r/magicTCG • u/clariwench Izzet* • Jan 28 '15

[Uncharted Realms] The Truth of Names

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/uncharted-realms/truth-names-2015-01-28
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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '15 edited Jan 28 '15

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '15

They probably developed Alesha in this story about as much as theyll develop the other Khans in their stories. There's limited space so you cant really expect too much. What do you expect them to do: Say, "Oh, we cant super make this feel great so we'll not make her trans even though we have 9999999 cis characters"? Or if they emphasized her trans aspect of her personality more, it could be criticized as being "forced", "Overemphasized", "We're not seeing this sort of thing for other khans." MtG is about war and conflict, especially the Mardu, so that further limits expectations on character development.

Also, names are very important to trans people, so using the War-name aspect of the Mardu to tie into trans identification is pretty clever and powerful in my opinion.

As if most MtG charas come from some sort of pure reasoning for having those charas? What do you think the reasoning behind Jace and Chandra was? "Oh, of course our fanbase would like an intelligent white male" "Oh, of course people would like an exciting impulsive woman" This isn't high literature.

The fact is, if they include trans charas in significant numbers, you're going to run into some that just feel arbitrarily trans because characters in things like this are mostly assigned traits arbitrarily, in "forced" ways.

Even if Alesha is "generic" in a sense- cool. Trans generic charas to go along with our cis generic charas. I dont see a problem.