Catherine: Psycho // Sexual

Catherine is about how men should focus on self improvement and their own choices and agency, and how being forced into a system of competition where they tear each other down instead of building each other up is an awful nightmare and also kind of women’s fault if you think about it.

The original 2011 game Catherine is about Vincent and his girlfriend Katherine with a K - overbearing dominant, career minded, controlling girlfriend whose hobbies include being mean, being a woman, hating fun, being a mean woman, ringing up Vincent to tell him not to have fun or see his friends, and being a woman who is mean.

Vincent is out drinking one night when he meets Catherine, with a C, a sexy young blonde woman who is instantly interested in him, and Vincent starts cheating on Katherine with Catherine. Each night as Vincent drinks, regrets his whole life, hooks up with Catherine with a C again and generally feels like shit without actually changing in any tangible way or acting differently at all, he is plagued by horrible nightmares in which he climbs a wall of blocks at constant risk of falling to his death. You see, if you fall in the dream and don't wake up before you land, you die in real life.

That's not what happened to this guy though, he just forgot to take a glass of water with him when he went to bed. Kids, when your mum tells you hydration is important, she means it. 

These nightmares, in which the dreamers all see each other as humanoid sheep, plague supposedly unfaithful men, and are killing off more and more men, and more and more men in the waking world start to report having the nightmares - also one woman but we’ll get back to that.

As Vincent continues to ascend the block tower nightmares, he eventually discovers that the man at the bar he and his friends drink at is an immortal demon god called Thomas Mutton, who is giving the deadly nightmares to bad men who need to be weeded out to make sure people keep having reproductive romantic relationships. Fans of the channel may have gained the impression I am a little quick to jump to calling something fascist or “a bit eugenics-y”, but uhhh… Do even need to say it here?

Vincent also discovers that Catherine with a C is a shape-shifting succubus demon seducing all the cursed men who get the nightmares to test their commitment to their partners. I’m not gonna say it’s a foolproof plan. I’m not gonna say it really makes total sense, even. But that’s what she’s there for.

The game has some solid performances, ranging from really fun enjoyable performances. One character is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal, the voice of someone in practically every cartoon you’ve ever seen and also Sasuke from Naruto. In this game he plays a menacing weirdo who lives in a box and asks you questions that never fail to make normal sane people go “What? What the fuck even is that question? What do they think is the moral answer? What?” such as “Does life begin or end with marriage?” and “Are all men stupid?”

If you want Vincent to stay with his girlfriend, Katherine, you need to answer “Not all men…” apparently, by the way.

The majority of the actual game takes place inside the nightmares, where you climb the block towers, answer the false dichotomy questions, and play a final round on each night where you have to escape a boss - a few of the stand-out bosses are: a giant evil angry Katherine, because Vincent hates his girlfriend; a huge ass with a mouth because Vincent does butt stuff with Catherine; an evil baby because Vincent is afraid of being a father; Katherine again but this time in a wedding dress because Vincent hates his girlfriend; the baby again but now it’s a cyborg because they were running out of ideas; and finally Thomas Mutton in a floaty chair with a big gun.

As an aside: The game loudly declares “EDGE” whenever you connect a block by its edge to another block, which, if you’ve ever played even a minute of this game you will know is about half of all the times that you move any blocks in the game.

I’m gonna put my cards on the table really early on here. I think Catherine, intentionally or unintentionally, espouses the ideology of some of the most deeply misogynistic people you can come across in life.

Furthermore, I am absolutely fascinated by revisions and additions made in the remake, Catherine: Full Body. Some of it seems to be addressing criticism that the game had originally to various levels of success and some of it seems to be addressing the original game on its own terms, and I think the way that it does both of those things is very interesting.

So let’s dive in and find out whether this game really has a consistent, intelligible philosophy to it, or if it’s all just edge.

Part 1: Katherine with a K

When the game first came out it was praised for being complex and mature because of its choice based morals system that determines the different endings, but for some reason Shadow the Hedgehog was critically panned. If anything is evidence that critics are out of touch with what really makes a video game good, surely this is it.

Catherine had 8 endings and Catherine: Full Body has 13 fucking endings. I have put in a huge number of hours into this game, and i know it dwarfs the number of hours I’ve put into some good games that I like, and I am really mad about that.

