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In fact, what is your policy on female candidates? Having already established that the only female Mudokons are the queens, wouldn't it be a tad awkward? (I understand Abe and pals are genderless but they have always had male voices).
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It's a problem that came to our attention some time ago; we want all fans to have a stab at it if they have the voice and the equipment, but we don't have any female characters.
Worker-class Mudokons are biologically (as well as behaviourally) asexual. It makes perfect sense to me that they would each sit somewhere on a male-to-female gender gradient, but all hovering around androgyny or gender-neutrality. So you'd have female-expressing Workers, maybe they have slightly different facial structure, maybe they feel comfortable in a tube top, maybe they tie things into their ponytail. Some way to make them read as female without them being male+boobs+eyelashes. Why would they even have breasts, biologically?
In a factory setting, especially a slaughterhouse, the male end of that spectrum would be prefered. Sensitivity and compassion are no good when you're killing animals on an industrial scale, and useless slaves are gotten rid of, usually while they're very young. This is why Sam sewed sensitive baby Abe's lips together, to stop him crying and upsetting the livestock. But all the same, "female Mudokons" (but still asexual workers) would be there.
They would be different and picked on. They would be torn between how the world (their world, restricted to the factory of course) wants them to be or how they are perceived, and how they actually feel and identify. They would be treated as a sub-class for no decent reason beyond the Mudokons who conform to what society expects wanting to stay in that position of power. Because power structure is all Mudokons know.
And then when Mudokons are freed and they start exploring their identity, both as a race and as individuals, they can really start going a whole bunch of different ways. And we don't have to worry about making sure the designs look silly and feminine, because now there
are feminine Muds, and things in between. We see them rebuilding a rich, diverse society that stops caring about the societal rubbish they were brought up on. It makes their discovering nature and themselves all the more visually and emotionally apparent.
So I spoke to Lorne about that, and he was very open about the idea. Together we thought this would actually be quite revealing about the way the industrial races treat the natives, ignoring their identity, destroying their traditions and turning them against each other. Subtextually it drew from the struggle of people facing oppression in an unwelcoming society. It would also let us stop having to exclude about half the fans and voice artists that might want to get involved.
But the condition was always going to be "if we have time", and creating variations of characters was something that had to be dialed back for time. We wanted Mudokons working in the barrel storage and packaging to be wearing overalls, and those working in slaughter and processing to have aprons. I think there's a few different designs for Natives, but variations as a whole got dialed back and "female" Mudokons along with it.
But, y'know, if you're happy to voice a character that presents as male and everyone will refer to with male pronouns, that's fantastic. It will help allude to this kind of identity variation. And if you're not happy, then I'm really sorry and understand where you're coming from. I hope we can be better accommodating to people in the future.
On a side note, I recorded a whole bunch of lines today. It was fun!
Do you want to be in New 'n' Tasty?
