webcomic. Not only would it have helped me (and other people like me) figure ourselves out, but it'd help to normalize the idea of people like me, and lead to more societal acceptance...or at least societal tolerance!
There's a number of groups that see people like me as dangerous predators, ready to deceive and harm others. Hell, I fit neatly into the TERF narrative of the "man pretending to be a woman". I'd rather they just see me as normal, or harmless...well, mostly harmless.
So wynoxium, I see your concern as being well intentioned, but it comes across as saying we need to "see past bodies" when being judged for my body is part of the problem. I'm not ashamed of my body, even when I wish I could change it to suit my identity at any given moment. I just don't want to be hated for it.
Marvel always leaves us wanting 10% more. Give Loki one line about his gender, let Carol kiss Maria, have Russo say something more than a snippet about his date. Marvel has given me, as a queer person and a person in general, inspiration and hope and joy, but I am always the one translating these stories to fit me, rather than plainly seeing my experiences on the screen. As we wait for November and The Eternals movie to come around, I become more apprehensive of their promised gay main character. Is he going to be stereotyped or killed off or swept under the rug? I hope the writers can put a sliver of the faith and love into these characters that the fans always do. : )
Same. I really do hope The Eternals turns out good! Like we're also supposed to be meeting his husband & kids too which should be so sweet :)
10% is WAY under selling it to me lol. I'm left wanting a lot more
@@Lisa_Flowers I understand. It would be a big step for Marvel to include these things. But for the story, it wouldn't have been a stretch or unrealistic in any way.
OK but you see here's the thing. I imagine that the same reason non binary representation is very low or non human is probably due to the fact that most the population is binary, even without getting into sexualities. And tbh I don't even know what Non Binary would really look like, its part of what I argue about when it comes to Autistic or Asexual representation as I see myself in characters that aren't even representive of my disability or my sexuality. Like I love Sheldon Cooper but also Freddy Freeman from Shazam. Plus I try and think of my favorite source of media right now IT and tbh I don't think making one of the Losers have They/them pronouns or even She/they would change anything. It would be the same story, the same people just different words for them. Tbh I'm very concerned about the MCU in general, from a MCU fan myself I haven't heard people over the moon for Loki or FATWS the same way they were for Wandavision. I think like Zombies and Vampires before them, a burn out is happening with superheroes, not to mention the fact that most of the original MCU cast left after Endgame like RDJ and Chris Evans. Not to mention the pandemonium we found ourselves in in 2020, I think its going to be very telling how the next years go to what gets green lit or not, such as Space Jam 2 made more its opening weekend than Black Widow which made me sad.
I really admire ur diligence, after the 5th "FIRST LGBT+ CHARACTER" i gave up expecting anything
It's kind of depressing that having a writer acknowledge that their character is canonically queer is progress when the actual representation is so poor. The show was a lot of fun but the actual representation was just bad and quite disappointing - and that's saying a lot, seeing as my expectations were already low lol.
Haven't seen the show, probably never will since I'm pretty done with Disney's bullshit, so this comment is only based on that quote in this video:
How strange isn't it that an author asks the consumer to interpret queerness in his own text, instead of giving an answer? I bursted out laughing when I heard that. It's bizarre.
If you're just watching stuff simply for representation then its no wonder you have low expectation. You clearly can't enjoy anything if it doesn't represent you.
@@Nomoredrama2000 that’s not at all what they’re saying from my understanding. That’s a very black and white conclusion, ignoring the nuance of the importance of diverse representation, and the way most humans experience the media we consume.
literally this!! exactly what I was thinking.
A few notes on the mythology part:
1. Loki is not Odin's son, but rather a sort of "blood brother". They are not related, but they have a strong kinship. It's like that friend of your dad that you call uncle despite not being related to them.
2. A thing we have to remember about Norse mythology is that our only written sources were written long after vikings were no longer around. The folklore related to the Norse gods was still spread around mouth to mouth, but the people who put it into text first were Christian monks and they did not hesitate to spin certain things in their favour. The Prose Edda literally starts with a story that's supposed to make it clear to the reader that the Norse gods are actually conmen/wizards/witches who managed to fool the vikings into believing that they are gods. It was a way of discrediting the "pagan" gods and solidifying the status of the Christian God.
Because of this it's really hard to know if the portrayal of Loki as a genderfluid character in Norse mythology was actually true to how he was perceived in the times of the vikings or if it was the Christian monks' attempt at smearing him. In terms of Þrymskviða (the story about the stolen hammer and Thor and Loki in drag) Thor is portrayed as being humiliated because he has to dress as a woman even though he is clearly male while Loki is supposed to be seen as deviant because he embraces it and feels at home in it. This is how the Christian monks wanted these characters to come off. There is also a theory that the Christian monks tried to cast Loki as the "Lucifer" of Norse mythology to have a villain that can be linked back to Christian mythology.
I love the idea of genderfluid Loki as a nonbinary person myself, but just have to point out the context is really important in terms of a "canonical" version of Norse mythology: there is no canon as the only text sources we have was written by people who were not around at the time of the vikings and who had a very strong bias against other religions.
That in turn just makes it even more frustrating when people insist on sticking to rigid gender roles and such in regards to Norse mythology because there are literally no limits or rules.
1. That's a really good explanation, thank you very much.
2. Well, while a lot of what you're saying applies to a degree to texts that we have about the Norse religion in Europe, a lot of it isn't true or doesn't apply in this special case. The texts about Loki were written in Iceland about only 10 to 20 years after the last time someone went to war officially declaring himself a Viking - so, absolutely *in* a human lifespan, not centuries after. Second, no monks in Iceland. Iceland took on christianity by democratic poll(!) as means to prevent revenge feuds that seriously threatened to wipe out the Icelandic youth. "Thou shalt *not* kill" seemed a new and inspiring idea. However, they took on this new religion only with some conditions, namely to absolutely be allowed to worship the old gods in private (plus, no celibacy for church people, so, no "Christian monks" in Iceland). There simply was no dichotomy between the old religion and the new in the sense that they wanted to extinguish the other - in Iceland, it was a coexistence. Also, from what we knew from law texts and such - it is very unlikely the Viking age was the queer paradise some people want to see in it. The tales about the first Christian missionary tell about how mich he was frowned upon by Icelandic people not because of his ideas/religion (which the found ridiculous... what do you mean, a saviour that doesn't fight?!) - but because he had long, colourful ceremonial robes and a male interpreter stuck around at any time (omg, that's so gay). He was read as queer - and that's why people strongly disliked him. Gender-non-confirming folks and especially cross-dressing peopke were not met with chill attitude at all! The punishment to "being perceived as gay" (because that absolutely was enough) was death, which could be implemented by anyone, no court needed.
Tldr: The strong dislikining and judgement to queer people/ characters in myths may very well stem.from the Viking people and not from christianity. Christian religion was not by any means the only tradition that was opposed to queerness - and especially the Vikings seemed to have been very homophobic and opposed to cross-dressing/being gender fluid.
