#off screen trans character

[daycordatthreepm]

not to be the guy that’s only talking about mizu5, but I think the impact of it is so interesting. obviously it’s going to have the impact of handling a trans character’s story really well —something that is so important as we continue to progress as a society— and I think it’s also a testament to how much these things can blow up. handling a queer character’s story well is going to make a really good impression among audiences (at least, the ones that are progressively becoming louder and louder in the grand scheme of things). I’ve seen this event bringing people into proseka too, which there’s something to be said there

it’s so interesting to me how much this event has spread outside of the immediate and related fandoms for project sekai (think enstars, bang!dream, etc.), onto completely random people’s social media feeds. the amount of tweets I’ve seen from random ass accounts talking about this is kind of fascinating

like this is just some guy. and I’m obsessed with it.

anyways. big game companies or tv studios. make more trans and queer characters that have care and understanding put into their storylines. it will pay off and age incredibly well and bring you more money

[recovering-vamp]

Pals <3

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

aurhrhrgrg I hate homophobia I hate needing to teach just to live my life

[giantkillerjack]

Your stance on the Dunmeshi queerbait stuff is a bit selfish. Wanting this one manga to go exactly the way you want is a dangerous path - the way you phrase it is so entitled, making it clear it's not about consuming media about lesbians, but making one specific work suit exactly what you want. So many yuri mangas are written by sapphic women. It's a shame your stance is how it is.

And bastardizing the term queerbaiting does no good, either. Neither does the japanese manga market. You should research more before making such hurtful posts.

Hope you have a great day anyway.

[Anon is referring to this post, I believe.]

I mean, one of us certainly IS acting very entitled and weird about the media they like, and it ain't me. Like, I think you just have associated this piece of media with your own identity in an unhealthy way that makes you react to criticism of it with intense defensiveness. You don't own Dungeon Meshi. You aren't Marcille. Dungeon Meshi is NOT a yuri manga; it's a beautiful manga with either sapphic queerbait or a woefully underdeveloped queer relationship at its center.

Maybe if you had an argument besides "it does no good" to criticize it, but you don't. So.

Smh, it's a "dangerous path" - I'm screenshotting that bc I know it'll make my wife laugh. Like, friendo, wanting a piece of media to be better isn't dangerous. But calling someone selfish and hurtful for criticizing media while offering no clarifications as to who I've hurt or how (any fellow sapphics bleeding out in here? Or is it just me with my bonkers-heavy period??)... it's overstepping a social boundary in a bizarre way.

Like, I'm sorry that I'm better at media analysis than you (not actually sorry - I am being petty! :D), but I actually have studied queerbaiting!! I am willing to bet I have done more research than you! (Are you from twitter? You have that vibe. - Again, pettiness.)

... and I spend every day with my wife (the best writer I know; I'm so honored to share stories with her), talking of nothing but our shared special interest all day - i.e. media analysis. (I honestly don't know what neurotypical couples talk about lol)

And I've done enough research to know that one of the side effects of queerbaiting is that fans are often in denial about it and then get REAL MAD when someone points it out. I was there for the Sherlock/Supernatural fandom. Shit was crazy. (Not saying Super-who-lock bc my man Russell Davies was like MAKE THOSE BOYS SMOOCH! 😎)

Also like, my apologies to Ryoko Kui - I really do love Dungeon Meshi - but like, I'm just better at writing and illustrating queer rep than she is. I make real gay protagonists who do gay shit and are gay, and I will never queerbait my audience. Womp womp.

Also, honestly, even if I turn out to be wrong about the queerbaiting by the end of the series, this message was still rude and entitled and weird. We have a lot of issues facing our queer community that endanger real people; someone calling a story queerbaiting mistakenly is not one of them.

[ye-olde-tardis]

The amount of parallels i could make between myself and Viktor are INSANE

[nickbutnodick]

the fact i spent a solid 20 minutes being unfathomably happy because trans men were mentioned in passing but also in an affirming way two(2) times in a three minute skit is probably a sign of some deeper societal issue.

[sigmaleph]

you are offered a choice:

You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.

You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don't pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.

what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you're tempted to answer 'it's complicated', round off to trans)?

