Gender and sexual identities in ASOUE

[Esmé's meme is meh]

Okay this began as a thread to discuss the henchman who looks like neither a man nor a woman/mountainous person/creature/etc but now is about gender, sexual identities, queer references and interpretations of stuff in ASOUE, etc.

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I post this here since we had an interesting series of comments about this character here

What do you think about this? I just found this illustration:



I actually like the depiction Helquist did of him/her. It's not monstrous or grotesque, it actually looks like someone you'd find on the streets. It reminds me of that coach in Glee.

[Skelly Craig]

S/He's also in the Marvelous Marriage portrait by Helquist (in colour). And there's another one from the paperbacks where their face is half obscured, but we see the whole body.


I've recently re-read an Edward Gorey story and came upon a part that made me think of your discussion; simple yet effective enough (although might be interpreted as just cross-dressing):

[A comet crashing into Earth]

I like the Penny Dreadful versions because they give us Helquist's interpretations of a bunch of characters we didn't get to see the first time around. I'm very disappointed that they were cancelled before we got to see his idea of Hector, Jerome or a bunch of the islanders.

Although I love the picture, as I do most of the illustrations from these editions, I don't really agree with Helquist's vision of that particular character. It seems a bit more feminine than masculine to me. Though I'd have a tough time coming up with a better visualisation, I admit.

[Invisible]

She is by far my favourite henchperson. She's absolutely adorable!! Does anyone else think so? Or am I alone on this? She's so cute! I could cuddle her all day long!!! SQUEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

[J-Bird]

Quick to assume that they are, in fact, a she. We can't even assign them one just to make the woman/man ratio of the henchpeople even. From the time they are involved with Olaf/living, there are two powder-faced woman, Fernald, and the man with the long nose. I personally see Esme as more of an associate to Olaf than a henchwoman.

[gliquey]

I really dislike the picture of the henchperson from behind, running away with Olaf, in the end of the normal edition of TWW. The penny dreadful image in TWW isn't great either, in my opinion. I think both images seem to make the henchperson look male, especially the former.

But I actually quite like the "It was a lousy play" and Marvelous Marriage drawings of the person with ambiguous gender. They suit Helquist's style and disguise the gender of the character well, which I can't imagine is an easy thing to do when drawing a face.

[Cyril]

I've recently read Edgar Allan Poe's The Bells, which says:

They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human

That reminded me of Snicket's "nether man, nor woman"
Also here are the henchmen in the Russian edition of TBB

[zakeno]

I really don't like illustrations of them because they tend to go in line with the 'gender confused? MUST BE A MASCULINE CODED PERSON WEARING MAKEUP/FEMININE CLOTHES' bla bla bla trope. It's a gross trope that just... won't.... die....... though luckily it's starting to go away now. It was really common in the early 2000s so I'm not surprised Helquist illustrated them in that way. Goes hand-in-hand with the 'men in dresses are funny!' trope.

It's a different kind of 'wow I hate this' than how this henchperson is described in the books, which is a 'wow I hate this' because it covers the other trope of 'monsterous because no gender' (which I've already rambled a lot about so I won't continue). (angry agender trans person whining, here)

Lemme doodle them really quickly as I might see them? Since having people 'decide' which of the binary genders must be 'correct' is something I go through every... day... of my life...... I have a pretty good idea of what makes people assume one or the other, or have trouble figuring it out entirely.



I imagine them with softer features and a fairly androgynous sense of fashion, leaning towards 'tomboy' fashion that's made for women but still is fairly masculine in appearance. They're heavier and hold a lot of weight to their middle, which makes them a bit 'curvy' in an apple sort of shape. They keep their hair medium-length. They don't talk much, or at all, probably because their voice would give them away to other people and make other people assume they've 'figured out' this person's gender. 

(also by definition they're not a man or a woman so 'speculating' on what their gender 'really is' is something I think everyone should resist doing. *pulls collar* sorry to be a non-fun certified agender©).

But overall, yeah, still hate this character for how blatantly stereotypically offensive they are. not that handler or helquist meant to be offensive, since it was very common during the time and no one knew better, but hey, we're talking about this in 2015. So yeah, it's a bad character. Can we talk about trans headcanons instead because that sounds much more fun. (*mashes fists into table* AGENDER QUIGLEY... AGENDER QUIGLEY...)

[bandit]

Am I missing something here? Your doodle is literally identical to what they look like in the Helquist illustration--down to the clothes--except Helquist's character is wearing makeup, which is understandable since they are in a play.

[zakeno]

Sept 7, 2015 19:33:23 GMT -5 bandit said:

Am I missing something here? Your doodle is literally identical to what they look like in the Helquist illustration--down to the clothes--except Helquist's character is wearing makeup, which is understandable since they are in a play.

