#I don’t have to prove my transness to her but this feels so bad

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

dont want to talk to my mom about this but I think I have toooo ://

[chris-prank]

Do you have any fun facts or ideas about your little guys (gender neutrally) that you haven't shared/ properly shared yet?

I’m glad I can share some LOREEEE 😆

･*:.｡..｡.:*･*:.｡..｡.:*･

Martin

🪓 I don’t know if it was clear from my drawings in part 1, but Martin is in fact trans! I didn’t mention it explicitly because I didn't find a way to write it in organically. In future works his transness will be mentioned and have more of an importance, but don’t worry guys he won’t be defined by it only!

🪓 When the apocalypse started, he stayed by his mothers side to protect and care for her, just like she did to him when he was small. He really loved his mother dearly. One of his earrings is actually from her!

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

Atlas

💿 Currently in his timeline, Atlas is the most advanced android on earth and not only because of the coding Hydrotech gave him. When he was saved by the reader, his program changed, making him more independent and capable of human feelings

💿 There’s a childproof setting on Atlas, meaning that his private parts can be retracted inside of him. In his main story, it is still active, since the reader didn’t canonically do anything with him yet so they don’t know about it.

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

Esteban

📈 He has ✨ daddy issues ✨, but more seriously he really has a bad relationship with him. When Esteban was younger he wanted to prove to his father his worth, but in adulthood he realized that he would never be proud of his accomplishments. There’s still a part of him that yearns for it, but he doesn’t expect it anymore.

📈 I hinted at it in my previous posts, but Esteban really enjoys cooking and he is skilled at it too! He especially loves to be able to make food for his partner! To him, the effort that goes into a meal is the best way to show the extent of his feelings!

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

Dr. Seraph

🧪 He turned to a life of crime because people in the scientific world didn’t believe that his ideas were possible, so he couldn’t explore his whole potential. Fatalité was the one to approach him and to offer him a job in exchange for limitless funding.

🧪 Vincent even used to have a small crush on Fatalité, since he was the first to believe in him. But soon it died down because of the verbal and physical abuse.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[vinyl-bf]

My cousin is apperantly a cishet transmed. I usually have a zero tolerance policy for truscum, but i love her a whole lot and she means so much to me. I feel sick and need help-🧺

I'm sorry, love. I'm pretty sure my entire family is transphobic and so if I ever began teaching them about transness, non-dysphoric transness would be one of the first things I'd mention. If she's up for being educated, there are many sources out there disprove her stances.

It's okay to still love and care for a person with flaws. Literally everyone has flaws so don't feel bad for still loving her.

My suggestion is to ask her if she'd be willing to see some sources that prove you're stance. And if she reads through them and remains prideful, then I'm not sure what then.

[jude-harley]

How come you don't understand satire? When Redkatherine drew her OC as a witch boiling trans ppl, her spellbook was a biology textbook. Grow up. You want to be a victim so bad.

actually, i do understand satire. the thing about satire is that, for it to work, you have to be punching upwards, i.e., making fun of someone who is better off than you, not worse off than you, and because she didn’t specify that the people in the pot were trans women, who she views as the patriarchy, you can’t argue that she was punching upwards.

secondly, for satire to work, it was to clearly be satire. in the post about the witch boiling people alive, it’s really not clear that it’s satire. no part of it indicates to me that it’s satire. it’s just her boiling trans people alive using a biology textbook. and one of the hands isn’t even wearing a real flag, so it’s kind of sad that redkatherinee couldn’t even be bothered to look up “gender flag” and just slapped some colors on and called it a day. 

which leads me nicely into my third point: it’s not satire, it’s hyperbole of her viewpoints. satire is meant to be ironic; it’s an exaggeration of someone ELSE’S viewpoints to point out the flaws in them. a fantastic example of satire is the work “a modest proposal,” in which johnathan swift satirically suggests that the irish could solve all their problems if they just ate their own babies. after all, the english thought that the irish needed a can-do spirit and to stop having so many damn babies! swift thought this was stupid, and did not agree with the english, so he made a work in which he took their beliefs and stretched them to the logical extreme to mock how heartless and cruel the english were to the poor irishmen. 

