Guess I'll Die: A Non-Wrestling Blog Post
Please bear with me as this is not a post on pro wrestling so feel free to ignore it. It is about comic books (one specific comic book to be exact) so that might interest some people, but ultimately this whole blog post is going to be very personal for me and I have talked about it somewhat on Bluesky in the past. But I grew up with LiveJournal and long form blog posting of deeply personal shit is what I know, so here we go.
I don't read comic books but the first 20 issues of DIE (Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans) had a massively profound impact on me when I read it earlier this year. And with the announcement of a sequel series called DIE: LOADED I find myself very excited and now revisiting a lot of the emotions I felt after finishing it the first time. So yes, you guessed it, this is a post about being trans and coming out. Sorry, I guess. There's going to be mild spoilers for DIE in this so consider yourself forewarned.
The real world backstory is that one member of our TTRPG group had picked up the complete Volume 1 of DIE and he had been talking it up. He loved the story and the art, but the thing he kept coming back to was that main protagonists of the story, The Paragons, reminded him a lot of our own group. He was adamant about not spoiling it, but did mention how one of the characters, Matt the Sorrow Knight, reminded him about our friend who had passed away last year. He was a wonderful guy and a very loyal friend, but he did carry a lot of depression in him. He'd never quite gotten over his mother's dead years ago and a lot of Matt's character traits in the story do actually line up really well with our late friend's. Beyond that though, he kept insisting that the similarities with the characters and all of us didn't stop there and he lent his copy to another member of the group who returned it saying, "Yeah, you were right. There's a whole lot of us in the story." And he then insisted that I had to read it next. Well now I was curious, though I was mostly expecting to be reminded of our dearly departed friend more than spot direct comparisons to any of us in the real world.
Then I read the first chapter and saw Ash. In the real world, Ash presents as a man but inside the world of Die she's a woman because that was the character she made to play the game. I thought, "Huh, we have gender bending in this story. That's interesting." Then the story progressed slightly and I started to realize that most, if not all the narration is coming from Ash. Then they reach a scene where the party just straight up asks her, "So what's the deal, why are you so comfortable being a woman here." She has an answer but refuses to give it and it really clicked. When my friend had said that there were characters that reminded him of our own circle he was also saying Ash reminded him of me. I was Ash and he was 100% right.
After I stopped crying and yelling at my friend for not warning me about the fact that he had given me a story with a major trans plotline I started again from the top and it was hard to not to notice the obvious hints the story dropped before the reveal of Ash's identity in Die. The part that really stuck out for me was when the party confronted her not long after their return to just ask, "Do you want to talk about this and why you're comfortable being a woman here," and Ash knows the answer but refuses to give voice to it. I've had conversations like that leading up to coming out and I've also had that same inner dialogue and I've made the same choice that it would be easier to just not say anything at all when pressed. There are all these little details about her in the story that end up feeling quite familiar when you know exactly what it is you're looking at.
It was kind of scary how well they wrote Ash as a character and while I wasn't quite as old as she is when she figured herself out in the story, but still, I'd lived as a mostly straight cis man my entire life up until the point that I wasn't. It really was like looking into a mirror and seeing a different version of yourself reflected back at you though I don't have the power to make people do anything I ask, I swear. At the climax of the story, it's revealed that the Paragons are stuck in Die because Ash doesn't want to leave due to not wanting to admit to her trans identity and the world was made by their friend Sol, the GM, specifically for her so she could figure herself out. I thought that was kind of sweet. I do draw some issue with their leaving her identity as being genderfluid so that she could return to the real world and continue to live as a man. Because listen, you don't subconsciously trap your friends in a nightmare game world to avoid returning to being a man if you're comfortable as either gender. Girl, you're probably just a girl. But I digress. The story is going to continue so we might get some new insight on her soon.
There's more than a few things about DIE that hit me hard as a trans woman who is close to three years into her transition. Mainly it struck me that I very rarely have ever felt actual representation like that in any kind of media. Growing up in the 90s characters were either flaming homosexual or queer coded to the point where you couldn't deny they were but writers couldn't actually say it out loud. Even moving into the 2000s and 2010s, the odds of seeing actual trans people or actors or stories was slim or relegated to indie productions and web comics. In short, I felt incredibly invisible and never knew exactly how to process my identity that I was struggling with. This is very much reflected in Ash's character. When we see her at the start of the story as a teenage boy she finds herself dodging typical homophobic insults that were way too common in the 1990s and 2000s. She literally prevents herself from being able to talk about it and therefore process her experiences in Die with her powers in the years between their first journey and the story depicted in the comic. That felt relatable given I grew up in an environment where it was encouraged to not talk about anything person, let alone sexuality or gender identity. Keep it bottled up, force it all the way down, and don't bother anyone else with it. That's what I was taught and that's how I lived most of my life. It sucked.
