#but ESPECIALLY not seeing him in pride posts?? when he’s the only canonical transmasc character we have so far??

[godforsakenbeast]

fucking begging y’all to remember Tubarão’s existence at all, but especially to include him in pride content.

[2-bdamned]

in regards to the aoex pride post i made last month, here are my personal headcanons as to why i think those are their sexuality’s! ( also thank you to @johnannepeterric for asking about this as i’ve been waiting to share these for a hot minute!!)

rin:

sexuality + gender identity:gay and trans(ftm)

reason: i don’t think he exactly cares for the concept of gender and sexuality but just thinks people should be allowed to like and be whoever they want. he knew he was in the wrong body since he was a little kid but never knew how to phrase it till later on in life. as for on screen reasons, he tends to cover up quite a bit before and after becoming a demon as well as tending to wear baggy clothes to hid his form. not to mention he has very poor posture which most transmasc people (myself included) tend to do when we can’t bind or don’t feel masculine enough. and i think he’s gay mostly due to the fact that he’s never really shown to have any friendships outside of the exwires and tends to get his platonic and romantic affections mixed up quite a bit (as to explain why i still headcanon this after the manga and his confirmed feelings towards shiemi)

yukio:

sexuality: bisexual

reasoning: he seems to show and equal amount of emotions to his colleagues and to the exwires and im like 90% sure he doesn’t really talk about romantic through the manga/anime at all. i think he’s always known he’s liked both genders since he was young. shiro seems like he was very accepting and i honestly think he would’ve helped both the boys with their sexuality’s and gender since he didn’t get the freedom to express that stuff when he was younger due to you know ‼️‼️(SPOILERS) ‼️‼️ literally being a clone made in a lab. yukio seems the type to not really care about gender when it comes to romance and instead look for traits like personality and motivations. his friendships are most based on him genuinely liking the person rather than keeping up with his appearance as someone who’s quite popular. this could possibly lead to the same being transferred over to his romantic bonds.

shiemi:

sexuality: lesbian

reason: like rin, she tends to get romantic and platonic affection mixed up from not having friends till high school. there’s a bit in the manga where izumo brings over some romance novels to try and help shiemi out with figuring out her feelings. we all know most romance novels don’t exactly have the best explanation for feeling so i think that’s where shiemi got mixed up. she gets her admiration for rin mixed up with romantic feelings when in reality, she’s not into him. we can also use the garden scene from kyoto arc as some reasoning to this headcanon. izumo called shiemi a weed and she surprisingly takes this “insult” very well and even thanks izumo for the interaction. even later in kyoto saga, we see shiemi use even more of her power to save izumo from the miasma. she clearly cared a lot about izumo and basically wore herself down to the the brink of exhaustion trying to dave izumo herself when she could have easily run and got help from another exorcist. sheimi seems to care deeply about her friends but shows more concern to izumo than any other exwire (minus rin and yukio).

shima: ‼️‼️ HIS WHOLE HEADCANON REVOLVES AROUND MANGA SPOILERS SO THATS A HEADS UP‼️‼️

sexuality: gay

since he found out about izumo from the illuminati, he never really had a “crush” on her per say, but showed an unromantic interest in her due to her past and just wanted to know more about her. since he had kinzou around him as a kid, i think that played a huge part in him hiding that he was gay (just bc kinzou is a huge perv and probably pushed some of that onto him). that could also lead to the reasoning as to why he’s so pushy with izumo. he’s trying to convince himself he liked women by trying his hardest to like izumo. the kinzou thing is the only thing really leading to me believing this but an alternative reason could also be a fear of changing his personality this late on when both suguro and koneko have known him to be a certain way since he was young. he’s shown to have this perverted personality since he was quite young and it’s even mentioned in an extra concerning why suguro and koneko use his last name and not his first. these two factors lead me to believe his attraction to izumo and subsequently, his attraction to women, is just a lie he’s putting on.

koneko:

sexuality + gender identity: pansexual and genderfluid

reason: koneko is shown to have a deep love and care for the people around him and i think that not only applies to him with friendship, but with romance as well. like yukio, he tends not to focus on the gender of the person perusing him, but rather their intention, personally, and motivations. he wants to know if his partner is a good person rather than their gender. gender wise, i just don’t think he cares. it’s not explicitly shown but it can be heavily implied when he talks to rin about why he has a hard time trusting him after the “son of satan “ reveil happens. for gender identity, i think i as a kid, he was commonly referred to by most pronouns since he wasn’t exactly the most “boy looking” when he was young. later on he learned he didn’t exactly mind what gender people perceived him as but rather how they perceived him as a person. there’s no canon information for the genderfluid headcanon but again, these are my personal headcanon, they don’t exactly have to make sense.

