Implied vs Explicit Representation

The following video contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I Saw the TV Glow, The Last of Us Part 2, To The Moon, and The Amazing Digital Circus.

When crafting a piece of media with potentially invisible minority character identities at its core, one of the biggest questions you need to answer as a creator is whether to make the identity at the core of your story implicit or explicit.

Either path comes with potential drawbacks, but understanding the pros and cons is important when creating a story, particularly one aimed at a broad audience.

For an example of a story taking the explicit path, see Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the character Taash. 

Taash is a non-binary character, something we know for a fact based on playing the game and without needing to engage with supplemental media. For players who explore all of Taash’s loyalty missions, it’s impossible to miss. Taash’s coming out as non-binary is a part of their core storyline, and the game uses real world terms to address their identity within the universe of the story.

Some players complained that real world terms for gender identity felt out of place within the game’s setting, but it cannot be denied what Taash’s identity is. 

Nobody online attempted to deny that Taash was non-binary, because the narrative gave no room for doubt on that subject. Taash’s pronouns are established as they/them, and are solidified in an emotionally significant scene where their mother uses the correct pronouns to show they’ve come to accept their child for who they are. The narrative goes out of its way to make clear the character isn’t simply bucking against gendered expectations, they are explicitly confirmed to be non-binary.

Another example of a game with explicit representation is Tell Me Why, a choice based narrative adventure game where a pair of siblings return home after many years to investigate their mother’s death. One of those siblings is a trans man named Tyler, whose journey in part involves exploring his mother’s relationship to his gender transition.

Tyler’s status as a trans man is very much explicitly addressed. Characters who knew him as a child need convincing that he is who he claims to be, his childhood notebooks are an experimental playground of name trials, and a leaflet in his mother’s study shows that she was making an effort to accept his identity as a trans man around the time that she died.

Tyler is also played by a trans man, and basically nobody attempted online to deny that this was the character’s identity, it was explicit in a way that had no room to argue its legitimacy or its existence as representation.

Implicit representation comes with a whole different set of potential drawbacks, which I would argue often outweigh those of explicit representation.

Back in 2020, The Last of Us: Part 2 was initially released. During the game players meet a character named Lev, played by Ian Alexander. Lev is never explicitly referred to as a trans man during the narrative, but he uses he/him pronouns, shaves his head like the other male members of his religious sect, and is referred to by a feminine deadname by members of his former cult during a firefight. When paired with the choice to have Lev played by someone who at the time identified as a trans man (Ian Alexander has since come out as non-binary instead), and it’s pretty clear that the intention was for Lev to be read as a trans man, despite the label not being used explicitly in the text of the narrative.

At that game’s launch, a huge wave of people online attempted to edit Lev’s fandom wiki page, repeatedly, trying to add his deadname to the wiki and refer to him as a woman rather than a man, because “the game never explicitly says he’s a trans man”.

Frequently the retort from those who refused to accept that the character was trans came in the form of suggestions that the matter was “open to interpretation”. If the media didn’t literally say the words “trans man”, then it was fair game to loudly declare Lev was female instead.

Season 3 of the TV adaptation of The Last of Us is currently in production, and the show’s creators have decided not to cast a trans man performer to play Lev in the show. A disappointing number of people online are championing this as “proof” that Lev being a trans man was “only ever a headcanon”, and returning to the assertion that the character was never meant to be read as trans in the first place.

This past week saw the online premiere of Episode 9 of The Amazing Digital Circus, the show’s finale.

The Amazing Digital Circus is a show focused on a number of individuals trapped inside a digital world, with only each other and an all powerful ringleader AI for company. 

One of the characters trapped inside this digital world is Jax, a closeted trans woman whose internalised transmysogony, fear of rejection, and fear of hurting those that she comes out to, cause her to lash out and reject attempts at emotional intimacy from others.

Jax is a closeted trans woman. This is never said explicitly in the text of the work, but was pretty clear to a lot of people watching even before its eventual reveal. From her outsized reactions from to being forced into feminine clothing, to her exaggerated attempts to insist on her own performative masculinity, the clues were there in the text of the work from fairly early on in the show. Plus, if you know the show’s written by a trans woman who’s talked about her relationship to Jax as a character, the parallels are pretty clear. There was even official artwork drawn of Jax taking Progesterone, a hormone replacement medication taken by trans women, under the justification that it “makes you good at gambling”.