[terresdebrume]

Going off that one poll, I'd like to test a theory.

More reblogs = bigger sample size.

Also, I think follow up polls would be a good idea but tbh i might need input from actual disabled people for those ^^"

[plaidos]

Sorry if this is going too far with turning your inbox into the children's cartoon complaint zone, but the stuff about Grenda in Gravity falls got me thinking.

I was a teenager when Gravity Falls was coming out, and it remains one of my favorite cartoons, but rewatching it recently made me uncomfortably aware of just how much mean-spirited and offensive comedy there is throughout. Grenda as a "comic relief" character is a huge one of course, but there's just a LOT of deriving comedy from people's bodies and appearances. Plus just straightforward man-in-a-dress jokes...

There's also the fact that Alex Hirsch seems to think AAVE (or like "slang" created to be a comically heightened imitation of AAVE) is the most hilarious thing ever, but also makes sure it's always coming from on-screen white characters, as if that unproblematizes the way it's mocked? It's a CONSTANT recurring thread throughout the series.

I ended up falling off a recent rewatch for a while after hitting the episode "Soos and the Real Girl." It really hit me there with the exact way they were characterizing Soos's social incompetence and "childish" interests, oh, he's straight up supposed to be autistic. He explicitly gets obsessed with the dating sim because he likes how social interactions have predictable rules in it, unlike real life. It's hammered home *multiple* times that one of his big stated social deficiencies is an inability to make eye contact, etc. Come the fuck on. And that's fine in a vacuum, the episode ends with everyone realizing he didn't need to change himself because he could still have value as a person as long as his awkwardness was charming to a quirky chubby woman.

But all the jokes in the episode are still about how funny it is that he's socially unaware and makes other people uncomfortable or frightened. And worse, it recontextualizes the way he's used as a joke throughout the rest of the series, the way he's portrayed as stupid, as a man-child, as being abused and taken advantage of by his employer while he's oblivious to it. It's just so gross. And that's not even getting into how he's also fat and Hispanic, and he's not just mocked but *dehumanized* for comedy CONSTANTLY.

Plus that episode throws in one of the show's transphobic jokes for good measure. Isn't it so funny that you can't tell if this person in alternative fashion is a man or a woman? Isn't it funny that Soos is so autistic-- I mean socially inept-- that he openly, in public, to their face, speculates on their gender? Not like for trans people that's a nightmare scenario that carries an implicit threat of violence or anything...

And all this is absolutely not to suggest that Gravity Falls is a uniquely harmful piece of media. I know for certain if you pick any network sitcom at random, before or even since Gravity Falls, you'd find way worse examples of all of this. But it's just a bummer to now be a grown-ass fat, autistic, trans woman who can recognize some of this stuff, and realize that even the media that's most special to me thinks it's funny to be hostile to people like me, that it's not really made for me. And to recognize that it's even worse for people who are marginalized in ways that I'm not.

Anon I’m in love with you — it’s like you went down a checklist in my brain of every complaint i’ve ever had about this show. i completely, completely agree with every note here — the jokes about AAVE specifically stood out to me, especially since there’s been at least one occasion where Hirsch went on a twitter rant about how (xyz aave) is the worst, stupidest thing to ever happen to the English language (meanwhile he thinks combining the words “Bill” and “Dipper” is funny enough to include as a joke despite it being just literally putting two names together. wooow how clever and funny white people are, thank god this caucasian braingenius is protecting the sanctity of the english language from black people who make up bad new words)

also dude can’t go five seconds without putting a white person in a “cowboys and indians” style native american costume. Hirsch has a fucking major problem with the way he treats his hispanic characters & how he portrays native american mythology & culture as basically this funny stupid thing to be used as set dressing for white people.

it feels a lot like he watched The Simpsons’ (sometimes effective, sometimes ineffective) satire on racism, bigotry, and the conservative tendencies in archetypical american towns and understood that it was funny but didn’t get why and just limply recreated the jokes without the structure for it to be a satire. not that the Simpsons doesn’t fall into these same problems with racism & body shaming, but i feel like they at least have a veneer of it being “isn’t it stupid how people like Homer think like this?” rather than just “haha different culture talk funny”

and the problem is, it sucks that it’s like this because it’s so good. it feels like every time i recommend it i have to be like “a lot of the jokes have aged like milk but it’s worth it”. like i love Gravity Falls. which is why it’s important to criticise it for its flaws.

