A Random String of Bits

Languages of Skyrim

2012.04.26 at 06:30 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged grammar, language, Old Norse, Skyrim

Can we still talk about Skyrim? I mean, I know it’s been out for a while now, and a lot of people have moved on. But I’m still playing it, and enjoying the vast explorable terrain, hundreds of quests, and terrible, hilarious bugs.

As I’ve been playing, I’ve noticed that they’ve really tried to turn the production values up to eleven. The terrain feels a lot more detailed, the voice acting is improved (and there are more voice actors), the quests are more detailed and varied, and the game is sprinkled with non-human languages. Notably, the Dragon Language (spoken, obviously, by dragons, and also by the ancient Nords) and the Falmer Language (the Falmer are a race of elves who became blind underground monsters) get considerable attention in various storylines in the game.

But for all that attention, the actual language construction has… mixed results. And since I occasionally like to tear things apart and nit-pick them to death, I thought I’d discuss what they’ve done, and where it succeeds and where it fails.

Building Imaginary Languages

A spoken or written language that is created intentionally (as opposed to most natural languages, which develop organically) is called a constructed language, or conlang. These can be created as fictional languages (well-known examples include Klingon, Na’vi, Quenya) or intended to be used in the real world (Esperanto, Solresol, toki pona). Someone who creates constructed languages is often referred to as a conlanger.

Conlangers are often seen as eccentric nerds who are wasting their time and skill. However, they are employed with increasing frequency by big media producers who want consistent, realistic languages in their fictional universes – Klingon is an early example of this. And, of course, Tolkien is the grandfather of self-indulgent conlanging, creating at least a dozen languages, many with etymological histories, ‘older’ forms of the language with traceable roots, and an amazing attention to detail. Sure, he told some stories, but that was mostly just to give his languages somewhere to live.

Real-world conlangs are often made with optimistic and lofty goals: Esperanto (a fairly early constructed language), for example, was designed to be “an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that transcends nationality and would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto). So, world peace through language. Sadly, 125 years on, we still seem to have a lot of war. Likewise, toki pona is designed to “shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona).

But on to Skyrim…

The Falmer “Language”

The Falmer language is a disappointment. I know it only comes up significantly in one quest line, but still… it’s not even remotely a language of its own, just English text written with an alternate alphabet. Basically, a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. I think I might have preferred untranslatable gibberish to this.

I mean, it’s not that hard to whip together just enough of a constructed language for one quest. I’m not asking for much here, just something a tiny bit more sophisticated. Watch how much we can do in just a few minutes:

Start with the grammar. We can make arbitrary decisions here – no one’s going to fault us for such a simple use case. Let’s pick an SOV word order, with simple inflectional markers for genitive and plurals. Say, add ‘i’ to any word to make it genitive, and ‘o’ to make it plural. Words ending in vowels take ‘ti’ and ‘to’. Simple enough. We’ll also say that the language uses a fairly simple structure, with short sentences and a minimum of relative clauses. Where prepositional phrases occur, we will let them retain their natural English word order unless there is some obvious reason to use SOV.

So, take the first sentence of the original encoded text. In our new language (keeping English vocabulary for now, but simplifying a bit) it looks like:

MERCER FREY MYTI EVERY STEP ELUDES.

The next step would be to make up some vocabulary; there aren’t that many words used in the original text, so it should be pretty easy to cook that up. Even an amateur conlanger like me could make something at least mildly interesting in just a couple of hours. And more importantly, it would give us a translated text with a consistent feel (it would flow like a natural language) but without falling back on something quite as obvious as basic substitution. And tools can automate a lot of our work – if we keep the original text simple enough, we could even just use sed or perl (or another search/replace solution) to do most of the heavy lifting.

You could argue that it is Gallus’ ‘encoded’ journal, but the story makes a big deal about the fact that it was written in Ancient Falmer, which is So Terribly Hard to translate and makes it super secure. Anyone, given a few hours, could work out “he’s used some other alphabet to write words in my language”.

And sure, there are a lot of quests, and I don’t know how big their design team was. Maybe a couple hours was too long to spend fleshing this out. But it’s still a disappointment. I suppose decoding the message is a nice easter egg, but an easter egg that required digging deeper would have been more interesting to me.

Dragon Language

The Dragon Language, on the other hand, is used much more extensively – there are numerous writings in it throughout the world, the dragons and draugr will speak in it (as combat taunts, in particular), and the protagonist (along with several NPCs) can use special ‘shouts’ that are formed from words in the language.

With increased visibility came an increased attempt to make a language that makes sense. While the dragon language, like Falmer, has its own script, the script isn’t just used to encode English; every time that script appears, it translates into something intelligible in the Dragon Language.

And the resulting language is a lot more interesting than Falmer. The grammar is very similar to English, but not identical. Word order is almost the same, but plurals inflect differently, and there is no case system (at least not that we see in the game), which is a bit lazy and feels like the result of a rushed production schedule.

Obviously we have a very small vocabulary available – there isn’t *that* much written or spoken Dragon Language in the game. But still, some of the word forms are interesting. One that struck me on an initial overview is one of the most well-known and widely used words, dov. Dov means ‘dragonkind’, as in the entire race of dragons. The word for a single dragon is Dovah. Now, ah means ‘hunter’, but “hunter of dragonkind” doesn’t feel right. So, this isn’t a simple compound word. I suspect the conlanger was going for ‘ah’ here being rooted in aan, the indefinite article in Dragon Language, with some morphological drift (which is especially likely with very common words, and since ‘dovah’ would basically be the dragons’ word for ‘person’, this is likely). This is an impressive touch – it shows that some real attention to detail was paid when choosing words for the vocabulary (instead of the usual fantasy conlang approach of ‘string syllables together more or less at random’).

Looking at the wider vocabulary, the language tends to form a lot of compound words, in a manner similar to German. I initially thought that some of its vocabulary was pulled from either Old Norse or modern Icelandic, but on further inspection I think that’s just random collision. The pronoun system is suitably complex as to feel natural. It is also quite distinct from English.

Another thing worth remarking on is that the Nords are a visibly Scandinavian people. The word Draugr, for instance, is an Old Norse word, although it is used a bit incorrectly in Skyrim (the word is used similarly to ‘mummy’ in Skyrim, but the original meaning is closer to ‘zombie’ or perhaps ‘revenant’). So, I am assuming that the Dragon Language is intended to sound Scandinavian, because it does. Even without obviously basing its vocabulary on any Scandinavian language, it pulls off the trick of really sounding Norse. The creators of the language have a good ear for phonology.

If I have one real criticism of Dragon Language, it’s the name. We don’t have anything better than ‘Dragon Language’ to work with. Either Dov’um or Dovzul would have been decent choices. Both can translate roughly to ‘dragon voice’.

Like I said above: Bethesda really pushed the production values on this game. There is a lot of wonderful attention to detail that shines through in this game. The Dragon Language is a good example of that.

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Concerto for a Rainy Day – 2012 Carolina Spring Go Tournament report

2012.04.23 at 14:00 · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged AGA, 碁, go, reflections, tournament

The day begins early – much earlier than most Sundays. I’m out the door at 8:15, for a tournament that starts at 9:00. I usually sleep in on the weekends; I didn’t even know Sundays had a 9 o’clock.

The day is rainy and grey, but bright in that clean Spring way where the contrast between everything is sharpened and it feels like you can see forever. I drive in the rain to NC State campus, a twenty minute drive through the odd combination of semi-urban and rural landscape that makes up Raleigh. Once on campus, I’m a bit confused – GPS helps me get to the right general area, but I’ve lost my GPS signal now and end up parked in a deserted-feeling area in front of a row of buildings. There is no one else walking around here, and as I’m looking around and trying to get my bearings I hear a rumbling noise. On the far side of the road, a train goes rushing by on tracks I hadn’t noticed.

The lack of people and the light rain and the sudden noise – suddenly everything feels surreal, just to the left of normal. It’s a dizzying experience – this always happens when I am stepping into the unknown, especially when I don’t have anyone familiar nearby. It isn’t a negative sensation, though; it’s pleasant in an “I might be stepping into fairyland and I may never find my way back” sort of way. I check my phone, which has gotten its GPS lock back, and realize I need to drive a block further. I spot a sign for the building I’m looking for, and park.

The surreal feeling persists as I cross the street. I realize I’m at the back of the building, which explains why things feel so deserted. I find the front entrance, and enter to find… a deserted building. No one in the lobby, no signs posted, and no obvious Go-related activity occurring. I check my email (thank the gods for smartphones) and realize I missed a detail – room 404. Great. I’ll never find it.

I do find an elevator, though, and while I wait for it several other people arrive, obviously Go players (exactly how this is obvious is lost on me, but it is clear they are Go players). One of them, an older man, smiles at me in greeting, and with that, normalcy returns.

Setup

The tournament takes about an hour to get going. The organizers seem to be having trouble with their tournament software. While we wait, I say hi to the players I know from the Triangle Go Club, and end up in a conversation with someone who is about my age. We start to play a warm-up game. He gives me 9 stones, and I’m doing pretty well about 50 moves in, when we notice that the tournament organizers have set up a projector and are projecting the first round pairings. We clean up our game, and I grab a bottle of water and head over to my assigned table.

