Lament of the Mind

fandomsandfeminism:

The above panel is from the webcomic El Goonish Shive and I want to talk about it for a minute. 

El Goonish Shive is a….weird webcomic. I’ve been reading it since I was in high school. In all honesty, it started off pretty shitty. Bad art, not the best writing, but in the, damn, what, 7 years, I’ve been reading it, it’s really developed into a story that I like. (No, really, if you decide to read this, the first like…3 arcs are just…really hard to get through. It’s worth it overall though.) 

It’s a weird story. There’s aliens, and super science transformation guns, and body swapping antics, and gender “switching” antics, and evil plots, and card game tournaments, and romance, and humor, and it’s a very hard story to explain to people. Like, one of my favorite arcs involved one of the Protags, Elliot, accidentally getting a magical female twin clone named Ellen who then goes on to date Elliot’s ex-girlfriend. You just have to roll with it. 

The character with the pink hair up there is Tedd, and the brown haired girl is Grace, his (magic) girlfriend. 

Tedd has been a main character since the very beginning. He used to wear his hair long and had thick glasses because he worried he had kind of a girly face. He recently cut/dyed his hair because he decided to embrace his girly face though, which was cute. He’s builds super science stuff, and it was sort of a running gag for a long time that he enjoyed playing around with his transformation gun, making himself look like a hot chick sometimes, or an alien….or a hot alien chick. This has been a recurring gag for YEARS.

And then…well….this comic happened last week, and that running gag suddenly became so, so much more.

I keep coming back to this strip and staring at Tedd’s face, how defensive he is about enjoying being a girl sometimes, the shock he feels when there’s a word for it. There’s a word for what he is, and it doesn’t mean he’s broken or bizarre. There are other people out there like him, other people will understand why he feels this way. I remember the first time someone told me about the word “bisexual” and suddenly it was like this huge part of me made sense. 

Poor Tedd has been silently struggling with these feelings, still caught up in cissexist notions of gender and sex (notice the use of “opposite sex” in there.) And now he has a moment of revelation. He has a word for it now: Gender Fluid. I just want to hug him. 

I’m really excited to see how this will develop as the comic goes on. I’m excited to see this comic, which is so often just silly humor and magic stuff, developing even farther to give us more and more diversity with these characters. And I’m just excited that Tedd is figuring out who he is. 

I’ve gotta share this one too. I’ve been reading this comic for…god, so long I can’t remember, how long has this thing been going on? And it’s hard to explain, and while I LOVE recommending it to people, it’s so weird that it’s definitely not for everyone.

But then a moment like this happens. Something like this is HUGE, and IMPORTANT, to a lot of people. This is something people should see and know about. It’s one of those moments that happen that I think many, many more people should embrace.

There are a lot of people who go through life like this (well, okay, minus the transformations and magic, yanno), but never quite know how to explain themselves. Seeing a moment like this presented so clearly, so…honestly, in the pages of a comic, and then being embraced by that comic’s characters? These are the kinds of stories we need told. These are the things that people need to see. If more creators would embrace these kinds of reveals, show these kinds of situations and feelings and show how much these things mean to the people involved… it would mean so much, to so many people out there.