#it’s okay to like and identify more with male characters but also maybe examine WHY you connect with them more

[ashirisu]

look i can’t help that i find Some Guy™ so relatable

but also it’s worth noting that the reason i, a woman, so often identify with Some Guy™ more than any of the women in the exact same piece of media is that male characters tend to be written with more nuance and personality than all of the female characters combined.

misogyny in fandom is a real problem but we simultaneously need to acknowledge that it begins with misogyny in the media we’re consuming. the emergence of the strong female protagonist and girlboss female villains has been sort of a step in the right direction, but these characters are often just as one-dimensional as their more traditionally sexist counterparts.

when more women are written as neurodivergent, mentally ill, queer/queer-coded with complex relationships, and altogether as better characters, we’ll likely see more girl blorbos out there.

(and in the meantime, we have to stop demonizing the few that we do get. y’all can’t say you support women’s wrongs and then rally against every female character with flaws for simply existing)

people online will say things like “omg female character is stunning showstopping the character ever she’s mothering she’s a goddess a cuntress nobody has served like her I support women’s wrongs my beautiful gorgeous darling princess the entire world and male character is just some guy.” And then they’ll care about the some guy more

[cyeayt]

If you’re reading a post describing a problem (this post focuses on fandom but I think some of it should be applicable irl) and you relate to the behavior or belief being criticized, that does not make you a bad person or inherently wrong. However, your response is important.

You probably need to process it, see how and why it applies to you, and if necessary, take steps to change it.

Examine the thesis of the post. What is the thing op is actually talking about? Does it really apply to you? Do you understand why op is calling the thing harmful? Do you agree? (For me these have mostly been yes, but who knows maybe you’ve found someone you want to block. Note: if you do end up deciding that the post is wrong, make sure it’s for reasons other than your discomfort. Curate your spaces but learn to take criticism.)

Dig into your mind. How does this apply to you? How often and in what circumstances do you do the thing? Why? Is your doing of the thing actively harmful? (Probably not on a huge scale, we’re all just people with phones, but you are part of collective movements opinions and actions.)

This is the most uncomfortable part. If you find yourself to be a perpetrator of something you’ve deemed harmful, don’t freak out. You are human, you are imperfect, and you can change and grow.

After identifying why and where the behavior happens, think about what you can do to break or reduce it. This might be hard. It’s okay and probably good if you have to put direct effort into it. Your brain is a ball of squirming meaty worms, and being aware that they’re squirming in a shape you don’t like won’t stop them from squirming there. Habit forming advice might be helpful here.

For example, this post is mostly talking about the tendency in fandom to focus on male characters. I’m guilty of this, and I’m working on it. Some things I’ve done/doing are: identifying women characters I already like and putting time into talking/drawing/writing/posting about them. Making effort to notice women characters in media im consuming. Figuring out why I don’t like certain women characters and deconstructing the stereotypes and mischaracterizations I often find there. Making women ocs with traits I tend to like in male characters.

These are just things that have worked for me in that area, but the energy and point can be translated into other problems as well. This is the longest step. It’s not even really a step, more of a habit to be formed. There isn’t a point where you’ll complete something and be able to go: wow, I’ve got it!

You’re also not alone. Depending on the subject, there might be books, posts, podcasts, zines, etc to help you. You can make posts yourself about it, talk to your mutuals and friends. Discuss it with people irl, if you can.

(Note, this is where it slips into minority “it’s not our job to educate you” territory. I agree with this sentiment. But oftentimes if you do a little digging, you will find someone who wants to and is making an effort to. I see this mostly in the context of white supremacy, the unlearning of which is a difficult and uncomfortable journey. Basically, don’t expect people to cater to you, but also chances are someone’s already written a book about it.)

I don’t have a conclusion to this post. It’s kinda rambly and the organization was dropped in favor of smaller more readable paragraphs.

Disclaimer! I am just some guy(?)! I don’t have that much experience! If this comes off as pretentious I’m sorry I’m just trying to be nice and understanding. I have and will engage in problematic behaviors in the past future, and right now probably, because its impossible not to. Chasing standards of moral perfection will always fail because it doesn’t exist and people are beautiful horrible messes and we all live under capitalism anyway. This doesn’t mean you can’t try to be better, but if you try to be perfect you’re going to have a nervous breakdown. Improvement is constant and eternal work!

I am personally also just naturally very self aware and good at identifying what’s going on in my brain. If you asked me how to deconstruct an assumption I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I would probably do an allegory with a big nasty knotted ball of string that hangs in your attic, and you just start poking the handle of a broom up into it at a frequency that is up to you. Once or twice a week I take a second to run through my misogynistic hall of mirrors and widen the cracks in a few of them and stick post it notes of women I love all over the place.

Also have fun and do whatever you want.

Did you know there’s a limit to the number of tags you can put on a post? I didn’t!

https://mashable.com/article/how-to-be-antiracist <- fun read, very important and topical, but also exploring ideas that can be extrapolated to other areas and biases

[transthaumaturge]

Ace Attorney and the Finally Kind-Of Okay Queer Representation

Note: This post contains massive spoilers for Turnabout Academy, the third case in the 3DS game Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. There are also spoilers for a few cases in the earlier games. Please only read on if you’re okay with that.

I love Ace Attorney, but as a series it is fraught with bad queer representation. It really says something that the first queer character that I felt pretty good about was five games in. Most of this bad rep is in the form of effeminate, gay-coded men that are written as evil and/or comic relief. A brief rundown:

1) Redd White, the power-hungry CEO of Bluecorp;

2) Jean Armstrong, the cowardly café owner who lied on the stand (and who is repeatedly misgendered by the judge for comic relief);

3) Florent L’Belle, the greedy Mayor’s Aid.

All three characters are presented as a mix of negative stereotypes and bad-faith comic relief. They’re dark spots in an otherwise really fun series, and it’s made me very uncomfortable interacting with each one as I’ve played through the cases. I’ve never felt worse about Ace Attorney than when it’s punching down on gay-coded characters, all of whom were written with no redeemable qualities. I mean, two of them were the actual murderers in their respective cases! Honestly, it just sucked.

That’s why I got so excited (and also super-nervous they would botch it again) today while playing through Turnabout Academy, at the moment when one of the characters is revealed to be explicitly trans. I’ll go over the general facts and then discuss why this was a step in the right direction, but still very flawed.

In the case, Robin Newman is a high school law student and a close friend of the defendant. In the early stages of the case, Robin presents as a very masculine individual and even wears a chest brace that is supposedly proof of her manliness. This whole time, she’s represented as a very aggressive and unhappy person. But on the first day of the case, it’s revealed that she put on a feminine costume belonging to the defendant because she really wanted to wear something girly. When further pressed, she comes out in the courtroom and reveals that she’s actually a girl—the chest brace was hiding the fact that she had breasts, and her parents raised her as a boy as some terrible step in forcing her to become a prosecutor when she grew up. Afterward, she’s a very cheerful, peppy person and says that she’s grateful she finally gets to live life as a girl and pursue her dream of becoming an artist.

As a trans woman myself, I started getting really excited as soon as it became clear that Robin put on the outfit—and even more excited when it was finally revealed that she was a girl who had been raised as a boy. The first thing that tipped me off to my gender identity was wanting to wear women’s clothing, so this gender euphoria through clothing scenario was something that I could relate to on a deep emotional level. And while I got nervous at first because the blame for the murder was briefly pinned on her, that ultimately goes nowhere. This is the first queer character in an Ace Attorney game that is represented as kind, positive, and trustworthy. Robin is wonderful. I love her so much.

But now I want to dive into where parts of her portrayal are still negative, and how Capcom made several missteps that ultimately resulted in Robin not being as fleshed-out and three-dimensional as she deserved to be.

