Read more about Cyberpunk 2077➜ https://cyberpunk2077.mgn.tv
In Night City, what makes you transgender?
Amidst the Keanu Reeves and Evil Corporations and Nomads and Gangs and Questions about Morality and Mortality, there do exist some trans people and trans rep that are worth talking about. Which is what we do. In this video.
Links:
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lilysimpson
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The Pokemon Trans Video: https://youtu.be/5z2f3w2POaI
The Fairly Oddparents Trans Video: https://youtu.be/ll0tax7b47M
The Good Doctor Trans Video: https://youtu.be/jyiFGJ6FKRo
The IT Crowd Trans Video: https://youtu.be/-kO1Nxk2PmQ
The Friends Trans Video: https://youtu.be/Q77zQEqiVRs
The Simpsons Trans Video: https://youtu.be/dB_2znSeloo
Bookmarks:
Intro – 0:00
The Character Creator – 1:51
The Mix-It-Up Ad/Cosplay – 14:20
The Claire Russell – 21:40
Outro – 30:00
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thank you for making youv videos , I hope you also have a great day.
1. I feel like Skyrim is actually an example of trying their best in the time they're given to give you flexibility w your cultural backgrounds. For ex. If youre an orc youre automatically welcomed in the orc strongholds. However theres very little dialogue that fleshes out that experience- mostly bc skyrim in spite of not having a voiced protag still has almost no fleshed out dialogue at all. A mixed bag.
2. I appreciate this discussion of cultural blankness- my friend whos black made a black character originally, but she said that the voice threw her out of immersion too much and ended up restarting to make a white girl
The hero homogeneity expectation in Skyrim is so strong, they even default to the Nord in the alphabetical list of ancestries at character creation.
CDProject Red could definitely have done worse and better with gender representation. I can only think of one other gnc character you meet and they are an undeniably evil person.
Claire is badass, honestly hope she gets a happily ever after.
Lol they basically make fun of Trans in the game, and considering in that universe people even change themselves to be animal-like this all just sounds like a huge cope, Claire was also just an illogical character and not very well written, dumb motivations with some of the worst missions in the game
I really appreciate you finally addressing what other people have ignored: that the advertisement is meant to make you uncomfortable.
Good job. Very happy to see this version.
I think the issue was that one of their major shareholders was NVidia and they strongarmed the company into releasing early to coincide with one of their Graphic Cards releases. This led to a lot of the features being rushed and huge crunch. I don't entirely blame PCDR because they have done everything they can to fix, and improve the game. The next DLC is almost a complete rework of the game, skill trees, vehicle combat, cyberware including edgerunning. I really get the feeling this was the game they wanted to create.
On the subject of V always being V. I don't have a huge issue with this, you kind of end up with 2 choices you end up either with a voiceless character that can be anyone, but in doing that you end up with less ability to tell a story or you end up with a voiced character that is a person that will always be that person no matter what you choose. Geralt will always be Geralt, Shepard will always be Shepard and V will always be V. It limits the players choices, but allows a much more interesting compelling story.
The thing that really threw me out in the game was the nature of relationships, in a world where you can have hot-swappable genatalia and can replace every bit of your body. (There is a great side mission where the barman gets you to spy on his wife because their children look nothing like them, and it turns out she isn't cheating but on the run from something in her past, so has a completely different body). The fact that you have a straight and gay male love interest and a straight and gay female one feels very discordant.
You made some interesting points about the mix it up ad. I hadn't thought about it that way before.
21:35 yes
nice hair
Fab video as always, really loving seeing you grow! Would love you to take a look at the new Sims 4 character creation!
Never played the game but other than the character creator I did not know it had trans rep. Very cool.
A pool of plushie sharks from Ikea makes me go "Oh wow that's trans"
Claire's story is a lot like mine. Lost everything in 2020, including most of my friends. But a really sweet and kind friend, who I'd worked with for years, was there for me. Cared about me. Later, cared for me after 2 gender-affirming surgeries. We ended up falling in love, and have now been together for the last 2+ years! And he'll be taking care of me in 3 weeks when I get bottom surgery. 😊
Great video, Lily! I've never played 2077 because of the whole CDPR transphobic stuff, but this did make me appreciate where they got things right.
I love having the option.