[renthony]

One of the few things that really annoys me about Valheim is that, when creating a character, the beard style slider is present when selecting a "female" avatar, but you can't actually click them or add a beard to your female character. Like, I don't usually expect beard options for "female" avatars, because trans & intersex erasure is constant, but why keep the buttons on the screen if I can't even click them? I thought for a split second I might get to have a character model that looks kinda like me, but nope. :(

It doesn't piss me off as bad as the Sims 4 does, though. That game's devs made a huge deal about their new inclusive gender, sexuality, & pronoun settings, but you still can't add facial hair to a "female-framed" (ugh) model without mods. And they still use the male/female symbols for physical frame, which means making an intersex sim is fucking impossible. Even though there are intersex pride objects in-game. Sigh.

Anyway, my 2025 gaming wishlist is "a game where you can be fat, and have both titties and a beard at the same time."

[hikarry]

For the longest time, I thought I was cis. Not necessarily because I felt it deep down, but because I was forced to present as feminine as possible. My father, trying to counterbalance the whole "being gay" thing, made sure of it. I was supposed to look a certain way to fit into the "norm" he wanted to project.

Fast forward to 2020, when the world stood still, and so did my sense of self. Like many, I had a sexual crisis during lockdown, and a gender crisis hit right after. I went hyper-feminine, leaning into the only identity I knew. But suddenly, it became unbearable. I felt itchy, uncomfortable in my own skin. I found myself stealing my brother's clothes, hiding my long hair under a beanie. Some days, I loved being feminine. Other days, I relished the comfort of masculinity. And sometimes, I just didn’t care.

I didn't have a name for what I was feeling. I knew about being cis—it was the default, the norm. I had trans friends, and I knew about being non-binary from TikTok. But none of these labels seemed to fit me. I wasn't just one thing. I was everything. Then, a TikTok video introduced me to the term "genderfluid." It resonated. I liked the idea, but something still felt off. The only people I saw using this label were behind screens, with a seemingly magical ability to transform their appearance effortlessly. They could switch genders with such fluidity and grace—powers I didn't possess. I felt like I was on the outside, looking in.

Then, in 2021, everything changed when I watched Good Omens for the first time. And that’s when I met Crowley.

At first, I didn’t quite grasp his whole gender vibe. But on a rewatch, it hit me like a brick. Crowley was like me. His fluidity, his complete disregard for sticking to one gender—it was exactly what I had been searching for. He didn’t fit into a box. He just existed, gloriously and unapologetically, as whoever he wanted to be in any given moment. And that was me.

Crowley was the first genderfluid "person" I met, even if he was just a character. Seeing him on screen was incredibly validating. Up until then, I felt like a freak, confused and lost. But Crowley showed me I wasn’t alone or abnormal. He made me feel seen, understood, and normal. It was a revelation.

Crowley helped me embrace my identity without overthinking it. Just, you know, fuck it. Female, male—who cares? It was liberating. I owe that sense of freedom to him.

To anyone struggling with their gender identity, feeling like they don’t fit into a neat category, I hope you find your Crowley. That moment of realization where you see yourself reflected somewhere and know you’re not alone. Because you’re not. We’re out here, existing and thriving, just like Crowley.

[cosmic-vanity]

Are there any trans guys in mainstream western animation? And I don’t mean headcanons I mean like. ACTUALLY confirmed characters. Because I’m curious now.

I guess there’s that one guy in SPOP but you would never know if it wasn’t like, confirmed off-screen. And I’m not sure I’d even call that show mainstream considering how it was dedicated to a specifically queer demographic and only available on ONE streaming service.

EDIT: No, Barney from Deadendia/Dead End: Paranormal Park doesn’t count either. That show isn’t mainstream at all.