The remake is really an extra level built on top of the base game, almost like DLC, which is handy in conceptualising the difference between them because the original is just the core plot and mechanics, and the remake is mostly the outer veneer. Catherine: Full Body, like an ogre, has layers.

The original game is really all about choosing between Katherine and Catherine, also framed as good versus evil, light versus darkness, order versus chaos.

Neither of them are really full characters, despite being the name on the cover. Katherine with a K spends all her time telling Vincent not to have fun - like all her time. Catherine with a C, as it will turn out, is a demon succubus.

In the best ending for Katherine with a K you win her back after admitting to your infidelity and have a wedding as soon as possible right there in the bar because Vincent is an absolute wasteman. In the best ending for Catherine with a C it turns out Vincent is a clone made from alien DNA. Wait, no… that’s Shadow the Hedgehog again… At least Shadow the Hedgehog respects women.

In the best Catherine with a C ending you go to live with her in hell, but because you proved what a total piece of shit you can be, it turns out Vincent is an excellent demon and absolutely runs the place. He also rubs his relationship with Catherine in her demon dad’s face, with an obvious and weird cuckoldry subtext that I don’t have the 2 hours to spend unpacking today.

So what is Catherine the game trying to say?

Vincent is like Ebeneezer Scrooge. We learn from other people’s mistakes, including fictional people, and in stories where something supernatural teaches someone a lesson, the base assumption is that the character would never or could never change without this paranormal intervention. Scrooge is a greedy old miser. He will never learn. No earthly power could compel him to be nice to people, so he has to be frightened into changing by an unearthly power.

Similarly, Vincent is a character with a character flaw, but his flaw isn’t that he’s a wealth hoarding capitalist. Vincent is a fuckboy. Vincent thinks that women are manipulating and controlling him and that his gf is really mean and he just kind of accepts the idea that she’s out of his league and therefore doesn’t leave this relationship he’s obviously miserable in. Instead, he starts sleeping with another woman.

The revelation that the game is trying to drive at is that men should build each other up instead of tearing each other down. Vincent and the other sheep men have been pushing each other off the blocks to get to the top, but it’s the shared knowledge and advice that helps Vincent get to the end and defeat Thomas Mutton. Ultimately the block wall serves as a time-honoured metaphor for self-improvement. There will always be a mountain, and it will always be a metaphor.

The good endings with Katherine and Catherine are both pretty acceptable to the player, the bar-wedding ending emphasising settling down, finding safety and security in the “normal route”, the demon-dad-cuck ending emphasising personal choice and freedom - breaking away from the herd. 

The “bad” endings where Katherine and Catherine both leave Vincent don’t feel like very real endings. They’re quite rushed and simplistic, and in the remake they don’t have the Ode To Joy credits sequence that shows snapshots of what happens later. The “bad” endings really do feel like endings players will feel disappointed by, probably causing them to start the game over and try harder to get the ending they were aiming for. The game doesn’t seem to endorse one choice or the other, it just wants you to choose something, and in doing that it drives towards a central point about agency.

The game wants the player to either actively embrace the tradlife, or fully reject it. Or does it? Both of the “good” endings actually have Vincent side with the stated goals of the antagonist Thomas Mutton, the literal actual devil who wants to force men into reproductive pairings. So maybe the game is about how reproductive relationships are an evil trap, or maybe it’s about how men should stop being part of the herd and choose their own destiny.

Either way, I think that for that to be the metaphysical scrooge-like change the audience is supposed to learn about through Vincent, the intended audience has to be incels.

What were “incels”? Sources today suggest that they were a group of angry young men, infuriated by the fact that they couldn’t attract the attention of women. As a result, these men formed highly toxic communities rife with misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and racism, that largely focused on these men and boys criticising themselves and each other, and tearing one another apart in attempts to explain why they were so - in the parlance of the time - “unfuckable”.

Of course, as we all remember, when World-President Occasio-Cortez passed the 6th Amendment outlawing being “horny on main” and redefining all sexuality as a form of artistic expression, incels were rendered obsolete.

There is a community online, largely comprised of former incels, who call themselves men going their own way, who unlike their more famous counterparts aren’t constantly obsessed with dating, and aren’t convinced they can never get a date, but just like incels, they do have a deeply held mistrust and even hatred of women, and their world view is really derived from the same place. They think women are trying to trick, manipulate and control men, and the reason these men choose to “go their own way” is because they’re sick of it. They’re conscientious objectors in the incel gender war.

