#but tbh most of my headcanons about characters being trans (and I have a fair few) have them as post-transition

[amplexadversary]

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[narrativelysignificantturtleduck]

yknow in regards to trans hcs, im surprised not more people hc sokka as trans. obviously there are more than a lot of the other characters, but when someone asked me if i had any trans hcs once, I thought abt it and the conclusion I came to was Sokka

i feel like i've seen a fair amount of people headcanon him as nonbinary, which falls under the trans umbrella depending on how you define things. that's where i'm at with him. sokka puts a lot of pressure on himself to live up to a warrior-masculine ideal, and his arc is about realizing his strengths outside of that - creativity versatility intelligence, as piandao put it. and while that could just be an arc about learning to embrace a different kind of masculinity, it's an arc that includes a scene of him dressing in drag and looking down at himself in awe, as well as the scene i put at the beginning of my queer sokka compilation. (the tags on that vid were mostly "omg he's bisexual" which isn't wrong but i threw that in as a nod to him being nonbinary.) i don't think he's transfem - i think most of his issues with masculinity are about the narrow ideal of it - but i do think he'd be comfortable playing around with different gender expressions and wouldn't mind being gendered differently in the kyoshi warrior uniform.

being the scientific guy (gender neutral) that he is, i imagine at some point post canon he's like "well when you analyze gender it really doesn't make any sense! like if women aren't better at sewing and men aren't better at war and it's just some anatomy what's the point? plus anatomy isn't even that binary! gender is ridiculous!" he's baffled when other people agree with him but also affirm that they identify with a gender. objectively speaking, gender is stupid? why would you do that?

(to be honest sokka, i don't know. because that is very much my view of gender and yet when i questioned my identity i still came to the conclusion that i'm a cis woman. my gender is "girl, but on purpose this time".)

i've also seen transmasc sokka, where his struggles with masculinity are because he feels he needs to prove it extra hard. that's a pretty interesting take but not the one i feel personally. he more strikes me as someone who's rigidly stuck in what he thinks he was born to be. he idolizes his father as the warrior ideal he's supposed to live up to, not realizing he can have a sense of self outside that legacy. i think an important step in sokka's gender journey would be realizing his dad is not some hyper-manly warrior. according to bato's stories, hakoda's a fun goofy guy who loves coming up with pranks and riding animals (very aang-like, tbh). like i've said, the vibe i get from him is dad who builds legos and tinkers around with shit in his garage. not gender non-conforming, exactly, but definitely not hypermasculine. also i think hakoda's bisexual.

basically, i'm right with you. i definitely think sokka's got some gender shit going on

[roostertuftart]

For the character thing, Butters?

Sexuality headcanon- Tentative bisexual. More into women, I think? Or at least femininity. But he's not purely gynosexual! Just mostly ig.

OTP- I feel bad because I barely ship Butters with like... Anyone tbh. I like Bunny and Stutters the most probably but I wouldn't say they're ships I think about frequently. Well... Bunny kind of but usually more as a plot device than something I just find cute. I find Bunny very interesting though.

brotp- BUNNYYYY, love Kenny and Butters as best friends. They're great together. I love them being fairly supportive of each other and Butters being super attached to Kenny.

notp- Kyutters. Sorry, just can't see it nor do I find it interesting Ig.

I ADORE Kyle and Butters' dynamic- I like that they seem to not regard each other very highly, particularly Butters towards Kyle, I like that they're so dysfunctional as people who are both victims and it's sort of resulted in them pitted against each other rather than the real enemy. I actually really enjoy them getting to be close friends but capable of being pretty brutally honest towards each other as both are fairly critical of the other. But romance? Idk. Not into it.

first headcanon that pops into my head- It's hardly a headcanon at this point but the idea that he still grows up to be a great businessman and probably into a healthier version of what Vic Chaos was

EDIT: ALSO TRANS FEM BUTTERS FTW. Though I like cis Butters too. my butters headcanons r varied and not strict

favorite line from this character- "We can shoot up the school!" or tbh his whole speech at the end of Butterballs.

one way in which I relate to this character- Ummm I actually relate to him a lot in having been kind of the "weird autistic" kid growing up who was pretty naive and often left out or messed with by other kids. Not to get too deep into my psyche or whatever but basically, it caused me to begin to resent what I saw as other people's naivete or ignorance for a long time purely bc of what it reminded me of in myself. I used to not like Butters as much because it felt so much to me like something I despised about myself. These feelings are something I've worked on since, obviously, since I don't think it's a fair perspective to have (and even built on some internalized ableism!!), plus I still have these naïve moments myself, as does everyone! But I think it's sorta interesting how much it warped my early view of this character.

thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character- Oop. Well. I guess the above also answers that.

cinnamon roll or problematic fave?- Both he can be such a MONSTER but also such a sweetheart. He needs therapy above all.

Here's the prompt for anyone else!

[snapedefender]

Hi! Recently discovered your blog and really love it! I've been making my way through your posts (as I'm sure you've noticed, sorry) and I've noticed that some from like 2018ish are still pretty relevant to Snape discussions today. I'm fairly new to the fandom so I was wondering: have the anti snape people just been recycling the same talking points for the past 4-5 years? That would be kind of depressing if so, since so many of these arguments are just bad and you'd think that they'd trickle out as people realize it... Or have you noticed some definite trends in the arguments and talking points surrounding Snape that have changed over the years?

it's funny bc i dont really pay that much attention to notifications (every once in a while i dive in to see if there's any responses/tags i want to respond to, but otherwise they're white noise 2 me) but i can always tell when someone's just found this blog bc a lot of times i'll get so many notifs from them in a row. so no need to say sorry! there's no bigger compliment to me than someone who wants to keep all my opinions about snape lmao.

anyway, hand to god, i'm pretty sure anti-snape people decided on their four arguments about ten years back and have just been recycling them with different wording ever since. there are arguments i remember seeing in ye olde harry potter fandom that are almost unchanged today. the pervasive idea of snape as a creepy stalker, that snape traumatized neville, and that snape willing gave up harry and james to "have" lily are the three i've noticed just have stuck around for so, so, so long. it's VERY frustrating.

to be fair, hp has regurgitated plenty of fandom discourse just by way of being a long-lived fandom with a healthy and quarrelsome fan base. but the snape arguments in particular always seem especially long-lived. i don't think i noticed exactly how repetitive they were until i ran this blog and started seeing them crop up over and over (and over and over).

in the anti arguments, the main thing i've noticed though is the same thing i think everyone's noticed about the way people talk about characters they don't like - there's so many social justice buzzwords thrown in to "prove" a character is "problematic." back in ye olde hp fandom days, there were plenty of people who didn't like snape and there were shipping wars and such (jilly vs snilly and so on) but the vitriol about snape being abusive and problematic and so on is something that's a more recent trend and is really born out of the way people need to make characters they dislike morally bad so they can feel justified in it. (the inverse is also true - the push to make james and the marauders feminists and such all comes from the desire to make characters we like better/less "problematic.") there's been a much steadier shift from "i don't like snape and i think he's mean" to "i think snape is actually the most evil, abusive character who traumatizes children for fun and doesn't mind killing babies" (all arguments i've seen at least once if not multiple times lol).

on the flip side, from the pro-snape camp, i feel like the arguments around snape have become more nuanced and there's been a lot more mining of material. that said, there's also a lot more defensiveness - whereas before there could be a live and let live attitude about anti snape people, now it really does feel like you have to defend on all sides just to say something about a fictional character you like. so that leads to a lot more snappish discourse than there used to be over snape on both sides tbh.

but aside from discourse, the trend i've really loved seeing is how much more we've pushed to examine snape's identity - the uptick in ace!snape and trans!snape headcanons, the queer shipping with snape, and so on are much more varied than back in the old days where you basically had... snilly as a major pairing and snape as a het white dude and that was it. (at least in my corner of fandom!)

[strangestcase]

Not the anon and so sorry for dragging this out but it's said that jekyll is like that because Jekyll has "internalized queerphobia" but he's like, actively harming Jasper, a trans character and it's giving me bad vibes tbh as a trans man but I'd never say it bc I'm sure I'd anger some A LOT

there's ways to make characters have internalized queerphobia without being... you know. making them like that.

I would have gone for Jekyll going. "oh." and you know. being WORRIED. or making clumsy questions to sate his curiosity. or even, idk, becoming an overbearing gay dad extremely worried his trans son is going to get hurt.

internalized queerphobia stops being internalized when you hurt other people. it's THAT easy. but I'm going to be fair, I expected some goof of this sort to end up happening.

also... not to be that guy but I would have not... you know, done that if only because trans man Jekyll is a popular headcanon in the Jekyll and hyde fandom and a lot of TGS readers liked and encouraged this headcanon too (me included!! Jekyll is a very transgender character if you catch my drift)

just... tone deaf, tone deaf. there's other ways you can make a flawed protagonist and turning one of pop culture's most prominent canonically mlm characters into a low-key transphobe feels. shitty.

though being fair I stopped reading the comic after I realized the fandom was being very gross about Jekyll's mental health, with the author not putting a stop to their characters being turned into eye candy by fujoshi, and decided to never touch it again when the whole thing with Eli came out (I encountered it randomly in the jh tags and I made the biggest facepalm ever) so... hm, I can't say I'm that surprised.

[lilyhoshikawa]

🎥🎶💕🏳‍🌈💎 for hunters perhaps? >:3c

Oh golly! Ok fndkfnfn let me do this then. This may be difficult-

🎥: Do you have any favorite scenes from your hyperfixation?

This is hard bc I have a lot of scenes I like and good scenes keep happening dhdjfn.

There are a lot of stand-outs so far. Among them is definitely like, the confrontation in the car between Blake and Sakio, and the recent social link scene with Blake and Lena on the boat.

Scenes that DON’T involve my own character that I adore include. The scene with Sakio and Camellia at the graveyard. The scene with with Lena and Twitch outside the store. The Sammy’s scene where they read Tango’s letter. Also the scene with Sammy and Masumi bc it was just extremely funny.

