Ashe Thurman
Bio
Writer. Voice actor. Game Developer. Non-binary goblin.
Check out my other work on pixelsandpins.com
Stories (5)
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In Which the Mother of a Queer Person Continues to Fail at Irony
My mom’s homophobic, even if she doesn’t realize it. But not…like…a Homophobe, you know what I mean? She’s a “love the sinner, hate the sin” homophobe. A “marriage is between man and a woman, but if they want a civil union, that’s okay” homophobe. A “I use my one lesbian friend as a rhetorical shield for my weird takes on queerness” homophobe. Someone who I genuinely don’t think harbors active malice toward the LGBTQIA+ community, but genuinely struggles, intellectually, with how gay people fit into the “order” of her universe. And while this obviously isn’t good, it’s at least fixable long term. There’s a chance for some reprogramming. Of the various, increasingly cumbersome conversations we rehash regarding progressive issues, there’s one that we always drift back to. I call it the “I liked it until it was gay, but I won’t admit it” conversation.
By Ashe Thurman4 years ago in Pride
I Get to Be in Anime Sometimes
Be me, circa early 2000’s. Young teenager, staying up late on a school night, keeping my television as low as possible so my mom doesn’t come in and yell at me to go to sleep. We’re through all the preliminary adult animated cartoons that I saw on Fox, like, a year ago at that point. And then it’s time. The introductory bars of “Ready, Steady, Go” or “I Am” or “Tank” or “Dream Island Obsessional Park” or the opening of whatever show or season was first in the lineup at the moment. Anime. This weird, Japan-based form of animation that, for a long time, I could not get some people I knew to understand past Pokemon or Speed Racer.
By Ashe Thurman4 years ago in Geeks
One of the Best Romances Ever Written is From an Action RPG
Because of my job and the genre of game I write in, I consume an absolute unnecessary amount of romance. Sometimes willingly, sometimes as an adjunct to a larger story. And I often find that the placement of the romance in the latter condition creates a genuinely more effective emotional investment than one in which the romance is the central theme. Oh, Ashe, so you’ve got something poignant and insightful to say about the human condition and how the footprint of an inter-social narrative conveys the ways in which we, as people, desire to connect and experience the world?
By Ashe Thurman5 years ago in Gamers
My Gender is Crab
On Twitter and in casual conversation I have described my gender as the following: crab-person, one of the creatures from “Behemoth’s World” by 70’s sci-fi painter Richard Clifton-Day, a bird demon with a funny hat, the Pokemon Gengar, and “a lady, I guess, but…you know…not on purpose.” The non-binary experience is, by its nature, weird as hell in the context of a system that, at its best, describes itself as a spectrum between set points, and, at its worst, demands you fall into a discreet category of only two options. Are you neither? Are you both? Are you sat somewhere squat in the middle? And the answer is just sort of…yes? My relationship with my own non-binaryness is informed by a patchwork of neurodivergences. At its core, though, it stems from a pervasive intellectual disconnect from existence as a human as we, collectively, understand it. Sci-fi and fantasy is both an instigating factor, and, as a writer, an exploration of that thought process.
By Ashe Thurman5 years ago in Pride