@@elektra121 ergi ("unmanliness, effeminacy") was magic that only people unconcerned with manliness could practice. But Odin, arguably the most central god, was the only manly figure who practiced this style of magic. I mean, maybe it's similar to Christ being able to "bring life" without a womb and pregnancy but it seems similar to how some cultures have their own version of transgender, like the Hindu priestesses who Europeans would call transgender women, but tend to be relegated to their own sex. It's probably still not queer FRIENDLY and certainly not open and welcoming, but it isn't dragging and murdering queers the way homophobia is defined today. It reads more like a forbidden magic that could offer great power at the cost of great isolation and probably some amount of suffering. More like a tortured artist who suffers for their art and lives in poverty. No one wanted their kid to be said artist, but society might appreciate their tragedy and works. Crossdressing and changing sex was still percieved as deviant, but it wasn't persecuted with the same violence as Christianity could go in certain times. I'm sure if Norse culture survived longer or spread across Europe as widely, we would have seen more diversity of prejudice or acceptance...
I agree with most of what you said, although Red from OSP made a really interesting video about Loki and parallels with christianity a while ago. It makes more sense to me that there would be more comparisons with jesus then with satan
Incidentally, the Bible wasn’t written until centuries after the last events were supposed to have happened.
I agree with what you said... but they changed Loki a lot in the MCU, even in the comics, like they made Hella be an older sister to Thor and him in "Thor Ragnarok". To the point their Loki is not the mythology Loki anymore
I once played a dnd character who was a Formian Soldier (basically ant people, who walk with mantis posture). I had broken from my colony, and was adventuring as a mercenary. Without thinking about it, id made the decision that, biologically, it didnt make sense for a binary gender to have developed in the societal lexicon, given sexual dimorphism wasnt a factor. At some point, the topic of gender came up (another character realized mid sentence that he didnt know my pronouns while referring to me, and a small conversationhappened after). When asked, my off-the-cuff response to what my gender was was "well... i am a soldier. That was my role... but... by your terminology, i suppose... female feels right." At some point, one of my friends in the group, a non binary individual, hugged me, and mentioned being happy i didnt just make the strange alien creature NB, because the trope was annoying. And that kinda stuck with me
I see well-meaning people try to make lists of ace/enby/genderfluid characters that exist in pop culture. The amount of “ace representation” that boils down to robots, aliens, and villains is too damn high.
Wow did you just help me get words for my gender identity? Me thinks 🙃
(Ive commented somewhere on here, but im a transspecies female , and although i wouldnt use 'woman' for its species specific connotation, id say id possibly use some sort of similar explanation 🐬)
Steven universe is kinda neat in that regard - as the gems are sexless, but generally identify as female, with the only NB characters occurring when steven fuses with gems and that one human Sadie ends up with - which is really good IMO cuz we've got just plain old regular human being NB, but also stevvonnie being intersex(which definitely isn't the best - same issue different specifics, although not *as* bad IMO cuz it's at least 2 humans fused, but still distancing intersex peeps from humans)
It makes sense, ant workers are pretty likely to be female, and I'm a huge fan of nontypical female types, like bearded dwarf women who look just like dwarf men in D&D type settings :) I'm glad they got to experience that kind of validation from you
Pratchett deals with this with golems too.
I'm reminded of a quote by Ursula K LeGuin about her novel the Left Hand of Darkness, arguably the grandparent of the Non-Human Non-Binary trope. Paraphrased: "Science fiction is not prescriptive, it is descriptive. I am not saying that in a millennium we will all be androgynous or that we should all become androgynous, but that in certain ways in certain times and in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting or prescribing. I am describing." That was over 50 years ago, by a cis woman who probably had little to no concept of nonbinary people, and yet it still seems relevant for both those that use the trope as otherizing and those that use the trope as escapism or exploration.
Off topic, but that book is still so good. 😭 Estrevan, both through Genry's eyes and their own words, was so important in figuring myself out.
Ursula revisited Left Hand of Darkness, as her own understanding of gender evolved, partially in response to criticism of that work, in the essay "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," which has an early, and surprisingly not-often-quoted musing on non-gendered pronouns as a linguistic norm in English.
Le Guin had far more imagination and foresight than all her male peers in scifi combined imo
Le Guin is a master and an absolutely underrated author
@@phosphenevision A few had some insight (Moorcock, Pohl from the OG crowd perhaps?) and of course other women authors like Joanna Russ are equally great.
No one could do what Le Guin did though.
Even in the face of the terrible plot, the fact that Sylvie is apparently the ONLY lady Loki???? In an infinite multiverse???????? That pissed me off the most
@Benjamin Barack Yeah, fair. I did enjoy watching it somewhat, but it was a constant struggle of "really? you had so many options, and this is what you want me to accept? okay." I'd place it firmly in a 'fun but stupid' category, at least to me after only one viewing. Loki is one of my all time favorite fictional characters, so I really, really wanted to like the show, but... Idk, maybe I had my hope up too high ig
Me hearing that ‘wren’ is going to sponsor this video: “ah, Rowan’s just going to try to sell me a kitchen, it’s fine”
Rowan: “if you’d like to hear more about the climate crisis-“
Me: 😳😗
haha - always ready with a plot twist
I learned so much about my carbon footprint and now I'm sad xD
@@shannon3353 Don't forget that your personal carbon footprint is microscopic compared to the footprints that coal & farming industries have. If we want to combat global warming we must focus on making changes on a structural level (not trying to dismiss personal impact, every bit helps!)
I think the main issue with the character of Double Trouble is that them being non-binary felt tied to them being a trickster/double agent. So even if it is DT's identity, they're seemingly using it to fool people. I'm sure this wasn't the writers intent, but it still kinda comes across to me as 'not identifying as either man or woman = trying to trick you'.
Double Trouble felt very "devious bisexual," and was a disappointment in that area.
I had to cut various bits for time - and the "deceptive trans" section was one of them - I felt like to do it justice it would have to be part of its own video - would def be interested in watching a vid from a trans creator about it in more depth!
I don't see their idenity being tied to their role as a double agent but rather DT's love of theater, DT refers to themselves as playing a part (judith butler gender performativity) and everyone in the show respects their identity
@@tattoocutiegal7629 I don't think Double Trouble is framed as being non-binary BECAUSE they're a double agent (at least I hope not), but the way their identity is expressed through the plot is by way of fooling people, or messing with their heads, like with Catra. The only time we see DT even really use their identity in a theater context without them being antagonistic is near the end of the show, which is the last time we really see them. And they're the only prominent-ish character in the show who's non-binary; I didn't even know there was someone else till I watched this video. Now, none of this comes across as deliberately ignorant or hateful in the slightest, but it's still a very easy trope to fall into.
@@CasualShinji they did not mess with Catra's head they give her an intervention or a free therapy session, DT could've just allowed Catra to continue digging herself into the hole she created but they didn't and if it wasn't for DT Catradora would not be a thing also, I do agree with this video while I love DT it sucks that there aren't many human NB characters and if Spop had at least one human NB don't think people wouldn't be that bothered by the character.
As a genderfluid person, I honestly didn't want the Loki show to make him genderfluid at all. I like her being genderfluid in the comics because comics have the benefit of writing, which can show us a character's internal thoughts and feelings more intimately than external and visual-heavy mediums like film/tv. For live action, you really only have two choices: cast multiple actors for each gender or cast one person whose wardrobe changes to indicate a different gender. Which, in terms of doing genderfluid representation well, especially when you're already locked into an (assumed) cis man as your lead, is just sticking yourself between a rock and a hard place. The first option over emphasizes sex in relation to gender, and makes genderfluidity a thing that can only exist in fiction. The second option could potentially overemphasize the importance of presentation with regard to gender identity and get into man-in-a-dress and cis people taking trans roles territory.
Isn't Loki gender fluid is Norse mythology?