Round 1

My first game is against Andrew, rank 15 kyu. Andrew is young – probably no older than 12. He is also very polite: He introduces himself and shakes my hand before he sits down.

As I entered at 19 kyu, I have black with 3 handicap stones. I had a chance during my warm-up game to figure out how the Ing bowls work, but it takes me a minute to work out how to program and use the game clock¹. They’re pretty intuitive, though, and I am soon hearing an amazingly cheerful voice (it reminds me of Sumomo) telling me my timer has started counting. Since I have handicap stones, my opponent actually goes first, so I immediately press my button to make it white’s turn, and hear the same message repeated again, with ‘White’ in place of ‘Black’.

Andrew plays his first move in less than a second. This isn’t too surprising – in a 3 stone handicap game, playing the 4th hoshi is an obvious opening move. I respond aggressively, approaching his stone, and now the tournament really feels underway. I throw myself into the mental space of Go, of territory and influence, attack and counter-attack.

Andrew responds almost immediately to every move I make, while I feel lumbering by comparison, often thinking for several seconds before responding. This trend continues throughout the game, and his fast moves make me feel like I need to respond equally fast, which leads to several mistakes.

His play is surprising – he pretty much discards joseki and instead favours attaching to any approach move I make. I’m admittedly weak against strange openings – even if they’re technically weaker, I haven’t seen them as much and so the best response isn’t obvious and automatic.

More importantly, Andrew is very good, especially at local fighting. I cede more and more territory, and lose several sizable groups of stones. My opponent is the tide and I fall back before his steady and relentless onslaught. I know enough about the game to build a seawall, though, and eventually the board starts to settle. Then I see it – a critical point in one of my opponent’s shape in the south-west side of the board that, if I can play there, will kill two large groups, giving me some 40 points. It’s monumental, and it could turn the tide of the game. And it’s my opponent’s turn. If he sees the weakness and plays the point, these stones will be alive.

My hands start to shake, and I can feel my pulse in my neck, speeding up. My face flushes, and I’m afraid I might actually break into a sweat. Adrenaline. I’ve always had strong adrenaline reactions, but I’ve learned to usually keep up a calm front in the face of an adrenaline storm. Still, I feel light-headed and it’s hard to think.

I stare at a different part of the board, afraid of drawing his attention to the weakness.

He makes his move, attacking my stones in the northeast corner. A few points there doesn’t matter, though. This play is bigger. I put my stone on the board firmly, and it makes a satisfying click. I press the game clock, and it chirps, signaling to Andrew that it is his turn.

The game is over shortly after this. After some confusion about how to count, we calculate the score. Even with my 40-point comeback, I lose by 20 points. Still, I feel like this is a good result. He was clearly better than me, and I had some really clever play near the end.

Round 2

I finish the first game pretty early, and have a chance to watch the other games and socialize with other players who have already finished. After everyone is done, it takes the organizers a while to enter the results and pair up the contestants for the next round. This is a repeated theme throughout the tournament, but I don’t mind – it’s a good chance to rest my mind and let my nerves calm down a little.

This time I’m up against Larry, another young player. He is ranked at 20 kyu, so we play an even game, with Larry taking black and me taking white. Larry is very intense; he doesn’t say hi, just sits down and we begin playing.

After the first round, I’m expecting to have to fight hard in this tournament, so I play very aggressively at first, overextending myself a bit. It quickly becomes apparent that I have a strong advantage in both tactical and strategic play. There are still several tricky points, and I manage to kill a large group with some pretty clever play.

The clock is running pretty low – I have less than two minutes of thinking time remaining. The smell of pizza intrudes – I’m starving. Most of the games have finished, and people are walking around while they eat. Several of the younger players are whispering nearby.. Needless to say, this is a distraction. I’m not blaming this for what happens next, but it was probably a factor. I make a huge mistake and let my opponent revive a large dead group. This probably costs me 30 points.

But I’ve taken all the corners and three of the sides, and pushed a wedge into the center. I win easily, by 76 points. I would suggest that Larry overestimated his strength, except he finished the tournament 3-1. I suppose my play style was just strong against his.

Round 3

Next comes some surprisingly delicious spinach pizza (in the sense that spinach pizza is not usually delicious) and Yet More Difficulty generating pairings. Now the problem is obvious – the children are competing as part of teams, so that their totaled wins and losses are considered. The pairing code doesn’t have a way to represent this, though, so the organizers are manually re-pairing the team members so that they don’t face each other.

I get paired with Dale, a stronger player than me – I take a 4 stone handicap. Dale is an older man, and the only adult I play against in the tournament. He is sociable and friendly, and this puts me at my ease, a relief after the previous two rounds.

Dale plays in a more relaxed style than Andrew (the only other game in which I had a handicap), and I’m able to make some pretty solid play against him. It is a very peaceful game until the end – only a small handful of captures. Still, the game is very intense and intricate as we test each other’s weak spots.

When the board feels settled, Dale keeps studying it, running his time down to less than a minute. Then he makes a desperate invasion into the widest part of my territory. I know he’s a stronger player, so I take a long time to respond. This stretches the game out for several more minutes as I carefully try to avoid mistakes. My fortifications hold, though, and his invasion fails.

The total comes to 67 points for me, and 65 points for him. We count again – it turns out he missed a space in his territory. 67 to 66. I win by a single point. This is the closest game of Go I’ve ever played.

Round 4

Even though I’m in one of the last games to finish in round 3, I know it will take a while to get the next round set up, so I take a walk to stretch. The rest of the floor is quiet – a couple students in a computer lab, and two of the young girls from the tournament playing in one of the study lounges. It strikes me how cold it is in the hall – I didn’t notice how warm it was in the room where the tournament is being held. Too many bodies.

I return to the room just as things are getting set up. I look up at the projector that shows the matches, and find my name.

Table	White	Black	HD
…
14	Wiggins Anna	Evans Violet	7

I’ve been paired with a 27 kyu player, and I’m giving her a 7-stone handicap. The tournament organizer actually walks over and apologizes. He explains that they try to avoid handicaps this large, but it was the best they could do with pairing.

But I’m intrigued. This should be a challenge. I’m not great at handicap games, and with 7 stones even a beginner will have a good chance.

Violet sits down across from me. I say hi as she places her handicap stones. She returns my greeting, but reluctantly – she seems a bit shy, or maybe she’s just distracted.

I scatter my opening moves around the board, approaching the corners. She repeatedly blocks by attaching high (I typically approach a 4-4 corner play via the low approach). This leaves her open to a 3-3 invasion, which I am able to exploit on all four corners. I am also able to capture a few sizable groups early on.

So, this may not be as hard as I was afraid it would be. But there’s another problem – as we play, she is building a very solid wall around my territory, claiming the entire center of the board. Normally this is not a sound strategy – there isn’t as much territory in the center as there appears to be, and it is harder to hold. Building that wall takes a lot of moves, and lets me firmly establish my own territory. But I’m backed against the edge pretty effectively here, and it looks like she may have enough points to win.

I manage to connect my corners, taking three sides. Violet is determined to hold the last side, though, and this is, ironically, my chance. I attack a section of her wall that isn’t fully connected. Then another. And another. Eventually I’ve formed a couple of cracks, and I move to drive a wedge into her territory. I don’t try to capture territory, just consume it. This is scorched earth – I just want to make sure nothing will ever grow here again.

I succeed, and we count the stones. I win by 25 points, which means the territory I succeeded in reducing gave me the win. Salting the earth made all the difference.

Wrapping Up

The projector is now displaying the tournament results. I can see that I did pretty well – my standing based on strength of schedule is listed, and my score is double the person below me. That win in round 3 really helped.

In the lull after the last round, people have started talking pretty loudly, and we’ve achieved the sort of din that only 30+ people in a confined space can make. The organizer has to try a few times to start speaking. They have divided the players into 4 sections based on strength:

C	27kyu – 19kyu
B	15kyu – 6kyu
A	5kyu – 1dan
dan	2dan+

I’m excited by this, because sorted like this, I’m at the top of section C. When they actually announce winners, though, they announce a 3-way tie for first; they are *only* using wins and losses to determine who ‘wins’ here.

This seems an odd choice; surely, in a ranked tournament, one unambiguous winner per group is preferable to 2 or 3? Especially given how likely it is that, in a given group of 5-10 players, several players will finish with 3 wins and nobody will finish with 4. This is basically why strength of schedule even exists.

I’m not concerned about it, though. Some pictures are taken, and I hang around with a few other players to help clean the place up. We turn out the lights and head downstairs.

At the front of the building, I say goodbye to the people still standing around and head back to my car. The rain has stopped now, and the late afternoon air is crisp and clean.

¹For anyone who is unfamiliar with Go game clocks, the clock has (in addition to some setup buttons hidden under a panel) 2 buttons for each side – one with your colour and a smaller one with your opponent’s colour. They also have an indicator that tells you how much time you have left and how many moves have been played. You press your colour after you move to indicate your move is done (it stops your game clock and starts theirs). You can press and hold the opponent’s colour to have your display show how much time their clock has left. In this tournament, we had 30 minutes main thinking time plus 5 30-second byo-yomi periods. Tournament time in Go is very different than in Chess and many other games.