The men going their own way, or MGTOW community is a place for straight men to discuss their life plans that actively resist the normalised plan of getting married and having kids. To that effect these men discuss pickup artistry or wax philosophical about how hiring a prostitute is like having a girlfriend but more honest, and otherwise have a good old time hating women and embracing being alone.

In many ways, the MGTOW is the graduated, enlightened form of the incel, and this game, Catherine, is trying to communicate their philosophy.

Katherine with a K is horribly controlling and mean, and spends pretty much all of her time trying to stop Vincent from having fun with his friends, like some kind of Ferris Bueller villain, but looking at their relationship for ten seconds it’s actually pretty clear that Katherine with a K is an abusive partner. The game’s solution to this, primarily, is that Vincent should be more successful and be grateful for his mean girlfriend.

On the other Catherine, Catherine with a C just showing up in Vincent’s bed every night even though he pleads her not to isn’t an issue of consent, it’s just her being too sexy for him to refuse in the drunken stupor between scenes that we don’t see.

The game comes from a place of such low self esteem that even though it paints Katherine with a K as a horrible abuser and Catherine with a C, frankly, as a rapist, Vincent is the bad guy in this. That’s kind of why it feels like an unreliable narrator story “yeah my girlfriend is horrible she wants to control my whole life and the woman I cheated with is an evil seductress demon. It’s not my fault”. 

It’s not just that the game holds men in low esteem though, it treats male sexuality as inherently predatory and only ever pleasurable for men. That’s why it thinks it’s okay for Katherine with a K to treat him like that, as long as he embraces their life together. That’s why Catherine with a C can’t possibly be ignoring Vincent’s right to consent - because obviously men want sex all the time, and as long as Vincent gets to have his wicked way with these women, he’s getting his end of the bargain. That’s what’s so intensely MGTOW about the whole thing.

Simultaneously, Vincent is the victim and the bad guy, but he isn’t the bad guy in any way that would really prompt men to treat women differently. The game just states that Vincent should embrace and own his behaviour, whether he prefers order or chaos doesn’t matter, it’s all about “being a man” and pursuing his own agency.

This is essentially the authorial intent version of understanding this game. The analysis, like the game itself, has multiple different routes. And how could it not? After all, the game, uh, isn’t exactly subtle about what it’s messages are. In fact there is a whole character dedicated to pausing the game and saying to you, the viewer “hey what’s going on here, weird huh? You having fun? Did you notice how there are themes?”

The game is practically begging for us to give it aggressive readings, simply by how insecure it is that anyone might not understand the authorial intent. The fact that the authors want so badly to tell you what they meant by the game that they’re basically showing their whole entire ass makes you think about who they are, what they think, what their ideology is, and it becomes almost impossible to ignore them when you think about what this game is about.

Frankly: what this game is about and what this game is trying to say are two very distinct things.

Part 2: Catherine with a C

Catherine: Full Body, the game takes great pains to explain to you, is named after the way that wine is rated, which is also using language like a woman's body. The game really dedicates a whole narrated segment to telling you that wine can be light, medium or full bodied, and then to explain that that's like women, and that's why they called the game that. 

Fellas, we've all been there, you're in a bar when you spot a broad, and you brace yourself and deliver your line “hey baby anybody ever tell you got a seriously medium body?”

I want to look at the changes made in Catherine: Full Body, but before we continue I should acknowledge that there’s a translation issue here, both lingual and cultural.

The real question I want to ask with this essay is “Do flirts dream of sheep man?”

It is important to acknowledge that I have a western perspective, from which I am critiquing this Japanese game. There are normalised cultural attitudes towards gender, sexuality and relationships that I am not privy to, since I don’t live in Japan. On the one hand this makes it easier to hold those things to a moral standard because I’m not familiar with them, but on the other hand it does weaken my understanding of the starting point the developers are coming from. If certain tropes and attitudes are totally normal for Japan, then the message that the authors are trying to convey would have an overall different magnitude and meaning, but I can’t know how standard those attitudes are because I live in England and so I have my view shaped by normal attitudes among the english.

