KBABZ wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:17 pm
Melee_Sovereign wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 3:07 pm
Well Ratchet & Clank doesn't have any humans. I don't even think humans exist in that universe.
That wasn't why I brought it up. R&C is an example of a franchise that has a wide variety of races, but also has a handful that are front and center, most prominently the Lombaxes. Thus if you wanted to only lightly convey a queer storyline (aka chicken out on it), you wouldn't make them a Lombax, you'd make them one of the minor side-races like whatever the heck Skidd McMarxx is, who never play a prominent role in the core story.
Another fantastic example is Star Wars. It has so many races that it's incredibly easy to tell such a storyline with one of the more alien races. But as Julie is emphasizing, that obscures the point with metaphors and not having them be humans, who are easily the more common race in that universe. It's a little bit like how Chewbacca gets extremely little characterization in the movies because he's a walking carpet who speaks a language the audience can't understand, while someone like Lando gets a full arc in five scenes across two movies.
For franchises like R&C that don't have humans, I don't think the problem is making a species that aren't the main species trans. It's making a species, that seems so esoterically different from humans, or anything in the human-like category, trans.
Even though Skidd McMarxx isn't a Lombax, there's nothing less human-like about him than any Lombax. R&C is a lot like, say, Spongebob in this regard. Spongebob is a sponge, Patrick is a starfish, and you have crabs, lobsters, squids and fish. But in that universe, they're all just "people". They're all in the "human-like" category, and they're all just a substitution of humans. But you also have species in Spongebob that aren't human-like, such as the jellyfish. Making Skidd McMarxx trans would be like making, say, Larry the Lobster trans, because he's among the "human-like" aliens in that franchise.
I think it becomes "chickening out" when not only you make a different species trans (assuming there's no humans to begin with), but when that different species is already so unhuman-like from every other species in the franchise, which would imply that "trans" is something intrinsic to that species alone.