First, Robin’s reveal is still treated like comic relief at times. I was really uncomfortable when several characters said “he was a she???” or something to that effect. Given that “he-she” was once a widely used transphobic slur for trans women, it wasn’t in good taste. Also uncomfortable was the fact that as soon as the big reveal happened, she took on a bunch of hyperfeminine behavioral and vocal tics. The worst was when she started swooning every time that anything shocking happened for the rest of the time she was on the stand. It felt like this was just a way to play up the comedy side of “hey, she’s a girl now.” She was forcibly outed in the courtroom, and then magically showed no trauma or self-doubt afterward. It almost felt like she wasn’t there to be a serious character anymore. Later, she thanks Athena for outing her. I think that sends the wrong message.

What did the game do right when portraying her? I loved how visibly relieved and happy she was after coming out, though it sucks that she didn’t get to do it on her own terms. It’s later revealed that she had confided in a professor about her gender identity and had a plan to come out to the school, so that was a nice touch. I also really liked it being mentioned that she had been raised as a boy, removing most of the ambiguity about what we were seeing—that this wasn’t a self-imposed repression of her authentic self, but something that had been forced on her. They used the right pronouns for her throughout the entire rest of the case without slipping up even once, thankfully not misgendering her for laughs like they did relentlessly with Jean Armstrong two games earlier. She was also just a really pleasant character to be around afterward, so that was nice.

What would be on my wish list if I were asked to help in rewriting Robin to be a more positive example of trans representation? First, I would fix her character’s comedic behavioral tics. Most witnesses have some silly animations, but the fact that all of her tics after being outed were hyperfeminine to the point of parody made me uncomfortable. Are there other ways to make her a bit quirky and visibly feminine without punching down on her burgeoning relationship with her gender? I’m sure that there are. It would also be nice for her reaction to being out in public for the first time to be more on par with what you might actually expect if a trans woman found herself in that situation. She probably feels relieved, but also a bit scared, embarrassed, and hesitant about how she’s supposed to act now. I would love to see some of that reflected in how she talks and in how she acts. Maybe she’s daydreaming of what she can wear now that she’s out, and that’s interspersed with nervous hair-twirling and curtsying at awkward times.

I’d also like her to say something to Athena about how she wished that she wasn’t forced to come out in front of a bunch of people like that, but she’s happy that she gets to be herself. Anything other than thanking Athena for outing her with no qualifiers. The fact that she was forcibly outed needs to be portrayed as a traumatic moment. Sure, something good came out of it and Athena didn’t immediately realize that that’s where the cross-examination was going, but it shouldn’t have happened. An apology from Athena would also be nice. She should feel at least a little bit guilty about outing someone in the middle of a courtroom, even if that someone was much happier afterwards.

Finally, I’d love for there to be less ambiguity about the events that led her to this point—and ideally, something that more explicitly shows that she’s a trans woman. The way her dialogue was written, I think the writers were trying to portray her as having been assigned female at birth, but later forced by her parents to take on a male identity for…some reason. It’s never explained why they would want to inflict that on her. She’s trans regardless of her sex at birth if she was forced to live life as a boy for her entire childhood, but I think that it could be handled better. A few possibilities that I like more:

1) She was already in the middle of gender transition, and started wearing the chest brace when her breasts began to develop since she wasn’t ready to be out in public—especially to her parents, who might have cut her financial support off if they had known. After all, she was at a prestigious private legal school. That must have been a concern.

2) She was intersex, and her parents raised her as a boy when she was growing up because that’s unfortunately what happens so often with intersex children—they’re forced into one side of the binary or the other, and sometimes they find out later on that their parents didn’t make the right choice or that they don’t identify with a binary gender identity at all. Robin had breasts because she was born with both male and female sex characteristics, and try as her parents might to force her into manhood, she still had a uterus. Not every intersex person is trans, but plenty are.

3) Or just…remove the bit where she’s revealed to have breasts altogether, and keep in the fact that she’s a girl who was raised as a boy! Why does she have to be “a biological female in disguise”? While either of the above two options would have been good ways to explain the fact that she had breasts, I’m not giving the writers enough credit to have thought of one or the other. If they had, it would have been hinted at. On some level, it felt like they were saying “it’s okay everyone, she’s not really trans. Look, she had breasts all along!” If that’s what they were trying to do, then screw it; just change the reveal but nothing else about the character, and make her an unabashedly AMAB trans woman.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the topic. I recognize that this was super long-winded, but I needed to get my thoughts out—anyone who’s interested in this and got something from the long read, I’m glad that I was able to provide some insight. And I’m not even done with the series yet! Maybe they did do better! I don’t have my hopes up, but maybe! Anyway, please feel free to reblog this post with your thoughts or message me if this inspired any opinions of your own. As long as those thoughts aren’t “Robin isn’t really trans or queer at all.” I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.

Have a great day, everyone! And thanks for reading!

[dustyard]

A Guide to Dæmons, Sexuality, and Gender

Let’s first get this out of the way: being gay does not automatically mean your dæmon is the same sex as you. Are we good? All on the same page? Lovely. The whole idea behind gay people having a same-sex dæmon came from a singular character who was implied to be gay in the books, who also had a same-sex dæmon, and as far as I’m aware, Pullman has neither confirmed nor denied any theories regarding sexuality and dæmons. Even if he has, there are times when disagreeing with an author about their work is absolutely acceptable, and this would be one.

When examining dæmon genders in regards to human sexuality, I think it’s important to look at why dæmons come out a certain gender. I’ve seen a lot of theories floating around, one of the most popular ones (that I’ve seen, maybe it’s changed though) having to do with balance. For example, a masculine person needing a feminine dæmon to even them out. I wholeheartedly reject this idea, in part because it’s a bit derogatory, as it implies that gay men are feminine and gay women are masculine, therefore needing a dæmon of the same sex to even them out. I personally believe that when it comes to figuring out the gender of your dæmon, you should remove sexuality entirely.

When trying to decide what gender fits best, the consideration I think needs to be whether you’re more drawn to masculine or feminine energy (or other, but I’ll get back to that in a bit). Now, this doesn’t mean whether you’re attracted romantically/sexually to masculine or feminine people. It also doesn’t mean how you personally prefer to present. For example, I am female. I enjoy being feminine, acting feminine, and exuding feminine energy. However, I feel a strong connection to masculine energies, which is why I feel my dæmon is male. I like observing masculinity, hearing from the male perspective, and I also appreciate masculinity in part because I am not masculine. I appreciate the contrast to myself. For some people, they might feel very drawn to feminine energies, but again, this is not sexual or romantic. You could be a straight woman with a female dæmon because you simply prefer female energy, not because you dislike dick. A person might not want/need the contrast in gender the way I personally do, and that can be for so many reasons it isn’t even really possible to list them all.

Now, having gotten all that out of the way, I do think that non-straight people are more likely to have same-sex dæmons. A correlation rather than a causation, if you will. In part I think this has to do with non cis-het people generally being more flexible in their gender performance (this is a big generalization, I am aware, don’t bite my head off) and because of this, might be more comfortably with a same-sex dæmon. As I said before, sexuality/your gender does not directly determine your dæmon’s gender, but there will probably be a correlation.

If you’ve read this whole thing and are asking, well, what about me? I/my dæmon don’t fit under male or female? Then the answer is that honestly not much changes, but deciding how your dæmon portrays themselves may be more challenging.

For those of you who don’t identify as male/female (I understand that there are a large number of labels you could use, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to use genderqueer as an umbrella term) you can absolutely still have a dæmon that identifies as male or female. As I pointed out earlier, your gender does not inherently determine the gender of your dæmon. If you feel particularly drawn to female energies and are genderqueer, congratulations, you probably have a female dæmon.

In regards to dæmons being genderqueer/not fitting the traditional gender binary, this is also an option if you feel that your dæmon does not fit within the confines of the gender binary. You do not need to identify as genderqueer for this to affect your dæmon. Admittedly I don’t think of genderqueer dæmons as particularly common, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it can’t/doesn’t happen. Again, this would probably be more commonplace in queer safe spaces, but not always.

Onto some commonly asked questions:

Gender is, at its core, a social construct. If we accept this, why then do dæmons have to conform to any gender at all?

