Kindred

In February 2015, a League of Legends tournament operator changed a rule for their girls-only Iron Solari tournament: only one LGBT girl per team, or there would be an “unfair advantage.” Riot, the makers of League of Legends, had an immediate response.

When it comes to LGBT acceptance, Riot has been doing two things that have compelled me to write this, and write it now, and that is why I am not getting much else done today; because I just cannot stop thinking about all the ways in which this is coming together, and the ways in which Riot has been really really really clever. They are taking an audience that has a not-insignificant amount of bigots, and subtly causing them to shift and open their minds in ways that they might not necessarily feel comfortable doing directly with humans.

I don't remember when I started playing League, exactly, but it was definitely quite a while before I had my whole gender revelation. I would sometimes kind of take the game to task, among my friends, for some things that I saw as sort of like playing to tropes, playing to ethnic stereotypes, or playing to even gendered stereotypes. But Riot is not really any more guilty of that than most other media producers I've seen who are inventing original characters and original stories and original content around their game, or even just broadly, like comics or movies or whatever.

By that I mean things like the women being always thin, very fit, and the same with the guys for the most part, with a few exceptions. My earlier complaints would be things like, on the male side, with male champions, you have champions like Gragas, you have champions like Urgot, who are male, and definitely clearly masculine, but also in a kind of non-mainstream way, in that Gragas is very heavy, and Urgot is kind of grotesquely disfigured, and sort of half-human. There weren't really any female examples of that.

The women were all still really thin. There was some variance in breast size, and that was kind of it. But that was the starting point for something that's become really impressive. Waifish Jinx came out, and she had very very very small breasts. She was the first female champ that I remember seeing who wasn't a child, like Annie, with such a small build. It was nice to see some variety come in.

But in the last six months or year, Riot has really started to get creative with their champions. They are challenging their community's capacity to understand things outside of gender binary, and outside of culturally normalized gender roles. They are doing this by presenting new champions who don't look like what the audience thinks someone who uses pronouns like "she" and "her" should look like, but instead just presenting someone who is that way, in a world where that mostly doesn't matter. They have the ability to do this because it's a fantasy setting. They can come to their audience with a character that is not human at all, where all of the extranormative things about that character are so out there that their gender becomes the least confusing thing about them.

The first example of this, which was kind of impressive, but didn't blow me away as much as the one I'm going to get to, is Rek'sai. Rek'sai is female, an alien monstrosity... uh, thing. She's this rapidly-tunneling land-shark sort of creature that's kind of short and squat and really wide, but she also will literally pop up out of the ground under your champion, and take them to pieces.

On the forums, there'd be some discussion, where people would say things like "I wonder when he will come out?" or whatever, but when Rioters would speak about her, they'd gender her correctly because that's a matter of brand consistency, if nothing else. Riot is clear about what Rek'sai is. There is no ambiguity about her gender, but a fair sized segment of people see a character concept like Rek'sai, and they want the gender to be masculine because of how she looks. Even so, whenever she was misgendered on the forums, there was always a response from someone in the community correcting that.

So we have people getting used to this model of understanding two things. One is that if someone misgenders someone else, it's appropriate to correct them, and two, any idea of what is required for someone or something to be female is challenged. For non-humans, we don't get hung up on this as much in reality. You see a girl dog, and you think it's a boy, and you say "how old is he," and they say, "oh, she's two," and you say, "oh, 'she,'" okay, great. No big deal. Minor mistake, it's fixed, nobody cares, and the dog never had any idea.

But in fantasy settings, we have the advantage of creating something entirely new that's outside of everyone's understanding or experience, and saying, by the way, this thing has gender, and even though your expectation based on appearance is that her gender is male, it's not; her gender is female. And that maps really pretty closely to the thought processes that are required to get your head around trans people being legitimately whatever gender they understand themselves to be.

