#mentions stories i barely talk abt. sorry i am all in on the pokemon autism all the time lsjdfklsdjflsdjflkdsfdsf

[vaugarde]

15 & 19?

15. Do any of your ocs use neopronouns? Which ones?

Currently there's just Kiran, my GTI partner OC! Xe uses Xe/They pronouns. I'd like to do more though

19. Do you have preferences about depicting homo/transphobia in your stories? What, and why? Does it vary by story?

If you asked me a few years ago, it'd have been a hard no for everything, especially fandom stuff. But now, I've written a creative college project about that exact thing, so... yeah. I'm still trying to break out of my "overcorrective" mindset where I was so paranoid about doing things "right" in my stories that I felt terrible for including anything about bigotry because of all those posts like "oh, you're a terrible awful person for recreating homophobia in fantasy!!" that circulated a while back.

I'm still sorta thinking on it for my oc projects- in the short stories I wrote for my video game story for college, one of the characters had a homophobic mom, so once I go and flesh that verse out, I'd like to elaborate on that, like how representation affects queer people irl.

Buuut for Sordid Souls and all my PMD ocs, I wanna follow the idea that societal norms and terminology are different because of the separate histories and whatnot. No clue what I'm doing in Sordid Souls yet, but for PMD I have some stuff down that I'd like to elaborate on ^^ Mostly regarding transgender issues.

Basically it's much more normalized and the concept of "coming out" isn't really a thing most of the time. I kinda wanna nab Eve's thing where once you figure out you're trans, your aura reflects that and other Pokemon just naturally pick up on that. The neutral pronoun is changed from "they" to "it" (to reference the first PMD game where that was the case), and "it" is also used to refer to legendaries, so rather than being derogatory, it's actually a pretty honorable pronoun! Some might even see you as a bit full of yourself for using it..... (As an aside, I know that creates inconsistencies, but for now I'm excusing it as like... these Pokemon don't really speak English? They're doing pokespeak. So there are some untranslatable elements, is what I'm going with.

Since evolution is so encouraged and celebrated in this world, that means change is too, in a way (insert ISAT joke), so really changing your gender and pronouns is seen as another faucet of that, especially since aura reflects it. Hell, names are treated differently too, some Pokemon have different names depending on which town they're in, some don't give theirs out at all, so even name changes are just kinda like "alrighty, so anyways," It's just something some Pokemon do, and some Pokemon don't.

That being said, I still imagine that in certain groups and parts of the world, there's some weirdness and transphobia. They usually get dismissed or even made fun of because usually these Pokemon also align with Pokemon that like... think evolution is bad, actually. But in certain isolated instances, it can be damaging to trans Pokemon they know.

There's currently only two instances of this in canon and I'm gonna keep quiet about one because I'm off and on about it and worried about the reception.

But the other instance is Odin. TBH he's an isolated incident where he's literally just transphobic to Maya. Because "oh, my son's not smart enough to figure that out. That Scizor must have confused him (Maya adjusted her aura years before she met Cheri)." He's also just clinging to the father and son branding he used when he was her manager, and how dare she try and confuse people by changing it to father and DAUGHTER?

Actually now that I think about it, both cases I'm thinking of are also crossed with the perpetrators being ableist and trying to take agency away from their disabled kids. Which tracks. Ableism on the other hand is something that comes up a lot so it makes sense that it'd intersect with transphobia sometimes.