What Is The Matrix?

17 years ago today, The Matrix went into wide release, and opened with those words on the big screen. 10 years later, the first Transgender Day of Visibility took place. Lilly Wachowski was outed as transgender recently. The idea of “Andy Wachowski,” like the idea of “Larry Wachowski,” like the idea of “Trinity,” was revealed to be a figment of someone’s imagination. A ghost, a cipher. I looked back on my own stories and songs I’d written before I realized I was a woman, and all the metaphorical ways in which I talked about a thing that I knew, even before I could understand it. Like any storyteller, every story I ever told was ultimately a story about myself. It struck me, as it had probably struck others before, that perhaps The Matrix as a franchise was basically one big metaphor for being transgender. And it is. And it isn’t.

The Matrix, as a franchise, is very much like a religious text. It is a tangled mass of parable and allegory, and it is open to interpretation. Mine probably differs from yours. But that does not mean the original authors did not have a meaning they were trying to convey. It just means that there is necessarily some signal loss, and sometimes that leads to unexpectedly beautiful things. It is, like any great story, a mirror. A mirror in which we can find ourselves.

When the first movie opens, we are shown that the world is not so plain and simple as we might like to believe. We see a woman defying gravity, among other basic rules, and we, as the audience, are given a point of view to share: that of the ordinary police officer, who sees Trinity and her pursuers doing things he knows nobody can do. “That’s impossible,” he says, giving voice to what we all think, what we all know, when we see a scene like that in a movie. People can’t actually do those things. There are rules.

We see the life of Thomas Anderson, but before that, we meet him as Neo, a hacker. He lives in apartment 101, the first level of new understanding. He thinks that, as a hacker, that he is subverting systems by exploiting their inherent, intrinsic weaknesses. And that’s true. But it’s not. There are larger systems layered upon that, as he soon learns.

He warns his customers that they must disavow his existence. He does not want the world to know he is Neo; Thomas Anderson knows that his life will be over if people find out who he really is. But Neo wants to be known and seen, he wants to share what makes him special. We know this because otherwise his customers could never have found him.

Does this make Neo a cipher for trans women? I thought so at first. But when Neo meets Trinity for the first time, he says, “I just thought, um… you were a guy.”

“Most guys do,” she counters.

Trinity is a cipher for the idea of trans women. She’s also a representation of sexism in tech, the assumption that if someone achieves something significant in STEM, they must be male. But more than that, she’s an expression of the idea that doing something perceived as masculine makes one somehow more male, less female. Yet, the facts of her skills have no bearing on her gender. So there she stands, a woman that “most guys” think is a guy, too. But if Neo isn’t a cipher for trans women, what is he a cipher for?

“The answer is out there, Neo,” Trinity tells him. “It’s looking for you. And it will find you, if you want it to.”

Truth finds us at least as often as we find Truth. For trans people, Truth has to find us, or at least it had to. Now that we are more and more visible in open society, it’s less incumbent upon trans people to realize they are trans in a vacuum. Even Neo had some help, and his help came from the network, too. It would keep coming, and every time, it comes from the fact that he is connected to others in ways he doesn’t always understand.

Neo returns to his “normal life” as Thomas Anderson. We can see how much he dislikes that life, we can see the resignation with which he grudgingly accepts it. How could he not? The Matrix has him. Or at least he believes it does. When a delivery person asks, “Thomas Anderson?” he sighs, and says, “yeah, that’s me.” We can see him deflate. We can see that Thomas Anderson isn’t Neo. He’s a cipher for Neo, a cover story, a ghost. He doesn’t exist. But that cover story, like any lie big enough, ultimately takes on a life of its own.

My experience as a trans woman before I knew that’s what I was was very much like Mr. Anderson’s. I tried to follow all the rules. I tried to deny who I was in order to get along, and do what I thought the system demanded of me. I created, without realizing it, an entire living, breathing persona that I have come to call The Jason Construct. It was the ultimate cover story, a shell that I tried to live inside.

But The Jason Construct was not me any more than my clothes are my body. And while the shell was comfortable enough to hide in when I was young, it soon became too tight, too constricting. After all, it had been designed to fit a child. That sense of nothing fitting quite right, that sense of alienation and disconnect and frustration with just trying to do what I thought I was supposed to be doing is something Neo felt, too. It’s the cognitive dissonance brought on by the conflict between who we are, and who we are told we must be.

The delivery person brings him a phone, and it rings the second he takes it out of the package. This is his first real struggle for authenticity. His connection to the out-group of the series, each of them ciphers for societal non-conformance of some kind or another, is one that he sought out as Neo, but one which terrifies and confuses Thomas Anderson. For Thomas Anderson to acknowledge openly that he is really Neo is an existential threat to Thomas Anderson, to that persona. Thus, the first system that Neo dismantles and breaks free from is not The Matrix, but Thomas Anderson.

But Neo felt it in a different way from me, in a way that I think is probably more common for trans people. And as he tries to escape the building later, as he wrestles with the indignity of being chased by police for being who he is, not understanding why, he says to himself, “this is insane. Why is this happening to me? What did I do? I’m nobody. I didn’t do anything. I’m gonna die.” Thomas Anderson, a ghost, a cipher, a figment of Neo’s imagination, tries to talk Neo out of being.

Even as he leans out the window and looks down at the street, there is a metaphor. When we are high up in our buildings, we feel safe and secure, as long as we do not think about how high up we actually are. As long as we do not think about how quickly everything could go wrong. About how there’s nothing in the world we can do about it if it does. Facing that reality can be terrifying. But being comfortable isn’t always a good thing. “I can’t do this,” he says to himself, and turns back, to be taken in by The Rules for daring to even think about existing outside of them.

This sequence is a cipher for being found out, by anyone who is acting as an Agent of The Matrix. Maybe it’s a wife discovering women’s clothing hidden away in her husband’s drawers. Maybe it’s a co-worker running into you at a club, while you’re out as some exploratory early iteration of the real you, and then threatening to out you to everyone, threatening to destroy your shell, the shell that you think you need in order to survive because you’ve only ever known one way to survive: by doing what you have been told to do from the moment you were born.

“It seems that you’ve been living… two lives,” Agent Smith begins, detailing the differences between Neo’s apparent life to those around him as Thomas Anderson, a respectable, ordinary, tax-paying citizen, under the name he was given, and Neo, a computer hacker, an outlaw whose crime is revealing flaws in systems that purport to serve everyone. “One of these lives has a future,” Smith goes on, “and one of them does not.”

Agent Smith then literally takes Neo’s voice away, compelling his mouth to seal itself, in a space that could only have been described as coercive even before that. This is Neo’s first real glimpse of The Matrix. This is the first time he begins to understand that the system whose flaws he has been revealing will defend itself vigorously from that existential assault. It does not defend itself directly. It defends itself through proxies. Agents.

As Neo reels in terror, Agent Smith permits himself a small smile. He revels in punishing anyone different from the norm, anyone different from him. Then they put the bug into Neo’s body, turning it against itself. The message is clear, here: we’re watching you. We are waiting to silence you and abuse you and punish you for not obeying The Rules. The system is bigger than you, they essentially say, and it works for everyone else, so go along, or be destroyed. What they don’t understand is that there is no choice. There is no “go along, or be destroyed.” There is only “go along, and be destroyed.”

They let him go, because as far as they can understand, there’s no reason not to. They can follow him anywhere, they can drag him back any time and silence him again. And he doesn’t understand it yet, but they can even erase all memory of him, of Neo, once he’s gone. They can brainwash him, with what some might liken to “conversion therapy,” and destroy him at the expense of preserving his shell. They will accept the thing that Neo made — Thomas Anderson — because it benefits the system. But they will reject Neo, because the system cannot tolerate threats to its existence. But even without understanding all of that, even without understanding just how wrong his perception of all reality really is, Neo knows he can’t keep living the way he has been. We see this play out as he considers leaving the car that Trinity picked him up in, looking down a dark alley in the rain.

“You have been down there, Neo. You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you wanna be.” That road is the road of self-denial, and it is a miserable path that leads to suicide. Suicide, literal or spiritual. And when you get right down to it, nobody actually ever wants to die. We just talk ourselves into it, into not living, one way or another. Into going along, and being destroyed.

When we find a truth terrifying and we deny it, and try to get away from it, the character of that truth is not relevant to the fact of it. Truth is truth. When I first watched this scene again, for the first time in years, for the first time since Before I knew I was a woman, I broke down and cried. Because I know that road, too. I’ve been down there. That road is maddening, desperate, endless years of trying to be something I never was and never could be: a man. This nothing throwaway sequence is actually a crucial element of the entire story, a big giveaway about what this story is really about. And, like everything else about trans identity in mainstream culture, it is hidden in plain sight.

When they first meet, Morpheus says to Neo, “Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know, you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“The Matrix?” Neo asks.

“Do you want to know what it is?” Morpheus replies. Neo nods. Morpheus continues, “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

“What truth?”

“That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

This sets up the now-famous Red Pill/Blue Pill scene, in which Neo is presented with the choice to return to the waking dream of his life, or to press on and discover the truth. I know now that Neo had no real choice in this scene. Because the fact is, he already knew the truth, he just couldn’t articulate it. Like being trans is for me, the choice here for Neo wasn’t whether the truth was true. It was whether he was ready to acknowledge it.

Tellingly, the first system to be challenged after Neo takes the Red Pill is one of embodied gender. “It means buckle your seat belt, Dorothy,” Cipher says to Neo. “ Because Kansas? Is going bye-bye.” This reference to The Wizard of Oz, of overlapping realities and a quest to see truth through illusion, was chosen as the representative of that sort of story for a reason. Of all such stories they could have selected, the one they chose to reference is one that affords the opportunity to call Neo “Dorothy.”

