#and I actually really like the textual implication that he just doesn't and that's fine! so. im gonna run with that for something

[dingodad]

i totally agree!! i didnt know how to word my thoughts on it, because just suggesting the two binaristic options of "trans or intersex" felt both limiting and not true to the overall subject. so thank you for putting to words something i was trying to get at!! ive been loving your analysis of homestuck recently so its really nice to be able to just pick your brain about it sometimes.

also because i like adding a prompt for you to respond to that isnt just my praising you, how do you think this whole conversation affected kankri on beforus? textually i think its pretty clear, that in contrast to karkat's closeted archetype, kankri is more meant to be that one guy you knew in high school in the GSA club. well intentioned but definitely too caught up in the literal linguistics of it all

happy to help :) and happy to respond to more asks. as you can see.

i have never thought super long and hard about kankri in this respect because well he is very messy lol and i've never been able to land on a single interpretation of him that i think entirely fits within homestuck's themes. which is probably fine because probably nobody was ever meant to put all that much thought into him anyway. but i think the caste-oriented interpretation of mutant blood maps pretty easily onto the queer interpretation here, in that kankri is very much a gay guy who doesn't want to acknowledge that being gay doesn't totally absolve him of the privilege of being a guy.

i guess there are holes in that interpretation, not least of all the fact that it's never really insinuated that kankri is Actually gay in the way karkat is lol? all of his noteworthy romantic feelings in both lives are toward women; his quadrant-transcending relationship with the disciple is definitely "queer", so you might jokingly categorise him as "gay for girls", but i don't think he ever even really comes across as LIKING women that much. and he dislikes women in about the same way you'd expect a straight guy to dislike women. in this sense asexual kankri is a very amusing interpretation even if it very clearly is not true.

kankri being "the troll version of gay" also kind of comes with the implication that maybe being a special little gay guy comes with perks and privileges on Beforus which is, again, funny to imagine but prooooobably not the intended message hussie was going for? lol? unless it was. oomf @odddaysgeorge's interpretation of the message behind Beforus immediately came to mind when i got this ask: "having all their basic needs met and their identities affirmed turns these queer teenagers into neurotic entitled perverts complaining about fake problems." i don't necessarily agree that the intention behind Beforus was this antagonistic, my read on act 6 is that it broadly approaches queer topics in pretty good faith, but it's certainly not an inaccurate read on meenahquest. and i certainly think "move aside entitled gayboy, a real feminist is talking" is a sentiment that broadly aligns with hussie's attitude toward the girl alpha trolls versus the boy alpha trolls. it's just that. again. i can't even be that sure that kankri is even supposed to be gay. so you see what i mean when i say this shit is messy

[taiey]

Yeah, ace Jon supremacy but we don't know where on the ace spectrum he is so I feel he's sex positive with people he cares about/loves. 

...“Doesn’t. Like, at all.”

We have, I think due to the general dearth of asexual characters, collectively settled on “it’s fine to ignore/change ‘he doesn't’ but not John being asexual at all” (we have not collectively settled on this I just think the people saying otherwise sound mean) and like. as a “doesn’t, like at all” myself i am not maximally suited by this leaning but

but we decided labels oughtn’t be erased, using the words, word-of-author asexual is important - and descriptions aren’t. like if he had the correct terminology, ‘sex-averse’ would mean ‘we know where’, but the more nebulous, more personal, - that can be overwritten, over and over again, he does he does he does.

[there’s a - Watsonian/Doylist thing here, watsonian the information is third-hand and years out of date - doylist it is literally all the information presented to us in the narrative. nothing within the narrative contradicts or amends or even adds to this. it’s - ] [it’s not, actually “we don’t know”. it’s that you or someone you listened to decided what we know doesn’t count.]

[...also when i play textual games on those rules it’s because i don’t like the only answer we are given and want another one for some reason.]

Possibly I am actually being most bothered by the resultant implication that John didn’t really care about slash love Georgie... c’mon, self, think of others’ usual perspectives,

probably this exact person doesn’t remember the exact conversation where we hear about John’s sexuality and doesn’t mean that tertiary implication.

possibly it is the baseless, unfounded suspicion that that person thinks, somehow, in some manner, on some axis, that “sex positive with people he cares about/loves” is ... better ... than “doesn’t. at all. including with people he cares about/loves.” maybe it’s the ‘but’.

