In this episode, Caitie and Simone discuss the Wachowski Effect, a phenomenon that occurs when a creator or writer begins to hate their work after transitioning into a woman. They discuss two prominent examples of this: The Matrix and Dragon Age: Age of Sigmar, and The Veil Guard.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone. I am excited today to be talking to you about a phenomenon that I call the Wachowski effect, because it is something I have noticed in media.
00:00:12.340And we will be using two prominent examples of this. One is the Matrix series, and the other is the Dragon Age series.
00:00:22.340And Veil Guard specifically is a particularly prominent example of this, in which a previously really talented creative or writer becomes really, really terrible after undergoing a gender transition into a woman.
00:00:40.500And when I say they become really, really terrible, I don't mean conservatives start hating their work.
00:00:46.360I mean, like, everyone starts hating their work. And I want to explore both the timelines of this, so people can see, like, okay, so for example, with Veil Guard, oh my god, I was just watching some scenes from it, and it is so painful.
00:01:02.360But we will go through them. You don't even know. Like, it's not bad. It actively hurts to consume, where, like, I'm not even going to play the clips, because if I play full clips of these scenes in this episode, people will stop watching this show, just because of the pain it's delivering to you, the viewer.
00:02:07.820Understand the effects of this, because we've seen a lot of woke games fail this year. This isn't quite as bad as something like, oh, what was the last one that we talked about?
00:02:18.140But, like, just a horrible failure that we talked about. But it was bad, and people knew it was going to be woke, and this was a successful franchise before. So we've got different estimates of sales for this.
00:02:30.120Since recording this, we've gotten more accurate numbers in. It looks like it's pulled in about $63 million in earnings, or about one-fifth of what it needs to break even.
00:02:37.380It's current player count for peak daily is around 36,000 players. So only, like, three acts.
00:02:49.440Honestly, based on the footage you shared with me, even just the character design, which honestly super yucks my yum, but just the... It's impressive that people can work through that.
00:03:01.480So, I'm non-binary. What does that mean?
00:03:10.840That means I don't feel like a man or a woman.
00:03:14.300If you are neither a man nor a woman, then what are you?
00:03:18.800Non-binary. I just said, and I'm going to use they instead of she from now on.
00:03:23.660Just a note here, because this is a mistake I made throughout the recording, I assumed that this individual, from the way that they looked, was a non-passing trans woman, but they are actually a non-passing, non-binary individual that looks and codes male, but was born a woman.
00:03:41.180I suspect the reason for this is that the writers of this are non-passing trans women, and they identify more with a biological woman who is non-passing, non-binary.
00:03:54.100So they are basically attempting to write themselves into the story as if they had been born a woman.
00:04:02.800This feels like... There was that year when I just had norovirus, like, three times in a row, and I was just constantly... I had food poisoning, but I'm the kind of person who just eats through food poisoning, because I don't not eat.
00:04:14.340And just, like, that feeling of, like, you're incredibly sick, you are constantly vomiting, but you keep eating the food.
00:04:21.300That is what I imagine playing this game is like.
00:04:25.180No, it is eating vomit's level appetizing.
00:04:31.040Actually, it is worse than Concord, or even Dustborn, when I was watching it, because I watched, like, video playthroughs of Dustborn, and I found it cringe in, like, a funny way occasionally.
00:04:41.840And, like, the main character was super hateable, and manipulated all her friends and everything.
00:04:47.000And that's another thing about the characters in this, is the characters that are supposed to be woke representations are genuinely awful, awful, awful.
00:04:57.420What you shared with me is, like, what is this?
00:05:00.160I will play, like, a bit of a scene here, so you can understand how disconnected these people are from reality.
00:05:04.980Where the character that's supposed to be trans representation, her mother tries really hard to be accepting of her, and she's just a complete bitch about it.
00:05:41.000And then, after her mother dies, she takes her mother's horn, so, like, part of her bones, and wears it as, like, a thing, even though she knows her mother would disapprove of this.
00:05:54.180And this is one of the things that her mother really hated was her adopting these practices that were of a people in a culture she did not identify with.
00:06:03.180Your mother's horn. You wear it as jewelry, like the Ravani do.
00:06:16.920Well, and didn't, one of the clips that you'd sent to me, perhaps my memory deceives me, but the player selected the option of just don't say anything, and yet the character then came on to someone else in a really aggressive, creepy way.
00:06:34.100So, if you're, like, a female character, this is actually, like, to me, it shows how blind, so, I think for a lot of lesbian women, the absolute horror is some non-passing 6'5 woman pressing them against the wall and putting them in a situation where they feel super threatened.
00:06:54.140And this woman doesn't realize that this person is not recognizing them as a woman at all, that they look like a giant man to them.
00:07:33.060No, but specifically in the gameplay, if memory serves, the players, like, recording this demo selected the option of say nothing, like, basically don't escalate this further.
00:07:50.540And then the character, nevertheless, like, despite the player's non-consent, escalates the situation further, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:07:57.900Oh, no, everything about this is written by somebody who seems to have no idea how flirting works.
