For Tech Radar's week on queerness in games, I wrote about my relationship to Xenoblade Chronicles and what Future Redeemed means to me as a queer player and a critic/journalist. It felt like reevaluating a bad relationship, reflecting on the good and bad and coming away with an understanding that even at best we see things irreconcilably differently.
This article was fantastic. Some of my own thoughts in response to it:
Honestly, in recent months I've come to the conclusion of "fuck canon" as a concept. Would I love if queer Xenoblade characters were explicitly and unambiguously queer with no room for conservatives to argue against it? Yes. Obviously.
But who cares?
These are stories that exist for people to connect to. And a lot, a lot of queer people connect with these stories and these characters. If Monolithsoft didn't intend it? Too bad for Monolithsoft, but these characters are queer, regardless of how canon it is. That personal connection, that relationship between player and media, is far more important than any authorial intent.
Impact over intent. And the impact is there.
Fuck conservatives who say it isn't canon. Fuck the room left for ambiguity and pushback. It doesn't matter. If you connect to Nia, Juniper, or A in a trans way, they're trans. If you connect to Morag as a sapphic woman coming out to herself well into adulthood rather than as a kid or teen, she's sapphic.
I wonder if anyone is out there trying to claim that Mia doesn't have gay dads?
Last year, I wrote a trio of essays against intention in my Unwinnable Monthly column, which you can read here:
Tatsuki Fujimoto and Oto Toda’s “Just Listen to the Song” is a short story about the mortifying coil of interpretation. It’s brief for a one-shot from the mangaka of Chainsaw Man at just 18 pages in length and its subject matter is far less spectacular than anything he has written yet. The premise is simple: a high school boy records a love song, his crush shares it with their class and soon the world is watching, looking, seeing things that weren’t there, or perhaps . . .