One of the difficult things in educating people about what being trans looks like is managing any expectation that people think about these things if they don't know any trans people, or anyone else that is really outside of the realm of their experience, outside the realm of their day-to-day lives. If they don't have a reason to know about it, if they feel they don't have a reason to have the vocabulary about it, it can feel kind of oppressive to have someone come in and say, "you need to behave this way, you need to refer to me in that way." Rek'sai gives Riot a way to get people to do that without feeling so opposed to it, because League of Legends is something that they've come to of their own accord.

People are showing up and playing because they love the game. Whether they love the mechanics or the lore or the construction of the world, the way that the maps are designed, whatever it is, they want to be there. They're invested in it. And Riot, the people who have created that world, are able to dictate some parameters of that world, and say, "this is it, this is the world, so, take it or leave it." And they have enough of a customer base, they have a good enough product in terms of a value proposition in gaming, that they can get away with that.

The thing that really impressed me, though, was not Rek'sai. I didn't even realize all of these subtle things about Rek'sai until recently. The thing that's impressed me a lot more is this teaser of a champion that's not out yet, as of this writing, called Kindred. Kindred, if you look at the concept art, is designed as two spirits. Which itself un-subtley refers to a widely understood queer and/or transgender model; the Native American two-spirit.

Kindred is plural, a pair of beings who are never without each other, who cannot be separated further. They are two, but they are atomic. They are two, but they are one. And in the cinematic teaser, Wolf has a voice that might be described as male-typical, and Lamb has a voice that might be described as female-typical. And they also have sort of more stereotypically masculine and feminine sort of properties. Wolf, as one might guess, is the more masculine energy side, more aggressive, feral, direct action, attacking stuff. And Lamb is more overseeing, caretaking, with a healing aspect that is represented in "Lamb's Respite," Kindred's ultimate ability. But because they are two, even though it's a singular entity in terms of game mechanics, the pronouns for this champion are "they" and "them" and "theirs." And so, I've seen already on the boards, people will pronoun Kindred as "he" or "she," and sometimes they are corrected. And when corrected, sometimes there is a pushback. But in this case, there's no ambiguity about the character's pronouns the way there may be some understandable debate about them in reality, because Riot controls the reality of Runeterra, the game's setting, absolutely.

Riot doesn't need to police the forums and go in and correct people misgendering Kindred via pronouns, they can just keep using those pronouns consistently in all media regarding the character. In this way, they also set a great example for trans people in managing reaction to being misgendered in their own lives; if you are misgendered and you correct someone, there's a chance you'll have some pushback, and it may even become relatively violent. But, if you just keep asserting yourself, people will probably come around eventually, and even if they don't, your allies will reveal themselves. The other thing that's really obvious as a call-out to this sort of two-spirit model, which is really heavily influenced by gender, is the symbology that's used for the masks that Lamb and Wolf wear, and even their own coloring, which are both plainly inspired by the yin and yang concept. With the darker shade of coat and the lighter tint of mask, Wolf is plainly masculine with an aspect of feminine, in terms of visual composition, and is established in opposing balance with Lamb, whose colors are reversed.

This is really impressive to me, that a company that has this size of an audience, an audience that has a lot of people in it who are really transphobic, biphobic, take your pick... non-cisgender-heterosexual-phobic... has been releasing champions that challenge our notions of gender. I saw something on the boards the other day, where this trans girl was being bullied about her appearance and the fact of her being trans. I reached out to her and was like, "hey, I'm here for you." It was important to me to be sure that she knew she was not alone, because being rejected so broadly leads very quickly to a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation, a sense that maybe who we are is wrong, when nothing could be further from the truth.

She seemed confused by this, and a little bit defensive, which is understandable given the kinds of introductory messages girls like us get online. I went on to say, more or less, "this is me, here's my Facebook page if you want to get to know me at all, but I'm mostly just here to let you know that I'm here for you, and that's it." And I left her alone after that, but she's initiated chat with me since then, and I feel like I've done a good thing. I reached out to her in the first place because her forum name and summoner game name is very much "I am female," and her post on a selfies thread on the general discussion board had people saying things like, "that's not a trap, that's an ambush," which is referring to this idea that a trans girl is trying to "trap" someone, or trick them into thinking that they're a "real girl," as if they were anything else.