🎶: If your hyperfixation has songs / an OST, what is your favorite song from it?

Hm. Well time once again to advertise my Blake playlist, which I’m constantly putting a lot of work and thought into tbh dhjddb, I’ve deleted a fair number of songs from it when I feel they don’t fit, and I’m constantly messing with the order of the songs in relation to Blake’s prospective characters arc, and adding more as I find them fndkfnf I’m always on the lookout.

Also, vane is constantly updating the official playlist with some real bangers, and I appreciate that. Amil’s and Twitch’s themes are real good.

💕: Tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them!

Everybody has really really good characters, heck. One thing that strikes me is that even with taking the backseat and having to be on autopilot for several sessions, Camellia still has such a strong and distinct personality, to the point where everyone is on the same page abt them, and I think that’s just really amazing dhdjfjf, that’s how strong an impression they make every time they’re around.

Lena is also so good, she’s like… I think abt her frequently. Sometimes I just start giggling when I think abt Lena, bc she is a national treasure, and I hope she knows I care abt her. She’s great in this way that she’s both very funny/cute and also has a lot of depth and nuance to her arc, and I’m so excited for more.

In the same vein, Sammy. No one character has made me go from giggling to sobbing as fast as this green goat. One moment Sammy is making their cat do a little greeting and I’m rolling on the floor from the cuteness, and then the next second they’re crying and saying they don’t want to be left behind, and then I am also crying. How do they do it. The absolute range.

I also really appreciate Ilse like, particularly in contrast to Blake sometimes, in that Ilse is very smart in a way that’s quiet, self-conscious and careful, while Blake is at times recklessly arrogant, and those two bounce off each other well. Ilse feels mature at times but every time they quietly like, try to be the bigger person, or to not make a problem of themselves, I wanna give them a hug and be like “u deserve to be recognized and acknowledged and u deserve better” dhdjdndjdn. When u have big personalities like Sakio and Lena and Blake in the party there’s something compelling abt Ilse being with them and not asserting themselves as they try to do their best, if that makes sense, and I want them to know I see and appreciate them.

Sakio is also so good and I’ve talked abt this to vane plenty before but holy shit. There’s so much obvious care and love and effort and skill that went into writing a character who is both wrong in many ways, and who many player characters antagonize for good reason, and yet still so incredibly sympathetic, so likable and so compelling. The fact that both Blake and Lena have this relationship with Sakio where they don’t like or trust her, necessarily, but also can’t deal with her not being there, is so fucking good, it creates such powerful conflict in the smallest of ways. Sakio is great bc I love her and I understand her and I appreciate her, but I also wanna yell at her and think she is absolutely horribly wrong about incredibly crucial things and u can FEEL that turmoil in her as well, with her knowing on some level that her actions are going to cause harm, and she’s just waiting and hoping to take the fall, thinking, maybe foolishly, that she can, and that doing so will save everyone else.

I also fucking love so many minor characters we haven’t seen much of so far. I absolutely love Bee and I’ve told vane abt this but she’s just a total icon. Theo is also great, he is the only valid he/him in the entire campaign djdkfj. I love Twitch as well and I’m very excited for some of the interesting stuff in Twitch’s arc that has been hinted at coming to fruition later on, that’s very exciting. I’m also very excited to learn more abt Amil’s whole deal, I appreciate them a lot and I feel bad every time I have to make Blake come pester them fndkfnf. Oh also Prim, how did I forget Prim… what’s going on with her, I have no idea, but she’s a mean lady and my love for mean ladies is well-documented. Also her look is iconic. Also also Puck, the fact that he’s a child and I didn’t know it for several months shocked me to my core but it has made his brand of Shakespearean mischief that much more endearing, and now I seek only to give him snacks and let him sit in his funny garbage throne. I forgot abt Puck earlier so I’ll say he is the second valid he/him in the campaign but frankly I think Puck should take some neopronouns for a spin, he deserves it.

🏳️‍🌈: Do you have any headcanons (LGBT, race, neuro, etc.) that are important to you?

(*throws neurological disorders at Blake*) jdkdnfkf no but jokes aside. I love that this party is like, 5 player characters, 4 of whom use they/them. Just. The raw power of a persona series written by LGBT+ ppl…

I can’t speak on other ppl’s characters too much but as for Blake, they’re a closeted transfem and also too much of a disaster for a coherent sexuality but probably bi. Autistic, and an abuse survivor who experiences paranoid delusions and self-destructive tendencies. Probably more, but specifics are messy, they’re a fucking mess, what’s going on with them, they don’t even know.

Masumi is a binary trans lesbian, also an abuse survivor and manages quite a bit of paranoia of her own, dealing with mood swings and occasional delusions of grandeur, most of it she keeps internally managed which isn’t great for her mental health.

💎: Are there any fun facts or trivia that you would like to share?

Blake’s original characterization was thought up prior to the campaign and was very different from their finished characterization. They lived on a farm with their parents and were pretty quiet and passive before being arrested for a murder they didn’t commit (this part is the same) and their personality was way more quiet, reserved and passive, with the whole celebrity aspect completely absent. They were still going to be the sort of clever leader type character but leaned far more into the background. Their design was also different, with their hair in a low ponytail rather than high and scars on their face from scrapes and accidents working on the farm.

I realized that, even though this character was more of an original idea than Masumi (who I was playing in another campaign at the time and who was characterized somewhat differently as well) I didn’t find myself excited to write them, couldn’t get invested in them in the same way, and as I kept workshopping them I decided to be more self-indulgent and lean more into shamelessly making them an Akechi expy in more ways.

And what resulted from that, ironically, is what I feel is a better character in the end. Blake feels more dynamic, lively and interesting now than the old iteration I first thought up, back when I was intent on making them My Own Creation with their own arc. At this point I’m comfortable saying that Blake, for all their similarities to Akechi, has evolved over the course of the campaign into a more interesting character, into someone I recognize as distinctly different and who stands out. They feel unique to me, and feel like my own character. And I think that only could’ve happened through playing them in a TTRPG like this, in developing them along with others, and having to adapt, and I think that’s the beautiful thing about developing characters with other people. The Blake I’ve ended up with is one I’m really happy with, who I feel is more interesting and dynamic to me than if I had just tried to force something unique just to not feel cringe about making an expy. And maybe I need to learn that lesson before I go through the same thing with Zee fjdkfnf.

[maxbernini]

Can you please do all 4 cashqueens for the meme you just reblogged? :D?

i sure can!! putting this under a read-more so i have free range to be as annoyingly long as possible 😍

ava pereira sexuality headcanon: bisexual icon gender headcanon: idk if i have a specific one?? but i do think we’re long overdue for a trans girl in the skamverse, and i like trans ava a ship i have with said character: a part of me will always yearn for the superior nooreva (nora & ava, i refuse to believe the names were coincidences lmao), but i think yara/ava would also be an incheresting concept...both of them being supportive friends who aren’t afraid to tell it as it is. don’t think that’ll happen so maybe one of josh’s yet to be explored friends? a BROTP i have with said character: i love that they’ve emphasized her and fatou’s friendship. like yes cashqueens forever but i don’t think it’s inherently wrong to be closer with specific people in a group, and she & fatou are very sweet, very iconic. loved their insta story shopping trip :’) a NOTP i have with said character: it's not that i think constantin/ismail are unredeemable it's just that i don’t like redemption via love stories and. they literally bullied her? to the point where she wanted to go to america? a random headcanon: she definitely runs/ran a fandom blog at one point, and maybe also wrote fanfiction. i can’t find it rn but that fan art based on the cashqueens finding out about destiel being canon?? i’m obsessed general opinion over said character: i love her!!! so much!!! i love when she’s smiling and it takes over her whole face :’) she reminds me so much of my irl friends and honestly i think she’s the most realistic character in the new gen. she’s fair and supportive but has her limits, she’s insecure but still confident, she’s funny and friendly yet still kinda awkward. like she didn’t IMMEDIATELY warm to nora, they still had their awkward silence scene, and i just love it + her.

fatou jallow sexuality headcanon: canon lesbian icon gender headcanon: would LOVE nonbinary lesbian fatou and for her season to explore how she navigates gender & sexuality & expression as a black german teen (@ druck please give us the eskild figure skam austin never did) a ship i have with said character: druck are literally serving us frenemies to friends to lovers AND skater girl x popular secretly soft mean girl can you believe a BROTP i have with said character: ava as mentioned above but i do love her and nora’s friendship, especially how casually touchy they are with each other. i know there was a week when nora was getting shipped with EVERY character we met but i think fatou/nora works best as wlw besties a NOTP i have with said character: fatou x men a random headcanon: she 100% tried to start an anime club at school, to moderate success a general opinion over said character: i don’t like how it was juxtaposed with ava re: their reactions to nora, but i do love how chill she is. i think a remake fails when their characters aren’t people you’d wanna be friends with but i def want to be friends with fatou

nora machwitz sexuality headcanon: yet another bisexual icon. although why do i feel like she embraces the sapphic label specifically djdkdkdk idk just the vibes gender headcanon: again i haven’t thought much about this one but it would be very iconic of druck for there to be no cis or straight girls in the cashqueens a ship i have with said character: josh!! wish i could explain the shot of serotonin i got when he jumped down from the roof. they’re so...good. flawed, but good, and always wanting to do and be better. and the HANDS of it all. a BROTP i have with said character: outside of the cashqueens i think her & zoe’s relationship is most interesting to me and would love more background growth there in future seasons. also kieu my vu a NOTP i have with said character: constantin a random headcanon: she and josh are BOTH bisexual, the ultimate wlw/mlm solidarity, and she draws them shirts for pride. a general opinion over said character: i simply want to give her a hug :’) i think she would probably benefit from being more open but rome wasn’t built in a day and i’m so excited to see her play the supportive friend role in seasons to come

mailin richter sexuality headcanon: closeted lesbian who thinks she’s just a really overinvested straight ally icon gender headcanon: nonbinary lesbian mailin would also be fun esp. if they compared her experiences with fatou’s (me talking about this as if either would happen 💀) a ship i have with said character: maybe yara again?? don’t really have a specific ship atm tbh a BROTP i have with said character: love the idea of her having a mini crush on fatou that never goes anywhere BUT fatou is the first person she comes out to a NOTP i have with said character: other than the davenzi hallway parallel i never got the vibes with her & nora and fandom’s preference for mailin/nora > spiderwitz annoys me to the point where i almost actively dislike them as a ship a random headcanon: she got her love of gardening (and thus eventually climate activism) from her grandmother; they used to garden together a general opinion over said character: i love how funny she lowkey is?? idk if it was intended that way but when she told the cashqueens someone could steal the insta gang’s money, and then she told the insta gang the same thing, and THEN she stole the money herself djfkfkfkf peak comedy to me

[thealpacalypse-archive]

A handy guide to avoid accidental transphobia

For cis people in the Druck fandom who write fic, headcanons or meta and don’t wanna mess up 

Including questions like: Is David trans? Is he beautiful? Is he wearing a binder this whole damn time?? What’s his story?

hey everybody, I’ve debated making this post for a while now because I don’t want to seem ungrateful to the people who are already trying, and I know that there are other trans people in this fandom who are already doing a pretty good job educating people, but then again, why not share my thoughts as well. 