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pygo – a go game client

2012.04.19 at 06:30 · Filed under Programming ·Tagged 碁, go, GTK, pygame, pygo, python, SDL

If I have anything like ‘regular readers’ (I’m not certain from the traffic patterns on the blog whether or not that’s true), you’re probably wondering where I’ve been. The answer is, basically, the same as it ever is: writing code.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Go, and doing some tabletop roleplaying. My latest programming projects are related to those hobbies. Today I want to talk about pygo, my new Go game client.

There are already a tremendous number of game clients out there. So, why would I want to create Yet Another One? There’s always the excuse of ‘it is a learning experience’, but I also try to make things that I hope will be useful to me personally. And the problem with all of the existing Go clients is that they come in one of two styles:

Desktop clients that are timed, and expect you to play an entire game in one brief sitting. Of these, cgoban3 is by far my favorite client (although it can only connect to its own kgs server).
Web-based clients that expect your games to take a long time – usually you make a move, and come back later to see what your opponent has done.

I wanted a client for medium-length games: a game that unfolds over the course of an afternoon, or maybe a couple days, while the players are simultaneously doing other things. So it needs these features:

Untimed – infinite thinking time allowed
It is possible to put it down (close the program) and pick it back up later
Desktop-based. Being on a website makes me feel like I should play just one move and check back much later, and I want to avoid that mentality
Ability to play multiple simultaneous games

I couldn’t find a client that met all of these requirements, so I decided to build this one.

First steps – pygame

My first implementation of the game used pygame. Pygame is a pythonic layer on top of SDL (which I’ve talked about before, with some convenience libraries added for games. Unfortunately, this really means ‘games’ in a much more ‘modern video game’ sense, and this library felt less and less like a good fit the longer I worked with it. When I started implementing network play, it really fell apart; getting pygame to work with either threads or existing networking libraries (like Twisted) is painful. Adding widgets like buttons or menus requires adding third-party libraries, and theming them is an additional layer of work.

Here is what the pygames version looked like before I scrapped it. This represents a long weekend’s worth of very casual hacking (maybe 6-8 total hours of distraction- and interruption-filled programming):

This looks okay, but those buttons are an eyesore, and just feel like bad UI

Note the fairly ugly buttons along the side; several of those buttons (Quit, Join Game, Listen) would be better off in a menu. But menus (especially via a menu bar) are non-trivial with pygame.

Now with more GTK

With pygame scrapped, I decided to use a widgeting toolkit that wasn’t aimed for games, because I don’t really need anything graphically sophisticated. GTK is an obvious choice, because I’ve used it extensively before. It was the first widgeting toolkit that I used, and it is still, in my mind, how such toolkits “should work” (I realize there are toolkits out there that may be better, but this one feels like the natural way because it is what I learned first). Python’s GTK bindings, pyGTK, are really good.

So, in much less time than it took me to create the previous version of the game, I had re-implemented it in GTK. To be fair, I didn’t have to re-implement any of the actual Go logic, because that was encapsulated in a GUI-element-free class (good programming technique pays off). I also haven’t started working on the networking code again yet, but I’m pretty sure Twisted can integrate into GTK’s event loop seamlessly, giving me sensible threads-free networking.

Anyway, here is what we have now:

Notice the menu bar and the nicer-looking buttons.

Much prettier. We even have a menu bar, with all of the cruft unrelated to a specific game hidden away. Even better, with Glade laying out and drawing that menu is free – it doesn’t require me to write a single line of code. I just tell glade what function to call when each menu item is clicked, and it handles all of the boring GUI stuff.

The biggest problem I’ve run into with the GTK version was also a problem I had with pygame – the board graphics take a long time to update. With GTK it is especially problematic when I try to redraw the board.

So, I modified the Goban class (which has all of the Go game logic) to return a list of positions that should be re-checked for new information. Then, in GTK, I only redraw the parts of the board that may have changed. This makes the game perfectly responsive – no detectable delay. And using python’s list data type makes this beautifully easy and elegant.

The Future

There’s still a lot of work to do here. I plan on having direct peer-to-peer network connections, as well as having a server that players can connect to. Playing multiple games simultaneously isn’t implemented yet (although with GTK, this should be almost trivial). I may implement timed games as an *option*, and alternate board sizes, komi, etc. still need to be possible. The code can’t do scoring.

Now that the project is in pretty good starting shape, it’s also available on github.

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Wandering Son Reflections: Episode 7 – “Barairo no Hoho”

2012.01.28 at 08:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged Hōrō Musuko, transgender, Wandering Son

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This episode deals mostly with Shūichi forming a romantic relationship with Anna (and the resulting fallout). It is told in an interesting nonlinear fashion; we see the two of them interacting, but not the beginning of the relationship. The story then cuts to someone teasing Anna (who is older than Shūichi) for dating him, which causes the other characters present to react with surprise. This is clever, because it aligns the character reactions with the audience reaction – it is as much a surprise to us as it is to them. This is a very effective use of closed narrative, and it manages to drop a surprise reveal into a fairly straightforward story.

Puberty sucks for nearly everyone, I suspect, but being trans at puberty is its own special form of torture. So, here we have a continuation of that narrative: Shūichi gets a zit, and wants it gone. Shūichi’s concern over having a zit seems to be markedly (socially unacceptably) feminine, to the point that he has to debate and work up courage to ask anyone what to do about it. And when he does manage to ask someone, it is his sister’s friend, whom he hardly knows – probably the distance between them makes it easier to broach the subject without feeling weird.

So, Shūichi and Anna’s relationship blooms from Shūichi asking her for advice about skin care. Anna, counter to Shūichi’s concerns, seems to take this in stride; she doesn’t appear to think that there is anything wrong or deviant about Shūichi having these concerns. The social conventions that Shūichi is concerned about violating here are ones I came up against repeatedly in my own childhood, to the point that before I was Shūichi’s age I had already internalized the idea that any beauty regimen beyond the bare minimum of showering was unacceptably feminine, and was careful to cultivate an attitude of wanting nothing to do with any of it. But Anna doesn’t seem to care, casually accepting his behavior and not remarking on it at all. Given Shūichi’s trepidations, this doesn’t seem to simply be a cultural difference – Anna just seems to have a worldview slightly askew of the cultural norm.

This episode is the first time we see one of our gender variant characters (other than Yuki) dating someone (or showing any interest in someone) who doesn’t know about their gender variance, as well. There are a lot of topics this brings to mind, but for now I’d like to give a sense of what it feels like to date someone while struggling with gender identity issues. To put it bluntly, being trans ended one relationship for me and dramatically altered another. So, let’s switch gears from Shūichi’s narrative to my own.

I have been in very few relationships. Depending on how you count, I’ve been in 2, 3, or 5. A comparatively small number. At any rate, I’ve only had two long-term (> 2 years) relationships, and those were both touched by my struggles with gender identity. In the first case, I dated a girl throughout high school. I struggled with depression the entire time, which I now recognize was repressed gender dysphoria. I used the fact that I was in a relationship with a heterosexual girl to help me invalidate the feelings of wrongness that were getting stronger over time. Eventually this led directly to me ending the relationship. At the time, I didn’t really understand why I felt the need to end the relationship – certainly I knew that the fact that I felt like I couldn’t tell her I liked to dress as a girl was a major factor, but looking back on it, the only justification I had for that feeling was that she was straight. I recognize now that I was already unconsciously identifying my gender variance as not “cross-dressing”, but a more fundamental difference between my assigned gender and my gender identity.

The next relationship was more complicated. She was bisexual, and somehow this made me feel more comfortable telling her about my gender variance (the reasons for this are more obvious in retrospect). As it evolved (I eventually spent a lot of time introspecting and decided that I must be genderfluid. Looking back, I can see this had nothing to do with any actual masculine feelings, but was completely about me being afraid of change, since it let me confine my femininity to my private life), she was understanding and accepting. There were certainly problems, though – the biggest is probably the fact that we were married, and had planned to have children together. Adapting to the idea of not having children with me was tough (although being polyamorous was a real boon there). But on the whole, our relationship got better as I got less depressed.

My latter experience here is not necessarily common; I have heard many trans narratives in which bitter breakups come from coming out to partners. This, then, has to hang over Shūichi’s head. Mixed in with the happiness and trepidation and hormone-fueled irrationality that comes with a first relationship are complex fears and nagging doubts: Will she understand if I tell her? Will she freak out, turn on me, out me to everyone, to my parents? Is dating even worth it, when I have this complex and taboo secret?

Can anyone possibly want me once they really know me?

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Wandering Son Reflections: Episode 6 – “Bunkasai”

2012.01.26 at 04:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged Hōrō Musuko, transgender, Wandering Son

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

When I transitioned, I took all of my men’s clothes, put them in trash bags, and gave them away. This was a very cathartic experience – the moment I left the lie behind forever. I’ve noticed that a lot of trans women are sentimental like that.