I’ve thought about this as well, and I think the best way of going about it would be doing the first option and casting a trans woman as fem Loki. I think that avoids most of the problems but since I’m not genderfluid (I am nonbinary though) I can’t really say.
@@pig_rabbit6944 I mean...what is or was "canon" in Norse mythology (an odd word to use in this context given its biblical roots, but alas) is entirely determined by which group/cultural practice you're talking about. Many different groups believed in Loki, passed down stories about him, many of the records we have today are Christian retellings, and of course there are many, many different pagan groups today with vastly different views on gender. There isn't a definitive yes or no. Even if there was, did Loki fight Captain America in Norse mythology? Marvel isn't beholden to an ancient mythos, but it should be beholden to modern people and do right by them.
I mostly agree, I'm not upset they added it but didn't expect them to do anything at all with it, in a way I prefer that they didn't. I honestly cannot imagine Disney could write it or do it any sort of justice so I'd rather they didn't touch it. At least we have some of the comics doing a decent job
@@pig_rabbit6944 Yes and no. In the Edda, the "canon" for Norse mythology, Odin responds to Loki's jab about doing woman's magic on earth with the fact that he was woman and bore (not fathered) children there. One of his main myths involves seducing a stallion as a mare and giving birth to Sleipnir as a result. He's known as the mother of witches, not the father. He takes on definitively female identities. That said, AFAIK, his pronouns are he/him. He has definitely had sex with women and fathered children, who all have their own stories, including Hel, the Midgard Serpent, Fenris, and the ones killed in response to his role in Baldr's death (different mother than the monsters). So while his sex is definitely fluid, and his role is definitely fluid, I don't know for sure that his gender is. For that matter, it's hard to say what version is the true version and which is the ruse.
That said, Marvel's Asgardians and the mythical ones aren't identical. I don't think that Loki's gender identity is explicitly set in Marvel comics rather than implied. I'm also not sure how much Marvel Loki shapeshifts vs. casting illusions.
While you made some very good points about how the show did or didn't represent Loki as genderfluid, for me the conversation where masc-Loki casually affirms his bi- or pan-sexuality was incredibly affirming. Some may see it as too little, too late--but I saw his statement "a little of both, I suspect the same as you" as affirming and normalizing Loki as non-heterosexual. As a bi/pan person myself, I found it exhilarating to see a character I love admit to being bi/pan and doing it nonchalantly, like "no big deal."
I agree, the casualness of Loki saying "a little bit of both" was great as a pansexual person but I wish we could see it. Marvel put Loki with Sylvie essentially the same person from different timelines (self-cesty, would you do-the-do with your clone type deal) while Mobius and Loki was right there and would explore the same themes while showing explicit MLM or NBLM relationships instead of a throw away line. And as a nonbinary person we don't really even get a throw away line on genderfluidity nor any visual representation of this either (through how Loki presents). Personally I feel as through Sylvie (who is at least femme presenting if not a cis-woman) was kinda added as a substitute for Lady Loki instead of having Loki transition his form from masc to femme, but this is just my opinion, no hate to people who think or see things differently to me
I agree, as a pan person. It was absolutely incredible to see that representation on-screen, but I am still left wanting more. I’m don’t really blame anyone specifically for it, but I feel that Marvel could have been a lot braver, instead of giving us tiny crumbs of representation that we accept because we’re so desperate for it.
I'm a bit cynical, so even though the line is interesting representation, I feel it was designed to be easily censored/cut in other markets. :-/
@@grandsome1 agreed, but it still felt incredible bc we are so starved for representation
@@maxcollateral I get that, but the thing that really bothers me about the Sylvie v. Mobius debate and that KEEPS coming up in discourse is the ugly amount of bi erasure from certain camps. "Oh, Loki *can't* be bi if he's in a relationship with a woman!" or "Well, he isn't REALLY bi if he's not with another man," etc, as if being in a hetero-presenting relationship somehow magically invalidates every other part of one's sexuality. As a bisexual woman myself, I get so very, very tired of that rhetoric.
There's also a lot of sexism and internalized misogyny embedded in most fandoms that makes the fanfic writers and artists predisposed to automatically eliminate women characters in favor of shipping two male (and usually white, lbr) characters, rationale be damned. Representation is important, of course, but look at the ratio of m/m fics to f/f fics in pretty much every fandom. Much of that m/m shipping is just done by straight women fetishizing gay men/men in same-sex relationships rather than any authentic desire for representation. There's a very cynical part of me that really thinks that if Sylvie had been a male character and Mobius a female one, the crowd hating on Loki/Sylvie now wouldn't have a problem with it, even though they currently claim it's just because of the ~story and not some truly abhorrent and insidious misogyny going on. But as long as fandom gets two white guys banging, it's happy.*
I say this as someone who reads and writes a lot of m/m fic, among other things, so I'm not taking issue with that specifically. My problem is with how fandoms tend to marginalize female characters in such transparent ways, often rejecting a loving, supportive relationship in favor of pairing up the two white male leads in some toxic nightmare relationship just because they're aesthetically pleasing together. The example immediately coming to mind is Tony/Steve in the MCU when Pepper is a treasure and works well with Tony, but also, Tony/Rhodey is RIGHT THERE and makes so much more sense.
I'm trans and I've always felt like an alien so I love fantasy characters/aliens who are trans, in fact I'm writing my own characters like that.
oooooooh you'd love Juno Birch. She's a trans woman who does this drag queen alien 50's character and she's hilarious.
Edit: she has her own youtube channel where she shows her drag make up, plays sims, and does funny stuff. But she's also an amazing artist who uses a lot of 50's and 60's fantasy art as inspo
this is one of the reasons i really enjoy seeing queer and trans characters who are alien or robots or other nonhuman species written by queer and trans people, it speaks a lot to the experience of feeling othered and treated like you aren’t human. it’s just such a good way to represent your own feelings and relationships with your identity and society in a more concrete way. i think it makes a lot of sense that people in the lgbtq+ community often will seek out nonhuman characters to kind of adopt as their own or create their own characters who fit that role (i myself am queer and genderfluid and i absolutely love seeing characters like that :))
The main viewpoint character in the sci-fi story I've been working on is trans (and a hybrid of two alien species, neither of which is seen as a big deal in-universe).
As an aroace person I've always found myself drawn to non-human characters too, especially robots. I know it's a harmful stereotype that all ace/aro people are robotic and unfeeling but still... robots are cool af lol.
Thank you! Cis people on Twitter kept reminding me that genderfluid people don't have to change anything to be genderfluid but LOKI ISN'T A PERSON BUT A CHARACTER WRITTEN BY A CIS PERSON 😭
I'm cis and GNC, if I could be shapeshift I would shapeshift like every two months. Why WOULDN'T Loki.
I know Loki is just the jumping off point for this video and therefore there was not time to go into every detail but I am glad to see you bring up some of the things that made me dislike it so much. For me (queer, trans and non-binary btw) it was a huge disappointment all the way through. A thing not mentioned in this video that I think is worth bringing up is a scene that indicates Sylve did not actually choose to take feminine form but that “the universes need for chaos” made her female. This could of course be read in several ways but one of them is that she was simply born female and that here physical body decided her gender and pronouns. What I am saying is that the scene could be read as her confirming being a cis, woman version of Loki. Either way you read it, the scene removes so much agency from Sylvie as a character. I guess you could argue that it is a bad attempt at saying that you don’t choose to be gender fluid or trans but I think that is giving these writers too much credit.
