#That one gay webcomic all of Tumblr came together to create

[hibdazzle]

AJSJAH I LOVE TUMBLR SO MUCH FOR THIS

anyone please ask your crush out like this

[checkdispleased]

re. ep. 21 on Lardo, what are your thoughts on the idea that Lardo's haircut/ art student vibe, is sort of trading on the visual cues/ imagery of queerness, to provide an illusion or semblance of queer rep, while not actually doing the work to write an actually queer character? You guys have touched on N using a sort of visual/generic shorthand in her characterization in other areas, but the mentioning the Ollie/Wicks thing got me thinking again about how few canonical queer characters are 1/2

2/2 are in the majority of the comic, for a comic supposedly all about queer rep. [it kinda reminds of that author of the wizard books and her word of god gay character after the fact, though i don't think N is doing it to nearly the same degree], but i can't help but see similarities in how cultural cues are used to a nod to representation that's not actually treated as canon by the text itself.

I just deleted a whole stupid Harry Potter essay and will instead say this: I was about to say we found out Dumbledore was gay 15 years before OMGCP even started, and then I remembered I’m an idiot who can’t do math. Still, not that I think JKR needs or deserves the very meager fairness I’m about to lend her right now, but, one difference between that series and this comic is, Harry Potter is not about queer experience, and it never claimed to be, and it wasn’t de rigueur for YA book series to feature any LGBT characters necessarily over the period when it was begin published. Check Please is supposedly about that exact topic! And it was created and presented in a space -- specifically the slash fandom subculture on Tumblr, in 2013, working on the vernacular of webcomics -- where the expectation of queer content was de rigueur. In addition to the fact that I got into the comic because I had heard Jack and Bitty got together, this is maybe why I diverge from @tomatowrites​‘ uncertainty that they would get together: this was being created from and presented in the space where that was exactly what would happen.

To be also fair to Ngozi, I guess the comic never really positioned itself as speaking to LGBT experiences other than Bitty’s. Still, he says he’s come to Samwell because of the breadth of its queer community? I think, through the lens of the comic alone, what he must have meant was that he wanted to be in a place where he could be openly gay to find a boyfriend, not that he wanted to like, have LGBT friends broadly speaking. One interesting thing about the Y4 Tweets, which I have only ever seen in the chirpbook, is that it is established that Bitty, uh, addresses one of the most pointed criticisms of Check Please:

“ducksducksducksducks,” I’m entirely sure based on other Tweets in here, is Lardo.

Hey, this is loooong.

This is SO confusing because it’s like, Lardo’s not a lesbian ... probably? She’s very into Shitty? They live together? Like sharing-a-bedroom live together? There is nothing in the physical comic, or anywhere else that I’m aware of, period, where it’s implied that she’s into women at all, beside the fact that she’s got short hair for a while? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think these were ever tweeted; I think they were written to go in the chirpbook. So it’s tough to know, in a Watsonian sense, what precisely Bitty is responding to, or if he’s responding at all. There’s no context for this. Like much of the comic, it’s just there, implying some things broadly while also addressing a major criticism of the text (that Bitty has no gay friends) without actually examining it within the text itself. Confusing!

I’m not sure what was originally intended in regard to Lardo. (Would love to hear Tomato weigh in on this, if she has time.) It could be as straightforward as, some people at art school look like this. It would be absurd to code a character as queer and then do nothing to establish them as queer in your queer webcomic, of course. Anyone who understands the potential gain of having people think Lardo is not cishet must also understand the potential cost of not just making it canon?

Part of the essay I started writing about Harry Potter up there was to say that, of course, fuck JKR, but also, I think people are making a very 2020-based criticism of the “Dumbledore is gay” reveal, which happened in 2007, concerning a book series that was written starting in the mid-1990s. Not that nobody was ever gay in mainstream media before Check Please, but I do think it’s possible that as popular as those books were, and as powerful as the author was, she may actually have felt she couldn’t put that in there? At the time, I felt like it was a cheap nod to an obviously huge slash fandom -- but now I actually kinda feel like, okay, maybe it was a cheap nod to her obviously huge slash fandom and also she genuinely didn’t think she could have it in there? The very conservative principle of universally legal gay marriage still felt, at the time, like a distant prospect. My goal in thinking this through isn’t to say it’s okay because it happened in ~the past~ when things were less socially just, but rather, to try to explore the thinking that must have gone on around these decisions.