[olderthannetfic]

/olderthannetfic/769334704445997057/another-fandometrics-year-in-review-another-bevy

I am - genuinely - very sympathetic to the frustrations of solely f/f shippers and I DO think some people are a little too quick to shrug off the lack of f/f in fandom spaces with “lack of representation in media what can you do” when fandom is all about assigning personalities and backstories to one-line characters. HOWEVER. As someone who likes all kinds of ships, the experiences I have had across many MANY fandoms with solely f/f shippers treating people who also liked the main m/m ship as traitors and bad feminists, not to mention the number of people who have told me, a trans man, that I HAVE to write more f/f and less m/m For The Sisterhood, has made me LESS likely to engage in f/f, not more. Some of y’all are your own worst enemy when it comes to this stuff I swear. (Hashtag not all femslashers, hashtag some of my best friends are femslashers, etc)

--

Demands that people defend and explain perfectly commonplace things always end up generating dumber and dumber explanations.

I agree that that explanation by itself is kind of weak, but "Why are you asking only about AO3?" (as people often are) plus representation problems plus the other commonly cited reasons add up to a perfectly sufficient explanation. People just don't like what they're hearing.

--

The kind of f/f fandom people are often looking for—a by cis wlw, for cis wlw one—is not that different in size from the by cis mlm, for cis mlm one. They are both small.

Yes, I know they pretend that's not what they mean. They are lying. Possibly to themselves. Just look at the bawwwwing over the idea that cis men liking f/f could add to the amount of f/f art or the audience for the same.

Many AO3 slashers are better compared to transbian catgirls making lesbian furry porn or cis dudes horny for Buffy/Faith or something. There are plenty of people who care about f/f. They're just not necessarily the ~right~ people in the right spaces making the right art to count in some wanker's statistics.

Part of the reason our explanations and discussions always sound so bonkers is that we constantly compare apples to oranges.

--

And while we're at it, let's talk about that hoary old ~one-line character~ thing.

The reality is that we like to talk about how we elevate random walk-on characters, but the vast majority of shippy AO3 fanfic is about fairly major characters. Clint/Coulson was bizarrely popular in 2012. It has been twelve years. It is time to get over it.

On top of most things focusing on leads, the focus is often on characters who are given a lot of interiority. The audience is invited to be in their head and care about their feelings. People aren't usually good at analyzing film, so they use more familiar metrics involving text: how many lines do they have in the script? How many minutes does that translate to on screen? They don't know how to quantify a character being treated as an object to be looked at beyond "Booty shorts bad". But it's not general sex appeal or amount of skin on display that matters here.

As audiences, we respond to film grammar and "Just happen to like" or not like some character as a result of it, but we aren't aware of the mechanics, so we can't explain why beyond vague spluttering and "How dare you! Everyone should think this because it's the natural response!"

In general, media with multiple central women who have intense relationships with each other and who are conventionally attractive generate plenty of interest in f/f. Media with one hot girl who has the camera trained on her ass all the time while the men do everything interesting usually don't.

It's a no brainer and the harebrained explanations come from trying to look deeper to find the secret conspiracy where there is none.

--

The biggest mistake of most of this dumb discourse is "But I see all these queer women here. Why isn't there more f/f?"

This presupposes some default "normal" level of f/f without any actual justification for why that would be expected. You see the same nonsense from people going "Why is there so much m/m?"

What's the default? 10% because of the fake statistic that 10% of people are gay? 75% because action movies are sausagefests and all the important relationships are between men? What's the "normal" level of femslash? 25% because f/f, f/m, m/m, and gen are all equally valid? 80% because lots of fanfic writers are women?

Chasing one precise number is a fool's errand, but building a whole theory on the idea that there's an implicit number without even digging into that assumption is more foolish still.

When you look at the fanfic (or art!) spaces that are full of dudes, they often look like a bit of a mirror of AO3. Lots of het still. Lots of f/f. Lots of lady blorbos people are obsessed with. Limited m/m. Depending on the space, there might be a lot more gen. It's not perfectly 1:1, but then AO3 isn't precisely like other chick-heavy fanfic spaces anyway.

--

In my experience, the thing that makes a blorbo take off is that they're fairly major in canon, often driving the narrative even if they aren't the main protagonist, and they show up early.

