#im sorry but that boy has not shown any romantic attraction to any women

[txxty]

i feel such a genuine calmness in my soul every time i see someone say that mike wheeler is gay rather than bisexual (or i guess straight)

[magpiesbones]

Actually i think that the main conceit of the original grishaverse trilogy is that there Was in fact an assumption of An Amount of critical thinking and analysis skills that. not to stir up shit. are a bit rare in the circles of YA fandom and YA fandom enjoyers. ESPECIALLY regarding the darkling. Everyone is allowed to have one (1) tumblr sexyman style villain that they no holds barred hate and he is mine.

so the thing about the darkling. the Thing about the darkling is that hes absolutely a satirical and critical version of the sort of Immortal Hot Boy (antihero flavor) who is i think possibly best shown in Edward Cullen and Erik phantom of the opera. Hes powerful! hes hot! hes Deeply Fucked Up! he’s unavoidably an abuser!

ANYWAYS BOOKVERSE SPOILER WARNING since im putting this in the tag, also i don’t know how to format a read more so Long Post! sorry.

however Immortal Hot Boy trope is SO prevalent in early 2010s YA fiction that it genuinely does not occur to people to question even after you get shown a parade of his red flags. the fact that the darkling is a. of a comparable power to alina and b. seems to take her powers and autonomy seriously makes him PRIME shipping material especially if You, an enjoyer of early 2010s YA fantasy and fandom, are already used to this extremely specific parade of red flags being portrayed as hot and desireable. its an unavoidable cliche of the genre (spike from Buffy, snape, Rath Roiben Rye from Tithe, the list goes on) and he is absolutely set up as a love interest Would Be, narratively. but heres the thing:

Shadow and Bone (the books) fundamentally Are Not YA Fantasy and Romance books. theyre action/adventure tragedy books written for teenaged girls.

Alina Isnt the typical Strong Female Protagonist (Look At How Well We In The Writing Room Do Female Representation flavor) literally On Purpose. Alina does, in fact, just want to Go Home. however, she Is in fact a feminist character as honestly? the deciding metric for whether a book Respects Women is whether their characters are treated with respect and consideration (in the writing. books that portray misogyny do not become unfeminist by doing so) and Alina’s character (and zoya, genya, and tamar) is. Alina’s only stated goals from the beginning of the series is that she wants a. to go home and start an orphanage, b. to hang out with her best friend, and c. maybe be romantically involved with her best friend if he is so inclined. thats it. no this is not particularly GirlbossTM of her but GirlbossTM characters are not the only type of valid female character okay. but then it turns out that alina has actually God Level Powers, which, and I cannot be more clear here, she does not want.

It is therefore narratively important that alina has her choice of love interests throughout the series. in S&B, alina’s crush on mal appears unrequited and inopportune, something that has the power to ruin her current relationship with mal and not do much else. in contrast, the darkling is mysterious, attractive, and, most importantly, clearly interested in her, even if his interest mainly manifests in terms of interest in her power. he presents himself to her as the only one in the world who can understand her (which. red flag.) but in doing so, he assumes that her entire previous identity will be subsumed by being the sun summoner, which it never is. throughout the series, alina remains consistently alina. There is, throughout his expressions of interest, never any doubt that he would act exactly the same to another girl with the same power set, as he is, ultimately, not attracted to alina, but to the sun summoner. Even if this was his only problem, that’s still Not Ideal, since that’s absolutely objectification. this is not immediately evident on a cursory or first reading, both due to imperfect writing and the use of a non-omniscient and therefore semi-unreliable narrator.

Then he stops being a viable love interest as it is revealed that in fact he has a history of manipulating girls and young women under his power. The most egregrious example of this is Genya, who murders the king on what is revealed to be the darkling’s orders, and then reveals that the king has been raping her. Genya is the most beautiful girl in ravka, which can be and often is construed as a sort of power, but is one that she has no choice in. the Darkling’s manipulation of genya here cannot be overlooked either, since he does use her as a tool in his warmongering and then a scapegoat. there are Absolutely parrallels to be drawn here to alina’s situation: the darkling takes advantage of a young woman’s quest for power (or not even that— arguably, just the wish to get out of a bad situation) and then uses this to take her power from her. The darkling may not have had sexual or romantic intent towards genya, but this act Was an expression of his power and control. Genya is, by committing this act, forced to remain with the darkling, as this act, no matter how justified it was, is still treasonous. Alina, similarly, is manipulated into a quest for power that ends with  power taken from her by the darkling, where he literally collars her with the antlers, which then allow him to control her powers without her consent, as if she were nothing more than an instrument. symbolically this is extremely significant, but this is a tumblr post and not a thesis. the important part:

The Darkling is not interested in Alina as a person, but in the power alina has and how it can be used to benefit him. even though the sun summoner may be most powerful with the darkling, Alina is ultimately a tool to him, and has no power in their interactions.

that’s horrifying! the darkling is unarguably a villain for that! not to mention that he knew what was happening to genya (and certainly dozens of other girls), had the power to stop it, and chose not to! and yet that is, when taken to its end, the ultimate conclusion of the Immortal Hot Boy With Magic Powers: controlling, manipulative, and genuinely? fucked up. the darkling IS meant to portray this as Actively Fucked Up, but a lack of narrative control and audience expectations did. well.