Which leads me, finally, to the actual point of this post: conceiving of Lardo, and OMGCP, in 2013, Ngozi was coming from a slash fandom perspective that largely held these two beliefs:

It is unrealistic for a story to have more LGBT characters than the main pairing; 10 percent of people are gay so if a friend group has more than one or two gay people in it, that’s submitting to some kind of slash-brain internet logic that can’t hold; and

Just as it is homophobic to presume that gay people are or have to be any particular way, it is similarly problematic to presume someone is queer just because they look or act any particular way

The first one is really rooted in fanfics where an entire cast of characters who aren’t gay in canon are suddenly gay in fanfic; this is presumably not a problem for OMGCP because OMGCP is not actually a fanfic. But it is heavily influenced by fanfic; it functionally works as a fanfic ahout two characters named Jack and Bitty who just happen to have also originated within the fanfic. But the comic’s initial readership is going to be people whose interests cross with fandom, because Ngozi is a prominent fan artist so her audience is gonna be that! So you can kind of feel why maybe Bitty is the only gay in the cast until it turns out Jack magically (??) is also.

Which brings us to Lardo: she looks like someone you would think is into women? But I think she was potentially designed as an example of a character who seems gay but isn’t, because it is not okay to presume things about people based on how they look. This is pretty complicated because, well, yes, in general there’s a saying about not judging books by their covers because that level of superficiality perpetuates harmful biases. At the same time, people do judge just about everything by their appearances regardless of whether it’s superficial or not, and so most people know this and use their own appearances to construct their own identities, that is, try to tell people how they want to be read. It’s very 90s-2000s to assert that it’s wrong to make assumptions about whether someone is gay based on appearances, and you can understand why: normalizing gender non-conformity was and is an important project, but until recently the only way to do that was to do it from a position of insisting cishet people could be gender non-conforming. Of course, looking back, this feels like an insane supposition because of course there is a gay aesthetic, or gay aesthetics? Of course queer people have always looked and acted certain ways to try to subtly identify for the purpose of finding fellow travelers?

If I recall correctly, this came up in fanfics a lot, where you’d have one character who is the straightest man making jokes about how much he loved to suck dick, or whatever. And maybe, maybe, some of this lingers in Lardo. I’m thinking mostly of how Kenny was used in South Park fics, but also, come to think of it, Butters, who doesn’t so much crack jokes but he does seem pretty gay, if you take soft-spoken weak-willed effete boys to be gay, which, of course you do. We all do, sometimes. (There’s also an episode about him cross-dressing.)

But what’s even more striking is that there’s already a character who embodies this particular trope in Check, Please: Shitty. He’s theatrical (flamboyant?), he’s writing his senior thesis on the homoeroticism of hockey, and in a very brief (very badly written) ficlet from the back of Huddle Vol. 1, he checks out Jack’s body in the lockeroom and tells Jack he’s a “Greek god.” When Jack says, “That’s so gay,” Shitty responds with, “Welcome to fucking Samwell. Sometimes dudes will tell you you’re hot without even saying ‘no homo’ afterwards.” So we’ve got Jack, who is gay, telling Shitty it’s gay to admire another man’s body as he reddens and is visibly uncomfortable, while Shitty, who is straight, acts like it is somehow normal for all men to be attracted to other men without it being much of an issue for him personally or society broadly. This is not to say that you can’t find these attitudes reflected in the real world; Jack, who’s closeted, obviously has reasons to posture like this, or be uncomfortable with another man complimenting his appearance. But paired with Shitty’s comments the comic is engineering a reversal that claims it’s not inherently gay when a man is attracted to the body of another man -- except, it is? It’s a fiction that serves a kind of post-post-modern post-queer theory pop cultural attitude that I think, in 2020, we’ve moved on from. Underneath Shitty’s posturing is the sad truth that it’s a straight man, particularly a man like Shitty, whose comments on other men’s bodies would be tolerated; it’s unlikely that this is something Bitty (or Jack) would feel it was socially acceptable for him to say. Shitty’s working here as a type.