so, lets look at the picture in question.

 if a trans person were to make that same exact picture, but instead caption it, “this is how terfs think of themselves lol,” THAT would be satire. not very good satire, but it would be satire. if redkatherineee were to make an image of, i dunno, trans people handcuffing lesbians to trans women so they’d have sex, that would be satire. again, poor satire, but satire nonetheless, and you would be able to say that it’s satire. 

for example, i’m hoping to god this was meant to be saitre:

http://redkatherinee.tumblr.com/post/168147248964/thank-you-pronounrespecter-3

because it does technically meet the qualifications of satire! redkatherinee believes she’s punching up, and, to her credit, she makes the trans woman white and the woman who i’m guessing is supposed to be the cis lesbian black, giving at least a granule of substance to the notion of the trans woman being the oppressor. she’s also exaggerating the opponent’s points instead of her own, which is what you’re supposed to do in satire. but this one still falls into the trap i mentioned before: it’s not clear whether or not it’s satire. hell, i’m still not entirely sure if it’s meant to be satire or not.

what redkatherinee made with the post you mentioned was not satire. it’s not punching up, it’s not clear that it’s meant to be satire, and it’s exaggerating her own points instead of the points of her opponents. i’m aware that it’s meant to be a joke about how trans rights activists think TERFs are evil witches who want to boil trans people alive, but if you are a terf, making a post where you depict a terf boiling trans people alive is not even REMOTELY close to satire. even if you didn’t mean it, you’re just further proving the point of your opponents! 

finally, i want to discuss another one of redkatherinee’s “satire��� pieces, which, in my eyes, solidifies her art as morally repugnant.

this post. 

http://redkatherinee.tumblr.com/post/165547471624/my-new-character-mary-radfem-police-is-always

god, so many things are wrong with this. 

i’ll start simple. again, she’s not punching up. the way she’s framed this, the trans woman isn’t the person in power, it’s the radfem police officer. she’s in a position of authority not only as a police officer, but in the way the art itself is framed. 

again, it’s not fucking clear that it’s satire! i’m not even sure WHAT she’s supposed to be satirizing. i’ll get into more detail about this later, but for now, let’s move on. 

just like with the witch post, redkatherinee isn’t exaggerating things she disagrees with (i think. again, getting into that later.) she appears to be exaggerating her own points in an attempt to pull off the whole “lol this is what the gendershits think we want!!!” thing i talked about earlier, which will always be unsuccessful, but is downright disasterous when you don’t even make it clear that it’s supposed to be satire.

onto the biggest issue with this. god, i really didn’t think i had to say this, but satire has to be hyperbolic to work. i thought we had covered that at the bit about eating babies! this is not hyperbolic in the slightest.

the LGBT community has a long history of substance abuse due to the fact that historically, the only places they could meet up were bars. even today, a large portion of LGBT spots to meet up in person are bars. the LGBT community has a long history of illegal substance abuse due to the fact that a.) the mafia was entangled with gay bars, b.) when being gay is illegal, you can’t effectively keep illegal drugs out of gay meetups since the meetup itself is illegal, and c.) because, in short, LGBT people are more likely to get the shit end of the stick, which in turn makes people more likely to seek drugs out of desperation. so, already, the drug metaphor is really insensitive.

