Magic the Gathering and LGBT Representation

I was a huge Magic the Gathering player. I own hundreds of cards, made multiple decks, and continue to play, although less frequently, with my friends. When I lived in London, I would stop by Forbidden Planet everyday on the way home from work to pick up a new booster pack. Looking back, it’s sad and scary how much money I spent on these cards, especially given my current post-college grad money position. Magic the Gathering allowed me to enter a world filled with badass warriors, dragons, magic, dimension hoping, and innumerable different creatures. Not only that, it gave me, though the card game itself, an agency and role to play in this well-crafted (if not always well-written) world. Yet over the past few years, I've grown away from Magic the Gathering, mostly due to lack of time and money. Yet Magic the Gathering, along with the fantasy it created and the community it fostered for me in the real world, will always hold a place in my heart.

Sooooooooo many Magic cards.....

 So when I logged online one day a few months ago to find that Magic the Gathering become a talking point, I was surprised and interested. I was even more surprised to learn that the issue was one that was near and dear to my heart. Magic the Gathering had introduced a their first transgendered character in the form of “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.”

As a transwoman myself, I was extremely interested in this new character. I’m always down for more LGBT representation, especially when I myself consider myself a part of the B and the T. The fact that she was in an epic fantasy world, a genre that has historically ignored women, was even more interesting. While Magic The Gathering has always had strong female characters and women have appeared as strong characters in mainstream epic fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings’ Eowyn, Dragonlance’s Bloodmoon or Kitiara, and Aria or Daenerys in Game of Thrones, they typically are side characters who compliment or are even completely separate from their male counterparts’ separate, and usually more important, quest (See Tolkein’s totally male Fellowship of the Ring or completely male filled The Hobbit). So I decided to take a look at Alesha and see how they would tackle trans issues in an epic fantasy world. What I found surprised me.

What I found most important and most surprising is that Alesha’s transgendered background is almost completely a non-issue. Here is a passage from her story and the revealing of her transgendered origins at the age of 16:

She had been so different – only sixteen, a boy in everyone’s eyes but her own, about to choose and declare her name before the khan and all the Mardu.

The khan had walked among the warriors, hearing the tales of their glorious deeds. One by one, they declared their new war names, and each time, the khan shouted the names for all to hear. Each time, the horde shouted the name as one, shaking the earth.

Then the khan came to Alesha. She stood before him, snakes coiling in the pit of her stomach, and told how she had slain her first dragon. The khan nodded and asked her name.

“Alesha,” she said, as loudly as she could. Just Alesha, her grandmother’s name.

“Alesha!” the khan shouted, without a moment’s pause.

And the whole gathered horde shouted “Alesha!” in reply. The warriors of the Mardu shouted her name.

In that moment, if anyone had told her that in three years’ time she would be khan, she just might have dared to believe it.

After this section, Alesha’s transgendered nature becomes a non-issue. She is female and that is that. The understated way in which she is introduced is refreshing. Many times with characters who represent LGBT, the characters become simply that; representations. Nothing more or less. A gay character becomes singularly characterized by their one trait-they are gay. They sometimes have less personality outside of that single fact or, at the very least, much of their character development stems from their sexuality or gender identity.

Also, she's just damn cool

While many lesbian and gay characters are starting to avoid this trope (see Mitchell and Cameron in Modern Family as good example) many Bisexual and Transgendered characters still face this. Take a look at Laverine Cox’s character in Orange is the New Black or Jeffrey Tambor’s award winning turn in Transparent. Much has been made recently of these two transgendered characters in the mainstream, and rightly so. It’s extremely gratifying transgendered issues, specifically transwomen issues, are being showcased in a way that is catching the attention of the mainstream. However, for both of these characters, much of their character arcs revolve around their transgenderism, especially at first.

This also occurs much of the time with bisexual characters, where being bisexual becomes a main focus of their stories. I can only think of a handful of characters such as Prince Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones, Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who, or Bo in Lost Girl who are bisexual and rarely, if ever, had arcs that specifically dealt with the fact that “oh, I’m bisexual.” For these characters, they love who they love. There almost always are important character arcs revolving around their relationships, but rarely does gender matter. That is how an LGBT character should be written.

Bisexual characters like Lost Girl's Bo are extremely important for LGBT representation

 As a bisexual transwoman myself, being transgendered and bisexual is an important part of my identity. There is no getting around that. But it is not all who I am and why I sometimes don’t bother to say that I am transgendered. I am by no means hiding, but I also wish for others to see me as more then just a transgendered person. There is much more to my personality and many more struggles that I face other then being transgendered.

I am not saying to completely disregard transgendered or bisexual issues in mainstream culture. In fact, I think characters found in works like Orange is the New Black and Transparent are incredibly important to begin a national/worldwide understanding of what transgendered people go though.  However, sometimes its nice to see a character who can be transgendered or bisexual but also be so much more then those singular identities, much like complex human beings in real life. Now it’s time for me to go build a Magic the Gathering deck around “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death.” Excuse me, I got money to spend.

