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Episode 211: Queers Across the Multiverse 2024
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! This week Taya presents a special episode with audio from the Queers Across the Multiverse panel from OrcaCon 2024. Taya hosted local Seattle Vorthos Lilian Young and Magic story authors Seanan McGuire and Alison Luhrs to talk about how queer representation in Magic story and cards has changed in the past four years, what it looks like today, and what we'd like to see going forward. Alison and Seanan bring delightful stories from behind your favorite characters. Also make sure to tune in next week for a very special Goblin Lore Podcast Preview Card!!
We also finally have a Linktree with all of our discounts/resources
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As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
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Transcript
Queer Representation in Magic: Then and Now
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to a slightly different episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. This is going to be a panel that was hosted by me at the local convention OrcaCon this first weekend in January here. The panel was entitled Queers Across the Multiverse 2024, which was a follow-up on a panel I ran in 2020 right before the pandemic.
00:00:57
Speaker
The panel is about queer representation and magic and what's changed in the last few years. The original panel talked about the history of queer representation since the start of magic and what that looked like and kind of the sad state of it at the time and what had been changing and what we wanted to see going forward.
00:01:18
Speaker
And now we're taking a look at it from how things are today. And we had some really great guests for this
Meet the Panelists
00:01:26
Speaker
panel. We had
00:01:29
Speaker
You know, former Wizards employee and, uh, Wizards or a magic story writer, Alison lures. It was fantastic to have her. We had a current story writer, Seanan McGuire, um, frequent guests on the podcast. It was great to have her. And we had a local magic player, Lillian Young, who was on the original panel back in 2000, uh, was great to have everybody on the panel and.
00:01:54
Speaker
A little bit about OrcaCon.
OrcaCon's Inclusive Mission
00:01:56
Speaker
It is an annual gaming convention here, focused on diversity and inclusion. It was started by a group of people who saw that all the other cons were run by middle-aged white men and wanted to start a con of their own that was representative of themselves. So the people who run this con are largely queer and
00:02:21
Speaker
people of color, people of different gender identities than white cis male. So it's great to have a con that represents more people. If you're ever in the Seattle area the first weekend in January and want to come to a con that's focused on board gaming and TTP RPGs and such, I would love to see you there. It's a fantastic convention.
00:02:46
Speaker
it's great. One note on this, the audio is not great.
Audio Quality Apology
00:02:52
Speaker
The room was not miked for audio. We did the best we could with the equipment we had and hopefully Hobbs can do a little post-production magic on the audio, but I do apologize for the audio quality. It's a little
00:03:07
Speaker
over the it was a little too much gain on the audio on the final recording so hopefully it's not too horrible to listen to and I hope you don't take that away from new wonderful content and the wonderful speakers that we had so let's get right into the content and thank you again I hope you enjoy this panel as much as I enjoyed hosting it and our wonderful guests
00:03:35
Speaker
I enjoyed talking to our wonderful guests. Thank you.
Panelists' Magic Backgrounds
00:03:38
Speaker
Thanks for coming to the panel on Queers Across the Multiverse 2024. This is a follow-up on a panel we had in 2020. I'm going to discuss what's changed since then in Magic Story and lore.
00:03:54
Speaker
to introduce ourselves real quick. I'm Taya Steer. I'm one of the co-hosts of the Gobblemore podcast where we talk about magic story and mental health topics. We usually release on Wednesdays. So if you're interested in those topics, please give us a listen and hopefully you'll be interested in what we're talking about. I've been playing magic for a long time and big time worth those.
00:04:24
Speaker
Sure. Hi, I'm Allison Lewis Sheeper.
Magic Beginnings and Evolutions
00:04:28
Speaker
I'm currently Associate Narrative Director at Bungie, working on Destiny 2. But prior to this, for nine years, I was at Wizards of the Coast and I've worked on Magic the Gathering a lot. I have written 26 and counting magic stories. And it's my fault that a lot of these queer characters are here, so I would love to yell about them.
00:04:52
Speaker
I'm Lillian Young, she, her. I've never done anything officially for Magic, but I do like making custom laser cut deck boxes, which can be very fun to mess around with. And I've been playing Magic off and on. Learned in 1995, but got seriously into the game five or six years ago, 2018.
00:05:16
Speaker
I love how much our panel introductions sound like we're going to an aquatics anonymous meeting. And I'm Shawna McPher. She, her, I am a freelance author who's currently doing a bunch of work for Magic Story. I started playing Magic with Alpha and then I got out, I got completely pleased. As of the dark, I was out for 20 years. And then Grace Fong, who was one of their narrative directors, asked me to come back and write the Magic Story. And I thought, sure, that's not gonna make me start playing again.