I enjoyed the character customization in the fantasy borderlands game (I can't remember the name right now) but it allowed my character to have masculine and feminine features and use they/them pronouns 🙂
Personally, I don't think I agree quite on the whole character customization part of the essay, I understand your point and I think it's valid criticism, but in my eyes, you're playing V, not someone you make. Yes, you get to create your own V, but it's still V, the same V that you would get had you made them look any other way with the same backstory and fate. I do agree they should have added a pronouns option, but I can also see how and where that would create problems in the game itself, nothing that couldn't be fixed, but something that could be very easily overlooked and missed. I do really appreciate your point of view and voice in the matter and I think you made great and valid points!
I feel like I may have been one of those commenters on the original video because Claire is one of my favourite NPCs ever haha sorry! This was brilliant, your videos keep getting better, the more I watch the more wonderful I think you are and the more I regret a rather ranty comment I left on another video about that Black Mirror episode, which I can't find now, so I think you may have deleted that one too which makes me feel worse! I recall you missed some nuance in one scene and I exploded in media analysis rage all over my keyboard, but thinking more broadly I think you were right, I'd watched the episode through my own cis bi lens and very much seen the story from the perspective of Anthony Mackie's character, but there was a whole other side to that story, and I agree; in terms of just, like, potentially having a cool trans episode, it absolutely was Black Mirror's biggest miss. I was overcritical. You rock. Carry on x
Can you do a video on the video game Catherine?
The new Saints Row has a pretty great character creator and voice customization options. My first time experiencing Trans representation in gaming was Far Cry 6, while that and FLAK but you've already covered them.
the main reason i dislike cyber punk is because of how they treated they're developers, and that because of the great show people came back and gave them more money. all it does is show that they can get away with horrible work conditions and it will be quickly forgotten about if the product is good
( i wrote this before watching the vid so i dont know if you talk about it)
(addendum: you do not. i don't know why you would its not important to the subject )
Paolo de la Vega is the transmasc character in Far Cry 6. I'd love to see you cover his representation in gaming.
Your hair looks SO PRETTY
Yeah a lot of disadvantages to having a voice acted protagonist. If the main character doesn't have a voice actor, you can add as much dialogue variety as you want to within the bounds of time restraints and to a lesser degree file sizes. But the moment you want a voice acted protagonist, you've basically written the character for the player for two main reasons. One, the voice actor inevitably put their own bias in the lines and influence the personality in that regard. Two, is that audio files are one of the biggest at fault when it comes to bloated file sizes in games, so you can't really write all the variety you'd want for roleplay options. Not to say that it's an inherently bad idea to have the main character be voice acted, but doing so will always take the characterization of them out of the hands of the player and put it into the hands of the designer, which isn't really what you want for a western style rpg.
I haven't played this game, and I wasn't sure what to make of it. Thanks for getting into it!
I really like your hair. It suits you really well
The only games I've played that actually allow your custom character to have specific cultural influences and interactions based on how you created them, are of course, fantasy games. You can play a lizard or an elf or a a dwarf or whatever specific fantasy race and have your character respond and interact with the world in a way that takes that into consideration in games like Divinity Original Sin, or Dragon Age, or the Pathfinder video games. Why can that not be true for actual real racial and cultural identities in games like Cyberpunk? I guess the answer is that being able to portray a multitude of different real life cultural backgrounds would take, you know. Effort. Research. Respect. Communication and advice from people of that culture. And it's much easier if you can just make up whatever you want or look at a lore bible or something for a fantasy world with elves.
This is just a guy with blue hair wearing a poorly fitting t shirt 😂😂😂
Love the purple! I have purple and also been putting pink in it as it fades.
Maybe I missed something but could someone explain why the cosplayer dressing up as a transgender person is not okay? People cosplay outside their gender all the time and crossdressing is also a thing. So why would cosplaying be wrong in this situation? They would be just cosplaying as a different gender which is nothing new.
A technical issue with pronouns is, that in many languages the first person also uses gendered forms. This is the case in Polish (dev's country) and would effectively double the amount of lines needed from Vi's VA. Would be great to have it, though
I was just playing this, coming back to the game. My reason was mostly it is one of the few games I can dress up like it.
Do you know much about cosplay competitions? Genuine question. Because you might wanna look into it before assuming that people are treating gender identity as a costume, because that's simply not accurate for the vast majority of the community.
Yay videogame talk! I approve of videogame talk~. Good to see you correct an old video, too. Cool to learn about Claire.
And yes, Cyberpunk and other games definitely should just have a pronoun option determine your pronoun.
By the by, South Park: Fractured But Whole is one of the few games I can think of that lets you explicitly have a trans character in both the character creator and the game dialogue. (Another I can think of is Dream Daddy, which lets you pick whether your character wears a binder, but doesn't change any game dialogue even where it would be relevant.)