Somebody else posted this sort of trollface or grossed-out kind of face cartoon drawing, that said "cross-dresser" under it really large. There's definitely a lot of vitriol around girls like me in gaming communities in general, and specifically within League's community. But Riot, for its part, is saying that they don't agree with that. They're not just passively saying "hey, we don't like that," but that they're completely opposed to it in their corporate philosophy.

This was really illustrated clearly in February, when a tournament operator called Garena, from the Philippines, was changing some rules around their Iron Solari tournament. The Solari in game lore are represented in Leona, who has sun-themed abilities and iconography. So the Iron Solari tournament, inspired by that, is a girls-only League of Legends tournament.

Very briefly, as in "in the course of 24 hours" briefly, in February, Garena issued a statement saying that they had heard from a number of their players that perhaps if a team had a lesbian or bi or transgender girl on their team, that they got an unfair advantage for some unknown reason. The text of the announcement literally said "may probably have some unfair advantage." They of course got a backlash from people in the community, but then they had a pretty strong and unsubtle backlash from Riot themselves.

Riot tweeted an unambiguous statement that "LGBT players are welcome at official LoL tourneys. We're working with partners to ensure consistency with our values across all regions." In other words, if you do not allow unrestricted access to LGBT players at your tournament, it will not be an official League of Legends tournament. And if you don't have the support of League of Legends' publisher for your League of Legends tournament, that is a big problem.

The next day, Garena rescinded the rule, saying they "sincerely apologize for any offense we caused to the LGBT and gaming communities." It had the usual corporate non-apology trappings of how their initial decision "created a lot of good discussion and debate," and how they had been "discussing the ruling with our partners and re-examining our approach" and ultimately changed their minds, but it was pretty clear what happened.

Maybe, I don't know, six months after Kindred's come out, it will be really natural for people to refer to someone that they understand as a single entity as "they" or "them." So when they meet a non-binary person after that, now they have a model. Instead of having a reaction of "that's crazy, that doesn't make any sense," they have this concept they can attach it to. It might not be completely accurate or relevant, but it will be in the ballpark. Someone can say to them, "hi, my name's Chris, my pronouns are they, them, and theirs," and instead of having no idea how to respond, now the listener can think, "oh, they're like Kindred, okay."

And then everything is easy. Because they've already had conversations with their friends about Kindred, as a champion, and because Riot is very clear about "this is the grammar," and "these are the words," it gives people a way, through play, to flip that switch, and get their heads around saying something like, "we need Kindred to come and gank top, we need them to get there fast." And then they meet someone who's non-binary, and suddenly it's not that hard for them to talk to their friends about this person, or to use their pronouns properly. If their friends play League, too, there's no need to go into an explanation that they may not feel equipped to give. It just becomes normal, or at least more normal, and less alien.

They can say, "I was hanging out with Chris last night at their place, we had pizza, and they were like, 'do you want Mountain Dew, or Coke?' and I was like, 'I want vodka,'" or whatever. The pronouns disappear, mechanically, and the message is conveyed because the hangup of using a pronoun that deliberately keeps some aspect ambiguous, or defined as "outside of the Gender Binary," disappears, too. It normalizes the use of non-binary pronouns, which is fantastic. Non-binary pronouns are something that I still struggle with. Like most people, I have been encultured to presume gender and assign it mentally, even to people I will never interact with at all.

If I see someone on a bus that appears outwardly feminine to me, and I tell a story about them later to a friend, I will almost certainly refer to them as "she," even though that may not be accurate. I have non-binary friends whom I still instinctively read as male or female, and having an extra model in my head to associate them with reduces that.

I know very few non-binary people, and it's difficult for me to correctly use their pronouns. It is sort of alien to me. And I also understand that they're right, and that the problem is me, and not their identity.

This is the genius of what Riot is doing with these kinds of champions, like Rek'sai, and Kindred. They're saying, "Rek'sai is she. Kindred is they." And that's it. They don't have to come out and have Rek'sai say "my pronouns are she/her/hers," they just always consistently state them that way. Because that's what they are.