An I think it’s not a coincidence that he’s paired with Lardo within this story? She is similarly gender-transgressing; beyond having short hair she is characterized as a “bro” (an inherently male-coded performance) and crushes at beer pong and belches on her opponents. Not in the comic, obviously, but we’re told she does -- maybe kind of like Shitty only finds Jack hot off-page? (When he’s not lounging naked in Jack’s bed--again, something that Jack is uncomfortable with, but if a gay man did this, it would certainly be a problem.) I think these are all jokes that are very of their time for fannish texts in the period leading up to when this comic was started.

Again, nothing is impeding Ngozi from putting a female-identifying character who’s attracted to women into her markedly LGBT webcomic in 2014. I think it’s more than likely that if Lardo were meant to be queer, it’d be in there, somewhere. Or, rather, I think if it were an intended reading from start, it would have been in there. Or it would have been in a Tweet. In an extra. In an FAQ. On the Patreon blog. Mentioned in a Livestream. Somewhere? But where we get one incredibly disconnected hint that she might be, it’s in a Kickstarter-backed volume of post-canon content in a way that ties into the actual story or Lardo’s nonexistent interior life not at all. It’s not a story about her--but that’s the point? It’s not a story about her. If it were meant to be a story about a friend group, how would this particular detail not be enriching? When Lardo notices Bitty fretting over Jack’s game in the library, doesn’t the moment have more weight if she can empathize with even slightly more incision?

And like, you can say a lot of things about JKR, and the politics of gender and sexuality within her books was always bad, so this isn’t giving her, like, credit. But you can totally see how using cultural cues might have been all she felt she was able to do in the 1990s and early 2000s, yes, even as one of the most powerful authors working at the time. This doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have done more, or that her bad views are actually understandable, see. (I mean, they’re perfectly understandable, also abhorrent.) 

Ngozi is making a fucking gay webcomic for a gay readership on Tumblr in 2013-2020. She had no reason to use cultural cues to hint broadly unless she wanted credit for something she felt she couldn’t represent (which makes no sense, see previous sentence; entire essay) or Lardo was never intended to be anything other than a cis straight woman -- which is a fine thing to be, by the way, nothing against cis straight women? It’s just that like, this comic got a lot of flack from an internal crowd of complainers, myself included, about the things it didn’t do -- and one big thing it neglected to do was introduce meaningful relationships with other LGBT characters for Bitty. So I think that Chirpbook shit is just a late-in-the-day retcon for virtually nobody.

But this is a conspiracy theory so like, take it with a grain of salt.

[tundraroo]

Rick x Kade

THIS is a rant i’ve wanted to make since i got my tumblr, but i never did it because using tumblr on your phone without the app doesn’t let you make paragraphs and shit, so i’ve been postponing it until i could get on the computer. So anyways yeah it’s fucking rant time.                                                                       Ok, so, basically, there’s this webcomic called Savestate. It’s a furry comic that’s themed around video games and other sorts of media, created by Tim Weeks. The whole comic is centered around two Australian Shepherd siblings named Kade and Nicole. Kade is, without a doubt, the video game fanatic of the two (although all of the main characters like video games or because that’s what the comic’s theme is). He spends most of his time playing video games, or doing something related. He’s very fun and happy and lovable. Then there’s Nicole, his twin sister who was born a couple minutes before he was. She’s a bit less hyperactive than Kade is, and takes on the “older sibling” kind of role, even though she’s only a couple minutes older. The comic is mostly centered around them, although there are 4 other main characters that join in at different points in the comic.                                                                                                                    The other 4 main characters (in order of first appearance) are Harvey, Rick, Ness, and Riley. Harvey and Ness are both ghosts. Harvey is a spirit that inhabits SaveState manor, the place that Kade and Nicole live, after having it passed down to them by their Uncle Scooby (yes, Scooby as in Scooby Doo, it’s really just a gag joke). We don’t really know where Harvey came from, but when we first met him he vowed to be the one to destroy the world, but got caught up in Kade’s video game collection (which is massive by the way).                               Rick, my personal favorite character, and also the one i’m shipping with Kade here (we’ll get to that in a second), is an iguana, and has been good friends with Kade and Nicolie since childhood. We first meet him after Nicole runs out of gas on the road in winter, and Kade calls Rick to help her. He does end up helping her, but, he ends up passing out, because he’s an iguana, therefore cold blooded and not able to handle the cold that well. He was also shipped with Nicole for a period of time, but Tim Weeks shot that down in response to a tumblr ask asking about the ship (i don’t know if he still answers asks anymore though). Anyhow, Rick is a bit more well manned and timid than Kade and Nicole. I cannot stress enough how much i love him. He’s such a good boi.              There’s not much to say about Ness. It’s a spirit that inhabits a plush dragon that Nicole received from her dad. Nicole named the plush originally after the Loch Ness Monster, but was shortened to just “Ness” when it was possessed. It’s also a reference to the protagonist of the video game “Mother,” which i think is a very nice touch.                                                                                                   The final main character is Riley, who is a female dachshund, and also teased to be Kade’s love interest. She works at a local video game store, and we meet her when Kade and Rick are walking down the street. Kade notices the new game store and immediately walks inside. Riley is a bit shy and soft spoken, and it took her a long time to get used to Harvey and Ness when she first met them.