So, when Yuki puts on a men’s suit to attend the play, it struck me as odd – keeping that kind of reminder of my past life around is something that I actively avoid, and I know the same is true for many trans women. This is, then, a great example of the fact that everyone’s experience is different. Exactly what being trans means to Yuki probably doesn’t match what it means for Shūichi, or Mako, or Yoshino. Or me. The show has been pretty good at conveying that already, actually, but this really drives it home for me.

This episode gives us several examples of the thing that this show does the best: presenting an understanding and empathetic portrayal of trans people without feeling heavy-handed or contrived. It is a glimpse into the lives of several trans people, how they think and feel and how they deal with navigating in a world of uncertainty. It’s the genuine sense of empathy here that keeps the show from feeling sensationalizing – the focus is often on the trans experience of these characters, sure, but it also takes great pains to ensure that the characters feel like actual individual people and not just something to gawk and giggle at. In other words, even though the show is explicitly about gender issues, it never feels like it’s all about gender issues.

Our first example is the one we already discussed above: Yuki feels the need to cross-dress to go back to her old school. This is something that I refer to in my own head as the Double Life Problem. See, the problem is that even a successful, pretty, fully transitioned trans woman can find herself buried by self-consciousness and doubt about her ability to pass the moment that history enters the picture. Obviously this is not a universal truth – see “everyone’s experience is different”, above. But for many of us, I suspect, our lives are divided into two sections: before we transitioned and after we transitioned (and of course, there’s the liminal phase of “during transition”, but that is, we hope, as brief as possible). And so our social circles can likewise be grouped into ‘people who met us before we transitioned’ and ‘people who met us after we transitioned’.

So when Yuki decides to dress as a man when going back into a group of people (her schoolteachers) that haven’t seen her since she transitioned, it’s safe to assume it is out of fear that she might be recognized. People in general will often go to great lengths to avoid embarrassment, and added to that is the dysphoria that would accompany someone excitedly calling you by your old name and then asking why you’re dressed like a girl. Yuki appears to have decided that it’s better to endure a little known dysphoria than to chance the possibility of a larger amount of dysphoria coupled with public embarrassment. This is not the choice I would make, personally – I refuse to pretend any more, no matter the situation. But that works well for me; obviously Yuki prioritizes differently. Either way, this is another insight into what it means to be trans on a very real and human level. The story is very clearly about these individuals and their experiences, instead of claiming to be about trans people as an entire group – yet at the same time it finds a way to hit on a lot of widely shared aspects of trans experience.

The next example we get of the show’s empathy and insight is a subtle part of a larger scene. Yuki comments that it’s “too bad” that Shūichi won’t be Juliet in the play. Mako, who is playing Juliet and who has gender identity issues of his own, is standing nearby and holding the dress he is going to be wearing. When he hears Yuki saying it is ‘too bad’ that he won’t be playing Juliet, Mako clutches the dress to him slightly. The camera lingers on this for just a moment, but it is the most expressive scene in the episode. This is very effective visual storytelling, evocatively highlighting Mako’s own gender identity issues, and the way they consistently take a back seat to Shūichi’s.

This moment is also the first time all four of the show’s gender variant characters are in the same place, and the gesture underscores the fact that they are all in different places with accepting and embracing their gender identities. We have Yuki, the role model of successful transition and passing as cisgender (ironically cross-dressing for the first time in years). Shūichi and Yoshino are both in a place where their gender identity is largely accepted (if not fully understood) by their friends, and are slowly becoming more vocal and confident about it. Mako, on the other hand, is still struggling to articulate his feelings. He isn’t as confident as Shūichi, to the point that he hasn’t even expressed to his friends how much having the role of Juliet means to him. His friends (well, Shūichi, at least) know that he enjoys cross-dressing, but they don’t have any clue about the extension of that into gender dysphoria (which, as we’ll see in a bit, Mako does seem to have). In addition, Mako feels that he is not “pretty enough” to be a girl, as he has explicitly mentioned in the past when contrasting himself with Shūichi.

At the opening of the play itself, Mako freezes, and he says (in internal monologue) “everyone is staring at me”. This is the first time Mako has ever dressed as a girl in public. He is duly shocked. Despite the social acceptability of this particular gender variance, Mako is very self-conscious. And this is a feeling I understand deeply. Being trans is often something that takes a long time to accept (that is to say, it gets heavily repressed and undoing that takes a long time), and that acceptance is an incremental process. Some (possibly many) trans people, myself included, identify as cross-dressers for some amount of time. Cross-dressing (although the term becomes a misnomer when you later find that you are trans) is typically a very private thing; it is something that social stigma drives us to do in private. So, to dress as a girl and then be seen in public is like having a deep and shameful secret suddenly exposed. Even if it is in a socially acceptable context, or if no one recognizes you. Getting over that internalized idea – that dressing like a girl was something I should only do in private – took a concentrated act of will. And it took time. Mako, on the other hand, hasn’t had any of that time to adjust. So he freezes.

Speaking of the play, let’s talk about its context within Japanese education system. Bunkasai (文化祭) means ‘cultural festival‘, and is an aspect of Japanese culture that has no analogue in US culture. So, the trappings and conventions here are a bit unusual to a Western audience. It is basically a sort of show-and-tell to the world, where students can provide some entertainment of cultural merit for friends and family. It’s not optional – all students are expected to participate as a requirement for graduation, although I get the impression that it isn’t graded per se. Bunkasai are held from the elementary level through university, although at the university level they are no longer mandatory. Plays are a fairly common choice for classes to present.

Another notable thing about the play is the way that it uses gender; all of the actors are intended to have the gender roles reversed, including the trans characters. In other words, Juliet (a trans girl) is meant to be played by a cisgender boy. Likewise, Romeo is played by a cisgender girl. This is a subtle nod to the validity of trans people’s gender identity. If a girl had been cast to play Juliet, it would have implied that Juliet was a male character; by putting a (ostensible) boy in the role, it suggests that the characters involved have no problem accepting Juliet’s gender identity as valid and true. That this choice goes unremarked throughout the show may imply an unrealistic world (in which trans acceptance is far more advanced than it really is), but it’s a welcome, validating nod all the same. After all, the show portrays plenty of social backlash at other times, so it’s nice to establish the play firmly as a narrative victory on this issue.

After the play, we get our first real sense that Mako is decidedly gender dysphoric as opposed to just a cross-dresser. He laments to Saorin that “all I wanted was for someone to see me as Juliet”. Shortly thereafter, Saorin does what may be the first genuinely nice thing the character has done: she gives Saorin some flowers (that had been given to her earlier), and lies, telling him that she was told to give them “to Juliet.” When he is then predictably flustered, she says “All that matters is that someone saw you as Juliet.” This explicitly acknowledges both that Mako has dysphoria and that Saorin knows it (and acknowledges his evolving gender identity as valid). This contrasts sharply with her refusal to acknowledge Shūichi’s gender identity, which just adds more evidence that she was simply being spiteful and jealous in her previous tirade.

While he’s still very much a background character, this episode gave Mako both definition and character development. And Mako resonates strongly with me, because his experience is a reasonable match for my own experience around that age, particularly the feeling that it isn’t worth trying to be a girl if you don’t already look feminine enough; that thought was one of the strong motivators that kept me from transitioning much, much earlier than I did. I’m glad that they gave this character more of a voice here, although unfortunately he will fade into the background again for the rest of the series.

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MIT Mystery Hunt 2012

2012.01.23 at 14:00 · Filed under Puzzles ·Tagged language, meta puzzles, MIT Mystery Hunt, puzzlehunt, toki pona

Every year, hundreds of people travel to MIT during the Independent Activities Period for the MIT Mystery Hunt, a popular puzzlehunt. This year was my second Hunt. This is a review, analysis, and/or postmortem of it. It contains some of the solutions, so if you want to go play with the puzzles yourself (as they are all posted online), be forewarned!

How does this thing work, anyway?

First, since most of the people who read this site probably aren’t puzzlers, a brief description of the flow of the Hunt. Teams arrive and set up in pre-arranged headquarters (either a location near campus for teams that have them, or a classroom or two for any team that requests one). Everyone gets their stuff set up, then the hunt itself begins on Friday at noon with a kickoff presentation (traditionally in Lobby 7, which is functionally the ‘main entrance’ at MIT). Then teams return to their rooms and hit F5 repeatedly on the Hunt website (this year that was at borbonicusandbodley.com), waiting for the first round of puzzles to be released. Once they appear, the teams start trying to solve them.

Puzzles come in ’rounds’, which are unlocked over time or via solving puzzles in the rounds you already have. Exactly how these work has varied somewhat from year to year. Each round also has a meta-puzzle (or simply ‘meta’), which uses all of the answers from the round as the clues to some new (often quite difficult) puzzle.

Each year’s hunt also has a theme: a nominal reason for the teams to be solving puzzles. This year’s theme was related to the film The Producers, which led to a series of rounds based on ideas for terrible Broadway musicals (all of which were puns on existing musicals: A Circus Line, Okla-Holmes-a!, Into the Woodstock, Mayan Fair Lady, Phantom of the Operator, and Ogre of La Mancha). So, that was cute, and it made each round unlock produce a round of laughs and/or groans from the team.

