#i'm so tired of gender non-conforming characters being treated like this.

[sovamurka]

i just KNOW that if sevika was a man, people would be shipping sevilco like crazy, making analysis of even tiniest bits of interactions, screaming "HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE ANYTHING BETWEEN THEM???"

[theothergal]

I've seen a post on Twitter that, in my opinion, summarizes what lots of Bridgerton's fan think about Eloise.

The tweet said, basically "I hope that the friendship with Kate will help Eloise realize that she can want romance, be a wife and a mother, be part of the Ton and still be 100% herself"

And It made me think...

What if "being 100% herself" includes not wanting any of these things?

Eloise has made quite clear that she doesn't want to be a wife and that she doesn't like the Ton's events, how can she be "100% herself" while conforming to the societal standards she resents?

I know, I know she will, eventually, because of the canon, but I don't like this attitude toward any female character Who Is not 100% gender conforming.

And it's not just Eloise, every time a female character Is not 100% feminine and Happy of being feminine Is automatically called a NLOG.

Yes, there's a conversation to be had about those female characters who put down other girls, but the focus should be their behavior, not their gender non conformity.

It's grating seeing all these post wishing for female characters to become more gender conforming as growth.

"Another pick me! I hope X will grow out of her NLOG phase and start appreciating romance, embroidery, pink and dresses"

"Wouldn't be cool if that masc female characters started hanging out with girly girls and became more girly herself? She can be a masc with a splash of pink and makeup😉"

"Female characters who resist arranged marriage are so stupid! Just think about the advantages It brings! A smart girl would be happy to wed a stranger for money and power. Freedom and reproductive autonomy? What are those?"

"I'm tired of of these girlboss female characters fighting and punching like men, we need more female characters,who use their feminine power to succeed. Action female characters are basically men with boobs"

Do you hear yourselves?

Put this in your heads. Some women and girls don't like pink, dresses, embroidery, makeup...and it's perfectly FINE.

I wish there were as many masc characters as you think there are. Instead we get slightly-tomboyish-but-still-feminine-enough female characters who are ALWAYS forced into femininity and eventually "learn" to enjoy.

You make me want to write a story where the FMC Is 100% gnc and stays like this until the end, and when somebody tries to femminize her she tells them of.

Like "I don't want to wear dresses, or pink or heels. I don't want to marry or have children. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever".

Sorry, it became a rant, and I'm sure I Lost some nuance, but seriously, stop treating gnc female characters as bitter nlogs who should learn to become pure and beautiful girly girls.

I'm nowhere near the most masculine girls ever, and I still get sometimes shat on for not liking makeup, for not shaving and for acting awkward sometimes, and I know I'm not always pleasant to be around, but it's not always my fault.

It's not fun.

[smellybead]

(Hi this post is not formatted or worded the best I apologise it is late I'm tired, not wearing my glasses and mildly pissed off so hope that explains the slightly disorganised state of this)

The sheer amount that hange is referred to with she/her and just overall perceived as a woman is !! Really somewhat annoying !! Like go ahead and do that sure

But people's reasoning will often be "hanges gender is up for interpretation" I want to know where that interpretation came from and why tho? The character that's very purposefully depicted as ambiguous with their gender, is mostly referred to either neutrally or masculinely and opts for masculine clothing options.. I personally dont see why you would choose to perceive them as completely a woman. Hey, if you were to give me genuine reasoning why you like to perceive them as a woman, I may not agree with you, but I'll hear you out!!! However if you tell me "it's up for interpretation" "i can interpret her gender how i want" and end your reasoning there, I'll know that's very likely not why and you're just saying that to have plausible deniability and dismiss any criticism that people have. AND IM NOT SAYING "it's up for interpretation" IS FLAT OUT BULLSHIT REASONING. DONT THINK THAT I AM !!! I'm just saying that this is what soooo many people give as reasoning when they just don't WANT to perceive hange as anything but a woman (because they don't like queer/complex identities/dont see them as valid)

Yes‌, in fandoms people headcanon characters as genders other than what they are canonically, i very much do this regularly. But this is *giving* queer/complex gender identities to characters who lack it, as a form of representation. Not *taking it away* from them when they already have/are implied to have it. It's very rare to see characters who don't/are implied to not conform to the gender binary in popular media! I personally see myself and my identity represented so much in Hange especially! So it's frustrating to see people (cough cishet people) dismiss it and take it away from them!