    Ok, now that introductions are out of the way, let’s get on to the actual ship, Rick x Kade. This ship, let me tell you, has basically no fanbase supporting it. I’ve found maybe 2-3 other people who share this ship with me. There’s not many people, which is actually kinda weird because Rick x Kade is amazing. Absolutely spectacular. Like, they’re honestly just two absolute dumbass boyfriends. They’re so cute and it makes no sense why people don’t ship this more because there’s SO MUCH good shit to go along with it. They’re personalities honestly just go so well together. At first i only shipped it because it was gay, but then i actually looked into it a bit more, and discovered that it’s actually a REALLY GOOD ship. First and foremost, i need to talk about the gayest scene in the ENTIRE COMIC. So basically Kade, Nicole, and Rick are babysitting for their neighbors, because they have to go out of town to a new years party they were invited to, and the babysitter they hired had to cancel. So the 3 of them are babysitting Chris and Claire, who are maybe like, 10 years old or something, we don’t know their actual age. So Nicole, Kade, and Rick play some games with them for a couple hours, and by the time Chris and Claire’s parents get back, Rick and Kade have FALLEN ASLEEP. NEXT TO EACH OTHER. ON THE COUCH. We learn from Nicole that at one point Rick was using Kade’s tail as a PILLOW, and that Nicole got a PICTURE OF IT, and that fact ALONE is just like,,,, super good and cute and gay and hnnnnnng my heart cannot take this. But then Tim Weeks, in his BENEVOLENCE, actually ILLUSTRATED the picture that Nicole took!!!!! And when i saw THAT for the first time i just hdjafdjkafhjkgfjkgfjkhfjkajhjahfkjafajhfjdahfjdahfjkdgafdajhfjda died. I died. It’s too cute.They’re so cute together and gay and i love them. Ok ANYWAYS there are a lot more really good scenes than just that. Like, there’s one where Rick is staying over at Kade and Nicole’s house, and he gets the option of either sleeping on the couch, or taking Kade’s bed and having Kade sleep on the couch. So Rick, for SOME REASON, took the couch. He got woken up in the middle of the night, though, to Harvey and Ness playing Mario Kart. Rick asks them to stop playing until morning, but then Harvey ends up scaring him enough to the point of him leaving the couch and sleeping somewher else. That somewhere else, i like to think, is Kade’s bed. It makes SENSE too, because Kade’s bed was the other option Rick was given. I also just really like the thought of them sharing a bed because it’s gay and they’re cute. fdjahfjdafjgdajgfdafjjfhdjafgjkajgaj i love them. Rick and Kade also go to the movies together sometime, and you can’t tell me that those AREN’T dates. Honestly. There are so many good scenes with the two of them. They’re adorable. I love them. Just,,,,, fdahfjdkagfgdajkghjkfgjdkaghjakfjkdghjkagfjahgjkafjkhgjajkdagfkj,,,,,,, so cute, so gay. Honestly my OTP among any show or comic. It’s impossible to stress just how much i love them. No amount of ranting could describe how much i love those two. Such cute, dumbass furry boyfriends. 10/10. That’s the tea sis.