Who were “the english”? Though little survives today, modern sources suggest that the English were a nation of people who, with increasing fervor and enthusiasm, voted in politicians who ripped the nation, the public infrastructure, and ultimately the people themselves, to shreds. Twitter posts from the year 2020 suggest that these politicians may have been some sort of either vampires or leopard-people, and while the nature of these politicians is unclear, what remains certain is that they derived sheer, possibly sexual, pleasure from killing the poor.

Probably due to a combination of jankiness in translation and the moral framework the authors are trying to create, the questions they ask you in this are absolutely fucking wild.

As I mentioned before, Catherine Full Body has 13 different endings, with different outcomes for getting together with different characters plus “good” and “bad” variations depending on how accurately you matched your answers to the morals of the characters in question. “Who would be responsible if you cheated?” for example has two possible answers. “It’d be my fault” puts you on the moral, angelic, good path towards staying with Katherine with a K, and “The person I cheated with” puts you on the evil, demonic, amoral path towards being with Catherine with a C.

To be clear, you do not have to do anything in your actual gameplay that engages with the characters to get the ending where Vincent stays with them. Talking to women is not what gets them to marry you. In Catherine, as in real life, only knowing the correct answers to Sasuke’s riddles can win a woman’s heart.

There is also an extra, secret ending for players who complete the side missions, where Trisha, the woman from the framing device around the game reveals she is secretly Ishtar the goddess of fertility - you know Ishtar, she’s the one those madlads in Babylon were so crazy about they built a huge gate almost entirely out of blue - which back in 575 BC was the most expensive thing in the world.

Anyway that’s her, that’s Trisha, and she decides that you - not Vincent but you the player are a worthy partner for her because you’re so dang good and videos game and then she comes to your house to do a big fuck on you. That’s actually in the game. A reward for the player, and the reward is woman implies you get to do a fuck. Cool.

Also she and Astaroth (Sasuke) are the same person apparently. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this information, I’m sure you won’t know to do with it either, but nonetheless, it is now yours.

Returning to Vincent as the author-audience insert, the stepping stone character, it’s probably the way the game constantly treats him as not really responsible for his own garbage actions that makes him so basically detestable. In the loading screen of the game, there to greet you every time you load up Catherine: Full Body, Vincent is tied down and clearly in a state of torment in between the three love interests. Oh no, poor Vincent.

The additions that the developers chose to make to the basic game are so fascinating to me because instead of choosing to address or change any of the glaring, bizarre, intense misogyny, they just wanted to add on more of the same.

There are big opportunities to flesh out the world of the game, like the baby that pursues Vincent in the nightmare screaming “daddy, don’t leave me!” what if that was because Vincent never knew his father? No? No it’s just because he doesn’t want to have a baby. Hm.

They added alternate endings for Katherine and Catherine, and they added a third love interest. In Katherine with a K’s alternate ending, she realises how extremely out of Vincent’s league she is and starts focusing on her own life and career, and with all the free time she has now, she becomes a massive success and has millionaire men throwing themselves at her feet begging for a date. In Catherine with a C’s alternate ending she goes back in time and becomes Vincent’s high school girlfriend.

At first blush it might seem like Katherine with a K’s alternate ending shows some growth. She realised that she’s wasting both her time and Vincent’s, and pursues an option that will really be healthier for both of them, but then as you see that Vincent continues to chase after her and even declares that he’ll “never stop trying to win [her] back!” you realise this ending exists only to punish Vincent for his behaviour.

The main thing it reminds me of is Captain Voyeur.

Captain Voyeur was a short student art film written and directed by John Carpenter when he was still a student at USC (you can see it for free on YouTube). It’s about 8 minutes long. In the film a man working in an office is clearly sexually frustrated. He then goes home and dons a cape, mask, pants and nothing else, and ventures forth into the night as the titular Captain Voyeur. Voyeur first looks in the window of a couple having sex, who seem to be aware he is watching. He moves on. Then he looks in the window of someone who is hanging up sexy lingerie, and is excited before realising the lingerie belongs to a crossdresser. He moves on. He comes to the window of a woman who is undressing, and seems to have found what he is looking for but then she spots him, pulls out a gun and shoots him. 

The overall effect of Catherine in some ways is not unlike Captain Voyeur. The audience gets to engage in all of Vincent’s shittiness in a way that is constantly self-flagellating but is also totally useless. It’s masochistic masturbation. Vincent showing us that men are terrible and the worst doesn’t really address any of the ways that men are terrible, it just allows the player to feel guilty in a useless way for a little while and then move on having learned nothing.