00:05:46
Speaker
We're fine. We were not fine. We were not fine. My house is now just a sea of magic cards. Yeah, it tends to go that way. Just quick intro questions and kind of get to know the panelists here. How did your spark ignite?
00:06:11
Speaker
Oh, I got a job after being unemployed for a little while. And I didn't know a thing about magic when I first started working at Wizards. So I had to learn really fast because my first job was as community manager for Mikko. And I had a steep learning curve. But as soon as I started learning and as soon as I learned that there were characters and stories, I was like, oh, I'm done. And yeah, over over my time at Wizards, I got deeper and deeper and deeper.
00:06:37
Speaker
And so my house was also overcome with magic hearts. And then I sold them and got a heat pump. So there we go. Air conditioning is great. It's so tight. It's so tight. I love heat pumps. Yeah, I got in and revised and played for a while. I got out in college and then came back and I was in her store and I've been playing ever since.
00:07:06
Speaker
now mostly commander player but uh really like you know obviously i'm on a podcast that talks about story so story is definitely my big thing but i bought my first packet electron boutique in 94 and kind of got hooked early on uh spent what little income i had as a high school student on magic uh kind of the rest is history from there
00:07:33
Speaker
I learned to play when my brother brought this weird card game back from summer camp. It was like, hey, we should try this, we should play this. And then I went to the same summer camp the next year. I'm like, okay, learn some of these things. Immediately put that game aside for the Star Wars CCG. Which, if I do, then I can get the two giant boxes of cards that are still in my pants. But thank you.
00:07:59
Speaker
And then I kind of left that aside, then came back when the set, Unfinity was released, or Unstable, excuse me, Unstable was released. And I realized, I remembered like, oh, this game can also be really silly. But this was also around the time of Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan, which was when the web story was really picking up, really getting its feet. A lot of characters were getting some very
00:08:28
Speaker
interesting places, getting to some really interesting places in their story. And that also means I've also been following a lot of the stories since then.
00:08:39
Speaker
I was, and this may be a shock for those of you who knew me, know me now, a deeply awkward teenager. I had no idea how to interact with other teenagers, but I was also horrible and really wanted them to touch my boobs. And somehow, I got the idea that I could convince teenage boys to touch my boobs if I kicked their ass at the party. I want this movie. I want this movie. I want this movie.
00:09:16
Speaker
But that is how I got heavily into magic was that I really really wanted to get laid.
00:09:23
Speaker
And I was heavily into magic for several years. I actually played competitively, which is unrealistic to anyone who plays with me now because I'm so bad at the game. And then my middle sister decided to sell my entire deck for some money. And I was an extremely poor teenager. We were on welfare, so I've gotten most of my cards by panhandling to buy booster packs. Like, I would literally just want people to go, can I have a quarter?
00:09:48
Speaker
And this is back when packs were about 75. So you didn't have to do that for too long to get another pack. But they were Arabian Nights. They were antiquities. They were no longer available. And I had no cards. My heart was broken. And my sister did not get in trouble because I was older and had to be the bigger person.
00:10:05
Speaker
And that is why I broke up with magic for 20 years, because it was easier to hate the game than to hate my sister, that I was not allowed to feed sharks. And then I rediscovered magic in a huge and horrible way, and discovered that my brother, I have no siblings that share both secrets with me, my brother on my father's side had been playing hardcore is it for years. He was just like, yes, the dark side, it's here. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Favorite Queer Characters in Magic
00:10:43
Speaker
Who is your favorite queer or magic character? I know that's going to be a hard question for you. That's like picking your favorite child. I think part of my heart will always lie with you, honey. But comic was my biggest success. Like, comic is the reason we get to have a good part of this panel. So I'm going to say it. I'm going to say comic.
00:11:05
Speaker
I can tell the story of how the outing, officially, of queer characters in Magic happened to me. Yeah, let me say that later. I've got to go with Chandra. She's one of my favorite characters in general, but I've got the $1,500 statue of Chandra in my living room, so it's kind of hard to beat that. She is my favorite character and my favorite disaster by girl. Perfect.
00:11:34
Speaker
She is. My favorite queer character recently has actually been Sahili Rai. And that is after the Brothers War story where she was placed in opposition to Urza, war criminal and terrible, terrible person. She was placed in opposition to him also as an artificer. And one of her quotes from that story will actually be my next tattoo sometime this year when she said, I choose beauty.