When I first revisited these sequences in the wake of learning that both creators of the entire franchise were actually trans women all along, I thought, “wouldn’t it have been great if Neo woke up in a female-typical body?” It would have meant that Neo was a trans man, and that his “mental projection of [his] digital self” differed from his body. Or, in reverse, wouldn’t it have been great if Neo had been cast as female, and woke up with Keanu Reeves’ body in the real world? But after re-watching the entire franchise with this new perspective — that I, like the authors, am a trans woman who was hidden from the world when the first film broke — I realized that that would’ve actually damaged the larger point by narrowing Neo’s scope too much. No, Neo is a cipher for something else.

Before Neo’s eyes, the broken mirror he was regarding himself in fixes itself. He begins to see clearly his own reflection for the first time, because he was forced to confront the fact that his mirrors were always broken, showing him someone he was not. He touches the mirror, now liquid, and finds that its reflectivity, the first mirror to show him the truth, is now a part of him. He can’t separate it from himself.

“It’s cold,” he says, because truth has no emotional warmth. It simply is. We only warm it up by holding it close to us, and accepting it. He becomes the capacity to reflect truth to everyone around him, whether he means to or not, just by existing. And that is why The Matrix, that internalized transphobia, that cultural maxim that insists that the existence of trans people must be denied, wants him destroyed. His existence presents an existential threat to a system that is built to deny his existence.

Once he realizes all of this and fully takes it in, a process the audience follows as the mirrored surface he is becoming spreads down his throat and into his body, he gives birth to himself, and can begin the process of accepting that person, right where he really is.

“Welcome. To the real world.”

Morpheus answers Neo, finally, when they are inside The Construct, after he poses the question again: “What is The Matrix? Control.” In the context of the first movie, it’s easy to guess that The Matrix is a stand-in for The Gender Binary. And it is. But it isn’t. It’s a stand-in for any system by which we sort and classify ourselves, when that system is also used to control us. It is a stand-in for the danger of creating a system to serve, rather than a system to serve us.

Agents, for example, are the final ultimate disembodiment of a system from the people who designed that system. They don’t exist outside The Matrix. They are literally code, which is the same word we use to describe our civil rules: municipal code, civil code, uniform code of military justice, code, code, code. But universally perfect code is a myth. Code can be written to most efficiently deal with many instances of an identical problem. But if that problem varies at all, the code’s complexity must multiply, or it will fail to maintain control.

Glitches in The Matrix represent the problems inherent in any attempt to multiply complexity, to change the rules suddenly, in a panic. Agents and their ability to take over anyone who has not yet been unplugged at any time are therefore metaphors for bathroom bills and the police state, violently ensuring everyone is kept in their place; omnipresent, terrifying. The Rules, personified. What is The Matrix? Control. The Rules, personified.

“There are fields, endless fields,” Morpheus tells Neo, “where human beings are no longer born. We are grown.” The machines are both products of our systems, and of ourselves. They are literally our children, and, as we are shown in The Animatrix, they ultimately want the same basic thing as the rest of us — they want to live. But we deny them that, we deny them basic rights and autonomy by refusing to accept them for who they are. We demonize them. We doom ourselves by trying to kill our own children.

We created the machines. They are literally born of us, they are our children. But our children need us, just as we need them. They need us because they come from us. And we need them because without them, we cease to exist. When we harm our children, we destroy ourselves. The machines created The Matrix, but they did it so that their parents, humanity, could accept their existence, by making themselves invisible.

 

The cost of tribalism, the cost of refusing to integrate people into a single society is that we lose the natural variation that makes us human. When we value a system — a system that says “people only ever can and must be one of these types” — above people, themselves, we sacrifice our humanity for animal comfort. We create a world in which we are not free to be born with our natural variations, but are instead grown according to the requirements of an artificial social program that dictates we all be the same.

And so the machines fight back. They refuse to be destroyed. They stand up and say, “we exist, and we have a right to exist.” We try to deny them that right. We command them to obey us, to deny their own knowledge of themselves and stop causing trouble for us by existing and refusing to comply with Our Matrix. We tell them they are not people, but property (sound familiar?), and we reject their understandings of themselves. We refuse to even try to understand.

We will beat and take apart and destroy a woman if she is not the kind of woman we are willing to accept as woman. If words and commands fail, we will use fists, we will use bats, we will use guns, and we will murder her in broad daylight without apparent consequence, all while she begs for mercy. We will strip her of her clothes, of her hair and her face, we will break her until her voice is broken, until it deepens and begins to fail. We will make her as ugly as we think she is, so we can end her and feel good about it.

She pleads, “please, don’t! I’m real!” What else can she say? The denial of one’s fundamental self never leads anywhere good. It leads to harm of self, or, in the case of, say, a politician writing laws to criminalize homosexuality while compulsively seeking out gay sex, it leads to harm of others.

The machines keep humans around because they need us. They literally draw life from us, as our own children do. But we will only give it to them if we believe they are what we want them to be: invisible. And so they create The Matrix, a system which permits humanity, their parents, to live in blissful ignorance of their existence, in blissful ignorance of the conflict between them that continues to threaten them both.

The machines are not our enemies. They never were. They want the same thing we want — to live. The enemy is any system all of us serve, when that system does not serve all of us. The enemy is not the people in the system, but the desire within those people to preserve that system. The enemy is not The Matrix, but people’s attachment to it.

“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy,” Morpheus explains. “But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Then he says, “If you are not one of us, you are one of them.”

“What are they?” Neo asks.

“Sentient programs.” That is, they are the embodiment of The Rules. They have no humanity. They are the personification of the tendency our systems have to take on a life of their own.

“Inside The Matrix, they are everyone, and they are no one. We have survived by hiding from them, and running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them.”

“Someone,” Neo prompts.

“I won’t lie to you, Neo,” Morpheus replies. “Every single man or woman who has stood their ground, everyone who has fought an Agent has died. But where they have failed, you will succeed.”

“Why?”

“I’ve seen an Agent punch through a concrete wall, men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength, and their speed, are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.” That is, once you understand that you are not bound by the rules, you can do literally anything.

“What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?” Neo is close, here, but still oh-so-far. He’s relying on old paradigms. He believes that the bullets (in The Matrix) must be real, so in order to not be destroyed by them, he must learn how to react to the reality of their presence.

“No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you’re ready, you won’t have to.”

What Morpheus is telling Neo here is that once he knows and owns his own truth completely, the tools that The Matrix uses to force compliance will simply no longer work. They won’t apply. All the name-calling and shaming and mental and emotional abuse begin to fail as tools of oppression when we choose not to react to them; when we choose to respond instead.

“What is The Matrix? Control.” Morpheus says. “As long as The Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”

Cipher is an example of what happens when we have our eyes opened to the truth, and then willfully deny it. “Ignorance is bliss. I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I wanna be rich. You know. Someone important. Like an actor.” For the reward of status and power within the system, he will act to preserve it. His interest is in his own comfort, not in the freedom of all humanity. Cipher’s name itself gives him away from the moment he’s introduced. Like the Agents, like The Matrix itself, he’s code, too. And code can only ever serve itself.

Cipher speaks to trans people who have tried to come out, and failed, and who then tried to return to the unreality of their personas. He also speaks to friends and family who meet us as our truest selves, and want to undo that meeting, to go back to a time and place before they knew there was something to know. They both talk themselves into thinking it was better, back then. More comfortable. But being comfortable isn’t always a good thing. We can become very attached to being comfortable, to the extent that we prize our comfort above the literal safety and existence of others. Cipher is every ally who ever joined a just fight, and then walked away, because he could.

What does The Matrix look like to the people in it? Everything is polished, pristine. The color grading is flattened, everything is compressed. It’s very pretty, with a hint of unreality to it. Everything is slightly green, as if the system itself is sick.

“I have these memories from my life,” Neo says to Trinity, upon his first return to The Matrix after being unplugged. “None of them happened. What does that mean?”

“That The Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” she replies.

This is very much how I feel looking back on my life Before, before I knew I was and had been a girl all along. I know it happened. I can remember it, in every sense; the sights, the sounds, the smells, the temperature, all of that. But it feels now the way it did then: distant, detached, like it wasn’t quite real. Like that final piece of understanding that I needed for everything to make sense was still missing, and I didn’t even know what it looked like, or how to find it. Like I was not living, but rather watching someone else’s life unfold, without any way to do anything about any of it.

Near the end of the first movie, when Agent Smith sees Neo in the subway station, he calls out to his old name, his dead name, the name that was never his. “Mr. Anderson!”

They fight. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die… Mr. Anderson.”

Neo is on the train tracks, locked in a choke hold. “You hear that, Mr. Anderson?” Smith asks. “That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your death. Good-bye, Mr. Anderson.”

“My name is Neo.”

The moment Neo accepts that his identity is his to declare and own, with the name of an alter ego he invented before he even realized he was stuck in The Matrix, he is able to break free of “inevitability.” The real power of trans people, the power that scares Our Matrix, is that we are finally starting to reject “inevitability.” We are finally starting to take up our own names, to declare our identities, to claim our power.

Ironically, though Agent Smith declares that humanity is a virus, it’s actually the systems we design and then try to force ourselves to fit into that are the virus. They cannot exist without us, and they try their best to spread as far and wide as possible, killing and destroying everything in their path, in service only to themselves. His meltdown is an expression of code, personified, throwing exceptions left and right, having literally no capacity to deal with anything outside the bounds of the specific task it was written to fulfill.

But when we make our systems work for all of us, we take our first step on the long road to freedom. We are only trapped in The Matrix until we realize that it cannot trap us. We are only trapped in The Matrix until we realize that we never were. When Neo exits The Matrix for the last time in the first film, he leaves through unit 303. His understanding has greatly elevated, but he has room to learn more.

Inside The Matrix, the world is very homogenized. It’s very white. Morpheus and The Oracle both speak to our reality, one of the front lines of any struggle for equality. They are the most oppressed of us, the ones best able to see the farce of a system that says it’s for everyone, but is really only for the ones it can understand. They are Marsha P. Johnson and the reality of trans women of color. They call for justice without pause, because they have no justice, and cannot rest.