It’s like when you apologise for not doing the washing up sooner and then your partner stops exactly half way through and says you can just do the rest of them later and that’s not what you meant… you just wanted to say sorry and for the dishes to just be done…

Female revenge fantasies written by men are often this way - simply self-hating without any actual prompt for change, in a way that therefore also lets men off the hook for being awful. So when you see this alternate ending, you probably realise that it’s not really there to make Katherine a rounded character with her own agency, it’s there to encourage male self-flagellation. It’s there to beat Vincent down and crush him for being a loser who doesn’t take care of his big strong GF, and that’s basically all Katherine’s character was there for in the first place.

Remember when I said before that Vincent was like Ebeneezer Scrooge?

What really troubles me about Catherine: Full Body is that Catherine supposes that the audience needs the paranormal example of Vincent to learn from, and change, and with nearly a decade’s hindsight and life experience in between, you’d expect the remake to be clearly and consciously different. You’d expect the remake to reflect on the naivety and the rampant sexism of the original and address it, but no - Ebeneezer Scrooge woke up the next day after Christmas and said you know what, I was right before, orphans can eat shit.

And then there’s the third love interest.

Part 3: Rin

When I assert that in Catherine: Full Body I may have found the single video game that hates women the most, you might not quite believe me based on what we’ve discussed so far, but so far we haven’t talked about Rin.

In the original game, the waitress at the bar Vincent drinks at, Erica, admits to also getting the nightmares, which seems pretty strange. Maybe the nightmares don’t only affect men after all?

Toby, the youngest of Vincent’s group of friends has a massive crush on Erica, and makes a big deal out of the fact that he’s a virgin and he really wants to start dating as soon as possible. Later in the game, he goes on a date with Erica and is humiliated when he discovers that she is a trans woman. 

The game is pretty consistently awful about this. In one ending Toby is moaning about wanting to settle down with someone and Erica cheekily pops up to remind him that he’s got her and he explicitly says he wishes he were still a virgin. It’s pretty fucking awful to be honest. Erica isn’t really shown as a person with agency or much of an internal life, and her feelings barely matter to the characters around her.

Also as an aside in the Catherine with a C alt ending with the time travel you see Erica before she transitions, and it turns out her deadname is Eric, because as we all know, trans people always choose their name by taking their deadname and gender flipping it.

During development of the remake last year, after Erin Fitzgerald, the voice of Erica, retweeted a fan who was angry about the transphobia in Catherine, she backpedalled a bit, saying she was just sharing it “for the kind words about Erica”, but at the same time she went on to imply and even say in posts on discord that the English translation of the game had consciously toned down the transphobia of the Japanese release.

Like, this is the toned down version?

Erica and her portrayal is something the game received heavy criticism for in the first place, and even as a baseline, doing nothing to revisit Erica with the remake is pretty awful, but Rin, the third love interest introduced in the remake, is also a trans woman, and to my mind it’s pretty clear that this is an attempt to show some of that growth since making the original.

Rin has amnesia, and doesn’t remember who she is, and Vincent wants to protect and defend her, which is an okay...ish start but both Vincent and the repeated framing of the game treat her like a child. There’s a really unsettling sexualisation/infantilization crossover with the framing here, and with really no more interaction than Vincent kind of just being around and creepily staring at her, Rin falls madly in love with him.

You may have already guessed, but to get the “Rin Ending” you don’t need to talk to her or treat her well, you just have to answer Sasuke’s riddles.

There’s an assumption there, that trans women should be grateful for anyone at all wanting to date them. The focus is always on Vincent, on Toby, on how the men feel about this, on whether it makes them gay, never on how Rin feels about dating notorious trashy fuckboy Vincent. The game is very sure that Vincent getting together with Rin makes him gay, but also doesn’t want to come out and say that explicitly, at least in the English release. It will refer to Rin as she/her up until the reveal, after which she’s they/them and “not exactly a woman” or even “a guy”.

The game uses a version of the “trap” narrative that perpetuates this idea that trans women want to trick men into being gay, the narrative that they explicitly go with the most pernicious version of for Erica. For Rin they attempt to soften the trope by making her a born-sexy-yesterday wide-eyed childish innocent - she’s not tricking Vincent, he’s just attracted to her. 