In the cases where they weren't there at the very beginning, them showing up was the catalyst for fans who like this type of character to get into the canon at all. It's not just Castiel: you see it with Methos from Highlander and plenty of others. It's usually in a context where that fandom didn't have that much established for this type of fan. There wasn't a second dude to pair the lead with or the ship turned some people off or something. Highlander, for example, had fucktons of het shippers, both of canon het and of various OFCs and canon dudes. It was the slashers who stampeded over there when friends told them there was new ship potential for m/m. SPN... Sam/Dean was very popular on LJ, but I think it's obvious why a viable non-brother ship was of interest to people. I watched tons of people get pimped into Teen Wolf for Sterek. Of course they ended up liking it and not really caring about other ships: they were pre-selected to like that specific vibe. (And they are all wrong because Scott is the best and Derek has weird teeth.) The same thing happens with f/f. People get into media all the time because they're promised such-and-such a ship dynamic.

Wynonna Earp had plenty of people who were there for the women because the women are who matter for the most part. People were super into the canon f/f because it's hot and because it didn't seem like they were just going to get hit by a bus and shooed out of the narrative.

How many things that everybody and their sister saw have that many main women who matter? Some, definitely, but they're outnumbered by the sausagefests and by the things with very central het. Not everything with a huge audience gets a big fanfic fandom, but most things with big fanfic fandoms do have a big audience. You need critical mass to make a fandom happen.

Something like MCU has a variety of tasty shipping options, but the characters it spent all its time on first were the small selection of guys fandom cares the most about. When other characters were established very early, they also had an early spurt of fandom. I can't be the only one who remembers Pepperony fandom on LJ. It wasn't just people tagging canon ships in the background: Pepper/Tony shippers were a whole thing.

Yes, there are exceptions, but we make a big deal of them while ignoring the overall pattern.

Again, it is time to get over Clint/Coulson, Arthur/Eames, and people hallucinating that Hux had a personality in that first movie.

These are rare exceptions, and they're all snark-based at that. Darcy Lewis was also obnoxiously popular based solely on a few lines of snark, but that didn't count because she wasn't the correct and virtuous choice of favorite female character.

(Seriously, you should have seen the whining about all the people horny for Darcy who didn't give a fuck about boring Jane. Sorry, but your blorbo is a snooze and mine has amazing tits in addition to being funny.)

--

Let's go look at what's big on AO3 since it's easy and that's what other lazy statistics compilers do and then base their whining on:

Looking at the M/M tag, here's the sidebar:

Castiel/Dean Winchester (111856)

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (70823)

Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski (70134)

Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (67796)

James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers (61397)

Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) (56548)

Minor or Background Relationship(s) (55109)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (49179)

Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (46679)

Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (44754)

I'm seeing canons with huge audiences. Teen Wolf and SPN are way more popular in fanfic fandom, relatively speaking, but they're certainly not obscure media.

I'm seeing a lot of leads. Sirius/Remus does stand out a little: they aren't walk-ons, but fanon did elevate them. Same with Draco, but main protagonist/most obvious nemesis is hardly a surprising ship type.

Let's play with exclude filters and see what's next (numbers won't be exact since this is via excluding the previous batches):

Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson (43234)

Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji/Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian (40115)

Jeon Jungkook/Kim Taehyung | V (38398)

Keith/Lance (Voltron) (32757)

Dazai Osamu/Nakahara Chuuya (Bungou Stray Dogs) (32744)

Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester (31834)

Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV) (31527)

Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) (31011)

Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter (30819)

Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood (30133)

Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson (27403)

Original Male Character/Original Male Character (26854)

Bakugou Katsuki/Kirishima Eijirou (26854)

Jeon Jungkook/Park Jimin (26454)

Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov (26453)

Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF) (21154)

Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion (20946)

James T. Kirk/Spock (20716)

Min Yoongi | Suga/Park Jimin (20561)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet (20113)

Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru (20039)

Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio (18806)

Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel (18013)

Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier (17577)

Dan Howell/Phil Lester (17518)

Levi Ackerman/Eren Yeager (17404)

Han Jisung | Han/Lee Minho | Lee Know (17390)

Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou (17141)

Tartaglia | Childe/Zhongli (Genshin Impact) (17041)

Harry Potter/Severus Snape (16773)

Oh look: more leads.