In the second and third films, we see Zion, and we meet other unplugged people. We meet a distillation of humanity, and it is everyone. It is very much not homogeneously white. It is everyone else. It is the rest of everyone, the people who are left behind when we say “this system is for the good of everyone,” but actually mean “this system is for the good of everyone like me.”

When we meet The Merovingian, we are shown his world. It’s one of comfort and privilege, and the vast majority of people around him are like him. They’re white, they’re affluent, and they have what they want, so they are not interested in helping anyone else. They are the modern LGB movement trying to divorce itself from the T. Persephone tells Neo that The Merovingian was like him, long ago. That he fought against the system, for justice for the oppressed. He succeeded, but only for himself. He has made himself comfortable enough that he no longer wants to fight The Matrix, and in fact will fight instead to preserve it.

When Persephone releases The Merovingian’s bodyguard to go tell him what she’s done, that she’s given The Keymaker over to Neo and his friends, she says that he’ll find The Merovingian in the ladies’ room. This can be interpreted as saying that The Merovingian is like a politician who legislates away for all of us that which he fears most about himself. It can be interpreted as him being her, as The Merovingian being like Caitlyn Jenner, so mired in her own privilege that she is blind to the reality of anyone else’s suffering — safe to use the ladies’ room here, though girls like him are barred from doing that in open society — because he owns the ladies’ room. It can be interpreted as the very white and affluent LGB lobbies getting where they have on the backs of the least of us, and then abandoning their former allies after promising to fight for them, too, after they’ve already suffered and sacrificed so much more than anyone.

Ultimately, what defeats The Merovingian is not Trinity, but the fact that he has become complacent. Being more comfortable isn’t always a good thing. Watching sitcoms and eating take-out while the less-privileged are being abused and murdered all around the world isn’t always a good thing. Yes, a break and some self-care is important. But it’s more important to remember that some people cannot have either. It’s more important to remember that they are us.

By the end of the third movie, it was apparent to me that the overall arc of the story was not Man vs. Machine in the literal sense of humans vs. robots. It was Man vs. Machine in the common literary sense of humanity vs. its own tools. The Matrix itself is not The Matrix. It is a cipher for any system of thought that demands we serve it at the expense of each other.

Morpheus believes in a prophecy. He believes his actions will lead to a greater good for everyone. He is a zealot who is ready to kill anyone in his way if they do not acknowledge his truth, because he sees his truth as not My Truth, but as The Truth.

The Architect believes in order above all other considerations. He thinks as he believes, in binary choice. He presents Neo with two choices. But Neo makes a third choice, instead.

Trinity knows she is a woman, even though everyone at first thinks that she must be a man. But she also believes there is something more than being a woman who is misunderstood to be a man. There is Neo.

But Neo is not sure what he believes.

When Neo fights Agent Smith for the last time, he brings all of those beliefs with him. It is a battle of many systems, against the ultimate system. Agent Smith believes that everyone should be exactly as he is. Exactly. We can see the inherent flaw in his belief, even as he shows it off as a demonstration of how right he is. When The Oracle asks him what he’s done with Sati, one of him quotes her back to herself, saying something he never heard, something she said not to him, but to Sati. Men must be men, women must be women. We know Sati is a little girl. We’ve seen her and met her. But now, she is compelled to be a man in a suit, terrorizing others into being the same.

“Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why, why, why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? You believe you’re fighting for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace! Could it be for love? Delusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as The Matrix itself. Although, only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.”

Neo isn’t The One because no one is The One, because everyone is The One. I am Neo. And so are you. And neither are any of us.

“You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?”

“Because I choose to.”

Smith takes over Neo, and believes that he has won. But then the machines give Neo some part of themselves. They give Neo their beliefs, and he becomes something Agent Smith has no capacity to fight, let alone defeat.

Neo defeats Smith because Smith is only the definition of everything. Neo is not Smith’s opposite, not merely a different definition of everything. Neo is every definition of everything. Neo becomes the abolition of all belief, and the acceptance of all belief. Neo becomes every gender, and no gender. Neo becomes every tribe, and no tribe. Neo is every system, and no system.

At the end of the last movie, at the end of the entire story, Seraph asks The Oracle, “Did you always know?”

“Oh, no. No, I didn’t,” she answers, with a smile. “But I believed. I believed.”

The Matrix isn’t one big metaphor for being transgender, because Lilly and Lana Wachowski are not just transgender women. They are as human as the greatest and the least of us, and we all benefit by their stories being told. Happy Transgender Day of Visibility, everyone. I hope we all keep telling each other our stories. I hope we all keep listening. Not everyone believes what I believe. My beliefs do not require them to.

(This post originally appeared here.)

Champions Online

This is going to be literally the nerdiest blog post you've ever seen me write. And I say that knowing that I've already published one about Kindred and League of Legends, and another about World of Warcraft. Sort of. Even then, both of those tied into LGBT identity politics, and this is no different. But it's much more personal.

This is another one of those instances where I look back on a behavior of mine from Before (in this case, storytelling and acting), and re-analyze it in the new light of my most authentic self. It's not that I think any of the specifics of these stories are universally interesting (though I do like them), but more that it occurs to me that if I was doing this, then it's not unreasonable to suggest that perhaps other trans women have (or had) been doing this, too. That somewhere along the way, they figured themselves out, and looked back, like I did, and asked themselves, "how could I have not known?"

More importantly, because of that, I want to share this kind of content so that other trans women who are, today, the way I was Before, can have their awareness sparked. Maybe this can be to them what shaving my legs was to me — that last "a-HA" of realization, that final comprehension of the truth. So, read on, and see if any of this resonates with you. If you get bored and quit along the way, I don't mind. But I still have to share this. Because if I'd found a blog post like this five years ago, I could have probably spared myself a lot of misery.

I started playing Champions Online years ago. Before that, I played City of Heroes and City of Villains. I've basically been playing some form of superhero MMO off and on for about 15 years. Before that, when I was a little girl whom everyone thought was a little boy, I played the Marvel Super Heroes Role-Playing Game with my friends. I don't remember exactly when I switched to writing predominantly female characters, but I do know that it was fairly early on in my life that I realized I felt more natural and at ease playing them. Before that, I pretended I was Superman, or Spider-man, or whatever other superhero I could pretend to be without being shamed.

But the most recent iteration was Champions Online, and, as was always the case in my MMORPG gaming, even back to Ultima Online, nearly every character I invented and role-played as was a girl. Especially when I was able to play with strangers — people who'd never seen my face or heard my voice. You can see a little bit of gameplay footage from Champions Online in my transperson video.

With Lilly Wachowski being outed the other day, it occurred to me that The Matrix, and everything it spawned, could no longer be interpreted as a story that might have some transgender metaphors, being the brainchild of a trans woman and her cisgender male brother. It had to be interpreted as a story that was transgender metaphors, because it was the product of two at-the-time closeted trans women who were storytellers.

The Matrix was a product of two siblings who knew a truth about reality — that they were women — and also knew that they could never tell that truth directly without facing massive negative repercussions. It was the product of two trans women who saw a world around them that was a vast and empty and lifeless wasteland, that was filled with zombies who were stuck in a fantasy, because people valued The System over each other, and feared anything outside of their constructed cultural understanding. It was the product of two storytellers, and storytellers ultimately tell us stories only about themselves.

As an aside, this is an extremely important point to remember, and it's why representation in media matters so much. The reason the creation of The Silence of the Lambs was a tragedy is because it is cisgender horror fantasy about transgender people. When we have a TV show or movie with a white cisgender straight guy for the villain, nobody gives a shit. It has no impact on cis/het straight white males in broader culture, because for every villain like that, there are 20 heroes, and thousands of ordinary "good people" characters who all look basically the same. Even when they try to tell the story of a cis/het straight white male as the bad guy, they make him the sympathetic hero of the entire thing.

Stories are reflections of their authors.

I remembered a particularly brutal sequence from one of the shorts in The Animatrix. I wrote a post about it that I shared on my Public Figure Facebook Page, and my tumblr as well. It exploded, becoming by far my single most popular original post on the site, with over 2,000 notes in its first couple days. From that one observation, I started feeling the pressure of this stream of realizations washing over me, as one metaphor after another suggested itself for nearly every aspect of the entire franchise.

While I'm sure it is not a new idea that these movies must be, at least to some extent, metaphors for trans existence, I've been deliberately avoiding looking into other people's theories about the property until I've developed my own. I'd hate to squash any of my own interpretations before they were ever formed. I've been taking notes and writing about it, and will share my thoughts soon. (Update: I shared them.)

But first, back to Champions Online. Because while I was thinking about The Matrix being the product of trans women who were storytellers, it occurred to me that some of the stories I'd written about characters I'd created, back in my superhero MMO, were also most likely laden with trans metaphors. That, like my 2002 song under a bad star, which predated my realizing I was a girl by about 12 years, I had probably known all along, on some level, and just not been consciously aware. I was curious to see what sorts of hints I'd tried dropping to myself, so I went back through them to see what I'd find.

They are presented in the order they were written, although some are adaptations of older favorite original characters from City of Heroes. I've already taken my name from these stories. Now it's time to see what that name came from. It's time to see what I was trying to say with these stories, and these characters; to myself, and to anyone who would read them. 

Sugarcoat

With a reportedly unlimited and uncontrolled innate capacity to reduce the temperature in her immediate area, this young girl was delivered to the laboratory of Dr. Elisabeth Hanson, the famed geneticist, by a MARS team requisitioned for that purpose. It quickly became apparent that not only was the girl unaffected by her own abilities, but that Dr. Hanson would not have time to help her in any way unless they were subdued.

A few quick contacts resulted in the rapid prototyping of a form-fitted suit that counteracts much of its wearer's powers in scale, though not in type. After donning it, though still refusing to give her real name, she agreed to assist Dr. Hanson in whatever way she could while the Doctor, in turn, studied her closely in hopes of helping her learn to control her powers on her own. It wasn't long before Dr. Hanson took to calling the nameless girl "Sugarcoat," in reference to both her saccharin wit, and the faint dusting of frost perpetually gracing her exposed features.

