#gnc protagonist

[homosekularnost]

(murderbot from exit strategy voice) time to go meet my friends, pin-lee who is tough and cool and competent and also the other useless two

[dreamdripdistance]

transfem joker . if you even care.

[whitestopper]

Might have made this post before, but I was thinking about She Ra and in the prom episode... why were the two most gnc women also the episode's two main antagonists?

[trilliath]

I just want a full length adventure novel with a druid just like Halsin and a nonbinary fae-touched mysterious ruthless lonely equally-grown elf featuring polyamory and pansexuality and earned trust that I can lose myself in and cry over is that really so much to ask???

[cardentist]

Context: [Link 1, Link 2]

the conversation about how we talk about marginalized men aside, this really is just inherently flawed from a conceptual level.

if you take a character that embodies traditional femininity as dictated by gender norms and you make that character a man that is, quite literally, Inherently subversive of those gender norms.

if you took cinderella and you made her a man that would Easily open up the opportunity to explore and comment on gender, gender roles, And cinderella as a character.

the framework assumes masculinity as non-subversive when the reality is that the form of masculinity that is accepted is highly specific and easy (and Necessary) to challenge.

[mutedeclipse]

I fine it funny how in older Bomberman games BomberMAN sounded like a kid lmao. I actually never got why he sounded as such.

Have you ever heard of goku

[transmorolians]

every gnc protagonist has

scarf

hat

cloak

[qbdatabase]

October 20th was International Pronouns Day, so this Saturday we have a special Picture Book Parade that's all about pronouns! These colorful children's books talk about how to use pronouns, introduce kids to the many different pronouns they can use, and talk you through what to do if you don't know which ones are for you 🏷️✏️❓

[1800duckhotline]

really want to draw all of the different canon fits for the gangrel fledgeling on temerice. her base fit is directly based off of the first one anyways but i mean the other 3 and the war form too

[tyrannuspitch]

more seriously it is REALLY interesting to me that, on one hand, we have people claiming that the original thor movies were "toxically masculine" for asking you to "take everything so seriously", and ragnarok was actually doing a Feminist Act in fixing this (by... making men express less emotion), and on the other hand we've always had misogynists claiming that the original thor movies are an embarrassment, too silly/cheesy/camp/melodramatic/etc, clearly Gay And For Girls.

like. a LOT of people get uncomfortable when they see men expressing too much sincere, vulnerable emotion. but here one group that's mostly cis women says the problem is masculinity, and another group that's mostly cis men says the problem is femininity. like... you see something you that doesn't meet your gendered standards/expectations, and you get uncomfortable... and then you try to justify it through gender war. the whole zeitgeist in a nutshell.

(but also, somehow, the solution to "bad" masculinity is "good" masculinity, never femininity, and that "good" masculinity is closer to the ideal/norm, and yet this is apparently "camp"... gender non-conformity can be good in theory, but in practice... not like that! never like that!!!)

[hollistercrowley]

pink male aesthetic

Stickers

Plain

[kakushusband]

On a *much* lighter note: I'm warming up to devastation bc her major flaw is such an easy fix.

And I'm very curious to see what will happen to the psimon/bruno dynamic after adding a brick shithouse butch to it 🫶

[the-acid-pear]

Fun fact: that's Che Guevara.

[sir-walton-goggins]

I'm a simple creature. My dream is to have a cool story-lead survival horror game with a gnc afab protagonist

[djuvlipen]

Ladies, if you are looking for a TV show that

talks about period stigma

arranged marriages

purity culture and virginity

the hold Catholicism has on Polish culture today

misogyny and how GNC women are treated in Romani culture

racism against Romani people in Poland

then you should look up Infamy (or Infamia), it's only 8 episode long, it's on Netflix and it's about a Romani teenage girl in Poland in 2023. It's very good, the creative team worked with Romani consultants, and although the main characters aren't played by Romani actors, the secondary and background characters are. You can also hear actual Romani language in some scenes!

It got barely any promotion and after the show was released, Romani male antiracist activists attacked it and tried to boycott the show, calling it racist because it criticizes Romani cultural misogyny. That show is so important because you barely see Romani protagonists in media; it is the first time a big platform, like Netflix, does something like that, while also being careful to consult Romani people and work with them; it discusses incredibly important issues that are usually invisible; but instead of hyping it up, those Romani males attacked it.

[olderthannetfic]

I have really mixed feelings about the small proportion of F/F fiction (original or fanfic), because yeah sure, people have their desires, they should write what they want, I get it. It all works out when I hear it from person to person. But somehow the logic only ever applies in one direction? "There are more male protagonists because men only care about male characters! Women also mostly care about male characters, because that's the majority of characters they get!" And then somehow we also yet kvetch when men write female characters (because it's incorrectly or something, nevermind if women are writing male characters correctly). Why don't we expect gay men to feel compelled only by femslash for the same reasons (but gender swapped) as the lesbian slashers/fujoshi? All of those very rational justifications are applied selectively, "for me for not for thee," and it all only leads to "idk I just don't wanna write femslash", for Reasons. Do we get to call them microaggressions yet?

--

No, you don't get to call other people's fantasy life a microaggression.

That is indeed "for me but not for thee" in the sense that you get to want what you want but other people aren't supposed to follow their id.

Do you also police gay men who spend too much time on drag and obsessing over female divas? That's an actual real world behavior that's somewhat equivalent. It frequently goes unchallenged, at least by progressives, because men are allowed to do whatever they want with chick stuff, while women are "stealing" if they dare to stray into dude stuff.

(God, I've seen so much more policing of drag kings being ~problematic~ for acting out stereotypical gender than policing of drag queens for the same. It's nuts!)

Fujoshi are often queer, but it's absurd to think we're mostly lesbians. We tend to be bi or asexual women with gender stuff going on, though there is a mix of everybody, including lesbians. There are also a lot of AFAB non-women who get lumped in with us. On the rare occasions I find a man willing to admit to being a similar demographic, he usually does like gender play in his hobbies and entertainment. It's just that men face even more pressure than women do to fit into tidy categories. Bi women get told we're whores. Bi men are told they don't exist.

Yes, I know plenty of lesbians who write more m/m than f/f, but in the big picture of all of AO3 or all of fanfic or all of media, they aren't the demographic driving these numbers. They're vastly outnumbered by the bi women, the asexual women, and the straight and gnc women.

The men we should be looking at as an equivalent aren't cis gay men but bicurious soy boys and the like.

Do most of us fujoshi object to equivalent men doing an equivalent thing? I've seen it sometimes, and I agree it's hypocritical. I'd like us to afford men the same ability to play and take on identities in their art. I remember enjoying Ranma fandom back in the day and reading quite a lot of f/f that was probably by men. It had some of that same sense of distance and fantasy that I so enjoy in m/m aimed at fujoshi. (I do consume some by-cis-gay, for-cis-gay content, both m/m and f/f, but it's often too literal and too bound up in specific named identities for my taste.)

On average, the people I see complaining most about men producing f/f material are the same people who think that because I have a clit, I should center my life around women exclusively. In other words, people spouting radfem ideology, perhaps on purpose or perhaps without realizing.

I do agree that some of the ways of expressing a lack of desire to write femslash can get pretty douchey. I want us to move away from some of the less accurate ones like "There are no compelling female characters" because of this.

But the reason for all these jerkass explanations is that women and people perceived as women who like m/m are constantly asked to explain ourselves. These aren't usually microaggressions: they're openly hostile. People get defensive and try to answer with important-sounding reasons about identity and pain because society at large won't accept "I like this" as the true explanation.

Pleasure is never enough of a reason for a woman to do something.