Well, they don’t. Besides, just because gender is a construct doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. Money has no inherent value, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t massively influence our daily lives. You may decide that the traditional gender binary doesn’t suit either yourself or your dæmon, but that doesn’t mean that those who feel it does ought to be belittled.

So, if I’m gay, is my dæmon the same gender as me?

Nope, not necessarily. You can be gay and have a same-sex dæmon if that feel right, but you can also have a dæmon of the opposite sex. Both are completely fine.

What if I’m straight? Can I still have a same-sex dæmon?

Yes, you can!

What if I’m bi/pan/ace/whatever, does that affect my dæmon’s gender?

Your dæmon’s gender is separate from both your gender expression and your sexuality. Therefore, whatever you identify as does not inherently affect what your dæmon will present as.

Do dæmons have sexuality?

This is a harder question to answer, and I’m going to go with a resounding “eh”. I don’t think dæmons would have sexuality in the sense of desiring to have sex with another dæmon—at the very least, I have never experienced this. I do, however, think that some dæmons would show a marked preference for the gender of the dæmon that belongs to their human’s romantic interest. For example, a dæmon might be drawn to male dæmons than female dæmons. Could this affect their human’s romantic/sexual endeavors? Yes, I think so. Maybe not overtly, but a dæmon that likes male dæmons might encourage their human to go after their preferred gendered partner who also has a dæmon that is the gender they prefer. Does that make sense?

I still don’t know what gender my dæmon is, how do I figure that out?

If after reading this you still aren’t clear, that’s totally fine! Gender is a very complicated topic that uses a lot of abstract language; dæmonism is the same. Put the two together and nobody knows what’s going on anymore. There’s no need to immediately gender your dæmon. You can play around with what gender they present as for as long as you want. A lot of this is very instinct and vibes based, so it really is just whatever feels right to you.

I used to think my dæmon was X gender and now I think they might be Y gender. Is that okay?

Yep! Totally okay. Who’s going to stop you, the dæmon police?

What if I don’t want to gender them at all?

Again, perfectly fine, and really, who cares? Is anybody going to break down your door and tell you to stop imagining a talking animal that does or does not conform to a certain gender? I highly doubt it, or else you’re living a much more exciting life than I am.

In summary: dæmons do not derive their gender from their human’s gender nor their sexuality, and dæmon gender is an entirely separate category.

[darks-ink]

Ectober Week day 6: Unearthed (AO3)(FFN)

Content warning: Suggested character death, descriptions of corpses

In the stress of the events that followed the Accident, as Danny struggled to control his new-found ghost powers and as ghosts started attacking Amity Park, the trio completely forgot about the body that they had buried in the woods.

Until someone found it.

Crime in Amity Park, real actual crime, committed by humans, was exceedingly rare. Robberies and muggings were practically unheard of, never mind murders. And while ghosts attack the city almost constantly, physical injuries are very rare. Sometimes people get injured in the general chaos, hit by debris for a ghost fight, or get threatened, but no one ever gets killed.

So when a corpse is found in the woods near Amity Park, the whole town becomes abuzz with rumors and gossip.

The police are called, the crime scene thoroughly investigated, and the corpse is studied, but the public is told nothing except that a body was found.

But good God, were the police unprepared for this. Working in Amity Park prepared them for a lot of weird things, the job lending itself not to strict, highly experienced police officers but rather the adaptable younger officers, and most of them had never dealt with actual dead bodies like this.

And the investigation wasn’t easy, either. It clearly wasn’t a recent crime, the body partially decayed and burned beyond recognition. They can’t even prove if a ghost was involved or not, because any traces of ectoplasm that might have been left behind would have evaporated a long time ago.

The slight body is brought back, and carefully examined. It was almost impossible to determine the cause of death, but there didn’t seem to be any injuries. They determined it was likely that this person had been killed by the same thing that had scorched them so badly, but they weren’t sure what, exactly, that had been.

It was much easier to determine who this person had been. The corpse was male, a mere teenager at the time of their death. And while he had been burned beyond recognition, there were more ways to identify someone than just by looking at them.

When the results of the DNA comparison came in, every single person on the case was baffled. They decided to verify it by comparing the teeth of their corpse with the dental records of the DNA match.

It was an exact match.

There was only one problem; the person that was a perfect match for the corpse from the woods was still alive.

It was one of the newer officers who suggested that they didn’t actually know if he was, in fact, alive. And while this might normally get a person send off to get their head checked, it actually wasn’t too crazy for Amity Park.

The boy was still in the city, still lived with his parents and still attended school, but he hadn’t been to any medical check-ups in close to two years. It was absolutely possible that the boy was a ghost.

Which led to the next concern: was the ghost that lived among them in the city the teen’s own ghost, or was it a different ghost pretending to be someone he wasn’t?

While the ghosts of Amity Park weren’t known to kill people, they had been known to pretend to be alive. Some could even pull it off so convincingly that no one knew until the ghost blew its own cover, usually in a fight with Danny Phantom.

So the possibility that a ghost had attacked an innocent teenager, killed him, and then replaced him, was rather unnerving. It was made all the more chilling by the knowledge that this boy had died and no one had noticed until they found his corpse.

This opened the way to another horrifying possibility, however. Maybe the boy’s parents never noticed because they were the ones to kill him.

They had always been ghost nuts, even before Amity Park saw its first ghost. And if the boy had died two years ago, as his records implied, then that would have been just before the city had its first spectral visitors. The parents might have found a way to guarantee that the boy would become a ghost, and killed him so they had proof.

But the police weren’t paid to speculate, they were supposed to find evidence and prove what happened to the boy. And so they set out to FentonWorks, where they interviewed every member of the family separately.

They couldn’t diverge too much information during the interviews, of course, and the people they were interviewing weren’t the easiest either. Between the adult Fentons, who would constantly ramble about ghosts and their inventions, the older kid, who seemed to be analyzing every single word the police said (and even what they didn’t say), and the youngest kid, the possible victim, they had their work cut out for them.

The parents seemed genuinely upset by the news that the dead body that had been found was a teenager, and immediately jumped on the possibility that a ghost was responsible. While this would be rather suspicious for most people, it was rather characteristic for the Fentons. Between their responses, and their general behavior towards their family, it was declared unlikely that they were responsible for the death of their own son.

The oldest child, the daughter, also carried no answers. When she was asked if her brother had changed over the last years, she had shrugged them off and told them that “he was a teenager, it would be worrisome if he hadn’t”. Her gaze was sharp and calculating, however, and she was clearly taking in every word they said. They ended up cutting off the interview early, afraid of letting anything slip.

Her younger brother, the ghost, the possible victim, was the most befuddling. When they asked him if he had heard of the body that was found in the woods, he didn’t respond with recognition. No, his eyes lit up with fury that had the officers shaking in their shoes, and clenched his fists as if he would go out and beat up the person responsible right that instant if he had known who it was.

It was clear that this ghost wasn’t the killer of Daniel Fenton, but this just raised more questions. Because if he wasn’t the killer, and he didn’t know that it was his body that they had found (didn’t even seem to consider that possibility), then who was this ghost? Was it the ghost of Daniel who had forgotten about his death when he became a ghost? Or was this just some random ghost who decided to pretend that he was Daniel, and then never stopped?

When the officers met back at the station to discuss everything they had learned (and everything they hadn’t), they could only come to one conclusion; they had to interview the ghost again, but this time with a focus on identifying him.

This proved to be easier said than done, however, because they had to achieve this without the ghost finding out that they had found the body of the boy he pretended to be.

The spirit that may or may not be Daniel Fenton was brought into the police station for further interrogations. He seemed to have gone through a personality shift since the last time, however, and played the act of a stubborn teenager far more than he previously had. He was obstinate and bull-headed, eyeing them with utmost suspicion and constantly questioning why they were asking him this.

When the man leading the interrogation finally reached his wits end and growled out “Dammit boy, we know you’re a ghost” the specter freezes up, eyes blown wide with barely hidden fear.

“I- I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered out. “Me, a ghost? That’s- that’s crazy.”

