#if any german speakers here have any advice about pronouns in german feel free to tell me

[mishalikessoundsandcolours]

Gender question rant I guess (long, sorry)

My need to come out at least to some people at my school is growing greater, but there are two main reasons that really hold me back from doing that:

The fact that my identity is so vague (I really don't know how else to describe it). Like, being not cis and out is not a huge problem in my school, I mean of course there's a bunch of queerphobic people but there are also plenty of people who are cool with it, and enough queer people as well. I know that there are a few trans people too, though I only know one of them personally. But I just don't know how to explain that 'I'm genderqueer, even if my gender expression isn't strictly androgynous, I do dress femme sometimes and I don't have huge body dysphoria but I'm still not a girl, I'd just like you all to refer to me as Lior instead of the name you've known me by for years and to switch between pronouns all the time' - that's the way I technically feel. I could make the pronouns thing a bit easier by just choosing gender-neutral ones because even though I like switching it up the way my closest friends have no problem doing, I'm comfortable to settle on they/them as a default in public. HOWEVER, I live in Germany and the problem is that there is no exact equivalent to singular they because 'sie' means both she and plural they. It's stupid, I know. I've read about some German neopronouns like 'dey/dem', 'sier' and 'mensch' (that's basically just the word for 'human', I actually like this option), but firstly, people might not take those seriously because "they're too hard to get used to" and secondly, I'd need someone I trust to refer to me with these pronouns a few times so that I can see if they really fit, BUT all of my close friends who I'm out to are russian-speakers. And I also just don't know any nonbinary/genderqueer people who speak german in real life, and I speak English with the ones I know online. Why do languages have to be so harddddd I wish every language was like Finnish where everyone is just 'hän' in third person. Anyways, that was the first problem!

The second one is more simple: there are too many people who've known me for six years and I've only got two years left here, so is it really worth it? I'm just scared that not may people will believe me if I explain my identity to them because "I've known you since fifth grade, you always looked and dressed like a girl!" or whatever. I dunno. I don't know what to do. I don't feel much like myself when I'm called by the name I've gone by so far in German (which is already a different version of the name my parents and other russian-speakers call me and also a different version of the name I have on documents). But I feel like people would be too confused if I came out. But there are also just some people I like to be around, especially my bandmates, and I'd like to fully be myself around them.

I'm just confused and angry at myself for being so confused and arghhhhhh. I don't know anything anymore.

[thetwoguineabook]

6 and 7 for Blackbird! Or maybe if you're willing, also 10 :" thank you!

6: hardest/easiest character to write for?

Blackbird is an unusual one because normally I would say Victor is much, much easier for me to write, but I have a heck of a lot in common with this universe’s Yuuri, particularly in terms of having come through a lot of political/ideological nonsense and in believing that the right answer to any given ethical or political question is probably ‘it’s complicated’ followed by a 4,000 word essay. But both of them present some interesting challenges just in terms of trying to reach across both a cultural and an historical divide.

The hardest character to write was undoubtedly Yakov, given that I was trying to sensitively portray a very complex and difficult experience that is way, way outside of my own, and that I had to do it through Victor’s POV when he was aggressively clueless about anything to do with Yakov’s inner life.

7: hardest/easiest verse to write for?

Not 100% sure what you’re intending ‘verse’ to mean in the context of a single story, but I will say oh my god it is so much easier to be writing scenes set in London than in Berlin. I’ve never been to Berlin; anything I described there was about 25% Google Maps and 75% bullshitting. It doesn’t help that modern Berlin and pre-1945 Berlin are really dramatically different to one another, in no small part thanks to the city being rebuilt in two distinct sections. Also historical maps, picture archives etc for London are in English; I can muddle my way through reading German, but not with any great confidence.

10: any writing advice?

I gave some very broad-based advice in a response to an ask here, so here’s some much more specific advice based on two problems I see a lot of in fanfic:

1) Never, ever, ever use an adjective- or any other word, for that matter- that you aren’t already familiar with. There is really no such thing as a direct synonym- even words with very similar meanings have different connotations and will make your descriptions feel different to a reader. A thesaurus is not a tool for expanding your vocabulary, it is a memory aid to prompt you with words you should already recognise (which is why, despite its limitations, I love Panlexicon, as it makes it very easy to visually connect words).

I know it can be tempting to try and embellish your writing with new words, but words are the tools you are using to convey your ideas. If you don’t know exactly how a tool functions, it is liable to ruin everything you’re trying to accomplish. A story with a simple vocabulary which the author is nevertheless in full command of will be much more effective than one in which the language has run out of the author’s control. And if you really do want to expand your vocabulary so all the fancy adjectives can be yours? The only way to do that effectively is to read more. And not just fanfic- too many fanfic writers clearly don’t read much else. Read everything.

2) You almost never have to use epithets- yes, even if you’re writing something in which every single character is referred to by the same pronoun. Repetition of a character’s name is not actually that noticeable in the flow of reading- it doesn’t disappear quite as smoothly as ‘said’, but it is not that jarring to have a character’s name crop up multiple times over subsequent sentences, especially if it’s necessary to distinguish who is doing what to whom.

Characters can also be distinguished by who is the subject and object of a sentence even when you use the same pronoun for each, eg. an apparent fan favourite from ch. 4:

Victor was his, before anything and everything else, and he was determined to have him.

They’re 100% distinguishable because Victor is the object of the sentence and Yuuri the subject- obviously the switch from the nominative ‘he’ to the accusative ‘him’ is helpful, but even in a sentence where the same form of a pronoun is used you can distinguish the subject and the object, eg. this TOP SEKRIT PREVIEW sentence fragment from ch. 5:

It would be so much easier for him to do this without looking him in the eyes

You can tell that’s not the same ‘him’ right away. Even if you are, like me, a native English speaker who was never taught any actual grammar in the context of English (everything I know about grammar I learned from foreign language lessons), you will naturally distinguish the actors in a sentence.

And if all else fails? Just rearrange the sentence. Again, another example from ch. 4 because it’s the freshest in my mind:

He had been summoned to Oxford by Minako and the pair of them sent out to dinner together only about a month after Phichit had arrived in the country

This one caused me a brief headache because it was originally ‘He had been summoned to Oxford by Minako and sent out to dinner with Phichit only about a month after he had arrived in the country’, which I felt could be misconstrued as placing their meeting in 1944, shortly after Yuuri’s arrival in the UK, rather than in 1947, shortly after Phichit’s. Keen as Minako is, even she wasn’t trying to send Yuuri on dates during the second phase of the Blitz! So rather than go for something awkward like ‘a month after the Thai/short/[unnecessary racial descriptor]/hamster-obsessed/who-even-knows man had arrived in the country’, I restructured the sentence so it was both clear and free of epithets.

Describing a named character as ‘the [adjective] man/woman/porpoise/tentacle beast’ draws attention to that characteristic. This can be used effectively when you do in fact want your readers to think about that characteristic, or when describing a character whose name has not yet been revealed. But using bland epithets like ‘the Japanese man’ or ‘the other skater’ constantly is a bit like playing the boy who cried wolf with your readers- when you do ultimately want to call attention to a characteristic relevant to a given moment, they’ll be so worn out that they won’t notice.