It's just like, yeah, sure, hange could be a woman if you wanted them to be, thats *fine*. But why are we as a fandom so hugely opting for that and treating it like it's solid canon facts. Treat it like what you say it is and what it actually is: an interpretation. It isn't canon!! Isayama was very particular about Hange's gender being vauge/not defined!! I personally see Hange as something outside the gender binary, their gender is queer in nature to me. That is my interpretation, it's not canon either. Hange's gender ambiguity (their gender ambiguity, not any possible queer identity) is the canon thing. Although I do think use of they/them and gender neutral language *is* more in line with how they are canonically portrayed.

Also, I see people say "oh well she has boobs so as far as I'm concerned that's a woman" (I know you're just an ass if you're saying that. Boobs ≠ woman hope we are clear on that. but also) is it crazy for me to say that's debatable? Yeah hange has definitely been depicted with boobs (especially when WIT was animating, they got feminised a fair bit in those seasons) but a lot of the time, hange's drawn/animated with a flat (or at least a much flatter chest). If anything is "up for interpretation" I would say it's hanges boobs LMAO.

"Thank you MAPPA for giving hange back their flat chest" we all say

Anyway sorry for my rambling. Uh basically/tl;dr let us have ambiguous/gender non-conforming characters and if you dont like that, don't hide behind "it's up for interpretation" to dismiss conversation about it.

Hange ily sm ur so dear to me please come home

[thecoolerliauditore]

I've only skimmed a lot of the posts so sorry if this point has been made but I wonder how peoples' perception of Masculinity vs Femininity as a spectrum affects their perception of characters and designs. Do some people view Masculinity and Feminity as complete opposites, with androgyny as the middle ground? Can you be masculine and feminine simultaneously, while not really being androgynous? Does the 'threshold' of androgyny change depending on how the cc/character is depicted in 'canon'? to be clear I don't necessarily think any of these viewpoints are 100% correct or whatever but I think it's interesting how people will have different perspectives, because most people's view of gender are skewed different and what might read as a fem design could read masculine to another or just entirely androgynous. sorry for the ramble this stuff fascinates me deeply

No yeah it is fascinating!! It's a. very complicated topic since of course the concepts of "masculinity" and "femininity" are very frivolous and amorphous, hence why I kept feeling the need to clarify how it gets. Weird with anime-inspired styles what with the culture shock and whatnot.

This song was really popular in fandoms awhile back and I think it's like. a great example of how one culture's completely neutral (or even masculine!) traits can be seen as feminine (or in this case, "gay") when viewed by another. It's also just really funny and I'm kinda sad no on has done a life series animatic to it yet.

masculinity and femininity as a scale with androgynous in the middle is also something I'm glad you bring up, because the concepts of masculinity and femininity are so arbitrary and as such there are so many ways to deviate from the norm -- some more socially acceptable than others! Thinking about, for example, the young MAGA hat'd women you see on sites like twitter with the most racist takes of all time and who are very proud of their ability to keep up with the boys in terms of 'murican masculinity (chugging beers, changing tires, so on and so forth) but at the same time cake their faces with makeup, support that Hashtag tradwife lifestyle and Would Not Ever Consider wearing clothes from the mens section because that is the Bad type of gender non-conformity for commies and lesbians or whatever.

Compare that to like. sorry incoming irl lore. the way I've had people in both more liberal and less woke areas get nervous when they try to address me, with the only big difference being that more younger, liberal people will typically either ask for my pronouns or they/them me by default.