“wait, but she’s just talking about the transes!!!!!111!!!1!”

not really. she might have meant it that way, but that’s not how it comes off. for starters, the drug thing affects the WHOLE LGBT community, not just the T. also, drag queens were also a huge part of the community historically, and thus subject to the same substance abuse issues. drag queens are usually men in dresses, and redkatherinee thinks trans women are just men in dresses. here’s the thing, though. redkatherinee never makes the disclaimer that “oh, drag queens are fine, just don’t try and call yourself a woman :))))).” this image makes no such subtle distinctions. it’s merely the distorted projections of redkatherinee’s views, a man in a dress we’re meant to gawk at and laugh in disgust at. the bulging eyes, the disheveled, dyed hair with horribly glaring roots, the protruding forehead, the faux breasts which clash against the skin, the angled nose and jutted chin dotted with a five o’clock shadow, the fat, lolling, tongue, uncanilly wide smile, the dripping sweat. we aren’t supposed to sympathize with this person. we aren’t supposed to look at them and laugh at how the gendershits think they’re oppressed and overreacting. i daresay we aren’t even supposed to feel pity. we’re supposed to feel disgust. and by trying to evoke that disgust at trans women, at “men in dresses”, redkatherinee alienates drag queens, who were and still are a cornerstone of the LGBT community, and yes, still fall under that category of “more vunderable to substance abuse” which makes this piece oh-so-insensitive, and the drug imagery not hyperbolic enough to fall into the realm of satire. 

so, we’ve established that the drug aspect of this piece cannot be considered satire, whether you view trans women as women or just men in dresses, since both trans women and drag queens, as part of the LGBT community, are at higher risk for drug abuse.

like i said earlier, substance abuse is an issue for all of the lgbt community, so by trying to use drug abuse as a metaphor like this, redkatherinee really just shooting herself in the foot.

“but it’s just the transes!!!!!!!!!!1!!1!!!1!!1″ you cry again, ignoring everything i’ve said about how she’s alienating drag queens who are also a part of the LGBT community. okay then. 

let’s take a closer look at the drugs out caricatured trans woman has stuffed into her bra. 

the drugs in her bra are, from left to right, the pansexual flag, the lesbian flag, the agender flag, and what appears to be the bottom half of the gay flag. 

so, pansexuals, lesbians, and gays. i’m sure even terfs can agree those are all part of the LGBT community. guess what that means! they have to fight off substance abuse too! so, hooray! redkatherinee, a lesbian, has actually shot herself in the foot now!

and, redkatherinee, what did you say your stand on drugs was again?

ah, yes, thank you. redkatherinee has now implied that being pansexual, agender, gay, or a lesbian, is bad. 

“but….. it’s satire… stop……. being so offended………….” you sputter out.

okay, but, on top of everything else i said about how redkatherinee has utterly failed at satire, she depicts the trans flag as a drug too. what message is that supposed to send? like, seriously? what the fuck is she trying to say here? that being trans is bad, like a drug? but she also depicts sexualities as drugs! there’s a lesbian drug! is redkatherinee saying being a lesbian is bad? is she saying drugs turn people gay? is she saying that the LGBT community is but a way for people to cope with the cruel bitterness of the world and that ultimately, the community will self destruct in a chaotic downward spiral and can only avoid its fate by submitting to the hand of radical feminism?

since you clearly don’t know what it is, i’ll give you a helpful tip; that right there was satire. redkatherinee is a lesbian, of course she doesn’t think lesbians are bad. but in a bid to hurt trans women as much as possible, that’s the point that she’s made. 

but oh, redkatherinee couldn’t make her art insensitive enough. no, no, she had to go above and be-fucking-yond. her radfem character arresting her trans caricature is a police officer. 

since being gay was illegal in the US until the 1960s, the relationship between the LGBT community and the police is strained, to say the least.

 so between that and the substance abuse problem, depicting a police officer arresting a trans person for drug usage is, um, how do you say, bad.

hold on. the drug…….. is a metaphor…………… for being trans……………………….. the police officer is radical feminism…………………. holy shit guys it’s so deep

for real though. this is the point where, even if you don’t think trans women are real women, redkatherinee goes from bad, to downright monsterous. 

in the recent past, being trans was, technically, illegal. now, none of these laws said, “transes are to be arrested on the spot!” but “wearing dress of the opposite sex” was illegal. even worse, many of these laws were much more agressive towards “biological males,” as redkatherinee would put it, and these crossdressing laws continued well into the 80′s. hell, the “immoral dress code law” of Oakland, California was only amended in 2010. 