The interrogator sighed deeply. “Look, we identified the body as Daniel Fenton’s. That means that you,” he poked Danny in the chest with a finger, “are either Daniel’s ghost, or you’re some spirit playing pretend.”

Danny scowled at the officer and swatted away the finger, speaking with venom dripping from his voice, “I’m no pretender.”

“So then why not tell us who killed you? Because I gotta tell you kid, when we asked you about the body last time, you looked ready to murder whoever did it.”

Danny hunched in on himself, blushing, with embarrassment of all things clear on his face. “I… forgot.”

“You what?!”

The boy shrunk in even further, rubbing the back of his neck in what had to be a nervous gesture. “I forgot about the body.”

The officer blinked at him, stunned. “You forgot that you died?”

“Not that I died! Just- just where we left the body.”

The interrogator groaned, sinking his head into his hands. “Can you at least tell us who did it? Who was this ‘we’?”

Danny smiled sheepishly, still rubbing the back of his neck. “Uh, it was an accident. And my friends and I, we just kind of, uh, panicked. So we buried the body and then just kind of forgot about it?”

“Well, we’re gonna need official statements from you and your friends. And then we’ll have to inform your parents.”

“Wait, no, you can’t! They’re ghost hunters! Why do you think we decided not to tell anybody?!” Danny scrambled up, the panicked look back on his face.

“Look, it’s just protocol, alright?” the officer attempted to soothe, but Danny just glared at him.

“Really, you have a protocol for ‘a kid dies in an accident and comes back as a ghost’?”

“Kid, just calm down, okay? I promise you that it’ll be fine, your parents clearly love you.”

Danny huffed, but slumped back into his seat.

“Fine, so what now? Official statements from the three of us, and then? Gonna officially declare me dead? Send me off to the Ghost Zone? Set ghost hunters on me to make sure I don’t turn malevolent?”

The officer glared at him, but Danny ignored him.

“Well, if Phantom hasn’t kicked you out of the city then you’re probably fine to stay.” Danny snorted at this, but the officer didn’t understand why.

“As you guessed, we don’t have protocol for this. Most people outside Amity don’t know ghosts exist. Hell, most people in Amity don’t even know that they could pass for living as well as you apparently can.” Danny muttered something under his breath, but the officer didn’t catch what he said and chose to ignore it.

“So, we’ll take your statements, and then we’ll talk with your parents to figure out the rest.”

And so Samantha Manson and Tucker Foley found themselves at the police station, where they managed to comfort a once-again panicking Daniel Fenton, before all three had their statements taken.

Danny rode in the back of the police car with the same officer that had interrogated him earlier that day, and a female officer he didn’t recognize. He felt like he heading towards the gallows, ice-cold dread pooling inside him.

He also felt somewhat guilty that he hadn’t told the officers the truth, and hoped that it wouldn’t come back to bite him. But the truth was just so ridiculous, they probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway. Better to play along, he thought. Not that that stopped him from feeling guilty.

Instead he tried to focus on calming himself down. He took a deep, if somewhat shaky, breath. Calm down Fenton, he bit at himself. You’ve faced off against ghosts like Pariah Dark, but you’re scared of your own parents? They love you, they’ll accept you, and it’ll be fine. They don’t even know you’re Phantom! They have no reason to hate you!

All too soon, and simultaneously not soon enough, they reached FentonWorks. Danny followed the officers to the front door, still trying to cork up his overworked emotions. He’s so occupied that he doesn’t even listen to the conversation between the police and his parents, just trailed after them and slumped into a chair in the living room.

He heard the male officer clear his throat, and snapped back to attention, cringing slightly at the worried expressions on his parents’ faces.

“So, Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. As you know, we found the body of a dead teenager in the woods near Amity Park recently.”

His mom frowned, glancing between the officer and Danny. “Yes. But how is this related to Danny?”

“Well, we successfully identified the body-” Oh no, nope, too brash. They needed to break this to his parents with more care- “and we’ve received statements confirming it,” the man just kept talking, completely oblivious to Danny’s panicking. “The body belongs to your son, Daniel Fenton.”

Danny froze up, fingers digging into the armrests of the chair with almost enough strength to tear them, anxiously gazing at his parents. His mental cursing fell silent, dread washing away all his emotions until he just felt numb.

The expressions on his parents’ faces hardened, and their hands shifted to reach towards the anti-ghost weapons they carried, and yep, this was going exactly as he feared. But he stayed still, frozen in place.

The moment was broken when his mother swung up an ecto-gun, however, which was knocked aside by the female officer, the shot just barely missing Danny. He panicked, went intangible on instinct, and fell through the chair and onto the floor behind it.

“A dirty ghost replaced our son! Some filthy piece of ectoplasm killed our Danny and replaced him!” his dad roared, and Danny remained crouched behind the chair. He could feel adrenaline bubbling up, his core releasing ghostly energy into his body, and he was struggling to stop himself from transforming.

“Please calm down! We assure you that no ghost killed your son-” “And how can you be so sure?! It’s been pretending to be our son for lord know how long, how do you know it didn’t lie about- about killing him?”

Danny forced himself to block out the shouting match, glancing around the chair and catching the eye of the male officer. The man turned slightly towards him, then jerked his head towards the front door almost imperceptibly. Danny frowned at him before understanding dawned on him, and he turned himself invisible but remained in place for another moment to confirm. The man nodded, and Danny took this as a dismissal. He hesitated for another moment before turning intangible as well and launching himself towards the nearest wall, phasing through it.

Once outside, he confirmed that no one could see him, and then retained visibility again, having dropped his intangibility the moment he was through the wall. He stopped for a moment to think, trying to figure out what to do next. He checked that he still had his phone on him (he did, thankfully), and shot a quick text to Sam and Tucker, asking if he can stay over at one of their houses.

He stuffed the phone back into his pocket before they answer, deciding to go on a patrol first, to blow of some steam. He reached out to his ghost core and let the cold power flood over him, transforming him into Danny Phantom.

Turning invisible once again, he launched himself into the air. He retained visibility again somewhere in the clouds, but can’t bring himself to care.

Several hours later, while on patrol with Sam and Tucker, he received a text from Jazz. It simply read “mom and dad think that a ghost killed Danny and replaced him, wtf?” and Danny can’t stop the snort that comes through. God, what a mess.

“Hey guys, I gotta go talk to Jazz. I’ll meet you back at Tucker’s place, okay?” Receiving two nods as answer, he quickly texted Jazz (“omw”) and shot off towards FentonWorks.

He hovered outside her window and knocked, then entered as she nodded at him. He opened his mouth to explain himself, but Jazz was faster.

“So, what on Earth is this about?” she snapped at him, and he rubbed the back of his neck, smiling sheepishly.

“Well! When the accident happened and I became half-ghost, I may or may not have left behind my old, fully-human body. And since we were kind of, you know, panicking, we decided to bury it in the forest so no one would ever find out what happened.”

Jazz stared at him, incredulous. Danny hunched up in response, blushing in embarrassment.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we were past lying to each other, Danny.”

“We are! I just… I just kind of forgot?” he muttered, guilt lacing his voice.

“Oh my God, please tell me you’re joking.” Jazz stared him in the eye, then sighed. “Danny, how on Earth did you forgot about the fact that you buried your own corpse in the fucking woods.”

“Look, the Accident was a really confusing time, and then I had to learn to control my ghost powers, and then ghosts started attacking and we just kind of forgot, okay? Now will you please help me explain this to mom and dad so they’ll stop shooting at me?”

Jazz looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read, but she put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him into a hug. “Of course, little brother. We’ll figure this out, okay?”

Letting go again, she put her hands on her hips and put on a determined expression. “So, first things first. How much are you going to tell them?”

“Uh, everything, I guess. Well, except for the Phantom part, they don’t need more encouragement to shoot at me.”

“You’re not going to tell them about Phantom? Are you sure?”

“Jazz...” He sighed. “If this goes well I’ll tell them, okay?”

