I preface this post with my obligatory statement along the lines of "I can't believe that this stupid bullshit is the thing that is bringing me back to my blog." At this point, it's a tradition. I don't like it, but for now, I must accept this truth.
I generally reserve the CPA as my outlet for longform content on the topic of Magic: the Gathering. On occasion, I find myself wanting to opine on something that I just don't deem suitable for the CPA as a forum. Seems a bit strange considering that the CPA has effectively been a dead website since 2018 or so, and it's limping along just because a few people happen to visit regularly and post whatever they want to post. Most of my content there receives no engagement anyway, so what's the big deal? Well, I do still have some sense of propriety here, and I tailor my CPA posts to, at least theoretically, be meaningful relevant to hypothetical CPA lurkers. And some things, despite being Magic-related, go much to far in evoking the image of me standing on a soap box. As a courtesy to no one in particular, I self-censor enough to confine that sort of content to this blog space, rather than to my posts on someone else's forum.
Just over a decade ago, there was a controversy of sorts in Magic, which I vaguely recall. I had a lot going on at the time. I can't quite place where I saw this topic crop up back then, nor whether I had any sort of response or even opinion at the time. Like I said, I had a lot going on. In my hazy memories, this controversy was mostly insignificant. Then again, it got enough press that I heard about it, so maybe my impression there is overstated. Well, I was just reminded of this by an article on Commander's Herald, written by one Ciel Collins. I'll excerpt the relevant portion.
In the year 2013 (over a decade ago, egads), there were a grand total of 41 planeswalker cards, depicting 22 distinct characters. Of those characters, 14 were men and only 6 were women (Karn and Ashiok both exist outside the binary, though the terms weren't fully developed). This would be brought to Wizards of the Coast's attention in due time. I dug around some old forum posts and saw... timely discussions of the matter that wouldn't be worth the mental hazard to bring up, but there were posts from Mark Rosewater that I remembered from the era.
Two in particular are of interest, linked here and here and show below. Just bear in mind that these are relics of an older design philosophy, and Rosewater has since noted this line of reasoning was erroneous.
Although I truly believe that I remember this being an issue somewhere back when I was a college student, there's actually nothing special about the year 2013 when it comes to planeswalkers, and anchoring things to that year seems, in hindsight, pretty arbitrary. The Mark Rosewater "tumblr" posts cited in the article are from 2012, and it's worth noting that Mark Rosewater was not part of the Creative team, so he presumably had no say in what the gender of planeswalkers depicted on planeswalker cards would be. He may have been knowledgeably representing the viewpoint of someone else within WotC who was responsible for this, or he may have just been spitballing. From what I've seen of Mark Rosewater's statements over the years, both possibilities seem equally likely.
So I'll admit that as soon as I read this part of the article, I started doing some searches on Scryfall, skeptical of the whole controversy. Why pick 2013? Why not 2007, when planeswalkers were first introduced? Why not 2017, on the tenth anniversary of planeswalkers being introduced? Why not 2012, when those Mark Rosewater posts were originally published? Why not 2018, before War of the Spark introduced a deluge of planeswalker cards? Why not right now? And why count clearly monstrous planeswalkers as one gender or another? Ajani is a leonin, a lion-man. Does he have a lion-dick or does he have a man-dick? I don't think it's ever come up! Does a lion-man really count as being part of the boy's team? Nicol Bolas is a dragon! Presumably he has a dragon-dick. Or not. I don't know dragon anatomy. I guess Nicol Bolas was always canonically a "he." But then again, so was Karn, and yet this very article seems to be claiming Karn for the "non-binary" column. Why? Why can Nicol Bolas be masculine, but not Karn? And why the emphasis on the individual planeswalker characters that appear on cards? Do the ones that get a card, or the ones that didn't get a card yet not count? Counting by character instead of by planeswalker card is a choice too, because you can tally Tezzeret, Venser, and Koth all in the "man" column, but is it not also significant that Chandra, a woman, has always held the record for getting the most individual planeswalker cards? For whatever reason, WotC's track record for most of the history of planeswalker cards has been to introduce more male characters, but to usually only give them a single card or to wait a very long time before giving them a second card, while female planeswalkers have more frequently gotten multiple planeswalker cards much sooner, and in greater numbers. Does that even matter? The article on Commander's Herald frames this in a discussion about
planeswalker cards, and even despite doing this in the context of
talking about planeswalker characters that have lost their planeswalker
spark and have since appeared as creature cards instead of planeswalker
cards, there's actually some conflation here, because if you care so
much about tallying up genders or whatever, there's a distinction
between planeswalker characters and planeswalker cards.
For instance, Dyfed is a planewalker character, but not a planeswalker
card. The Royal Scions is a planeswalker card, but not a planeswalker
character. Grandmother Sengir is a planeswalker character and is also a card, but is not a planeswalker card. So if we're going to tally these things, we have to decide
which thing we care about.
I was coming up with all these questions and more, reflexively probing the weaknesses of this whole dredged-up controversy as presented in the article, scrutinizing the entire argument from multiple angles. And then I paused, took a moment to back away from the whole issue, and pondered the matter from the beginning. I realized that I'd been sucked in. I'd seen someone pointing at something and calling it sexist, and I'd perhaps gotten a bit defensive on behalf of people I don't even know. So let's start at the beginning here.
However you tally things up, whether you're counting creatures, planeswalkers, characters, cards, characters on cards, characters not on cards, planeswalker characters, planeswalker cards, planeswalkers named in flavor text on cards, or whatever, no matter what category you decided to focus on, once the count is done, you'll probably have a difference. You probably won't have an exact 50/50 split between men and women. And that's OK. It's OK for there to be more planeswalker characters on cards that are men than ones that are women. There's nothing wrong with that. The article accidentally baited me into getting hung up on details, but once I step back, I realize that this whole "controversy" is silly to begin with. And I don't just mean something so dismissive as "it's silly because this is all just a card game anyway." Rather, I mean it's silly because the controversy is premised upon the idea that "representation" matters here, and that notion, on its face, is pretty ridiculous in this context.
Koth is a man with metal spikes built into his body. His hair is made of metal. His body glows with the heat of a a forge and he can magically control metal, earth, and stone. Sorin is a man whose grandfather forced him to become a vampire, and he has lived for over 7,000 years as a vampire. Garruk is a man who has used magic to enhance his own size and strength to superhuman proportions, and who can control animals. I am a man. I do not especially relate to any of these fictional characters because they are also men. I am not "represented" by them on account of our shared maleness.
I see this in other places too. People seem to believe that if they tally things up and there's a difference between the categories they tallied, that this is proof of some injustice. It isn't. It's OK for there to be more male characters on planeswalker cards than female characters on planeswalker cards. It would be OK for it to be the other way around. There's nothing good or bad about this. It's all happenstance after decades of storytelling by swaths of people who have come and gone, all working to tell fantasy stories in a fantasy world that gets used in a card game. Expecting gender ratios in every conceivable part of this mess to be perfectly balanced is silly. Finding them imbalanced is OK. It's OK to be male.
