#(spoiler: I don't really subscribe to Alastor's smile being stitched on)

[prince-liest]

R.e. Lady's first. Alastor going all in on female gender expectations gives different implications to the "smile is a tool" thing, doesn't it.

Doesn't it!!!! >:)))))

I didn't actually write a moment where I went into it in the fic itself, but I was 100% pondering at one point the, like, connotations of telling women to smile compared to men. There's a little bit of it in the pilot episode when Alastor tells Vaggie to smile, and you can kind of tell (or at least I interpret it as such) that he's just being a bit of an old-timey demonically-creepy jackass, but she takes it as the kind of skeevy "Smile, sweetheart!" that women get from men all the time.

And the thing is, I think that a fem!Alastor would just fully internalize it just like that. It would be a showman's smile for her as well, but it would also feel like something that is expected of her as a woman, which makes it interesting to me because I think Alastor's smile in canon is fully a self-protective choice to mask his own feelings and prop up his persona, and it takes on a totally different tone when it's something born not just of Alastor's own emotional neuroses but also societal expectation.

Anyway, I just think that consigning herself to female gender expectations would fuck Alastor up extra in some fun ways (and conversely also free her in some others, such as emotional expressiveness).