hobbitsaarebas:

w4rgoddess:

(via How Trans Consultants Saved Dragon Age: Inquisition)

None of this is surprising. I’m very glad they didn’t fuck up Krem the way they almost did, but they still didn’t bother to hire a trans actress.  Then again, it didn’t occur to them to have a black woman voice Vivienne – or to have consultants about racial representation ever, despite their many, many missteps on this front – or to be supportive of their devs/writers who are women or PoC or queer when they’ve been attacked by GG types. Bioware does good superficial diversity, but when it comes down to actually living their commitment, nothing goes below the surface. They used to be better, but they’ve become a company where the decisionmakers are all white dudebros, and damn does it show.

A trans “actress”? What in the fuck??? If Bioware were gonna hire a trans person to be Krem’s VA, he’d be an actor, not an actress! What in the fuck, if you’re gonna talk about transphobia, maybe try not saying something misgendering in your actual damn post

Also what in the fuck is that article’s subtitle, “Inquisition almost screwed up on trans representation”? It already fucking did screw up, there are still ridiculous amounts of transphobia and ciscentrism in the way Krem is handled. It’s just that it’s less grotesque than it could have been. The author of this article (who, so far as I can tell, is a cis woman) is acting like the transphobia in ME:A is a big surprise from Bioware when it’s par for the fucking course with them. Most of the entire article describes how transphobic and disgusting Patrick Weekes (Krem’s author) was for the entirety of the writing process and how he had to be damn near coerced into changing the awful way he wrote Krem, and yet this author thinks it’s any kind of fucking surprise that Bioware was transphobic again later in another game?? The author even goes on to say “While Weekes deliberately wrote Krem as a trans character for cis people,” as if this isn’t itself cissexism, creating a trans character whose purpose is to serve and engage cis people. 

Look at this fucking line from this fucking article: “So much of transition in real life is dictated by trying to avoid becoming a victim at the hands of others” UM NO, TRANSITION IS ABOUT A LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE, AND GENERALLY IT’S NOT ABOUT VICTIMIZATION??? THAT’S WHAT TRANSPHOBIA IS ABOUT, NOT TRANSITION. And that is a bolded quote in the article, like it’s saying something important or relevant or interesting instead of patently false and fear-mongering. Goddamn.

Here’s another quote from the article: “Internal emails from Weekes show that from the character’s inception Bioware’s intention was for Krem to ‘have a female voice actress who has been instructed to act as though passing for a man’, with the idea of hiring a trans man to voice the character never being a matter of internal discussion.” So again, this article is acting all surprised by Bioware’s transphobia while citing explicit and undeniable examples of transphobia. Good job, Article Writer. 

That whole article is a mess, and @w4rgoddess clean up the misgendering in your post.