She nodded, before cutting back to the original subject. “Alright, so you’re going to tell them that you got into an accident with the Portal, and that you instantly became a ghost, and that you freaked out and decided to bury your body and pretend nothing happened. Does that sound about right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. You think that that’ll be enough?”

“Of course it will be enough. The only reason they freaked out is because they care about you. Do you have somewhere to stay for tonight?”

“Uh, yeah, Sam and I are sleeping over at Tucker’s place.”

“Good, good. Come by tomorrow after breakfast and we’ll talk this through with mom and dad.” Seeing his hesitation, she spoke again. “Danny, don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine, I promise. Now go and get some sleep, because you need it.”

He smiled at her and disappeared. She shook her head, a fond smile on her face.

The next day, not long after his family would normally have breakfast, Danny found himself hesitating in front of the door of the house. He took a deep, fortifying breath, and then walked in.

He could hear quiet chattering coming from the kitchen, and made his way over. He watched them for a moment from the doorway before his dad spotted him.

“Danny-boy!” he boomed, before remembering their last interaction, face souring instantly. His mother’s face also fell, but Jazz smiled at him and grabbed their parents before they could pull out any of their weapons.

“What are you doing here, ghost?” his mother hissed. “Haven’t you caused us enough pain yet?”

Danny winced, and Jazz glared at their mother before chastising her. “Mom! I asked Danny to come over, not that it should have been necessary since he lives here.”

“Jazz, that’s not your brother. That’s some foul ghost playing a sick game of pretend.”

“No, you listen to me! Danny has been a ghost for two years, but he never told you. And this is exactly why! He came over to tell you what happened, and you won’t even let him!”

“Jazz, you knew? How- how long have you known?” Danny had never heard his dad so quiet, and he hated it. He hated everything about this entire conversation. He could barely stop himself from turning invisible.

“I’ve known for a while now, but he told me about a year ago. And yes, I know the entire story.” She looked over at Danny, hoping that he would take over to tell his story. Seeing that Danny wasn’t about to join the conversation, however, Jazz kept going. “Do you remember when he had an accident in the lab, in freshman year?”

His parents glanced at each other, and loosened up a little. “Was that it? Was it- was it one of our inventions that- that killed our son?”

Danny sighed, drawing the attention back to him. “Yeah. It was the Portal. I uh, I turned it on while I was inside.” He shrugged at them, smiling sheepishly. “You put the on button on the inside, that’s why it didn’t work.”

“Sufferin’ spooks,” Jack swore quietly, eyes locked on Danny.

“But if it was the Portal, then how did your,” her breath caught for a second, “your body end up in the woods?”

“I panicked, okay? We didn’t know what to do and we were all really freaked out so we decided to just bury my body in the woods and pretend it never happened.”

“Oh sweetie,” Maddie mumbled, standing up from her chair and walking over to Danny. She touched his face, gently, before pulling him against herself, hugging him. “Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

A second pair of arms wrapped around the two of them as his dad joined in. “Oh Danny-boy,” he muttered, and Danny was shocked to see tears forming in his dad’s eyes.

“It’s- it’s okay. You didn’t mean it. I don’t blame you for panicking.”

Finally they pulled away again, and he saw his family all smiling at him, and he found that he couldn’t keep the truth to himself any longer.

“Actually,” he glanced over to see Jazz nodding her approval, and steeled his resolve. “Actually, there’s something else that I need to tell you. Uh, promise you won’t freak out?”

“Of course Danny-boy, you can tell us anything!”

He stepped away from them, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply. Then he called on his ghostly core, and let its power wash over him.

“I’m, uh, I’m Danny Phantom too. This,” he made some vague hand motions towards himself, “is what I actually look like as a ghost.”

Suddenly he was drowning in warmth as his father hugged him again, ruffling a hand through his hair. “Look at my son the ghost hunter! I knew you would follow my footsteps!”

“Well, I still think that Phantom has done some… questionable things, but I’m guessing that you have an explanation for all of that?”

Seeing that Danny was getting overwhelmed, Jazz cut back in. “He does, trust me. He has told me everything.”

His mom nodded, and then smiled at him. “Then I must say that I’m proud of my ghost-hunting son as well. My own little superhero, huh?”

She re-joined the hug as well, and Danny’s dad grabbed Jazz and pulled her in as well. Danny melted away in the familial love, feeling far happier than he had in a long.

He was in such a state of bliss that his next words slipped out without intending it.

“Also I’m only half-ghost, I’m not actually fully dead.”

“WHAT?!”

Cut intro / Prologue of sorts.

Also available as a 15 chapter fanfic / sort of continuation eventually.

[grifalinas]

So I see a lot of discussions where people are trying to find out if a creative idea they have is Acceptable(tm) and Not Problematic(tm). And while I certainly advocate talking to people (who have welcomed the discussion) about how to better represent people like them in fiction, there comes a point where the questions are less “Can you help me understand why portraying black characters as more aggressive than white characters is problematic?” and more “Is this okay? What about this? Here’s a vaguely-described scenario with the bare minimum of details, please give this the stamp of approval”... etc. Which is. Frustrating.

Instead of relying on Tumblr culture to decide for you the difference in Good(tm) and Bad(tm) tropes/headcanon/writing choices/whatever, learn to think for yourself. You want to make sure your writing choices aren’t problematic? Pay attention to the following things.

(Please note that all of these require you to be honest with yourself. It doesn’t work if you hem and hedge and make excuses.)

Motive.

Why are you making that character ace? Why are you making that character evil? Why did you slate that character for death? Why did you put those two characters together? How did you land on that narrative for that character?

Basically, what is driving you to make the choices you are making?

“Did I make this character of color ace in an attempt to desexualize people of color and pave the way for a white couple to get together?” I don’t know, did you? “Did I kill that female character in order to push the male character’s story by causing him emotional pain?” I don’t know, did you? “Did I portray that trans man as curvy because I have a fetishistic view of trans men?” I don’t know, did you? None of these scenarios- a black ace character, a dead female character, or a reluctantly curvy trans man- are instantly bad just in their concept. Can they all be executed in bad ways? Absolutely! Do they often come from bad places? You betcha! Are you approaching them badly and from a bad place? I can’t answer that. Only you can.

And yeah, sometimes you’ll examine your motives and realize... oh, there’s no reason for me to have written that greedy character with physical traits stereotypically associated with Jewish people, except that I live in an antisemitic society that has taught me to associate those two things with each other. And when you make that realization you’ll have to confront that part of yourself and train yourself to do better.

Patterns.

There are patterns in everything- in the stories you consume, in the stories you create. It’s important to recognize these patterns, so you can avoid perpetuating the harmful ones (pro tip: pretty much any pattern if perpetuated ad infinitum can be harmful, even the seemingly positive ones). 

When finding the patterns across the board, this is where talking to people (who have invited that discussion) and listening to open discussions that you’re not involved with directly comes in (but again, make sure you’re invited). People in minority groups are the best at pointing out the patterns about how they’re portrayed. From a young age I was smart enough to notice when stories only had the one black character, but it wasn’t until I actually started paying attention to what black people were saying that I started noticing when there wasn’t one at all. Which I personally feel is an important distinction that I had to actively learn to make.

But there’s also patterns in your own writing. Maybe you always make your trans characters fit a certain body type, maybe you always have the same dynamic with your ships, maybe your stories all follow the same basic formula. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing- storytellers have signatures, and if you like a character type or trope or what have you, why not put it into your story? It’s your story, after all, and you’re allowed to be self-indulgent with your very own story.

The trick is to look at the patterns and find the places where those patterns are harmful. Are all of your trans characters across the board ace, while cis characters are prone to being allo? I actually spotted this pattern in my own work awhile back; it’s a little more complex than that because I tend to default most of my characters to ace unless I think about it, but I realized I’m a lot more prone to making cis characters explicitly allo while I tend to gloss over it with trans characters. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trans ace characters, but that certainly does seem like a harmful pattern, don’t it?