If a team completes all of the rounds, they unlock the ‘endgame’, which usually involves some final puzzles and culminates in a runaround (a sort of scavenger hunt that involves actually running around MIT campus. Here is the beginning of one from last year). The runaround ends in the ultimate goal of the Hunt: finding a ‘coin’ (sometimes an actual coin, sometimes not). The team that finds the coin wins the Hunt.

There are also, at least in recent years, a number of ‘events’ during the hunt. Teams can send a couple members to these events, which are sometimes puzzle-oriented but can also be skill-based. The reward for the events are points that can be spent on puzzle answers. This is especially important strategic resource, and is mostly useful when you are working on a meta-puzzle and need more of the answers from its round to make sense of it.

A review

As a whole, the hunt was a lot of fun. I think last year’s (video game-themed) hunt was a better hunt overall – the multiple runarounds were especially fun. But this year had a lot of interesting puzzles, and I certainly performed better than last year. I can claim two solid solves, which I’ll discuss in detail later.

This year’s approach to round unlocks was, I thought, quite good – each round had a set unlock time (a time at which every team was guaranteed to have it), and the more puzzles you solved the more points you accrued. Your point total was fed into a function that decreases the time until the next unlock happens. There were also multiple unlocks per round – each round came in two halves, and there were, I believe, two unlocks for each half (so, 4 unlock points per round).

This was very similar to last year’s method, but more sensible – last year the unlocks were based solely on points, which accrued over time with a bonus given for solves. This made it a bit hard to get a quick estimate of how many solves your team had achieved. It felt like the points mapped more directly to how well the team was doing this year.

The result, for our team at least, was a fairly steady flow of new puzzles into the mix. This is good – it means that if a given team member didn’t have any insight into any of the existing puzzles, there was always something new for them to work on coming fairly soon.

Each round in this hunt had two meta-puzzles, and the round ended in a ‘production’, in which teams were tasked with writing and performing a short skit that included the meta-puzzle answers as elements. I wasn’t fond of this element – it strayed away from puzzling a little too far for my tastes. Luckily, there were enough people on my team that I didn’t really feel pressured to participate. Still, this mostly left me longing for last year’s runarounds through the tunnels.

I finally went to an event this year, as well, ‘Bringing Stars Together’. I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, the premise of the event was interesting: a logic puzzle (fairly straightforward, with 4 constraints) whose clues are discovered by chatting with the characters involved in the puzzle. This is a novel way to present a logic puzzle, and that part was a lot of fun. On the other hand, the effort vs. reward for this event was laughable – the event lasted more than an hour and a half, and was only worth 0.2 answer unlocks.

The hunt also seemed to have more ‘mini-events’ and puzzles that had physical components (that teams had to go and retrieve from various rooms around campus) than last year. I think I walked the entirety of the Infinite Corridor at least 10 times. One notably interesting one involved playing a game of Jenga to get the clues for a (very simple) puzzle. These were interesting and a welcome addition to the usual LAN-party feeling of sitting in the team headquarters staring at spreadsheets. Not that that isn’t a lot more fun than it sounds, of course.

Also, none of the puzzles made it necessary to spend a lot of time outside. In Cambridge in January, this is a welcome feature. On a completely unrelated note, I really need to invest in some Boston-strength clothing.

So, that was the hunt. Codex made an admirable attempt at matching the bar set by Metaphysical Plant last year. I’d say they nearly reached it. I look forward to seeing what the Manic Sages can follow up with next year.

Puzzle Logs

I worked on a number of puzzles, most of which were eventually solved. Here are some of my thoughts on some of my favourites (and least favourites), along with a description of how we solved (or tried to solve) them.

Blinkenlights

In this puzzle I quickly realized that we have ‘top’ rows and ‘bottom’ rows of lights, and that we could click any of the currently lit top lights to change the other lights in some sort of pattern (and I mapped all of the positional changes out pretty quickly). Furthermore, the bottom 8 lights for each group of 16 top lights was counting up in binary, every time a move was made in their ‘group’. At first it looked like each set of four lights were self-contained, but after finding a sequence that turned all 4 lights off, other lights in the group of 16 turned themselves on. I couldn’t find any pattern to this, until one of my teammates (Max) suggested that maybe each group of 16 lights (4 groups of 4) acted like a group of four – following the same pattern. And each 2 sets of 4 lights corresponded to a letter at the top of the screen.

After some legwork (a whole lot of clicking), I turned out all of the lights, revealing the message “SolveRestThenPluralizeTitleWord4″. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how to solve the ‘Rest’, as the entire thing was already solved. This is where I dead-ended, and eventually abandoned the puzzle (after about an hour of solid work on it).

The solution, it turns out, was to find the *shortest path* that turns out all of the lights (i.e. solves the maze), which leaves the lights in the bottom rows in a state that spells out “PATENT 2,417,786″ in ASCII. Finding the shortest path through this would have required both a lot of leg-work and some non-trivial programming (in javascript with greasemonkey, probably). I had considered this as a possible solution, but dismissed it as too much work to be practical. It’s good to know I was on the right track, at least.

Pure and Simple

This puzzle fell into a certain class of puzzles: a simple series of images presented with little to no context. I’m not historically that great at these, but in this case, I had the a-ha moment that led to the puzzle being solved.

Image puzzles are a lot like word association games with a visual element. The first step is usually to identify all of the images, and our team had done that by the time I looked at the puzzle. Initially I just glanced at the images, nothing clicked, and I moved on. In the lull after solving Revisiting History (see below), though, I looked at this puzzle again. Someone had identified the second picture on the right side as Brahms. Which is when it hit me: the last picture on the left side was a picture of 3 coke cans.

‘Cans and Brahms’, of course, is an instrumental track from Yes’ album Fragile, which consists of some brief excerpts from one of Brahms’ pieces arranged and played with synthesizers. From there the team was easily able to deduce that all of the images could be paired to form song titles separated by ‘and’.

I knew my near-encyclopaedic knowledge of progressive rock would come in handy some day.

Revisiting History

Ahh, the Doctor Who puzzle. I recognized what was going on in this puzzle at almost the exact same time as one of my team-mates – I turned to tell him about it (as he is easily the most knowledgeable Doctor Who fan I know) only to discover he was already beginning to match the descriptions to the companion(s), Doctor, and episode titles. We had that information down amazingly quickly, but extraction was difficult – nothing we tried seemed to work. Then another team-mate noticed that the word ‘who’ appeared in every clue. Using that as an index got us to the answer very quickly. I think this may have actually been our first solve – we had it within the first hour of the hunt, certainly.

Eek!

This puzzle was a lot of fun, and I am proud to say that I can claim most of the work for my team in solving it. It is, obviously, a 3-d maze. We took each self-contained ‘piece’ of the puzzle on each level and numbered them. Then, we mapped the connections between numbered nodes, and used this program (which took something like 10-20 minutes to write and test) to solve it:

#!/usr/bin/python

import networkx as nx
import sys

source = '44'
target = '3'

def parse_input(infile):
    g = nx.Graph()
    f = open(infile, 'r')

    for line in f:
        meta = line.split(':')
        node = meta[0].strip()
        edges = meta[1].split(',')

        g.add_node(node)
        
        for n in edges:
            other_node = n.strip()
            g.add_edge(node, other_node)

    f.close()
    return g


def main():
    infile = sys.argv[1]
    g = parse_input(infile)
    path = nx.shortest_path(g, source, target)
    print path
    print len(path)

main()

There were a couple of hitches: a small error in our mapping data being the crucial one. But we got a solution, then mapped it on the maze (with a highlighter). The result clearly said ‘side elev’ on the top row, so we took the thing and mapped it out with burr tools. We found the word ‘Love’ very quickly, but that wasn’t the answer. So, I shelved the problem and went to bed.

Looking at it again the next day (Sunday morning), I saw the trick: the flavour text implies that the path taken should be the negative space, not the positive space. With this as a clue, I re-mapped the solution in burr tools, inverting which blocks were solid. This led to the answer: the word ‘Love’ was still visible on one side, while ‘Etc’ was visible on the other. ‘LOVE ETC’, is, of course, the answer.

JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS

We didn’t solve this puzzle, but I want to include it because it is very clever. I almost solved it, too. I looked at the keyboard, typed out the phrase (which took a while, because I’m used to typing in dvorak), but I didn’t spot any obvious patterns, probably because I was focusing too much on remembering qwerty. So close.

Sounds Good to Me

This was my absolute favourite puzzle of the hunt. It was delightful in every way. The cluing at the beginning sets the tone: in greek characters is the latin phrase ‘nota bene: non sequitur lingua Iaponica!’. Which is to say, basically, ‘what follows is not Japanese’.

Instead, it is toki pona, a constructed language (conlang) with, according to Wikipedia, 3 fluent speakers. This wonderfully obscure language is fairly light on vocabulary (120 root words and a smattering of loanwords where necessary). One of my team-mates got the hiragana transliterated into latin characters, and another team-mate identified it as toki pona (he recognized it because of a passing acquaintance with the creator of the language).