Sure, there are some little oddities, like the fact that taekook is obviously the worst BTS ship and it is a personal attack on me that it is that popular. But come the fuck on: this is a parade of some of the most famous musicians and most popular anime, shows that had huge audiences and particularly huge audiences of the type that like fanfic.

Let's have a look at f/m:

Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug (33773)

Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy (33031)

Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) (29586)

Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren (24192)

Minor or Background Relationship(s) (21606)

James Potter/Lily Evans Potter (21088)

Kylo Ren/Rey (16028)

James "Bucky" Barnes/Reader (15922)

Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley (15635)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (15335)

Pepper Potts/Tony Stark (14552)

Fox Mulder/Dana Scully (14214)

Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin (13616)

Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson (11471)

Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak (11383)

Captain Hook | Killian Jones/Emma Swan (11272)

Castiel/Dean Winchester (11187)

Other Relationship Tags to Be Added (10529)

Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov (9750)

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s) (9736)

Okay, it is AO3 after all, so some m/m ships have snuck in there, but the general trend is still leads, leads, leads, now with some readerfic. (For James/Lily, you can blame the insanity that is Marauders fandom on TikTok, or so I hear.)

And f/f:

Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor (21520)

Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s) (17873)

Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan (16168)

Minor or Background Relationship(s) (13681)

Clarke Griffin/Lexa (12876)

Adora/Catra (She-Ra) (11532)

Amity Blight/Luz Noceda (10880)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (10532)

Caitlyn/Vi (League of Legends) (8925)

Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long (7766)

Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler (7369)

Korra/Asami Sato (7146)

Wednesday Addams/Enid Sinclair (6720)

Other Relationship Tags to Be Added (6684)

Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught (5764)

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s) (5529)

Chloe Beale/Beca Mitchell (5347)

Laura Hollis/Carmilla Karnstein (4895)

Jirou Kyouka/Yaoyorozu Momo (4662)

Charlie Magne | Morningstar/Vaggie (4402)

Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan (4284)

Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer (4223)

Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam (3936)

Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova (3876)

Maya Bishop/Carina DeLuca (3700)

Sister Beatrice/Ava Silva (3689)

Castiel/Dean Winchester (3664)

Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price (3471)

Miranda Priestly/Andrea Sachs (3394)

Ruby Rose/Weiss Schnee (3324)

Carmilla might be a little obscure compared to some media, and some other ships have snuck in here, but again, we're seeing some fairly prominent canons and the leads or at least main cast who have intense relationships in those canons. If most fantasy tv shows were Once Upon a Time, all of AO3 might be awash in nothing but swanqueen and captainswan.

The big thing that one sees is simply that f/f fandom often revolves around different media, while m/m and f/m are more likely to be into the same stuff that's full, full, full of main dudes getting to do things with one woman who matters.

We do not, in general, elevate anybody.

Not unless some very talented writer leads the way first with a juicy longfic that establishes all the fanon.

We repeat the myth that we do because it suits a certain narrative about how creative and transformative fandom is—and another equally popular narrative about how the lack of ship A/B is a ~conspiracy~ to rob one of one's rightful overflowing feed trough of fic.

It's bullshit.

We write about leads.

[c-is-for-circinate]

It feels like there's this narrative that fandom keeps wanting to explore, with Steve Harrington, about this very specific type of martyrdom where self-sacrifice is an expression of a lack of self-worth. And, like, yes, write the narrative that's meaningful to you, and yes ok Steve does admittedly get beaten up a lot, but -- legitimately I do not think this narrative is actually Steve's story.

Like, without gendering things too much, there is something in the Steve fanon that I keep seeing that's so reflective of the specific kind of sacrifice and societal pressures exerted on girls, specifically -- this story of 'you make yourself worthy and worthwhile by carving pieces out of yourself', of believing that you must always give and never receive to justify the space you take up in the world. Yes, boys can experience this same pressure (and obviously trans and nb people of all genders run into it as well! sometimes a lot!), but especially in the mid-1980s cultural context where Stranger Things takes place, it's just...really not likely to be a dominant narrative for Steve to be operating under? It doesn't even really match the Steve we see on screen -- who is happy to make sacrifices for the sake of others, yeah, when needed, but who's not particularly kind or giving unless somebody asks first.