For the sake of it, though, i might as well get into the rest of alina’s love interests, because the implications and power balance in all of those relationships are fascinating to consider and write about. 

second: nikolai, the spare royal, secret bastard, and Actual privateer. He’s not even a consideration until the second book, but, like the darkling, he also offers Alina power in exchange for the use of her own, but he, at least, is honest that his offer is not really romantically inclined, and explains it all for her: her power as the sun summoner will legitimize his reign (as. he is also the Only remaining legitimized member of the royal family). Nikolai’s honesty does put him over the darkling in terms of Alina’s romantic prospects, but he still wants the sun summoner, and not alina. nikolai represents a cause, not a romantic interest, and while their interests align for the duration of the war, alina Does Not Want political power, a life at court, or any of the things that a more permanent relationship with nikolai will unavoidably require. Alina’s goals and nikolai’s are fundamentally different, since alina is a commendably consistent character, who still just wants to run a countryside orphanage with mal.

finally there’s mal. He is Absolutely Nothing compared to A Thousand Year Old Wizard God and The Next King. But he wants Alina. He doesnt care if she has powers, and remains the Only one of her love interests who is Actually Interested in who she is, instead of what she can do for him. in any other book, the main girl character giving everything up to date a mediocre dude and run an orphanage is not, particularly, great. However, this Isn’t any other book: by dating her bestie and running away to an orphanage in the countryside Alina is fulfilling her Only Stated Goal. The sun summoner’s powers have only even been used to control her and arguably when her powers were strongest she had the least narrative agency as she was imprisoned and used as the figurehead of a cult. Alina was a living martyr even Before she faked her death. she Does Not Win and even symbolically loses by becoming powerful enough to fight the darkling: so she Doesn’t.

Alina’s agency comes from her choice, and not her powers, and her powers are intrinsically not her choice, which is why the final battle cannot be fought by her. if alina really Is the Only One powerful enough to fight the darkling, then the darkling is proven right, and the entire war does Not matter: if Only Alina can fight, then the war was over in book one, because the stag’s antlers mean that the darkling can control alina’s powers. and that’s nihilistic and depressing. 

Even alina thinks that this is true, though: she thinks that everything comes down to an ancient and extended scavenger hunt, and she thinks she has no choices. yes, completing morozova’s trinity renders her Physically unable to fight, but mentally and symbolically she was unable to fight either chapters or books previous to the final battle. ironically, she regains the ability to choose after losing her powers, since her agency is not related to her power level, but to her choices.

It doesn’t matter what alina chooses to do, but it Does matter that she has the power of choice. Alina is, in this way, a better-written character than any of the sort of GirlbossTM Strong Female Character types that were really Very much her contemporaries.

and, as an addendum: no, it’s not particularly great writing. you can sort of see the loose strings, even if they’re not particularly important loose strings, but you can see the writing get Much better as you read, and, like, the themes Are more complicated than the writing can support. this is a subversion propped up by the bones of the narrative it subverts, and they’re not particularly strong bones. yes a great deal of it is expectations projected onto a narrative and a lack of critical analysis. however, the narrative actively welcomes projected expectations and only reveals that they’re being subverted twenty pages later. so.

[landofsomethingsomething]

your askbox seems crowded with johnroxycallie asks today. welllll sorry im going to add another one to the pile! i am intrigued! i used to ship johnroxy because it seemed real & cute but i moved to roxycallie when it was canon. but this is interesting?? sooo im interested but not sold. give me your best sales pitch for this new ot3 and adopt me into that good good 4 person fold?

Okay here’s why I like it.

To start you have to understand my salty relationship with Roxy’s bisexuality. I basically wrote my own god damn narrative for it in my own head because I am just so over homestuck’s completely unwillingness to give women arcs relating to their sexuality. Womens’ queerness is always something treated by the narrative as obvious and unworthy of commentary or exploration or any element of revelation/self-discovery or even an iota of reflection or struggle, which is especially FRUSTRATING when they’ve been shown struggling with the queerness of OTHERS. It’s that last part that gets me w Roxy -- I especially hate this with Roxy specifically because her relationship with Dirk was so very fucking fraught with her being bitter at him for being gay and thus unwilling to be with her. Roxy was aggressive about her attraction to Jake and Dirk and I would have really liked to see SOMETHING about like. The narrative there after she meets Callie, especially when Callie expressly tells Roxy that her species can’t experience human romance and blah blah blah blah there are so many things I would have loved to know more about re Roxy and her sexuality but this post is already going to be long so enough said about how mad I am about this specifically

The way I’ve settled on it for my own peace of mind is that Roxy went after Dirk and Jake most aggressively because she had the “save the human species” thing held up as the banner of like, the most important thing she could do to the exclusion of most else. Couple that with her being upset at Dirk for being gay and you get a workable explanation for her suppressing her own bisexuality and being so exuberantly performatively straight. 