...maybe it’s the underlying attitude that results in “[when they’re having sex] Jon believes in love.” ...yyyeah, ok, i was right.

that’s not even what “sex positive” means.

[radiosandrecordings]

Been thinking recently about queer theory in audio, specifically in regards to intimacy and how different identities have different needs and how this interacts with the medium. 

The big examples, and the one I see most frequently talked about, are kissing noises, usually in regards to some of the Big Podcasts, TMA and Penumbra (It doesn’t really seem to come up in a lot of the other big podcasts - TAZ is a TTRPG, not an audio drama, W359 has no romance, there’s kissing in The Bright Sessions but it doesn’t seem to be that big anymore)

Here you’ve got to examine both what purpose the kissing serves, and what it actually sounds like, and to do that you have to take in to account the context of the show, the soundscape at large + the directing style, etc etc. Penumbra is easiest because it has what I would consider to be not a realistic audio style, but not an unrealistic one either. It doesn’t care about how you’re hearing this, there’s no framing device, so spatial awareness isn’t really done with rigidity - You can hear people talking, you can hear the THEIA talking to Juno, you can hear Rita over whatever she uses to communicate with Juno etc. I think S1 is best to examine here because S2 doesn’t really focus on romance, but S1 is primarily a noir romance, with all the heaviness and passion that that entails. When Juno and Peter are kissing you can hear it, and there’s a reason for that outside of genre convention too. Sophie Takagi Kaner specifically wanted the kissing to be very in-your-face (or. ear.) because they wanted the queerness, and specifically in this case the sexuality aspect, to be something unavoidable. The first arc ends with two queer people making out and you can’t avoid it, and that’s the intent! The genius of it though is that it’s also made to be plot relevant - This is Peter using his sexuality as a distraction, he’s sexy and he knows it and he’s about to escape into the night like the thief on a mission he is. And it doesn’t sound wrong in the soundscape, the whole show up to that point as been quite over the top, so this doesn’t sound out of place. The combination of dialogue, sounds, and Juno’s noir detective monologuing over the scene make it work.

Now take something like TMA. TMA also features a queer couple, but the big difference is that you do not hear anything intimate going on beyond a hug. And yes, part of this has been said on the director’s behalf to be because they just couldn’t get the kissing to sound good on audio, but whether it was the intention or not, another key difference is the fact that one of the two characters is ace. And it adds this really nice layer of like, schrodinger's kissing to the character. Because we’re told in regards to sex that he “Doesn’t. Like, at all.” but we’re never given any indication on his opinions on kissing and that’s fine! It isn’t that kind of story. Penumbra S1 I would argue is a romance, but TMA, even when it has the main character in a romantic relationship in S5, is not a romance because the horror and tragedy take far more priority. So I think one could argue that his aceness is shown through the fact that he’s never shown kissing his boyfriend, and that he can absolutely be read as kiss-averse, or maybe just kiss-sometimes, or maybe he’s fine with kissing and it’s just all off-audio, that’s the interpretable part of it. I’ve seen some bizarre takes in the past year saying that the creators of TMA are homophobic, even, for making this directing choice (Because ah, yes, let’s tell the bi man writing a m/m relationship that he’s doing it wrong) when I just don’t think people take the time to consider that A) Audio is hard to work with tone-wise and if they couldn’t get it to sound good, then they couldn’t get it to sound good B) not every queer person needs to be represented in the same way. Penumbra’s overt sexuality is it’s way of doing that, and intentional or not TMA’s protagonist’s lack-of is shown in a lack of those moments. 

If people are looking for audio dramas on the spicier side though, apparently there is a market for explicit audio drama? I’m not quite sure how it works but props to those people for finding out how to do that. I know Dreamboy uses third person narrating but I think there is some genuine audio drama with sex stuff out there, and Good For Them. But also, when a relationship is shown without those aspects, that can be just as revolutionary and queer too, as much as we live in a heteronormative world, part of heteronormativity is amatonormativity, so different media can be important in their stances for different reasons, they can co-exist and one does not automatically become bad by juxtaposing the other. 

