I Dont Know Thatmuch About Batman, But I Know Good Characters When I See Them. Heres A Little Personal

i dont know that much about batman, but i know good characters when i see them. here’s a little personal rendition of some of them

full view for better quality!

Character: Wirt

From: Over the Garden Wall

Gender: Nonbinary

Why: When the tavern keeper asks who Wirt is, he says “I’m a guy, I guess…” and when he is asked a second time, he says “I don’t know. I don’t really like labels. I’m just sort of, like, myself, you know?”

boy am i tired

What to do now that Halo’s come out as nonbinary:

A guide by a genderfluid person for the writers of YJ

1. Have at least one character ask about pronouns. She can still go by she/her. Plenty of nb people, including me, use those pronouns, but the talk needs to happen somewhere.

2. Brion needs to ask Violet if it’s okay he still call her “girlfriend”. He doesn’t need to redefine his sexuality. We don’t need this to be about him. But deciding between girlfriend, boyfriend, enbyfriend, datemate, partner, or something else is a small thing that would go a long way to actually show she’s nonbinary.

3. You know how the show has multiple times had M’gann and Conner yell “we’re not human!” Let Halo have that same energy when she’s called a girl.

4. Happy Harbor High School GSA. Just mention it once.

Violet’s Gender

So I promised I would talk about it, and now I will. If other nonbinary and trans people disagree with my take that’s fine, I’d love to chat.

Here is the entirety of Violet’s coming out:

Violet: More girls…Despite my outward appearance, I do not know that I am a girl or a boy, as Earth languages define the words.

Brion: But your soul, it’s from-

Violet: A Mother Box, an approximate English translation of the New Genesian word for what I was. But what I am now, is just me. I-is that okay?

Brion: Beyond okay.

All things said and done, and my own personal theories and problems with Halo/Violet/Gabrielle aside, this is okay. Her gender is not framed as because she is a Mother Box, an alien computer, which was my biggest concern when I heard about the spoiler. It’s framed as a fact of who she is, as a human person.

The music swelling as M’gann (who is heavily coded as a trans woman) looks on, is a nice touch. The positive reception is heartwarming. But overall I’m not as excited about this “rep” as I want to be and it’s for a couple reasons but the biggest one is that this is all that’s said on the matter. When, no, I’m sorry, I’m going to need a little bit more.

For example, it would’ve been trivial for a character to ask about pronouns.

From experience, I can tell you the first question someone asks when I come out to them (as long as they’ve heard about being nonbinary before) is what pronouns to use. And if that answer had still been she/her? Fine. But with Forager still being gendered against Forager’s will, the conversation is long overdue.

If you’re going to bother having nonbinary character(s), you need to do more than have them say “I don’t feel like a boy or a girl, I just feel like me.” If Violet’s really been thinking about this, she would have thoughts on her pronouns, on what label fits (third gender? bigender? agender? genderqueer? the list goes on).

Or, even if you don’t want to have a long conversation about all that, they already have Captain Boomerang call Violet a girl, even while she was distracted you could have someone else (Forager perhaps? Artemis even to make up for misgendering her?) “She’s not a girl!”

TLDR: Halo being nonbinary isn’t outright transphobic or harmful, but it wasn’t pulled off as well as it should’ve been.

do you know how I would write a character with multiple pronouns? Would different people use different ones? And if the POV is omniscient/narrator would I just pick one pronoun to use?

Writing a character with multiple pronouns.

Many nonbinary people use multiple pronouns, in a wide variety of forms. How you would write them depends on what your character personally prefers. Here are the most basics three varieties:

1. All pronouns (or a specific list of pronouns) are fine, with no preference. A character like this might have different people (especially groups of people) in their life who use different pronouns for them. If they’re being viewed by another narrator, then use whichever pronouns that narrator wants to call the nonbinary character. (If you have multiple narrators, this might mean different narrators use different pronouns for the nonbinary character.)

Example: Yale doesn’t care if people refer to them as he, she, xe, or they. The narrator of their story first refers to Yale as they/them (and so will I for this example). Yale refers to themselves with the pronouns they feel fit most closely with their current gender presentation, which is masculine for work, androgynous for relaxing time, and feminine for fun outings.

2. All pronouns (or a specific list of pronouns) are fine, with a preference. Characters like this will usually have one pronoun they’ll specifically give if someone asks them, but they also don’t feel offended or uncomfortable if people refer to them by other pronouns. Narrators who are aware of this will (hopefully) use the preferred pronoun to refer to the character. 

Example: Kleos doesn’t mind he/him and she/her pronouns, but says they prefer they/them, if asked. The narrator of their story specifically asks them which pronouns they prefer when he meets them, and therefore refers to Kleos as they/them throughout the story. Other characters don’t ask, and some of those refer to Kleos with gendered pronouns. (In this world all gender identities are accepted, so Kleos not bothering to correct those people demonstrates that the gendered pronouns aren’t offensive.)

Certain pronouns at certain times. Some characters only feel comfortable being called the pronouns they currently relate to. They might identify as a man one day (or hour or week) and a woman (or nonbinary person) the next. If this character is the narrator, or the narrator is omniscient, the character should be referred to by the narration using the pronouns they relate to at that moment. If a different character is narrating, then the nonbinary character should either tell the narrating character which pronouns to refer to them with until further notice, or give some visual clue that they’re relating to a certain pronoun at the moment, (or else the narrating character might start using the wrong pronouns, which while perfectly realistic, really needs a genderfluid sensitivity reader to double check so I won’t cover here).

Example: Acan feels like he’s a guy some of the time and a girl other times, so he switches between he/him and she/her pronouns depending on what he identified with at the moment. People close to him understand how he changes his body language and voice to match his current gendered identity, but he’ll tell others flat out that she’s a girl now and would like to be referred to with she/her pronouns until further notice. 

Because using multiple pronouns (and nonbinary-ness in general) aren’t things most people are familiar with, you do need to explain it to some degree. This doesn’t have to be a big deal though. If the narrator already knows about the nonbinary character’s pronoun preferences, just have them mention it in the narration, and if they don’t, give them a quick conversation where they ask the nonbinary character what pronouns they go by.