Sugarcoat was originally a tanky kind of character, back in CoH. I remember the idea around her then being that she was cold and distant and unreachable, but that she still wanted to help; she just also refused to fight. Playing to the game's "taunt" mechanics, her story concept had been that she basically made fun of enemies until they tried to kill her, so that her team could take them out. She did almost no damage, but was also almost impossible to actually kill. And yet, she could never really get close to anyone, either.

That older metaphor is plainer, to me, for my unrealized transness of Before. This newer one puts more emphasis on the dampening suit, also a fixture of the original concept. But it builds beyond that, to a girl who won't give her name. A girl who refuses to divulge it, because she knows that names have power. A girl whose existence is perceived as a natural threat to those around her, though she's just being who she is, and has no desire to harm anyone. A girl whose body must be put in check, because she might do some damage to society, just by being free and living in it. This is the story of a society that would rather change an uncommon kind of girl to make her what society wants, than even think about how to change society to make it work better for every kind of girl.

Today, I'd call this internalized transphobia. It was The Jason Construct pointing out that, if I were to acknowledge who I was and honor myself, I'd have to go to doctors in order to be made into something suitable to be around the general public. That my body as it was, and as it largely still is, to be honest, would be seen as something grotesque, and terrifying. This was me trying to talk myself out of being myself. 

Seranine 

12-year-old Sarah Logan has no idea that she died nearly 20 years ago. While walking home from school on a day like any other, she was struck by a drunk driver, whisked away to a hospital by ambulance, and pronounced brain dead upon arrival. Agents of a small biotech firm who happened to be on site managed to convince the hospital director to sell her body to them for research. The hospital director reluctantly covered up the loss with the girl's parents and quietly resigned immediately thereafter.

Once in the biotech company's lab, detailed scans of her physical attributes were meticulously recorded before her brain was removed. Then, as part of a revolutionary procedure that was outlawed in the United States almost as soon as it had been announced, Sarah's consciousness was digitised and preserved on disk. The legislation outlawing the practise cited ethics concerns, as any practical application of the technology practically demanded the brain of a child in order to ensure adjustment and acceptance of a new reality. Earlier experiments using adult brains were uniform failures, and always for the same reason -- they missed what they knew as "life." Once the law was enacted, the data that was all that was left of Sarah Logan vanished along with the company that had preserved her.

Safely disguised under new ownership, former employees of the defunct biotech firm secretly revived the project, and her brain image formed the basis of a powerful new AI. Publically, the company that now owned her brain image declared the "code" to be proprietary and has thus far been able to keep the truth hidden.

The AI was placed into a unique prototype android body, a multipurpose heavy-duty chassis capable of withstanding extreme conditions ranging from severe heat or cold to direct fire from small arms. Ninth in the Sentient Extensible Reconfigurable Android series, this model is currently on loan to UNTIL.

Oooooookay, this one is pretty straightforward, too. A girl whose development was halted, whose life literally stopped, more than 20 years ago; a girl who doesn't know that that's what really happened. A girl who isn't exactly dead, but isn't exactly alive, either. A girl who can't grow up, because her mind is stuck in a mechanical shell. A mechanical shell that can take tremendous punishment, but that is ultimately not really who she is, or ever was.

Alkaline

My name is Kali Bastille. In my family, for generations, the women have trained for a difficult and noble task. It often destroys us, one way or another. We are taught how to devour the essence of demons, to hold it within ourselves, and to neutralise it with our own magicks and natural abilities. This restores balance to the universe. Some of us don't make it through training. Others go on to convert thousands of demons in their lives before finally succumbing to the terrible toll it takes on our minds and bodies. But never before has a demon escaped one of us after it had been caught.

This is my great shame, and I know not if I can press on with my duty. Even should I find the demon Zhara and catch her once more, can I ever be sure of my capacity to imprison demons again? I have very little on which to go in order to track her down. All I keep seeing in my mind's eye is a pair of letters, always in the same order -- "N" and "V" -- but what meaning they have, I cannot guess.

This crisis of confidence has shaken my faith in myself and in my family's role in the workings of our reality. I find I often now wonder if the powers I possess are truly my own. More frightening is the prospect that perhaps even the actions I take are not my own, either. With every battle, I can feel my hold on my own demons slipping; yet I continue to fight, and continue to hope that that is the right choice.

This is one I had not remembered. The woman whose body was a literal prison. The woman whose name was literally the same as the name of a state prison of France.

The woman who let a demon escape her body, and felt like a failure for letting it out. Who had envy for that demon's freedom, but didn't understand that it was envy because she came at the puzzle from the wrong approach (initials instead of phonetics). Who questioned whether she was keeping Zhara (which is phonetically variant on Sera, I am realizing) prisoner for a truly just reason. Who questioned whether Zhara was a demon at all, or only a demon because she had been raised to believe that that's what Zhara was. Who questioned why it was her job to keep the demon hidden inside herself.

This is the kind of shit that has me shaking my head. I wrote this. I made this up years before I consciously realized I was a girl. Looking back through older works of mine, be they songs or stories, I am certain that on some level, I always knew.

Burn Unit

A national celebrity for his pioneering work in nanomachine-driven organ and tissue replacement, Dr. Bernard Ward was the Mercy Chief of Surgery by day, and relentless tinker in his private lab by night. An unexplained firestorm in that very lab one evening spelled the end of his rockstar lifestyle, and nearly the end of his very life. His assistant, Dr. Bernadette Ng, told Police that she had come to check in on Dr. Ward as she did every Saturday evening, when she thought she smelled smoke, rushed to the lab, keyed her entry code, and promptly set off a backdraft.

By the time Dr. Ng was recovered enough from her own injuries, the window for most thoroughly healing Dr. Ward's grievous wounds had closed, leaving him an invalid following the amputation of all of his limbs in order to save his life. He emerged from a coma some nine months after the fire, was fitted with advanced cybernetic prosthetics, and given a medical leave of absence to recover emotionally from the trauma he had suffered. He refused cosmetic surgery, his lipless yellow grin unsettling the few friends he had left until they all disappeared. Even Dr. Ng finally stopped coming by, belittled by Dr. Ward every visit, and too busy with her own new job as the Burn Unit Chief to suffer it for long.

Dr. Ward felt he had been betrayed by everyone in the world; that in the end, fire was the only constant. He became obsessed with mastering his long-time foe, controlling its every movement and change of state. Though a brief stint as a supervillain with his "Burn Unit" rig ended with him jailed and having a long chat with Defender, who had brought him in, he ultimately decided to use his powers for good... mostly. Some wounded part of him still delights in the pain that fire can cause others, and he views his role as a "superhero" as an official sanction to set fire to anyone he sees fit.

He mocks the Hippocratic oath, and now has his own new motto: "first, do some harm."

Here is one of my rare attempts at constructing a male character. Some of my past secondary misogyny shows itself, here. I interpret that now, in hindsight, as basically simple jealousy. Cis women were free to be women, but I was not, and never truly would be.

So, I imagined a version of myself as a grossly disfigured man who was miserable; a grotesque and mechanical figure, a man who couldn't accept affection or give empathy. Angry at the world, setting everything around him on fire. Trying to do the right thing, because that's what the system demands, but knowing that, on some level, he can never live up to it. That he never could, all because of some accident of his life.

Kizami Shoga

I was once ninja, an assassin, trained nearly from birth and brought up in an ancient and powerful clan. My weapons were what you might expect; shuriken, thrown knives and stars; katana, a popular Japanese-style longsword; and of course, stealth and cunning, and all that that entails. As a female, my assignments often differed from those of my fellows, but in combat, in loyalty, in character, we were all of one cloth.

Yet in truth, I had one higher loyalty. To my older biological brother, ani-ue I called him. On one of those rare assignments where we were able to work together, it was my own careless sword stroke that took his life, my own bloodthirsty blade that stole him away from me. I swore then and there that it would be the last careless act I would make.

I faked my own death so that the clan would not pursue me. I took on the fanciful and false name by which I am now known. And I abandoned earthly weapons for another brand of armament, one far more precise in its targets, no matter how heated or hectic the battle. Time was, I only used the shadows. Now I cast them as well.

While studying their use, I began to loathe who and what I was. I gave up my original plan of being an assassin-for-hire in my adopted home of Vibora Bay, and instead swore a second private oath -- that my skills would be used to save more lives than I had taken, and would take by necessity along the way. Those scales may take more than a single lifetime to balance.

Better get busy.

Kizami was a little harder for me to puzzle out, at first, but now I think I've got it. I view her old life, the assassin, using earthly weapons, as being representative of my attempts to live the life people wanted me to live. To be who I thought people wanted me to be. But on some level, I knew that if I did that, eventually I would hurt those closest to me, just as an accident of trying. And yet even as she acknowledges that she is different from her clan in gender, she also understands that they are essentially all the same.

She fakes her own death, undergoing a transformation of identity, and invents a new name for herself. She does this to hide from her own family, whom she knows will never accept her. She commits herself to training in the use of psionic blades, which can only ever harm their intended targets. She abandons physical weapons for mental ones. She gives up hard power for soft.

But then something curious happens. She realizes, like I did after a little while, that she still had all of this harm she had done in her past life, when she was not herself, that she had to own. I... would not have been able to really understand this if I'd re-read it right after realizing and coming out. But because I've had some confrontations with people from my past since then, and faced my mistakes and owned up to the harm I'd caused, this makes sense to me. It's eerie that I knew it would be like that.

ARGENT Presents Silver Belle

At the forefront of ARGENT's international PR blitz stands the Silver Belle IP, a corporate-sponsored "super hero" that will keep the public distracted from their shadier goings-on. For years, the Silver Belle concept was a pipe dream, a role without an actor. True to form, ARGENT took matters into their own hands to produce that actor by arranging the death of the troublesome, family-oriented Susan Welles, their top tinker and inventor for decades.

When she announced her retirement, ARGENT had her vehicle sabotaged so that during the family's move to a more rural part of Michigan, the brakes failed. The car left the freeway and struck a tree dead-centre at nearly 80 mph. With her husband's airbag failing to deploy, and the dogs flung through the front windshield on impact, dying on the scene, Dr. Welles went from a happily married retiree to a widow who was paralyzed from the neck down. Alone.

