Canonically trans pirate: Alister St. Marina
So, when we first started the Sea of Thieves comics, the game was still in alpha testing. I got the incredibly cool privilege of rolling up on the Golden Shores before other people even had access, because we were basically launching simultaneously. One of the really cool things about the set up was that we got to create our own crew from scratch and tell a story on the sea when it only had a few legends in it, so we were given free reign. I knew we had a handful of issues to tell the story and I hoped we'd get to come back to them, but nothing was certain.
Some of the characters, namely DeMarco and Lesedi Singh became regular characters in the game, which was something I had never even realized was a possibility. Then, of course, DeMarco's death as a big story in the game. It was the first big mystery. And Lesedi was part of it. We even got to hear Lesedi's voice (I was quietly VERY excited they actually cast a South Asian woman in the part).
That led to a new opportunity! Years after their initial adventures, we got to make a new mini-series called "Sea Dog's Search" which centers Lesedi on her quest to find her brother's lost soul. We wanted to change things up and show that it had been years of adventuring on the Sea of Thieves, so even though we hadn't written years of comics, we wanted to show that their lives had kept on going. Since Lesedi was our focus in the series, updating her look was important to me. In the first comic, she started out looking like this:
Then, in the game, she and her brother founded The Sea Dogs and got sharp matching outfits:
Obviously, she stay's looking fly, but it's worth noting that this was a matching outfit with her brother and much more his style than hers (DeMarco loves clothes and dressing sexy, Lesedi has always been a little more no nonsense). So now that she's out from under the shadow of both her brother and legendary father, we've done some updating to her look. First, she had to get rid of the old one and do a bit of fighting of her own:
Over the years, the variety of what you can wear in SoT has improved so we wanted to give Lesedi something that felt like it had a little bit of who she is and a little bit of her home.
But there was somebody else who hadn't really been in the game whose evolution was perhaps more important to me.
When we had done the first miniseries, I talked with the crew about the possibility of having a trans character in the books. They were excited, but one thing they really wanted in the comics was to make sure that things that characters did in the book were more or less achievable in the game and, at the time, there was no way in the build to change your character's look or gender once you started.
But now, there is! There is a potion that allows you to change the look of your character including their gender. Rare and co was very supporting of us then following through with an idea we had during the first fun that was now possible. I had originally written the character of Alessia St. Marina as a person who was not comfortable in her own skin and had used costumes and espionage as a way to cope with that. She was especially fond of going undercover pretending to be male.
At the end of the mini-series, Alessia ended up getting together with her partner in crime, but she was never able to come out as trans. But it has been a few years both in our world and in the game one, so allow be to introduce you to Alister St. Marina.
He's a smooth talkin swashbuckler who just happens to be married to one of the most dangerous cutthroat women in the world, whom our crew has to rescue from her most recent scrape.
So, thank you very much to Rare, Titan, and everybody else involved for letting us tell this wonderful story and bring the first canonical trans masc pirate character into the Sea of Thieves.
See you out there, you salty sea dogs!
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today tumblr i come to you with a Post about Peony and Archie, kind of a rarepair because ive pretty much only seen them together in nsfw art
im working on a t4t silly smut fic of them because i havent seen any fanfic of them together at all and im also brainstorming for a story of how they met for the first time set in late 2000s early 2010s, a modern piracy AU involving both of them figuring out identity and life choices and stuff
the ship name i made for them is bunkmateshipping :)
i want both of them next to me immediately i need them on either side of me.
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Happy Blorbo Blursday! Which one of your characters would benefit from modern medication the most? If your characters are modern, what medication would help them that they're not on?
I have one story that isn't modern, so I'll answer that first. Riix could absolutely use a therapist, some hrt and top surgery to become less insufferable.
I guess Beela is technically modern? Like, all the characters come from "now" but it takes place mostly on other worlds of varying technology. In which case I'll say that Beela could definitely use some anti-depressants and anti-anxiety because they are nothing but depression held together by anxiety
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