Obeisance

Presenter Information

Ava T Guest

Location

"Reverie" (alternate readings)

Event Website

https://linktr.ee/guavawildfrontier

Document Type

Presentation

Start Date

22-8-2024 12:00 AM

End Date

31-12-2024 12:00 AM

Description

Ava T Guest
Obeisance, 2024
Fandom: Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online
Digital art and text
N/A
Collection of the artist/author

Rating: Teen and Up
Tags: Cowgirl fiction, Original Characters, Original Fiction, Original Female Character, Strong Female Characters, Wild West, Western, Cowgirl romance, Female Protagonists, Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online, F/F

Creator's notes: “Obeisance” is an illustrated short story about the author’s original roleplaying game character, Marie: a Red Dead Online video game fan fiction, with pictures based on gameplay screenshots. A whirlwind Wild West LGBT romance arises between Marie and Violet (a fictional character) and there is a pensive moment for one woman during an embrace where her attention wanders from her fully clothed partner snuggled up to her in bed.

Comments

In order to establish a reasonably diverse sexual history for my Red Dead Online original character (OC) Marie Baptiste, star of several illustrated transformative fictional stories, I invented an ex-girlfriend for her. This relationship or liaison between Marie as a masculine-of-center or butch character (an indigenous woman of 28) and a plausible rival Lothario (think Shane or Papi from The L Word) would have some reciprocal give and take, but the story is meant to put Marie in her place as not the biggest most famous lover in gay 1898. Thus she would meet an older woman with a “butch in a skirt” style (sort of a Black lesbian version of the canonical Red Dead lady outlaw Black Belle) in a story fragment I adopted and expanded for this project, when I heard of it through Star Trek channels June 25, 2024. Reverie by Kelli Connell, an image where the model is mirrored as both butch and femme characters in an embrace, immediately suggested my character as the partner who lapses into a reverie. While the partner lying on her back seemed to me to be gazing intently at the other woman with her full attention. I cast Violet as this attentive character.

Often upon a revelatory sexual experience that expands one’s notion of one’s sexual identity, some time spent processing it internally is called for. My character Marie is beset by multiple internal dialogues, self-asserting thoughts of past partners, and slowness to notice and acknowledge her own feelings. Spacing out, while still in physical contact with a partner Marie likes very much, is both quite in character and perhaps acceptable right at the end of an emotionally rewarding weekend.

Behind this story, my own musings upon queer women’s and nonbinary people’s sexual positionality, including stone-ness (as a complete and worthy whole sexual approach) and versatility, were deepened by the writings of Jack Halberstam, Leslie Feinberg and Alison Bechdel, among many more since my grad school experience through 2010. The extremely compelling figure of the bounty hunter mentor in the Red Dead game also influenced the origin of Violet: not least the moment they first met, when my female character scrambled to light the legibly masculine Black woman’s cigarette in a riveting cutscene that hits way different when you’re not playing a white cowboy.

As a white woman who lived a Native American character in an open world Western video game for two years, my thought to subvert the image of Connell’s “Reverie” was to place my indigenous character in an embrace with another masculine-of-center Indigenous or Black woman of color (BIPOC). Thus, a butch/butch romance. The story fragment was in place since 2023, and I gave the fictional character a name, Violet Thompson, June 24, 2024 after I viewed Connell’s Reverie. i wrote the story of both women’s thoughts in that moment, flashing back to their first meeting a few days before.

Further, the more I read of Connell’s “constructing realities” the more I feel this fits with the way players experience a multiplayer game separately, even when the characters are onscreen together. Scholars have explored the idea of a game environment mediating interaction between players. Or that role play allows trying on different identities. Or that “shipping” straight tv characters is a method for LGBTQ people to create representation for themselves when a paucity of them exists. Encountering and using the animations, emotes, idling routines, action and mechanics of an enveloping game like Red Dead screamed storytelling at me.

While I was not a “role player” live in the game world, through taking in-game virtual photographs, the pictures themselves suggested to me characters walking together or interacting, seeming to be in dialogue. Stories suggested themselves extending from sequences of images. Soon I began to do photo shoots with evocative poses in order to support a story I’d compose later. This process, in place since spring 2021, absolutely parallels what Connell undertook in her Double Life series, with a single model in both roles. I could tell a story in pictures, or support dialogue and narration with images with a comic book or graphic novel approach, or write plain prose.

As I made friends with players I met “randomly” in game, fictional characters like Violet Thompson still had their place in my stories about my original character. However, writing a story starring a friend’s character was a kind of love letter to the other player. With original characters, this is a very important readership: folks looking for a portrait of themselves, alternate selves, or a new spin on a beloved character they’ve lovingly created and inhabited for hundreds or thousands of hours of gameplay. My impressions of any real-world qualities revealed by gamer friends were also fertile ground for subtext for their Wild West characters.