#is it the butch of it all? is it the genderswap? i'm just curious

[thegirl20]

It's funny how everybody's all 'lesbian greaseball' this and 'butch greaseball' that, but nobody seems to be bothered about lesbian* Dinah.

Dinah is the most into her girlfriend it is possible to be. She literally worships that big dumb engine and isn't shy about it.

She sings a whole song about how sad she is that Greaseball has dumped her. All Greaseball sings about is her muscles and we're all like 'yes lesbian train of my dreams!!'

*None of these trains are explicit about their sexuality so Dinah could be bi or pan or whatever else

[macdenlover]

Question for ya about genderbent mac and gender/sexuality performance. Assuming she would have a similar repression then coming out experience, would you change her appearance/presentation? I feel like in recent seasons mac's changed so much so I'm curious how you'd represent that in your art!

okay so! @bitseventimes made some really good points in this post about this idea already so i’m kinda piggybacking.

short answer: not really? i’d keep her presentation pretty in line with canon mac so she’d be rockin the tommy bahamas shirts the same seasons as him. i think my version of fem mac would have always been sorta masc except for the few occasions she’s had to put on a dress. but she’d complain about it the whole time. I think her evolving relationship with gender expression and sexuality over the seasons would be less visual and more internal/behavioral.

long answer: unfortunately i don’t think it’s really possible to do a perfect 1 to 1 genderswap parallel that carries ALL the nuances of a character’s relationship queerness/gender expression while still keeping that character recognizable. so it’s okay to bend the rules a little. my headcanon is that fem mac was always a tomboy but saw femininity as a shitty obligation you have to deal with once in a while for show, similar to canon mac’s relationship with having sex with women. i think i saw someone hc that fem mac would wear dresses to church to be closer to god and like yeah. that’s exactly it. overall her demeanor and interests and style would stay pretty close to canon mac. i think early seasons mac would feel ashamed for not being as put together as other girls and especially denise who always has perfect hair and perfect makeup and mac can’t even put eyeliner on without almost blinding herself. and that combined with repressed lesbianism would manifest into this misogynistic pick me “i’m not like other girls” mentality. she’d still have just as much cognitive dissonance as canon mac—convincing herself that dudes like natural girls better anyway but also of course denise has gotten laid so many times she always looks like a whore. and then that changes when mac comes to terms with being gay. (some of the misogyny is still there though this is it’s always sunny in philadelphia). anyways she starts fully embracing the butch thing with more confidence in the later seasons because turns out bitches really dig it. but if denise wants to do her make up every once in a while she sure won’t complain. if you really want to explore queer repression in relation to hyperfemininity it’s wayyy more interesting through denise’s character and it fits really well with whats already established in canon dennis. mac’s performance of femininity would exist as this external factor but denise’s performance of femininity would be so much more internalized and rooted in her self worth. mac takes her heels off 15 minutes into the party because she’s impulsive and it’s irritating and denise bears through the pain because if she can’t be beautiful then what is she whats the point? denise would belittle mac for not putting enough effort into her appearance but deep down she wants the strap so fucking bad would be sort of jealous of the freedom mac has with her appearance and she’d grow more and more resentful toward her in the later seasons after mac comes out.

sorry this turned into a macdennis analysis post and i’ve flown way off the rails from ur ask 😭😭😭 but hopefully you get what i’m saying

[the-everqueen]

Definitely curious about the genderflip Sandman fic 👀

SAME. as in, this is only a concept on the back burner of my brain because i haven't really worked out a satisfying answer to the central q of the thing which is: what does a gender flip DO to these characters?

because here's the thing. i think 99.9% of the time a genderswap au is unnecessary and boring. (not to mention essentialist as hell.) boys have pussies, girls have dicks, people of all genders are intersex, etc. some of us notgirls and failguys just want to vicariously experience our fave getting his clit sucked or her prostate massaged. i personally hate fics that go "but what if these [cis] dudes were [cis] GIRLS" and then proceed to strip the characters of everything that makes them compelling, that makes THEM, because at that point you might as well just flesh out your OCs and maybe interrogate your internalized misogyny and transphobia while you're at it.

anyways.

in the case of sandman, i am (transparently, obviously) curious about what happens if the Corinthian is not designed to be (read as) a man. in the comix, he very much embodies the fears and risks associated with gayness in the 90s (the AIDS epidemic, the dual violence of the closet and/or being outed, the culture around cruising, intersections of race and class with queerness in U.S. urban areas, etc). in the show that's subtly shifted to be a broader umbrella of queerness as well as a very 21st century anxiety around surveillance/public vs private that also taps into a cultural fascination with serial killers. in both cases, him reading as white, middle-aged U.S. man is a CRUCIAL part of what he signifies. he looks like (and takes advantage of being) someone with a lot of social privilege, across multiple categories. no one is going to question why he's in a fancy hotel, a conference room, a seedy bar, a suburb. OBVIOUSLY that changes if any one of these categories changes. i'm thinking about how and also what that means.

(the dreaming spinoff comix tried to do a Thing with a female Corinthian: while Coco spends a year as a real boy, a trans woman named Echo takes his place in the Dreaming. the spinoff handles Echo...really poorly. [i wrote a whole paragraph here trying to distill her arc but it's tangential to this post so suffice to say: it was Bad.] Echo is posed as this "femme fatale" type because i guess if the Corinthian is a woman, she'd also have to be sexy and alluring to the (heterosexist) male gaze. imho this was a cop-out, but then again...what about that spinoff wasn't.)

on some level i'm not sure the Corinthian could ever be anything besides the Corinthian, if that makes sense. as in, if you change anything about him, maybe then he ceases to be the Corinthian and becomes something else entirely. Dream can take different forms (and Overture has a femme!Dream) because stories can take different forms across cultures and times and species. but the Corinthian is intrinsically tied up in humanity and its biomythic nature. and what we think of as Human, as Sylvia Wynter reminds us, is very much tied up in narratives around identity including race, gender, and class.

at the same time my id absolutely wants a butch lesbian Corinthian who uses he/him pronouns. mostly because lesbian and wlw sex STILL gets dismissed or sanitized or erased or pathologized, even though queer women remain subject to state, police, and domestic violence at higher rates than their straight and/or cis counterparts. (also yes i'm counting my trans hermanas y primas, t*rfs can fuck right off.) but also because i'm a fagdyke with religious trauma who relates very hard to god's failed masterpiece.