As a genderfluid person, I'll second that disappointment. I'm dearly looking for representation of people like me, but it's scarcer than hens' teeth, even in queer-positive media (much less anything by The Mouse). My friends helpfully nudged me in the direction of Loki when I groused about this, but then they realized shortly after that it might've been a stretch. I assured them the fault was more in Disney than themselves, and was kinda impressed that they noticed something was off themselves. "sex=fluid" is...not a great way of indicating genderfluidity, and even my cis friends noticed something was off.
These latest developments with Sylvie just give me less and less hope that I'll find representation here. I'm so fed up with this...
+
That weirded me out so much, it would have made more sense if Sylvie had decided to present female regularly and for that to be her Nexus point and the reason the TVA wants to prune her. It would give so much more weight to her character
Exactlyy!! I was super happy when Sylvie said that she didn't go by "Loki" thinking she was trans, only to a few episodes afther "I wAs BoRn FeMaLe aT AsGarD" there is no reason for them to add that line unless to make clear that she is cis 😔
i have a constant conflict with myself where i adore shapeshifters and low key wish for that superpower and always id with nb shapeshifters, but also im ready for human nb rep thats more down to earth... but also shapeshifting cool...
Me: /Sees you, Lokis and the rainbow in the background/ /Clicks immediately/
Janet does, in fact, remind people that she is "Not a person" or "Not a human" as well as "Not a robot"
Correct: She is an angel (This is a joke but like not entirely wrong???????)
She describes herself as an “anthropomorphized vessel of knowledge”
Janet was rad. Bad Janet was possibly radder.
Remember when a Bad Janet didn’t correct Jason when he called her a girl, and he used it as a way to catch out an omnipotent and omniscient being who tricked literally everyone for months????? Implying that “our” Janet declaring herself “not a girl” is a unique difference between her and other Janets?????? Even other Good Janets???? Because if it was bog-standard Good Janet behavior, wouldn’t a Bad Janet know to copy it?????? The same way she copies their perky, “Hi, there!”s???????
(Please, don’t take this from me. I want this. So bad.)
@@kate_m. she coud have forgotten to correct it. Our Janet has done it fore censuries and just does it atmoatlicly at this point. Im a year into using nonbinery terms and I still acendently missgender myself just because im not used to it yet.
The thing with double trouble is how much I love the character, even though they're not great representation
Tbh I think the problem is that there isn’t enough queer representation as a whole. I’m not really familiar with the show so I’m going off of what I’ve heard, but based on what I heard I think Double Trouble’s characterization would be fine, IF there were also a wide variety of characters in media in general that don’t equate “gender nonconformity” with “”trickery””. But as things are right now, it happens to play into overwhelmingly prevalent stereotypes which is why it’s kind of sus.
My gender-fluid friend really doesn't like that Loki is assumed to be gender-fluid because he changes his sex, since this still supports the notion that sex determines gender. This is a notion that makes life extremely difficult for them as a gender-fluid/non-binary individual as people do not believe that they can be any gender other than the one that matches the sex they were born as. They suggested that if Loki wanted to better represent their gender-fluidity, he should have some moments where he goes by she/her pronouns in the same Tom Hiddleston body that he usually appears as.
Would be nice to get scene in the comics where she's like: "just to be clear, I am disguised as a man right now, I am not actually a man right now."
Oooooh that would be AMAZING
But Loki isn't really gender-fluid in a human regard. He's both been mother and father in the original religion. He's going to be different given that he can literally chance sex or even complete type. Our idea of not fitting our current body doesn't work for someone who can literally change their body to be anything they want it to be, female, male or even horse. Just because Loki isn't gender normative doesn't mean he's going to be the human idea of gender-fluid basically.
yeh that’s the problem with both the cases of genderfluid representation I know of, Marvel’s Loki, and Alex Fierro from Magnus chase, they both use shapeshifting. And it seems gender fluidity is only ever considered when it comes to Loki.
Yeah, there could be a scene where Loki would go by "she" even if presenting as "he" bc didn't bothered to make the change this day
But then there's still the issue of magic. If anyone had the power to effortlessly manipulate their body to best match their identity why wouldn't they? The issue is not really Loki's fluidity but lack of wider representation. He became the Genderfluid Representation and not a dude who happens to treats own gender with a bit of more liberty and sometimes goes by "she"
i really like the way the idw transformers comics handle the alien gender situation - they took the whole 'transformers was originally made as a toy franchise for boys so 99% of the characters are male' thing and rolled with it, making them an almost entirely 'male' race. i put 'male' in quotations because they never actually refer to themselves as such - they _are_ a genderless species, they also just happen to go by he/him pronouns and present in a masculine way as a default [which also results in a homonormative society too]. there are still women in their species though, it's just that most of them happen to be trans!! the best way to explain how is to quote anode, who is one of said trans women; "the further you get from cybertron - the more people you meet - the more you realise that as a race we've been limiting ourselves unnecessarily. you know before the war, when the primal vanguard used to come home between campaigns? there's always be a few who had reclassified themselves - a few 'she's' amongst the 'he's.' they tended to stick together. 'he to she.' i didn't understand the significance. what difference did it make? but after we left cybertron and started to meet so many other races.. yeah. _then_ it made sense. it made _perfect_ sense."
it's a neat concept, and while not perfect, it's still a good take on introducing 'human' gender concepts to aliens that normally wouldn't confine to them
omfg i was about to make a similar comment
idw transformers my beloved
Oh that's amazing
As a genderfluid person, "it varies moment to moment" would have felt wonderful to hear (since it is so similar to how I personally describe my fluidity). However, I didn't even know Loki's gender was being debated because I didn't even notice the "sex: fluid." So for me, the MCU has once again queerbaited us and it feels pretty bad, especially since Loki has always been a favorite of mine.
Exactly, those are details that people that pay a lot of attention see, it shouldn't be blurry, I shouldn't have to wait for someone with better eyes to tell me I am being represented.
As someone who is genderfluid, Loki should have to shapeshift to show genderfluidity because that is how that particular character does protray themselves, as a personality trait
Fr I thought that what female Loki was until I heard more of the show
Do we know if mcu loki has that power?
I guess technically he creates the illusion of being a different person, not an actual physical body change
@@bjam89 He shape shifts into Captain America seamlessly so there's no reason to think he can only shift into male characters.
I'm not gender fluid so help me out here. I had the feeling (a very wrong and rather offensive one) they were trying to represent the fluidity through the existence of Sylvie. But what struck me was, they are not the same person, not technically (I mean Alligator-Loki for crying out loud) and it seemed to me like that was their representation of Tom's Loki gender fluidity. It felt yucky to me. Did I get it wrong? Was it ok to be like that? I'm really trying to understand.
If I had a show all the aliens wouldn't be male or female or label their sexualities. I'd do it bc that's what's most realistic and I wouldn't count it as queer rep. I would also have plenty of human queer rep. This is how it should be.
Thats always something that perplexed me about Mass Effect, you have all these crazy aliens and it's the far future but everyone is cisgender and heterosexual besides Liara (who I'm not sure is good bi rep)
What about shows like Steven Universe? It felt almost exclusively like queer rep, had an alien species that were all feminine/ were female, and is still considered important representation.
That’s what I’ve been going for in my story at least.