So, yeah. Look at the patterns in your work. Look at the patterns across the board. Listen to people you’re trying to create representation for about the harmful patterns they have to deal with. And if you find yourself falling into a harmful pattern of your own- like associating moral purity with tallness, or turning your characters of color into animals, or killing all of your wives- then take a step back, observe your motive, and figure out how to fix it. Even if the solution to a lot of dead wives is to kill some husbands.

Execution.

So, I maintain that there are very, very few tropes that are inherently Bad(tm) and need to be left behind in the name of progress. Barring some, any trope can be executed in a good or bad way, depending on the writer- a genderbend from one writer could be a reinforcement of gender stereotypes, while from another can be a thoughtful exploration of how environment affects personality depending on what gender you’ve been assigned + what you identify. Just because someone does it wrong, doesn’t make the concept itself bad.

All right, you looked a your motive and you looked at your patterns and you said, okay, I think I’m in the clear, but that still doesn’t change the fact that I’ve got a male character with a dead wife, and I know that’s Problematic(tm). What do?

You pay attention to how you write it, of course.

Execution is everything in writing. Look at coffee shop aus- they’re a popular concept, there’s eighteen billion of them in any given fandom, unless you’re dead set against them you probably have at least one that you really loved. So what was it about that one that made it special? Execution. How the writer approached the story and what they did with it.

You’ve got an idea that could come across harmful. You’ve got a Chosen One(tm) coming to the city he’s destined to rule. You’ve got a Gentleman falling in love with his Valet. You’ve got a character losing his sight in an accident. You could very easily do this poorly. You could very easily perpetuate harmful ideas about divine right to rule, or power imbalances in relationships, or disabled existence-

-I’m going to pause right here and put in a disclaimer that while it’s true that fiction affects reality, it doesn’t affect it anything like how Tumblr culture insists it does. It’s a lot more complex than that and most audiences have the awareness to understand that the story they’re taking in is a story, and reality will assert itself a lot more than you’re giving it credit for. That doesn’t mean don’t be aware and put in the effort in your writing, it just means don’t get your knickers in a twist just because you’re reading a story that happens to have favorable monarchs. Sometimes the writer just wanted a fairy tale.-

-Thoughtful execution is the most important ingredient for a good story; it can take a book that is merely “light, attractive reading”, to be read when you don’t want to get too invested, to “powerful, impactful, couldn’t put it down”. Good execution can, in fact, change the way people see the world, albeit in subtle ways.

There’s no easy way to get better at execution. It’s just something you have to practice.

Context:

At the end of the day, context is something you can’t divorce your idea from. You’ve got a female character who previously identified as a lesbian, but then became attracted to a man and started questioning that. What’s your context? Is it a story about how sexuality can sometimes be fluid, not necessarily for everyone but sometimes, for some people? Is it a story about bisexuality, and the journey to find out one’s identity so they can have a deeper understanding of themselves? Or is it yet another story about how lesbians just need to Find The Right Man to cure them of their lesbianness with their cishetero Straight Dick Of Healing?

Context can turn a bad trope into something poignant. Context can turn a terrible idea into something that will make someone go ‘huh’ and maybe learn something new about themselves.

(But for the love of god please pay attention to your presentation. ‘Woman who thought she was a lesbian falls in love with a man’ is a terrible presentation for a story about bisexuality. Again, please exhibit the awareness I know you to have.)

[songsforfelurian]

Being non-binary is such a strange thing 'cause like, most people don't even think there's anything outside the gender binary. And there are so few non-binary characters in media. And like, most websites and games don't even give a neutral option so you're stuck with chosing one or the other.

Agreed! I think about this a lot, and I think there are many reasons that people struggle with the concept of non-binary or gender-nonconforming. Buckle up for another long one, under the cut.

1. Perceptions of gender are subjective and stereotypical.

If you ask five different people to define “gender,” or tell you the defining characteristics of a “boy” or a “girl,” you’ll probably get at least five different answers. Those answers might have some features in common, but the more you dig or challenge, the more the stereotypes start to unravel. 

“Women usually have long hair.”

Do they? As of when? How ancient is that stereotype now?

“Men are physically bigger and stronger.”

…Except the ones that aren’t? This can’t possibly be a defining characteristic, if there are so many exceptions.

“Women wear makeup, and men don’t.”

In U.S. culture, maybe, but how surface-level can you get? Men and women may be held to different standards of physical beauty, but men are equally likely to obsess over hygeine, grooming, and fashion. Or not. Again, find five different men, and you’ll find five different sets of habits and interests.

Even though most reasonable people would acknowledge these blatant stereotypes and exceptions if questioned, they’re still uncomfortable with the gray area. They don’t want to have to justify a belief or attitude that has been so widely accepted for so long, namely that “boys are boys” and “girls are girls,” and everyone in the world knows what that means.

2. Our culture is progressing, and many people already see deviations from stereotype as “normal.”

Another challenge in gaining visibility for non-traditional gender identities and expressions is that even many forward-thinking people don’t see them as necessary. You’re a girl and you have short hair? Cool. You’re a dude and you want to wear makeup? You do you, bro. You’re a vaguely-femme, high-powered, pantsuit-wearing, force-to-be-reckoned-with boss in a typically male-dominated field? Duh, feminism. I honestly think a lot of people don’t really see what all the fuss is about. Deviations from the stereotypical norm are becoming more and more commonplace - dare I say, even expected and encouraged - and I think there are many people out there who accept this without contemplating the implications of their whole concept of gender.

In some ways, I think this is a good thing. I loathe gender stereotypes. I don’t know what people mean when they use the terms “masculine” and “feminine” half the time, and I really think that says something important. Maybe “male” and “female,” “masculine” and “feminine” truly AREN’T the binary so many of us were raised to believe they are. And maybe a lot of people really are okay with that.

3. Our terminology is failing us.

The downside of this vageuly forward-thinking attitude is that it lacks clarity and common language. If we’re having a conversation and using terms like “masculine” and “feminine” or “male” and “female,” we may have to dig pretty deep to figure out whether we’re using those terms in a similar way. If we’re not, uh oh, that’s uncomfortable. Now we’re in awkward, potentially hostile territory. 

“Obviously, feminine people are more emotional than masculine people.”

“Obviously, masculine people have more dominant personalities and are better suited to leadership roles.”

Yikes. These hidden assumptions/attitudes make it really difficult to understand one another and to achieve a productive exchange of information. So even though I love that it’s becoming more commonplace to defy stereotype in general, we do need to have open and ongoing discussions about gender. Our language and terminology need a serious overhaul, and we need to work on clarifying our terms, and assigning new ones, when necessary.

4. Many people don’t understand the difference between “gender expression” and “gender identity.”

I didn’t know that these were two different concepts until I was well past my teens, mostly because I’d never heard anyone talk about it. I’m going to go ahead and blame stereotype for this one, too. In order to classify your own gender expression, you need to have some notion of what “masculine” and “feminine” mean, and my point is… good luck defining those terms without stereotype, and good luck defining those terms in the same way as anyone else. It’s subjective, and complicated.

I saw some graphics recently that helped me frame my own thoughts a bit better. Traditionally, most people see gender identity and gender expression as spectrums like this:

Graphics like these have always bothered me, and I only recently figured out why. I don’t know if I actually feel that “masculine” and “feminine” are opposites of each other. I think they might exist on individual continuums, more like this:

I like this better for so many reasons. It allows for individual subjectivity - the fact that someone’s personal definition of femininity might differ from mine. I like the neutral visual, since it implies that “nuetral” is more of an absence of those stereotypical characteristics, as opposed to suggesting that someone becomes “more masculine” as they become “less feminine,” and that “neutral” falls at some arbitrary point in between.

I think a model like this can help bring clarity to our ideas about “identity” vs. “expression,” as well. I tried to place myself on these continuums to show what I mean. Here’s my breakdown for gender expression:

I present as very stereotypically feminine (long hair, dresses, occasional makeup), but I enjoy some articles of clothing or aspects of physical appearance that are stereotypically masculine, too.