An automated translator for toki pona -> English exists, but doesn’t work very well (as we quickly discovered). Instead, I translated most of the entries by hand, learning toki pona vocabulary and grammar as I went. This felt very much like my recent Old Norse translation project, and like all translation, was enjoyable for its own sake. As I translated, it became clear that the toki pona text was providing definitions of words or phrases in other languages. Eventually I found that the words at the end of each paragraph were language names in Toki Pona (the ‘official’ dictionary doesn’t list these, as they are loanwords). After we figured out a couple of these clues, it became obvious that these were phrases or words that were used in English but were actually loanwords from the given languages.

These clues gave us the acrostic DANKESCHOENINJAPANESE. Of course, Japanese has a lot of ways to say ‘thank you’, but the 7/9 at the bottom of the page clued us into a 2-word phrase that, in Latin characters, would give us 7- and 9-letter words. So, ARIGATO GOZAIMASU was the obvious choice.

I often describe myself as an ‘amateur linguist’. Philologist might be the better term. I really love Language. Learning languages and playing with language are both hobbies of mine. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly useful, mainly because I never devote enough time to any one language to learn it thoroughly. However, in this case my exact sort of language skills and knowledge were perfectly suited to this puzzle. If any one puzzle next year is half as fun as this one was, it will be well worth the trip.

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Wandering Son Reflections: Episode 5 – “Natsu no Owari ni”

2012.01.02 at 04:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged cissexism, Hōrō Musuko, slurs, transgender, Wandering Son

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Trigger Warning: this entry contains discussion of cissexist slurs, in particular the T-word. If you want to skip that, start reading below the ‘End of Trigger Warning’ message

Also, Spoiler Warning

I’m going to start in the most obvious place: the subtitles in this episode use the word ‘tranny’. In fact, the word gets used several times in the series, but this is the first occurrence. So, let’s talk about language.

When I read that subtitle, I winced; I’m particularly sensitive to the term, and even hearing it used in a reclamatory sense makes me cringe. I’m just not a fan of this word at all. It offends me. But more importantly, it is a slur – actively harmful language. To understand my perspective on this, I actually recommend something written by someone else – Kinsey Hope’s excellent post on words and offense. In fact, for the purposes of this discussion I’m assuming you’ve clicked that link and read her post.

So, Kinsey has hopefully established to your satisfaction that slurs are bad. If not, well, the rest of this discussion probably won’t do much for you, and I’m honestly surprised you’re reading my blog in the first place. However, in a fictional story designed to be roughly representational of reality, slurs can have a function. If slurs are used in contexts that demonstrate the bigotry of the speaker or challenge their usage, then they have a place in the story. And, of course, words used in a reclamatory context are as acceptable in fiction as they are in reality.

Before we can consider how the word is used in Wandering Son, though, we need to consider that this is a translated work. So, let’s investigate the Japanese world being used here, and see whether the translation is accurate. The Japanese word that is being translated as ‘tranny’ is ‘okama’ (おかま). Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, an all-around excellent Japanese language resource for English speakers, has this to say about the word ‘okama’ (only the relevant part of the definition is provided):

(n) (colloquial, often derogatory) male homosexual; effeminate man; male transvestite

While gay men and transvestites are certainly insulted using the word ‘tranny’, as a slur its function is to attack trans women. As a result, this definition and the translation chosen didn’t really sit well for me. So I did some more research, and found this book, which discusses the use of ‘okama’ and gay male culture in Japan. The overall sense I got from this book’s treatment of the term is that the dominant cultural elements in Japan often conflate gender identity and sexual orientation (this is unsurprising, as it is true of straight culture in the US as well), and while GLBT culture in Japan distinguishes between the two more accurately, there is still some degree of conflation between the two. I suggest reading the excerpts available from the book for a more detailed look at this.

The upshot of all of this is that I get the impression that the translation here is accurate in context; at least, it is accurate enough for our purposes. Given the target and the speaker of the word each time it is used, I believe it was always translated so that it is accurate after adjusting for American cultural expectations. I am by no means an expert on Japanese language or culture, however, so I acknowledge that this argument may be flawed. At any rate, I’m proceeding with the understanding that the translation can be taken at face value.

With that said, I think the usage here is fair, narratively speaking. The first usage we see is of a somewhat confused boy using it in disgust; another use is by a character who is well-established as cissexist and bigoted. The word is also used reclamatively, and almost accusatively, by Yuki (more on that in a later post). These instances of the word serve to present cisnormative reactions to the idea of transsexuality, and so help establish the narrative of the broader culture in which Shūichi is struggling to define himself.

End of Trigger Warning

The episode as a whole was pretty uneventful. It almost feels like an intermission. A couple of things do happen that I want to talk about, though.

First, this episode finally touches on the subject of ‘outing’: Shūichi is outed to all of his friends as a cross-dresser (which, while not necessarily accurate, is typical of the tendency to conflate all gender variance). While shocked at the time, Shūichi later seems to be somewhat relieved at having the truth (or an approximation of the truth) presented by someone else. Yoshino, on the other hand, responds to the person who outs Shūichi with hostility. This leads Shūichi to realize (via internal monologue) that Yoshino is willing to get angry on his behalf. Later, while talking to Mako, he says “People laughed at me. In grade school, they said I was girly. But you and Takatsuki understood me, so I knew everything would be okay.”

Watching those scenes, I realized something that hit me pretty hard: I never had anyone like Yoshino and Mako. Throughout my childhood, I had friends, but I was never close enough with anyone to tell them about my gender confusion. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I would find someone I was really comfortable being myself around. If I had had friends like that, I may have come to understand myself years earlier. Those years feel wasted in hindsight – years spent not being true to myself.

This kind of regret is common amongst trans people – at least, it is common amongst the trans people that I know. I transitioned at the age of 27. Looking at average life expectancies, that means I spent one third of my life lying to myself and to everyone else. Being in pain, and depressed, and not even understanding why for most of it. It is hard not to feel regret over that.

Wandering Son, of course, doesn’t really touch this particular problem; Shūichi is still very young, and the story (in the anime, at least), doesn’t progress far enough to deal with the actual issues of transition. But it drudges up those feelings just the same.

Also in this episode, the students are assigned their roles for the upcoming play. Notably, they are assigned the roles by lots; Mako ends up being Juliet, while Saorin gets the role of Romeo. This is certainly an interesting plot development, since the normal Western narrative structure here would be to give Shūichi and Yoshino those roles (as that would parallel the overall theme of the show, and set up the classic Happily Ever After ending). Instead, we get Mako, who has some gender confusion of his own, and Saorin, who certainly wanted to be Romeo, but only because she wanted to use it as a platform to profess her love for Shūichi.

And Saorin, for her part, remains as unsympathetic as ever. She broods, whines, and is unselfconsciously self-absorbed throughout the episode, and ends the episode by asking Shūichi (out of earshot) “Why art thou Juliet?”. While this certainly serves to underscore the play-within-a-play structure* that the Romeo & Juliet play represents, it serves even better to underscore Saorin’s selfish, cissexist attitude towards Shūichi. Instead of wanting Shūichi to be happy, she wants him to be hers, and her heterosexual identity means that, as a consequence, she wants him to deny his gender identity for her benefit.

This is another narrative that is common in the transgender experience. Spouses and lovers of trans people often struggle to accept their partners’ transitions. This frequently leads to divorce, and is frequently accompanied by a selfish desire for the trans person to be cisgender. Some trans people choose to suppress their trans identity to keep their marriages together. Speaking partially from personal experience, I suspect that this rarely solves the problem, instead leading to resentment and depression. Saorin, here, seems to want to found a relationship on this dynamic.

* The extended homage to Shakespeare built into the first half of Wandering Son deserves analysis, but is outside the scope of this series’ focus. I’ll just leave it at ‘obviously, an extended homage to Shakespeare is going on here’.

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Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe

2011.12.29 at 17:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged C.S. Lewis, Christmas, Doctor Who, Narnia, Patrick Troughton, Sylvester McCoy, things that make me cry, William Hartnell

As ever, Spoilers.

There are only two episodes of Doctor Who that have ever made me cry. The first one was Forest of the Dead – River’s death scene was amazing, Alex Kingston sold the idea of a woman who had loved the Doctor so well that I couldn’t help but feel that the Doctor had lost something tremendous. It remains one of my very favourite scenes in the show.

The second episode that made me cry aired a few days ago, and I just got around to watching it last night. The tone of The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe is like the last three scenes of Forest of the Dead stretched out over an entire episode. To be clear, and to keep from burying the lead: if you didn’t think this episode was good, you are wrong. You must have watched it wrong. Maybe your TV was broken.

Claire Skinner and Matt Smith absolutely shine in their scenes together. The emotional pitches that they hit are simply stunning, and Moffat’s dialogue is some of the best it’s ever been. Moffat’s stories often have sentimental notes, but here it is turned all the way up. And Skinner sells her grief so well, it is impossible not to empathize with her.

The title is an obvious reference to C.S. Lewis, of course, and the episode certainly contains thematic parallels: a father lost to the war, a family staying in the country to get away from the bombing, an old house and a strange box that leads to another world (and a snowy one, at that). But where it gets interesting is where the story deviates from, and especially where it actively rejects and subverts, the ideas of Lewis. In the title, the Doctor takes the place of Aslan/Jesus, and Madge is in place of the witch. The TARDIS, of course, is the wardrobe – it’s even lampshaded as such. But while the Doctor could conceivably be a Christ figure (even if he makes a better Odinic warrior), he doesn’t serve that role in the narrative here. Instead, he instigates the adventure and serves as a sort of tour guide / expository force. The action is centered around the Arwell family, and rightly so. Smith is channelling Troughton again here, lingering around the edges of the story and never taking center stage.

