Alesha
Before I get to the art books, I have an obligatory stop on the Vorthos news train. Last week’s Uncharted Realms story focused on the Mardu khan, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death. If you haven’t already, open a new tab and read James Wyatt’s “The Truth of Names” before going on. I’ll leave a picture of Alesha as a buffer.
The Mardu khan, nineteen-year-old Alesha, was born with a body perceived by others as male but identifies as female; Doug Beyer has made it clear that in the Magic canon, Alesha is transgender, or “trans” for inclusion of more concepts and possibilities. (Note that Alesha herself, and the Mardu at large, might have a sharply different idea of what that means from how it would be seen in the present-day West; see Two-Spirit for an example from the contemporary world.)
[JDB’s note: In the following section I’ve tried to use the right terms and approach the topic with respect. If I’ve messed up anywhere, that’s my fault and I apologize.]
Alesha confirmed her self-identity when she earned the right to name herself after a battle. The khan at the time asked for her choice, she stated her grandmother’s name Alesha, and the khan didn’t miss a beat. He yelled out “Alesha,” the gathered Mardu yelled out “Alesha,” and for the naming ceremony at least, that was that. She’d earned the right to name herself, and if that’s what she wanted, done!
Every once in a while, someone might decide to give her grief – the nameless orc who’s willing to help out his clan-mates but takes time out from a raging battle to insult his khan, for instance – but she knows who she is and she won’t let anyone else define her. Except to give her the epithet “Who Smiles at Death,” of course. She’s cool with that.
Alesha is the first character in Magic lore to have been assigned a specific gender at birth and publicly identify as another. In Magic’s early storyline, the Weatherlight Saga, one of Urza Planeswalker’s companions was Xantcha, a Phyrexian “newt” (an androgynous, humanoid creature made out of the infamous Phyrexian glistening oil) who developed a sense of self-identity, “female” included. The Phyrexian leadership didn’t like that.
There’s also Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, whose gender is unknown in the official Magic canon. While Wizards of the Coast as a whole had trouble keeping to that line and Ashiok as a character wasn’t as representative or well-defined as Ashiok could’ve been (a search for Doug Beyer’s Ashiok Tumblr posts makes for interesting reading), the nightmare Planeswalker was another step on the path to “hey, this is part of our world and it should be part of Magic’s world too.”
Whether Alesha is the first trans character in Magic comes down to a battle of definitions in a Vorthos back alley between Team Xantcha and Team Alesha. What really matters with Alesha is that she is, and that’s gotten the attention of beyond-Magic outlets such as The Mary Sue and Kotaku.
Alesha hasn’t cured things like this…
…but she has made people cry, and she has given some people in the Magic community – Wizards of the Coast employees, third-party-site personalities, and Open Series competitors among them – a character that reflects them.
Within the sets of current Standard alone, we’ve seen Magic specifically address for the first time loving same-sex relationships (the Guardians of Meletis and the young men in the Uncharted Realms short story “Emonberry Red“), a Planeswalker who doesn’t fit gender norms in Ashiok, and now a successful and self-identity-secure transgender legend in Alesha. That’s a lot of firsts in a short space.
It’s clear from this Doug Beyer post that Wizards felt it was taking a risk with Alesha, but after the overall response to her, I doubt the Creative team will hide from any stories that could be told to the “Age 13+” audience Magic has, and if Degrassi is any indication, there’s not much that’s off-limits. In fact, the recent Creative moves suggest Magic has given up trying to win over any holdouts of the various culture wars.
Magic’s come a long way from the 1990s, when Wizards frantically scrubbed the game of any and all demons (do a search for creature type “Demon” as printed on cards and note the long chronological gap between Ice Age’s Minion of Leshrac and Onslaught’s Grinning Demon). When Magic made its debut in 1993, couples on Supermarket Sweep were still looking at each other and telling the host “We’re friends” or “We’re roommates.” It would be four years before the eponymous character on Ellen had “The Puppy Episode,” five years before Will & Grace went on the air, seven years before Richard Hatch became the original reality TV villain on Survivor.