My breakdown for gender identity, though, looks pretty different, and absolutely swings/changes over time:

I feel and behave way less stereotypically feminine than I look. This also helps me conceptualize that I have features of behavior and attitudes that fall into both categories, rather than having to place myself on a single sliding scale somewhere in between.

I think if more people spent time looking at graphics like this and examining their definitions of masculinity and femininity, then more people would probably identify as non-binary or gender-nonconforming. A lot of people aren’t aware that their gender expression and gender identity may not match, and honestly, we make so many assumptions about people based on their physical appearance, it shouldn’t be surprising that many people don’t dig any deeper.

I’ve written on this subject before, but I think the whole concept of “gayer than thou” comes into play here, too. I’m hesitant to identify as non-binary, even though I feel that I am, because my gender expression is typically feminine. It’s the same discomfort I feel about identifying as pansexual even though my relationship looks stereotypically hetero to the outside observer (it’s not!). Gatekeepers in the LGBTQ+ community can make it difficult to feel as though gray-area terms, identities, and expressions are valid.

And isn’t that ironic? That even LGBTQ+ individuals are more comfortable with the binary? 

I, personally, prefer the gray area.

[hub-pub-bub]

If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous.

But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous, bafflingly out-of-place comma, perhaps, or inexplicably used the wrong pronoun? Maybe they’re simply mistaken. Or maybe they’re in the vanguard of a futuristic linguistic trend that, decades or centuries hence, will be widely embraced and regarded as correct.

Our language is forever evolving, and 2017 was no exception. Two key authorities on proper usage—the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style—both made modernizing tweaks in their latest updates.

Examined closely, these offer glimpses into the past and future: “Often people think of language shifting over centuries,” says Grammarly copy editor Brittney Ross, “but some of these happened pretty quickly.”

We’ll give a rundown of a few of the recent changes that felt consequential, and then delve into one particularly contentious stylistic faultline we’re still watching—the Oxford comma.

Both style guides are through with capitalizing “internet” and “web.”

Associated Press editors made this move last year, and the Chicago Manual has now followed suit. Not to make anyone feel old, but if you remember the sound of a dial-up modem, you’ve witnessed the arc of these terms trending from exotic to mundane. Same goes for this one:

It’s now email, not e-mail.

Chicago Style lagged a few years after the AP made this shift, but it’s now unanimous—no hyphen required. Similarly:

AP Style now has an entry for esports.

The e is not a typo; we’re talking about competitive multiplayer video games. One could argue that 2017, the year of Starcraft: Remastered, approximates a 20-year anniversary for esports, which have now become commonplace—and so lucrative that popular streamers on Twitch have their own agents.

AP editors also added an entry for autonomous vehicles.

It will likely be years before you get a chance to ride in a self-driving car, but in the meantime, journalists can’t stop thinking about them. (Guilty.) Just don’t call them driverless unless there truly isn’t a human onboard who can take the wheel.

They can now be singular—sometimes.

AP and Chicago Style editors both cracked this door open in 2017, but neither yet seems ready to charge fully through it, prompting the Columbia Journalism Review to declare “it’s the middle of the end for the insistence that ‘they’ can be only a plural pronoun.”

The style guides allow for a singular they when referring to someone who doesn’t identify as he or she, but they also note you can often just write your way around this by reworking the sentence. Here are highlights from the new AP entry:

“They, them, their — In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them. They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable…

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun.”

Whether this shift heralds the widespread adoption of what’s known as the “epicene they,” we’ll have to wait a few more editions and see.

Whither the Oxford comma?

No discussion of warring (okay, not really) stylebooks would be complete without considering the Oxford (or serial) comma. For the uninitiated, that’s the last comma in a list of three or more things, as in this example:

“My goals for 2018 are to learn how to use commas like a champion, to run a half-marathon, and to get good at poaching eggs.”

Whether that last comma is necessary is hotly debated. It featured in a 2008 lyric by the band Vampire Weekend that might be politely paraphrased as “Who gives a hoot about the Oxford comma?” And this year a single Oxford comma was even the subject of a court fight with millions of dollars at stake.

Chicago style recommends its use in almost all instances, while AP style leans somewhat against it. The AP’s position is squishy, though, as it recently noted in a series of tweets that began “We don’t ban Oxford commas!” Rather, they say you should use it when it adds clarity and ditch it when it’s nonessential.

As AP Stylebook lead editor Paula Froke told a roomful of colleagues this spring, “The stylebook doesn’t ban the use of a serial comma. Whether you put it in at all times is a different debate.” That’s hardly a hard-and-fast declaration, but the Oxford comma is divisive, as anyone who’s served as a copy editor at a student newspaper can attest. Brittney, Grammarly’s resident style maven, puts it this way:

“Oxford commas are like the Ugg boots of the punctuation world. People either love them or hate them or don’t know what they are.”

Brittney notes that Grammarly is pro-Oxford comma, in part because many long-timers (“the OG Grammarly users”) have voiced fondness for it. “It’s really carried over into our blog, social media, emails,” even in settings where AP style might be more typical: “We’ve kept the Oxford comma just to keep things consistent.”

And consistency, alongside clarity, she says, should be more important than pitting one stylistic tribe’s abstract symbols against another.

“When it comes to AP vs. Chicago style, I think a lot of people forget the importance of the word style. The important thing to remember is when the style isn’t working for you, you should do what works.”

[ber39james]

Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017?

If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous.

But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous, bafflingly out-of-place comma, perhaps, or inexplicably used the wrong pronoun? Maybe they’re simply mistaken. Or maybe they’re in the vanguard of a futuristic linguistic trend that, decades or centuries hence, will be widely embraced and regarded as correct.

Our language is forever evolving, and 2017 was no exception. Two key authorities on proper usage—the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style—both made modernizing tweaks in their latest updates.

Examined closely, these offer glimpses into the past and future: “Often people think of language shifting over centuries,” says Grammarly copy editor Brittney Ross, “but some of these happened pretty quickly.”

We’ll give a rundown of a few of the recent changes that felt consequential, and then delve into one particularly contentious stylistic faultline we’re still watching—the Oxford comma.

Both style guides are through with capitalizing “internet” and “web.”

Associated Press editors made this move last year, and the Chicago Manual has now followed suit. Not to make anyone feel old, but if you remember the sound of a dial-up modem, you’ve witnessed the arc of these terms trending from exotic to mundane. Same goes for this one:

It’s now email, not e-mail.

Chicago Style lagged a few years after the AP made this shift, but it’s now unanimous—no hyphen required. Similarly:

AP Style now has an entry for esports.

The e is not a typo; we’re talking about competitive multiplayer video games. One could argue that 2017, the year of Starcraft: Remastered, approximates a 20-year anniversary for esports, which have now become commonplace—and so lucrative that popular streamers on Twitch have their own agents.

AP editors also added an entry for autonomous vehicles.

It will likely be years before you get a chance to ride in a self-driving car, but in the meantime, journalists can’t stop thinking about them. (Guilty.) Just don’t call them driverless unless there truly isn’t a human onboard who can take the wheel.

They can now be singular—sometimes.

AP and Chicago Style editors both cracked this door open in 2017, but neither yet seems ready to charge fully through it, prompting the Columbia Journalism Review to declare “it’s the middle of the end for the insistence that ‘they’ can be only a plural pronoun.”

The style guides allow for a singular they when referring to someone who doesn’t identify as he or she, but they also note you can often just write your way around this by reworking the sentence. Here are highlights from the new AP entry:

They, them, their — In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them. They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy. However, rewording usually is possible and always is preferable…

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun.

Whether this shift heralds the widespread adoption of what’s known as the “epicene they,” we’ll have to wait a few more editions and see.

Whither the Oxford comma?

No discussion of warring (okay, not really) stylebooks would be complete without considering the Oxford (or serial) comma. For the uninitiated, that’s the last comma in a list of three or more things, as in this example:

“My goals for 2018 are to learn how to use commas like a champion, to run a half-marathon, and to get good at poaching eggs.”