As for the other titular character, Madge is far from a bitter antagonist – she is the heroine of the story. And that leads us to what I’m going to call a tie for the best refutation of C.S. Lewis’ sexism that I’ve ever found (the other is The Problem of Susan). Lewis made it clear that women existed to support men – this motif is played out repeatedly between the brothers and sisters in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Of course, women have another option: they can be evil, literally frigid bitches. In other words, women are either weak or they are abhorrent.

Moffat, on the other hand, explicitly rejects this; the forest calls men ‘weak’ and women ‘strong’, and both female characters are at the center of the action, with Cyril, the son, playing the role of peril monkey. Lily gets the crucial scenes where she and the Doctor are looking for Cyril, and Madge gets… well, everything else. Coming to the rescue in a giant mech, running through acid rain, saving the population of a planet. And backing all of her actions is the distinctly feminine concept of motherhood. This is made explicit repeatedly, with the Doctor even making the inevitable ‘mothership’ pun. Madge draws her motivation and her power to the story from aspects of her identity that are intrinsically tied up with being female. This is Feminism in the tradition of the Female Mysteries of modern Paganism (and without even the biologically essentialist attitudes that are unfortunately common there). And speaking of Paganism, the carved/grown tree-people (and accompanying tower) have a distinctly Anglo-Saxon Pagan feel to them, which serves to make the story an even stronger counterpoint to Lewis’ work.

So, we have a very Pagan Christmas story with a theme of the fundamental power of womanhood. But the real focus of the story is on the importance of family, of celebrating life with people you love. It’s the sort of feel-good, heartwarming message that you might find on ABC Family. But we are saved from Seventh Heaven with Druids (Seventh Ogham?) by the superlative writing and acting. At no point does the theme feel heavy-handed or contrived; it flows naturally from the narrative.

But this is identifiably a holiday story, in the sense that it is themed along traditional holiday motifs. And, in that tradition, the Arwell family gets their presumed-dead father back. Frankly, I’m torn about this choice – I was annoyed when the very touching scene where A Mother Explains to Her Children About Their Father’s Death is interrupted for “oh, he’s not dead after all”. On the other hand, the subsequent scene is just as touching, with Skinner once again rising to the acting challenge and effectively conveying the amazed joy of someone who finds their lover isn’t dead after all.

No, I take that back. I’m not torn. Let the Arwell family have their father back. Maybe leaving him to die would be a stronger narrative, more raw and emotionally evocative. But it’s Christmas. Let’s embrace the aesthetic of Happily Ever After, at least this time. Just this once, everybody can live.

And now, about the Doctor. I said before that Smith was channelling Troughton in this episode. But his other seeming muse, Sylvester McCoy, is completely absent from this one. The Doctor has no great scheme here – he is simply trying to do something nice for a sad family. But significantly, the Doctor is shown to be much more human here than McCoy’s Doctor. Which isn’t surprising – one of Moffat’s key themes (and Tennant before him) is humanizing the Doctor. We have watched the Doctor learn how to love through the course of the new series. This is a sharp contrast to, well, all of the classic Doctors to some degree. But McCoy’s Doctor was the real cornerstone of this mode of being. Perhaps the best expression of the difference is from Human Nature, by Paul Cornell (the New Adventures novel, not the new series episode):

‘I hope that one day, when I’m old, when my travels are over, and history has no more need of me, then I can be just a man again. And then, perhaps I’ll find those things in me that I’d need to love, also. not love like I do, a big love for big things, but that more dangerous love. The one that makes and kills human beings… It’s a dream I have.’

The new series answers this quote by having the Doctor fall in love without ending his travels. This takes the form of romantic love twice, obviously. But this episode shows a distinctly platonic love towards Amy and Rory. The Doctor repeatedly talks about ‘happy crying’ as a human trait, and then does it himself when he realizes how much Amy and Rory care about him. This is the sort of emotional investment in a companion that we haven’t seen since Rose, and really didn’t see before that at all (sure, there was Susan, but frankly I have a hard time believing Hartnell’s Doctor loved anyone). Even Ace, who the Doctor seemed very paternal toward at times, was used by the Doctor as a pawn repeatedly.

The point is that the Doctor is a lot less Time Lord and a lot more Human than he used to be. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing – he’s still a mythic figure, and subject to the narrative and aesthetic rules of mythic figures. But he also has the capacity to enjoy Christmas dinner with his family. Let’s let him have that, too. It’s Christmas, after all.

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Wandering Son Reflections: Episode 4 – “Watashi no Namae o Ageru”

2011.12.22 at 14:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged Hōrō Musuko, transgender, Wandering Son

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

This is the first episode that made me cry.

Sure, each of the other episodes made me get teary-eyed at least once, but this one actually gave me a need-a-tissue, tears-streaming-down-my-cheeks crying fit. It did this by being painfully sweet. But we’ll get to the scene that made me cry a bit later. First, I want to talk about swimming.

I fondly remember the days when throwing on a bathing suit and going swimming was straightforward, or even possible. As my gender dysphoria increased, and I started shaving the hair from areas that gave me the greatest bodily dissonance, swimming slowly became more and more awkward, until it was basically impossible for me to comfortably go swimming in public. Now that I have transitioned, swimming is still awkward. It is difficult for me to find a bathing suit that doesn’t make me feel exposed, and even then my body’s shape makes me feel very uncomfortable when it is that obvious. So when this episode opened with the cast swimming at school, I winced inwardly.

The scene is used to show more of Shūichi and Yoshino’s dysphoria. Shūichi is visibly envious of Yoshino’s figure, and Yohsino is distinctly self-conscious when she is complimented as looking ‘womanly’. And this leads us to another aspect of trans experience that this show portrays very correctly – the unknowingly harmful comment.

Speaking for myself, as always, I know that as I began transitioning, offhand comments directed at me while I was dressed as a boy could often hurt, even when there is no ill intent (or special knowledge) on the part of the speaker. A good example occurred when I was at the bank. The teller attempted to compliment me by saying “Your hair is so cute! Girls must be jealous of it.” While it is good to know my hair is cute, the way the comment put me solidly on the ‘boy’ side of the line stung. (Edit: Luckily, this is no longer a problem for me. It remains, however, an experience common to many trans people.)

The episode gives us another example of this, too. When Shūichi gets out of the bath, his sister comments “A boy shouldn’t take such long baths.” In this case, though, it is possible the comment may be more intentional. Even given only the evidence seen so far in the series, Maho would have to be pretty oblivious not to suspect that her brother is gender variant at this point. However, the show hasn’t really given us any indication that she is aware of Shūichi’s struggles, and actually implies an active lack of empathy towards him. When Maho’s friend Anna* makes Shūichi cry, Maho’s response is “It’s fine, he does that all the time.” This is both callous and suggests that Shūichi is suffering from depression, likely caused by dysphoria.

We also see a little more of the show’s fourth trans character, Yuki, in this episode. Yuki is a grown trans woman who has befriended Yoshino. She has a boyfriend (Shi), whom she has known since childhood, and he was “the only one who never bullied [her].” Yuki comes across as a very warm and genuine person, as well as being pragmatic. She also represents a trans success story – she is a successful, confident, attractive woman who survived being teased and bullied. She’s a representation of the It Gets Better narrative, which has been criticized (rightly) for being naive. But where the It Gets Better campaign feels like it is encouraging a complacent ‘just wait, and everything will be alright’ attitude, Yuki’s character doesn’t bear that connotation (she doesn’t strongly oppose it, either – we simply don’t know enough details about her story for that to be any part of the narrative here).

The touching scene in this episode (the one that made me cry) comes when Yoshino and Shūichi are alone and talking to each other. Yoshino offers Shūichi her name, in exchange for his. The impact of this hinges on another thing that is fairly unique to the trans experience. Names are important things for a lot of trans people. We cast off our birth-assigned names when we cast off our birth-assigned genders. This is a deliberate act, and choosing a new name also has to be a deliberate act. Here, Yoshino is offering Shūichi a name. I have been in something similar to Shūichi’s place, here; my name was given to me by someone I hold dear (although it was not offered as an exchange). Even so, Yoshino’s actions here made me realize just how precious that gift really is. I felt like I had taken it for granted, when I should be treasuring it.

So, that scene made me cry, for deeply personal reasons. And now that I was good and tearful, though, the next part of the scene just fed the cry fest. So, moving on…

Shūichi tells Yoshino that he wants her to be Romeo in the play, and for him to be Juliet. He says “I want you to see me as a girl… because I see you as a boy.” This seems to be both his way of giving Yoshino a gift in exchange, as well as an attempt to tell her how he feels. “I see you as a boy.” I remember the first time someone said to me, “You are a girl.” The words came at exactly the time I needed them. Simple words; to cisgender women, it is a statement so obvious as to be not even worth saying or hearing. But every time I feel bad, every time I feel too much dysphoria and I’m trying not to hate myself, I remember those words. “I am a girl” is easy, for me. But knowing that someone else sees me the way I see myself… that helped immeasurably. That simple second person pronoun makes all the difference.