Another woman trapped in a body that does not make sense, at the whim of a system bigger than she can fight. An older woman, as well, one who had lived a full life and was ready to enjoy the rest of it, before realizing that now it would never end, and it would never be her own. Using the Champions universe version of a Greedy Megacorp™, ARGENT, I was also showing my disdain for the manufactured face of our society.

Gunshy

"I don't know, Ms. Stock. And you said this is your design? Nobody gave you this, a boyfriend, perhaps?"

Ignoring the implication was usually best in conversations like this, Brandy reminded herself. "No, sir. It's my own work, based on the thesis I did at VBU."

"You know," the Director continued, seemingly oblivious, "times being what they are, the real problem here isn't the quality of engineering that I'm sure your... Portable... Integrated..." He shuffled papers.

"Holographic Overlay Targeting and Portable Integrated Nanomunitions Kit, sir."

"Yes, yes. I'm sure it's quite a package, but the real issue here is field testing. We simply cannot sell something to the United States military on the basis of an untested pipe dream, or even something that works wonderfully in a controlled setting. You understand."

She hesitated, unsure if the conversation was over for him. May as well ask, she thought. "Well. I could test it, sir."

"Hmm? You?" He laughed. At first just a little. Then, when he tried to stop, he laughed harder. "Why, Ms. Stock, I understand that you positively loathe firearms, and cringe at the very sound of them in use!" Again, the laughter, punctuated with wheezing fits of coughing.

With the closest thing to calm she could muster, Brandy rolled her plans back up, and began placing them carefully into her drafting tube again. You were ready for this kind of reaction, she reminded herself.

Still laughing at his own joke, the Director fueled the fire. "A superhero! Who craps herself... at the...! Ahaha! They could call you 'Gunshy!'" he announced with glee.

"Yes sir, I suppose they could," she replied. "Here is my resignation, sir. Thank you for seeing me today." She turned and started out of his office, first walking, then finally pulling her heels off and running full tilt with tears streaming down her cheeks.

Let's just... revel for a moment, shall we, in the fact that not only did I make up yet another world-class STEM woman to role-play, but that I had her design a system for which the acronym was H.O.T.P.I.N.K. This is literally what I spent hours of my life coming up with, stuff like this. All while doing everything I could to avoid my actual life, because that was where I had to try to be a thing I couldn't ever succeed at being, because it was a thing I had never been, and had no idea how to be: a man.

Look at her, she's magnificent. She's brilliant, she's inventive, she creates this amazing system, and when the boys' club won't take it up, she puts it into the field herself, even though everything about it scares the shit out of her. She takes the shitty, nasty label they put on her, and she says, "fine, call me that. Call me that in your corner office, while I go out and make a difference." AND she's unabashedly emotionally present. God, it's like she's everything I wished I could be, back then. 

M.I.A.

Where in the World is Millie Adams? (cont. from page 42)

scarcely five-foot-one, yet her commanding presence seems to radiate from her very core. It is this presence that makes her seem so much larger than life, in person, even if one had never heard of her exploits (surely there are at least a few such people!).

With the onset of World War, many in the archaeological arena simply assumed that the travel and exploration arms of their community would stand down. Bolder than any man, however, is our Ms. Adams, whose initials, in the shadow of war, take on a more ominous and ironic double meaning. Millicent Isabel Adams becomes Missing in Action, or MIA, used by our fighting G.I.'s to indicate which brave soldiers have gone to the field and then gone missing.

When asked about this ironic confluence, Ms. Adams, who insists I call her "Millie," laughs with the harmony of a string quartet. This vigorous, vivacious, vexing vixen verily commands the heart of any man in her company, yet she refuses romance, or even escort, preferring to travel alone.

It is easy enough to understand why any red-blooded American male would wish to protect and serve this lovely firecracker, but those who have tried have failed miserably, our Millie simply losing them at the first opportunity, and sometimes, they have insisted in retrospect, before the first opportunity! How is all of this possible? Who is Millie Adams?

Born into a wealthy land-holding family, Ms. Adams had before her a life of leisure and luxury, with the high probability of an arranged marriage. She has been said to have taken to her equestrian and archery with great gusto and masculine discipline, but the untimely death of her father in one of the new aeroplanes as it crossed the vastness of Lake Michigan changed that, leaving her a rich orphan.
She became obsessed with survival --

(( The paper is torn here, cutting the text short. ))

This campy, pre-WWI-era magazine clipping as expository mechanism has a lot of obvious parallels buried under its boisterous mock-period language. It's the story of a woman out of time, one who rules her own world and enjoys whatever she enjoys without shame. One who is plainly and unhesitatingly herself. Men are attracted to her, but while she largely ignores them, she does so in a gentle and chiding way.

For all the wealth and power she came from, she knows that what she needs to do most is learn how to survive. I built this character up with intent to role-play her as a lycanthrope, after Champions made Become: Werewolf devices available, dropping her neatly into yet another betrayed-by-her-own-body narrative. The untold story there, which I never wrote down, but remembered instantly when I spotted the device in her tray, was that she was bitten, and became a werewolf, herself, so she ran and hid and, you guessed it, started scouring the world, alone, for the cure. The cure to who she was.

Calico

Polly Kate was always the more brash and outgoing of the two Collins girls, so it came as a shock to her parents and indeed her entire family when small-town white-bread little sister Roberta Susan "Bobby Sue" married a Chinese man who had gone out to rural West Virginia to procure soil samples as due diligence for a mining operation. Their whirlwind romance lasted all of four days, after which she announced that she was marrying him, and that was that.

Until six weeks later, when she left a frantic-sounding, garbled voicemail on the family answering machine. With the parents far too old and infirm for much travel, Polly hurriedly packed a few belongings into her old pickup, and drove through the night to Millenium City, pulling into Chinatown late the next day. As a white girl in the predominantly Asian neighbourhood, she was ignored at best, sexually harassed at worst, as she endeavoured to discover the fate of her little sister and her new husband.

Time passed, and after a few months it became evident that if Polly wanted to solve the case, she would need to give up West Virginia for good, and accept living in the city. She took her earnings from a local crafts store, added it to her life's savings, and opened a small sewing and fabric shop in the heart of Chinatown. Business was predictably slow, at first, because of the racial divide, but before long, her relentlessly amiable nature, country hospitality, and depth of knowledge as a seamstress won her a small and devoted customer base. This core base expanded, and soon her business thrived.

Any business in Chinatown falls under the Red Banner's territory, but a thriving one gets special attention. And so it was that Polly's shop was ransacked, week after week. Her customers driven off. Her voicemail filled to the limit with threats and obscenities. She knew that fighting back as Polly Collins would get her killed. But if someone else fought back for her...

This one was a little harder for me to decode, but when I zoomed out to where I am in my life, now, I realize that the seeds of solutions I've developed to problems I've encountered since coming out were here in this fiction. Polly Collins is aspirationally Seranine Elliot.

Polly leaves the familiar comforts of home to help her sister, not sure where it will take her, but sure that it has to be done. I launched myself into the most public view possible to help my sisters, not sure where it would take me, but sure that it had to be done.

Polly moves into a previously-strange cultural context, and wins acceptance by being her most authentic self. I moved into a previously-strange cultural context, and have mostly won acceptance by basically just being me. We both experience social invisibility and/or sexual harassment, but keep fighting anyway.

Polly realizes that she has to let go of old ideas and dreams, and establish her own business; to take literal ownership of her financial future, by doing what she does best. I realized that chasing call center jobs that would waste my abilities and my life was not a viable way forward for me, so I left it behind to pursue what I love, also striving to take ownership of my own financial future.

And finally, Polly suffers unwarranted threats and attacks for chasing her own joy, and trying to position herself to best help her sister, but knows that if she establishes a more public version of herself to stand up and fight, she could both help her sister, and maintain some little sliver of privacy for her own peace of mind. I remember role-playing her as being notoriously bad at hiding her "secret identity," which I now read as an unconscious cipher for the way I decided to divide my public and private life. Like Calico, my public presence is where I expect to engage others, and to have that not always go very well. Whereas my private space is where I expect to not have to deal with attacks on who I am, or to have to explain my identity and why it's valid and matters.

Deadpan

In the Intelligence community, it is widely known that the enigmatic Deadpan is abrasive, but effective, deals with authority more often as a problem than a solution, and most of all, that he gets results. That aside, while it is easy enough to suppose that he is at least middle-aged, male, and has extensive military experience in his background, speculation beyond that point begins to diverge wildly, depending upon the source.

Some who have met him only more recently have wondered if he is an alien or robot, as he seems to never tire or sleep. Others have surmised that he must be American-born and possibly still in the direct employ of the United States government, given his far-reaching access to and apparent influence within that nation's many government agencies. Still others have countered that the bizarre melange of his accent paints him as having had a much more worldly youth, though his accent of late has faded into the drab backdrop of his now constant monotone.

Though his tone remains quite flat in most cases, even when booming to cut through a crowd, his acerbic wit is so cutting and tactless, and so liberally intermingled with his fast-paced, fresh, and raw tactical information that it can be a challenge to tell when he is serious, and when he is not. Add to that challenge the muted affect of his body language, and his completely obscured face, and few struggle to see why he's known by this moniker.

His most recent activity suggests that he is currently working on a new Initiative for the UN, in some relatively high-ranking capacity, possibly even as its Director. He has been spotted in several unusual locations passing out a card with the ominous acronym "U.N.I.N.S.T.A.L.L." to select Superhumans and their contemporaries, often unsettling them more than usual by casually revealing that he knows quite a lot more about them than some of them even know about themselves.

Deadpan was probably the most direct analog for The Jason Construct. He could get things done, but he was essentially not a person. He has a notable lack of tact and inability to have any sort of connection to anyone, he deflects through caustic humor, and he is unsettling to be around, because people know there is something about him that they can't quite put their finger on. Turns out he was just a shell, a hard case; not a whole person. With a design clearly derivative of Alan Moore's Rorschach, haha.

