my thoughts on the trans charles headcanon!
let me just start off by saying i love it. just to make that 100% clear at the beginning of this.
ok i think that charles being a trans man would change his relationship with the characters in the movies + his relationship with his mutation in the films as well. for one, i think that his first encounter with raven would hold more weight. because raven would be his first look at someone like him—a mutant—but also his first look at someone who was able to defy gender norms in a way he was unfamiliar with. i'd imagine that as a child he would be so isolated that he would assume his feelings in wanting to be anyone but himself [pre-transition] were inherent to everyone. and encountering raven changed that perspective but also drove home the fact that his expression of himself didn't change who he innately was. as raven changes how she looks frequently but at the end of the day, is still raven. i feel he would get his first realization that, ah, just because i look like a girl doesn't mean that i am one.
(i also like to imagine that his telepathy would be a tool for him to use before he's given access to the resources he needs to medically transition. it would work as a way to help along his social transition, maybe by subtly changing people's surface level perception of him if they were interacting in his youth. when he grows older and he does have the ability to medically transition, he would stop purposely affecting people's perception of him but that habit would be so engrained that it would subtly colour his interactions with the general public unconciously.)
anyway, i think the way this plays into his relationship with his sexuality would be fun, too! the flings he's implied to have in first class are obviously just superficial (as he repeats the same routine to pick up girls multiple times). we could argue is his version of comphet, if we're assuming he's gay, but the way he was raised makes him want to strive to be the person his parents wanted him to be. or the relationship of his sexuality with his gender identity and how he feels slightly invalid in his dual identity as a gay and trans man, because, to him (with internalized queerphobia), he would assume he's just taking extra steps to come around to liking men as a cis women.
besides that i think his relationship with erik would also change. because, like, i like to work with the idea of erik being a bisexual man (as he does have a relationship with a woman a decade long in canon and i'm not opposed to it in the context of the story) but him still interacting with charles as a man would still be pretty validating to charles. because, i imagine in first class, charles would still be welcome to float around the periphery of erik's thoughts (as erik wasn't opposed to charles' mutation as most people try to say he is—as far as i remember, erik lets charles into his head during first class multiple times without becoming angry!) and charles would see (at least on the surface level) that erik's attraction to him isn't because he sees him as a woman but moreso that despite being attracted to both men and women he still respects charles' identity as a man and builds a relationship in that context.
i have more thoughts about this that i'll probably add to later but this is just a summary of a conversation i had with someone in my discord server that i thought had enough substance to make into a proper post. thanks for reading!
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just a thought that not enough ’no order 66’ aus pay attention to how it affects anakin.
like, most of the time they’ve turned him into a gentle, kind soul who fixes peoples wounds, is a loving husband and a great dad to his twins, as if with palpatine gone and ’telling the truth’ to the jedi council somehow would not result in any repercussions in his part. the jedi wouldn’t just let him walk free, but maybe expel him from the order or at least take away his seat on the council (because it was palpatine’s doing in the first place) and that could further drive anakin’s resentment towards them.
say, fives stopped order 66, and anakin and obi-wan never got to mustafar. still, there are underlying issues that in my opinion just exploded on mustafar, and during the chip arc they are still there. anakin is still bitter, angry, jealous, possessive and controlling, and he fears losing people and is violent.
no order 66 and palpatine’s death doesn’t erase the genocide he committed, the lies he told, the progress he made in descending to the dark side. during the chip arc he is still close to the dark side and to falling. it doesn’t go away with palpatine gone, but more like bubbles under the surface, ready to overflow and take over his actions.
his fear of loss and his attachments are what made him fall to the dark side and commit another genocide. so even with palpatine gone, his fear of losing padme and his newborn twins, his paranoia towards the jedi and his distorted world view are still there, though in smaller scale. and those feelings still have a hold of him, and i think after his twins are born, it can only get worse.
i think when he holds his babies for the first time, all he can think about is what he can lose, in how many ways can they be taken away from him, and what can go wrong. so i think that as padme enjoys her new life as a mom, anakin is just scared. frightened of losing his children. and that’s what is driving him mad. and he’ll do the same as he did in revenge of the sith, do everything in his power to not lose his kids, even if it meant hurting others. call it selfishness or cowardice, that’s what anakin does, that’s what he’s meant to do.
anakin’s whole character was built for the sole purpose to fall, and ’no order 66’ aus won’t change that.
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Every time I think about it too much, I go utterly insane over Noé's little "I'm glad you're the person you are now" speech.
Like, no matter how you read their relationship, it's undeniable that by that point, Noé cares about Vanitas so much. He's clearly quite upset by Vanitas's "as if anyone could fall for a person like me" line. And because of that, he goes out of his way to try and reassure Vanitas that he's good and worthy of love, and he specifically crafts his reassurance in a way that he thinks Vanitas will be able to accept.