[aikainkauna]

How about instead of purity culture, we re-associate sex with empathy and romance instead?

Oh, you're not so-and-so -sexual anymore, you're so-and-so -~romantic~ now, Tumblr?

Can you please actually fucking look at what you're implying there? And exactly how fucked up it is when you break it down to its roots? No?

Well fucking done for further perpetuating the status quo of sexuality being the douchebag abusive male idea of sexuality, then--where sex doesn't include romance and love natively, where sex doesn't mean you should care about your partner or your health (AIDS epidemic, anyone?), where sex is just base and lower than your high and lofty and pure fleshless love, and where sexuality and bodily pleasure automatically translates into victimhood: being groped, abused, used.

Well done for further driving in the poisonous wedge Judaeo-Christian dualism has fucked the world over with in separating love (high, holy, virginal, saintly) and the flesh (sinful, a waste, demonic).

Well done for digging yourself deeper into a gender trench (because this, as usual, doesn't pass the 'do websites full of guys follow this trend?' test) where men are stupid dumb animals who just think with their cocks and women and theys are morally superior, higher beings who are ~above~ all that nasty fucking--because they have never experienced or even imagined, let alone gone forth to actualise the concept of bodies with vaginas having love *and* physical pleasure at the same time.

Honestly, fucking *stop* it with the self-victimisation masquerading as some kind of pride and radical assertion of identity, when it (like so many of Tumblr's sexuality and gender trends) is yet another manifestation of a mindset wherein abuse is *accepted* as the default fate for female bodies. Just like boobless webcomics don't help normalise boobs and lift them out of their fate as objects that will get you judged and groped and abused.

For fuck's sake, another severing of romance, emotions, psychology (i.e. the main aspects of biological human females' sexuality) from physical sex, falsely valorising mental love, asexuality and purity culture is *not* going to help make sex less rife with abuse.

It's another manifestation of the kind of prudery which makes the dumb young guys even more abusive, makes them hit back even harder with rape jokes and abuse porn because they feel like that's soon going to be the only way they can ever even *have* a sexuality, the only way they'll ever get laid--because they, too, have swallowed the same crap about sex being abuse, and adopt the brash, swaggering identities of rape culture in *direct fucking reaction* to the prudery. And then the girls get more wounded and become too PTSDd to ever dig themselves out of this mess--and look what a lovely, lovely vicious cycle of misery we've got!

When we, the intelligent apes--who have the capacity for *both* high morality, sociality and complex psychology *and* bodies that can have sex more than almost any other species on the planet--should be kissing and hugging and fucking and coming and having happy piles of snuggles instead. We were doing that perfectly well before we came down from the trees, and were *the* species whose sexuality transcended mere procreation into complex social interaction, love, social cohesion and who generally fucked so pleasurably and lovingly we stuck together like glue.

Until all this socio-religious bullshit and other excuses we invented severed Real Morality from the genitals, and everything went downhill from there--and it's getting worse and worse every day on the Internet.

Severing sex from romance, severing love from the physical acts of love, doesn't make you purer. It does *exactly* what religious dualism and toxic masculinity have done--it makes you into a victim. It does not help create a world in which love, romance, sex and respect and pleasure for bodies of all shapes and sizes and sexes and genders and orientations--*our birthright*--are the default setting.

Seriously, think. Does that identity of yours stem from victimhood? From dualisms? From abuse? From gender roles you haven't actually dug to the bottom of? Because hey, you're so un-normative and so so queer you cannot *possibly* have any godawfully sexist, dualist, anti-pleasure-and-love baggage fucking with your cognition this very moment? (Just because there's a fancy stripey flag for it, it doesn't mean it's necessarily progressive or a way out--it may very well be digging yourself in *deeper.*)

I honestly don't give a fuck if you have the physical libido of a small village or a gnat, or what your personal happymaking amounts of mental or physical love are (45% physical gay humping, 150% mental furry fantasy?), but watch that terminology. That terminology and rhetoric affects the world around you and how people see themselves and each other, so examine what you are actually implying. Watch the paradigms that have gone into that--the "sex is mindless humping/abuse and I can vouch for this" being one of the worst and hardest to dig yourself out of, especially if you've been the one victimised.