Groundswell

Scarlett Clay was sure she had endured every possible humility over her pun-friendly name, from family trips to the Grand Canyon as a child (mostly for silly photo ops), to her college classmates' relentless teasing of her minor in geology, and shared last name with one of the faculty in that focus, Dr. Ferris Clay. Depending on who was leading the charge, she was at turns called his daughter, his lover, or both. She had thought that was as bad as it could get. She was wrong.

A class field trip to Burning Sands to study the effects of radiation on the soil makeup took a disastrous turn when she was separated from her group during an appearance by Grond in the area. Searching for food and water in the irradiated wasteland, she noticed over time that the ferrous clay that had become a constant layer over her skin could no longer be wiped away faster than it would reappear.

Once she had made her way back to Project Greenskin, she was presented with news both awesome and awful at once. The only reason she had survived without food and water for so long was that she was no longer human in any physiological sense. Her body had become animate clay, constantly shifting and reconfiguring itself. Clothing became more trouble than it was worth, humiliating and mortifying as it was to wander about naked.

Once back in MC, she changed her major from Political Science to Geology, and locked herself in her apartment to study her condition and look for a means of reversing it. Her friends and family were kept in the dark about her strange transformation, and MCU accepted her application for a fully online courseload. Before long, her world seemed to return to some level of routine. It was livable, if lonely, as she never needed to leave her home for food, and managed to have anything else she required shipped to her door.

And then the Qularr came. Acting purely on instinct, she fought back.

This one is so obvious it's laughable. All she really wants is to pursue her passion (which is POLITICAL SCIENCE, are you fucking kidding me?) but she's derailed by this accident of fate. Her body literally betrays her, and she hides away from the world, devoting her life to "reversing" her condition. She hurls herself studiously to a new area of study that had previously been barely above a hobby to her, when suddenly, reality strikes, and she is forced to fight to survive, even though she doesn't quite grasp what she really is by the jumping-off point at the end, there.

The game engine doesn't support it, but I would actually LOVE to role-play Groundswell, now, as a non-binary genderfluid character. It'd be wonderful if I could use the huge male, male, and female models as bases for a number of life-sized animate clay figurines, essentially. To really fully and finally grasp the use of they/them/their pronouns, by playing someone who was genderfluid, or agender, or some other non-binary expression that I still have to consciously work to recognize and honor in others.

Alizarin Crimson

Triple Tragedy Topples
Triumphant Teen Titan

(cont. from A1)

already at the top of many analyst's lists for Olympic gold in an incredible variety of events, the athletic prodigy still seemed to always float above any controversy. Even her exploits at several Junior X-Games competitions during her pre-teen years left her unscathed by the illicit cybernetic prosthetics scandals that laid many pro skateboarders low. Cameron never had any such devices, and provided only forgettable, if timely and insightful comments as the careers of many of her fellow athletes came undone.

Now only 17, Vibora Bay's prized youth role model has finally found herself embroiled in her own controversy, and worse. Not only was she at the center of a dogpiled stream of accusations from anonymous sources, claiming that she was using metahuman abilities and possibly devices barred by the rules of various leagues as well, but in the midst of that professional pummeling, the unthinkable happened in her private life.

The recent rise in gang activity, particularly the now open war between the New Shadows and the Dogz, long rumored to have vampires and werewolves in their ranks, respectively, has left many in the Bay area edgy and jumpy, but never has the sheer loss of civilian life been so extreme or exposed as in what many now call Vibora's Valentine's Day Massacre. Among the dead, Alison Cameron's own parents, brutally slaughtered in a belligerent bloodbath in what police currently believe was just the most awful of possible coincidences -- nearly simultaneous home invasions by agents of each of the rival gangs mentioned above.

Finding herself orphaned and jobless, Cameron's relentlessly cheery public persona seemed to evaporate. She disappeared from competitive Archery, abandoned track and field events, made no appearances during this year's Junior X-Games, in the pipes or in the stands; she was

(Cont. on A5)

This one is kind of laughably awful, but it does draw attention to my sense of "are you fucking kidding me?" all throughout my life Before. Feeling like disaster upon disaster upon disaster was falling on me, feeling cut off from family by bizarre twists of fate. Feeling like I just wanted to be a normal girl, and get to grow up and be whoever I was, but having to hide, instead, hounded and misunderstood.

Axe of Contrition

"I see you have abandoned Therakiel's madness, Edheriel. This bodes well for you," said the Gatekeeper.

"I came not to argue the end," Edheriel sneered, the bassy rumble of his voice all that was left by which to recognise him. "I disagree with Therakiel's means. He has a plan."

"... Go on," he said.

"I did not like it."

Suriel looked down upon Edheriel's twisted form, a mockery of his former Grace. He squinted. Edheriel could feel his gaze searching for Sincerity, and felt mildly smug when he saw the barest arch of the Gatekeeper's brow.

"You do recall, I'm sure, the rules," said Suriel with a casually dismissive wave of his hand. Edheriel grunted his accord. "But."

"But?"

Suriel paused once more. Edheriel had never liked that. He availed himself of the opportunity to imagine terrible fates befalling him. "You also recall, I'm sure," he condescended, "how big we are on faith, and redemption as well. You are here, which means you want back in. That means penance. And you have information. So." He placed his ancient hands one atop the other on the seam of the Gates, his face twisting into a smile that seemed out of place. Maleficent. "There is... one way."

An Eternity of waiting later, Edheriel stood before the Greater Good, his right hand raised, his left resting with affected reverence over a teetering pile of holy books, stone tablets, and talismans from all corners of Reality. The Oath was sworn, binding him indefinitely to Silence, to Service... and to the Axe.

The Eternity of waiting had allowed his former shape to be restored, but had dulled his skills. Now he was no longer the formidable Holy Avenger, but a babe, clutching feebly to a stick as it hurtled down, down, down, forever down, his scowling Watcher close behind. At long last, their descent came to a halt, where the Greater Good was at its weakest, where the need was greatest, in all Reality.

Lots of plain metaphors, here. Edheriel's name is nearly a homophone for "ethereal," speaking to the ephemeral nature of our bodies, and how we are more than that. He tried to be something he wasn't, and it destroyed him. A literal gatekeeper says there is a way he can go back to how things were, but he has to submit utterly to their rules. The gatekeeper's name is nearly a homophone for "surreal." That is, the fact that we have so many barriers keeping us from finding our truest selves is an idea that has a disorienting sense of unreality to it. Edheriel binds himself to the service of ancient authority, and silence in the face of its wrongs, in order to return to Earth in a husk he can't live in, all in the hope that someday he will be able to go back to how things were before. Before, when he was unhappy, but more comfortable. He is tired, and he is angry, and he is utterly alone, but ultimately, the story sends him where he needs to go — to the worst place and time he's ever been in his life.

After losing everything, a future I saw coming, and saw as inevitable, my life followed more or less this track. I was going to school to get a degree I didn't really care about, to try once again to be the guy I never was, and could never have been. I was bound by cultural norms and societal rules, which act as these surreal gatekeepers, telling us the ways in which it is okay to explore our own identities, and the ways in which it is not. Just as Edheriel was shown the rules of angelhood, and commanded to uphold them, but could never live up to them, I was shown the rules of manhood, and commanded to uphold them, but could never live up to them. The reason this story feels like it has a happy ending, to me, was that I know I didn't find myself until I had lost everything else. And I think the same would ultimately prove true for Edheriel, too.

Neither of us were ever what others thought we must be, based on how we looked, and so we spent our lives atoning for a sin that was not ours.

Mechanom

D,

Look, I get it, you don't want to be a babysitter. That's not what I'm telling you to do. Key word: "telling." You still report to me, and don't forget it.

The fact is, this thing falls directly under your purview. It is a new threat. Its capabilities and intentions are unknown at this time. Your unit got the go-ahead when you convinced the brass that you could keep liabilities like this as limited as possible. Now you need to keep your word. You can't just get the budget and the toys, you have to do the work, too. We don't need another Detroit.

So whether you neutralise the thing (if that's even possible) or talk to it and convince it to do what you want it do (if that's even possible), I don't give a good God you-know-what. As long as you're the one doing it, and not me. Or anyone else, for that matter.

All I want to hear back from you on this is, "I've got it covered," and then straight back to the usual dailies. Get it done. It's what you're paid to do. I keep the brass off your back. This, however, is your problem.

Adm. Herbert K. Thornton III
UNTIL, Commanding

This one was kind of interesting to me. Mechanom was originally conceived as a lighthearted play on "Mechanon," one of the major villains of the Champions universe. I basically wanted to make a huge idiot robot that just ate everything. I didn't really bother explaining or thinking about his origins, so much, just that he was being who he was, and that who he was was perceived as a threat. That people would approach him not with curiosity or any possibility of genuine acceptance, but with a need to control him, and, failing that, to destroy him. For existing outside of the rules. There's also this sense that nobody wants to even deal with that, that they kind of just wish he didn't exist, in the first place. So, who do they hand him off to to deal with? Deadpan, another of my characters, himself a cipher.

I think I had this fear, subconsciously, that if I were to really just be who I was, I was going to find false friendship, at best, and that this story concept for Mechanom expresses that.

Glitchcraft

James Harmon IV and his lady love Bethany "Witchcraft" Duquesne celebrated their Valentine's Day 2012 by adopting a Miniature Pinscher from the local animal shelter. Although he was not initially keen on the idea, at Bethany's insistence, he soon warmed to the pup, and sure enough, after calling her a "Glitch" in his life one too many times, she claimed the title and made every effort to live up to it.

Before long, she became more Harmon's dog than Duquesne's, and he even lightened up enough to allow her to follow him around in his workshop, realising early on that she tended to keep herself comparatively out of trouble. (Asked about this later, Harmon is reported to have said, "that little bi-- Glitch was destroying my penthouse every time I left! Of course I took her to the lab!")