so this? this isn’t satire at all. it isn’t hyperbole at all. there’s no exaggeration here. you can’t claim satire when depicting something that actually happened. and i hope you don’t forget that the trans woman being arrested is also holding gay, lesbian, and pansexual drugs. and you know. “homosexual activites” were also illegal. if you changed the cop to a human, took out the winky face, and removed reference to radical feminism, this would be nigh indistinguishable from propaganda against “degenerate activity.”

look at this piece of anti-gay propaganda. here, drugs are a metaphor for being gay, just like redkatherinees metaphor between drugs and being trans, and, of course, her metaphor between drugs and being gay. remember, that’s not me being hyperbolic! redkatherinee literally drew the trans, lesbian and gay flags as drugs! this fucking regan-era shitstain is more subtle that her work! and this took me two minutes on google search to find!

oh, my friend, but if you thought that was all, you are very, very, wrong. 

see, this is only in the united states. i covered it since that’s a large portion of tumblr’s userbase, and where i’m from. but redkatherinee isn’t from the united states. no, she’s from russia.

you know, where it’s actually, literally illegal to be gay. and actually, literally illegal to be trans. and you can be actually, literally, arrested for those things.

in conclusion. i understand satire. redkatherinee either doesn’t, or is so gung ho to shit on trans women that she forgoes it until she needs a defense to look like a decent human being, and in the process, fucks over the entire LGBT community. if you think redkatherinee’s work is “satire”, then i think i’ll be performing some “brain surgery” on you with a rock.

[sparto-i]

Soul character analysis?

hoooo BOY you better buckle in because he is my favorite gotdam character and i have a lot of things to say about this boy

first off, let’s start out with a summary so ppl who don’t wanna read 4,000 words can still get something outta this: 

soul is a bit of an anomaly with his characterization in the beginning being VASTLY different from his characterization in the end: overall, he’s gone through the most change out of any character in the series. starting off, he was highly insecure and defensive, which likely could be the result of growing up under scrutiny: i have every reason to believe soul’s upbringing was not colorful or happy, but rather harsh and rigid. this is reflected in his desperation to scramble for an identity in the beginning (i have some theories about that). his turning point is when he’s infected with the black blood and begins to have more and more conversations with the Little Ogre- which made a few observations about him: he’s insecure. unsure. nothing like his partner. as the series progresses, he begins to gain confidence and lose that desperation to fit into a certain box and really starts to come into his own. he gains confidence in his abilities to think and analyze, as well as his abilities to support others. this shows his truly kind-hearted nature: a cool dude wouldn’t be a total jackass, right?

now for the REAL party (after the readmore)

just a warning, there will be a lot of mentions of mental illness (especially when it comes to his self-image) and unhealthy family relationships. if i need to add anything else to the warnings, please let me know!

let’s start off with soul’s past:

it’s a well-known fact that he comes from a rich, successful family of musicians- which is something he seems to be trying to forget. soul drops all of the aspects of his past life: he hides his skill and love for the piano, as well as redacting his last name entirely. again, this is common knowledge in the fandom by now. when he discovered he was a weapon, he took the chance to drop the Evans’s family tradition of producing musicians and started a new life.

but why? it’s never explicitly said that his home was a bad environment for him, only that he felt pressure to continue to uphold the esteemed family’s reputation. growing up under such a big shadow would produce that reaction in just about anyone. perhaps it’s soul’s running away that’s the most telling aspect of his life pre-DWMA. not only does he book it out of his home and into Nevada, but he completely tries to erase everything he was- the Wiki page on him states, “Memories of his past still affect him emotionally, so much so that he prefers to forget them entirely.” Pressure to be successful, while extremely stress-inducing, wouldn’t likely make him like this, unless his family was actively exerting this pressure on him. If his parents had reassured him that he didn’t have to fill in their shoes, he probably wouldn’t have run away, but would have rather gotten permission to enter the DWMA as per his request. But, that’s not what happened. 