When Shūichi returns home, he repeats to himself “Boku no namae wa Yoshino.” He is still using the masculine pronoun ‘boku’, despite the fact that he is clearly starting to come to terms with his identity as a girl. This makes sense, though – it takes time to clear all of culture’s gender essentialism out of your brain. I still misgendered myself, in my own thoughts, for quite a while when I began to transition.

The other scene worth commenting on from this episode is a meeting between Saorin and Shūichi. Saorin asks him to come over, ostensibly to talk about the play. That is where it starts; Shūichi added to the play the idea that Romeo and Juliet could give each other their names, and Saorin offers Shūichi her own name. On learning the origin of the scene in the play, Saorin feels slighted, but Shūichi explains to her that he doesn’t want to become a girl for Yoshino’s sake, but for his own. Saorin responds with a selfish tirade that includes a lot of gender essentialism. She equates GRS with gender, saying “[without an operation], becoming a girl is impossible… It’s all just an act.” She also says that she doesn’t want Shuuichi to become a girl, because she is in love with him (presumably as a boy).

At this point, Saorin has very little to redeem her character. She contradicts herself a lot (and this seems intentional, as she seems very confused about her own feelings). She is consistently portrayed as selfish. She seems to fetishize Shūichi’s gender variance on the one hand, and be terrified of it on the other. She seems, in short, to be deeply cissexist, but her feelings for Shūichi make her willing to encourage his dressing as a girl. When the idea of it being more than that, however – when the idea of Shūichi actually being a girl comes up – she reacts with defensive hostility.

* So, as a character shares my own name in the show, I feel obliged to comment on that. I really want Anna to be a good character! She seems to have the potential to be; at least, she felt remorse after making Shūichi cry.

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Wandering Son Reflections: Episode 3 – “Romio to Jurietto”

2011.12.19 at 15:00 · Filed under Media ·Tagged Hōrō Musuko, transgender, Wandering Son

This post was originally posted in February of 2011 here. It has been updated substantially.

You can watch the episode here.

Spoiler Warning

In this episode, it feels like the show is finally reaching its stride. It combines the strengths of the previous episodes; the pacing is as good as the second episode, and the overall emotional impact and thematic cohesion is on the same level as the first episode.

So, like the episode, let’s start by talking about bras. For a young and not-so-budding trans girl, bras occupied an odd position in my mental landscape. I was consciously envious of the cis girls around me that were developing breasts. At the same time, though, I had already developed a knee-jerk defense mechanism against anything with a feminine connotations (at least in public). We’ll come back to this in a bit.

In the episode, though, the character contemplating supportive undergarments is Yoshino, who expresses terror at the thought of having to wear one, and asks Shūichi if he has ever wanted to wear one. This leads to both of them admitting envy of each other’s bodies. This is a touching scene, and seems to me to be deeply insightful about a very particular part of trans experience. Here the characters deal with it awkwardly, but that makes sense – the characters are still very unsure of themselves and still discovering their identities.

Near the end of the episode is another scene where Yoshino tries on the bra she bought. It ends with her throwing it off in disgust, and hugging her boy’s uniform to her chest, sobbing. This is an utterly heartbreaking moment, and it is so well portrayed that I felt slightly embarrassed, as if I had accidentally walked in on someone at a private moment. It is also a very powerful scene, and it nearly made me cry. As a trans woman (as opposed to a trans man), I can’t pretend to understand exactly what that moment is like, but the show succeeds in evoking empathy, which is quickly becoming its basic mode of operation.

Continuing on the theme of approaching puberty, Mako (Ariga Makoto) points out to Shūichi that their voices are going to change soon, which is upsetting to both of them. He further suggests that they record their voices “before it is too late.” This is also used as a pretext for them to dress up as girls together. This solidifies the subtle hints in the last episode that Mako is also gender variant. He seems much more excited to dress up, and seems to view it as a social activity, a way to bond with Shuuichi over a shared experience.

Anyway, I am describing this scene because it gives me a chance to talk about Japanese language and gender. When Shūichi begins recording his voice, he begins “Boku no namae o…” (My name is…). Mako stops him, saying “be more feminine.” He starts over, this time saying “Watashi no namae o…” (My name is…). The difference here is in the first person pronoun used, and it is something English doesn’t have an equivalent construct for. ‘Boku’ is an example of a masculine word – not masculine in the sense that words in some languages have gender (the Romance languages being readily available examples), but in the sense that it is a word typically only used by men. ‘Watashi’ is considered gender-neutral, but my suspicion is that, since ‘boku’ is used so predominantly amongst boys, ‘watashi’ is probably viewed as feminine by comparison. Unfortunately, this distinction is not caught in the subtitling.

Everything I’ve discussed so far are the sub-plots of the episode, and the episode’s core is worth remarking on as well, which centers around a play that the characters’ class is planning for the school’s cultural festival. Saorin suggests that the class do a ‘genderbender play’*, or a play in which the boys play the girls’ roles, and vice versa. This idea is enthusiastically accepted by the rest of the class.

Saorin submits a script idea that is a modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, while Shūichi comes up with the idea of writing about boys who want to be girls, and girls who want to be boys. This seems to be a huge leap forward in Shūichi’s thought process – he is, in a way, openly admitting that he wants to be a girl, not just dress like one. Whether or not he will eventually consider the distinction between wanting to be a girl and the idea that he might already be a girl remains to be seen; so far, the show has kept to the potentially gender essentialist language of “a boy who wants to be a girl”**. Shūichi’s words here mirrors my feelings and understanding of myself at his age, actually; having never really encountered the idea of gender variance, that was the way I framed the thought, when I wasn’t running away from it at full speed.

After the play is announced, there is a scene where the girls from the class are talking excitedly about the idea. They see it as a simple way to break social rules, and talk animatedly about it. The three trans characters, however, are all visibly uncomfortable. Here we have yet another interesting insight into trans experience. When I was a teenager, whenever someone mentioned cross-dressing, or any kind of gender variance, I felt a mixture of embarrassment and shame. This even extended to topics that were stereotypically feminine but without the gender variance context – any conversation that mentioned makeup, nail polish, or women’s shoes was likely to make me blush. As a result, I spent a long time actively avoiding anything feminine, even to the point of harboring a deep aversion to the color pink.

At the time, I didn’t even know why I felt embarrassed. I recognize now that it was the same thing I see in the characters in this scene – they are afraid that if they show too much enthusiasm, someone will know. That they will see into your soul and find the truth you’ve tried to hide from both them and yourself.

Shūichi and Saorin’s teacher suggests they combine their scripts, and at Shūichi’s suggestion, the play becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet with the lead characters both being trans. What is more interesting, though, is Saorin’s behavior while they work on the script together. She invites Shūichi to come work on it at her house, and he agrees after she promises “not to do anything weird this time.” However, she immediately breaks her promise, and gets very excited about the idea of Shūichi wearing one of her dresses.

Saorin’s behavior here feels very creepy, and it certainly borders on chaser behavior. What’s more, it is clear that she has done this before. Shūichi is obviously uncomfortable with her taking such an enthusiastic interest in his gender identity, and yet she persists. Whether this behavior is an attempt to create a bond similar to the one Shūichi has with Yoshino, or whether the behavior drove Shūichi away from Saorin (and towards Yoshino) in the first place is uncertain.

Saorin also notes the parallel between their play’s Romeo and Juliet, and Shūichi and Yoshino. She suggests casting Shūichi as Juliet, and Yoshino as Romeo. Her suggestion is tinged with bitterness, but she seems to have a moment of genuinely wishing for Shūichi’s happiness. Interestingly, this casting upholds the original point of the play (which was to reverse the gender roles of the actors relative to their characters) in a surprising way: it casts Shūichi as a trans man, and Yoshino as a trans woman, so that they are still playing, functionally, the opposite gender.

* The translation ‘genderbender play’ didn’t really sit well with me, so I did some checking. Luckily, Shūichi writes down the phrase during the episode, so I was able to find the kanji: 倒錯劇 (tousaku geki). The dictionary meaning of this phrase would be ‘inversion play’ or ‘perversion play’, which don’t really convey the subtitled meaning at all. My assumption was that this is a particular phenomenon in Japan, but the only results I can make any sense of on a google search for the phrase are related to Wandering Son. If anyone with more knowledge of Japanese culture can confirm whether this is a cultural thing I am missing, I would be grateful.

** I am aware that some trans people see themselves as having been their birth-assigned gender before transitioning, and this complicates the language I use when I talk about this element of the show’s dialogue choices. My personal experience is that I was always a girl. Society’s gender essentialist memes convinced me otherwise for a very long time, and this leaves me with an unfortunate reflex reaction that tries to categorize phrases such as ‘I am a boy who wants to be a girl’ as cissexist. However, giving in to this reflex would be erasing of trans people whose experiences do not match my own, so I am trying my best here to use language that doesn’t do that.

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