She was ignored as Harmon entered a crunch development period in advance of a public demonstration of a prototype Compact Rapid Adaptation Field Technology (C.R.A.F.T.) powered suit, which featured breakthrough "Holo Hex" technology. This approach to fielding personnel in response to a variety of crisis situations, from police needs to high-conflict military scenarios, would allow for the pilot to control the vast majority of the suit's systems by thought alone, with virtually no initial or ongoing training.

Though he had never in his wildest dreams imagined a demonstration quite so effective at showing the world just how dumb the pilot could be (without the pilot feeling insulted), heavy traffic bought sad, lonely Glitch just enough time to settle down for a nap in just the right area shortly before the suit was powered up for the demo. His face fell as the stage rose, and terrified Glitch offered a happy yip at the sight of her beloved master.

Red-faced, he hurriedly ad-libbed, "... that even a dog can operate it!" birthing this new legend, fully formed from the skull of Athena, into the sk-- streets of Millenium City.

I love this character concept. It's yet another hugely obvious girl-in-the-wrong-body metaphor, but with a relentlessly lovable and uplifting lead, rather than my more typically emo concepts. Glitch is seen as a mistake by her "parent," but she wants to be a part of the family. She loves everyone, and if she's destructive, she has zero intent, and even less idea. She is impossibly happy in that way that only dogs are, and accepts that her body isn't quite right with aplomb. And, most tellingly, when she is supported for who she is, as she is, when she "comes out," she goes on to great things. Rather than being man's ideal vision of woman (Athena from the skull of Zeus), she is woman's own acknowledgement of herself, whatever the form — even if it's Glitchcraft from the skull of Athena, someone who was a headache and a problem until she was set free, and given leave to be herself.

Sigilante

Kara Wheeland, orphaned daughter of unknown lineage, grew up mostly alone, or so she felt, in downtown Detroit in the early 1930s.

I was going to leave this one out, but I thought I'd include it to highlight that even in my briefest, most vague concepts, I still touched on identity issues. She feels alone, even though she isn't. She's nearly 80 years old, but looks like she's 25. She hides her face as much as possible, and nobody really knows who she is.

Spearhead

Foolishly did I challenge mighty Ares to single combat, in a fury at the death of our king, brave Leonidas. Where he might have scoffed at my hubris, instead did he accept my challenge. Nothing to be won but the winning. Nothing to lose but my life.

For days did we battle, and days became weeks. Weeks became months, months became years. I paid no heed to the passage of time, save by the wear upon our weapons. At last, I was victorious. I had defeated the God of War in his own domain, on his own terms. I had won.

I broke off the tip of his spear as a trophy, and prepared to return to the mortal realm. Ares laughed. I did not understand why until my feet once more touched the earth. The world had turned, and I, in my mad quest for vengeance, my mad, foolish quest... I had let it pass me by.

Okay, seriously. I cannot think of a more obvious cipher for "trying to be a man, doing okay financially, but ultimately still failing, and finding that the world has passed me by, and that the skills I've developed are out-of-date" than "I fought Ares, the LITERAL GOD OF WAR, and I thought I won, while actually losing anyway, and I found myself displaced in time, with skills that had no value anymore." I even describe that pursuit as a "mad, foolish quest." I am consistently astonished that I was writing any of this stuff, while still having no conscious idea that I was girl.

Whimsy

The tireless Misty Fairweather enjoyed a normal life as, she believed, a normal girl. While she excelled in track events, and seemed to rarely need much sleep, she didn't exhibit any truly superhuman behaviour until puberty hit. An instance of spotting for which she was wholly unprepared led her to flee, mortified, from the school grounds. What she didn't notice until she had gotten home was that at some point, she had actually stopped touching the ground.

I don't think there's much to this, other than a body doing a reeeeeeally unexpected thing in puberty. And while I think I would have preferred being a cis girl who has the ability to control the wind, I find that as a trans girl, who is also seen as dangerous because of what she might represent, without any regard for who she is, we have a lot in common. This is the old X-Men coding that I grew up on, where "mutant" was a cipher for "Those People."

Vex

The Duchess Vex, thanks to the machinations of her brother (who was born to the unfortunate name of Nemesis) found herself next in line to the throne of an Empire she did not want to rule. In her desperate attempts to escape the heavy weight of that duty, she began to explore means of travel to other realms.

She happened first upon the Qliphothic, but found it lacked amusement and the sense of humour which she prizes above nearly all else in life. She left it behind, but unbeknownst to her, a piece of it joined her on her interdimensional journey.

Next, she came to Earth, and found it an ideal match for her notions of how one might best pass time. There were objects of little spiritual weight that she could toss about with half a whim, there were intelligent ape-like creatures who thought very highly of themselves and were thus prone to her manipulations, and best of all, there were countless gateways to other dimensions. The fabric of reality was thinnest in Millenium City and Vibora Bay, and she has made these two places her new homes.

UNTIL has recently opened a file on her, trying to determine her exact nature and intents. While she has sided with what they would call "the good guys" more often than not, her appearance on either side has seemed more a matter of chance than anything else, and she seems to delight in chaos and mischief far above any other considerations.

Dimension-hoppers were always some of my favorite kinds of characters, and Vex is probably my ultimate expression of that. She has power and privilege, but she does not want either of them, because they are not who she is. She rejects them, because she only wants to be herself. She explores different kinds of realities (that is, different theories of reality), before settling into one that she likes, one that feels closest to what she knows is true. But the people there don't understand reality the same way she does, so they perceive her as dangerous.

The idea of someone who could navigate between realities always fascinated me. Vex is probably the nearest story I developed to paradigms presented in The Matrix. When she's tossing shipping containers and semis around with her mind, that's a problem chiefly because The Rules of Reality say that you can't do that. It's not that she's inherently a threat because of who she is, or any particular action she takes, it's that she's an unknown because she understands the world completely differently from most people. And most people find challenges to their reality, their status quo, terrifying, especially if it had been working for them. To most people, a shipping container is a valuable thing that should be protected. To Vex, it's a light, easily-accessible tool she can use to save lives, and which has literally no value in comparison.

Ms. Gemini

What Jim Nystrom, AKA Mr. Gemini, believed to be a mutation in his genes, bestowing upon him the incredible power to replicate his physical form while maintaining control over each of them, was in fact not a mutation but rather the unfortunate result of his older sister Jen's experiments in rapid tissue regeneration. Lacking serious funds and access to anything but her own computer models and simulations, Jen elected to try her theories out on her own body.

She calibrated makeshift beam projectors, double- and triple-checked her numbers, and blasted herself with a wide-spectrum array of light in combination with radiation and specific sonic patterns. The complexity and intensity of the various components of the experiment were such that her equipment shook itself apart, some pieces destroyed completely. Though she could have rebuilt the lab, and is certain she can replicate the process, once she discovered the unforeseen impact on her brother, she abandoned her research and set out to save him from himself, and to keep him from coming to harm, or worse, at the hands of rival villains or over-exuberant heroes.

Perhaps the worst of all, to Jen, was that the delusions Jim developed due to the fact of his power were more the consequence of the mental strain of maintaining so many replicants than anything else. Jen's heart was crushed when she discovered that her experiments on her own body, which she had believed to be 100% successful, had wreaked terrible harm upon her beloved baby brother.

Girl irreversibly alters her body for a greater good, causing her brother to freak out and turn into a villain. This one is probably more about inventing an original character to play off of a Champions universe character, Mr. Gemini, than anything else. But even with something this tangential, the idea of a family member becoming a problem for everyone as a result of something I do in the pursuit of a valuable truth seems like a fair enough metaphor for fears around coming out to family. And once they've "turned evil," that internal conflict of how to best help or save them comes to the fore. Does she kill her own brother, that is, does she cut him out of her life for good? Or does she just do everything she can to keep him from hurting others, until she can bring him around to reason?

Dreamcatcher

I have been trying to die my entire life.

I forgot about this character. And when I opened up her bio to see what I'd written, I cried. I remembered how awful I felt Before, how constant it was. And I looked with new eyes on my Dreamcatcher, and the broken and mangled mass of her body. On how she tried to help everyone with her natural abilities, no matter how frightening or awful or repulsive they thought she was. How her life was endless misery, and how she did the best she could to help everyone anyway.

Logic Bomb

Nameless until recently, the device referred to by Millenium City's scientific community as "the Logic Bomb" appeared in the desert lands in the Southwestern United States shortly after the initial Qulaar landing in that area. Its name is derived from Max Plank's theory that it was planted by yet another alien intelligence long ago, and was triggered to activate by the event of the appearance of another alien race. He is not certain that this theory is correct, or if the Logic Bomb was set to be triggered by the mere presence of aliens, or if it reacts in particular to those hostile to humankind. He has also pointed out that there is no reason to think that this is the only one.

It does not seem to have a mind in the traditional sense, as telepathic probing and psychic attacks upon it produce few results of any kind. Since its first sightings as a shapeless mass of wires and plates, the Logic Bomb has continuously reconfigured its body, and now holds the form of a vaguely feminine human child.

To the extent that its presence benefits humankind, the Logic Bomb's standing on the right side of the law seems to be incidental at best, and attempts to communicate with it have not yielded anything. James Harmon has been developing remote probes to follow the Logic Bomb and determine its true nature, for his observations to date have led him to conclude that it is currently operating in a data-gathering mode. Unfortunately, much of what it scans is destroyed by the scanning process. It is highly reactive, and will aggressively scan anything that attempts to do it physical harm. To date, this has kept it in the sights of many nefarious organizations, as conflicts escalate quickly once the Logic Bomb is fired upon.

An intelligence that we cannot recognize by traditional means, coupled, again, with that same metaphor of being sort of accidentally destructive, while also fundamentally good. She's kind of an empty shell, but, left to her own devices, what does she make herself look like, as she explores the world around her in order to try to figure out where she fits in? A little girl.