parents who live vicariously through their children put them through a lot of stress and oftentimes, that results in the child feeling unable to live up to their expectations, which turns into a low self-esteem complex. the child will either try hard to live up to those expectations, or give up entirely: soul chose the latter. as for his self-esteem, you can see this just about anywhere: he often compares himself to other people. he compares himself to his brother when it comes to his music skill, and he compares his abilities as a weapon to that of Giriko and Justin, both of whom can fight proficiently without a meister.

so, soul evans left his home and his name behind, ready to re-invent himself into the total antithesis of what he was going to be raised to be. which leads us into…

the image of ‘coolness’

soul’s beginning personality and appearance is the most well-known- a laid back, chill dude that worshiped the idea of “coolness”. during this stage, he was impulsive like Maka was, but for entirely different reasons: where maka would often act on emotion, soul would try to take shortcuts to get things done a lot quicker- this is shown in the first chapter when he tries to full-on charge through blair’s window instead of coming up with some sort of battle tactic. this is also in-line with the typical cool guy archetype- the guy that doesn’t take any shit from anyone, and who doesn’t think before he acts because only un-cool nerdasses do that. when an event occurs that makes Soul seem anything other than detached and in-charge, he clearly notes how “uncool” the situation is in an attempt to save face. noting soul’s typical personality during combat situations (i.e. advising maka to keep her guard up, seeing situations about five steps ahead, stressing the importance of plans), the moments of impulsive behavior he does have seems rather forced.

his past easily explains why he does this: he doesn’t want to be like his family. he isn’t soul evans, he’s soul eater. his insecurity caused by a rigid upbringing turns him to over-compensate by building this “cool guy” image, which is also the epitome of ‘Western Masculinity’. 

here comes the speculation piece: while i don’t believe you need to justify trans headcanons with explanations to make them valid, soul’s narrative illustrates a very familiar one: a lot of trans kids who are first starting out often over-compensate to try to mold themselves into the cis-normative perceptions of gender in society. i definitely remember my first year of my transition, trying every which way to look and talk different, walk different, like different things, even changing the way i sat down: since i was trans, i felt that i had to over-compensate and make up for my transness. soul’s over-compensation when trying to be and act “cool” definitely parallels that.

as time goes on, Soul begins to come into his own, after the first Crona encounter gave him yet another pair of eyes to criticize him:

The Little Ogre

the circumstances in which he earned this pest serve as the catalyst for his change in personality. trying to protect Maka from Ragnarok after she’d refused to use soul to block the hits from the sword, he became gravely injured and infected with the Black Blood. it’s after this that his maturity begins to show, but isn’t quite as apparent until the Kishin Revival arc, and the Little Ogre is introduced. 

through the series, the Little Ogre serves as an internal conflict for Soul, harping on him through all of his decisions: he’s too patient, he plans too often, he’s too scared, he’s too anxious, he holds back too much. all of this are feelings that soul knew he had, but never had them pointed out (likely because he never confided in anyone about these issues). this causes Soul to try to prove the Little Ogre wrong by either doing the opposite of what he’s being criticized for, or carry on what he’s doing and try to be successful while doing it. considering soul’s past and his lack of motivation due to being pushed too hard, it’s strange to see the Ogre’s insults actually motivate him: but, perhaps since this conflict is internal, and the Ogre is a facet of his mind, he sees the end goal as less of an unattainable one and more of something to work towards. one of the criticisms that really got to him, though, was that he was lacking in something really big:

the courage his meister had

(yikes that was a really bad segue)

it’s easy to see that maka and soul were created to be two sides of the same coin- opposite. soul’s eyes are red, while maka’s are green- they’re contrasting colors. soul’s soul (i never wanna use that phrase again) is blue, while maka’s is orange, which are, again, contrasting colors. their approaches to battle are vastly different, as well. maka acts on emotion, on what seems like the best option at that very second, rather than detailed observation. soul, being the weapon, observes the situation from every angle, keeping calm in most situations so that he can think a way out of any predicament: a great way to balance out his impulsive technician.