The relationship between Ash and Sol was interesting when the full extent of it is understood by the end. Sol made this game for Ash's birthday so she could find her true self, even if she was in denial about it at the time. And if it put everyone's life in jeopardy. Little bit of a reckless play to crack someone's egg, but at the same time I couldn't really imagine having someone in my life who knew me that well that they could instantly clock me at a younger age. And on top of all else, want to help me realize who I was for my own sake. I have had many great friends in my life and when I came out to them a lot of them had variations of "I'm surprised, but not surprised." I'd very rarely talked about how I felt about my identity with anyone, even close friends, up until I decided I was going to transition because generally the response was, "Well, I don't really know if you're trans." Gender non-conforming was looked at as expected because I was a weird little bi boy and there's nothing wrong with crossdressing of course, but trans? No way, that was rare and impossible. It did make me wish that someone had seen me for what I was before, but not in the way that one might inadvertently kill the world to get a vagina without needing to pay for bottom surgery. Friends in a transition are important and whether they're there from the start or you meet them on the way I find they can make a lot of difference.
The friendship aspect is really the final thing I want to touch on. Because I got really emotional reading this book and a lot of it did come from simply seeing myself within the main character in the story but I think what still makes me tear up when I think about it is how I felt seen by my real world friends. I met these people at least 10 years ago now and we've been playing games for that entire time. Even when I lived in Japan for 5 years I would log into Skype at some god awful early hour in the morning on Sundays to play with them. I had accepted myself as trans early in 2022 and I was a few months out for my first appointment with the hormone therapy clinic in Tokyo when I came out to them. I was nervous because I had come out to my job and they fired me within a week. I was losing my home, my job, and I didn't know where I was going to be living come 2023 and they were all cool about it. They've been cool about it for the last three years.
From my perspective though it has felt kind of weird at times. A group of cis straight men have all said, "We're cool with you and accept who you are." I don't think any of them have ever slipped up and called me by my deadname even by accident. It felt awkward because it was just an immediate change with very little discussion and it's not exactly something that we bring up. Even as the years have gone and the physical changes are more obvious it's very much just, "That's Eri, she's always been Eri." There's things and emotions I want to give voice to that I frequently don't because I feel like I might be putting weird trans girl issues on cis people and it's just very... it's hard to describe, kind of like how I feel like it's hard to describe how the world now looks to me from this perspective to people. That I don't want to just scare off one of my few support systems I have available to me. One of the biggest hurdles I've discovered in transitioning is loneliness. It can be so fucking hard to find actual people in the real world to talk to and who will understand what you're going through. I'm not out to everyone in my life still and the circle of people I am out to and feel comfortable talking to about my transition is small. God damn do I need therapy.
The cover of DIE, Issue 19. Art by Stephanie Hans featuring the Paragon, Ash.
I cried a lot reading DIE and I cried even more when I finished it. Because it dawned on me why my friend had wanted me to read it. He saw me clearly in the character of Ash. I think it opened some perspectives on what my life had been like up until coming out that he hadn't fully comprehended. It was the group's collective way of saying "We see you." I'm not their formerly male friend with long hair and a bra now. I'm Erika, I've struggled to be myself my whole life, and that comic helped them understand just a fraction of what it took for me to actually become myself. Much easier to explain that way than having to confront a rampaging manifestation of my own repressed sexuality and gender identity at the end of the day. Presumably, but I haven't tried the rampaging manifestation method with anyone yet.
This is all to say that, I'm very much excited to read more of DIE. I'm fully ready to have my emotions clobbered with a steal chair if need be. I wish there were more literature out there that captured this specific type of trans experience, namely someone coming out when they're older. I'm happy to have Ash though. As is, she's a complete disaster of a trans woman who isn't perfect and frankly that's what makes her so perfect to me. She's not the perfect trans character, because she's just like a lot of us: scared and trying to figure it out and making mistakes. She's the best, and I love her.
Comments
Post a Comment