00:12:02
Speaker
And that just like, yes, I want that right here. Nice. Going with the folks that are currently canonically known as queer, I also have to go with Tomic. Just because if you look at him on paper, or even look at him in most story appearances, he doesn't look queer. And the fact that he is not forced to be
00:12:24
Speaker
incredibly open and flamboyant all the time actually does show a step forward in story because for so long you could only have queer characters anywhere if they came in wearing six different pride flags and shouting at you in t-shirt slogans and that is not a criticism of real people who wear pride flags it is a criticism of the way that we frame queer characters which is a very different statement.
00:12:47
Speaker
And I just love that Tomi is just living his life. He's living his life. He got to marry a guild leader and not have to leave his guild. And that's going to cause some political fallout. And he's having a good time. I love Philip. Just layering it up. Yep. And he'll see your ass if you get too close to him. You'll be paying that for 40 years after you're dead. What is the cost of insulting the Orzhov guild leader?
00:13:17
Speaker
It's expensive. It's expensive. Unpayable. So I want to kind of talk about where we were four years ago when we first had this discussion because, frankly, it wasn't very good.
Improvements in Queer Representation
00:13:34
Speaker
We were just getting started with representation.
00:13:38
Speaker
And, um, we had some really cool characters. Um, you know, Alicia was our first trans character. Um, but she was dead. We had Terenos and Terenos, uh, you know, they had carts. They were cool. They were dead. Um, Lana and Elena, uh, cool lesbian characters from the Innistrad stories. No carts, but we had them in story.
00:14:07
Speaker
Our favorite girlfriend, Chandra and Nissa, had just been canned completely. That was not cool at all. Obei Fushiri had one line in story, a little cool reference to her wife. That was a nice touch, but we didn't have much there.
00:14:30
Speaker
We did get Ralentomic, thank you. We had an in-storey nothing on cards or anything. We had some very small plausible deniability on the cards. We had built-in intentionally on the cards. If you're paying attention to their costumes and their outfits, you can see they have... But if you're not looking for it or if you're trying to deny it in a market where you might be a little afraid of that,
00:14:56
Speaker
There's nothing like what's actually represented on the cards today, that's very clear. Our big concern was that it was pretty obvious from the outside view, all of our panelists at the time were outsiders from Wizards.
00:15:17
Speaker
It was clear that the creative really wanted this, but we were seeing that the business realities were probably that they weren't allowed to do this because of laws in certain regions and business concerns and worries about impacting the bottom line, essentially. That was our view from outside as the likely reason that this wasn't happening.
00:15:39
Speaker
Despite indications from the creative team in the storyline that this was the direction that things wanted to go and that was that was our view from outside and what we were seeing the way things looked and You know it looked like things were heading in a better direction than they had been and obviously you know compared to the previous 25 years of story things were definitely improving and
00:16:07
Speaker
There had been very little before that at all, so things had been getting better. But it still hadn't been, you know, we were, as a community, you know, kind of the big thing that came out of our panel then is that a lot of what we were expecting was the queerness was in the community, which has a very big, I think has a very big queer community.
00:16:36
Speaker
And we'll talk about that more some as we continue this panel. So the story is very important to the community because of just how much of a queer presence there is. But I'd like to talk about where we are today because that's really why we're here. And I want to start that off with the introduction of the regional content policy, which I think is
00:17:00
Speaker
what kind of unlocked the doors on a lot of things, which is where Wizards came out and said that they will start making content that they want to make available based on the regions that they can support it in and that they will basically self-censor based on the region. Is that a fair way to put it?
Creative Team's Efforts and Policy Changes
00:17:23
Speaker
years. It took years of fighting to get to that point. I can't go into the detail obviously, but I think that your assessment of that creative desperately, desperately wanted this is absolutely true. And it really did take years of fighting and working internally. Figuring out like, okay, I guess we can't just put stuff in there otherwise we get in trouble. We can't just do it this way otherwise this doesn't work. Figuring out the process is what allowed us to get to the point where everybody gets to be happy.
00:17:53
Speaker
But it really was like the concerted effort of Doug Beier, especially Jenna Howland on the team is also really advocating this. Kelly Diggs was there as well. There were so many good people who were fighting a good fight to try and get what we could into the cards and the stories and while working behind the scenes to find a way to get things in there permanently. And so that was the big turning point.
