#for example: arjuna has a very famous episode where in many adaptations he was a woman

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

I literally referenced the thing w sanzang in the tags of the first post I made about it

And even if there’s an alleged reason for the genderbend, you have to know the difference between an in-universe excuse to retroactively justify a decision and an honest decision

For example, why would quetzalcoatl, an Aztec god, be female because the Greek Aphrodite is also associated with Venus? Do you know how distinct the cultures of Greece and the Aztecs were? How separately they developed, and how there was no chance that one god could have inspired the other when that country was over 10000km apart, and the two cultures likely had no contact? Ask yourself if this is a decision that was made because it made sense for the character, or because they were trying to justify a divergent writing/design decision that the writers had already made.

Not to mention that there’s other notable cases of male gods/mythic figures associated with Venus in the first place-Lucifer, Malara, Taibai Jinxing (in some depictions), Shalim and Shahar, Xolotl, Monimos, Hesperus, Azizos, Auseklis (possibly), Aurvandill, Amatsu-Mikaboshi, and Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli are all gods who are typically associated with Venus who are also men/usually men. So why should being associated with Venus be enough to genderbend Quetzalcoatl? Is this a decision that seems logical, or does it look like they were searching for an excuse?

It’s the same case with bakin and sanzang- just because one of them is KNOWN for genderbent characters, or one of them has been genderbent before, doesn’t mean that their genderbending is now a given (and for the record, bakin is still a man in fate-he is in the body of his daughter in law Omichi in a scenario similar to hokusai and his daughter, so it isn’t a true genderbend). There’s plenty of other men in fgo who had cases of being depicted as women who notably ARENT women, and there’s no reason to not criticize genderbending when it’s done haphazardly and poorly explained. It’s a disservice both the the male figures they adapt and the female figures they could have adapted instead.

Sangzang would have a point if most of the genderbents weren’t disrespectful lazy cash grabs.

I’d be more willing to give it any nuance if half their genderbends weren’t just ‘lol we made them a girl/hamfistedly shoved the guy into a girl he knew irl bc reasons’

Like artoria was well done, even if her design was more feminine it wasn’t gratuitously over the top to the point where there was no way she could’ve been mistaken as a man, they acknowledged and explored why she pretended to be a man and how that impacted her relationships

There’s also da Vinci who, despite having some transphobic rhetoric with how the characters around her talked about her, made it explicitly clear that she was originally a man and intentionally chose to be reborn as a woman with the power of the grail due to her personal desires on the subject, and her appearance was that of the mona Lisa bc of it being both her most iconic work/her opinion of the ideal female form. Like that works as well if you don’t want to go the artoria route of rewriting your backstory, you have ALREADY RIGHT FROM THE START OF THE GAME established that you can use the grail to intentionally change your gender and appearance.

But then there’s quetzalcoatl who chose a female host because ? Or hokusai who’s actually the father and daughter fused (they could have easily been a proper duo servant or even separate units?) or raikou who was historically considered a man/concealed her gender, but has an incredibly feminine appearance and no effort to hide it in game, or bakin who again is a fusion of a man and his daughter in law who helped finish his work, or nero who was a man is a woman now because they wanted her as a foil to artoria or shuten and ibaraki are woman because of their shapeshifting powers (never appears as men despite this being their original depiction) or vritra who is a girl because she doesn’t even know, or Francis drake is now a girl despite being well known as a favorite (possibly romantically) of queen Elizabeth I because uhhhh no one would treat her as a woman???? Apparently??? Etc etc etc etc

Like they CAN do it well but so often they don’t and I’m not going to take their logic for it being a form of appreciation seriously when if anything it’s ignoring actual female historic figures so they can attach a more notable male name to a sexy design.