In my story an entire species uses they/them pronouns, with exceptions. There are also species out there with different gender ratios, such as one that mainly comprises females.
But I’ve made sure human representation is present. The main character is aspec, and her best friend is non-binary and autistic.
When I started writing this story in the ninth grade, I didn’t realize that there was confliction with non-binary nonhuman characters. But now that I’ve been writing it for awhile, I’m too attached to change it.
But, to be honest (and note, I am non-binary myself), I feel okay with nonhuman characters having queer identities. As long as it isn’t the only representation there.
In my book, I mix it up. There is a species who just identifies as non-binary, your sex is only relevant for reproduction, but most of them present as something you would call female here. The rest of gender identities were just brought by other species. Another one has a three-sex reproduction system but no gender-system. Another one is like us in the future (considering nowadays developments): There are male, female and gender non-conforming people, but the gender itself has no big impact in the society like in terms of clothes or stereotypes/expectations. Others are biologically bi-gender or agender and there are many different systems, none of them are the same.
It just wouldn't make sense that only humans developed something like gender. Saying that "all aliens" don't have gender or labelled sexualities seems just as unrealistic as the other extreme. Mixing it up and having variation is probably the closest to reality.
Not gonna lie, if I ever write a shapeshifting genderfluid character (or rather: publish, since these characters already exist in my mind) it's 100% a power fantasy. That's definitely what I'D like to be. However, I do think there's ways to make this better representation-wise, and already have a couple of ideas in this regard. (For starters, a character being a shapeshifter doesn't have to mean they're not human).
Wrt Loki, honestly I've never expected more than what they've given us. I never get my hopes up with the Mouse. Doesn't mean we shouldn't ask for more, mind you, but we also should be looking for representation in other (more genuine) places too.
As with most issues of poor representation, the problem is not the existence of queer aliens/queer robots, because they're rad to have. The problem is that the *only* nonbinary characters we have in fiction are queer aliens and queer robots, and we want queer humans too. It's like when people used to say that there were plenty of women in games and point to all the sexy prize women you were supposed to fight over.
I know multiple people who assumed that the actress who played Sylvie was going to be the enchantress, and then once it turned out to be a lady Loki where honestly disappointed like it would have been better to make her enchantress and do something else to include a lady Loki character
Honestly, in the end, she WAS the Enchantress a lot more than she was "Lady Loki". She is defined as a separate character, not Loki inhabiting a female body, or Loki shapeshifting his own body to reflect his genderfluidity (which is what the two instances of female-presenting Loki in the comics are). On the other hand, she is blond, she is called Sylvie, and her only magical power is enchantment.
But yes, I wish they had done something else (entirely separate from Sylvie's character) to represent the genderfluidity aspect. Also because presumably, it is OUR Loki (or TVA Loki) that is genderfluid. Since they have gone to great lengths to demonstrate that variants are individuals with their own personalities, I don't see why we should assume that ALL Lokis are genderfluid. The "sex:fluid" thing was specifically in TVA Loki's file.
How do we know she isn’t Sylvie the enchantress? There more to come right? Not an argument or even gender/sexuality based question. Just curious if y’all have heard something I don’t know?
@@butwhytho4858 I think she is very much their take on Sylvie the Enchantress. They simply made her a Loki variant, instead of a creation of Loki.
@@lottietalkie3142 I wouldn’t be disappointed if they go either direction, I was just curious if maybe someone had info I didn’t haha ty for the response 😁
Rectification 7:05 : Odin is not Loki's father in mythology!
Blood brothers I believe?
@@Lycandros yep!
Season 2 episode 7 of the owl house, "Eda's requiem", introduces us to Raine whispers, the Nonbinary head of the bard coven/ leader of the b.a.t.s (bards against the throne).
I HAD TO SCROLL WAY TOO FAR DOWN TO FIND ANOTHER OF US!
For anyone interested in a more queer representation of the Loki mythology there’s an amazing Norwegian show called Ragnorok that has at all the Norse myths but set in modern day I would highly recommend!
YES absolutely!
Do you know where I could watch it?
@@h_wrsm thank you so much!
I love Laurits, the way he starts exploring his gender presentation is very cool and natural. And when he dressed like that lady at the end of s1... Iconic
@@sergiovela7686 everything he does is iconic
The way I was reduced to tears multiple times through this made me realise that maybe I haven't processed my gender identity yet. Like, ouch, some of this hit too close to home. I loved it though.
🖤 I hope your journey brings you joy. Same here 🖤
I'd love to see a video about The Owl House, I just love what Danna Terrace and the owl house team are doing with that show. They have very normalized queer representation of main characters. Danna has been fighting for it and is making the most of what she has been given. I just love it so much and it deserves attention
For me the falling in love with himself part made perfect since. Loki would fall in love with himself lol But what kinda put me off was the fact that it had to be a "girl version" BEFORE he fell in love with himself (implying heavily that he's straight when canonically he is not).
EXACTLY! And she's the ONLY female Loki in existence, like they only bothered writing one so Loki could fall in love with himself, but it'd still look like the standard het romance- & if that's not it, why no other female Lokis?
_However._ Being with a woman does NOT mean he's straight, or not really bi. You're bi whoever you're with- you don't have to date different genders to "prove" it. Onscreen, tho- yeah, it feels like a bit of a cop-out to have one "I'm bi" line then throw him straight into a r/ship with a woman & never mention it again (afaik). I still don't think he _has_ to get with a guy, but it'd be nice to see the occasional thing that at least shows his interest in more than 1 gender- mentioning a previous partner, or saying someone's hot... Mostly tho, I'm just happy if they don't perpetuate the horrible negative stereotypes about bi people.
I never clicked on a video so fast!! Incredible as always 🥰
Yay! Thank you!
I’m nonbinary and I didn’t even notice they were “trying” to write a genderfluid narrative. They literally gave us nothing. I did notice when they confirmed MCU Loki is pansexual tho, he and Sylvie had a conversation when they were on the train in the fourth episode I think, about princesses and princes vying for his attention and he was like “a bit of both” and that was awesome. A shame they didn’t make his genderfluidity as obvious, even with a one liner like that.
My fav non-binary character is juno steel (from the punumbra podcast) and even though it takes place mostly on Mars he is still human and uses he/him and lady throughout the show and its never made out to be a "thing" it's just show as part of who he is
yesssss i love juno!!!!
Oh yeah he's rad. I mean by around the point that was semi-explored I did lose interest, but myeah he's neat.
I think it's crucial to have more human nonbinary representation, but I also like that a lot of non-human characters are nonbinary because why the hell would they adhere to human ideas of gender? Making them nb takes away the idea that gender is obviously universally binary. I think it's unimaginative if other species have the same genders and gender roles as human, so it makes sense they are nobinary. That said, we really need more nonbinary humans.
I think it's just an issue of lazy writing in that regard. One could try to imagine different societies and their gender conceptions.
Making every alien a slightly augmented human is lazy but then pretending that going against the "gender binary" is thinking outside the box in the writer's room because "why would aliens have human ideas of gender" isn't any better. Instead of actually thinking outside the box they just use this as a shortcut for whatever they want to invoke in their audience, to me it seems that there is an assumption in that explanation that gender is a human concept. I think that's stupid, how about not playing into human exceptionality in a genre meant to explore the vastness of cosmos?
The same situation of writers assuming the model of Western civilisation and its progress is just the natural order of civilization in general.
We're quite literally left with another binary of copy pasting the rigid system or outright saying there isn't one.
