Thread by @kaijidatingsim, Ok I finally have time and energy so...Let's talk about Lev tlou [...]

Ok I finally have time and energy so...

Let's talk about Lev tlou

To only talk about how his narrative is transphobic is to overlook how it is at heart a white saviour narrative

Lev is a trans guy who has had to run away from his home village because they're deeply religious and want to kill him for being trans. He first meets Abby when she is about to be executed by people from his village, and he and his sister save her, leading to his sister getting

heavily injured. From there Abby and Lev go on a quest to get medicine for Lev's sister, along the way Lev helps Abby to overcome her fear of heights and regain her humanity, and Abby finds out about Lev's gender and plays the good ally about it.

After they get back with the

medicine and Lev's sister is properly healed, Lev runs away back to his village to try to persuade his mother, who is deeply religious and transphobic, to leave with him. Lev's sister and Abby agree that this is suicide and go to the village, killing everyone in their way to get

to where Lev is. When they get there they find out that Lev's mother tried to kill Lev when he returned and Lev was forced to kill her in self defence. As the three of them try to escape they run into Abby's previous comrades, who immediately shoot Lev's sister because she and

Lev come from the group they are at war with. Abby tries to persuade them to stop but they don't care, even tho Lev and his sister are children. Lev's sister heroically shoots Abby's boss, and is shot dozens of times for it while Abby forces Lev to run away with her. They escape

and when Lev tells Abby that it was her people who killed his sister she says that he is her people now, and they spend the rest of the story as a surrogate family searching for safety and hope together.

So there's a lot to talk about here. On the most surface level there's

the fact that Abby is white while Lev, his sister, his mother and the majority of the religious group he is from are east Asian.

Lev's entire family has to be killed in order for Abby and his found family to work. His sister did not have to die, her death comes out of nowhere

and undercuts what you've been doing for half of Abby's plotline, but if Lev had any family left it would undercut his and Abby's last person they have left emo narrative, so this Asian girl has to die so that Abby can replace her as Lev's sister figure.

That's already pretty

awful but it gets worse when you bring what the main conflict of Abby's story is a metaphor for. The creative lead in this game has been quite open about how the Israeli Palestinian conflict was a big inspiration for this game, and once you have that in mind it becomes very

obvious how embedded that metaphor is in this game. The war between Abby's group (the wolves) and Lev's group (the scars) is being fought over land. The scars have a particular location that is of deep spiritual importance to them on the land that is being fought over. The wolves

capture and torture scars for information while the scars make a show of executing them. They are driven by a religion with a strict code, that the wolves see as backwards and deranged.

I am going to be generous and say that it's probably not intended as a one to one metaphor

so we don't have to examine what it means that this game codes the stand in for Palestinians as primitive and cult like.

But it's hard to look at Lev's narrative and not see the parallels to how people treat LGBT Muslims.

Lev is completely rejected by his people and his

family because of his gender, something that is sadly true of a lot of religious LGBT kids. But let's look at how the narrative deals with that conflict.

It is pretty unambiguously framed by the narrative as a terrible suicidal idea when Lev tries to reconcile with his mother

and persuade her to leave with him. In order to survive as a LGBT kid he has to kill his religious mother, narratively intense and tragic, symbolically cutting ties with his heritage and culture.

Meanwhile let's look at what Abby does to save him. She sneaks into land that was

never being fought over, that unambiguously belongs to the scars. She then murders everyone in her way. According to Lev's sister only half of them are trained in combat but the other half will try to kill them anyway. The game frames this as a sign of how deranged and

uncompromising they are, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that this is their home that Abby is breaking into, raiding, looting and killing her way through.

Violence is often framed as bad and morally grey in this game, but this isn't one of these cases. This is Abby's

narrative of regaining her humanity, this is her journey to save Lev, and by extension save her faith in humanity and ability to empathise with those who are meant to be the enemy. This is absolutely framed as a good thing, and as for the scars she kills along the way, well

they're crazy bigots anyway.

The sad truth is a lot of LGBT religious kids have to choose between their family and their identity, their culture and who they are. That is a narrative that I think deserves to be told.

But this is not an own voices narrative, and quite clearly

so because I don't think there's a LGBT religious person on the planet who would advocate for murdering your way through a religious group's homeland to save an LGBT kid.

This attitude does not exist in isolation. Homonationalism is an extremely dangerous tool that is used to

justify violence against Muslim majority countries, as well as other religious groups across countries America and other colonial countries have an interest in going to war in. The violence Abby commits on her quest to save Lev mirrors the violence that is committed in countries

like Palestine in the name of LGBT people within that country, as if they don't also suffer from imperialist violence. Israel has a history of presenting itself as extremely supportive of LGBT people as an excuse to continue committing human rights abuses against the Palestinian

people.

Yes the stand ins for the Israeli government are also portrayed as "just as bad" in the game, yes Lev continues believing in his religion once he leaves his people, but none of that changes that the game presents breaking into land that is not your own and killing

civilians as ok as long as it's to save a LGBT kid.

Lev is charming and likeable, the best voice acted character in the game and extremely easy to root for. He's also a tool of this game's extremely colonial view of violence. I think that needs to be discussed more

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