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The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a visual novel about being a witch and doing witch politics. Well, it's also about vengeance and sacrifice and a bunch of other stuff, but that's not really the topic today. It's got gorgeous pixel art, really cool gameplay that does not feel tedious despite being a visual novel, and most importantly: incredibly diverse characters. Indeed, almost all the characters are women- which I enjoy a lot! And not just skinny white women either- you've got women of colors, buff women, fat women, a whole bunch of women. It's fairly neat.

Cuz you see, in the worldbuilding of CWS, only women can become witches. This conveyed to the player when an amab character shows up, and is surprised that everyone uses the right pronouns for her even though she doesn't look the part. The protagonist responds that, as I said, only women can be witches. If girlie's a witch, then they must be a woman as well.

Now that's cool worldbuilding and all, love that, love gender inclusivity, this is a game that is both good and diverse and I would love to like it.

Anyways towards the end of the game, characters get chatting, and one of them asks "hey, do you ever wonder why only women and non-binary people can become witches? Why can't men become witches?"

Okay. First of all, the non-binary part is new information to me. When the aforementioned trans woman showed up earlier in the story, no one acted like not being a woman was an option for her. They all jumped to she/her. Kinda odd if a witch can supposedly be anything on the gender spectrum except a man.

Second of all- how does that work, exactly? Non-binary isn't some mystical third gender- it means "anyone whose gender doesn't fall in the established binary." Aka: if you're both a man and a woman, can you become a witch? If you're a demiboy, do you count as "man" or "non-binary"? If you're genderfluid, can you only become a witch on femme days? I checked on the wiki (which is, granted, incomplete, so maybe one of the last four witches prove me wrong idk) but none of the witches we meet are non-binary. There are a couple other characters who are, mind you, but just none of the witches. So it's not like I have any textual exemples to speculate about.

There are a lot of stories along the lines of "what if x gender had special powers" "what if x sex could do xyz" and there's nothing inherently wrong with them, but in real life gender and sex don't actually fit in these little boxes. If you tell me "no man can be a witch" then you're gonna have to tell me what you define as a man. If you tell me "people with xy chromosomes just vanished one say" you're gonna have to aknowledge that some perfectly cis men have XX (or singular X, or XXY) chromosomes. Or well, you can keep all of that as a background thing and never explore it I suppose, I'm a big reader I can make my own answer, but then you really shouldn't bring attention to the outliers in the first place. "Only women can be witches" can be read as the protagonist not necessarily being all that aware of gender issues, or having outdated knowledge, or more generally being a biased narrator. "Only women and non-binary people can be witches" raise a whole lot more questions however.

Anyways. There are a bunch of choices after this dialogue. Those I remember are "maybe it's a biological thing?" which seemed fucking stupid to me since being a woman is not a biological thing (we literally have a trans woman right here?) and "maybe because men already have too many privileges." I picked that one because it seemed the least nonsensical. This is followed by a character (who until now has been defined as "I want equality between all witches and I want witches to stop exploiting normies") respond with "I can't believe men would do this on your planet, we should bring a matriarchy to your world." Because obviously the problem with patriarchy is men and not that putting one group of people in power will always be a bad idea."

It's a very binary way of thinking. And usually I'd respond to that with "well these are characters, they can be biased, we've already established that all these people kinda suck and they're not moral idols." But that's an extremely binary vision of the world that comes right after aknowledging some people don't fit in that binary, which is a concept that is never further explored through the game.

This is, at the most charitable reading, sloppy writing, characters not being coherent with themselves. At the least charitable, this is "I wanted to write about how men suck, but it'd be pretty bad rep for our feminist queer game to not include non-binary people, so here's a throaway line about how they fit in the worldbuilding and no further thought about what that implies."

I am extremely wary of anyone who claims that "men are trash women are inherently more virtuous" because in my experience that's in large part a terf talking point. And I am doubly wary of any sort of "women and non-binary people," because it's very close to "women and femme" which really is just progressive speak for "women and people I consider women."

I want to like this game. I think media in general need more women, having women of diverse body types and skin color fucking owns. I want to like this game because it does have non-witch non-binary characters, and it makes my heart sings to see gender-neutral language in french. But I'm sorry. I can't. I can't because of this line. As a non-binary person, it makes my skin crawl. I can only read it as "non-binary people are basically women-lite," or "we're throwing the word non-binary in here cuz we need to aknowledge all genders but really we all know there are only two big ones."

I don't want to call this game enbyphobic, cuz I'm just one guy and not the council of genderfuckery deciding if objectively a line is bigoted or not. Maybe you're non-binary and read that line and didn't think anything at all. Maybe you read it and felt seen as a femme enby. Hell, maybe the writer is non-binary and felt like they were making a comment on their own perception of gender. Hell, maybe it was a translation issue all along and the english version has a flaming bigender witch I completely missed and a scene I didn't get about the complexity of gender and witchery. I don't fucking know. I don't have the truth in the world. I can only share my own impression. And my impression was that this line felt like it was excluding especially me and people like me.

I can't in good faith recommend this game. But if for some reason you still play it, make your own opinion, as per usual.