however, it’s his tendency to overthink that holds him back. the Ogre had commented that he makes decisions by way of elimination, not daring to act until the only logical path is an option. there aren’t many examples in which this messes up maka’s or his ability to fight: after all, maka is a very smart girl. but, soul’s inability to act affects him personally. he’s shown to have no direction in his life or conviction of his own, which is probably left-over effects from his life as an Evans. after all, if every moment of his life was planned, how was he ever to learn that he had a will of his own?

it was the courage maka had that motivated Soul to take some direction in his life. in fact, she’s the reason he does a lot of things. albeit indirectly and in no way to blame, maka was the reason he was infected with the Black Blood- he’d acted impulsively and out of emotion in order to fulfill his duty as a weapon: to protect. soul was a source of sage advice for maka, someone who would see the plan out to ensure their safety at all times. maka, in turn, was a source of courage and motivation for soul.

it’s this dynamic that pushes both of them forward, up until they finally achieve the goal of creating a death scythe:

while i could go on and talk about all of the facets of his character, from his strong friendship with blackstar, to his struggles in the book of eibon , this analysis is already mcfucking essay length lmao

if anyone requests a part two tho, i’ll most definitely do it

[princesscolumbia]

These were obviously written by someone who doesn’t have children

Anonymous said:im genuinely happy for you that your coming out was able to help your parents and that you were accepted by them and the environment for you was a supportive one, i really am i promise theres no sarcasm here, but do try to remember that a LOT of us lgbt folk have homophobic parents who sadly dont learn from their kids being lgbt, and instead hate us, abuse us, disown us, etc. the reason people are upset is bc they feel like you're undermining that and saying the abuse is "worth it"

Anonymous said:but the point is that a parent learning a valuable lesson isn't worth their child's safety. why should an innocent young person end up risking their livelihood? the statistics of homeless queer youth prove that it's not worth the risk.

Anonymous said:gay kids are not a lesson for homophobic parents. homophobic parents abuse us, homophobic parents kick us out, homophobic parents get us killed.

Anonymous said:you have to understand that not all parents are like yours. most parents completely hate their gay/trans kids and would rather put them through conversion therapy or ignore their gayness/transness than accept their kid as they are. sometimes they would rather have a dead cishet kid than a living gay/trans kid. a gay kid having homophobic parents isnt a punishment for the parents; its a punishment for the kid.

All four of these came in nearly at once, and I suspect that they were all the same person, so I’m just going to address them all at once:

Honey, sweetie, darling child...your experience is not universal any more than mine is. When you focus on the headlines that are intentionally written to be sensationalist and rustle your jimmies, you develop the same tunnel-vision that cops do; you’re only going to see the worst in humanity.

Couple that with the above comments clearly coming from someone who isn’t responsible for preparing a child to face the big, wide world. Yes, there’s people who are such monumental cock-bites that you’d think they’re getting paid for it (my ex-wife’s family comes to mind) but the vast majority of parents are really just overgrown teenagers making shit up as they go along and wondering how their parents ever managed. They don’t know any better than the next person, and often they’re getting bad advice from well meaning people who know even less than they do, but they don’t know it’s bad advice and they don’t know the people dispensing it are the wrong people to ask in the first place.

My ex-wife is in for a world of pain when my daughter gets old enough to start dating. Why? Because our daughter is most likely gender-queer and is showing signs of being only attracted to women. She’s got friends that are boys, but has shown zero inclination towards “church approved” heterosexual attraction; meanwhile, she’s flat out told me that she likes girls. She’s a little young to make that determination for sure (heaven’s knows I didn’t really understand my own attractions until I was in my early 20′s, even if I was sexually active in my mid-teens), but I’m willing to bet with how early the women in my family start puberty that she simply has a clear idea what her orientation is already. My ex-wife drank the kool-aid that her family served about how LGBT people are all inherently evil and sinners. My ex-wife gets to have a wonderful little learning experience where she gets to grow as a person or lose her daughter.