So. Callie is the only person outside the other alpha kids that Roxy has had this lifelong close relationship/bond with. They have a conversation where they basically gal pal each other aggressively, with Callie saying her species can’t do redrom/human romance and Roxy being cagey about whether she’d reciprocate because Callie is basically telling her there’s no point to the thought exercise and who likes rejection?? but Roxy is the one who brings it up and is clearly fishing to see if Callie likes her likes her and blah blah blah people have been shipping RoxyCallie long before credits video because of all this, the ring, etc. The closeness of their relationship and the mutual “if only this could work it could be so good” narrative there like all right. 

Then, John. There’s an element to Roxy’s attraction to John that’s rooted in that instinctive thing she has going on that you can see on display in their first meeting, where she sees A Dude and immediately does her mental calculus to determine hey here is A Dude, he’s kind of cute, he’s maybe not gay and/or off-limits b/c my best friend has a huge messy crush on him. And it would be real easy to weigh the scales here and go full RoxyCallie if that were the sum and parts of their relationship, but like, here’s the thing -- it’s not. 

I just cannot let go of John and Roxy as the sole survivors of the Game Over timeline. Roxy is Callie’s beacon of optimistic hope, Roxy is the one who acts to save Callie and preserve her in the alpha timeline (with John’s help -- John gives Roxy the ring after all. I like that detail in the full scope of them being a Unit in the future.) But JOHN plays that role for Roxy. Roxy watches Rose die and is ready to sit down and throw in the towel. She tells John straight up that her only plan going forward after this is to accept her fate and bury her mom and wait for her miserable doomed timeline to end and take her with it. John is the one who convinces her there might be a better way, there might be hope. JOHN is the one who acts to preserve Roxy’s existence in the alpha timeline. I really love the parallel between Roxy bringing Callie back from the brink of oblivion and John bringing Roxy back from the same via the same mechanism that allows John to get the ring that allows Roxy to bring Callie back in the first place. That is a really tidy loop and I like it a lot.

So, Roxy in Earth C with a boy she likes and has a connection with that literally no one else can understand because no one else went through Game Over, no one else has this dissonant experiences that might not mesh 100% with the people they love, no one else has this potential imposter syndrome. I love the idea of Roxy and John bonding over that and have never really been willing to give it up. I love the idea of Roxy coming to understand that her infatuation with the idea of A Boy, Any Boy and the future she wanted so bad were products of trauma and really examining that and then realizing she fell for John legitimately, that she genuinely finds him charming

Simultaneously, Roxy in Earth C with the alien girl she’s had a crush on for like probably forever, and now she’s free of the burden she always assumed she had to repopulate the human race. Also her entire family is queer and she’s free to explore her own feelings with that context. Maybe to accept that her feelings for Jane were never purely platonic (and her feelings for Callie certainly never were) and half her frustration at Dirk was that he insisted on being “true” to himself while Roxy never felt she could be and imposed straightness on herself out of obligation to the human race. That could make a girl bitter, right? (I have so many god damn feelings about Roxy and Dirk reconciling post-canon)

And here’s Callie with her insistence that cherubs can’t experience redrom, too. Except now she’s living on Earth C with, for example, Karkat, a troll who absolutely experiences romantic feelings the same way humans do despite all his species lore stating Trolls Can’t Feel Like That. And now Callie has eternity to explore HER feelings -- and we know part of why Callie just accepted that she couldn’t experience flushed/human romance is because she didn’t think anyone would ever love her like that anyway, right? She thought she was hideous and unloveable. Well now she’s here on Earth C and there’s no way Roxy is going to go on letting her believe that. And without that holding her back from exploring the way she REALLY feels, you can see a path to Callie allowing herself to experience emotions she never thought she could. 

And all of these are positive things and wonderful things for these people to learn about themselves and about each other. 

Roxy caught between the boy she fell for on her journey and the girl she fell for long before her journey even started, just having this realization like, everyone is doing what they want here, this is our universe and our earth and our society and our rules, and she’s kind of unofficially dating them both for awhile but not committing labels-wise to either until eventually she’s just like fuck it??? Here’s how I feel, now how about you??? And I cannot imagine Callie protesting Roxy loving them both or someone else loving Roxy as much as she does, and John’s relationship with romance throughout Homestuck is so bemused and ???? and exploratory, I imagine he’s like well this is kinda weird is this like a troll thing and Roxy is like no this is just an us thing and they deal with it

John and Callie have already been spending tons of time with each other throughout and again, as I referenced in an earlier post, there’s some initial awkwardness that settles out into a balanced arrangement and Callie and John both love Roxy and care about each other very much.