00:18:18
Speaker
Um, but the, uh, the tipping point, and I'll tell the story now of how that happened, uh, was after all of these years of like, okay, let's go talk to the lawyer, or let's go talk to my gig. And finally, uh, it was creating the, uh, return, no, not return to rabbit, but one after one, uh, guilt directly, uh, where myself, Doug, and Ari, uh, were on the world building team for that.
00:18:40
Speaker
So each of us were assigned two different guilds. I got assigned Orzhov and various, they were assigned various other pairs. The day came when the assignment was, we need to make some new characters, just some new legends that we can have in the background. And so everyone wrote up like, you know, little paragraph introductions. And I remember like sitting at my desk and deciding like, I choose Coles.
00:19:02
Speaker
I'm going to fucking do it. And so I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. And we came back the next day to like share with everybody what we've done. And everyone shared theirs and came around to me and I just like laid my paper across and said, I gave Rell the perfect boyfriend. Does anyone have a problem with that?
00:19:23
Speaker
No, we do not, let's see that. We all read it, we all like took a little, little, little tweaks at it, little tweaks in there and we're like, okay, I think we have a plan for how we can make this happen. And so that was what helped kind of like get the ball rolling to help get that policy. So yeah, sometimes you just gotta keep with it even when everything sucks, but eventually, eventually good ones.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah. And we're appreciative of that. And, you know, we did see that reflected, you know, at the time we did our last thing because, you know, Ral and Tommic were in the quantity at that point. So it was, you know, obviously things were heading in the right direction. And it was, and I think it was very prominent in the web story that we got in the
00:20:13
Speaker
other problems aside with the War of the Sparks story and the gathering storm was actually very good.
00:20:20
Speaker
Um, but we got to see that very well represented in the web story. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll definitely be talking more about that. It's fascinating how quickly things shift on a cultural level, both positively and negatively at the same time.
Cultural Shifts in Media Representation
00:20:41
Speaker
I really like to watch medical drugs and weirdly this is applicable. Like I love watching terrible medical drugs. It's,
00:20:48
Speaker
Never Lucas and we're all just having a good time Right now I'm working my way through Chicago Med, which is the conservative news of medical dramas It's directly yolks to a propaganda show. It is very much on the conservative end of this scale And I started at the beginning and watching the episodes that were filmed four years ago. We have the
00:21:10
Speaker
completely casual trans and intersex representation that is not questioned. We have doctors arguing for the right of children to self-determine gender-wise, and it's not judged at all because the moral panic that we're currently in the middle of have not spun up. So as we get increased representation and availability of certain types of queerness, and it gets easier to squeak those past the sensors without getting yelled at, we're seeing a tipping on a different axis.
00:21:39
Speaker
And that is hitting all areas of cultural storytelling. It's fascinating how fast it changes, because you can't necessarily see it when you're standing five years away. Also, now I want a medical drama set on Ravnica. Half the characters are just arguing to just, eh, who cares what they are, just melt them down.
00:22:06
Speaker
Got a headache, can't we use the rest of your body? Yeah. He wears off from the building department. They're having a great time. And then the entire hospital is just a giant tug of war between Izzet and Ligari. With the civic periodically coming in to take people that have been deemed incurable. Yeah. They're hard to grade now, but we'll see them. We're just offering to give people more limbs. Do you want to be a jelly fool? Yeah. Yeah, I do. You can't break bones if you don't have them.
00:22:38
Speaker
That's one way to do a gender transition surgery. So I think
00:23:01
Speaker
And after our panel, we actually saw the floodgates open.
Introduction of Non-binary Planeswalker
00:23:05
Speaker
And we started seeing this very quickly change. And we saw Nico Ariska introduce the first non-binary planeswalker. And they were the feature planeswalker of the set. They weren't an add-on character. They were the key art. They were the center of the main story.
00:23:30
Speaker
And it was the first time we were really seeing this is not just a set piece, but the key part of the set. They are still my arena, my avatar and arena to this day. Yeah. And we also got, I mean, small things even, but we got in the story for pull time, we got Neo pronouns used, which is
00:23:56
Speaker
You know, just a cool little touch that most people probably don't even notice, but it's in there for people who do care. You know, we mentioned Elena and Elena being in story previously. They've had multiple cards now. Some of them with both of them on the same card, some of them having their partner ability. I like to say since they don't have partner with and just have partner, I like to say that they're in a
00:24:25
Speaker
uh, polyamorous relationships. So they're open, open to dating others as well. But then the card that they do have to get there just calls them partners. Yeah, I both do and do not like that interpretation given that Will and Rowan have partner with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
There's romantic and platonic partners. There's also people on a choreo that have partner with giant sky shark. We do not judge. Although physiologically that would be uncomfortable.
