thoughts on trans fischl
originally written 12 october 2021.
this rant was originally handwritten in my diary (the first time in there that i finally allowed myself to record genshin thoughts in there), and is tangentially related to my thoughts and observations on switching from predominantly Het™ shipping spheres to more obviously queer ones in that poking around a discord server for a Het™ ship i had been into prior to genshin n seeing their Bad Opinions prompted me to write this.
fuck it time for genshin thoughts.
so there's this character named fischl, and if you read her character story, you can kind of get some massive TRANS vibes out of it bc she has this other name, this older name that she straight up REDACTS. if anyone ever tries to bring up her life or her name before she was fischl, they are immediately n despertately hushed.
so like, you know– a deadname sort of thing!
anyway, you can actually find fischl's old name if you go digging through official media n stuff [1] (it's a girl's name, but the Vibes n Purpose are still EXTREMELY Trans™)
anyway, i'm sure you can understand how, when i unlocked these character stories, i looked at fischl n went, "i diagnose you with trans."
so, what i'm here to bitch (or at least pointlessly commentate on) about here is just how sometimes, i'll see fischl referred to by her old name by people in the fandom or deliberately by characters in fic, n like. the first time i saw someone in the [REDACTED HET™ SHIP] server casually refer to fischl by what i find analogous to a deadname, it felt like a slap in the face for some reason?
like, fischl's a fictional character, n she's not real n not even explicitly canonically trans, but it just shocked me so suddenly as if they'd deadnamed a real person behind their back?
it feels silly to be so stirred up by this. technically, they're not doing anything wrong, just acting in a way that disrespects my headcanon.
i just? it feels so rude?
like she's not real, but i think a person who has an idea of the Trans Experience™ should at least be able to notice the parallel there, right? n so to see people do this to a fictional character feels either like they don't know enough abt being trans to see the parallel (n speak accordingly bc… like… idk it's nice to treat fictional characters in casual conversation w/basic respect like that? there's nuance here but ugh), or if they see it, they don't know that deadnaming is a huge no-go, or they just don't think anything of it.
but it just bothers me so much!
i don't even have a deadname, n as of right now, i don't expect to ever have one [2] , but… i guess bc i'm still pretty new to being not only, like, ~trans~ in general, but also in fandom, it feels like transness n the struggles that are often a part of being trans are just being… erased? made invisible.
i know that none of this is their actual intent, but i guess this is what people mean when they say that spaces that try to be inclusive might still be accidentally hostile to marginalized groups.
it's just a headcanon. my interpretations of a piece of media shouldn't be any more important than anyone else's, so why am i feeling as if they'd just been unspeakably rude n disrespectful of a real person?
Footnotes
1 —
please bear in mind that this rant was written about nine months before the midsummer odyssey event that showed fischl's backstory n redacted name in its quest.
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2 —
this isn't to say that i was still in an egg phase at the time of this writing, but rather that i don't expect to change my birth name despite being [nonbinary] trans.
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