#Wanna hear about my blorbo? PLEASESAYYESPLEASESAYYESPLEASESAYYES

[sylvanas-girlkisser]

As a follow up to last week's top/bottom post, i guess part of what kept me from identifying as butch for a long time, is that i am also both in my writing and as a person fascinated by feminity.

Like i know, to put it in the most fucking programmer terms ever, that butchness does not deeply equal masculinity, but I guess i was influenced a lot by how butchness in media/large fandoms as a spectrum ranging from "skinny cis girl in a leather jacket" to "trans masc uwu smol bean".

But also, wanting to get more femme so you can get more butch is kind of a weird gender which I guess goes back to the whole: complicated relationship to womanhood.

Tying it back to my whole "fascination with femininity" (which yes i know is a phrase the terfs are weird about but w/e): I find that high femme identity, or rather the heteronormative bastardization of it, tends to be portrayed as aspirational, rather than just that, an identity.

A phrase I have said A LOT when describing my gender is "I shouldn't have to wear dresses and 20 types of makeup to be recognized as a woman". And I think subconsciously that has also had a big influence on how women are portrayed in my writing.

Like, to compare and contrast: In the Burning Kingdoms (this series will not leave my brain), empowerment is very much correlated with beauty; Malini spends most of the first book imprisoned and in a drugged stupor. Unable to care for herself she stops bathing, her hair gets tangled, and she walks around in rags. The once she's freed, her first act is to get cleaned up and put on a fancy dress, which signals she's ready to take the fight to her brother.

And again, yeah that is just the kind of character Malini is right? Her power comes from being able to play whichever version of herself will garner the most sympathy - and there is no sympathetic version of an empress in a strictly patriarchal society that is not both regal looking and smoking hot.

By comparison, in my own writing, specifically "bury the antlers with the stag" Jaina is shown as the complete opposite. Her empowerment comes from being able to march into a room bags under her eyes, hair a mess, breath stinking of gas station coffee, and go "listen up idiots".

Like I don't think one approach is more "inherently feminist" than the other, its about the varied experiences of being a woman, and by extension the different ways empowerment of women and people with feminine adjacent gender experiences can be represented.

On another notes who wants to hear the incredibly complicated lore i came up with for my blood elf hunter?