[incoherentbabblings]

every new cover or variant of the batgirls comic that comes out shows how beautiful stephanie is like I fully believe she could be a model she's always been beautiful but now it's like on bombshell level of gorgeous

my headcanon is whenever cass and damian see tim they tell him he traded down & steph is the best he'll ever do 😭

This ask set something off in me so apologies for the length and how it doesn't really talk about what you spoke of but it's my brain and it does this. So, a two pronged response. Firstly: BERNARD AIN'T A STEP DOWN DON'T BE MEEEAAAAAAAAANNNNNN.

He is perfectly cute and as vanilla-esque as you would expect a blonde blue eyed seventeen year old boy to be and absolutely no-one came out looking good by comparison from the early artists during Willingham's Robin run when Bernard first popped up. In comparison everyone in Urban Legends are just so generically cute and it's just blindingly clear Tim has a type. And that's...fine.

They cute...

I can't be too mad. A sea of white people...

Anyway. Part two is the interesting way Steph's physical beauty (or lack thereof) is treated (or not treated) within the comics themselves.

She's never been drawn as the prettiest girl in the room, and literally no-one in canon has ever called her out for being particularly attractive, save villains who are just doing so to degrade her and reduce her value to what she looks like. And yes okay a character does not have to be called beautiful in canon by her mother or boyfriend or friends to be such... but at the same time, her appearance is nowhere near the first notable thing about her. Superboy recognized her voice when she was Robin before her body or hair. She never even considers her own physical appearance either, which is something Cass has even done. She just... is. Which honestly I fricking love.

Though to be clear, she is meant to be attractive, even if not outstandingly so. Again, just because she's not explicitly stated as such doesn't mean we don't all have eyes. She's conventionally attractive by western euro-centric standards in literally every possible way. She's white, blue eyes, blond hair, average height, slim and hourglass and yet simultaneously athletic figure... Like Steph is drawn to be attractive, definitely.

It's really hard to give her any defined facial features aside from her colouring (and even her blue eyes have shifted to purple and green occassionally) but in general she seems to have a slightly longer nose and face and fat lips compared to other female characters her age like Harper (who, at the risk of sounding mean, is typically drawn more like a rat, with more close features). Steph does canonically have good legs and butt, if Barbara is to be believed, but Steph was a gymnast first before putting on the costume, so no surprises there.

I just find it interesting that for a character who, for a significant chunk of her existence, was designed to be a love interest, and yet has little to no textual commentary on her appearance. Even more so considering how much her initial costume completely covered her face, hair, body to toes, not to mention the cape which could hide her body too.

The only time I can think of when she comments on her own appearance tends to be concerning her hair; how she got its colour from her dad, and then when she cut it, she snarked about the implication of short hair implying a smarter more put together person than a long haired blonde bimbo. But even then, no-one actually ever comments on her hair cut, she just brings it up herself when Cole tries to (badly) flirt with her.

Her appeareance is just conventional enough to not be commented on.

Save the times when she'd being assaulted and degraded.

I don't know what to think about that honestly. Bad guys calling her hot and making comments about her body is obviously bad, but paired with the fact that no-one else ever does... it's interesting.

Personally speaking - so we've departed canon and just what I like - I've spoken before about how I like my Stephanie's to have a frankly illogical and impractical amount of long curly hair. But DC artists tend to go for shoulder length straight blonde with bangs. They have a vendetta against curly hair I swear... I also do like the idea of her having green eyes like she did when she was Robin. But she has been consistently blue eyed since 2008 ish? So I don't really have a leg to stand on there. I like the bird analogy really for her, since she was Robin after all. Pointed features, round cheeks, pouty lips. Slim and not particularly curvy is how I imagine her personally, in that way where most gymnasts certainly don't have hourglass figures, but hey. This is comics. The world's greatest acrobat Mr Grayson is apparently 5ft 10", which is likely too tall to be said world's greatest acrobat. Steph's proportions, hair and so on don't have to be perfect therefore.

ANYWAY. She is a very pretty girl, all things considered. I do really enjoy the artist they have for the upcoming Batgirls series. Giving her the blocky haircut back, the rabbit teeth and the freckles are excellent choices. Her eyes are the size of dinner plates I love it. Making her visually distinct from Cassie, Mia, Kara and Courtney is nothing but a good shout in my book.

I also won't say no to the cheesecake issues either. If DC want this girl to be explicitly beautiful then fuck it go for it. I just wish sometimes they'd remember that she is still a teenager...

Finally, to actually answer your ask. Yes. My Steph stan brain go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr prettiest girl in Gotham y/y?