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buzzfella · 2 days ago

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Genuine question where does all the transfem etho truthers come from. I don’t have a problem with it but im curious what sparked it or what evidence there is.

its been around for a good long while in more furtrade oriented circles, ill break it down to the best of my ability but be sure to check the rbs incase someone adds something i missed. this is in no way comprehensive or academic i just have a lot to say.

the basics of etho transfem truthing principal goes as follows,

etho is very much prone to rejecting her own sense of self, defining herself through various relationships ( "im just etho/a good son" clip ) and generally seems unwilling to even truly recognize herself as a man

etho shows a propensity towards women, not sexually or even romantically but in a social sense shes very fawning and desiring of their attention, protection, and validation with very little explanation of why. this relationship is notable in the transfem argument because he shows romatic tension that unlike with others, seems to be more interested in seeing herself through a feminine lens in their eyes.

etho has a very complex relationship with masculinity, frequently interpreting things as somehow about gender in a way that no longer fits popular perception but seems to have stuck with her- frequently re-enforcing herself as a male, and seeming socially offput from being perceived with feminine context despite in many ways yearning for it. in team names, she will tend to throw in some sort of masculine expression (cabincore being "burly brutes", tuff guys, boat boys, ect) and regularly refuses to engage in more vulnerable or feminine things

other people seem to subconsciously refer to etho in a feminine way (bdubs "its like when you joke about hating your wife" uses she/her pronouns for etho when refering to her as his hypothetical wife)

etho has a general autistic demeanor about women, while this could easily be explained by just having autism i personally see it as her way of socially submitting to other women, she doesnt see herself as a woman but rather as a failed man, she gives up more facts about herself when gem is around, actively degrades herself in front of cleo ect

ethos weird fascination with dogs is another topic related to the above point, etho seems (in old stories like the flu shot story) to hold the belief that being punished and degraded is the only way to become her best self and please the people around her. her sense of self is very very flimsy because she refuses to observe her own body or personality for too long (again, refer to the skizz clip of how long it took her to come up with anything- ending in her saying she is helpful)

SEE BELOW CLIPS FOR EVIDENCE AND DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS.

ETHO'S FEMININITY BASED MASOCHISM

("like youre disciplining me")

(Etho instinctually placing gem as her enemy despite no expressed desire from gem)

("It's because you're scary cleo.")

("Cause gingers are spicy.")

("etho's never been spiteful with me, even though i deserve it.")

ETHO DOG MOMENTS(??????)

(bdubs calling etho his wife)

(this is so embarrassing i hesitated putting it in)

("Etho follow, come on!")

("Scott can you take your man, take him home!")

(Etho following when being called for after being called a dog all episode)

("Like a lost puppy without an owner")

("I'm a good boy.")

("You've sat down like a dog wanting a treat!")

("hes a cool puppy and doesnt afraid of anything.")

("[hits etho to lizzie] Go say hi to lizzie!" "Hi lizzie!")

ETHO BEING REFERED TO AS FEMALE

("I want to see mom and dad play."/ "I'll be mom.")

("thats me on the inside, but on the outside its just this.")

(impulse offhandedly refering to him as a gemgirl despite the term being gemboy but man this entire clip is something)

("I'm a mama now!")

("im not pregnant you cannot prove anything" ????????????????)

ETHO'S ODD RELATIONSHIP WITH PERFORMANCE

(Etho taking it as her responsibility to protect other people)

(defensively, "I am a tuff guy!")

(etho "I'm so humble!"/ selfdepricating by calling herself egotistical compilation)

(more etho "humble" esk moments)

(being heroic is automatically associated with obtaining a woman)

("you throw like a girl.")

(ethos awareness of his audience and actuvely prioritizing them above his win)

("I'm not like, the glue or anything!" unable to recognize himself as anything important to the team)

ETHO BEING TREATED ODDLY (mostly by women)

(cleo calling etho adorable)

(bdubs, theres no better word for it, catcalling/flirting with him for a whole episode which etho totally ignores)

(antagonizing cleo to get her to be upset with him and failing)

(being treated kindly by gem and becoming embarrassed and therefore silent because of the attention)

(Bdubs defending him and then calling etho "Easy-E" and sexy. etho refusing to aknolege it.)

MISC (mostly etho having autism)

("i think we gotta call cleo.")

("Its just the happiest most talkative hes ever been, and its adorable!")

("Theres a 'women-b-shopping' joke somewhere in there but im not gonna make it.")

("its a compliment! What?!")

("I wish i could sleep longer in the day, I wish people were nicer to me, i wish-")

(this clip has a too much to quote)

("not female thats not my reaction" why even mention it??)

