soc_puppet | (no subject)

Made it to the fourth season/second arc of She-Ra! I feel like this arc can be subtitled "Scorpia Needs A Hug".

I also have thoughts on Double Trouble.

For those of you who missed it, Double Trouble was a female character in the original series, and was rebooted as nonbinary. They're a shapeshifter, and they're a villain. (Well, they're kinda mercenary? But they've been hired by the villains.)

When they were introduced, there was some backlash; ultimately, showrunner Noelle Stevenson pointed out that it was important to have representation of all sorts when it comes to nonbinary characters, and that includes villains. And I can see where she's coming from; I just have two little things I'm kinda uncomfortable about with this particular representation choice.

First, Double Trouble is, to the best of my knowledge, the only nonbinary character in the new She-Ra. As is frequently pointed out by

writingwithcolor, having villainous representation can be mitigated by also having heroic representation of the same identity. I haven't really been following She-Ra fandom that closely, only paying attention when someone I follow reblogs a bit, but I feel like someone would have said something if another canon nonbinary or genderqueer character showed up.

Second, the type of representation that Double Trouble specifically provides is redundant. Nonbinary shape changers are not new, and nonbinary shape changing villains in particular are not new—see: Envy from FMA for a very well known example.

I'm not trying to knock anyone who likes them! If Double Trouble speaks to you, then more power to you! Honestly, they're a pretty fun character in general. I'm just personally a little tired of being served the same meal over and over again, with maybe different spices, when I say I'm looking for a specific flavor.

(BTW, if there's another canon nonbinary or genderqueer coming up, this is your cue to tell me about them. Or to just tell me they exist, I'll take anything.)

Okay, mini-rant over.

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DT is the big non-binary character for She-Ra, yeah. Admittedly we liked them when we saw them; they struck us as more neutral-aligned than Evil and got some great insights. The Q&A that Noelle did with their actor helped, admittedly.

There is a minor bit of trans rep coming up in Season 5, though. The original series had a trio of characters from another world, the 'Star Sisters'. They show up in this series as the Star Siblings; Jewelstar is confirmed-by-writers to be a trans man in this version.

On another minor-but-still-Dreamworks note, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts introduces us at one point to a trio of friends of the titular character. Troy is a boy, Dahlia is a girl, and Asher is non-binary. They're mostly in the background, but there's that.

Not a lot of genderqueer rep going on, but more than I remember from when I was younger. Hoping it continues to improve.

They are very cool and likeable, it's only the larger trend they play into that worries me at all.

I got to "meet" them shortly after reading this! I've now only got four episodes left to go 👍

That's another one on my "to-watch" list, which is more than a little ridiculously long at this point 😅

Yeah, that's fair. As fun as they are - and as prominent as they are - it would be nice to see more human non-binary characters. Most of the ones I can think of are all relatively minor.

It's slowly gaining momentum - Kipo has both nb and mlm rep - but it'd be nice if things were moving faster. Trends and all that.