suguro:

sexuality + gender identity: gay and trans (ftm)

reason: this one is mostly me projecting onto this man so if it doesn’t exactly make sense, y’all know why! but he’s shown to be quite affectionate to rin in both the manga and the anime. he doesn’t really tend to do that too much to other people, especially the women that are around him. he probably has some sort of crush on rin or at least some form of admiration to him. as for his gender identity, this is literally just me projecting. that’s it. but i think he does show some signs that i tend to show as a trans person ( the one example i can name off the top of my head is that he seems pretty insecure when shima and koneko brought up his body before he started working out and hates mentions of his body in general ). like rin, he tends to have very poor posture and also doesn’t wear form fitting clothes and this is especially prominent in official art.

izumo:

sexuality: lesbian

reason: she has a very deep relationship with paku and shiemi after the events of the manga take place. she never shows this same connection with any one else throughout the series. she gets severely worried once paku leave cram school and is shown to be quite empty after this happens. ‼️‼️SPOILERS‼️‼️ the same thing happens once shiemi leaves cram school as well and is taken by her family to go train. she seems to be deeply affected by these two events and even goes as far as to show the others her concerns after the thing with shiemi happens. after she ‼️SPOILERS‼️ gets kidnapped by the illuminati and winds up the the hospital, shimei is the first person she lets see her true emotions and feelings and doesn’t once make a comment on her being some kind of hindrance. we also see her show quite a bit of empathy towards shiemi when in kyoto. there’s a scene where they two are gardening and she calls shiemi a weed. she’s very much plays into a tsudere type roll in the beginning but this seems more like a backhanded compliment rather than trying to be a jerk to her. both of the girls receive this interaction in a positive way. we also can use the scene where shiemi saves izumo as a reason for this as well. izumo shows a genuine concern for shiemi both during and after her being stuck in the miasma. even when they go to the hot springs, she seems to have this perpetual blush while looking at shiemi. these all lead me to think she has some sort of feelings toward both paku and shiemi, leading me to headcanon her as a lesbian.

shura:

sexuality: lesbian

she was basically born just so she could produce a child to fuel some demons deep desires. her unhealthy attachment to shiro can be explained by this. i think this is the case for all the “attraction” she showed towards him as a young girl. all her life she’s been told she has to have kids with a man and that’s was her purpose for a long time. thus why i think she’s a lesbian. she never shows any real attraction to a man throughout the entire series besides the man who saved her as a child. she never talks about men till after her character arc in the manga and even then, it seems she just wants to live the rest of her life differently than before and doesn’t exactly seem too enthusiastic about finding a husband as it’s never mentioned again after that point. she really only seems to show an “attraction” to men when it’s useful to her. she uses her looks and charm to get what she wants when it comes to men. she has this facade she puts on where she acts innocent and cute and uses her looks to her advantage. she never truly shows an actual attraction to a man.

mephisto:

sexuality + gender identity: gay and genderfluid

reason: i don’t think any of the demon kings are cis. like not even remotely. they all have to take on different forms and have taken on many in the past. as long as it’s a body, they’re basically fine with whatever. mephs past forms are never shown but we can assume he’s taken on many different body’s in the past as well. after all this body hopping and the fact that gender is literally a thing made up by humans, i don’t think meph really cares about the forms he takes and how his gender is perceived. he knows he’s a powerful demon and could easily destroy the knights of the true cross if he wanted too so gender is the last thing he really cares about. as for sexuality, nothing on screen really points to anything but he tends to show more affection to the men on screen than the women. in fact, the only women we see him really interact with (that i can remember) is shura and we all know how they feel about each other. even though those two both “flirt” with one another, these seem to be more so parts of their personality’s rather than them both having an interest in each other. his “flirting” with shura seems to be more taunting her and displaying his absolute discard for human problems.

amaimon:

gender identity: agender

reason: just like meph, amimon had possessed(?) many different forms over the course of their existence. we even see him take on a rather feminine presenting form when they were destroying the earth. but unlike meph, he is less fluid in terms of gender and instead, prefers to not identify with one. she does use all pronouns and doesn’t exactly care on that front but i think there’s certain terms and compliments they don’t exactly like. meph does use gendered terms with amimon, but these two seem to be very close and have probably communicated this before as well. like koneko being genderfluid, there’s no definitive evidence to support this claim other than these are my own headcanons and i can do what i want.

[ardenttheories]

A random thought, but I think a lot of us are using the word “coded” wrong.

Typically, “coded” means that the character was intentionally written to read as a specific race/gender/culture/religion/sexuality, but was not allowed to be - or was not in a position to be - presented that way.