00:25:30
Speaker
What was it? It's not? The Midnight Hunt story. We got the Ol' Anne Crimson Vow. We got the wonderfully useless lesbian Chandra and Adeline. And of many romance, there are obviously some sparks there.
00:25:53
Speaker
Which didn't go anywhere because they're useless lesbians Chandra having some rebound feels Yeah, definitely But it was very clear in the story that there was some feelings involved and it was You know, it's Seeing it more out in the open again. It's just part of the story and then we get
00:26:18
Speaker
you know a secret lair for pride month and this is when it just all of the art was we get custom art for all these cards and the story that is specifically um queer representation and we get um wopley and saheeli uh have an absolutely lovely story together and a card a heartbreak
00:26:48
Speaker
The story was super fun. I desperately wanted to write a two-person love triangle, where like neither person knows that they're writing love letters to the other one. It's You Got Mail, it's the same thing. But it's my favorite love trope. It was such a relief to finally get to just like write just the most classic story I've possibly read in the public. And yeah, it was a blast.
00:27:12
Speaker
The card was super cute too. All of the cards in that release were absolutely adorable. Can I squeeze about basically all the cards in that release? We went to see Ralantomic's wedding. We got to see Elesha growing old, teaching the next generation of the Mardu. We got to see Bearscape, which just whoever allowed that to happen, I hope they got the thanks they deserve.
00:27:40
Speaker
We got to see Soul Ring with every single pride flag you can imagine and then probably three more that they made up in universe. That whole secret lair was perfect. It was great to see them take a flagship product like Secret Lair and just dedicate it to representation.
00:28:08
Speaker
you know put out something that this is going to be on the website front and center for a month and say this is a product that we're going to sell and then there was you know some issue about it like they didn't sell it in latin and south america which there are no laws preventing it from being sold there so there was a lot of people upset in those regions that they couldn't order it
00:28:33
Speaker
Uh, you know, I had a friend who was buying them and then shipping them down there for people who couldn't order them. But, um, you know, obviously they made a business decision not to do that, which was kind of sad that they made that choice. Uh, you know, obviously I can understand not being able to ship to some regions where there's laws specifically against it, but you know, why they decided not to ship to South America. I don't know.
Pride Month Secret Lair Release
00:29:04
Speaker
Wizards likes money so I've just been acting under the assumption that there was, if not a law, at least some very strong local regulation that would make it difficult.
00:29:17
Speaker
That doesn't mean I'm correct, but I do try to not assume that the company that owns literally everything I care about is completely into baby eating. Yeah. No, obviously they like money because what else are they doing?
00:29:37
Speaker
I want to see more of this though. I would love to see more special art on a regular basis going forward. I'd like to see another pride layer. And maybe more stories. Oh, there will definitely be stories. More pride specific stories especially.
00:30:00
Speaker
a lot of the queer stuff has been carried forward into the standards. Yes, and that's what I'm talking about. Sihili and Watley, they have a card together from the most recent standard set, poetic ingenuity, shows them together, shows them teaming up to make dinosaur robots. Right, and even just the fact that Sihili is now very firmly on Ixalan is carrying forward the queer story in the cards. Right, they could have stranded her anywhere.
00:30:28
Speaker
they could have left her home on Kaladesh. Yeah. And even for a former planeswalker, you don't uproot yourself from your home culture to that degree unless you're doing it for something or someone. Yeah. That was a big, because most of the planeswalkers have been left on their home planes post-desparking.
00:30:51
Speaker
those not familiar with that particular event in the set they just had this huge multiverse spanning world breaking invasion event and in the pun intended from the set aftermath of this they took a lot of these planeswalkers they had said okay these aren't planeswalkers anymore
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, and now if you want to go plane-to-plane, you've got to find a hole in reality called a nomen path and walk. Everybody's going to die of limero rabies. So no interplaner inoculations, that's going to be a lot of fun. We try not to think too hard about that yet. Well, I think about that constantly. I know you do, yeah. And I'm making it everyone's problem.
00:31:44
Speaker
The Innistrad variant of Zombiism has to be particularly virulent. Well the Innistrad variant of Zombiism we have been trying to just directly connect it to the nature of Nana on Innistrad. So having an overly detail oriented biologist does occasionally lend good things and not just the bone eating beetles that we have from this morning.
