#kind of treats masculinity and butchness as an innately wholesome and earnest form of wlw queerness

[gloriadenton]

So I know many other people more eloquent than me have already written about why "necromancer/cavalier are gender categories in TLT" doesn't work for them (cf @liesmyth). But one aspect of this reading that has always severely given me the ick is that imo, once you start to map gender onto "necromancer" and "cavalier," it frames necromancers as both the "feminine" gender (by contemporary irl standards) and the oppressor class. In ways that feel uncomfortably close to an MRA perspective on gender when the categories are "feminine" and "masculine."

If necromancer and cavalier are read as gender categories in TLT, then necromancers are literally "the weaker sex," smaller and less physically capable than their cavaliers. Instead, their power is drawn from witchcraft; their exploitativeness comes from their affinity with a supernatural force which is antithetical to life itself. They dominate their cavaliers by taking advantage of their cavaliers' devotion and by leeching off their cavaliers' strength; in the most extreme cases (lyctorhood), they devour their cavaliers like a vampiress or a silent movie villainness. (Which would be hot, I guess, if this reading wasn't also incredibly serious about reading TLT as a deconstruction of empire and structures of domination and hierarchy?)

And to me, all of this resonates with all those age-old paranoid fantasies about femininity as the gender category that's inherently more likely to be in league with the devil, you know? It makes TLT look like an incel treatment of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."