But it's up to you whether you want to perpetuate the fucking monstrous idea that sexuality is base and animal and that it doesn't include love and romance, perpetuate the very culture that's hurt you and made you feel awkward about your body and your pleasure and your feelings in the first place. Do you seriously accept the idea that sex and romance are mutually exclusive and that one is nobler than the other, just because that's been the idiotic idea the world around you has been operating through? Or are you going to put your foot down and say no to the dualism that's done nothing but harm ever since it began, and speak and kiss and fantasise and hug and wank and cuddle and fuck for something more wholistic and *human* instead?

[hungryego]

Why I love EGS so fucking much

I first checked out El Goonish Shive many years ago. If memory serves, this was in the early 2010s. I don’t recall reading much that didn’t feel like wish fulfillment and it didn’t draw me in so I left it. More recently, a friend of mine who I got into killsixbilliondemons (one of the best webcomics around today) and who reintroduced me to the Mistborn series recommended it to me. I vaguely remembered a few aspects but had no real memory.

EGS is a bit of a mess, really. This is because in its earliest days (2002, amazingly) it was poorly drawn, over-the-top silly, and more than a little problematic at times. Characters were not so tightly defined and there was a lot of nonsense. There was a magic gun that would transform people (mostly gender and furry stuff) but it was... kind of bleh? It’s hard to say. The author has admitted that at that time he was worried about reactions to any sort of trans-related theme so he overcompensated with the character’s reactions to Tedd’s... thing.

By the first real arc, Sister, things were starting to come together. I don’t really want to get into details, but that arc, while flawed, led to some amazing stuff down the road. It was also the first serious plot, which gave it more weight than a comic that was mostly random nonsense.

A bit later the Painted Black arc came and that was rather good. Still far from perfect, but Dan’s art style was drastically improving and Grace’s backstory was explained. It was also a lot darker than previous storylines. Don’t get me wrong - darkness is fun as hell but sometimes there’s too much and I think later EGS managed to set a balance between sadness and good cheer.

I don’t want to detail every story arc by any means but I feel like those two were important milestones for the comic. They helped me actually get into it.

As the story is today (obviously there are spoilers so, you know, don’t read if you're worried about that), there are a lot of fascinating characters, many of whom are queer. Actually, I’m pretty sure most of the main cast is some level of queer (the only one who I’m not sure of is Susan, but she has other issues that are treated well). Magic is abundant but surprisingly logical in that it is explained in a manner that is consistent and its rules generally don’t bend or break.

The basics of it in that world are as follows:

* Normal people can’t do magic, but they can acquire it through the intervention of magic immortal beings (who usually only give them marks in very specific scenarios or when they want to get something done as they can’t affect the world directly)

* People generally acquire magic in the form of a mark, which gives them access to one spell. Through practice (and often an intense event, emotional or otherwise), they can awaken and start acquiring new spells (chosen by magic, which has a will of sorts)

* Uryuoms have transformational powers and physical abilities that are like magic but internal in such a way that they have resistance/immunity to a lot of magic

Note: Uryuom aren’t aliens but are aliens and I’m still not really sure about where they came from. They featured heavily in some earlier stories (especially Painted Black) but haven’t shown much other than as background characters since then.

It’s worth describing the main cast and also some auxiliary queer characters of interest.

Note: in EGS, the word ‘transgender’ was used a lot with regards to transformation spells/technology, but trans characters in the standard sense of the word do exist. When I say “turned into” I’m referring to magic that physically changes their bodies, not their identities (which are separate).