In this post, I’ll collect a few headcanons, meta, and other discussions that i’ve seen around here and that made me personally uncomfortable - now be aware that i’m only one trans person and that other people can have other opinions on this, but also i’ve done trans activism for a few years now and i’m a gender studies major, so I definitely know what i’m talking about. also, a fair warning: this is gonna get long as heck. okay, let’s go.

Is David trans? The truth is: We don’t know yet. We only know that the actor who plays him, Lukas Alexander, is a trans guy. Now I’ve seen various people speculate if that automatically has to mean that David is trans as well, and obviously, no. David could be cis for all we know, and yes, casting trans actors in cis roles can be a pretty cool thing. However, if you’re cis, it would be cool if you reblog trans people’s opinions on this instead of shouting loudly about your own opinion, especially if it is that David should be cis for whatever reason. Why is that problematic? Trans activists are currently fighting for representation in media. There aren’t many trans characters we can look up to, especially not such young characters in a show that has such a big impact on a generation of young people. Many trans teenagers have never seen themselves represented in media, and many trans adults like myself are still craving for that good, good representation. Most of the time when we get trans characters, they’re played by cis actors - and because it’s mostly cis men who play trans women and cis women who play trans men, it perpetuates the idea that trans people are just especially well dressed up men and women who trick people into believing they’re ‘the other sex’. (ugh) Even though that’s a different problem, it links to this one as well, because trans stories in media are rare, and it’s even rarer to have them portrayed by trans actors. Yes, it would be revolutionary and gender-redefining if trans actors could play cis characters (or just characters whose cis or trans status is never brought up in the first place), but that’s one step ahead of the game in my opinion and tbh, cis people saying that they want David to be cis for whatever reason is just... suspicious.

Is David beautiful? Well, I’m sure we can all agree that this boy is a sight for sore eyes, and i’m pretty proud of this fandom for weeding out the transphobic assholes who called him ugly at the beginning of the season. I’m sure by now they’ve all seen the error of their ways because HECK, in levels of attractiveness, David is a king. Though it might not be the best to call him ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’ or other usually female-gendered words when you’re cis and describing him. Why is that problematic? Listen, there’s absolutely nothing inherently bad about calling boys pretty or beautiful or whatever - I personally am an absolute goner when it comes to soft boys™ and their aesthetics, and I also think that denying boys to be soft and pretty is misogyny in a way, because it’s implying that female-coded things are bad. However, there are many trans boys (and other trans and nonbinary folks who were assigned female at birth) who feel uncomfortable when these words are used for them because it can be linked to misgendering or remind them of times before they were out. Trans people are often highly aware of their body and looks, because the way we look is heavily observed, judged and policed by society, and most of the time, being seen the (gendered) way we identify is the only way we get respect and basic decency. We don’t know yet if David personally has a problem with being called beautiful or whatever, but we also don’t know how the actor who plays him feels about that, and there are a couple of trans boys in this fandom who’ve already expressed their discomfort with these words. So in order to protect them and make this fandom safe for them, it seems like a small price to pay to consider our choice of words more carefully when we describe David, and try to avoid female-coded words.

What about David’s chest? Now this one is tricky. I’ve seen discussions about it a lot: Does David wear a binder, did he wear it the whole time he was with Matteo, does he maybe not even bind, did he have a mastectomy? The underlying tone of these discussions is worry - we all want David to be safe and comfortable, and seriously, let me tell you once and for all: a binder shouldn’t be worn longer than 8 hours a day, it shouldn’t be worn when sleeping, and it shouldn’t be worn when doing sports (also relevant for our jock boy). It’s not safe and it can heavily damage the breast tissue, ribs, and lungs - it can be literally life-threatening. It’s perfectly fine to worry about this, but it still feels uncomfortable to watch cis people debate the state of a trans boy’s body in such detail. Why is that problematic? Trans people’s bodies have always been scrutinized and judged - by medicine, by the state, by society as a whole. We always have to prove ourselves and our bodies, and convince people that we’re not just tricking them into believing we’re someone we are not. A lot of ‘true womanhood’ or ‘true manhood’ apparently revolves around genitalia, at least cis people seem to think so. Which is why so many trans people (and let’s be real here, especially trans women) have to deal with the question: “Have you had the surgery yet?” - meaning, did they already undergo the one surgery among the various ones trans people might consider, that reshapes their genitalia in a way that is acceptable to society. Cis people often use these questions about our bodies and the way we change them to delegitimatize us and take away our status as a ‘real’ man or woman. Other than that, trans people’s bodies often get portrayed as something freakishly exotic by cis people; there’s a certain voyeurism about it, and it often gets sexualized - just look at the way trans women are treated in mainstream porn. Cis people examining our bodies, theorizing about what kind of operations we’ve had or haven’t had yet, and possibly sexualizing or belittling/dehumanizing us for it, that will always be very thin ice, because it comes with a lot of emotional baggage for trans people individually and as a community.

What’s David’s backstory? We’re all wondering that, especially since Druck is mixing up the whole Skam setting so much and we really don’t know what they have in store for us. Obviously I’m just as thirsty for theories as the rest of the fandom, but I’ve also read a few things that kinda irked me.  Here’s what to avoid: Referring to David as a girl or female in any way, speaking about him in the past with “she/her”-pronouns or coming up with a deadname for him. Oh lord please don’t. It’s nothing but misgendering and it’s so, so wrong. If you’re cis, also please reconsider posting headcanons for his backstory that contain heavy transphobia. Not only can that trigger trans people in the fandom (please use trigger warnings for that stuff, okay?), but there’s also a long history of cis people taking trans narratives away from us and making them only about suffering and pain. Sure, dysphoria sucks, the discrimination sucks, but me, a trans person, complaining about these things is WAY different from a cis person fantasizing about a really painful, possibly violent life for a trans character. Sure I want realism and I want a platform where we can discuss the truly awful experiences many of us have because we’re trans, but I wish that cis people would boost trans voices for that instead of coming up with their own fucked up fantasies about how badly a trans character might have been treated. If you’re writing fic or meta and you want to find an explanation why David changed schools so close to the end of the school year, you don’t have to dig deep into the trans pain to explain it. It’s not that uncommon for trans people to change schools, work places, etc. once they’ve transitioned far enough to feel comfortable - a new start makes the stuff like name changes, new gender presentation, etc. easier. And even if David’d move is related to transphobic experiences, I don’t really need to read detailed descriptions of it. You wouldn’t want to obsess over someone else’s trauma in vivid detail in front of them, so please be cautious when writing about something that’s seen as traumatic by many trans people.

Other useful pointers: There are trans people in this fandom who voice their opinions - seek them out, listen to them, boost their voices, don’t speak over them when they talk about trans experiences. Don’t focus too much on the fact that David is (or might be) trans. Like sure, include that in your writing, but make sure you know that it’s not the only and not the most interesting thing about him. In most regards, he’s just a boy, and he has a lot of character traits that tell us just as much about him, like the fact that he’s really closed-off, competitive af, artistic, a music lover and a complete emo dork, seems to have an active flight-or-fight response,... you see what i’m getting at. Let’s obsess about David on these terms, and I’m sure we’ll get a whole lot of new and interesting meta and fic about him that all of us can enjoy. 

