Feat. Guest Murphy Lee
In my consolidating of the content I’ve created I figured it would be a good idea to get these puppies circulating again. This is episode one of the two episode demo of the podcast I assembled for a class in college. They’ve been wasting away on my Soundcloud since then, but they’ve got some good things to say.
The second and final episode will go up the week of Christmas to make up for there being no content last month due to setting up this blog.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW THE CUT:
[ Opens with an excerpt of True Trans Soul Rebel by Against Me! ]
THOMAS: Hi, my name is Thomas Gurinskas and this is All Your Faves are Trans. A podcast about the appropriation of fictional characters as trans. I’ll be talking about fan fiction, fan art, and other discourse, along with having guests come on and talk about their experiences with trans headcanons. Why am I doing this? I’m a trans man and I want to create media for trans people, because there isn’t a lot and we need more. That being said, enjoy the first episode of All Your Faves are Trans
[ Transition with excerpt from Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations ]
THOMAS: This week’s character is Marvel’s Bobby Drake, or Iceman, of the X-Men. I picked Bobby for this first podcast, because last year he was outed as gay in the All New X-Men series. I say outed instead of came out because the circumstances were less than stellar, thanks Bendis. Anyways, I thought discussing an already canonly queer character would be a good way to start off. To speak more about Bobby, we have our first guest and a very good friend of mine, artist, fanfic author, and leading expert on homosexual subtext in the X-Men Cinematic Universe, Murphy Leigh.
[ Transition with excerpt from Build Me Up Buttercup by the Foundations ]
THOMAS: Alright, so, you have two different headcanons for Bobby as trans, could you talk a little bit about both?
MURPHY: Uh, yeah sure. When it comes to X-Men Cinematic Universe Bobby, I tend to, uh, to headcanon him as a trans man, because, I don’t know, it just sort of fits me with the way that he acts and how he comes off in the films as opposed to how he comes off in the comics. In the comics I headcanon him as genderqueer, which I pretty much got from a friend of mine, Orc, and I just really like that headcanon. There’s not really a huge amount of evidence either way aside from in All New X-Men Bobby does say that he would make a much prettier princess than Hank, which I thought was hilarious and it’s sort of what inspired Orc to the headcanon and I’m like I can, I can roll with this.
THOMAS: Hank could be the furry woodland creature friend.
MURPHY: [ laughs ] He definitely could, he definitely could.
THOMAS: So, art versus fic. You’ve… You haven’t drawn trans man Bobby and you haven’t, to my knowledge, written anything with genderqueer Bobby.
MURPHY: Uh, yeah. That’s partially because it’s much more difficult to draw Shawn Ashmore [ Bobby’s actor ] than it is to just draw a generic white boy and unfortunately Bobby Drake is like the worlds most generic white boy. It’s much easier to draw Bobby from the comics than it is to draw him from the movies.
THOMAS: That makes sense.
MURPHY: And I just really haven’t gotten around to writing genderqueer Bobby yet.
THOMAS: Now, this is kind of a more general question, but what does headcanonning characters as trans mean for you?
MURPHY: Generally it’s just sort of a way to go, um, ‘Hey, this character who already has a really interesting, sort of, backstory and way that they’re written and really interesting characterization, I think it would be more interesting this way and more relatable if they were also trans,’ because my nonbinary ass is always searching for representation.
THOMAS: And there isn’t really a whole lot out there, I mean… there are a few characters but…
MURPHY: Yeah, especially not in the X-Men franchise.
THOMAS: Yeah.
MURPHY: Like, we sort of have Mystique.
THOMAS & MURPHY: Sort of.
THOMAS: Is there anything else you want to talk about? In relation to Bobby.
MURPHY: Um, honestly, I think a big reason that I’m so fixated on Bobby specifically as a trans character is because I really relate to Bobby on a lot of different levels, because we’re both kind of ridiculous people who spent way too long in the closet and he is also from Long Island, he’s also half Catholic. It’s sort of like ‘Oh, this guy. This guy is like, pretty much me. Wouldn’t it be cool if…’ and so on and so forth. Plus when I first got into the movies when I was seventeen, I kind of really hardcore identified with him without realizing it, because I developed crushes on both his female love interests and sort of really fixated on his best friend turned enemy who, really, he should have been making out with.
THOMAS: [ laughs ] Yeah. I mean, I’ve only seen X2, but yeah.
MURPHY: Yeah. [ laughs ]
THOMAS: Well, I think that’s about all the time we have, so.
MURPHY: Alright.
THOMAS: Thank you for doing this.
MURPHY: You’re welcome.
[ Transition with Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations ]
THOMAS: That’s all we have for today. Thank you again for joining us, Murphy Leigh and for giving us an idea of how diverse headcanons can be for the same character, along with some insight into what headcanonning characters as trans means for you, particularly in this case. Next week, our topic of conversation will be DC’s Lex Luthor. Murphy Leigh is a nonbinary artist and writer based out of New York. Their pronouns are they/them/theirs. Their fan art of Bobby can be found on their twitter, twitter.com/m_leigh_media, that is, twitter.com slash m underscore l-e-i-g-h underscore media, and their fanfic can be found on Archive of Our Own under the name Murf1307, that’s m-u-r-f-one-three-zero-seven. The music in today’s podcast was True Trans Soul Rebel by Against Me! and Build Me Up Buttercup by the Foundations. I hope you’ll tune in next week for more discussion about all your faves being trans.
[ Closes with excerpt from True Trans Soul Rebel by Against Me! ]
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