That’s not going to be fun for either of them. Hell, it won’t be fun for me. (I’m not looking forward to being referee in that particular argument, and you know I’m going to be “blamed” for it) My daughter is going to get a chance to learn and grow from her figuring things out. My ex-wife is going to get a chance to learn and grow from our daughter figuring these things out. Neither of them gets to force the other to accept their opinion any more than you get to force my ex-wife to accept our daughter.

(Sidebar: For those who might be worried about the possibility of my daughter being sent to any sort of “conversion therapy” or some similar nonsense, there’s a clause in the divorce contract stating that I have full veto rights to any medical treatments our daughter is put through, and that includes anything like a “conversion camp” or similar. I didn’t know I’d be needing that clause for this purpose at the time, but I’m damn glad I fought for it)

Every parent of an LGBT kid has to learn, grow, and change once they find out that their child doesn’t fit into the mainstream. Most parents eventually figure it out and accept their child’s choice, if for no other reason than they know that said “child” is their own person and by the time the dust clears said person is over 18 and can do whatever the fuck they want and the parent either gets to play nice or never see that child again. This does NOT mean that ALL parents will learn that they should love their kids and grow their heart and mind, and when the parent chooses not to learn those lessons, that means they fail. They lose that connection with their child and deep down they know they screwed up. They’ll either learn and grow and get over it, or they’ll go to their grave knowing how badly they screwed up and be too stubborn to actually do anything about it.

Further, not everything a parent does that hurts the child is done to hurt the child. A well-meaning but clueless parent has just as much (if not more) to learn about their child’s orientation/gender-presentation as their child. These imperfect beings are usually doing their damndest to raise a kid, and now they are the odd-person out among their peer group, and all because of something that they have no control over. (Sound familiar?)

A good, christian, Republican father who thought he was raising three boys finds out he’s got two boys and a trans-girl is going to be so far out of his element he might as well be a pet store goldfish piloting a space shuttle. He has zero frame of reference and he’s just lost a son. He’s got to go through a learning process, he’s got to question everything he believes in, he’s got to go against the grain so hard that splinters are inevitable, he’s got to go through the grieving process, and he’s got to figure out how to love this changeling living in his son’s room. That is a LOT to go through, and it’s just as hard for him as it is for his son daughter.

Let’s take an opposite case: A...”good” (she’s trying real hard but keeps dropping the ball at the worst times through no fault of her own), atheist (as soon as she turned 18 she left her parent’s church and never looked back), Liberal single mother is told by her daughter (by a one-night stand during her brief stint in college...she’s not even sure who the father is) that her daughter is a lesbian and, by the way, her girlfriend’s parents kicked her out because their pastor said she was sinful and can she stay with them please? She now has to deal with a girl who’s legal status in the home is questionable at best, potentially abusive parents who will come over at any time to harass their daughter and the “heathen family of sinners” that “corrupted” their little girl, potential CPS investigations, and all this on top of having to completely scrap any hopes and dreams she had of her little girl finding a good man (preferably with a degree) to settle down with so her daughter doesn’t have to deal with the crap she did. Does she let them sleep in the same room? (They’re underage, after all, but since there’s no chance of pregnancy, does that matter, or is it the principal of the thing? Who the hell would she even ask about that?) How is she supposed to be there for her daughter (and possible live-in girlfriend) if she’s having to work 10 hour days 6 days a week? And let’s talk about the budget; she can barely afford two people, and now her daughter is asking to bring in a third?!

Both the parent and the child are going to do and say hateful, hurtful things. Usually, it’s without meaning to. If the parent is ACTUALLY abusive, then action gets to take place, most especially the child being removed from the abusive environment. The parent gets to have legal action taken against them, possibly including jail time for abusing a child.

tl;dr - The original post made a statement about how a kid being LGBT isn’t all about the parents. I simply made a statement that it also impacts the parents, and that is a good thing.