It would be eight years before Brian Hegstad became Magic Team World Champion.
Magic’s storytelling has been building up to Alesha for a long time. Now it’s time to see where it goes.
Art Books
It’s 2015 and I still don’t have an official Magic art book from this decade. I do not approve.
Oh, there are art books related to Magic, to be sure. The Gathering and Journeys to Somewhere Else are just two Kickstarted book projects by Magic illustrators past and present. The Art of Magic: The Gathering from 1998, focused on Tempest Block, today is well-remembered. Similarly, A Planeswalker’s Guide to Alara has great reviews on Amazon…
…all five of them, that is. The book didn’t sell nearly well enough to justify a follow-up for Zendikar.
The possibility of an art or worldbuilding book is one of the questions most frequently put to Doug Beyer. His response from a few weeks back is rational from the perspective of a Creative employee, particularly one looking at a two-worlds-a-year workload, but rather disappointing to the folks like me who want a Magic: The Gathering art book and want it yesterday.
I’m far from the first person to bring up the topic and past petitions haven’t met with much success, but persistence is underrated.
What would I like to see in a Magic: The Gathering art book? Not a worldbuilding guide, for one thing. Those are put up for free on DailyMTG.com and they’re awesome.
A coffee-table book featuring the best of the best in Magic landscape illustration? That’s more my speed.
The coffee-table book approach offers several advantages over the worldbuilding guides previously put out by Wizards of the Coast:
It isn’t time-sensitive. A book such as A Planeswalker’s Guide to Alara has to come out at a certain time to sell at all, and once the block is over, only a small core of enthusiasts might want to purchase it later. A coffee-table book of beautiful Magic illustrations, by contrast, doesn’t have to adhere to a particular schedule and it can sell for a longer period.
It isn’t word-heavy. In an effective coffee-table book, the words are minimal and essential. Say what is necessary to understand the image and get out of the way. That doesn’t mean that the captions and other text can be dashed-off or sloppy, but on the other hand, a coffee-table book has far fewer words than a novel.
It is something that can appeal to non-Magic enthusiasts. Fans of contemporary illustration, contemporary landscapes, or just plain-old-pretty pictures can find something in a coffee-table book. In a corollary to the infamous “sofa test” for whether an original Magic illustration can coexist with home decor, compared to a worldbuilding guide, a coffee-table book will have a much better ratio of beautiful landscapes to undead abominations.
It is something that’s proven a success in related categories. There’s a whole publisher, Krause Publications, that focuses on marketing books specifically to collectors and hobbyists. This includes coffee-table books as well as denser, drier tomes on, for example, the minutiae of coin manufacturing (a topic that is fascinating to its audience – me included – but not so much to others).
It is something that wouldn’t have to be written by a Wizards employee. Produced with the Brand and Legal teams standing over the author/curator of images with a proverbial brickbat? Sure, that comes with the territory. On the other hand, I can think of three individuals not named John Dale Beety who are both outside the Wizards walls and more than capable of doing the image assessment and writing necessary for a coffee-table book. We’re out there, Wizards. Use us!
To give an idea of how simple the text could be on a page of a coffee-table book of Magic landscape illustrations, imagine the Steven Belledin Forest below taking up most of the page (just the illustration itself, not the mana-symbol text box or anything else).
Steven Belledin
Forest, 2008
Oil on paper on illustration board
11″ x 8″
First printed: Magic 2010 Core Set
Setting: not specified
According to the illustrator, this Forest was inspired by wooded areas in New York and Pennsylvania, including Central Park and the battlefield at Gettysburg.
Simple and clean, yes? Repeat a hundred or so times, polish to infinity, and that’s a coffee-table book. Of course, reasonable (and unreasonable!) Vorthoses would and should disagree about which illustrations to include.
If you were the writer of a Magic coffee-table book of landscapes, which ones would you pick?