An example of this are the gems from Steven Universe. Garnet, for instance, is heavily black coded. She’s voiced by a black woman, has hair similar in style and shape, has similar body proportions, has similar speech patterns - you couldn’t look at Garnet and claim that she’s white, because she’s clearly coded to be black. The only reason she isn’t black is because she’s an alien with skin the same colour as her gem. 

It was an intentional effort on the writers’ part to make her black coded. They put thought and effort into presenting her in this specific way, to offer representation for black women - especially sapphic black women - even when the main character is nonhuman. To make it obvious that, yes, this character is meant to be you.

What isn’t coding, however, is when writers accidentally write a character one way when they completely intended to write them another.

The most recent thing I can think of for this is Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot. There’s so many hints towards her being trans - the scene where she’s getting all dolled up, a scene where what looks like a trans flag is on the wall, the general way she behaves especially about traditionally feminine things - that the fandom read into but weren’t actually there.

The writer/creator confirmed this. Jenny isn’t trans. That doesn’t mean that we can’t view her as trans, or that we can’t headcanon her as such, and the writer himself has encouraged that reading with pride that she could be something for the trans community - but she was never written or intended to be trans. It’s not the same as genuine representation. 

Being able to read into a character isn’t the same as them genuinely being coded that way. This is why, for instance, people can read John as both transmasc and transfem; he was only ever written as your typical cishet American kid, but some of his experiences and actions are reminiscent of what trans people experience. It’s just enough to read into, but not coded to a point of confirmation one way or another. 

This is also why it’s harder to read Roxy as transmasc. Roxy is inherently written as a cis woman. Hussie admittedly got better about his writing and it’s therefore easier to read her as a trans woman, but even she’s not coded enough that you can say with absolute certainty that the specific reading is what Hussie intended. It’s even less viable that Hussie actually wrote her from the start as transmasc. 

Homestuck-era characters are inherently cis. It’s an unfortunate fact that will never change. Hussie never introduced the concept of gender identity and revelations - such as he did with gender identities, which were a big fucking part of character progression throughout the story - because he never wrote the characters to require them. I deeply suspect that he waited till Homestuck was over to save the integrity of his characters as cis, and only now, in his non-canonical post-canon, are we seeing him begin to change his cis coding. 

Except he’s still using the same cis coded characters and randomly slapping on labels. However we read them isn’t how he wrote them, and they aren’t experiences he (or his team, for that matter) are all that good at capturing. This is going to be a big issue for him as HS2 goes on. Case in point, transmasc Roxy instead of transfem Roxy, and the already-neglected attempt to canonise nonbinary Calliope - alongside the inherent cisery of Ultimate Dirk when he’s predominantly read as transmasc. 

Or, it would be, if he even cared enough to remain on the HS2 writing team to begin with. 

Basically, what we need is more coded characters in Homestuck. We need characters that were always intentionally written as trans to be our trans representation. Our identities shouldn’t be afterthoughts or products of fandom vocality only. 

We have the chance to code the Omega Kids as something other than cis, and to write genuine trans identities with trans people on the writing team from the beginning. Of course we’ve had issues in the past (re: Lanque as transmasc rep and Vriska as transfem rep), but this is their chance to do it right.  

[bronanlynch]

recent media consumption summary time

could’ve sworn the last one was only two weeks ago but apparently it was three. sorry for becoming unmoored from the passage of linear time

listening: you know when you use a song lyric as a fic title and then you get that song stuck in your head for the next week? anyway Whirlpool by Sea Wolf sure is a song that I enjoy and also have had stuck in my head for a week. I feel like I should have smarted musical things to say here but I like Sea Wolf, they’re nice to listen to, they’re sad man with guitar music without being identical to every other sad man with guitar band

reading: finished my reread of Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, and my main thought this time around is that I love Kaz with my whole entire heart. also love a good multi-layered heist scheme. also also Wylan/Jesper is cute but I do think they don’t get nearly as much relationship development as the two m/f couples and like, I really like these books but that is very much a trend especially in sff YA these days

also finished Lord Seventh (Qi Ye) by Priest and. god I love the characters so much. a friend group can just be a bunch of horrible gay people pining for each other and betraying each other in order to save each other’s lives. extremely tasty. also,