And Steve does get hurt a lot on other people's behalf! And this is a problem! It's just a completely different problem than the one fandom keeps writing.

Steve, and I'm going to say this forever, is a story about toxic masculinity, which the show may or may not even know it's writing. The archetypes influencing Steve's character as it shows up on the screen (and the stories and messages that Steve would actually be surrounded by in his actual life) are not deconstructions of suffering heroes who never should have had to fight in the first place and were destroyed by it. That's the Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. Steve's not Buffy. Steve's cultural context is Indiana Jones.

Steve is The Guy! And part of being The Guy is that you're expected to take the hits -- not because Steve is less important than the women-and-children he's supposed to protect, but because, the story says, he will get less hurt. Why should Steve get in between Billy and Lucas? Because Steve is an eighteen-year-old athlete and Lucas is in middle school, and of the two of them, Steve actually stands a chance. (And yes, Steve got badly hurt there, and Max had to save him -- but if Lucas, if Max had taken that beating they would not have been running through those tunnels later.) Was somebody else better-qualified to dive down to the uncertain bottom of a cold lake in the middle of the night? Steve doesn't list his credentials there as a way of justifying some ideal of martyrdom; he is literally the most likely person on the boat not to drown.

And make no mistake: when Steve's pulled into the Upside-Down, he survives the bats long enough for backup to get there. Realistic or not, he's apparently tough enough that he's physically capable of hiking barefoot through hell without much slowing down. Steve is the tank for the same reason as any tank: because he literally has been shown to have the most hit points in the group. You cannot honestly engage with Steve in this context without dealing with the fact that he's right.

AND THIS IS A PROBLEM! This is still a problem! But it's not the same problem that fandom seems to expect. It's not an expression of caretaking or the need for self-sacrifice; it's not an issue with Steve valuing himself less. It's an issue of toxic masculinity so ingrained that Steve doesn't even recognize he's suffering from it, because one of the tenets of toxic masculinity is that Big Strong Guys don't suffer. It's just a concussion, it's fine, he'll walk it off. It's not that Steve thinks he deserves to get hurt, or even that he's less deserving of safety than the others. It's that absolutely nothing in his cultural context allows him to admit that he can be hurt in a significant way.

There's still so much tension that can be gotten out of this situation, I swear. There's so much that can be explored in writing! Hell, the show itself is deconstructing some of this trope, believe it or not, by giving us a Steve who absolutely can take all the hits thrown his direction but still doesn't know what the fuck he's doing with his life. It turns out that doing his job as The Guy is only mildly helpful in horror movie situations (mostly by buying time for smarter, squishier people to do the damage from behind him), and somewhere a little worse than useless in everyday life.

But Steve does not go out of his way to self-sacrifice, he really doesn't. He just does his job. He's The Guy. Of course he's not going to let a kid or a girl or some scared skinny nerd who just learned about monsters yesterday take the hits. Of course Steve's got this.

[falciesystemessays]

I honestly think that Dizzy's entrance to Guilty Gear Strive should be as much of A Moment for plural systems as Bridget's was for trans women. The character's not out yet, but every bit of promotional material for the character points in a very promising direction. So for people who don't go here, or who have only played Strive, allow me to tell you why a character trailer for a three-year-old game put me on the verge of tears.

For some quick context, plurality in a person is essentially the state of having multiple entities in one's head. The most commonly known form of this comes from having dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personalities. But plenty within the plural community (including me) have a broader umbrella for the term. The main terminology you'll want to know for this is that a "system" is a group of entities within one body (I for example am part of the Fal'cie System), and "aspects" are entities that aren't quite separable from the host, because they're the manifestation of specific parts of them. For the record I am very aware of how buckwild this sounds to an outsider, and I frequently get existential about it. A lot of characters in anime and games are incidentally plural due to their layers of fantasy nonsense. Some examples of this in action are Yami and Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh, Sora gaining Ventus's heart in Kingdom Hearts, and the explicit dissociative identity of the Storyteller System in Ace Attorney.

