"theyre all trans sharon": Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction

Academic Commentary
Title:	“theyre all trans sharon”: Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction
Commentator:	Brianna Dym, Jed Brubaker, Casey Fiesler
Date(s):	December 2018
Medium:
Fandom:	Video games
External Links:	http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/brubaker_dym_fiesler
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"theyre all trans sharon": Authoring Gender in Video Game Fan Fiction is an academic paper examining tag trends of works on Archive Of Our Own featuring non-cisgender characters. It was published in the journal Game Studies. The authors analyzed metadata from 402,084 unique fan fictions from AO3, and then drilled down to a subset of 2,279 fics.

Excerpts

Video game developers expand diversity in games by including diverse characters and different player mechanics, but in an industry still dominated by white, cisgender, and straight men (Paul, 2018), how do video game fans coming from those diverse backgrounds respond to representation in games?

Fan fiction communities, where writers create new narratives based on existing media, can provide a window of insight. Through video game fan fiction, these writers also respond to and reconstruct depictions of diversity within video games. Fan fiction communities, such as the popular website Archive of Our Own (AO3), therefore offer a space for video game fans to push back against different assumptions within games. The flippant statement “theyre all trans sharon” appears in the metadata of one story in this archive that re-imagines the main characters of a video game as transgender--a rhetorical move that in the context of this particular community of video game fans is nothing unusual. The sarcastic statement warns off any confused readers with a dismissive, textual wave of the hand. Of course they are trans, Sharon. Why would they be otherwise?

This comment appears in a freeform “tag” that describes and categorizes one of the many video game-based works in a fan fiction archive, where media remixes thrive. As they do on platforms like Tumblr, tags often serve as commentary in addition to categorizing function (Bourlai, 2017). This tag also pushes back against the heteronormative, hypermasculine tension surrounding the video game community.

It is well-known that fandomts[sic] often take miniscule details and run with them to craft alternative narratives, especially when inserting queerness into those narratives (Jenkins, 1988). However, authors commonly recraft canonically cisgender characters as transgender without making significant changes to a game’s narrative. Authors will also regularly acknowledge that they wrote Rhys as a transgender man, even when nothing else in the story would indicate this detail to the reader: “Trans rhys is implied because that's my headcanon and i'll take it to my grave”; “Trans Rhys, it's not mentioned but he's trans in the AU”; “trans!Rhys AU...uh yeah that's it im just a sap for trans rhys”; and “Also there's only like one thing barely implying it in this but you should know I wrote this with Trans Rhys in mind.” This sort of explanation is not unique to Rhys. Authors of fan fiction for other games also clarify that they had written a transgender character, even though nothing in the game’s story suggests that the character might be transgender. The author of one story about the Dragon Age series used this tag: “garrett is also trans but isn't specified in here.”

Sometimes, writers responded directly to the game studio in tags: “Bioware can eat my entire ass.” When game studios engaged less directly with queer diversity, such as in the case of Blizzard’s attitude toward Overwatch, writers often used sarcastic statements to challenge other fans that might critique their rewrite: “if somebody tells me i can't make them gay and trans in 1868, but magic dragon tattoos are fine then, i am going to eat their keyboard.” Statements like, “trans!zenyatta, dont ask how robots are trans im a writer it can happen” and “i headcannon outertale sans as trans and this story focuses on him ok” point to imagined nay-sayers lurking in the comments.

Even if the fan fiction on AO3 does not directly influence industry practices, the stories there provide critical discussion concerning topics less often explored in video games and the game industry. Fans have long used fan fiction to reimagine themselves in media. As we have demonstrated, fan fiction can also be used to expand narrative spaces in an attempt to make them more welcoming. The fan fictions around the video games that we have discussed represent epicenters of critical conversations that push at the boundaries of diversity in games and in broader gaming communities. Authors took advantage of the nuances that articulated character gender identity in Dream Daddy and created a vibrant space for writing about trans identity. The small details provided by the game developers provided a significant payoff for players. In other instances, fans found different routes to broadening diversity. In the case of Overwatch, authors rewrote many characters as different gender identities rather than adopting specific readings for a select few characters. In the case of Chloe Price from Life is Strange and Zer0 from Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software, 2012), players drew inspiration from comments made by people involved in the game development process to establish a character interpretation outside of the default assumption.

Video games will never satisfy fans’ desire for diversity with a magical number of token characters. While developers should continue to move toward providing diverse characters in games, they can also provide more opportunities for fans by leaving characters open to interpretation. In the case of Borderlands, authors rewrite Rhys as transgender widely across the fan community because nothing in the game narrative strictly denies this interpretation of the character. In addition to designing for multiple interpretations, developers can help fans craft more complex narratives by including character options that speak to more diverse gender identities. As is demonstrated in Dream Daddy, meaningful design choices can be as small as letting a character wear a binder instead of a tank top.