I'm lucky enough that most people here are polite but as someone who has presented both masc/fem the way people treat me is so distinctly different based on my perceived gender as well as my level of androgyny it was kind of shocking to me. Eitherway there's a distinct attitude it's like. Rude to not be able to tell whether someone's a man or woman I've noticed and nowadays I have a lot of fun stressing people out. Sadism in me or whatever.

ANYWAY this was about minecraft youtubers. Analysing how people gender their designs, unconsciously or not, is fascinating because of how interpretative these designs are. There's also probably something you could say about how gaming youtuber is a very male-dominated space and how female gaming youtubers tend to overperform femininity, but in very different ways dependent on their intended audience (compare say. Lizzie and Pokimane for example.)

I think it's also worth noting that like. masculinity and femininity in behaviour is very different from physical presentation. which is how you get images like this

in addition to, again, these concepts already being abstract.

and of course, all said with me biting my tongue on the queer side of things still, because that's a whole other sub-sector of stereotypes and in-group signalling and history that runs convergent with mainstream views on gender.

I think it might be an interesting exercise to put your own designs up against others and consider what points they differ and what that might mean for how the other artist interprets the character vs how you do it. And then if you can look up what the artist actually has to say about the character and see just how right/wrong you were and how your own biases come into play. Two different people can have very similar views on a character, for example, but communicate that through opposite design tropes because they have different associations with said tropes. Not just for gender things btw and I've found peoples more nuanced opinions are harder to read than you'd think! I don't think anyone would look at my Bdubs design and guess that I thought he was fairly feminine in personality, for example.

I love doing that and challenging my own pre-conceptions of what i think peoples takes are judging by their designs (as well as what I think certain traits indicate in personality!). It's amazing for example how many pearl designs I've seen as too feminine and rolled my eyes at turn out to be drawn by artists who very much consider her to be tomboyish.

[fromtheseventhhell]

The nonbinary!arya takes with Arya’s “i’m not a lady” quote makes no sense to me. I honestly don’t mind a single hc about any of the starklings’ sexuality or gender identity- but then the way Arya’s feminity is constantly brought into question irks me. I mean, the “i’m a girl” everytime Arya’s mistaken for a boy is Right. There. So there you go, Arya’s peak feminine icon because she firmly states, explicitly even, that she is, in fact, a girl at every opportunity. Bye

See my issue with takes like this will always be that this fandom is obsessed with removing Arya from her girlhood. So while I don't see anything inherently wrong with having the headcanon, most of the time it's coming from the perspective that her being a non-conforming girl in a strict patriarchal society makes her less of a girl. People think they're being progressive and "open" by having this opinion but, like you said, Arya is firmly rooted in her identity as a girl and corrects people on multiple occasions. Like...okay? You think a character constantly masculinized and belittled by fandom for not being a conforming female character is non-binary, congratulations? Meanwhile, female characters who actually toe the line with gender aren't getting the same treatment cause they're either considered too "feminine" or they're associated romantically with a man. It's just so forced, and I'm tired of non-conforming female characters being treated like they're lesser women.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Oh btw I don't even agree with Con either. I get where he's coming from with it, this show does shield it's audience from homophobic violence to a certain extent but I remember being a little girl with short hair and the hate I got after I cut it was different from the baseline bullying I experienced when I was just undiagnosed autistic. The Badmintons attacking Stede because they caught him picking flowers is such a clear homophobic attack and it was physical. You might argue that flower picking does not a gay man make, and to that I respond a pixie cut does not a lesbian or a trans man make but that didn't stop the fourth grade girls from maliciously within earshot asking each other "who's the new boy" so their friends could respond "oh that's just deadname she's a dyke now"