Also like, until there actually is some kind of epilogue that does more with John’s current depression arc and ties in the Masterpiece with everything, I like this alternate reality where John has someone who understands him in a way really no one else can there for him when his shit starts to go south, I like the idea of there being an entire long ass subplot where John tries to isolate himself and Roxy is instrumental in not allowing that to happen, I like Callie’s cheer in the face of her own blisteringly unforgiving history and reality being an inspiration for John, I like a lot of things that canon as it stands doesn’t have a satisfying character-driven arc for at the moment.

And, you know, to cap all this off, I really just like JohnRoxyCallie as an acknowledgement that bisexual woman are not “less” for liking boys, that bisexual woman don’t “count” unless they are exclusively with women, and that bisexual people in real life who ship bisexual characters with people of opposite/other genders are not somehow betraying the queer community by doing so, while simultaneously not sacrificing a potential f/f romance for a m/f one.

The LGBT community’s relationship with bisexual women is MY pet issue, because obviously I’m a bi woman, and there’s obviously an element of that going on as well. It bothers me with the treatment of a lot of fandom/homestuck’s bisexual women (this frenzy by queer fandom to erase every relationship a bisexual woman ever had with a man as being not real or not valid for x, y, z reasons while Straight Fandom is over there doing the same thing, but opposite) but Roxy is by far the Homestuck Canon Bisexual Woman I personally care about the most so SHRUG that’s why you get a million words of my feelings

Anyway that’s why I like them

[kittyit]

hey, i hope im coming to the right person with this but i really need some advice. i'm a teenage lesbian, and ever since i was about 9-10 years old i've been struggling on and off with gender dysphoria. some days i feel fine but some days (like today) i just really wish i were born male. i dont know what's wrong with me but it totally sucks and ruins my mood. nobody would ever be able to tell that i have gender identity issues. i dress and act pretty effeminately (1/3)

but on the inside i wish i sometimes were a boy. transitioning is totally out of the question, but even if i could, i still wouldnt want to. i know a lot of kids wonder what it’d be like to be the opposite sex, but this has been a long term thing that has caused me a lot of stress. it’s a really confusing and frustrating feeling. i have no way to relieve the dysphoria other than to wait until i feel better about myself another day. when i was younger i used to identify as ftm, but later decided i was just a cis lesbian because i didn’t feel like the trans label fit me. im sorry if im bothering you in any way but i saw a lot of your posts about detransition and dysphoria and i was wondering if you had any advice for me

——————

i’m actually really glad you sent this to me! not bothering me at ALL! i’m a femme with dysphoria and i’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about. having gender/sex dysphoria is not a uniquely lesbian experience but there’s absolutely a significant overlap - and butches get the worst of it, with the feelings they’re having reinforced by the reactions of the world to their butch existence.

i feel the major root of my dysphoria is something like this: when you’re a lesbian, you love women. lesbian love is usually not shown to you, or if it is, it’s in a way that doesn’t recognize how real and vital it is. when i was a little girl, all the messages i had to receive about love where about what men could/should/wanted to do/provide for women. the only way for a woman to be happy was for her to be wanted and taken care of by men in a myriad of ways.

so there was that overwhelming social message, saturating basically all media, advertising, just everywhere! men will openly say the same things too and try to enforce them as best as possible. same sex attraction is porn or a joke to most of them, even very young.in addition, there can also be a messages like that from other women. i had a lot of feelings for straight & bi identified girls when i was a girl who wanted something that i couldn’t give to them. often these feelings were accompanied by romantic, sexual, or intense emotional entanglement. regularly they were accompanied by the statement “i wish you were a boy.” i felt it in my heart too, because i felt like, wow, if i was a boy, she could love me back. i could actually make her happy.

the horrible feeling of not being able to fulfill other women or have a normal, healthy, happy relationship is very, very tangled up in my dysphoria. the more i’ve been able to embrace (instead of accept or ignore) being a lesbian, and the more i’ve been around lesbians who are unapologetic (or fighting to be) about being a lesbian, the more my dysphoria fades.

when love between women is positioned as not-real, not-enough, a joke, women who love women will also feel not-real, not-enough, and like jokes.

so i hope this was at least a little relevant to you! i really want to hear from more femme / feminine lesbians who have dysphoria. there as many ways to feel like a failed female / failed woman as there as female people alive and the more we talk about what we’ve gone/are going through the more we can help each other and ourselves.