[mystt]

i have a lot of thoughts about the state of homestuck right now and no one to talk to about it. im so sorry

i really want to love june egbert with all my heart, accept her with open arms!!! i relate so much to the idea of a weird awkward guying going thru a lot of his life feeling like something was wrong, like there was a disconnect between himself and the rest of the world, only to eventually realize that the problem was so deeply rooted that he never even realized that it could BE the problem! all of the art has been amazing, of seeing this just-out trans girl finally ecstactic to be herself and her friends meeting her for the first time all over again. the #juneisreal party on twitter yesterday was the most joyous and connected ive seen the homestuck fandom be for a long time!! but, because this is homestuck, i dont think everything about this situation is all sunshine and rainbows, not in the longterm anyway.....

frankly, a lot of ppl aren’t too happy about this, and they have every right to feel that way.  i can sympathize with those people because tbh i wasn’t a huge fan of roxy being transmasc in the epilogues (to be fair, theyve grown a lot on me now that ive had some time to think about it / see content involving them)! john has been an established character for a long time, someone that a lot of ppl have grown a very deep and personal connection with! its totally possible that someone read homestuck, interpreted john’s character in a very similar way to i just did, and come at the totally opposite outcome! maybe john is actually a trans guy and has a lot of trepidation navigating sexuality and gender because of it. the point is that all of it is valid, and as long as everyone respects eachother’s headcanons we’ll all be fine and dandy, right?

well, with hussie making her ‘real,’ the fandom dynamic around june (and roxy) content will inevitably change. the letter that hussie wrote for the epilogue is a bunch of garbage but it basically boils down to the epilogues not really being an epilogue but an on/off ramp to whatever homestuck ends up being in the future. this all but guarantees more june/transmasc roxy content, which im totally down for, but will that content be as ‘dubiously canon’ as the epilogues were? and if not, what happens then? 

are we supposed to believe that basically all homestuck content from this point on is al-a-carte, where each reader is able to pick and choose what is and isn’t canon? we were already doing that, but that’s the fandom’s job! call me crazy but there has to be some separation between fanon and canon! otherwise, you get complete mob-rule anarchy, which we’ve already seen wrt roxy and june!

homestuck is in a lose-lose situation with its characters at this point. the core appeal of the WHOLE DAMN COMIC is that all of its characters have very defined personalities and very amorphous everything else. homestuck is so everlasting because every reader comes out of it with their own permutations of each character in their head.....almost like.....a headcanon, u could call it!

but at the same time, homestuck has to have more ~representation~ in its cast nowadays. its just the trend that all media is following as people demand to see more of themselves reflected in the things they enjoy. that is absolutely valid in most forms of media where characters are well-defined in their identity, but that doesn’t work with homestuck, because no matter what you WILL be stepping on the toes of someone’s version of a character that they’ve been fostering in their own head for god knows how long

i think there ARE ways to make homestuck’s cast more diverse in a concrete way without making everyone upset! the first is to......make new characters......if homestuck really is entering a new era, why can’t it burst onto the scene with a new rainbow cast of misfits for everyone to imprint themselves onto? not enough trans mlm rep? why not make a new one (that isnt lanque)! not enough canon autistic rep? hire an autistic person to make an autistic character! friendsim would’ve been perfect for this, but they didnt take advantage of it basically AT ALL (and where they did they......kinda fucked up lmao)

something else ive seen suggested is to establish new identities for characters that don’t fundamentally change who they are. if you’re like me and you think homestuck needs more trans girls, why would you take JOHN of all ppl and make him mtf when you have a perfectly good rose....or jade....or terezi (or roxy but eh. thats not on the table anymore) right there!  

and i think its important to say that i dont blame this at all on the original creators of the june headcanon, i appreciate what theyve done and the works theyve inspired a lot! its not their fault, but things have really REALLY got out of hand. with pesterquest on the horizon, i think we’re in a fascinating and nervous period for homestuck. things are going to be changing soon, and i dont know if its gonna be for the better :C

[spadedraws]

Wait huh? Aren't you the one always trying to go outside the box whether it comes to fusion rules or au's? Being off color/defective doesn't mean short. Tbh, I feel as if it's their au and they should do what they please(your words of course)and transphobic or not, someone's bound to get butt hurt or disagree over it. No harm towards you at all and I am against transphobia but...you don't think you're looking in to it too much?

Putting aside your quite obvious tone of patronization; Yes I am the one who always tries to go outside the box when it comes to fusion rules and AUs! However, this isnt exactly the same. Discussing a headcanon for how fusion works is entirely different from regulating and informing yourself on the harmful media and representation trans people are subjected to on the daily.

Secondly, I never stated that the gem had to be short to be offcolor or defective, though I understand how the words i said could be interpreted that way. Someone came to me for advice, and I gave them the advice they asked for. They can make their Amethyst equivalent defective in any ways they’d like, be that too tall, too skinny, wonky arms, too short, too fat, really any type of bodily figure that goes outside the norm for the quartz of that type. I only gave one rule, again a rule they asked for: Dont make the gem’s defect their gender identity otherwise it could have some negative implications towards trans people in general. Do they have to follow this rule? I mean on a technicality no, they dont! But they suffer the consequences of putting themself at risk on a platform and media that is safe for the people they are (hypothetically) actively harming.

Since you’re so quick to analyze my wording however, (i.e. that little bit about “your words of course” was rude and you know it) let’s analyze yours, shall we? You state that you’re against transphobia, yet in the sentence directly before you say “transphobic or not, someone’s bound to get butthurt or disagree over it”. Interesting how that works out huh? You’re not transphobic..... except for when its just trans people getting “butthurt” about it. You could apply that to any context and it would still be just as wrong.

“racist or not, someone’s bound to get butthurt or disagree over it”

“sexist or not, someone’s bound to get butthurt or disagree over it”

“xenophobic or not, someone’s bound to get butthurt or disagree over it”

Just because a particular issue, ANY particular issue, is not relavent to YOU, doesnt mean that there aren’t people who are harmed by the issue. It still exist, and it still needs to be regulated regardless of how you feel.

Furthermore i wanna look at this little line right here:

“No harm towards you at all and I am against transphobia but...you don't think you're looking in to it too much?”

Im focusing on the second half really, but notice how you say, “you dont think you’re looking in to it too much?” No actually I dont!

How is it that, I get asked a question on MY platform, by a person who wants to know MY opinion on a particular topic, and then I go to a direct source for the answer, yet im looking into it too much?

Despite the tone of that text, I am genuinely curious on that one! Do you not research into topics that you’re asked about??? If I asked you, how many days would it take you to travel the world’s entire circumference walking in one straight line, and you consulted an expert on the weather patterns and the gear you would need and the physical stress your body would endure over that amount of time, is it fair for me to say you’re looking too much into it?

The correct answer for that one is: no.

If I’m looking for a legitimate answer to a question, you should want to provide me with the most intelligible response. Thats not looking too much into it, thats called educating yourself and educating others.

Going back to the original subject, and I’ll try to keep it brief since I’ve been talking for a long time now: My main point is that trans people deserve to be treated with respect. They didnt have this right for such a long time. Im doing my part in making trans people feel comfortable in these spaces. If you have a problem with me teaching people how to respectfully write their characters, we can have a one on one discussion in the private messaging system if you’d like. But dont you dare come on anon and tell me that im wrong for treating my friends with the respect they deserve and teaching others to do the same.

[gnostic-heretic]

regarding accusations of transtalia “fetishizing” trans people

i wish i didn’t have to make this post in this year of 2018 but here we go again i guess, against my better judgement. if anyone has anything to say about this they’re free to contact me on or off anon. 

the transtalia community (which is, by the way, at most a dozen people who create content, just a few of us consistently, so we’re far from being those all-reaching masterminds of evil) is made mostly of trans people, for trans people.  when it comes to the server, all of us mods are trans. the few cis people who stick with us are anything but chasers. if there were instances of fetishization on the server, the mods would step in immediately.

now, what’s tricky here is what even counts as “fetishization” of trans people. i would say, to me, it’s a very distinct kind of sexual content made of us that misgenders us, objectifies us, and denies us our humanity. it’s often degrading, and made for cis people by cis people.  there’s people, however, who claim that any and any type of content that includes people that are visibly trans (not even necessarily sexual at all) counts as fetishization.

let me break down some of those examples:

1. drawing a trans man with feminine characteristics and features is fetishization.

hi. my name is ivan and i’m a trans man.  this is a picture of me. 

you can think what you want of the way i look, to be fair, and it would be nothing i haven’t already heard before. straight girl, trender, “doing it just for the oppression points on the internet”... 

i would post a picture of my medical documents if i had them here, but i’ve started psychiatric care for hrt in 2016 and i’ll soon have access to my very first t shot, so even though all this is stuff that shouldn’t be said, shouldn’t be an issue, shouldn’t be an assumption people make, and so on... 

i draw trans men looking feminine, sometimes. sometimes i draw trans men who look very masculine. this should not make any difference: cis or trans, people’s gender expression covers a wide range that cannot be defined by stereotypes. 

i draw trans men looking feminine, or i choose feminine male characters to headcanon as trans men, because i want to project some of my experiences as a trans man on them; the struggle of having a presentation that defies common ideas of “woman” and “man”, of having your identity accepted, of having a body that you fully know will never, probably, completely “pass” the way some other people’s does (i don’t have a full body picture of me, but i have a very un-”manly” hourglass figure and i’ve learned to live with it). this is my motivation; i can assure you, reassure you that most trans creators do the same.  our work is not a cis-centric stereotype of what trans people “look like” to sell cis people (as proved by the fact that most cis people in this fandom not so subtly look down on us, to the point of shit talking us on public forums and get most people on there to agree) and if a trans person is offended by it, no one’s pointing a gun at your head and telling you to relate. it’s a very personal kind of fanwork, and a very personal kind of experience, and of course not everyone’s can match up. 

2. you draw and write about trans people in sexual situations, therefore you’re fetishizing them.

hi. my name is ivan and i’m a trans man.  i’m 24 years old. it’s not something i’d like to announce publicly, but since my fiancé (who is also a trans man) and i have been dating for almost six years, neither one of us is asexual, and neither of us is into waiting ‘til marriage, i think it comes without saying that i have a sex life.

let me ask you a quick question: is writing or drawing about two cis people having sex, well, is it “fetishizing” cis people? i doubt anyone would answer “yes” to this question.  because 99% of erotica published out there, books or fanfiction, is about two cis people having sex. 

when you’re trans and interested in sex and you read about cis people getting it on with cis people and only ever that, eventually, for some of us it gets alienating. i could read 3000 stories about cis men having sex with cis men, and this still wouldn’t speak completely to my experience as a gay man.  i choose to depict trans characters to finally see a relationship like mine, for the first time in my life. it’s depressing that my own fanfiction was the first i’ve ever read where two trans men loved each other, found each other attractive, because even trans men who write and draw are afraid to depict this kind of relationship. but why is that? to be completely frank, do you think trans people out there don’t have sex? we’re not toddlers and the last thing we need is this kind of infantilization, of de-sexualization- and so often this kind of attitude is coated in such a deep-seated repulsion for the idea of trans people existing in a sexual context (because we’re “weird”, right? it’s strange to imagine breasts on a man, right? top surgery scars are scary, right? of course no one says it like this, but it’s there, it’s in between the lines) that i’m more concerned about the people who use “but it’s fetishization” as an excuse for their transphobia than i am about the nebulous issue of trans people “fetishizing” themselves. 

again, if you’re trans and this kind of content makes you uncomfortable, no one’s forcing you to look- but i beg you to ask yourself why.  why are you so disgusted by your own reflection? why are you so afraid that someone will know, see that trans people (because it’s us making this content, tbh) also have desires? why are you so afraid of the idea that sometimes, trans people find other trans people attractive?