Re the discussion from around 10:00 to 15:00 about what your character is able to represent… I can get it with transness if trans folk aren't an identity group that plays a major role in the game, but I feel like if a game has an identity group significant in the story and has the ability to customize the PC into being (or looking like) a member of that group, it should have relevant dialogue options. And re Skyrim, that's really one where there's less excuse. They heavily emphasized the writing when they made that game, ethnicity/species selection is the first question in the character builder, and ethnic/species conflicts are core to the plot to the point of literally having different laws for different groups in certain places, but then they just… don't apply to your character, aside from a few lines of flavor text here and there. And it's not impossible to add at least some of it to the game – mods like Inconsequential NPCs do.
I made a super long comment on your last video about how much I liked the trans and lesbian rep in Cyberpunk! Not repeating it here tho OMG
Youtube did NOT notify me of this one!
The game make no less than four jokes about lady V having big balls. It even gives you the option at one point to say something like "So what do you need my big balls for?". It's such a running joke, at some point I just decided it wasn't a coincidence and was indeed confirmation that lady V canonically has balls.
I love Claire and her questline so much. I love that she and her story have a chance to be messy, and that her story's not related to her transition. I love that her transness is undeniable yet not front-and-center. I love that she's the bartender of the games main bar, and I love that the racing mini game gives her questline such a distinct flavor so it stands out among the side content. I love that she's in her own story, doing her own thing, and just has V along for the ride. She doesn't feel like she's there for V to "have a trans friend", she just feels like a typical well rounded side character that happens to be trans. Perfect.
I was very disappointed with how the backgrounds were basically superficial and dont really come up more than once or twice, if should reflect in every option you are given throughout the game or made it like an alignment scale where choices shift you into those different factions and then if you are high enough in them it unlocks options in your conversations. ANYTHING more than what they gave us.
I just saw it as being a part of cyberpunk, everything is sexualized and bodies can be almost anything from sex to weapon enhancements, like the ads say, skys the limit. Its supposed to be an exploitative corporate dystopia. I never thought anything more about it. Seemed very in setting for the world. While it could somehow be damaging in the real world, I think it would be weird to not include these themes in a cyberpunk world. Wouldn't it also be strange if a setting where men, women, and everything in-between was being exploited and sexualized and they just didnt include trans people in that? I don't think it was trying to target anyone or negatively affect the community in any way. They just didn't think about possible optics issues.
I wish cyberpunk was real, I would be in a completely different body as soon as possible.
while i do completely agree that just being able to choose pronouns would be a better option, i do have a theory on the voice thing. i havent played cyberpunk, but i imagine that at some point, the character you play as will refer to themself with gendered terms at some point, and that would need more voicelines to be recorded for the different pronoun you choose. though i cant imagine this happens ingame THAT often so i think it wouldve been possible to do and they definetly shouldve gone with the pronouns option instead of the voice option.
The irony of the skyrim jab is that your character creation choices in skyrim matters a lot more than it ever does in cyberpunk. That's not saying much, mind you, but people actually comment on your chosen race and it can affect some NPC dialogue and quests, and playing as a pro-nord elf as an example does have some curious exchanges here and there. It's hardly ground breaking but it's exactly the kind of thing that cyberpunk is lacking. Granted, given how more grounded in a more human setting it is, simply having a "race" setting would be really strange – but still.
"the trans-ness thing just kinda hits you in the face at this point, almost like you walked into…"
Almost like you walked into the blahaj section at ikea
I didn't even realize when I was playing, I just made trans femme afro cyber samurai and went through like Genji in OW.
It wasn't until a friend of mine brought up Claire once I explained what I'd done over the weekend.
She was all like, " So you're trans woman who is a mechanic that does less than legal street racing for money?" Among other things ofc.
She was like, " It's almost as if they based Claire off you!"
Im like, meh, when your breaking rules regarding gender norms, traffic laws are small pickings in comparison.
loved this!!
I admit, I finished the race. I thought the point of the quest was leading to a "she was losing sight of why she loved the sport, revenge solves nothing" kind of aesop.
My bad.
LOL at RESETERA proclaiming CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 the Antichrists of gaming but giving Naughty Dog's racism and dubious hiring tactics, Rockstar's YEARS of transphobic and misogynistic content, Blizzard/Activision literally slut shaming a woman to take her own life (among many, many other heinous actions), and now Bethesda's massive transphobic problem all HUGE PASSES and outright ignoring these problems when brought up. Especially if the poster who brought up the topic is a person of color. The selective and often fake activism in gaming will always make my eyes roll real hard.