("To be fair, etho doesnt generally say hes an adult.")

("thats the nicest thing youve ever said to me!")

FOR ANOTHER POST ABOUT ETHO'S AUTISM, SEE HERE

FOR ANOTHER POST ABOUT ETHO'S DOG LIKE HABITS, SEE HERE

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buzzfella · 2 days ago

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..."Other Thoughts about how scott calls himself a girl when he's mean" oh :0??

YEP okay I wondered if someone would ask about that. there are two sides to this and one is a lot more fun and interesting so I’ll talk about that one first. we’re doing a jenny nicholson list for most of this. the tl;dr is that scott calls himself a girl when he wants to be mean because it gives him a permission structure to be a bitch without it being directly tied to his ‘I’m LITERALLY nice’ persona.

some relevant information:

there’s an inherent weirdness to gender in minecraft that requires you to engage with the idea of gender as somewhat customisable, as is the case for most video games: it’s nonbinary by default. mobs are hermaphroditic unless they’re specifically customised to be otherwise, and you’ll often see people referring to two mobs as both boys or both girls but then breeding them. new mexico whiptail lizards got nothing on minecraft cows. occasionally someone will give a specific mob a specific gender (e.g. tilly the dog was always a girl), but often it changes (e.g. judge judy the frog was referred to with various pronouns at various times. genderfluid icon)

there are two basic ‘bodies’ in minecraft: steve and alex. both are genderless, but people tend to think of them as gendered anyway. scott uses the steve model; in contrast, lizzie uses the alex model. this means less about a character’s individual gender presentation and more about their physical appearance imo.

obviously a lot of this is bleed from the real scott’s actual life (he likes the film mean girls so he talks about it sometimes, which means he compares himself to a mean girl; he also often compares himself to other fictional characters from media properties he likes, such as katniss from the hunger games¹ or the disney princess merida²). I don’t think, when he compares himself to elsa (in esmp1) or elphaba (in xlife), that this actually means anything substantial about his actual perception of gender; I think it’s because he’s a relatively stereotypical gay man in his thirties who likes normal pop culture things like disney and musical theatre. he also likes taylor swift. it’s fine.

the nature of legs in minecraft means that skirts are automatically kinda split into trousers unless you have a specific mod that extends the skirt into the surrounding hitbox (there was a mod for this on xlife, for instance, and various people went around wearing cute little miniskirts. including joel³). relatedly, armour is often referred to as ‘clothes,’ and chainmail armour is sometimes referred to as ‘lingerie’ (a comparison scott himself has made). most life series players, with the exception of lizzie, don’t wear skirts. scott has worn skirts and dresses before, but not in the life series.

all of that is background noise to the main point, which is twofold: 1) scott’s perception of gender really only gets explicitly mentioned when he’s talking about being a girl, and 2) he basically only talks about being a girl when he’s talking about being mean.

part of this (a large part of it, actually) is because the ‘girl’ association is primarily from mean girls, so scott comparing himself to regina george (the archetypical mean girl) creates a permission structure to behave like regina george instead of behaving like his ‘normal’ self. when I was talking to kel about this, she brought up a really good point: scott’s need to control how people see him—and specifically to ensure that they see him as Nice and Good—means that he has to invent almost an alternate persona when he wants to be mean on purpose (and keep it in his video, that is; often he’ll say and do extremely mean things without providing any excuse, but most of those can only be seen from someone else’s perspective because he typically edits his worst moments out of his pov). extradiegetically I think the fact that scott settled on ‘mean girl’ instead of, like, ‘rude asshole’ or ‘countess boochie flagrante’ or whatever is just because he likes the mean girls aesthetic, but in-universe it’s because the only time gender gets mentioned is as a performance, and scott is invested in the idea of his meanness being performative instead of innate.

even sexuality is not spared from this discussion. scott has referred to himself as gay (less commonly the specific wording of a ‘gay man’ lol) various times in a life series context, although he also uses the same language for the most part to refer to past teammates. he called both jimmy (who was his husband) and pearl (who is a woman) his ‘exes,’ for instance. more pertinent perhaps is the context for when he first called pearl his ex: in double life, when he said ‘this [i.e., pearl’s supposed clinginess] is why I’m gay,’ drawing a connection between messiness/drama and Being A Girl. he’s gay because he doesn’t want to deal with Girl Drama. (honey I have seen what drama exists in gay spaces. I have experienced it.) this was a really funny and extremely stupid thing for scott to say, but it’s also revealing! the association between That kind of behaviour (meanness, drama, pettiness, etc.) and femininity (aka Being A Girl) is the crux of the matter here. drama is for the girls, so scott is a girl when he wants to engage with drama. it’s quite simple really.