(A small sidenote that I wished to bring up in this article but couldn’t find a good place to fit it. There as been little to no transmen representation in mainstream media, which is extremely disappointing. While transmen face very similar issues to transwomen, they also face very different struggles from their female counterparts. Their stories also deserve to be told and deserve a place in the current transgendered discussion. It’s sad and disappointing how often they are overlooked. This deserves an article of it’s own and probably will get one from me, but I wanted to at least mention it here.)

Gatecrash Review:Gruul

By James Earl

James Earl continues Pixel Splatter's look at the newly released Magic: The Gathering card set, Gatecrash, by taking a look at the Gruul guild.  

Take the burn of red with the large creatures of Green

At first I was very reticent to all of the Gatecrash guilds. While each of them seemed to be interesting, none of the new guilds seemed to suit my super quick, super aggressive play-style that I had honed with decks like Rakdos in the Return to Ravnica set. I first tried my hand at Orzhov, believing that that might be the only one that interested me, but after losing terribly with my first Orzhov deck, I found myself thinking that Gatecrash might be a total bust for me.

That was until I played my first draft with Gatecrash, and discovered the Gruul guild. Although it contained a color I rarely, if ever, played (green), the Gruul guild perhaps best suits my style of fast, aggressive play (shown in its red mana) while also combining it with the sheer power of green mana.

According to Magic: The Gathering lore, the Gruul guild was meant to help keep the wild animals and beasts of Ravnica alive. Their job was to preserve nature at all costs and to keep Ravnica connected to its natural roots. As Ravnica became more and more industrialized, however, the other guilds, especially Azorius and Orzhov, began to see Gruul as less and less relevant. The Gruul began to shrink and eventually fractured into many different clans, but these clans all still consider themselves Gruul at heart. They realized that they need to fight to stay alive, and quickly. Using the natural world around them, the Gruul did fight back, and with ferocious, wild power.

Looked down upon, the Gruul fought back!

The Gruul’s orignal mechanic, called “bloodthirst”, was meant to demonstrate the savage nature of the guild by having creatures with the keyword come into play stronger if you managed to damage another player that turn. Bloodthirst was a decent enough keyword and proved popular with the player base, so much so that the mechanic has recently re-appeared on several Core Set cards, although designers decided to move its affiliation to black/red instead of green/red to better match mechanical flavor. That being said, bloodthirst often just doesn’t provide enough bang for your buck, especially since against certain opponents getting any kind of damage in at all is a tricky proposition.

On the other hand, the new mechanic, “bloodrush”, for the Gatecrash version of Gruul perfectly matches the desperation and raw power of the Gruul. “Bloodrush” allows you, for a mana cost lower then the actual creature cost, to discard a creature with bloodrush from your hand in order to boost an already attacking creature you control. This can range from giving creatures simple power and toughness boosts to granting deadly abilities like trample and deathtouch. As a result of the low mana cost required to play a bloodrush effect, the keyword works well as a fast acting mechanic, allowing you to do tons of damage with one low cost creature early on in the game. In my personal play-throughs, when all goes well you can get rid of almost half or more of your opponent’s life with just a single early attack. 

The element of surprise is one of bloodrush's best features

The mechanic is helped by the fact that there are great cards to back it up. Ghor-Clan Rampager, for only 1 red and 1 green mana, allows you to boost a creature by +4/+4 and give it trample, making you almost certain to damage to a player regardless of whether they block or not. Wasteland Viper’s bloodrush allows you to give a creature +1/+2 and deathtouch, letting you to save your creature from a block and ensure the death of anything that gets in your way. If you just want to hit hard, Slaughterhorn, for only 1 mana, gives you a +3/+2 boost that can hit your opponent where it hurts. The nice thing about bloodrush is that it is put on creatures that, if you are running out of board presence, are good on or off the field. Bloodrush also doesn’t count as a spell, so good luck to blue control players who can’t counter it.

The thing that holds the Gruul guild back is that its non-bloodrush cards seem to be a bit limited. While other options can certainly help with trying to give your (most often) one attacking creature an open field, they don’t leave you many options for dealing with creative opponents who build decks with a lot of removal. Things like Ground Assault (which does damage equal to the amount of lands you have to only creatures) and Serene Remembrance (which gives you three cards plus Serene Remebrance itself back from the graveyard to your library, allowing you to re-use bloodrushed cards) seem to have very limited utility and might not give you a ton of help. Gruul also has absolutely no flying creatures, so while cards like Clan Defiance and Gruul Charm try to stop the flyers, if your opponent has a lot of them you’re probably in trouble. Another drawback is that you need to be very careful with using bloodrush, as a smart opponent will hold back and wait for you to power up your attacker and then blow it away with instant-speed removal, making you waste your resources for nothing. In this way a simple Unsummon, Doom Blade or similar card can be a devastating blow.

This does nothing for Bloodrush.

