Even when I left the company almost 3 years ago, there had been considerations in having Chandra and Nissa break up. But to see it executed as “so Chandra never really liked girls, she liked hunks like Gideon, but Nissa was hot”...

It’s a degree of carelessness and insensitivity around the story, character, and bisexuality that I find stunning. I have fallen out of keeping up w Magic story, but I know it transitioned from in house free short fiction to outsourced novels. But that cannot be an excuse.

Wizards has a responsibility for what stories they tell.

In any line of work, there is often a drop in attention to detail and sometimes quality when moving from internal to outsource. But it’s up to Wizards to set expectations and catch problems.

In this case, it feels like the problem is not JUST the moving of work from internal to external - the work also moved from a diverse team of writers with sensitivity readers to a singular author with uh, obvious blind spots in his storytelling.

It’s enormously disappointing to see the work of my colleagues get invalidated in a careless, throwaway paragraph that was probably just a check box on a “plot points to hit” list for the writer.

To see something like this make it to print feels like whoever is overseeing story now either didn’t do the diligence to shepherd this moment well, or just didn’t care enough to want to craft a good ending to a queer relationship.

Or, maybe on a list of revisions, didn’t think this merited a note. Or the most disappointing possibility - maybe this didn’t register as problematic at all to their sensibility due to their own limited perspectives and experience.

I have too many more feelings and words on this so find me in person if you want the LONG version of this and the backstory of trying to tell the story of Nissa / Chandra. In the meantime, please enjoy this series of gifs.

(Argh)

(End)