Trans Characters in Guild Wars 2
Mar. 6th, 2022 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olivermoss posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
transmediaclubI've been wanting to post about Sya from Guild Wars 2, but she is also a very minor character. But now that the game has a second known trans character, Yao, I can talk about them together.
Guild Wars 2 players first met Sya pre-transition when the game's many hub city was attacked. She's an aid worker we coordinate with to evac the city. We run into later and she recognizes us, and if we choose the 'Have we met before' dialogue she explains about how the events taught her that life is short and she needs to embrace herself.
The character was written by Jessica Croft, a transwoman who was a Guild Wars 2 dev at the time. She wanted to give a realistic vibe to why the player might know a character was trans and drew from her own experience. Most of her friends know she's trans because they've known her a while and seen part of her journey.
While this is a very interesting example of a good approach to a video game character, to date Sya is a very minor character and has very little dialogue.
"I added Aid Worker Sya thinking a couple people would notice in GW2. Im overwhelmed by the positive reaction to her" Jessica tweeted at the time.
In contrast, we know what Yao's pronouns are because another character references them in third person right after we meet them. Everyone just picks up on the pronouns and uses them. There is, so far, no further discussion on the matter.
Yao is voiced by Ry Chase who goes by any pronouns in their current twitter bio. On a meta level, we know Yao is agender because promo material refers to them as a "mostly-friendly agender engineer".
From a writing perspective, letting your audience know a character is trans or gender non-conforming is very different if they use they/them pronouns as opposed to binary pronouns. If someone uses they/them, or neo-pronouns, there is a reason for it to come up in a first introduction. If a character uses he/him or she/her exclusively, it's a different ball game (and why some video games have characters info dump or do a high drama reveal).
We didn't see a lot of Yao in the expansion so far, but based on the ending it feels like he's being set up to be a more major character. If we learn more about Yao in Living World I'll post an update. (Living World is the between-expansion content that often has more stories / lore / maps / difficulty / etc than what is dropped right at expansion launch.)
But so far, devs have confirmed that this is the expansion in a nutshell:
Guild Wars 2 players first met Sya pre-transition when the game's many hub city was attacked. She's an aid worker we coordinate with to evac the city. We run into later and she recognizes us, and if we choose the 'Have we met before' dialogue she explains about how the events taught her that life is short and she needs to embrace herself.
The character was written by Jessica Croft, a transwoman who was a Guild Wars 2 dev at the time. She wanted to give a realistic vibe to why the player might know a character was trans and drew from her own experience. Most of her friends know she's trans because they've known her a while and seen part of her journey.
While this is a very interesting example of a good approach to a video game character, to date Sya is a very minor character and has very little dialogue.
"I added Aid Worker Sya thinking a couple people would notice in GW2. Im overwhelmed by the positive reaction to her" Jessica tweeted at the time.
In contrast, we know what Yao's pronouns are because another character references them in third person right after we meet them. Everyone just picks up on the pronouns and uses them. There is, so far, no further discussion on the matter.
Yao is voiced by Ry Chase who goes by any pronouns in their current twitter bio. On a meta level, we know Yao is agender because promo material refers to them as a "mostly-friendly agender engineer".
From a writing perspective, letting your audience know a character is trans or gender non-conforming is very different if they use they/them pronouns as opposed to binary pronouns. If someone uses they/them, or neo-pronouns, there is a reason for it to come up in a first introduction. If a character uses he/him or she/her exclusively, it's a different ball game (and why some video games have characters info dump or do a high drama reveal).
We didn't see a lot of Yao in the expansion so far, but based on the ending it feels like he's being set up to be a more major character. If we learn more about Yao in Living World I'll post an update. (Living World is the between-expansion content that often has more stories / lore / maps / difficulty / etc than what is dropped right at expansion launch.)
But so far, devs have confirmed that this is the expansion in a nutshell:
