#or like even just the physical attraction aspect - which is so obvious that you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss it

[knightingale]

The "Sansa reminds Sandor of his sister" motive that some people try to hitch to his character really just flies in the face of his actual attachments to her, doesn't it? Sansa reminds Sandor of himself. He sees the little boy who used to love knights in this girl who's been swept up by the same romanticism. He sees his abuser in her abusers, the much larger knight(s) beating on the helpless child. He sees how she is betrayed by every level of authority that should have saved her and remembers his father's neglect and Tywin and Robert's apathy for Gregor's crimes. He's protective of Sansa because he was Sansa.

And GRRM's design, that one of the strongest warriors in the series, a fearsome and cynical 6'8" guy who's "muscled like a bull" and has the face of death itself, sees himself in this soft and effeminate teen girl, and empathizes with her because he was an abuse victim too, is INFINITELY more compelling than "Oh yeah I bet she just reminds him of his sister," who he's never mentioned and who we know literally nothing about. Way to unnecessarily water down a character, you couldn't have ignored the black and white text more efficiently if you tried.

[ask-obt]

I'm curious, if gender is so fluid and easily "switchable" for lack of a better word, what exactly makes someone in OBT gay or straight? For example if Rune transitioned into a boy, aura and everything, would Dielle still fancy her (him)? I'm guessing no, but I have trouble wrapping my head around it. (I promise this a good-faith question. I'm pan so gender identity doesn't really register with me when it comes to who I'm attracted to, haha.)

// the short, canon answer is that it's for the same reason folks might have preferences in partner's irl! while we can't all magically change our voices or physical attributes at will, gender irl is as fluid as you'd like to make it. and just like irl, sometimes folks have a partner who decides to change their identity, which can either lead to an expanded sexuality from their partner, or their preferences remain the same and the parties part ways. and the longer, me-pondering-the-sociological-aspect-of-gender-in-my-pokemon-fanfiction answer is... there technically isn't even any reason to have gender in OBT's world in the first place. I think it's pretty obvious that OBT's world doesn't have a lot of hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine culture present, especially considering pokemon in OBT don't have any biological markers to decide gender at birth. it truly just goes off of vibes B) it's not really a world where pokemon are told "you should man up" or "you throw like a girl", because, well, the more pressing matters at hand are all the different species in the world. and when there are so many drastic physical traits that can be seen between pokemon of a shared species thanks to hybrids/subspecies, gendered traits are pretty rarely taken into consideration. more accurately, there shouldn't be a gender binary in OBT... but as the human author writing for a human audience that live in a gender binary, I instinctively gave pokemon genders and pronouns and such because that's the world I live in. maybe if I did OBT over again I'd do away with gender entirely! for now though, I get that itch scratched by other PMD fanworks like Anamnesis, which has many anthology stories featuring nonbinary pokemon characters