00:32:13
Speaker
You know, we've gotten other representation too in some certain areas. One of the biggest kind of mixed properties is we had the Baldur's Gate set which brought in a lot of character from the video game as well which are all canonically pansexual. They will date absolutely anybody and in the game they do frequently.
00:32:40
Speaker
including multiple people in some cases, which is a lot of fun, but they introduced some new characters beyond the characters in the game, including a transbian lady who loves her rabbits, which was a really nice touch. You wouldn't know that unless you read the Twitter thread talking about the characters, sadly, but it still was nice to read that.
00:33:06
Speaker
Because the game at Baldur's Gate 3 was delayed by quite a bit. Yeah. So they didn't kind of come out concurrently. The cards were dropped or at least six months, nine months, something before the game was available, before a lot of people could be like, oh, all these people are queer, pansexual, whatever, had a lot of the backstory. Yeah. But it was still there.
Pansexual Characters in Baldur's Gate
00:33:30
Speaker
But Carlos Christ really shot up after the game came out because everybody loves hot Tiefling girl.
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah vampy boy Had a chance to play the game Yeah, yeah Mira's fun. She's not in the game sadly
00:34:02
Speaker
but she's in the card game. Yes, she is in the cards and we both have Nira decks and they do crazy, crazy things. Your Nira deck is a little bit more disgusting than mine. My Nira deck is very refined at this point. I got a Psychonic Rift last night. I'm always very sorry about that. It's not a great card in Nira though because it doesn't. It's a fantastic card in Nira. Consider how many ways I have to stack my top deck. Yeah, but you don't get the bonus when you've hit it off a Nira.
00:34:32
Speaker
That is true, but I'll never hit it off the mirror if I'm scroll-racking every turn. I like that there's so much representation in the Baldur's Gate set.
00:34:51
Speaker
I also don't want to give too much credit for it. I don't think we give a lot because a lot of that is on Larian's. Exactly. It verges on Dumbledore representation. There's no story I can read. It's not on the cards. I have to track down a social media thread.
00:35:08
Speaker
Or you have to play a hundred-hour video game. Exactly, and neither of those is really helping if I'm just interacting with magic. Yeah, I don't think we want to give Wizards too much credit on heroes. This is really on guard. I love their existence, and I appreciate them being canonical magic characters, but I want to be careful not to cross that credit line.
00:35:34
Speaker
You know, we did get some more standard story. We had Aaront and Parnissi on New Copenna. We got, although they didn't feature so much, we got the wonderful story of their wedding and the New Copenna set, but then we got them and, or at least we got to read a lot about
00:35:55
Speaker
errant in the invasion story. And Parnissi's not dead. And Parnissi's not dead, which is very good, yes. Thankfully they're not killing off all the gay characters, which is also another big positive. No, we are hitting the level of representation where we can kill some of them. That's enough representation. You can kill people if you have one lesbian, she has perfect broad armor, and she's boring. Yeah.
00:36:22
Speaker
But if you marry two of them, you can then kill their dad. And yeah, and after all this time, rural friends is officially canon. Yeah. It's a lot of work for each other.
00:36:41
Speaker
They finally kissed after trauma bonding in the bottom of a pit that they were fighting a monster in. This is a terrible start for a relationship. It is awful and I don't see good things happening for them, but they're gonna try. I got to consult on that story and it was deeply satisfying to finally hand over
00:37:07
Speaker
of stuff that we wanted to do or wanted to say. Kyra is amazing for playing off anything sapphic.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was an amazing story. I am such a delight to finally venturi. It's weird helping to shape a ship, but not shipping it personally. I also think they're great. They're a bit of a mess. That's the fun part. That's why it's important. Yeah. That is not a healthier relationship.
00:37:43
Speaker
And the healthy relationship in Current Magic with Ralindo. Watch it, you see it. Ralindo, I mean, other than the multiverse spanning tone. Yeah, everything else we have to say other than. Yeah. Ralindo, I mean, there's just an excuse for coming. There's just more people to see. So you mean while you're doing great? Yeah, I mean, there's a little coop planning going on. Yeah. Who hasn't? Yeah.
00:38:18
Speaker
Nahiri and Rada are having a great time in an alternate continuity that no longer exists since the comics lost the license. That's true. And I'm not bitter. The comic series were wonderful. Go down to the vendor area and buy the Nahiri comic that Seanan did because it's an awesome comic. And it's accidentally so queer. I did not do that on purpose. I'm sure. It wasn't until I saw the visuals that I'm like, oh, shit.