In the finale of the show Jax talks about revealing something “deep and personal” to her mother, in the hopes that revealing her secret would stop her mother constantly comparing her to her father (both accusations that she wasn’t male enough to live up to her father’s legacy, or was violent and dangerously male like her father). Her mother mocks her for her revealed secret, leading Jax to forcefully push her mother to the ground and run away from home. After hearing this confession Jax’s friend Ribbit promises the safety of that secret, and places a cute pink Bow on Jax, causing her to deeply blush. Unfortunately she then throws the bow to the floor in panic as soon as a male friend is heard approaching the room.

It’s about as clear of a metaphor as one could have painted, without explicitly using the words “transgender woman”.

When the finale first released in cinemas a few weeks ago, then online this past week, a number of people insisted that Jax being a trans woman was a “headcanon”, a fan theory but not something canonical.

Creator Gooseworks then proceeded to post a picture of Jax “if she wasn’t a piece of shit”, showing her presenting traditionally feminine. Again, pretty clear confirmation from the creator that this is a story about a closeted trans girl. 

The movie even makes use of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely, a song about a new born baby girl, over a montage of this character that we’ve just moments before learned was a woman on the verge of coming out as her true self. It’s so clearly right there in front of us.

BUT, because the creator also said she’s “fine” with people using any pronouns for Jax in discussions, given the complexity of discussing a character who hadn’t yet fully come out during the body of the work, many online took that inch and ran a mile with it, insisting that this was “permission” from the creator to not view Jax as a trans woman, and to stick with using explicitly he/him pronouns when referring to the character.

And yeah, you’re not wrong that Jax never uses any pronouns other than he/him during the text of the show, but it’s clear that a lot of people are using this in bad faith as an excuse to go out of their way to deliberately not respect the identity of a character whose gender identity is pretty heavily implied, and I would argue explicitly confirmed by the creator.

While I’ve mostly discussed examples of implicit vs explicit representation here that centre on gender identity, other topics such as disability navigate this space between implicit and explicit representation too. For example the indie game To The Moon centres two characters who are both autistic women. The term autism is never used to refer to either woman, but players can find a book by real world author Tony Attwood, an author who specialises in books about the now discontinued diagnostic term Aspergers Syndrome, now rolled under Autism Spectrum Disorder as a diagnosis.

The game is pretty clear that its two main female characters are autistic, providing excellent commentary on the differences in lived experience between those diagnosed young vs older in life in terms of their support needs and access to support structures, and how both sides of that experience often wish they had the other’s experience instead. It’s a beautifully moving story about autism, only confirmed explicitly to be about the autistic experience if you find clues left in the text and follow them to their formal outside of the game confirmations.

And I want to be clear, I do think that sometimes, implicit representation is the right move for a piece of work, despite the downsides that come alongside it.

I Saw the TV Glow is, at its core, a story about a closeted trans woman refusing the call to transition. Where The Amazing Digital Circus focuses on someone violently and aggressively resisting transition, I Saw the TV Glow is a slow creeping horror story about the life ruining cycle of depression that can result from decades spent ignoring something fundamental to your soul. Both I Saw the TV Glow and The Amazing Digital Circus are honestly very similar cautionary tales about the fact that trying to ignore your transness won’t generally make it go away, it’ll just manifest in ways that are deeply unpleasant to live through.

While I think that I Saw the TV Glow and The Amazing Digital Circus ultimately draw very similar conclusions about the destructive nature of resisting gender transition, I Saw the TV Glow far less frequently sees people attempt to deny that it is at its core a story about transition. That’s not to say those denials never come, I’ve heard some bonkers counter claims about what the story is trying to address, but it’s less frequently misinterpreted than other implicit stories about transness.

Why is that? It’s hard to know for certain, but I believe a big part of it is simply audience expectations. If your implicit story about a trans character is a stand alone work, one mostly known as “that trans horror story”, people come to it knowing that context and look at it through that lens, primed.

The Amazing Digital Circus, by comparison, was not sold to its audience as a narrative that would be in part about transness. Trans people in large part spotted where the story was going, because we understand the tropes being laid out. Many of us remember periods of leaning heavily into birth gender to try and push away the urge to come out. We’re primed to spot those implications, where a broad audience may not be. If transness for example crops up fairly deep into a narrative that wasn’t sold as being about transness, as was the case with The Amazing Digital Circus or The Last of Us: Part 2, that tends to be where you experience that audience resistance to an implied trans reading of the narrative. The same I believe is true for other forms of implicit representation. If the genre of the work isn’t priming audiences, or past episodes haven’t primed audiences, then a wide number of people will reject the idea that a narrative is, subtly and later on within its narrative, being written to tell someone else’s story.

I’m not suggesting that explicit representation is inherently better or worse than implicit representation, but I do believe that implicit representation will always take more skill to navigate, and will be forever be more at risk of a character’s identity being erased by large portions of your fanbase.