3. saying a character is trans, at all, is fetishization. 

honestly, i don’t even have anything to say about this one, just a big “fuck you”

with this post, i rest my case against all claims raised publicly about me, and about other people who mod the transtalia server.  draw your own conclusions, make up your own mind. the fact that i already know very few people will care or defend us is already telling of the transphobic environment that fandom can be and this is no exception.

so who is it that’s being transphobic, really? 

[lethalprotectcr-a]

✕ — isn’t that eddie brock wandering the streets of new york? civilians know them as venom and see them as an anti-hero. as far as i know, the 40 year old stands alone and is rumoured to be pretty temperamental & determined. ( tom hardy / male / he/him ) 

hey it’s spencer ( aka the binch the you can count on to play all the morally ambiguous middle aged men ) and i’m gonna tell ya bout my boy!! ( trigger warnings for mentions of death & suicide )

alrighty so before i start rambling about backstory stuff, i wanna mention that i play eddie as a trans man!! but he’s not open about it so unless it’s been previously discussed (either ic by our characters or ooc by us) then it’s safe to say your muse wouldn’t know about it!!

ok so i’m gonna be pulling from a few different things for him bc i hate how dependent his backstory is on spidey in the comics, but don’t know a whole lot about his backstory in the film yet, and also have a whole bunch of headcanons swimmin around in my head so !!! (but if you want to skip my rambling you can just read these four pages for the short and sweet of it tbh)

poor bbys mom died in childbirth and his dad always low key blamed it on him, which was the start of him being desperate for approval as a kid. that need for approval followed him into early adulthood & into his career as a reporter. it led to him insufficiently research some articles or be a lil dubious to get info in hopes of becoming successful. that led to him getting fired, his reputation being ruined, and him being disowned by his dad, which put him at an all time low. that was when he was contemplating committing suicide, but he didn’t bc SURPRISE!!! that was when he first came in contact with the symbiote!! ( this is where i start deviating from the comics and leaning a lil more on the movie )

while investigating an organization called the life foundation, who were studying symbiotes, eddie started digging a little too deep for the foundations liking. trapped in their labs, he was used as the subject for an experiment attempting to bond symbiotic alien organisms with humans. as you could probably guess, it worked, and that’s where venom comes in! then some stints as a hero, stints as a villain, some time somewhere on the middle of that scale, and a few other symbiote hosts later, the two are together again. ( das where we’re out now!!)

which one of them has control really depends on the situation; when venom is being/feeling especially and unnecessarily violent, eddie does his best to suppress him and keep him from hurting innocent people. when it comes to shitsticks tho he’s just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ do watcha gotta do big guy... and sometimes venom ends up coming out and hurting good people anyways. ---- most of the time when they’re venom, however, they both have control over their actions. rarely does the symbiote take full control unless its acting out, or acting to protect eddie while he’s unconscious

eddie likes the idea of being a hero and protecting the innocent, but his own moral ambiguity and venom’s inherent violence make that impossible. instead, self interest and self preservation usually is the priority for them both, but they’ve definitely had their fair share of both heroic team-ups and mean streaks.

he has some spidey-esque powers, like wall crawling as well as the ability to generate organic webbing, and some others powers like the ability to shape shift and become invisible. oh yeah and those sick slimy tendril things. his weaknesses are loud sounds / certain frequencies of sound && fire. also not the biggest fan of large amounts of water, but definitely finds them more tolerable that fire.

despite his penchant for team-ups, eddie’s one to keep to himself most of the time, so being stuck around a bunch of people is gonna be interesting for him to say the least // he’s also kind of a dick ngl 

probably gonna try to get a gig as a reporter in the 70s 

this is gibberish afdgthjk i’ll probably update it later

shoo ok that was a lot i’m sorry tysm for reading this ily & as always feel free to jump into my ims to plot w this slimy guy ♡♡♡

[phynali]

Hi, maybe this is a question better suited for your coldflash/fandom blog, so feel free to answer it there. I saw your post about identifying as non-binary/genderqueer, and I was wondering if you had any trans headcanons in the CW DC shows, and if you'd ever considered exploring them in fics? (Totally fair if you don't or don't feel comfortable answering, I was just curious)

I don’t mind answering here, since it’s topical to a discussion on this blog, and I also don’t mind answering headcanon and DC CWTV here ever :)

I should open with saying that the majority of my headcanons about different characters’ orientation and identities change as needed. Normally they aren’t ‘fixed’ really. Some are, like Len being pansexual, but that is largely to respect how Wentworth Miller is acting him and views him, because before WM said that, my headcanons were multiple for his sexual orientation.One of the few exceptions is that I 100% headcanon both Cisco and Barry as bi. And of course, I don’t headcanon around canon queer identities, ever.  But pretty much everything else changes depending on what fic or meta I’m writing or what I’m in the mood for? 

And the same applies when it comes to gender identity headcanons. Typically, they’re not pervasive or ‘fixed’ in my mind. So I can’t give you any strong/persistent headcanons or an analysis of them or anything like that for trans headcanons, but I can give you some of my favorite ones for these characters?

Hmmm... Barry being bigender is one I like a lot, tbh, or nonbinary in some other way. Iris being nonbinary as well, most likely genderfluid, and getting frustrated because “liking fashion doesn’t mean I always identify as a woman”. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any non-cis Iris headcanons floating around but I like it?

I’m also a big fan of trans-girl Linda Park?? And a huge fan of trans-girl Thea Queen omg. That’s probably my most persistent trans headcanon, I love trans!Thea. And trans-guy Mark Mardon tbh. That’s one of my absolute faves, thanks in part to an anon who sent me trans!Mark asks (here and here, though I don’t know if I filled that prompt very well, it was sort of out of my typical wheelhouse).

I’ve thought a bit about trans!Wally?? Which is all sorts of neat to me in part because the West family doesn’t know at first, though Francine of course does, and maybe Wally’s a little nervous to come out to them, in part because Joe can be a bit sexist at times?

On the writing side, I’m not sure I would write about this in the sense of the fic being about that, about being trans or nonbinary, partly because I’d want to do it justice and would be nervous to fuck it up, and partly because i don’t normally write stories that are solely/mostly about exploring one’s identity in a self-discovery process like that? (one could argue Melancholic Temperament had that as a central theme but I think of that fic more as a negotiation of identity and conflict between present vs. future and past vs. present and coming to grips with the cohesion of an identity over time. but I digress).

And tbh sometimes I write to escape my own gender frustrations, confusions, or struggles, not to immortalize them, or else I explore them via a more distanced metaphor instead. I almost feel like it’s something I’d “explore” more (i.e., make it a central theme for) in standalone fiction instead of in fanfiction, for some reason? I have plenty of trans and nonbinary OC’s, so maybe that’s part of why.

But I definitely can’t say I’d never write fic with that as the central theme either, because people evolve and in a year this might be the story I’m itching to write :) And I’d definitely write in trans characters where their gender identity isn’t a major plot point, it’s just part of who they are and is treated as such. And really, I should probably do more of that, or do it in a more overt way.

[phylumhearts]

can’t sleep so I’m gonna ramble about the vague au in my head where most of my kh art is set (cw trauma, sex and dysphoria references)

basically it’s a post-everything semi-au that’s more-or-less canon-compliant but developed in a way that panders to my interests changes several characters fairly significantly. after plot events happen and xehanort is defeated for good (i.e. the plot of kh3 and therefore nothing I actually want to develop on my own) almost everyone is traumatised from all the events of the games but try their darnedest to repair the damage and move on. most of the stuff i draw is supposed to be a couple of years post-xehanort when most of the characters have processed a lot of their shit and got a good start on rebuilding their lives. I am interested in eventually exploring earlier stuff but I like fluff more than angst so when I’m just doodling it’s mostly happy stuff.

the character who I’ve done the most thirsting development for is dilan, who recompleted as a misanthropic grumpy asshole but after some not-so-gentle pushing from aeleus (who held on to a lot more of himself as a nobody and therefore was one of the less hecked up immediately post-recompletion) gets some serious therapy. he reflects on the fact that all these kids being open to love seem to be having a much happier and easier time in life and eventually resolves to open himself to love. he throws himself into it, fucks up a fair bit, but eventually becomes the big pan poly nonbinary slut who I draw. he’s in a committed relationship with aeleus but maintains various kinds of relationships with most of the other ex-organization members (oh boy do I have a lot of nsfw headcanons here).

aeleus low-key becomes the keeper of hollow bastion (apparently that’s what the radiant garden castle is called even when the world is called radiant garden again? correct me if I’m wrong here) bc the other options are ienzo (who is very much not a functioning adult as he fully missed out on learning to process emotions as a teen), dilan (who is on a personal journey (read: constantly off slutting it up) and super not interested in admin, but does support aeleus), and even (ha ha good joke). the power kind of goes to his head in that his paternal instincts take over and (to even and ienzo’s protests) the castle starts to fill up with orphaned, lost, and lonely children. aeleus is also in a romantic relationship with even but I haven’t put heaps of thought into developing that

lumaria and arlene are both trans girls and dating. arlene is still a huge bitch to most people but when there’s people she cares about (read: her large number of younger siblings plus lumaria) she turns a bit mama bear. (the reason marluxia and larxene were against the organization’s supposed objective of regaining their hearts was that they both remembered how horrible dysphoric feelings are and didn’t want to go back to that. the other trans members of the org (zexion, luxord and saix are trans dudes, several other org members are nb) mostly had better experiences as somebodies.)

demy (I think it’s the best option, medy, myde, dyme, etc all sound weird to me) is a moderately successful drag queen. (think adore delano tbh)

I haven’t developed much beyond that but basically everyone is trans and poly and gay and I love them

[ameslore]

A-Z have fun dude

my dude

bless you ella

A- already answered!