Now then! To sum up Dizzy's backstory real quick, Dizzy is a Gear, basically a living weapon, and the daughter of original antagonist Justice. Most of her character up until this point has been desperately trying to cover that and live among humans, to... mixed avail. In the series' story mode she manages to start a family with the human deuteragonist Ky Kiske, who loves her a lot despite formerly being one of the best Gear-slayers. Ky is such a wonderful character, because throughout the series we see him go from hating Gears to tolerating a few of them to having a kid with one and actually becoming a little bit Gear himself. But this essay isn't about Ky Kiske.

In actual gameplay, as in the 1v1 fighting game battles, the main thing stopping her from relative normalcy is her two wings, Necro and Undine. The reason I say this character is a plural dub is because these wings are actually aspects of Dizzy, Necro being her rage and Undine her compassion. A lot of Dizzy's attack animations in Guilty Gear XX (the one where I've played Dizzy a lot) actually have Necro doing violent things while Dizzy herself is either distracted or afraid. This continued in Guilty Gear Xrd, where her instant kill move (every character gets one) has Necro unleashing a fuckoff gamma ray while Dizzy begs him to stop. Worth noting also that gamma rays are one of the moves her mother Justice used. Dizzy and Necro have clearly not been getting along, and while it's fun as a fighting game character bit, there is a certain level of sadness to it.

But in Strive? Oh my god, she looks so happy now! So at peace with herself and with her system. Lemme just rattle stuff off right now.

-Dizzy's attack animations all put her in control. Necro and Undine do a lot of fighting still, but never without Dizzy's control. They are fighting in tandem.

-Dizzy's victory animation has her hold out two hands. Undine naturally puts her whole hand onto one, and Necro finally puts a single finger on the other with a smile.

-Their super move, Gamma Ray, starts out with Necro and Undine firing a beam, and Dizzy getting scared. But after glancing at them and realizing it's okay, she joins in on the beam attack.

-She has a new move now, Michael Sword (Pronounced Mik-hai-ull), a full-screen slash that Justice used to have, indicating that she's come to terms with her origins and wants to use them for good.

-God, her opening animation and taunt where she communes with the animals like a Disney princess. Her new beautiful design. Her new theme song! She has never been this happy in her life!

The thing is, right, I can imagine people saying that this character growth isn't remotely the same kind of moment as Bridget's, because Dizzy's whole thing is based in sci-fantasy that could never be real in the same way that like, dissociative identity is real. Plenty more would deny that plurality exists at all outside some deluded roleplayers. And, I mean, was series director Daisuke Ishiwatari really thinking about people like me when choosing to take the character this way? I don't know, honestly. But I do know that Dizzy's character arc is authentic, to me. If there's one thing Guilty Gear Strive's story is really good at, it's giving long-suffering characters some well-earned peace. And if this is how Strive Season 4 is starting, I can't wait to see what they do next.

[jewish-sideblog]

I am sick and fucking tired of the fandomsphere's obsession with explicit canon. A character can be coded to hell and back and people will still refuse to acknowledge it unless the character looks directly into the camera and says "I'm [marginalized identity]."

The Spider-Verse movies made Peter B Parker Jewish and made Gwen Stacy trans. I don't give a shit if it's never said outright. It's canon. Peter B Parker has a Jewish wedding on-screen and shows off Hannukah bling in promotional material. He's Jewish. Gwen has a trans flag in her room and a trans-coded coming-out story that peaks with being cast in clear and intentional trans flag lighting. She's trans. Good on Spider-Verse for giving us solid representation without sacrificing time that should be spent on the characters' stories to bring explicit attention to their identities! The consequence is that you can't say he's Jewish or say she's trans in a public forum without having to pull out screenshots to prove your case.

Those are just two irksome examples from the same franchise, but this happens all the time across all fandom media. If you refuse to accept evidence and coding as proof, then you're perpetuating the idea that privileged identities are more normal and default than marginalized ones. Gwen shouldn't need to say "I'm trans" and Peter B shouldn't need to say "I'm Jewish" on-screen. No character should ever have to do that, because we never expect a character to reveal that they're canonically cisgender or goyishe.