Even the answers to unlock the “Rin ending” don’t work the same way as everything else. For Catherine and Katherine you pilot Vincent’s morality towards a vague destination. For Rin you need to answer exactly correct on all of the questions, and then pick the right dialogue options in a cutscene in Vincent’s imagination, and the questions are like “would you be okay with any secret your partner might have?” The game is checking, and double-checking and triple-checking that you’re sure you want this ending, because otherwise it might be tricking you into doing a gay.

Something particularly insidious is that this game positions itself as young people - hip young people who hang out a bar - it positions itself as somewhat progressive. It isn’t when I were’t lad we couldn’t afford any of these fancy genders you have nowadays it’s trying to be yah bro I don’t care whatever you are like all lives matter to me like uh you could be a man a woman whatever like an alien who cares right? No, I’m not gay, NO. but it’s like whatever, right?

Because of this, the game displays an odd mix of trying to be understanding, demonstrating what real-world transphobia can look like, and just inserting its own horrific and flimsily lampshaded bigotry in there itself.

When Vincent explains that he reacted badly to the revelation to his friends, they pretty universally call him a total asshole. When Vincent nears the end of the Rin storyline, in a dream sequence that usually contains Katherine and Catherine trying to kill each other Vincent instead walks in on Catherine having brutally slaughtered Rin with a kitchen knife, before Catherine refers to her as “that thing”. When Vincent admits to being in love with Rin, Jonny instantly punches him right in the face. When Vincent sees Rin naked he asks “Rin… are you a guy?” and she says “yes that’s right.”

The way that the game talks about gender, it seemed to me quite like it was translated from an original text that didn’t have the language to clearly discuss trans people, or gender in general in much depth.

One thing I looked at to investigate this further was the documentary Shinjuku Boys, about several trans-mascs living in Tokyo. The main takeaways being that trans people are the same everywhere, and there are trans people in Japan socially and medically transitioning, and that in Japan they may, or may not have the language to communicate about trans people in the same way. 

They referred to the guys in the documentary with a slang word which is also used to describe butch lesbians, and although one of them referred to his girlfriend - a trans woman - as a “man”, she described herself as a “man who likes men” and him as a “woman who likes women”, which is kind of peculiar, since they’re together. The implication would be that they view gender and sexuality as inherently linked, however, they constantly switch back and forth with how they use pronouns and terms like man and woman depending on context and what they’re trying to explain, and they were talking about gender to cis interviewers who were then reporting back to the cis public at large, and along the way there was a translation from Japanese to English, probably done by a cis person. Not to mention the documentary was made 20 years ago. 

All in all, all that can really be concluded is that most cis people view gender and sexuality as inherently linked, and that aligns with the fact that Rin was written by a cishet man whose understanding of the whole topic seems extremely lacking, and that the game awkwardly crams in a scene where the two trans women discuss the topical issue of same-sex marriage as if it’s linked to their gender.

The art book that comes with the special Catherine: Full Body “launch edition” talks about Rin at some length but pointedly avoids using any pronouns for her, like it would have been a spoiler.

The game spends really a lot of time on the question of whether Rin is a man, a woman, or something else, in between, but all of that was actually irrelevant, because she…

Well.

In Rin’s “good ending”, her brother - a huge android angel arrives to confront Vincent, revealing that Rin, too, is an angel and she was sent to protect the men from the nightmares. Vincent and Rin, wishing to be together, tell her brother about their budding affection and he is furious. 

Vincent defeats a final block tower level to prove his worthiness, and Rin’s brother explodes from sheer fury, revealing his true form underneath the robotics.

And then, at 3AM, live on twitch, my brain broke.

https://clips.twitch.tv/ScrumptiousCarelessCakeRuleFive

Rin’s brother was a mech suit, piloted by dozens of tiny pink aliens, which the game suggests is also Rin’s real form, although Vincent, having accepted he is in love with a trans woman, says that he doesn’t care. If she’s “secretly a guy” she might as well be “secretly a minions”.

I hope I don’t even need to explain how much this bullshit misses the mark. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out that what trans women want is for you to accept that they are women, not to accept how weird they are.

Rin might be non-binary, even, she might not be a woman. But they wrote her in to address the heat they got from their treatment of Erica, and so what they’re trying to do is answer the question “is a trans woman a woman?” Yes, she is. A trans woman is not a man. And she’s definitely not a minions.