B - A pairing–platonic, romantic or sexual–that you initially didn’t consider, but someone changed your mind.

tbh idk?

C - already answered!

D - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t.

i don’t have anything like that, actually. i either like a ship or i don’t.

E - Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom? If so, what?

the chimney fic for the inception fandom’s 2016 secret saito. also the fic that fulfulled @drown-yourdarlings prompt about rose and lissa’s lehigh university experiences but that’s on my fanfiction.net account and let’s not talk about that........... right now or preferably ever

(rest is under the cut for length)

F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?

i’ve more or less been in the va fandom since... 2014?

G - Have you ever had an OTP? If so, do you remember your first one? Who was in it?

see my answer to part (a)

(romitri was probably my first otp)

H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?

it used to be books, but i feel like there are so much unexplored depths in movies that it’s really to get inspiration for meta or fic, so nowadays it’s more movies.

I - already answered

J - Name a fandom you didn’t think about until you saw it all over Tumblr. (You don’t have to care about it or follow it; it just has to be something that Tumblr made you aware of.)

the 00q fandom. of course i knew about james bond, but i hadn’t considered the ship

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

rose hathaway, vampire academy. over the course of six books and maybe ten months(?) she really found herself, got a lot more mature and self-confident

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)

tasha ozera did not deserve what she got. she was a force of nature.

dominick cobb is a really fucking smart guy

M - Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

the collective smh + lardo

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

for inception and 00q: more well-developed female characters. more poc. more woc. more screen time for all three.

O - Choose a song at random. Which ship or character does it remind you of?

okay so haunted by beyonce always reminds me of arthur or q and I HAVE NO IDEA WHY BECAUSE THE SONG ISN’T REMOTELY RELEVANT TO EITHER OF THEM

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).

okay i actually had this idea rolling around in my head for months. i’ve seen something kind of similar to my idea, but the premise is a little different-- “a little less sixteen candles”, arthur/eames, by osaki_nana_707 on ao3

just a sec. let me pull up my doc.

high school teacher-student CANON-DIVERGENT au except there’s no underage pedophilia because arthur’s not actually a minor, he’s a grownass man

so BASICALLY. arthur is part of running project somnacin with dom, mal, and stephen miles, but it gets shut down when the first soldier loses his grasp on reality and shoots himself in the head. topside. which is like, a mess for the military, so long story short everyone’s like “this is a NOPE program BYE”

after project somnacin gets shut down, dom, mal, and arthur open an architecture firm but arthur, who’s a beast at research and investigation and also knows shit about criminal justice (or is it criminology?), occasionally gets contacted by the military/sometimes the nsa/sometimes the cia to do consultant work.

by now arthur is twenty-four. he gets contacted by the military and it’s like “okay so someone may have stolen top secret files about project somnacin and because you know about the [highly confidential] project and you’re really good at investigative research we need you to help identify who this person is [spoiler alert: it’s our beloved thief and forger, eames], figure whether this information is in danger of getting leaked to the public, and all that good security shit??? we might need you to bring him in”

so arthur does his fancy-schmancy research, has a breakthrough and identifies a one mr. [first name redacted] eames, british ex-pat currently living in america and teaching english at a private high school.

due to his small frame and general twinkiness (i’m sorry but it’s true), arthur can pass for a seventeen or eighteen year old. SO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS? HE DECIDES TO ENROLL IN THE SCHOOL THAT EAMES TEACHES AT IN ORDER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EAMES. in rolls the teacher-student au

okay. that was a very long way to establish the premise of a fic, but anyway if anyone wants to write that because i am Tired and have no time, just tell me and i’ll be ecstatic

Q - A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

the carry on fandom, mostly because the big blogs stopped posting/moved onto other fandoms and the content generally dried up

R - Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

i wrote a fic a couple months ago featuring adhd!arthur and adhd!eames. a genderfluid!eames fic is currently near completion. (i am so EXCITED)

T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

*grabs my fucking megaphone*

EDDIE CASTILE AND JILL MASTRANO AND ROSE HATHAWAY AND SYDNEY SAGE ARE ALL BI AS FUCK. ADRIAN IVASHKOV IS PAN.

ARTHUR IS PART JEWISH, PART CHINESE AND CAN SPEAK ABOUT FIVE LANGUAGES. HE WEARS JOGGERS AND BEANIES WHEN HE’S NOT WORKING. HE IS A CLASSICALLY TRAINED MUSICIAN AND LIKES TO SING

IN SOME CROSSOVER VERSE, Q AND ARTHUR ARE DEFINITELY COUSINS

U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

arthur (inception), q (skyfall/spectre), eddie castile (vampire academy/bloodlines)

this is when you notice that i have a type: quiet bamfs who have been whumped by their fandoms quite hard

V - Which character do you relate to most?

arthur. my son my sun my heart.

W - A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

“i wasn’t gay until i met you” or “i hate myself for being gay but loving you makes it feel better” because why do straight people think it works like that. also, not a fan of genderbending because the concept is inherently trans and nb exclusive, plus i kind of feel like it messes up the characterization.

X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

when both/all parties of the otp are absolute bamfs and surprise each other with their competency

and angsty soulmate aus. call me a cheesy, bright-eyed fucker but i love them so goddamn much

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

the NHL fandom (i do occasionally reblog stuff about the pens/marc-andre fleury onto my omgcp sideblog? and i watch a few games every once in a while but i’m not actively invested in it.)

also the yuri on ice! fandom. like i haven’t even watched ep. 12 but i’ll reblog a funny post about it every so often

Z - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go! (Prompts optional but encouraged.)

please see all this inception meta that i have:

plot meta, character and plot meta, wardrobe meta

[amorremanet]

11, 14 & 17? ^.^

asks for fanfic writers.

I did 17 over here, but!

11. do you listen to music when writing?

Sometimes, yes! It sort of depends on what I’m writing and what kind of mood I’m in, but I pretty much always listen to something. It’s more just a matter of whether I’m going to listen to music or TV/movies.

And then in each case, there’s the issue of like, “do I want to listen to the Twilight Princess OST or the Silent Hill 2 OST?” (because video game OSTs are great at both evoking mood and increasing focus), or, “do I want a video game OST, or my playlist for [character, ship, project, the mood I’m in, whatever; I have playlists for everything]”

—or if I’m going to listen to TV/movies, then it’s like, “TV or movies?” and then, “Disney movie or superhero movie? Marvel movie or DC movie? Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, or Female Trouble? The Prince of Egypt or Crimson Peak? Star Wars” or in TV Land, it’s more, “Well, I can’t work and listen to something relatively new [which is one of the biggest reasons why I’m perpetually late to everything new on TV], so… House or Criminal Minds? Yuri on Ice dub [because I can’t watch the subs and write at the same time] or SVU reruns? Firefly or Futurama?”

14. easiest character to write

Oh gosh, that’s…… hard. And it often depends on the fandom, and sometimes it depends on what kind of mood I’m in, but…

Barty Crouch Jr. has always been really easy for me (partly because he has Favorite advantage, and partly because I’ve put 16+ years into his character at this point, so like. JKR could drop all of her notes about his family and backstory and everything on us tomorrow — not that I really think said notes exist, but if they did — and I’d probably just go, “Yeah, that’s nice, but with all due respect, Mum? My version’s better, and I’m just going to continue treating it as if it’s canon because bite me, that’s why”).

AlSev Potter and Scorpius Malfoy are both really easy, too, but tbh, I think that’s because my versions of them are essentially glorified OC’s, since my attitude toward Cursed Child with regard to characterization is, “*nods mildly* That’s nice, but I’m going to pick and choose at my leisure, thanks. No offense, but I’ve been working on these kids since DH first came out, and I much prefer my headcanon Scorpius who is the biggest, loudest, gayest Drama Princess you have ever met in your life and has been trying to shock Lucius into having a heart attack and dying since he was like six,

“and my headcanon AlSev who’s sometimes Ruby Minerva Severus, most often genderfluid but sometimes a binary trans girl and other time a gay cis boy, loves Ginny but has a complicated and often strained relationship with her (but in fairness, AlSev-Ruby talks to Godfather Neville and Hagrid about their problems more than they talk to either Harry or Ginny), has a complicated relationship with Harry too but for other reasons and when Harry and Ginny eventually divorce each other, AlSev-Ruby is going to stay at their Dad’s more often than their Mum’s, and never lets anyone forget that their middle name is Severus because AlSev-Ruby likes pissing them off with that fact — especially their Weasley grandparents

“Ron but AlSev-Ruby usually feels bad about this because they know on some level that they’re usually lashing out at Ron unfairly because it’s not about their name in most of these scenarios and entirely about other emotions that AlSev-Ruby has no earthly idea how to handle or express in a healthy or constructive way, and they boil over very easily when people needle them about their name (and if it weren’t Ron on the receiving end of this, it would probably be James)

“and Snape’s portrait, whom AlSev-Ruby accidentally made respect them by going, ‘You’re a painting. You are oil on canvas, magically imbued with the real Severus Snape’s personality and memories. Snap at me all you want, but you can’t do anything to me that’s worse than what Rita Skeeter and Molly have been doing for my entire life so far. If you want to get to know me, instead of using me as some conduit for all of your lingering issues with my Dad, then cool, I’d like to get to know you, too. You’re the closest I can get to getting to know my real middle-namesake instead of the myth of him that’s been built up since the War. But if you’ve got nothing interesting to say, then please shut up and let me wait for the Headmistress in peace’ in their first year, if not as eloquently because they were eleven and being Sulky™”

As much as I still hate being compared to her, even accepting that I totally deserve it, Hermione Granger is another easy one for me to get into and always has been. The hard thing with her is not reducing her to either Perfectly Perfect Hermione (which JKR can even fall into some times, like when Hermione hexed the DA sign-up sheet and it scarred Marietta’s face without regard for how Umbridge is the one to blame in that situation and not Marietta) or some joke about some of the times in canon when she was Over The Top about something, in ways that Harry didn’t entirely get so the narrative treats them as Totally Hilarious, even though SPEW (for example) is actually not funny when held up to scrutiny and Hermione works so hard at school out of deep-set fear of failure and being dispensable, and probably also fear that maybe she doesn’t belong in the magical world

Luna Lovegood is also pretty easy for me, though the hard thing with her is trying to make sure that I write her thought processes honestly but in a way that makes sense for the reader (it’s a variation on the big problem of stream of consciousness writing, where writing actual facts stream of consciousness looks like Finnegan’s Wake and is tedious as fuck to read, so Luna has to be close to stream of consciousness but tamed enough so that the experience of reading anything written from her POV is more likely to be enjoyable, and less likely to be like getting hit upside the head with a tire iron labeled, “IT’S ART OKAY, IT’S NOT FOR YOU”).