00:38:48
Speaker
I personally think the period has to be asexual or she is even more insane than she has generally represented being. When you consider how many centuries she spent completely alone, she has to be okay going without that kind of thing for much longer than most human psyches can handle, or four psyches. Yeah.
00:39:11
Speaker
Girl needs a therapist. Also that. Girl needs to go spend a couple of years on Kalkheim with Tivar just pulling her into the fishing lodge and then throwing her a river. Yeah. Look, we need a lot of planeswalkers need therapists. Tivar running the post-planeswalker therapy lodge is a thing I've discussed a great night.
00:39:34
Speaker
Unfortunately, when you set up your story in your world building in such a way that to become almost with a few exceptions like Tivar to become one of these main characters, you have to go through major trauma. You end up weirdly with a lot of traumatized characters. Tivar, Amanatu, do we have any other non-traumatized flameth walkers?
00:39:56
Speaker
Samut sparked from a good interaction, but still after an enormously traumatic experience. I'm not too saw every bad timeline and picked the good one. Typar's brother asked him to put on a shirt. To come to my coronation, you must put on a shirt. It's kind of awful.
00:40:26
Speaker
She was not traumatized, she was just hungry. Yeah. She traumatized other people. Yeah. I guess that'll do it. We don't have enough about them. They might well be home so... No, I was not traumatized. I am the traumatized. We can't cause enough trauma here. Let's go elsewhere. Saving the multiverse through trauma. I saw a happy dream.
00:41:01
Speaker
Well, it was all puppy dogs and unicorns. It was terrible. So, you know, what do we want to see happen?
Hopes for Future Queer Representation
00:41:13
Speaker
You know, if we had this panel in another four years, what would we want to see change?
00:41:23
Speaker
I mean obviously I think at least Seanan can't speculate on a lot because she's actively working on storyline. Seanan likes bunnies. Yeah. Well luckily we're going to Bloomberg. Seanan didn't get to write for Bloomberg. No, Seanan is sad. But it turns out they won't let me write everything no matter how much I offer. I think your agent is probably happy about that. My agent would like me to stop.
00:41:52
Speaker
looking into retirement ideas for you. So I write for magic because it makes my cards tax deductible, not because they come in. I actually forgot to invoice them for like a year because that is how little they pay. Which is not a complaint. I'm very happy but my agent is just like, no, over here there is money. Over there, there is another box of bones.
00:42:18
Speaker
Where would you like to be? Have you turned into cards? Yes, but they won't be next to nothing. Sadly, there is no illusion there's just me doing whatever the hell I want. You can speculate those if you were allowed.
00:42:38
Speaker
So we've had some very good trans femme representation. We've had some very good non-binary representation, including not defining their original genders, even if they had original genders. They're just non-binary. Nico and Ashiok are just Nico and Ashiok. They're doing what they're doing. We don't have any trans mask representation. We have a very strong Fannan
00:43:00
Speaker
that Jace really just needs an excuse to show off his top surgery scars, but that is not official. He went to Ixalan, lost his chest, got into the shape he wanted to be, and now he doesn't need the clothes, just goes around talking to us all the time. What else are you expecting her?
00:43:26
Speaker
And he's got this great girlfriend and they're probably off staying entirely out of the way for the next set or two. I would like to not be involved in your narrative. Thank you. Because nothing good ever happens to either of them in narratives. Some of them deserve about 20 years on a beach. And not one of those nasty beaches either. One of the really nice beaches. How do I get that?
00:43:56
Speaker
pound.
00:44:21
Speaker
I would love to see a card with Rael and Toma together
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah, do you want to plug the continuation of the murder story that is dropping? It is a murder mystery. The 10 episode story started before the holidays because of reasons.
00:44:49
Speaker
And episode two comes out on Monday. Okay. Yay. And less applicable to people who are in this room, but because there are a lot of folks that do not think Ravnica is seriously as some people, uh, myself included, I have started doing Dean and extras breakdowns of all the murders and how long they are story explaining the Ravnica trivia. So even if you're not super familiar, it is still readable and you'll figure out what's going on.
00:45:14
Speaker
We have really enjoyed that on the podcast server, so thank you. I'm having a nice time with that. Thanks. Yeah, and we are excited to read more of the story, and obviously we'd love to have you on again when the story is complete. Okay, I'm happy to. I want to see, yes, obviously more. I want more everything. I would
00:45:38
Speaker
Like Lillian said, a trans-mask character would be nice. I would like a living trans femme character as well, though.
