Authors want to include nonbinary characters, but they don't know how to write them (see what I did there?): Nona The Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

 How many books into a series do you read before you give up on it?  Nona The Ninth is the third book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, and while it was originally supposed to be the final book of a trilogy, Muir did the most predictable thing ever and said, hey, people are reading this, I'm making money, let's keep this thing going!  Gideon The Ninth was a surprise.  One hesitates to call a gothic necromancers-in-space book a "breath of fresh air," but I did not expect to like it.  It had over-the-top buzz, and generally speaking, when something has that much buzz, I lose my hipster card if I don't find a reason to say that I hate it, but damned if that wasn't a fun book.  Muir took every absurd, self-indulgent gothic trope and turned it upside-down by having a POV character named Gideon Nav who was so crass and badass that she undercut everyone's self-seriousness with her two-handed sword, lascivious jokes, or both.  She was great, and she made the book.  Yet, she had to die at the end of the book.  Sort of.  To the degree that anyone dies in a universe of necromancy.  The second book, Harrow The Ninth, focused on Harrowhark Nonagesimus, with the problem being that she was the self-serious gothic trope who needed to be undercut by Gideon in the first book.  Problems ensued, as I wrote in my comments on that book a while back.  The book didn't really pick up until Gideon's return at the end.  And so comes book three, Nona The Ninth.  This book is a mess.  Muir will write more, and this is the point of abandonment.  I will write a very brief explanation, and then write about some of the more interesting messes.

So here's the deal.  In the distant future, humans are off elsewhere, there is a God-Emperor type guy (John Gaius), and below him, a set of uber-powerful fellow necromancers (Lyctors).  Because necromancy, there are underworld shenanigans, and the Emperor needs more Lyctors.  It is hard to become a Lyctor.  The first book covers a group converging on a house to complete a set of challenges to try to become Lyctors.  Each noble house sends a necromancer and cavalier (the necromancer's swordsman).  The Ninth House sends Harrowhark and Gideon as Harrow's cavalier.  Wackiness ensues, Harrow and Ianthe Tridentarius become Lyctors, the end-ish.  Book two is mostly about the Emperor and the Lyctors around him trying to deal with underworld necromantic threats.

Let's talk Nona.  The empire, such as it is, is falling apart.  The events take place on a planet that has broken away from the Houses.  In the first book, Palamedes Sextus (guess which house) died, but because he was smarter than everyone, he found a way to save himself, sort of.  He is sticking around in a weird, necromantic way, sharing a body with his cavalier, Camilla, and together, they are taking care of Nona, which is the memory-wiped body of Harrowhark.  The planet has unspecified political divisions between pseudo-revolutionary cells as they try to round up any necromancers, they're keeping a bunch of House members captive for leverage, and Camilla/Palamedes are trying to figure out how to save the Sixth House, deal with Nona, and get everyone off-world with the aid of Pyrrha, who is the cavalier-half of a dead Lyctor.  Got that?  Yeah, it's an incoherent mess, and all of this leads up to opening up the locked tomb on the Ninth planet, and... basically, the book is a poorly plotted mess.  The political divisions on Antioch are left as a background point that ultimately make no sense, Camilla and Palamedes no longer resemble their presentation in the first book, Nona is a non-character, which makes some sense as she has so few memories as to be a child, but basically, Muir wiped the slate clean without doing enough re-building.  This book did not succeed.  So instead, I'm going to note some things about political pressure on authors, and how that has changed since the publication of Gideon The Ninth.

Gideon was published in 2019, by which point the world of science fiction and fantasy had already demanded that everything be LGBTQ.  When the demand is identity first and quality second, quality can suffer, and it is easy to find examples, but Gideon The Ninth really is fucking awesome.  Muir is a gay woman, writing from her own perspective, and the point of opening doors is so that the world of art, literature, and really, all professions can benefit.  Art especially benefits from different perspectives and experiences.  Gideon is not LGBTQ for the sake of promoting anything, but merely because Muir wrote it.  In contrast, when I wrote something a while back on Charles Stross shifting characters in the Laundry Files series, I noted that he decided to write all-LGBTQ, not because he is gay, but to virtue-signal, and the new direction of the series was insufferable virtue-signaling.  As opposed to Gideon The Ninth, which was awesome.

But things have changed.  As the saying goes, gay is the new straight.  The hip, new thing is nonbinary, and demand for nonbinary characters has outpaced authors' capacity for writing.  I noted this in my comments on John Scalzi's Kaiju Preservation Society, which was ironic since Scalzi probably wrote the all-time best version of a nonbinary character in Lock-In, long before anyone was thinking about it.  The POV character, Chris Shane, never has a gender/sex stated, nor pronouns, and it works because of the technology central to the novel.  Chris also does not act in a particularly masculine nor feminine way.  Chris is an FBI agent, which is stereotypically male, so most readers assume that Chris is a man, but that's your own bias, and most readers mistakenly think that it is stated.  It isn't.  It is very cool, but the thing is that as we enter the last few years, pressure to write nonbinary characters has increased dramatically.  And nobody has come even close to Chris Shane.

Instead, I keep seeing the same problem that Scalzi had in Kaiju Preservation Society.

Dear authors:  If you want to include nonbinary characters, figure out how to write them.  See:  Chris Shane.

Because what authors keep doing, instead, is as follows.  They want the characters to be "fan favorites."  That often means "swaggering badass."  How do you write swaggering badass?  That tends to be with traits that, if you put them on a masculine to feminine spectrum, you'd place the character way over on the masculine side, because you're going for either action hero or the verbal equivalent.  Then, make the character biologically female, and attach they/them pronouns.  Badda-bing-badda-boom, Bob's your binary uncle, there's your nonbinary fan favorite character, voila!  Representation!

