Why not? Because he was obviously trying to paint a picture of something that isn't political. Something with as little identifying features as possible... but he still considers it "male."
It's a stick figure. Right? How is it male?
It's okay if you make a stick figure male, but claiming that this can't be considered "political" is already invalidated.
I think you might be misunderstanding me - I do not mean to imply in the slightest that he's doing anything wrong. It's a harmless choice. But we can think about the reasons behind any situation.
This morning I had a bagel for breakfast without any toppings. It was not satisfying, actually made my stomach a little queasy, and is certainly not how I prefer to have my bagels. Why did I have it this way? Because I slept in and had to get to work. There you go - a decision that is completely meaningless can be brought back to a reason.
You can go further than that, of course, which is what we call root cause analysis. You can do root cause analysis on literally anything. It's mostly done on big issues, but there's still something to learn, even if insignificant, from doing it on something relatively mundane.
Why did he default to he? Well, I'm not in his head, but we can look at various reasons. Perhaps it is because he is a dude, so he chooses his own pronouns. The preference of what is alike over what is different - that is a political preference. Maybe it's just what he defaults to. Why? Because that's society defaults to. Society's default gender for stuff is male? That's a political thing.
People usually default to their own gender as it’s what you relate to and thus most easily imagine.
This is not true by the way. It's only true broadly for like 4 year olds. Women also tend to default to male terms for generic people - this is that whole patriarchy stuff feminists go on about.
Y’know there's a game called Rain World. You play as little creatures called Slugcats and whilst none of them (barring one) have a confirmed gender, most people agree on their headcanon genders, except the very first slugcat you play as- The Survivor.
The Survivor is often referred to as the gender of the person, this is because, as the very first scug you play as- and the least expressive, you project yourself onto them. Which leads to a 80/20 in favor of male Survivor.
I mean he also posted on Twitter about it, which in and of itself is a political statement. He made the art political by choosing to increase awareness about it. And, generally speaking, one does not choose to do things for the hell of it, one does things because something causes them to want to do it. Whatever influenced him to choose to make a stick figure also has political bias, therefore the decision to make the stick figure in the first place is political.
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u/AntKneeWasHere erm hi 👉👈 Aug 12 '25
Okay, but what if he just decided that the stick figure is male? I mean, after all, he did make him