I was trying to keep them very similar but nixing the makeup because it's obviously overdone in comparison to all the females in the illustration (it isn't in the marvelous marriage illustration- since the powdered ladies always have a lot of makeup, but I still feel weird about the way it's done). I also tried to soften the jawline and chin which feel kinda squared out in Helquist's drawings. The idea that they needed to be in makeup but still couldn't be seen as male or female feels weird to me. I don't know. I feel really uncomfortable with this character and every way they're portrayed. It hits me too close to home as someone who deals with micro-aggression based on these stereotypes all the time. I hate that makeup=gender confusion to most people. 

Sorry if I'm not explaining this well enough. I just really detest this character and how they're handled and I have felt so since I was a kid. And I think the fact that people want to keep talking about them instead of talking about other characters being non-cisgender makes me extra uncomfortable?   (sorry sorry for rambling so much yikes I really hope I'm making some sense) (this character makes me feel a mad knot in my stomach and I really wish they weren't in one of my favorite series, but seeing as they are, I want to acknowledge them as problematic in their portrayal)

[Esmé's meme is meh]

It's funny how Handler, the Russian illustrator, most fanarts and people I asked picture the person who looks neither like a man nor a woman fat. I actually remember imagining him/her (still not sure which pronoun I should use, I'll use my I'm.not-an-English-native-speaker card here) as a really thin person because when I was a kid (5-6 years old) I met the mother of a kid I hated because he was really mean with me. The thing is she was REALLY skinny, bones and skin, and because of her oily hair, her wide clothes, her angry face all the time and her weird scratchy voice was even scarier than her son, and when I read TBB a few years later she was automatically my headcanon.

[Linda Rhaldeen]

I believe the character is described in the books as being enormous; strange how the mind can gloss over character details once we get a picture in our head. I, for example, had a mental picture of Snape as bald until the first Harry Potter movie came out. (By the way, for future reference the word they, while previously used only as a plural pronoun in English, has recently gained traction as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. It's fine you didn't know, a lot of native English speakers don't even know about it yet.

[Dante]

My mental images of Snape and Hagrid in the Harry Potter books were way off and actually derived from characters in other media entirely. The movie castings, and the fact that they were so much closer to the descriptions from the books themselves, helped to erase that, but it's still there.

Also, the androgynous assistant is canonically overweight. It's interesting that a couple of Olaf's troupe members are remembered by one feature when they actually have several - in the same way, the bald man is actually consistently described as being a bald man with a long nose (and even wearing a long robe), but you never hear about anything but the baldness. But here's the first appearance of the androgynous assistant: "There was a person who was extremely fat, and who looked like neither a man nor a woman." Their weight and stature is actually their primary feature, but I think we get hung up on the gender aspect because it's more unusual and therefore memorable, but mainly because it makes it complicated to discuss the character at all.

The narrative is the same, mostly; the character's enormity and unclear level of intelligence are consistently referred to as primary features and even the most important ones, but the awkwardness of our gender-neutral pronouns get in the way every time, although it is very true that Handler describes their lack of visual gender as something highly uncomfortable. This is sort of worse in every way in TWW, where the character's introduction goes on and on about their weight and size and how imposing they are, and that's the significant element in how the character is an obstacle afterwards - but it's their lack of gender that is literally described as "scary," which... I would be surprised if many people ever agreed with that much. It's not even explained why this makes the characters uncomfortable, it's just thrown in and it's bad, next to a bunch of elements that are actually physically dangerous and are detailed at great length. Very weird. I have a suspicion that Handler may have been called out on this in some capacity after TWW, as the character doesn't appear again until THH (five books later, and I think that's a longer gap than for any other troupe member), and in that book the gender aspect is completely irrelevant and presented in a totally value-neutral way. TWW is a bizarre and uncomfortable exception to TBB and particularly THH in this regard.

[zakeno]

I somewhat doubt that Handler was called out for it during the writing of ASOUE, because if so I highly doubt they would have been so monstrous towards the end of THH either. I'm sure he became aware of it at some point after the fact since there's the much more benignly described androgynous person in Suspicious Incidents, but it still kinda feels like a weak attempt to make amends. At least they're there even as a background character.

Though I would say Handler makes their gender their main feature because it's how they are referred to. They aren't 'the extremely overweight person' (which I'm sure could also catch fire from someone), they're 'the person who looks neither like a man nor a woman'. It's a shame because if they weren't so monstrous and inhumanly described and could just be evil on the same level of the other troupe members I'd like them a lot more.

[Esmé's meme is meh]

Can we change this thread and discuss about gender/sexual identity in ASOUE here? I can relate TCC with that.