00:08:03.440So, there's another scene where they're like, oh, you gave me this gift, and they're like, yeah, I, like, really like you for, like, your talents and your other talents, and you smell really good.
00:08:16.060I love the way you smell that we had a request for the defense to the Joe Biden hair sniff.
00:08:25.340So, if you have some creepy dude, doesn't have to be Joe Biden, all right?
00:08:31.260If you have some creepy dude who comes up behind you, and it's like, you know, making you feel really awkward, touching you in a way you don't really think is cool, and kind of snipping your hair, it's kind of weird, right?
00:08:41.940Okay, so, what we're going to do is, well, one thing you could do is you could just, boom, headbutt them, right?
00:08:48.580This scene I'm talking about where the player attempts to say, don't say anything more, and then it selects that option, and she says more, and it's like, ooh.
00:36:04.580I'm doing this out of principle to protect the sanctity of marriage.
00:36:08.960So for some of these individuals, they might have been drawn to the creative industry originally because they had that gay, super creative ability.
00:36:17.960But I think that the whole gaze being really good with the creative arts also shows you don't need to insert gender identity and sexuality into everything that you're doing.
00:36:27.660And for whatever reason, I'm still so curious because this seems to be a consistent trend, what that reason is.
00:36:37.180Part of me also then turns to the conservative Christian community, at least in the U.S., which is like, birth control is terrible for you.
00:36:44.480Like, exogenous hormones at all are a really bad idea.
00:36:47.500And then when you take someone who is transitioning, that's that on steroids.
00:36:51.640Like, just that level of medical intervention is going to mess with you anyway.
00:36:54.520Like, someone who's recovering from a major surgery, someone who's coming off a lot of drugs.
00:36:58.200Like, they also were probably going to be not in the best creative place.
00:37:03.000Could this also just be an issue of too much medical intervention?
00:37:05.800People recovering from surgery, people going through.
00:39:17.500Whereas a guy, you learned how to do that in, like, a different sexual environment.
00:39:24.340And so when I see the types of scenes where, like, the scene where the girl's being pinned against a wall and she hasn't really consented to this.
00:39:31.680This scene is, if it was a cis guy who was doing this, I don't think that that many women would be as terrified.
00:39:40.660Because they'd be like, oh, well, no, they would be as terrified.
00:39:43.540But, like, a cis guy would know better.
00:39:44.920I think the problem is, is that they learned that they need to be aggressive while they were a guy.
00:40:22.740Instead of that kind of their transphobia.
00:40:24.820And it could be that all these defense mechanisms that they've built up around this leads to them being, like, just barreling through a lot of guards.
00:40:35.540I love you some, like, I think with all of this, it's an interesting phenomenon.
00:40:41.900Because I'm trying to come at this phenomenon without any particular, like, yeah, I'm the type of person who thinks that the trans community oversteps a lot.
00:40:48.520Whether it is gender transition and youth.
00:40:50.480Or whether it is trans people in sports.
00:40:52.300But I also don't think trans people should be uncomfortable jobs, for example.
00:40:57.160However, I do think that we need to be realistic about how this seems to be a real thing.
00:41:04.520That people who are world class in a space seem to start sucking after they transition if it's in a creative industry.
00:41:11.640And we don't want that to happen, too.
00:41:13.280So, like, even if you care about trans people thriving, you don't want their careers to bomb after they transition.
00:41:19.760You want them to thrive after they transition.
00:41:21.360I didn't want the matrixes to start sucking.
00:42:35.660But don't you remember that one time, the last time I got overstimulated, ovarian, sorry, ovarian hyperstimulation, and my estrogen was, like, really off the charts?
00:42:43.620Like, you guys should be worried about this off the charts.
00:42:46.840And you were like, Simone, you're so mean.
00:42:50.160I do remember saying that you're being unusual.
00:42:52.080I was kind of denying it at that time.
00:43:03.680Anyway, I still, I have fascination with this from a more medical perspective.
00:43:10.760Like, I think that there are chemical things that are going on.
00:43:13.260And I think it's important to understand, especially if you're considering a medical transition for yourself.
00:43:21.040And even if you're not, because, like, from a nootropic standpoint, from all these other standpoints, your hormonal composition affects you.
00:45:00.860I was speaking or texting with that mother that I really admire that I keep telling her.
00:45:06.660And I realized when talking with her about her process, because obviously she has seven kids, soon eight, that when you become a parent of a really large family, it's not what people think it is.
00:45:18.340I think they think just like, it's like being in the Weasley household, you know, everything's crazy.
00:45:24.120But really, everything you do just is done on a commercial scale.
00:45:48.240But once you get that process down, it's quite doable.
00:45:50.840And I feel really grateful that when I grew up, I worked, well, sort of volunteered with my parents when they were doing whitewater raft stuff.
00:46:01.420Because all the river guides also did all the cooking, all the cleaning up after dinner.
00:46:07.040Like they did like all the catering, everything.