When Sylvie was taken by the TVA as a kid, my first thought really was that her nexus event is that she was born male and identified as female and that she used her shapeshifting ability to live female. Why else would there be only one female Loki? It would an interesting plot to explore, but I doubt they would go in that direction.
Given how she was playing with the model ship and dragon, I think her Nexus Event was that she would be purely heroic.
Then again, SPOILER ALERT:
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He Who Remains could just have been playing the long game and ensuring all the players were in the right position.
I am curious what her nexus event really is. Clearly something happened if Renslayers is teasing her about it
As an autistic non-binary person I've always felt seen by the robot/ alien non-binary person. I think it's the whole 'outsider a bit confused by humans' aspect.
Same kinda,I understand those outsider characters well too.
Literally thank you for making this, this trope really annoys me only because it feels so common now.
I love the idea of being a genderless alien but I don't like that now in media that seems to equal "nonbinary".
I wanted to like characters like Double Trouble but to me they're not nonbinary..they're just an alien.. (tbh the fact that they are also a con artist kind of irks me even though I like the conversation of gender being performance but idk it just feels like they did it weird putting them so close together)
and its annoying because I do feel like you can do both! but now it just feels like it's.....every.. time..
Omg. I also hated that they were a con artist.. I think it wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't like one of the few nonbinary characters that exist...
In my opinion, every identity needs 3 types of representation...
1) represent their struggles
2) represent their life outside of their struggle
3) represent a naturalized version where their identity is not important to the story or change how others treat them... Hosever they are visible... This means, that they can have a gay marriage, or other things that show them living a life as humans outside of the plot where their identity is visible, but not make the whole story about what its like to be a gay superhero or whatever...
I do want to add that in the case of Janet in the good place. Other Janets do not correct people when they are labeled as a girl. I personally saw this as conformation that /that/ Janet is nonbinary.
oH SHIT YOU'RE RIGHT. (I mean we've almost always only seen 'Bad' Janets in detail and like one neutral janet that shouldn't really count as anything because I'm pretty sure she's the only Janet that genuinely counts as a robot in everything but form and name, and like that one Disco Janet that I thought was very funky)
On one hand I can see that and agree but on another it feels like it's being stretched to that conclusion...
I'm always thankful as a bi masc enby person to hear others talk about how representation irl is different than in media, because so many people will say it's biphobic or transphobic etc to expect a show to actively SHOW their characters doing queer things, except the difference is that in shows characterization relies on showing and not telling, whereas irl people are much more complex and can obviously be understood as bi, etc, without ever having to exhibit that.
Really tired of "oh she's bi but we never show that in the show and don't have to" being used as an excuse to deny us rep. It'd be totally fine if that were used for a few characters as accurate portrayals of many bi folk irl, but this happens like every single time. I can't even think of a bi character in media who ever ended up in a lasting same sex relationship. Usually it's mentioned in passing like some sort of joke, or its used to fetishize women and then be tossed aside the moment a het relationship happens.
Big difference between irl rep and fictional rep, and yes, blatantly never showing any queer interactions in shows/books/movies for your queer characters IS a form of erasure. Irl is absolutely different from movies and we need to stop acting like it's ok to never portray queerness as long as we tell and don't show.
How I would love to see the alien trope play out:
Human: So are you a boy or a girl?
Alien: My gender is beyond human comprehension.
Human: So you are non-binary?
Alien: Referring to me as non-binary continues to projects human ideas onto my gender and invalidates my identity. I am simply [Alien gender word], the true meaning of which is beyond human comprehension.
Love the idea of Alien Gender Word
I would Love that. Alien Gender. And it can't be translated to human💖👍
The Loki/Sylvie thing was waaaayyy too much like incest for my tastes. They have the same family and practically surname!
They've just put "fluid" on the form and an easily editable scene to placate us.
It wasn’t incest. It was masturbation.
Loki is so narcissistic, of course he'll go a deviant of himself. At the very least, it wasn't a HORSE deviant of himself. (I'm referring to the mythos loki tho)
how do you see incest?? they didn't even know each other, weird
@@GabybelieberMcCan say your parents had twins, and put you both up for adoption. The adoption system is messy though, and you both are separated. Then, years later, you meet up, realise you have the same surname, that you both were adopted, and look very similar. You found your lost twin!
Then you hook up.
That's incest my dude.
But they aren't related and don't see each other as relatives. At absolute worst, it's a very vanilla selfcest but even that's a stretch.
Im pretty afraid for season two because marvel did confirm a male love interest, and i have a feeling theyre gonna use lokis genderfluidity to just make it a straight romance, by making him present female
oh shit, did they really? that's... depressing but also hilarious, lmao. like, assuming they actually do that, they really just said "you can have a bisexual loki or a genderfluid loki. PICK ONE."
Loki and möbius ideally
Then in season 3, look can go to superhell
@@eiliscantsleep y yo a ti, loki.........
Pretty sure it's a "yeah we have a male love interest for Loki in season 2" but it'll be a love interest for Sylvie because you know *wink wink* she is a Loki too *wink wink* that wouldn't surprise me coming from Disney...
Disney only has gay people in their major series/movie if their gender/sexuality can easily be hidden to still appeal to straight audiences. Loki is “canonically” genderfluid and bisexual but it’s never explicitly stated or shown in any significant way, and he ends up in a heterosexual relationship at the end. Marvel/Disney will never have an explicitly, undeniably gay character leading a film in their major properties.
The Owl House is the only exception I can think of but tbh I don't think they get credit for that, they barly promote it at all and kept talking about Luz and Amity as "close friends". Idk how they acted after they're officially girlfriends now but I'm not sure I want to know.
I still remember the pan-Lando fiasco from Solo.
@@andrewlane6914 yeah, otherwise it's in the background of Star vs., close to the last episode, "I don't want to date Earth... Men" on Ducktales; and I know Disney+ would really rather I watch that new Monster Inc show which looks SO mediocre.
He ends up in a relationship with himself. Sif told him that, at the end, all he’ll have is himself.
@@andrewlane6914 The Owl House is not a major property either. It’s only on their streaming service, and is barely promoted. I literally only heard about it from LGBT circles online. A niche internet cartoon is nowhere near good enough in 2021.
i really liked the non-human nonbinary trope when i was first exploring my gender identity - it felt very validating! it had felt like an acknowledgement of the socially constructed, non-universal nature of gender. non-human nonbinary characters to me were saying “hey the gender binary isnt this universal thing set in stone like people like to act like it is. if im nonbinary you can be too”
but nonhuman nonbinary characters have started feeling less like that to me and more like “the gender binary is a HUMAN thing and the only reason anyone wouldnt identify with it is if they are biologically incapable of doing so aka NOT human”…. nonbinary aliens are fine, they make sense, but it’s time we got nonbinary humans too :/
i was really hoping for a conversation between loki and sylvee that explored their ways of thinking more and highlighted their similarities and differences. including something along the lines of 'why the feminine form?' and 'why the male form?'. loki could have given an answer about how many planets favor the men and treat them better because of it so it comes out of ease and allows him to face less repercussions for his actions which would show his deviousness and intelligence, while sylvee could have said that many men she's come across bend more easily to her will when shes in female form which would show her own deviousness and intelligence but laced with a layer of manipulation rather than simplicity and ease. if they wanted a bonding moment between the two from this, they could have had loki mention how its been so long since he presented as a woman and he misses it, and sylvee could encourage him to do it in that moment and then we'd get to see lady loki too
One thing that I've hated with Disney is that it seems like they put 'queer' characters in their shows for good pr rather than for the sake of representing an oppressed community. They wanted to make Loki gender fluid but then they never really go on to display it in the show. They say one line about Loki liking a princess or a prince but then it is never really mentioned again. This seems to get the LQBTQ community talking about the show getting people to watch it more and make Disney more money without ever displaying a character ever being gender fluid or bisexual.