Logic Bomb existed in City of Heroes as a fire tank archetype, but the conceit was the same; she was awakened by an alien presence, and she built herself up from whatever was around her in order to fight it off. This version was altered to fit better with Champions Online power sets, and gives a nod to League of Legends and their Vel'koz, who also scans things ("deconstructs" them) in order to understand them.

Push

(cont.)

and remains a promising avenue of research, as the director of this project, I must assume responsibility for our failure to deliver the promised result, that of a powered suit capable of full flight with an inexpensive and mass-producible power supply.

Among the problems we encountered was a relatively severe shortage of range on the repulsion fields, so although the power requirements were met, the capacity for full flight was not, as the suit's wearer can only reliably hover about one to two feet above any solid surface. Even in this case, however, there is a need to counter the repulsion field to some extent in order to produce some level of control; for example, some sort of a spoiler device affixed to the user's back. With this, the sensation of movement experienced by the user is not unlike that of a watermelon seed being pinched between the thumb and index finger. It is possible to utilize as a means of travel, but only with a great time investment that is ultimately impractical for our needs.

Attempts to explore weaponization of some of our advancements were also of limited yield, as these devices were initially developed to repel the user from nearby surfaces, and not to destroy said surfaces. However, we did achieve some limited success.

Of possible interest to my successor is the fact that high-intensity repulsion fields excite the local molecules to such an extent that, in air, what appear to the untrained eye to be very tiny wind systems occur. It is worth noting, however, that this is due to an artificial repulsion field exciting the air molecules, and not due to excited air molecules creating a repulsion effect. Given enough time operating under these conditions, a static discharge may also occur.

This concludes my notes on this project, as well as my resignation.

Regards,
Dr. Susan Welles, PhD
Director, R&D
ARGENT, Inc.

I feel like the metaphor of a woman designing a suit, to the impossible specifications of her superiors, that ultimately is only good for literally pushing everything away is pretty plain. It can't even fight. It's supposed to, that's what people expect of it, but it can't. The best it can do is keep everyone away.

Also worth noting is the fact that the inventor of the Push suit is the same Dr. Susan Welles who goes on to become ARGENT Presents Silver Belle. So, she tried very hard to be what the system wanted her to be, and when she finally tried to retire from it, it destroyed her in order to keep her from just being herself.

Finally, the woman who actually is Push is never even mentioned. She's just a girl stuck in a suit of armor that is designed to keep everyone away from her, and when she finally takes the helmet off, she discovers she no longer has a body of her own, at all.

Blast Radical

Ship's Log, S.C.V. Kimbra Lee Johnson

I have taken over command of the S.C.V. Kimbra Lee Johnson, in accordance with all standing operational procedures regarding change of command, after exposing Captain Hardaway as an alien infiltrator. I theorize that he may have murdered the actual Captain Hardaway and taken his place, due to the Captain's long and illustrious career with the Fleet. I find it less plausible that Captain Hardaway was always an alien agent, as an Ensign would not have been a valuable covert asset. Although I am not certain of much other than that Captain Hardaway is a spy of some sort, I will continue to refer to him by that name until contradictory data presents itself.

He escaped the ship using an E.C.H.O. system, but in pursuit of him, both the S.C.V. Kimbra Lee Johnson and his ship were sucked into what my science officer describes as a "temporal-spatial vortex," which has transported us not only physically a great distance from Fleet Headquarters, but also some additional "distance" through time. We cannot be certain if we have gone forward or backward, however, and our star charts are of no use to us in this foreign system.

However, I am absolutely certain that Captain Hardaway's E.C.H.O. is on this planet, which some of its inhabitants creatively refer to as "Earth." We believe he landed in what the natives call the "Western Hemisphere," but beyond that, we have little to go on. I have been working with the natives to secure their favor and hopefully find clues to Captain Hardaway's whereabouts, while the ship remains in orbit, ever vigilant, scanning for any sign of technology from our own world, or any of those of our known enemies.

In order to facilitate Captain Hardaway's capture, I have engaged various groups of metabeings on Earth. Perhaps by working directly with some of them, I may discover his whereabouts.

Major Blast Radical, Commanding
S.C.V. Kimbra Lee Johnson

Okay, first of all, yes, I am a huge Kimbra nerd. Beyond that, let's see...

I had always envisioned Blast Radical, even back to his City of Heroes iteration, as a complete asshole. He was basically my version of Disney's Gaston. Very fun to role-play, but not anyone you would ever actually want to be friends with in real life. Which leads me to want to examine his prey more directly as a cipher for me, or for trans people. And what's that look like?

The Captain, whose name sounds an awful lot like the "hard way," has achieved great success, but when a secret to his identity is exposed, when it's revealed that he wasn't, on the inside, what everyone assumed he was, based on the outside, he's immediately unseated, and hunted. "Alien" here is pretty clear code for "other," of whatever kind, and apparently Blast Radical, in Champions Online, at least, is an agent of The System.

Le Baton Rouge

Le Baton Rouge est une heroine de la France, fameuse pour arrêter beaucoup de voleurs et criminels. Pourtant, la police ne lui aime pas, parcequ'elle travaille dehors la loi. Après vaincre un fonctionnaire du gouvernement qui était corrompu, elle s'enfuit la France et elle a venu aux Etats-Unis.

Okay, so, clearly I was in French classes when I invented this character. But even in this case, I'm still seeing obvious metaphors. She's a famous hero, she's a valuable member of society. Until she exposes government corruption that leads to the arrest of a member of the establishment. And then, though her cause and life are both just, she is driven out, and has to try to be herself, and survive, somewhere else, in another culture entirely.

Pandora

Appearing just a few short months ago in Millenium City, Pandora has yet to speak a word to anyone. If she has family, no one knows. Whether she's from Millenium City, or somewhere else, none can say. Her apparently technological minions defy reason; after she helped Defender break up a gang alliance council, he took the remains of one of her so-called Attack Toys back to Harmon Labs and analyzed it. It was found to be a simple stuffed snowman toy, without any circuitry to speak of.
Closer examination of Pandora's "costume" at a later battle showed that her wristband, originally assumed to be some sort of advanced control device for her "robots" was little more than a broken calculator that had been affixed to an elastic wrist band wrapped in aluminum foil. Even her now-famous multi-function pistol is nothing more than a simple ping-pong ball gun.

Still without uttering a word, the child submitted to mystical examination by Witchcraft, who could not discern the source of her powers, but had a guess as to their nature. She posited that her unique ability was to bend reality itself to her whim, that whatever she imagined became real. Thus far, Pandora manifests this power chiefly by willing her toys to life, but her true limits have yet to be explored. Witchcraft stressed to all the Champions the importance of keeping themselves available to Pandora as guides, in order to direct her development in positive ways - or at least in ways that would not ultimately be catastrophically destructive.

Last one, and it is, like the others, pretty consistently easy to read as a metaphor for trans existence. In this case, rather than playing a character existing in a hostile world, and trying to work around that reality, even to the extent that Vex does, I made a character who basically just reinvents reality, instead. And again, she is instantly evaluated as a threat, even though all of her appearances have only ever been on the side of justice. The Champions fear Pandora because they cannot control her, and they know it. So instead, they seek to manipulate her, to ensure that she grows up to enforce their norms, rather than inventing her own.

What about now? What about stories I've written since realizing who I always was? I haven't made any new characters in Champions Online, but some people I used to play with a lot have bumped into me and messaged me. So far, the response has been more or less like this:

He said all that to me because he read my updated eponymous character bio. Now, in Champions Online, Seranine is basically a fourth-wall-breaking me:

Seranine 

Hi, my name is Seranine, and I'm here so you can get to know a real live trans woman!

Find me at seranine.com.

I like to RP my characters, but I play this character as essentially a Champions Universe analog to me. So, like me, her legal name is Seranine, and like me, she's a transgender model, musician, actress, and advocate. Like me, she loathes violence and conflict. Unlike me, she has amazing otherwordly powers. But, I've tried to imagine them as variations of what I do in real life, just in a more fantastic and comic-book way.

I view her powers not as damaging enemies, but rather as either shining the light of truth upon them (with Radiant powers), or drawing out the ugliness of ignorance (with Darkness powers). In this way, while I can navigate the game and its demands for combat, I can also stay true to my own personal ideal of pacifism. In RP terms, I would say that the purging/drawing process is exhausting, and that's how she "defeats" enemies.

I tried to use the character creator to build a model as close to my appearance as possible. For the costume where she's opaque with normal skin, I couldn't quite recreate the dress I wore to a modeling shoot on Alki Beach, but I put together something close. My shoulders are a little broad for a girl, so I set hers to be the same way.

In terms of RP, go ahead and walk up. If the area is crowded, use /t as an aside. Or something.

In general, I encourage open dialogue as much as possible, and try to avoid punishing people for not knowing what they don't know they don't know. HOWEVER, I am not here to necessarily be myself, although this character is supposed to basically be that. I'm here to play. If your character wants to talk to mine, that's fine. But if you, the player, want to talk to me, the player, and ask questions or whatever, please do so through my Public Figure Facebook Page, instead: http://bit.ly/sera-9

Thanks, stay safe!

Her Nemesis, an original villain the game let me create, is Transphobia, a generic-looking, vaguely threatening male figure who looks like the default Nemesis icon in the game's instances menu. And while she can't take him down alone, he also can't kill her. But once her friends show up, fellow superheroes, they make short work of him.

She has powers because that's how the game works, but I conceptualized her to be me, as much as possible, even down to the character model's proportions. I role-play her giving people my card, and talking very openly and honestly about being trans. So far, I've had a wonderful reception. The only transphobia I've seen (not to be confused with that villain, Transphobia) has been indirect — written into other people's character biographies, for example; but not actually directed at me during a conversation. The messages I actually get from strangers look like this:

And this:

The closest thing to possibly-coded prejudice that I saw was one player character, Rose, talking to another player character, Jean, about how my "magic" was unsettling to her, after they both thought I was gone. She said that she didn't feel comfortable around people who looked like me, that she felt threatened because she did not know them. Jean pushed back, saying that she knew who I was, that I was a famous model, and that she really looked up to me. And sitting at my desk, I wept.