He prefaces his kind words with "I still don't like you," because he knows that Vanitas reacts poorly to outright being liked. He adds on the line about his statement being "arbitrary" in an effort to pretend that his speech wasn't prompted by hearing Vanitas spill his self-hatred. He goes to lengths to make things look as much as possible like Noé's just sharing a thought, not trying to comfort Vani, but his intent comes through crystal clear.
Yet at the same time, the way he ties his speech to his thoughts on having met Astolpho shows that he really is being genuine. He goes out of his way to say all this because he wants to reassure Vanitas, but he doesn't say a word that isn't from the heart. Regardless of whether he “likes” the way he is or not, he’s genuinely grateful to have the Vanitas that he has.
It's so telling that Noé's reaction to hearing Vanitas speak self-hatingly is to go out of his way to contradict that hatred with affection. And that he tries to go about it so delicately. It speaks so much to his depth of feeling and his emotional intelligence. It’s just such a good scene.
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Gunna yap about Gabriel seeing as his character sheet is done
(I haven't finished FO3, pretty much just got James back to Project Purity, so this is likely to change as stuff progresses and I learn more about what's going on)
If anyone wants to know anything about him lemme know 👉👈
General content warning for discussions of shitty mental health and trauma
(Loosey Goosey type summary at the end if you don't wanna read all that)
He's a MAJOR daddy's boy- he didn't get along with a lot of the other kids in the Vault so spent a lot of his time growing up hanging out with his dad, watching him work, learning things about medicine and helping organise all the tools.
When James left the Vault Gabe was DEVISTATED. He couldn't help but feel abandoned- Why would his dad leave? Was he not a good son? Did he do something wrong?
Then all the immediate fallout made him kinda resent his dad for a spell- (general how could he leave and be okay letting me deal with all that? Not that James knew the overseer was gunna utterly flip his shit ofc)
Once out of the Vault he learned pretty quickly that he cannot aim for shit, he just can't get the hang of guns and instead had to rely on a baseball bat and his fists. Begin a sheltered kid then suddenly up close a personal with all this violence took a major toll on his already shaky mental health.
When he reached Megaton he felt immediately out of place- he was unfamiliar with the social customs, he was naive and clueless about basically everything. He defaulted to Overly Polite in order to compensate but this came off (at least at first) to a lot of the settlers as him having a holier than thou attitude and as a result he wasn't well liked for a while.
He also struggles with the transactional nature of the wasteland (I help you, you help me), and got really frustrated that nobody would help him unless he but himself in danger. They KNEW he was inexperienced, frightened and confused and still demanded he go out into the wastes anyway.
He still goes out of his way to help people- giving up his own meager supplies for those in need, putting himself in danger time and time again, choosing to be kind where he can. He wants to be liked, he wants to be accepted and he wants to make the wasteland a kinder place than he found it. He puts the emotional and physical needs of others before his own (he's got a bit of a Martyr complex)
This feelings of abandonment with his dad, his feelings about being put in danger and not helped kinda manifested into a lot of anger and resentment. Hes MAD, at the world, hes made at his dad and hes mad at himself for being a terrible son and a terrible person. He takes that out on enemies in combat, and gets pretty damn good a punching thing but hates how relived the violence makes him despite his general dislike of such things.
He doesn't enjoy it though- all the blood and the fighting makes him feel like a monster. That he's commiting unspeakable sins and even if he finds his father Hes going to be so disgusted by the things he's done that he'll abandon Gabe AGAIN. It's something that haunts Gabe for a while, and he never quite gets over it, but he keeps looking for his dad, becuase James is all he has, despite his own fears of rejection and distain.
When he gets to Tranquility Lane and Braun's asking him to do all those shitty things to people in order to get his dad back- Gabe does it. No questions. He's come all this way, done all these horrible things- he swallows his revulsion, accepts this is how it is, and does whatever it takes to get his dad back. His actions at tranquility Lane deffo haunt him- he was selfish, he hurt people becuase he wanted his dad back so badly.
When he is FINALLY reunited with James he's kinda shocked that his dad doesn't hate him- He thought his dad would just be able to TELL that he's done bad things, that he's been selfish and cruel to get here but his dad seem oblivious to it. He kinda keeps himself away at first, afraid James is going to find out what hes done and hate him for it. There's still a lot of resentment about being left alone, even after Gabriel learns of project purity and that makes him feel so much worse. (Overall though Gabe is just so HAPPY to have is dad back and is finally able to relax a bit and start to process all the shit he's been through)
His dad left to go save lives, believing that Gabriel would be safe and relatively happy in the Vault, and Gabe hates himself for being so wishing his father had just stayed and left the people of the wasteland to suffer.
In summary- Gabriel's a Daddy's boy with a deeply unstable sense of self that hinges on his, often wildly incorrect, assumptions about how people perceive him. His perception of his own morality is massively incongruous with his actions. He's got abandonment issues, a martyr complex and is deeply angry at the wasteland, his dad and himself.
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