This absolutely. It's just pandering and in such a small amount they won't really suffer a huge backlash about it.
I mean, just one line from the show about them being Bi, was enough for the Anti-SJWs or Conservative to lose their mind.
Right? I know people who legit drop the show just because of that.
@@mandymoe12 I know a couple people who dropped all of the MCU after finding out that Starlord is pan. He can bang all the cis chicks he wants, but hell to the no squared on him touching a transgender person or anyone who isn’t a cis vagina person.
Just a thing: in Norse Mythology Loki (a proud Jotun, not an Asgardian) is NOT Odin's son; on the contrary, they met during one of Odin's adventure and they became a sort of "blood brothers". Marvel and the MCU were the one that put this notion into the media aka that Loki is Odin's son and Thor's brother.
How to reduce your carbon footprint? Hold big corporations accountable with politics and laws.
Thank you for uploading today since I had to deal with a homophobic conversation and also a transphobic conversation. I’m not out to my family as lesbian as is my cousin who is also lesbian. The homophobic one was against young and teenage lgbtq+ people with my dad and stepmom and the transphobic one was against anyone who doesn’t fit the gender binary with my aunt ,gran and lesbian cousin. But they would not class themselves as homophobic and transphobic.
9:51 The point you make here is actually something I find really interesting with Changeling lore in DnD. As a race of people who can change their physical appearance and sex at will, they are first described as changing appearance similar to how other races change clothes, but more interestingly, there's a bit about how sex, to a changeling, is just something else to be change. Just like changing hairstyle, skin colour, etc. Basically, they view sex and appearance as something close to putting on a different outfit.
"Every time we try to imagine an alien, in the end, it's just ourselves from a different angle, because all we have are human things. So the ambition to assemble them in an order that's alien to us is kind of inherently doomed. But that doesn't mean it's useless. Imagining that which is human, that humans are not. When I say I don't want to be human, what I really mean is "I can't stand being human like this. What I want instead, is to be human like THAT.""
-Heaven Will Be Mine by Worst Girls Games
Idk, I finished this VN last night, and that quote was just all that was going through my head through this whole video, I felt it was in some way fitting.
amanda bynes in shes the man feels like better genderfluid rep to me than loki
I hate that you are right but wow that’s so accurate
😅😆
I hate how accurate this comment is
Just want to point out that for bloodhound we do get to see more confirmation that bloodhound is a human from seeing their human parent, family, tribe and versions of bloodhound from when they were younger. This can be found in the "Story from the out lands" Video on bloodhound on the Apex TH-cam channel. This isn't like hidden lore it's just were most of the lore for the game is. We've just never seen bloodhound's full face.
AoS had better POC and queer rep than the *canon* MCU, and it's hard to not see that as one of the reasons Marvel is distancing their brand from it.
I think it would be amazing if going forward with the 2nd season of the series we saw more flashbacks of ‘our Loki’s’ life, we can plainly see that Sylvie being a female is *not* what caused the nexus event in her timeline.
More than likely it was her parents telling her she was adopted and that they were still a loving family, removing Loki’s main motivation for aligning with Thanos as he felt he was not ‘part of the family’, that they lied to him for centuries and that he wasn’t even an Asgardian but a frost giant.
I’d like to think that Loki spent phases of his life drifting between periods of being Female, Male, in-between & neither. Currently a male, after all ‘It varies from moment to moment’ with him.
But at that point in Loki’s life, he was a she. Her parents decided to break the news she was adopted for Sylvie’s timeline but didn’t do so in the sacred timeline. It’s just that in recent years over the MCU Loki has presented as a male, but who’s to say that Loki wasn’t a woman for a good century or two just before.
SHOW *AND* TELL PLEASE!
11:26 "That classic bastion of modern mythology, the Percy Jackson books."
*Proceeds to reference a character from the Magnus Chase books from the same universe*
Quick note on mythological Loki since I believe you referred Odin as Loki's father somewhere around the 7-8 minute mark: In the mythology, Loki is not Odin's child, instead being the child of (going off wikipedia but this is a very well known character and it's right at the start of the article so if it was wrong someone would have fixed it) Fárbauti (a jotun) and Laufey (a goddess, though I'm not sure if she features in any actual stories, they might both just be background characters to explain Loki's origin)
There was a close connection between Odin and Loki but it was - if I recall - somewhat more equal than father and child. It seems they may have been blood brothers (not in the biological siblings sense of the term) and were very close in the past but have since drifted apart a bit.
I'm sure someone else has more details but either way the "Loki is Odin's son" is only part of the marvel character and not the mythological one.
@@junhansguitar1036 Yeah that's essentially what I said in the second paragraph. Or if there's any specific nitpick you had with it, I can't see what that was.
You put into words exactly why I was so hyped about Raine Whispers from The Owl House!!!! Yessss
As a genderfluid person who loves fantasy and sci-fi I have to admit this is one of my favourite tropes. Genderfluid characters who are shapeshifters allow me to live vicariously through them (especially when everyone around them treats them as the gender they're presenting as - something I don't really get to experience irl) and also they're just cool lol.
At the same time, all of the criticisms in this video are 100% accurate and this trope can be genuinely harmful when it's people's only experience of nonbinary characters onscreen.
I'd be sad to see this trope disappear completely but would love for there to be more nonbinary and genderfluid human representation in media to balance it out.
I shudder at the idea of someone pushing me to only want to see me represented by the ugliest species in existence. I hate being human, why would I only want to see my gender experience portrayed as being human when being human is horrible.
omg this was the nuanced gender discussion around lokis shape shifting ability I was hoping would be in the show, loved this
Rowan back with another banger 😫🙌
Something that really bothers me is that, in my language (German), we don't have a gender-neutral pronoun. So in She-Ra, they actually referred to Double Trouble as he/him.
That's annoying
11:23 I think a solution to this particular part of the issue would be setting it up so the shapeshifting species in question is limited in their ability to only change into a form that reflects their internal identity, rather than just freely shaping into anything, that way the power puts emphasis on identity rather than undermining it.
23:00 I'm not sure about calling microbial life "queer"... even in such unrealistic context. It seems to me far more like it would be referencing the scientific reality of such life than personifying human identity onto it.
