Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2323-2327 (19-23 November 2012) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread
Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
I expect this may be answered in the coming months, but I wonder if Claire is a little resentful for how 'easy' it was for Clinton to fix his firework accident. If they haven't developed much better reassignment procedures in the QCverse, I'd imagine it's frustrating to see self induced harm stemming from stupidity corrected in awesome ways when it's such an ordeal to just get your body the way it ought to be.
The other thing I'm wondering is how this is going to be revealed to the wider cast and how they'll react. Some would probably react like Marten but I can see a lot of uncomfortable questions from Emily.
Edit: Claire and Clinton are 3 years apart. They are not twins, Claire is older.
Madmartigan:
--- Quote from: BoDJangles on 19 Nov 2012, 06:53 ---Clinton strikes me as the type of person who is chomping at the bit for a transhuman operation to make himself into an astral corona-surfing robo-whale (go play Eclipse Phase, kids! It's hella fun!), so I can't imagine a "simple" change of gender or sexual organs bothering him in the least. I expect when the two of them had the conversation about Claire's gender identity, his first reaction was "Psh, that's ALL you want to change when we've got fully-lifelike cybernetic prosthetics available? Plebeian." Any animosity between the two is just typical sibling annoyances.
--- End quote ---
If anything, Clinton is the type to go for dangerous hardcore cyborg surgery and become more robot than human and thusly become non-gendered as he's seems disinterested in the idea of romance.
--- Quote from: Change on 19 Nov 2012, 07:12 ---
--- Quote from: Madmartigan on 19 Nov 2012, 06:52 ---This would somewhat explain the more fiery sibling rivalry now. Though "trans" is a bit of an umbrella term and doesn't explain it all.
--- End quote ---
I think the fiery sibling rivalry is way more explained by the fact that they're twins, or even siblings. Jeph might have had your thoughts, but Claire identifying as trans doesn't really explain anything more about their rivalry than them being siblings would.
--- End quote ---
Just to be more clear, I meant the fact they were most likely brothers at birth and typically, the rivalry is more pronounced, in my experience, with brother/brother than sister/brother or even sister/sister. But that's my experience and I say this with the knowledge of all my cousins from my mom's sister are all female. The younger brother/older brother is a big thing. Though not as pronounced as it would be if there were a middle child.
StevenC:
--- Quote from: Daniel Patrick Moynihan on 19 Nov 2012, 07:22 ---I expect this may be answered in the coming months, but I wonder if Claire is a little resentful for how 'easy' it was for Clinton to fix his firework accident. If they haven't developed much better reassignment procedures in the QCverse, I'd imagine it's frustrating to see self induced harm stemming from stupidity corrected in awesome ways when it's such an ordeal to just get your body the way it ought to be.
The other thing I'm wondering is how this is going to be revealed to the wider cast and how they'll react. Some would probably react like Marten but I can see a lot of uncomfortable questions from Emily.
Edit: Claire and Clinton are 3 years apart. They are not twins, Claire is older.
--- End quote ---
I'd say in a world where fully functional sentient AIs exist and robot bodies for those AIs that are indistinguishable from humans in movement and speech are affordable for your average middle class person, surgery should be pretty far advanced too.
MercuryP:
I did some "coming out" as trans recently (I'm mtf and early in transition so I still look male), and I have to admit this is pretty much exactly what it's like. You decide you want to tell people about it, you tell them about it completely out of the blue, and if they're supportive they basically say "ok, thanks for telling me" at which point there is awkward silence while you try and figure out what else to say. Even with people who are open and supportive, oh the awkward silence.
If I had to summarize transgenderism in a paragraph, I'd say that everyone makes a lot of decisions about who they want to be in life. And while we can't choose our attitudes toward gender, we CAN choose whether or not we act on them, effectively making a choice between happiness and self-actualization, or living a life where you'll never have that. It's an obvious choice, and for transsexuals it's worth the time, money, and discrimination you're taking on in doing it. What people generally don't understand, though, is that the physical implications of being transsexual are not exactly a big deal to most of us; there are obviously differences in the values of men and women, and when everybody assumes your values are one way or another because of your physical appearance, you'd like to change your physical appearance to prevent that wrong assumption from occurring every single day of your life. For people who are willing to understand and support us, do know that people like me who are currently transitioning may be considerably more open to talking about the details of it than people who have already transitioned and would not like to be reminded of their previous life which they hated.
I'm kind of interested to see where this goes. I don't think there's a point to introducing an explicitly trans character and then not doing anything about it, but I can't really imagine there's that much of a story to tell beyond talking about things that happened in the past.
SJCrew:
While you worded it much differently than I would have, Willpell, I too think this was mostly a very 'in your face' comic intended to appeal to a certain demographic. But I'm not mad at Jeph for it. I know he's very keen on issues of sexuality and addresses them a lot in his works, so a shout out to his transgender readers does not seem out of character for him or the comic.
Judging by the responses and discussion in this thread, it appears the comic has achieved its intended effect.
@ TheCommodore: Transgender is worth discussion. It still isn't something modern society is completely used to, and not something many of us are even exposed to in our daily lives, so expecting everyone to be as casual about it as you are is unrealistic.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version