Now I don't really expect a 56 year old man who's mostly gender conforming to pick up on that. I expect Con to do what my dad did and go "wow kids are so cruel poor baby Stede" without really making the connection between his sexuality and the bullying. In fact, if the old man in question is an ally, as I know Con to be, he may have unlearned some gender stereotypes and it might not even initially occur to him to associate the flower picking and Stede's sexuality. That doesn't mean that connection doesn't exist. I don't fault Con for not making it. He wasn't in that scene so he didn't have to think about it too hard. He probably watched it once, maybe twice and, like my dad, didn't make the connection in his mind. But that scene was written by a writers room with people like me, who are gender non conforming and were almost certainly picked on as children because of it. They wrote that scene in there with that experience in mind, and then Nathan Foad, a flamboyant gay man, played his character as having a moment of recognition when that story was recounted to him. It is there and I'm tired of pretending it's not. It's not as sophisticated or deadly as an adult hate crime, so the adults watching the show can take it less seriously, but at the end of the day Stede got rocks thrown at him for picking flowers as a boy. That's about not conforming to gendered expectations and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

That said if you're gonna treat the word of Con (an actor not a writer or a director, only really has say over his own character, can have headcannons but after the show comes out those headcannons are no more official than ours) as the word of god, he didn't even say what you're saying he said. I couldn't be as disingenuous as y'all are being if I tried.

Con O'Neill: I love this show so much it's so kind. There's no hate crimes in it no one gets beat up for being gay. Not like in the other gay shows I've done where a guy graphically beats a gay person to death with a golf club. I prefer this.

Braindead people on line: HA! That means that Izzy doing direct verbal harassment of effeminate gay men for being too feminine and justifying selling Stede out by saying that he's corrupted Ed isn't homophobia and you need to shut up

[agnesgoesadventuring-blog]

I'm just real tired of how so many people in the fandom ignore that gender and sexuality aren't just one thing and that it can all be fluid and a spectrum Molly says his wiles aren't masculine and there are people decreeing (not just headcanoning, but saying that's the way it is or that's the way it should be drawn) that he's not male or that people need to not draw him with a masculine body. Astrid might be the one Caleb loved and people are treating it like he can't be queer. (more)

(continued) Molly has sex and people are trying to tell ace/aro people that now he can't be aro/ace. Headcanons are fine but way too many people in this fandom latch onto these things that aren't true that are only about them having limited understanding and treat every other person like they have to go by it.

I know. It can be incredibly frustrating. It's probably just the minority (or maybe not, I don't know. I don't actually know the exact demographics of the Critical Role fandom, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say it's the minority). But it's a very loud, aggressive, and hostile minority. And even the ones that aren't hostile and aggressive about it lend to the culture that's kind of "this is the way it is" in the fandom.

Gender and sexuality can indeed be very fluid, both in terms of the fact that every single person has their own sexual and gender identity and that no two people experience those things in the same way, and in terms of the face that for some individuals their gender experience and their sexuality can flow and change and not conform even to the norms of the "non-norms". There's also the fact that there are a lot of cultural constructs surrounding gender and sexuality that don't necessarily fit with a person's gender and sexual identity.  And the fact that, for so many reasons, our behavior does not always actually define our gender or sexual identities.

There are a lot of people who take their own experience with sexuality and gender and decide that That's the Way It Is, and treat everything and everyone else accordingly. Unfortunately for them (and for others, really, because it mean they're being treated in harmful ways), the spectrum of gender and sexuality is so much wider and so much more complex than just the experience of one individual person.

Sex does not eliminate the possibility of asexuality. There are multiple queer sexual identities that encompass attraction toward the opposite gender. Cultural standards of masculinity and femininity tie into gender and gender expression in so many different, complex ways (men can present as feminine, women can present as masculine, men and women can present as androgynous, the femininity or masculinity of the shape and form of the body is not inherently tied to how a person presents, and so on, and so on, and so on). And that's just the tip of the iceberg, even when discussing gender and sexual identity in Critical Role and the way fandom has interpreted and treated those things.

One of the beautiful things about fandom is that it is transformative, so it allows for that fluidity and broadness in the way we interpret and relate to characters and stories. We don't get to impose our personal experiences and interpretations onto others.