Yeah, at best it's a pun
Well, it is Futurama. If they can have a toad that hypnotizes people with its eyes, why can't they have sentient queer microbes?
i was surprised when i heard fandom rumblings abt canon genderfluid loki (i generally avoid marvel but my friends dont) but "sex: fluid" makes much more sense. gotta be honest, that reads to me as "loki is a shapeshifter" more than anything else, and it sounds like the showrunners are pulling a "dumbledore is gay." i'm glad we've come as far as toh and she-rah in terms of explicit rep, but that doesn't mean we can expect it everywhere, and i wish people would stop rushing to congratulate disney or whomstever for throwing them scraps that won't pan out. it's "sherlock" all over again. (i am not immune-ive definitely gotten into shows that are queerbait-y or even that had vague coding i could read things into-but it's important to recognize when ppl are working to push boundaries vs trying to capitalize on a growing demographic of viewers)
Strongly agree
Tangiental about genderfluid nonhumans in miniseries: in Good omens episode 3 in the crucifixion scene, Crowley is wearing women's clothing of the era. Crowley is still played by David Tennant in this scene and no attention is drawn to this detail (and yeah, I know the reason the protagonists aren't properly explicitly nonbinary is the same reason their being in love is relegated to subtext, corporations gonna queerbait) but it's a fun little fact that I want more people to know
In actuality the reason they didn't kiss was because they had to follow the novel (written in the 90s). The co-author Terry Pratchett is dead, and Neil Gaiman didn't want to change their vision much.
@@miticaBEP07 i left that fact out of my comment because i felt it was too obvious
8:09
the horse story
Loki was tasked with distracting Svadilfan under threats of violence and death. The chase ensued, and the impregnation happened. It wasn't only done in horse form, but done under duress. After long exhausting chase.
I agree! Here some KIDS shows the rep non-binary HUMAN characters (Craig of the Creek and Kipo and the age of Wonderbeasts) sadly none of them are main characters (or main side characters) tho.
Waitwait who's the nb in Craig of the Creek?
@@andrewlane6914 Angel and I forgot the other kids name
We just got Raine Whispers in the Owl House, but again: not a main character.
We did just get a super confirmed lesbian (technically bi/mostly-lesbian) romance for the main character yesterday though.
As a parent of children young to old something to remember is that children don’t see cartoon characters the way adults do. They are all equally real to children. All my children turned to me at one point while in elementary school and asked me if a cartoon was real. So while adults feel the difference between human characters and non human characters. Children don’t necessarily. They didn’t only ask me about “human” shows but ones with completely non human casts.
I want to thank you so much for your channel!! As a bi person, I love your channel so much!! You are awesome!!
Loki but pregnant is everywhere in norse mythology. In one story, he eats a half-burned heart (for some reason) gets pregnant, and births "the evils that plague the world."
Honestly guys, let's just never look for the MCU for any type of representation. Like ever. Disney has made it abundantly clear it just doesn't give a sht about queer people a LONG time ago.
The movies absolutely, but the TV shows are doing amazing.
Literally yesterday we explicitly got two main character girls in a relationship, and that another main character was in a relationship with a non-binary character (who has also appears in two episodes now).
Which is a HUGE step from Star vs. The Forces of Evil which needed just a few years ago that was being loaded for only _background_ queer representation, and one lesbian/bi couple at the very end.
It's practically two different companies. Like FOX News having Tucker Carlson while FOX had Brooklyn 99.
@@tyrant-den884 I dont know how to explain this to you but the worldwide corporation started by a racist homophobe does not care about the LGBTQ+ community. And any attempt it does moving forward is merely so it gets good PR. I'm not saying to dismiss the representation, I'm just saying don't place any expectations on it. Disney only cares about money. That is 100% the bottom line.
@@quiondasjj9293 and I'm hopeful at this direction they are seeking money in in the world of television.
@@tyrant-den884 So sad that queer people need to buy their shot at recognition, social validity, or acceptance. It is true that money is all Disney cares about, I just hope y'all have enough.
Absolutely.
Main Disney movies and the MCU in general have already spoken: they couldn't give less of a shit about us.
And frankly, every passing day I give less and less of a shit about them...
Me who hasn't read Magnus Chase yet just pauses the video to speedread the entire series and return in an hour to watch the video
Half of why I am tolerant of Double Trouble (and similar shape-shifting enbies) as more-positive representation is because...I've literally been in cargo-pants and an XL concert t-shirt and am so just naturally femme that I was forced and/or ridiculed by cis-men into the woman's restroom at bars. Some days all it takes for me to be perceived as "female" is that I shaved my face and put my hair in a ponytail.
That said, I do wish Double Trouble was less compliant with such a prevalent trope that makes us gender-fluid or non-binary people seem weird or alien or supernatural.
im picturing you as link from zelda
One note about Loki's gender in the mythology: He seems to have taken on an archetypical "mother of monsters" role-both in the sense that three of his four most famous children are monstrous (a weird horse, a giant wolf, and a ridiculously huge snake) and in the sense that we have an odd mention of him birthing the misfortunes of the world. More speculatively, some scholars have theorized that Loki was at some point a god of the hearth. All in all, I'm _very_ interested in what Loki was like in the centuries before we have any record of the mythology, and sad we'll probably never have an answer.
Personally, regarding the Loki show, I felt his response to the question of having a prince, or princess partner in the past offered more direct representation than the dossier. With him responding "a little of both"
oh man. "it varies from moment to moment" would have been so perfect and now im sad/mad it didn't happen :'(
What’s interesting is that for a while I did love the idea of just fluidly shape shifting between genders and that does sound amazing. However as I’ve grown up I’ve lost that fantasy, it’s still a fun idea but less appealing.
Now a more human genderfluid character just feels like it would be more refreshing. It’s really disconcerting to see mostly aliens when being represented, and a huge lack of labels when non binary people are present, human or not. Loki might not have been able to show us genderfluid Loki, especially with how Sylvia was written, but more acknowledgement of their identity would have been nice. I liked the line, “Well yes all of us are female sometimes, but I’m looking for one that is female most of the time” or have Mobius or Loki bring it up. We saw some of his past, maybe we could have seen a young Loki exploring their identity?
Maybe I hoped for far too much and too little at the same time. The bi representation was great. I didn’t expect a coming out scene at all and I was blown off my feet when it appeared.
Agree with all of this, though quick correction: in the mythology, Odin isn't Loki's father. (That's a Jotun called Farbauti.)
I would love to hear you talk about the owl house on Disney channel! It has a non-binary character, Raine, who uses they/them pronouns and is the love internet of one of the main characters. The protagonist is also canonically bi and in a relationship with another girl.
Thank you for making such researched, well-thought out content. I just finished my show and I was so consumed with this discourse for days! This video was very informative, eye-opening, and nuanced. You rock!
Love your videos. So much great thought behind each of your topics. I'd also want to know your thought behind Dr. Who. Why it took decades for this 'universe travelling time lord' finally choose to rejuvenate anything but 'white cis male'. And peoples' reaction to it.
I haven't watched the show myself, but Taylor from the show "Billions" seems to be a positive representation of a Non-Binary character. My mom watches a lot of TV shows and when she saw them she immediately sent me a bunch of interviews with the actor who plays them exclaiming "I think I'm starting to understand where you're coming from". It's so helpful for me to point at media like that and say "that's me"
It’s so funny when the Russo brother was playing the “first gay character” in Marvel… honey that’s not a character that’s a 20 second background person
my interpretation is that "sex: fluid" counts for all the loki variants across the multiverse, since they come in all shapes, species, genders, sexes, and aligator. the tva deal with alot of lokis so of course their file on them would be general to all of them.
I feel like we need new vocabulary to talk about this kind of Loki type situation. Calling it failed queer representation feels wrong, because authentic rep was so far from the focus of the show. This was what I’d call solely “queer acknowledgment”-even if it is well-intentioned, it’s so low effort that categorizing the show as queer media feels disingenuous. Maybe someday, in a world where lots of in depth stories featuring all different kinds of people exist, “acknowledgment” might not stick out like a sore thumb like it does today.
^^^This, exactly this
YES