00:45:48
Speaker
You know, Alesha's great, but she was, what, seven, eight years ago at this point? Not more than that. It's 10. 10, yeah. What is time? What is time? And she is dead, long dead in story. Just because her story was set 6,000 years ago doesn't mean it was a complete story.
00:46:11
Speaker
She got to grow old. She had a wonderful story. I just would love to have an active character present in the current era. Yes, she had a complete story. It was wonderful. We got to see it continued in the card when we don't have an active trans. We don't have any active transmasic or trans fat characters.
00:46:36
Speaker
If I'm looking high in the sky here, it would be great to see a story where a character is actively figuring these things out. We've been getting stories where these characters are confident in who they are, what they are.
00:46:52
Speaker
But that kind of gives the impression that in this world, like this is just a thing that everybody has, everybody knows, everyone is okay with from the get-go. And that is, even in the most accepting of worlds, that is not always the case. Yeah. And there is space for that kind of story. There is, yeah. There definitely could be something in that realm that
00:47:21
Speaker
I would love to see the Aetherborn come back. There's two, that would be... I mean, this probably goes into things you can't speculate on, but with their hint to the return of multiple planes for the Death Race set, I'm expecting to go back to Kaladesh as one of them. That's just my speculation as an external one, so I'm hoping to see some. But yeah, as bad as it was, I played Aetherborn Tribal for Kaladesh Standard.
00:47:51
Speaker
This is a weird side turn, but I would like to see us establish a healthy and not probably about to be eaten by lingering phyrexia taint headship. Because right now what we're running into is we've killed off Gideon and Liliana. We've broken everything. There hasn't been a happy ending for a heterosexual couple in a while. And if we don't
00:48:16
Speaker
If we don't provide at least one for people to latch on to, you start running into the, oh, this isn't for me anymore. And that hurts our ability to keep putting out story the way that we do. Also, when you look at the scope of magic history for so long, the healthy head relationships were,
00:48:34
Speaker
and wife number 73. And nothing for sure I've ever done has been healthy. So while my focus as a reader is on the queer couples, I do want to see on the narrative side, the memory that we need at least one or two truly stable heterosexual relationships. Yeah, that totally makes sense. You know, more for everybody. More for everybody, yeah. And that's not me saying I want Magic the Gathering to be a romance series because
00:49:03
Speaker
It hasn't been. Tamiro's husband never interfered with story. Liliana and Gideon interfered with story in the same way that I expect Chandra and Nissa to interfere, which is they created story by the raging crashfires.
00:49:20
Speaker
But I think what you just said really resonates with me. A lot of the arguments I remember when I first heard on Magic was like, well, Magic isn't about romance. It's not about facts that's going to be distracting people and people who don't like it. Not realizing that it doesn't detract from the game. It just adds to it. It just creates a new value and a new reason for people to come inside.
00:49:42
Speaker
A character having a spouse is just another facet of that character, whether it's a straight relationship. I think the only really good one we have is Teferi. Teferi is why we think we're pretty stable. People do want to deny that sex and romance have been a part of magic from the beginning.
Romance and Sexuality in Magic's History
00:50:04
Speaker
Quentin Hoover, who was an early magic artist, is one of my favorite magic artists of all time. And I was inquiring with his sons about whether they had any remaining prints or sketches or anything that I could buy. And completely unprompted, Quentin Hoover's son told me that it's weird how people today think Earth Find is sexiest. Earth Find, if I'm familiar, is a naked elf in a straight up shibari bondage position who has been tied down to ground.
00:50:33
Speaker
When I was in high school, I knew boys who were dating Yeah
00:50:55
Speaker
Well, I think we're just about out of time. Thank you all for coming, and I hope you enjoyed this talk. Thank you to my panelists. I really appreciate you coming and illuminating us with your knowledge, especially your inside views. It is very appreciated. This has been a wonderful talk. Thank you so much.
00:51:21
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find all of the hosts on Twitter for now. Hobbs can be found at HobbsQ, Tay can be found at Tayatransends, and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to the Goblin Lord pod on Twitter or email us at goblinlordpodcast at gmail.com.
00:51:43
Speaker
If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood gobsugs, our link tree can be found on our Twitter account and in the description of today's show. This has everything from various discount codes to the link for our Patreon. The music for today's show was by Wintergotten, who can be found at vintergotten at bandcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at stevereffel on Twitter. Cob and Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing forthos content.
00:52:11
Speaker
Check them out on Twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.