Have you written a nonbinary character?  Or realistically, have you written a trans man, as society works now?  The basic challenge of writing the nonbinary character is the challenge of finding a way to write to the middle of the masculine-to-feminine spectrum.  That's not what authors are doing.

So let's get into what Muir did.  First, if you go through the first two books, they were not packed with they/them pronouns.  Why not?  It was not, yet, the thing to do.  It is now, so everyone is a they/them.  There are points at which a character is referenced with a default they/them in defensible ways, such as when covered head-to-toe in armor and gear, with a voice modifier.  Yet, the patterns of deferring to they/them go far beyond that, and don't really make sense.  For no explained reason, New Character A gets they/them pronouns, and New Character B doesn't.  Why?  Never stated, but there are a lot of they/thems.  Why?  It is 2023.  Not in the novel, but in the now.  So, they/them.

But consider two examples.

"Our Lady Of The Passion," AKA, Pash.  As you can no doubt tell, Pash is biologically female.  Members of the various political factions have weird titles like this.  Why?  Why not?  Extremist revolutionary/terrorist cells will do shit.  It was actually pretty amusing.  Anyway, Pash was a character clearly intended as a nonbinary "fan favorite," along the lines described above, yet falling into the same authorial trap into which Scalzi fell in Kaiju Preservation Society with Niamh.  Biological female, over-the-top masculine personality, they/them.  Add to that the obligatory statements of Nona fawning over Pash's ostensible beauty, and badda-bing, Bob's your binary uncle.

When introduced, Pash is in full body armor with a voice modulator, strapped with a full arsenal of weaponry.  Default to they/them, because everyone is a they/them, although given the setup, if you bet on the character being male, you're a fool.  Unmasked, you get a they/them lecture, along with the ghost of John McLane in the background saying, hey, tone it down or you'll go full Andrew Tate.  And that's the problem with Pash.

Then there's the retcon.  Ianthe Tridentarius.  Ianthe comes to us from the first book.  She was the scheming necromancer from the Third House (hey, language!) who managed to become a Lyctor, and upon the revelation that she had been up to some shit, you get a different perspective on her personality.  She goes from kind of the quiet character in the background of book one to a substitute for Gideon in book two.  But anyway, part of becoming a Lyctor is that the necromancer absorbs the energy of the cavalier, or some shit like that.  So, Ianthe basically ate her boy, Babs.

Does that actually make her a nonbinary they/them?  Not according to book two, Harrow The Ninth.  In Harrow, she is Ianthe, a she/her woman.  Yeah, she energy sucked her cavalier, but fuck him, he was an asshole.  Yeah, she is too, but at least she developed a sense of humor in book two.  Whatever.  Regardless, necromantically absorbing her cavalier's aura, or whatever, did not make her a nonbinary they/them.  As of the publication of Harrow The Ninth, in 2020.

But times change.  Very quickly.  You need some nonbinary they/thems now.  Presto, change-o, retcon-o-range-o, Ianthe is now a nonbinary they/them because of having necromantically eaten her cavalier to become a Lyctor.

Retcons don't count, and indeed, reveal that this is about political demands.

And when we consider Ianthe herself (yes, I'm sticking with her book two pronouns), where would we place her on a masculine to feminine personality trait spectrum?  She is perhaps not the absolute girliest girl, but she is clearly on the feminine side.  Having absorbed Babs's energy, she can wield a sword, but so can Gideon, so can Camilla, and others.  She has a kind of toxic femme fatale thing (even if her sister is described as the hot one), and in no way does she read as masculine.  Gideon is far more masculine than Ianthe, but Gideon isn't nonbinary.  She's just kinda butch.  If Muir were restarting the whole thing, might she call a character like that nonbinary?  Maybe, but she didn't have an excuse to retcon Gideon, even if there is a whole thing about Gideon's origin story, and... that's a separate mess.

Regardless, if you go through these characters, and see the presentation of characters given they/them pronouns, they're a mess.  Again, see what I did there?  Between the retcon of Ianthe, the 1000000-to-1 masculine to feminine ratio of Pash, and generally speaking, the incoherent insistence on they/them pronounce without coherent characterizations, we see an authorial challenge.

How do you write a nonbinary character?

This is, actually, a thing that can be done, and has been done.  Chris Shane, of course, but consider all of the characters you have ever read that could easily have been swapped without making a difference.  There's the famous casting of Sigourney Weaver in Alien (her femininity became important in the second movie, but all that mattered in the first movie was her intelligence, her ability to get a grip and act rationally when everyone else lost their shit, and generally speaking, the fact that Sigourney Weaver is awesome), but in novels, there are plenty of characters who can be flipped.  If they can be flipped and you wouldn't notice, that means they were not portrayed as particularly masculine nor feminine.

That means, without trying, authors can write something like nonbinary, if they choose to stick that label on it, with continuing ambiguity and varying definitions of the label.

It is a meditative exercise.  If you understand how mindfulness meditation works, you will understand this.  Relax, and focus on your breathing without actively controlling your breathing.  Allow your breath to continue through autonomic processes while observing it neutrally.  That's actually hard, and it takes practice, because as soon as you start to observe it, you start changing your breathing patterns consciously.

Trying to write a "nonbinary" character is really hard.  The problem is that authors are under so much pressure to do so, and that means they keep failing, in the same ways.  When they aren't thinking about this thing called "nonbinary," they often write characters who are neither particularly masculine nor feminine, and that means they can be swapped without any real change.  Is that functionally nonbinary?  You decide.  See:  Ripley, Ellen.  But as soon as they actively decide to write nonbinary, they make the same mistakes.

The Black Lillies, "Same Mistakes," performed live.  The studio version is on 100 Miles of Wreckage.