Gruul is great at what it does, but if you are put in a stressful situation for the guild you may find it hard to adapt, which perhaps also fits the storyline and character of the slowly dwindling guild. Also, the fact that you have to discard creatures from your hand to activate bloodrush means that the longer your opponent lives, the weaker you become.

Overall, Gruul is one of the fastest guilds in Gatecrash, second only to Boros. But don’t let its speed fool you; Gruul isn’t about quickly nicking away at your health like Rakdos, for example. For Gruul, it’s all about quickly taking you down with a big, early punch to the gut. The Gruul say that, “The only law that matters in the world is the law of nature.” For the Gruul, packing a large punch is only natural.

The Walking Excellence: How The Walking Dead Manages to Stay on Top.

By James Earl

This past weekend, the AMC TV series The Walking Dead returned to for its second half of Season 3, once again breaking all kinds of cable viewership records. All this despite having to compete with the Grammy awards also on that night. With the show continually growing more popular, it’s surprising (or perhaps not so surprising), that the television has still managed to push boundaries and retain a stellar and consistent quality. The Walking Dead series has been translated into numerous mediums and yet in each medium it has still maintained an excellent standard of quality. What is it about The Walking Dead series that has allowed it to earn both critical acclaim and commercial success in not just one, but five different artistic forms?

AMC's The Walking Dead keeps breaking cable viewership records

For those that don’t know, The Walking Dead series originally started as a comic book series written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Tony Moore way back in 2003. While the comic is still on-going, the series has grown into a full blown franchise, with the TV series starting in 2010, a series of webisodes in 2010, a series of books based on the comic starting in 2011, a multiple award-winning video game based on the comics in 2012 (which is also a favorite of the Pixel Splatter writers), not to mention an upcoming video game based on the TV series continuity and a sequel to the original comic-based game. For the especially nerdy, there are even well-reviewed Walking Dead board games. However, within each of these different mediums, from comic book to TV to internet to video games to literature, The Walking Dead never seem to dip in quality, and, even more surprising, has become leading examples in each medium.

So what is it about The Walking Dead formula that allows it to have (such) unqualified success and quality? Perhaps it goes back to its original mission statement. In the first issue of The Walking Dead comic book, writer Robert Kirkmen wrote “How these characters get there is much more important than them getting there. I hope to show you reflections of your friends, your neighbors, your families and yourselves, and what their reactions are to the extreme situations on this book.” Perhaps this is what gives the Walking Dead its power. The Walking Dead is supposed to a reflection of ourselves. While zombies certainly create the impetus and stress for the characters, it’s not the zombies that are important. Like all good zombie or horror fiction, the horrific force is just the impetus for an exploration of character. One only has to look at the recent slew of bad horror movies to realize that when one focuses on the concept too hard instead of characters, the whole thing falls apart.

The popular comic series focused on the characters, not the zombies

This focus on character has certainly helped out the franchise in all its forms. The TV show’s characters have always felt engaging. The ideological battle between the optimistic Rick and the survivalist Shane led to one of the most engaging character studies on television in recent years. In the video game, the relationship between protagonist Lee and the young girl Clementine, and Lee’s (and the player’s) willingness to do anything to protect her echoes every parent or family members love and caring for their loved ones. The Walking Dead only provides an impetus (zombies) for these characters to be put to extremes and show who they really are when society crumbles. It allows us to see what ourselves and our neighbors are really like.

However, it might also be the flexibility of the premise that has helped the Walking Dead. The original comic series certainly left a great blueprint to look at, but it’s how the other mediums were able to make the ideas their own that really helped make them unique. Instead of being a paint-by-the-numbers interpretation of the comic book, the TV series forged its own way. While still following the basic plot and characters of the comics, the TV series took great diversions from the source material. The diversion to the CDC, Shane’s survival past Atlanta, Andrea meeting the Governor, and even the creation of fan favorite character Daryl were all ideas created specifically by the TV show’s writing team, and are nowhere to be found in the comic series. This allowed the TV series to not be bound by preexisting continuity, and allows them to surprise comic readers and new fans alike. This flexibility can also be found in the video game which, despite being set in the same fictional universe of the comics, follows a completely different group of survivors. Despite all the differences between the mediums, it’s the themes that ties them together and still makes them The Walking Dead.

The video game may follow a different group of survivors, but its themes echo those in the other mediums

However, perhaps it is Robert Kirkmen’s other statement in his original issues that really shows the power of the Walking Dead. “I want The Walking Dead to be a chronicle of years of Rick’s life. We will NEVER wonder what happens to Rick next, we will see it. The Walking Dead will be the zombie movie that never ends.” From the very start, Kirkmen wanted The Walking Dead to be something different. Instead of a movie that starts and ends in two hours, The Walking Dead will, hopefully, never have a true finish. Instead, it will keep going on like real life. The story of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse should not be condensed or shorted for, like real life, the dangers and struggles that they encounter are faced on a daily basis. From the very start, The Walking Dead has dreamed to be something that never really ends. If the quality and the sheer beauty of the storytelling keeps improving and pushing new methods of storytelling, here’s to hoping that it never does end.