(I would say that missed opportunity is my one complaint but like. my actual main complaint is that as much as I love the characters, I think that if the racism in your text is blatant enough that I, a white american with very little knowledge of the specific racial coding happening can pick up on it, then it’s uh. probably pretty blatant and that’s Not Great)

also did some pride month impulse purchases at my local indie bookstore, including Molly Knox Ostertag’s The Girl from the Sea, a lesbian selkie graphic novel, which did so many things to my heart. first of all the art is so pretty

second of all, I too have been lonely and starting to realize that I’m gay while living in a beach town with a summer tourism economy, drifting apart from a friend group that I didn’t feel like I was part of and wishing I was literally anywhere else even though I loved the ocean. third of all, gay selkies

also read The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon which I enjoyed even though I am definitely not the target audience for first person present tense novels, even if those novels are portal fantasies about fae power struggles and arranged marriages. I really enjoyed the three main characters and their relationships, and the worldbuilding was fun, though the twist at the end (and lots of parts of the ending tbh) felt a little bit abrupt to me. also, and this is a personal thing, but someday I would love to read a fantasy novel with a transmasc character that actually feels like it reflects my experiences. I guess that’s part of the problem with looking for this in YA, but that’s where I tend to see transmasc protagonists so here I am. anyway, valid for anyone but especially trans teens to want to read a narrative about someone being loud and open about their identity but that’s not my experience. which I think is why I tend to construct my own trans narratives around characters who like, aren’t canonically trans but have themes about lying and hiding and being defensive about their image because *that’s* a trans experience I actually relate to.

I’ve started In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens, which is not a book I intended to buy but 1) look at the cover

2) I am weak for gay people on the sea. it’s fun so far, I’m not expecting any sort of in-depth anything about royal power but it’s cute and light and I’m having a good time. my main complaint is again a personal thing, which is not actually a complaint about the book itself and more about twitter discourse about how there should never be homophobia in sff that takes place in different worlds and how we’ve had enough of that so everything should take place in a world where it’s fine and normal to be queer. and again, that’s fine! I do enjoy books like that! I am currently enjoying a book like that! but again, I have a harder time relating to characters whose queerness isn’t mediated by fear the way mine is (this book sidesteps that by making the main character a very anxious person, which helps increase the relatability, but also. there’s this whole thing about how people distrust him and there are rumors about his ~perversion and yeah it’s about his secret hidden magic but. felt very weird to have that set-up and then not have homophobia play any part in the way other people talk about him, y’know? like please, stigmatized magic as a parallel for stigmatized sexuality is Right There)

watching: finished Nirvana in Fire and am having lots of normal and moderate emotions about it. belongs in my mental categories of “media I want to consume over and over again and take it apart and figure out how to write like that” and also “things I want to rewatch when I have enough energy to appreciate it” because I do think if I weren’t so tired these days I could’ve tried to have predictions instead of waiting for the characters to explain their plans to me, as much as I do love it when attractive people smirk at the screen and monologue about their schemes

also watched most of Castlevania season 4 (I have 3 episodes left) and it’s. well. it’s not Good but it’s a lot better than season 3. however, I only care about a few of the plotlines and everything else is kinda boring. I like Alucard’s plotline and I like Greta and I liked the two scenes where Hector and Isaac interacted and I liked the vampire lesbians deciding that being gay was more important to them than doing war crimes. cannot be bothered to care about anything else though, especially St. Germain. more importantly, Alucard’s new look fucks. love the whole cape + tits out thing.

finally got around to watching the end of the first season of Elementary and once again, I enjoy it when people explain complicated plans to me. love a good mystery. also, predictably, I’m in love with Moriarty. her first two dates with Sherlock are about art forgery and Roman artifacts in the London sewers, how was I supposed to *not* fall in love with her. also every time she interacts with Joan after the reveal has extremely homoerotic energy. ladies is it gay to become psychosexually obsessed with a woman who outplotted you

also, very importantly, my roommate realized I’d never seen Tsubasa OVAs, and they sure are an experience. I read the entire manga in like two days in a fugue state last winter and remember very little of the plot of the second half of the story, so the second OVA which is like. a random section of the late plot was kind of a lot to try to process at once, though I do appreciate one of the main ships doing a Gift of the Magi thing except instead of selling treasured possessions to get each other gifts they’re sacrificing parts of themselves. however the first one is my favorite arc, because it should not surprise anyone that the post-apocalyptic vampire arc is my favorite. also, I don’t need to remember the actual plot to remember and appreciate how much of an Eliot-core character Fai is. look at him. prettyboy ice wizard pretending to be flirty and performatively useless to hide his trauma. also he’s a vampire. he sets off the cosplay and gender envy parts of my brain so much

playing: nothing new since last time, just more Tidepools and Beam Saber. maybe someday I will play a video game again

making: got to cook for just the two of us last week instead of having to find something that everyone would eat, so Zan and I finally got to make chicken marsala from this recipe and it was extremely good. next time we’re gonna double the mushrooms though I think, the recipe didn’t make quite enough compared to the amount of chicken

someday I will make non-food things again but unfortunately, when most of your energy has to go to either cooking and cleaning for other people or trying to get other people to cook and clean,

writing: posted three new fics: the Persona selkie AU, the Nirvana in Fire miserable sapphic makeout fic, and a slice-of-life Persona fic for an exchange, and worked on a couple of other things that are still secret for zine reasons