Then, Remus Lupin is by far the easiest of the Marauders for me to write, and Andromeda Black Tonks can actually be pretty hard for me sometimes, but she’s easier than either of her sisters and still one of the easiest MWPP-era characters for me, period.

And as far as non-HP characters go: well, my other biggest source of fandom writing in the past while has been Teen Wolf, and the top five easiest kids for me there are Scott McCall (to the surprise of no one ever), Kira Yukimura (#still bitter),

“Camden Lahey (but lbr, he’s pretty much just an OC with a canon name because literally all we know about him in canon is, “Isaac’s older brother, on the 2005/6 swim team, died in the military” so the rest of it is shit that I wholesale made up and of course he’s easier for me to get into character with than, say, Allison — who is probably the third easiest of the ladies for me to get into character with, after either Braeden or Malia but it depends on the day — because Allison has, like, actual canon shit to deal with and Cam…… kinda doesn’t.

Like, all of the vaguely Actual Canon shit that he has to deal with is stuff that’s off in the realm of extrapolation, interpretation, and, “Hey, nothing in canon says that he DIDN’T visit Derek and Laura in New York on his way back from his first visit home during his service, or that he DIDN’T drag Derek uptown to see Patti Lupone as Mama Rose because Cam is a Fanboy for reasons relating to his and Isaac’s late Mother, or that they didn’t argue at the intermission about how IT’S A MUSICAL DEREK STOP TRYING TO QUESTION WHY THE CHARACTERS SING JFC IT’S LIKE I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU”

or, “lbr, Derek is as subtle as a brick hitting you in the face at 5,000 mph and Paige canonically figured out that he was a werewolf anyway, so I don’t think it’s entirely implausible that, if we accept the idea of him and Cam being friends — and Cam being one of the only people who, like, genuinely likes Derek, instead of tolerating him because he’s okay at basketball and his family is rich — then Cam probably figured out that Derek and Laura are werewolves, and if that’s the case, he probably got trotted over to the Hales’ place so Talia could give him third-degree about whether or not he’s with the Argents or any other hunters.

“And, because he was like fifteen and had literally just found out that supernatural shit is real, Cam probably showed that he wasn’t a hunter by getting way too excited about hearing which magical creatures are real and temporarily shelving his hate-on for Talia to be all, ‘oh my god, are vampires real? can they infect werewolves? could Derek be like, a vampire werewolf, how would that even work’ or, ‘so silver bullets don’t hurt you, but what about someone saying your True Name? is True Name magic real?’ or, ‘do seances actually work? I’m totally not asking because I want to try and perform one to contact my dead Mom, I just want to know, like. For curiosity’s sake. Yeah……’”

[spoilers: Cam was TOTALLY asking because he wanted to try and use a seance to contact Eleanor. Derek and Laura had to stop him from trying to do the thing no fewer than eight times before Cam and Derek graduated. To his credit, Derek at least skipped trying to give Cam any kind of lecture, but tbf, he did that because he knew Cam would argue back at him about how Derek had no right to tell Cam that he was doing something stupid and dangerous and playing with things that he didn’t understand, and that Cam’s argument would probably be more than fair.

This did not stop Laura from giving Cam the lectures that he completely deserved, though, because: 1. he was essentially walking up to a big red button labeled, “do not push” and trying to push it without even reading the owner’s manual or the informational plaque on the wall that had a full explanation of why you shouldn’t push the button, and he KNEW that he was doing this, but he felt like it was all going to work out TOTALLY FINE because he wanted his Mom to be not dead and in lieu of that, why can’t he have a seance, Laura, UGH;

and 2. because, unlike Cam and Derek, Larua generally doesn’t do shit that’s too horribly stupid or that has completely awful consequences (…mostly), so she had an actual high-ground from which to give Cam these, “don’t screw around the magic, what the fuck are you thinking” lectures and wasn’t intimidated by Derek’s loudmouth little friend who, like, actively repels everything that even vaguely resembles chill.]

—so, anyway, the point is that I can pretty much do whatever I want with Cam and it makes him a lot easier to write. Laura is a similar case of, “this character is easy for me to write because I made her up,” and in fairness, a lot of my characterization for Braeden is headcanon, too. It’s just headcanon that has more of a basis in canon than Camden and Laura do.

I mean.

Except for parts like Braeden’s twin sister Belladonna who is a ballerina because fuck Jeff Davis, that’s why and also the only family member Braeden still talks to on any regular basis, and their parents who teach at Miskatonic University because I’m pretty sure it’s in the public domain at this point so nyeh, I’m gonna use it, and also they’re in the know about the supernatural but part of a group who has a policy of strict non-intervention, which Braeden thought was bullshit so she set out to do her own thing, which initially involved more plans to help people…… but then she learned that a girl’s gotta eat, and the mercenary work got started.

Also, she will wipe the floor with you at karaoke. Because I felt like it, that’s why.

Yeah, that’s all pretty, “this is not even remotely implied by canon and I wholesale made it up because canon wasn’t giving me like any damn Braeden backstory beyond the barest implications and I fucking felt like it, so there. PS: fuck Jeff Davis.”)

Derek Hale (I’m not always proud of this fact or entirely thrilled about it because when I get into Derek’s head, I take a lot of things from his canon characterization — especially in earlier episodes, before he started trying to be less of a jerk and discovered that: 1. he sucks as an Alpha, and 2. he loves Scott sooooo much — to their logical conclusions and his head is usually not a very pleasant place to be.

Like, he’s my werewolf disaster and I begrudgingly love him but we’re still talking about a guy who, when I write him, makes leaps of logic like, “Well, Cam said to look out for Isaac because he’s not here to do it himself. That is totally the same thing as giving me verbal permission to stalk his baby brother and manipulate him into accepting the Bite, very good plan, way to go, Derek!! :D” and thinks that, “Scott kissed ME first and didn’t explicitly SAY that he’s NOT 17, therefore I’m totally not obligated to ask him shit about shit or consider whether or not he’s having sex with me as a form of emotional self-harm” is a completely valid conclusion and way of doing things

He’s also a guy who would do things like cheat on Braeden with Cam and Cam with Braeden, while telling neither of them about this, and then when he gets arrested for doing something ridiculous, he would call both of them to come get him at the Sheriff’s station because he’s pretty sure that one of them will be mad and decide to just leave him there to think about what he’s done this time — which would end up in both of them coming, and figuring out that they’ve both been getting cheated on, and skip right past the, “being mad at the other cheated upon party” part to the part that’s more like,

“going for coffee and complaining about the fuck-up they’ve both been dating and making fun of things like his secret One Direction blog, or the Star Wars fanfic he writes where his blatant self-insert OC gets to bang Han, Leia, Mara Jade, Lando, both of the Solo twins, and Padmé (in some wonky shenanigans involving time travel) — oh and sucks for Derek, but Cam and Braeden decided to tell Parrish to just leave him in his holding cell because fuck him, they’ve been getting cheated on so he can just call Laura and beg her to come save his ass tonight”

negl, one of my favorite places to put Derek in non-supernatural AUs is prison. How he wound up there usually involved him killing Peter, and it sometimes involved him panicking and hiding Peter’s body under the floorboards because he’s a loser who thinks Edgar Allan Poe is actually a good model for How To Handle Murdering Someone, and…… yeah, I just. I love Derek, he’s easy for me to write, but he’s a disaster in ways I don’t always feel like dealing with, so sometimes, he gets to just go the fuck to prison so I don’t have to deal with him today.)

and……… ugh, I can’t pick between Danny Mahealani and Jackson Whittemore for the number five spot, but both of them are really easy for me, and like. Jackson, I am still vaguely ashamed of, but I don’t feel that bad about it because I got here by virtue of writing him when Astrid and I RP’d TW stuff together and she didn’t want to just talk to herself for ages by writing Isaac and Jackson, and I refused to half-ass it with Jackson and found a way into his head and here we are.

And Danny as I write him is, in a lot of ways, only somewhat less of an OC than Cam and Laura, so…… basically, that.

And bonuses, because I like talking about my legitimate OC’s, oops: Margot, Pete, and Sebastian are the easiest for me to write at the moment but in fairness, that’s largely because I’ve done the most work developing them as characters, relative to everyone else in the cast.

