red-headed android

i mean that shit literally. but i also mean it in another way. here’s the breakdown.

i, to whom gender is irrelevant, am pissed off that almost nobody knows how to write a nonbinary character that makes me feel anything. for some reason, almost all the ones who are remotely compelling to me are from Japanese media. you know, Japan, a country that famously has a smaller and less visible community of openly nonbinary people than, for instance, North America does.

why is this happening? what gives?

it’s because for a long time, and even to this day with only a few exceptions, for some reason anime and manga artists are the only people with any mainstream appeal who are willing to write nonbinary characters who are evil.

there are two ways i mean this. for one thing, the characters i’m talking about are literally evil in a lot of cases. they commit murders and other heinous crimes for flimsy selfish reasons. they are bad.

but they’re evil in another way too. a social evil, a necessary and even heroic one. and its name is ‘not giving a fuck what people think of you’. in a culture where standing out is embarrassing and policing others’ moral and social purity is a common hobby, refusing to apologize is evil. in a culture where honesty is gauche and irony is king, raw expressions of genuine feeling are evil.

to exist in an unapologetic, raw way is to warp the world around you. it is to force others to acknowledge upon truly seeing you that you are an exception. or a rule. it is to gut punch the soul-imprisoning Demiurge that is others’ expectations and tell it to get lost.

difference. solidity. obtrusiveness. power.

these are not fundamentally heroic qualities. and you know what else? they’re not relatable, either. people are uncertain. they’re defined by webs of messy connections with others that warp their actions, their thoughts, their very appearance into a better image of what’s expected of them. they do not want to cause a scene or to stand out. they prefer reconciliation to confrontation.

there are a lot of nonbinary people in fiction who are like this. relatable and inoffensive. never has a single one of those people made me feel a damn thing. they are dead husks, devoid of inspiration. i’m not proud to see myself represented by them–because i’m not represented by them.

you know who represents me?

Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist, that’s fuckin’ who.

that’s right. the lying, spiteful, petulant, cruel, cowardly little fucker who murdered one of the work’s most beloved characters in cold blood. this is a person who was complicit in a full-scale genocide, and laughed when they recalled framing someone else for their crimes against humanity. they’re so jealous of human connection, of the bonds of love that exist between others and that they can’t have, that they regularly taunt people with the memory of their murdered friends just to watch them squirm.

Envy is my hero. they are the most inspiring example of a nonbinary person i have ever seen in any media ever. and that’s crazy, right? because of how fucked up they are, but also because the manga and Brotherhood (the anime adaptation which I am more familiar with) never discuss their gender identity once. they are never assigned a single label. they never say anything about it besides vague, hazy implications in their speech patterns in the original Japanese. the fact they’re genderless had to be confirmed in a random guidebook most fans have never read! their identity is completely irrelevant to every single thing that they do!

and that just makes it better.

this isn’t a character who shows a mirror to agender people’s personal issues; it’s not a character who thinks about the struggles that those real-life people have for even a moment. they are inspiring because they are above that. beyond it. they don’t care how people perceive them. they don’t care about finding some hidden personal truth. they only care about misplaced revenge, petty cruelty, and the feeling of superiority they get from hurting people.

and in addition to being a complete fucking scumbag–that ‘actual evil’ part–they also completely don’t give a fuck, the ‘social evil’ part.

they don’t envy humans for having genders–in fact, that’s about the only thing they don’t envy, openly flaunting an androgynous form that they cherish so deeply it’s the last thing they’d ever let go. they love their body because it’s human, and in that, they affirm that genderless people are human. they are an insecure, hateful wreck and a walking contradiction, but they never moderate their feelings, never forsake their self-image or their twisted dreams. they never apologize. they are willing to do anything. they are willing to say anything. they are not bound by decency and sanity and kindness and the expectations of others. they are the most honest person in every room, even though their entire worldview is built on the lie–and they know it is a lie–that humans are inferior to them.

and at the end of the series, when protagonist Ed Elric needs to learn a lesson? he learns the lesson that one’s own personal truth, and holding to it, is more important than anyone else’s idea of what’s right or what should be. he learns that being righteous means defying others’ expectations, giving up the preconceptions about one’s own value forced upon one by others (including the supposed superiority of alchemists), and taking the honest path even when it seems impossible.

he learns to not give a fuck.

envy is not ‘nonbinary representation’ as it’s (anemically, disappointingly, and rarely) seen today. they were not written by a corporate video game, TV or film writer alongside a focus group from some queer organization, trying to engineer a character who will Offend No One and also Be Authentic To Queer Lived Experience, two mutually contradictory goals that mush together into a tasteless, mealy slop whenever people try to blend them. envy is the brainchild of a single cisgender person, Hiromu Arakawa, living in a time and place where nonbinary people were practically invisible, who stumbled upon the simple truth:

nonbinary characters (and characters in general) become compelling not when they are relatable, soft little star children who can do no wrong, but when they are fully realized, exhilarating people with flaws and delusions and things to hate about them. nonbinary characters (and characters in general) become inspiring not because they conform, but because they utterly refuse to, because they are themselves despite the pressures of society and narrative and culture.

and nonbinary characters in particular become good representation not when they grapple with the prejudices and failures of understanding of the world we live in–because to acknowledge those things, to make even the concession of considering them, is to apologize to them. the greatest insult an enemy can suffer is to be ignored. and so nonbinary characters become good representation when they exist unapologetically as themselves, in total ignorance of bullshit culture wars and norms that don’t apply to them. when they stand raw and real within a narrative, refusing to even entertain the possibility that the truth of who they are is up for debate, they force their world, and the reader, and everyone else who encounters them, to recognize them.

sincerity, passion, self-assuredness, and the refusal to apologize for one’s self and one’s feelings make people uncomfortable. they always have and they always will. discomfort is the soul of art and the root of feeling. it’s the source of all change. but people don’t like being uncomfortable. to impose that on someone through art is a kind of evil.

and you have to make your nonbinary characters evil.