Trans and/or gender non-conforming (identity is weird, don’t want to paste the label of trans onto certain characters):

Tedd Verres - arguably the main main character, although there are many arcs where they don’t show up much. One of the original two characters. Half-Japanese and born with some rather unique magical potential (and lack thereof), AMAB. Tedd has always been androgynous but would get extremely defensive if anyone referred to them as female. They learn about genderfluidity from Grace in a glorious moment. As the story currently is they are working out who they are, and since magic is going to change they’re dealing with the emotional ramifications of whether they’d rather be stuck as a boy or a girl in the likely event that magic changes.

Elliot Dunkel - the other first character in the strip along with Tedd. He starts out rough when it comes to gender stuff (see last panel here, first panel is flashback in following strip) but ends up zapped by a transformation gun and turned into a girl. Eventually he dispels it with a crystal but that creates a double under the ‘curse’ (Ellen, cis) and gives them both powers. Elliot’s is the ability to transform into a girl (and shapeshift under those parameters). He’s at first frustrated by the fact that he HAS to (because of the circumstances of his acquiring said powers he is forced to use up excess magic energy or else he’ll unintentionally transform at random times, something that would be rather inconvenient), but later on he realizes that he’s never really cared about being a boy or a girl and he was just dealing with societal baggage. Oh, and he develops the power to transform into a female superhero. It’s great. Realizing that he actually likes who he is and that being fluid is a part of who he is (all glorious moments of character development). Seriously, he went on a date with his girlfriend as a girl and it was so fucking cute and they are adorable together and just wow it was so cute. Elliot’s agender but also somewhat genderfluid. Also, mostly into girls but definitely enjoys men as well.

 Yes, both of the main characters (initially ‘boys’) later on realized that they were a variety of genderfluid.

Grace: Grace is part alien? (Uryuom insist that they are not aliens but their origins are still unclear), part human, part squirrel (Uryuom eggs can have DNA from up to twelve sources, to my memory). She’s a person of color who is a natural shapeshifter. I don’t recall where it is clarified but she doesn’t really have a sense of any sort of gender as she’s always been a shapeshifter and that’s just natural to her. Basically agender. Also, has discussed how human bodies shouldn’t be limited to characteristics of one gender, has explicitly discussed the lack of binariness to gender and sex and is just generally super wonderful.

There’s also one or two side characters who are trans and don’t have access to any sort of transformation powers.

Most relevant is Sam, a fan of an in-universe analogue of magic the gathering who is a closeted transguy (only is himself at tournaments). Also, an overdramatic doofus who is like one of those pokemon trainers who go on about wearing shorts because of how much easier it makes to run around. He is wonderful. He has a date (or a not-date because people are awkward) with one of the main cast members (Sarah) and as such is likely to become a recurring character.

It’s worth pointing out that of course EGS isn’t totally unproblematic (but what is, really?) and that in a world with magic transformation things can get a little weird but it’s definitely well done by more recent years. The stuff this year especially is just fantastic. Seeing characters break past socialization and realizing that they aren’t what they thought they were is fantastic.

Also, most of the other cast is some variety of non-straight:

Sarah (third character to be introduced) is bi (more into guys but definitely into girls too).

Nanase (Japanese) is a lesbian.

Ellen (Elliot’s female duplicated created by a cursed artifact) is a homoromantic bisexual (and dating Nanase).

Justin is super gay.

Also, a bunch of recurring side characters (or side characters who are definitely going to come back because of going on a gay date with one of the main cast members) are queer - Rhoda (bi or lesbian, person of color), Catalina (lesbian), Luke (gay, ethnically ambiguous), Ashley (Elliot’s new girlfriend, bi, east asian).

Lots and lots of gayness.

Apologies for general weirdness of the post. I’ve been dealing with a lot of mental health problems lately but I want to tell the world that EGS is one of my favorite webcomics and that whatever problems it has in its earlier years it more than makes up for. Give it a try if it sounds interesting.

Also, there are anime-style martial arts, founded by a man who mastered a few martial arts and watched way too much anime to the point of obsession and it actually works.

Dan Shive (the author) hasn’t explicitly stated his own identity but doesn’t really have a gender.

EGS tumblr - @egscomics

Also, reading the comic helped me realize that I’m genderfluid (not in a male-female sense but more of a female - nothing - weird stuff sense).

It’s good.