Whether that last comma is necessary is hotly debated. It featured in a 2008 lyric by the band Vampire Weekend that might be politely paraphrased as “Who gives a hoot about the Oxford comma?” And this year a single Oxford comma was even the subject of a court fight with millions of dollars at stake.

Chicago style recommends its use in almost all instances, while AP style leans somewhat against it. The AP’s position is squishy, though, as it recently noted in a series of tweets that began “We don’t ban Oxford commas!” Rather, they say you should use it when it adds clarity and ditch it when it’s nonessential.

As AP Stylebook lead editor Paula Froke told a roomful of colleagues this spring, “The stylebook doesn’t ban the use of a serial comma. Whether you put it in at all times is a different debate.” That’s hardly a hard-and-fast declaration, but the Oxford comma is divisive, as anyone who’s served as a copy editor at a student newspaper can attest. Brittney, Grammarly’s resident style maven, puts it this way:

“Oxford commas are like the Ugg boots of the punctuation world. People either love them or hate them or don’t know what they are.”

Brittney notes that Grammarly is pro-Oxford comma, in part because many long-timers (“the OG Grammarly users”) have voiced fondness for it. “It’s really carried over into our blog, social media, emails,” even in settings where AP style might be more typical: “We’ve kept the Oxford comma just to keep things consistent.”

And consistency, alongside clarity, she says, should be more important than pitting one stylistic tribe’s abstract symbols against another.

“When it comes to AP vs. Chicago style, I think a lot of people forget the importance of the word style. The important thing to remember is when the style isn’t working for you, you should do what works.”

The post Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017? appeared first on Grammarly Blog.

from Grammarly Blog https://www.grammarly.com/blog/oxford-comma-debate/

[data-plays-viola]

This is my review of What We Left Behind by Robin Talley, but a lot of what I said is applicable beyond the book, so I’m posting it here too.

This contains spoilers for the book What We Left Behind by Robin Talley. If you’re reading or going to read it, don’t read this (yet).

I think I understand why people are so upset by this book, but in my opinion that's because they're misunderstanding T. (As a note: this is all coming from the point of view of someone who identifies outside of the gender binary. Also I'm referring to Tony as Tony and with male pronouns as per his decision at the end of the novel.) I've seen a lot of people talking about how the book portrays being genderqueer as a transitional phase from being cis to being trans. I disagree with that assessment of the book. Yes, Tony questions his gender the entire novel. Yes, he decides by the end of the book to use male pronouns and is contemplating starting testosterone. None of these things mean that Tony identifies as a trans man, and he makes that clear throughout the novel. Yes, he has moments where he wonders if he is a trans man. But in the end, he can't settle on that because it doesn't feel right. And that, in my personal opinion and experience, is the essence of being genderqueer. Not only do I think a lot of people are misinterpreting what the word itself means, I think they're misinterpreting Tony. Genderqueer is both an identity and an umbrella term. Anyone who isn't strictly male or female falls under the genderqueer umbrella. And Tony, as he we leave him at the end of the novel, falls under that umbrella, he is neither strictly male or female. He even says that in the last chapter of the book. Tony struggles to find a label that feels comfortable for him, circling around and around and finally goes back to genderqueer by the end of the book. There may come a day when he decides he does identify fully as male. That doesn't mean that being genderqueer was "just a phase" (and I have a lot of feelings about this phrase, none of which are appropriate for a book review). He identifies as genderqueer, and that is his truth in this stage of his life. If that changes, that doesn't make his identity right now any less real. People are allowed to grow and change. For example, I identified as panromantic for a long time after I discovered I was asexual before I really starting examining my emotions and looking into the aromantic spectrum. I contemplated being "gender ambivalent" years before I discovered nonbinary genders. That doesn't mean any of these things were any less real to me at the time. That was how I believed I felt and it was very real. Just like how not being in the gender binary is real for Tony. I think part of the reason people dislike this book stems from a very common issue for nonbinary people ("Nonbinary" is my preferred umbrella term for people who don't identify as one of the two binary genders. I use nonbinary where I think Tony would probably use genderqueer in a lot of cases). [Also, let me make it clear that I don't mean to speak for every nonbinary individual, this just comes from my personal experiences and what I've heard from other nonbinary people.] Everyone is so tied into the gender binary. It's subconscious for a majority of people. Everything in our lives (speaking in terms of Western society) is permeated with it. You treat people you perceive as male differently than you do people you perceive as female (Yes, this is also sexism, but that's not the point I'm making here). It's an inherent bias most people (myself included) can't unlearn. For nonbinary people, unfortunately, there comes a point where they choose how they want to be treated. Some people don't, and more power to them, but I know for me, a lot of my choices in clothing, presentation, and pronouns stem from how I want to be treated by someone I meet in the street. Am I comfortable with someone calling me "sweetheart" and telling me what a cute girl I am? If yes, then I wear cute, 'feminine' clothing. If the idea of the old man ringing me up calling me "doll" makes me want to vomit, I bind, wear baggy clothes, sometimes I even change the way I walk and speak. There are some days where having someone assume he/him pronouns for me is euphoric. Some days, the same is true when people use they/them pronouns. Some days, she/her pronouns don't bother me at all. None of this has any affect on my gender identity. I think a lot about maybe someday going on T or getting top surgery, just like Tony. This has NO affect on my gender identity. Granted, Tony is stuck in that nonbinary limbo where nothing feels quite right, but that doesn't change this. Tony doesn't identify as male. In moments of turmoil, he wonders if he does, but by the end of the novel, he's settled into being at least somewhat comfortable with using genderqueer. That may change. He may identify as male one day. He may find another term all together he identifies with more than genderqueer. But that doesn't make this book "bad genderqueer representation". It's the opposite to me. This book hit accurately on so so many things I've felt and experienced as a nonbinary-umbrella person. I agree that a lot of characters dismiss his genderqueer identity (some shoving him into the "girl" box and some into the "boy" box), but that's very very accurate to what genderqueer people experience. I went through so many labels before settling with using nonbinary. Am I 100% comfortable with that as my identity? No. Were there times where I thought "do you really feel this way or are you just a girl who hates dresses you idiot"? Yes. Were there times I thought "Why are you like this, just commit be a guy and get it over with"? Yes. Did either of these choices ever truly feel right? No. And Tony clearly feels the same way. He never truly commits to being a trans guy, accept to his mom. And guess what? Sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier to go with the simple option when explaining yourself to someone ignorant who you know won't understand. That's why I let my parents assume I'm gay or bi (I don't know what they think, but it's probably one of those two) because that's a hell of a lot easier than the fight I know we would get into if I ever tried explaining asexuality. Basically this long ramble can be summarized by this: as a nonbinary/genderqueer person, I think Talley's representation of genderqueer people is very accurate, for some people. To people who think this book is bad because it gives people the wrong impression of what being genderqueer is, I say this: One, life is messy, and not every individual who identifies a certain way is going to give your exact right idea of what it means. Two, this line of thinking is similar to saying that flamboyant gay guys give people "the wrong impression" of being gay. It's not everyone's job "not to feed into the stereotype". For some people, identifying as genderqueer is a stage in their gender discovery. That's their right. It's not every genderqueer person's job to prove that stereotype wrong. Third, not to be rude, but this book isn't written for uneducated people. This book isn't meant to explain what being genderqueer is like a text book. This book isn't meant to educate cis people on nonbinary identities. This book is for genderqueer people. I don't think I've ever identified more with a character in terms of gender identity as I do with T (this isn't even the first book I've read with a nonbinary character, either). That's not to say other people can't enjoy it, but this book is for us. I know there isn't a lot of queer media out there, but it's not your job, my job, this book's job, or anyone else's job to educate someone. This book isn't required to give an exact perfect representation of genderqueer people for the purpose of educating people. It's our right and it's okay to have media meant just for us. Is it tragic that this book is one of very few with genderqueer character(s)? Yes. So go fix it! [Really sorry if this offends anyone, especially other nonbinary/genderqueer people who didn't like this book. This is just how I feel about the subject.]