Like, Todd (who is officially Seb’s “it’s complicated,” and Seb’s Gawain Stacy, if you ask Pete — or sometimes even if you don’t ask Pete, because he will totally tell you this whether you like hearing it or not, especially if your name is Sebastian) — Todd has this notion that he, Margot, and Seb are basically gay boy!Hermione (Todd), lesbian!Harry (Margot), and, “Ron but like what if his family had Malfoy money and he was gay” (Seb). He’s not entirely wrong (and their Houses map onto the Trio’s secondary Houses because of course I know my OCs’ Hogwarts Houses, like why would I not know that)

(This whole Thing of Todd’s actually STARTED because I knew that he is a Ravenclaw, Seb’s a Hufflepuff, and Margot’s a Slytherin, and went, “lol, it’s like the Golden Trio in an AU where none of them wound up in Gryffindor, heh”)

and it makes sense that this is how Todd sees things with them because the three of them found each other in undergrad (though Seb found Margot when their RA paired them up for some “getting to know you” thing during orientation because they were the tallest and the shortest people on the hall, and he found Todd at the first meeting of the campus LGBTIQ students organization, had a crush at first sight on the cute chubby guy in the hot pink t-shirt with the screenprint of the Pink Flamingos poster, and totally meant to go be Super Cool about asking Todd out……

……buuuuuut he got excited and instead it came out like, “Hi, oh my god, I love your shirt, you like John Waters, I love John Waters, he’s my hometown hero, oh my god hi hi hi, my name’s Sebastian what is yours do you want to go get coffee, please be my friend, do you like Rocky Horror too? there’s a theatre a couple blocks from here that does a regular shadow-cast, we should totally check it out, I have just met you and I like you please be my friend” instead of like an actual date invite. And he totally called his Mom later that night to go, “MOM, I MADE ANOTHER FRIEND. TWO IN TWO DAYS, MOM. yeah no i still kind of hate my roommate he’s a jerk BUT I HAVE TWO NEW FRIENDS MOM”

………He was very lonely before undergrad because his only constant friend who wasn’t one of his siblings and didn’t shun him after he got outed at Catholic school [though technically, he sort of outed himself in an attempt to spare his boyfriend/best friend from being outed because Seb’s parents already knew he was gay and were totally cool about it, but Damian’s parents believed in reparative therapy and his uncle was the priest at their Catholic school, so him getting outed was really not an option]? Yeah, that only friend was Pete. But I digress.)

Anyway, Todd’s view of things is a little skewed by how he’s lived them, and strictly speaking, trying to map any of my kids onto the Golden Trio and Company is going to end up being a discussion of archetypes and tropes more than anything else because…… But they’re not the Golden Trio and Company.

There are some similarities, but they are mostly in the realm of archetypes AND the ones that aren’t quite as trope-y happened by accident (like, when I noticed that Seb actually does have quite a few similarities with Ron, aside from having Malfoy money — right down to his dad having an A name (Abraham) and his mom having an M name (Marceline) — I went, “well, FUCK” and started trying to get some of those similarities to be…… less so? Because…… Seb’s not Ron. And I don’t want him to be too overly similar to Ron because I want him to be himself, in his own right.

Fortunately, though, Ron isn’t a filthy rich, gay recovering addict who’s been living with undiagnosed major depression for his entire life and sort of accidentally stumbles into finding his mutant superpowers, and whose abusers aren’t his parents — because Abe and Marceline are pretty chill and have been fab to all four of their kids — but rather a series of douchebag ex-boyfriends who [unlike Molly and Arthur] are for real in-text acknowledged as being abusive jerks, and that’s a pretty solid start on Seb Is Not Ron)

But if you were going to try to do the Golden Trio And Company map here, then Todd would probably be Ginny, actually. They don’t have a lot in common, but there are some points of crossover, and the biggest one for me at the moment? Is that right now, I’m guilty of something that I bag on JKR for doing all the time, which is, “Ginny is a great idea for a character but you didn’t fully actualize her like she deserved in the text, you regularly reduced her existence to being Harry’s Significant Other, and it’s frankly bogus, Joanne” — and I’m aware of this, so I’m trying to fix it by working on Todd as a character

But I’m also trying to not spend forever fine-tuning every last detail about a story and then not having a draft of it so much as I have a two-foot stack of print-outs about different parts of it that kinda sorta look like a complete picture when you arrange them just so and tilt your head slightly to the left. So, basically, at the moment? Getting Todd to be more fully realized is on my List Of Shit To Do, but it’s way less of a priority than, “actual complete draft of this train-wreck” because I can do some of this work in revisions and rewriting

But since I opened this door anyway and want to complete the thought for the amusement factor:

Seb, obviously, is Harry in the bigger picture, even if this is mostly based on, “Harry is The Protagonist of his series, and although MY series is ultimately going to be more of an ensemble cast thing, Seb is the focal character for the first book because, in fairness to all the others, he was here first”

Todd is Ginny for the reasons that I just said

Pete and Margot both have very fair claim to being either Ron or Hermione, so they could arguably take turns, and ultimately, the big reason why I’m going to say Pete’s Ron and Margot’s Hermione?

is that Pete has two older siblings and some Issues with both of them (though he’s working them out with his sister, and not so much with his older brother) and has been Seb’s friend longer

while Margot’s an only child and they have totally used the, “we’re both gay, we love each other like brother and sister” line when they don’t feel like explaining their no romo soulmates kind of relationship to people (and sometimes when trying to make Seb’s siblings be less…… not pleased that Margot is so important to him, because to varying degrees, all three of them kinda sorta blame her for some of his problems in ways that she doesn’t entirely deserve)

Lucy is Neville but, like, a plucky ginger lesbian. This is probably one of the comparisons that looks a lot more like reaching, because on the surface, Lucy has a lot more in common with Ginny outside of their roles in the plot — but the thing is?

Even once I get Todd to be more developed, and even if he and Seb aren’t endgame (which was my original plan and I might stick to it but they have a LOT of shit to work on before they can go there so we’ll see how that goes), Todd is still going to be Ginny’s closest analogue to me because the ideas of them and their arcs are closer than anyone else’s (though in fairness, my idea of Ginny and her arc isn’t necessarily anybody else’s because JKR botched writing Ginny so much that this is almost, “room for wild mass guessing” instead of, “room for interpretation”)

Whereas…… yes. Lucy comes on strong, she’s a plucky go-getter who would probably try to fight the sun if she thought the sun was looking at her girlfriend funny, she’s a complete loudmouth and not always in ways that are conducive to anything, she’ll call you on your shit but usually without realizing that she’s saying something she needs to be hearing too, she tries too hard to do everything on her own and usually needs to experience some kind of big setback before she’ll consider accepting help with anything, and she will probably shout at someone while telling them to go calm down because they told HER to calm down.

Also, she’s the only one in my main ensemble cast who’s a legit Gryffindor, for better and for worse (Pete is a Slytherin — though in fairness, Gryffindor is his secondary House [he is aware of this, thanks to an ex of his who made him get Pottermore Sorted and was dead shocked when he wound up in Slytherin, but he has no idea what this means but he’s offended by it because Gryffindor’s colors are red and gold and no thanks, he doesn’t like how he looks in red and gold. He loves how he looks in green and silver, though] — and Josie’s a Ravenclaw)

—but a lot of how Over-The-Top Extra™ she is? that comes out of insecurity and trying to be various things that aren’t true to herself, because she deeply believes that she isn’t good enough. Granted, a big difference between her and Neville is that, while Neville spends a lot of time in the early books being terrified of his potential because he might screw up and prove right everyone who’s ever called him useless, Lucy instead tries to outrun her all of feelings of self-doubt and self-loathing instead of dealing with them, and basically plays a game of, “if I ignore them and just act like the popular idea of me — or like the me I want to be — but louder, maybe they will go away!!”

She’s going to be shocked when this catches up to her, because when she first shows up in the story, she’s of the mind that hey, she has accepted that she’s a lesbian — even if she’s only out to a small handful of people because…… uh, she’s Damian’s baby sister and their parents are still Not Really Very Safe to come out to. Their dad is probably going to die without Lucy coming out to him and she has VERY fair reasons for being afraid that he’d disown her for this — but!!! She has still accepted this!!!! Clearly it was the ONLY THING in her life that she wasn’t at peace with and now she IS so everything is going to magically be ALL BETTER NOW RIGHT!!!!!

No, not really, Lucy. Your sexuality is just one of the things about yourself that you aren’t at peace with.

Lucy’s response: *throws herself even harder into trying to outrun her self-doubt and being completely disingenuous to herself in the process, while trying to smile and laugh like nothing is wrong even though it really blatantly is*

So, that’s all going over about as well as you’d expect (i.e., not very well, not even a little bit whoops), and a lot of her arc in the series is going to be about finding peace with herself and finding her own ways of being a hero that may not necessarily line up with any more conventional expectations thereof, or even her own preconceived ideas of How To Hero Good, and yeah. She’s Neville, but like, a plucky ginger lesbian.

Also, she and Seb are foils for each other in a loooooot of ways that make them mapping onto Harry and Neville make more sense than trying to make Lucy map onto Ginny, in structural terms

Josie is Luna, and I’m short-changing my genderfluid empath child a lot right now but I’ve also been writing this post for WAAAAAY longer than I intended and ahahaha, everyone’s probably bored

And Conrad is Draco Malfoy, but absent any of the excuses that fans love making for Draco (especially not the age thing, like. Draco behaves in a LOT of ways that are completely unacceptable for any person of ANY age, but I will acquiesce that his age is a contributing factor in some instances because he’s a freaking CHILD. Conrad’s not, though. Like, Conrad is 46 and the oldest member of the main cast in the first book. Conrad gets no excuse for his bullshit based on his age.

He also doesn’t get to claim anything about being terrified for the safety of the people he cares about, because…… uh. While I think that the HP fandom oversells that point re: Draco in HBP because at first, he was completely gung-ho and proud of himself for joining a group of Pureblood supremacist domestic terrorist fascists, Draco was still abused and manipulated by Voldemort here — and during the entirety of HBP and DH — and…… well. Conrad was lied to and played by people who are even bigger douchebags than he is, yeah. But he wasn’t sold on joining the neo-fascist supervillains by having his loved ones threatened; he was sold on it by having his ego stroked and only giving a fuck about how this could benefit him)

So, basically, Conrad is Draco with even fewer redeeming qualities

Given that I think Draco only has, like, TWO redeeming qualities, or maybe three on a good day (and that’s debatable because at least one point here is, “it’s not really a quality of his own so much as the fact that I hate victim blaming more than I dislike Draco”), uh

Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah, no.

Conrad is only not The Literal WORST EVER because there are other douchebags in his neo-fascist supervillain club who are even worse than he is.

i just love my oc mutant weirdos a lot, thank u for reading