—

some further notes:

scott actually exhibits a lot of stereotypically ‘masculine’ traits (as loath as I am to use this phrasing because I think it’s stupid lmao). his whole competitive thing with joel, for one, has an undercurrent of feminine-coding the loser in the typical schoolyard ‘fight-like-a-girl’ taunting (‘why’d your voice go high, joel!’). this has been a thing between them for a long while.

anyway go read katabasis if you haven’t already. there’s some gender in there, probably

being gay means that there aren’t automatically heteronormative gender roles in a relationship, but scott still kinda invents them anyway, and he always frames himself as ‘the man’—often in a tongue-in-cheek way (shoutout to that time in xlife when he told jimmy to ‘sit and look pretty’ while scott went and did all the hard work! something wrong with this guy I think)—even when his partners are also men.⁴ really what this means is that scott frames himself as the competent one.

anyway, all of this is to say that minecraft characters are inherently a form of drag or panto or performance, in the same way that inventing a character to roleplay is always performative; even if your character is the same gender as you (inasmuch as gender exists within the context of minecraft, which—again—it doesn’t really), you’re still performing. some people dress hyperfeminine (lizzie), some people dress hypermasculine (scar): both are performative displays of their respective ‘actual’ genders. scott has always cultivated a vaguely androgynous look even if it doesn’t match what he looks like outside of the game; scott’s not a blue-haired (currently! he has had blue hair before) twink in reality, but that’s how he views his character, so that perception affects how he and others alike see him. of course you have blue hair and problems.

—

the less fun aspect of this (where you kinda have to get a bit rpf-y with it by dint of the subject matter):

look, the thing is, as much as I do genuinely appreciate a lot of things about the real scott, he is also a man. and especially a particular type of gay man, the type to view women as kind of a separate species. (this is by no means exclusive to gay men—god knows straight men have not exactly treated women as human, historically speaking!—but the way that this certain flavour of gay man tends to view women is as some mythical superpowerful girlboss yass queen slay weaponised femininity whatever.) to be explicitly clear, I am not accusing scott of being misogynistic or anything; honestly I consider it more of a green flag than anything else if a guy has a lot of friends who are women, and I’ve fucked I mean known gay men who don’t, so... having female friends is preferable to the alternative. all I will say with any definitive opinion here is that I hate that stupid fucking ‘mommy? sorry’ joke and I hate how women are treated like aliens instead of people just because you don’t want to fuck them.

it’s important to note, imo, that scott isn’t the only one to do this. in double life jimmy compared scott and cleo to a duo of gossiping girlfriends shittalking their respective boyfriends (soulmates), for instance.⁵ there’s that whole thing where ren keeps assigning the ‘wife’ label to various men (but never to their face). martyn was the one to bring up the ‘mean gills’ name as a play on mean girls, and martyn has his own Thing with gender going on (why did he say jimmy was wearing ‘guyliner’ in the year 2025 for fuck’s sake) that I am woefully unqualified to address.⁶ bdubs has called people ‘pansies’ as recently as past life, which is arguably worse than anything scott has said. even relatively progressive gaming spaces are not free of this kind of casual misogyny! none of these specific examples is particularly bad on its own; it’s all part of a broader culture. nobody is immune to it.

—

¹scott’s whole Thing with the hunger games is a topic for a different time. he also really likes the idea of the eating berries trick, and has been referencing it for over a decade now, including most recently in past life.

²notable here as well is that scott usually makes these comparisons in a complimentary was: ‘I’m better than katniss with a bow’; ‘I’m basically merida’ (when he’s successfull at shooting people lol). this ties back to the idea of viewing women as automatically girlbosses.

³I am woefully underqualified to talk about joel and gender, but let me just say that there is certainly Something going on there.

⁴if I were being mean I would say something here about how real scott was very pointed about explaining that’s definitely a top and a dom top no less, but I’m literally nice. so I won’t.

⁵again: put a pin in the jimmy gender thing that I would have to talk about in a separate post, because it gets a lot less catty and a lot more miserable.

⁶I’m actually the world’s only cishet smajor fan (JOKE. JOKE. JOKE). nah it’s just because I don’t watch martyn enough to have good examples for this; I can read judith butler but I won’t make a twitch account for love or money, y’know? well actually it depends on how much money.

#i love love LOVE this oh my god #yes #i dont have cogent additions to add. just. yes. that. all that.

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