#woe. one of the original blorbos be upon ye

[dangoarts]

found an absolute GEM of a screenshot on prescott's wiki gallery page and i had to redraw it he's so silly

[johannestevans]

Woe, Boypussy Be Upon Ye: Transing Characters in Fanfic & Fanart

What’s the deal with envisioning your blorbos as transgender?

Originally published in Prism & Pen. Also on my Patreon.

It’s a meme, I made it. Here it is.

It’s been unbelievably positive for me as a trans dude, the change in approach to trans characters in fandom and subsequently in media in general, and I just wanted to write a bit about my experiences with the cultural shift and how positive it’s been for me personally.

What’s weird about people in fandom confidently, nay casually, writing characters as transgender and just having them be a regular dude with a pussy or a regular girl with a dick is that like… I remember when it wasn’t a thing.

Back in 2009, for example, which was a big time for fandom — Superwholock was running rampant, Star Trek (2009) had just gotten a new generation of fans into Trek — or even in 2012, when Les Misérables (2012) had dropped and gotten new people into Les Mis, or when the Hobbit had revamped a lot of interest in Tolkien’s books and the original Lord of the Rings films, not to mention The Hobbit itself, none of this even getting into the Marvel movies, like…

It just. It wasn’t a thing.

Sure, there were transgender characters around, characters that people wrote as trans, but I remember it so strongly as being very niche. It was deep, emotional work where people had to work to “justify” the emotional work they were doing, and even then, they couldn’t just say a character was trans and be chill about it. In order to justify a character being transgender, one had to put in mountains of evidence, or admit the trans perspective was a genderbend of sorts.

For me, I’m pretty sure the moment when things started to change was when I was reading and writing a lot of Loki-centred fanfiction, roundabout 2014–2017 — and the more permissive culture was very much borne of Loki being seen as an exception.

Loki, of the Marvel film and comics, is an alien secretly kidnapped and adopted into the Odinson family, and is known to change his body and appearance frequently, including changing his apparent gender or expression.

He was, in the comic canon (not to mention the original Norse mythologies) quite genderfluid, after all, so even if you didn’t refer to him as explicitly transgender, you could explore him as being some variety of genderfluid, nonbinary, or intersex — as an alien, as a Jötnar as opposed to being AEsir like Thor or Odin, as a god.

But then things changed a bit more.

Welcome to Night Vale, a weird narrative horror podcast, started in 2012, and one thing you could rely on from a lot of fanfics is that people might have weird or alien or otherwise not-not cisgender but not entirely cisgender genitals either. The Magnus Archives, also a narrative horror podcast, started in 2016, and when I got into the fandom in roundabout 2019, which is also when the new Good Omens TV show was due to release and there was a resurgence of interest in the book as well, I remember experiencing a sort of newfound thing where like…

I’d had a mental block around writing many trans characters, before — I could create my own characters who were trans, but a big part of me still felt like I wasn’t allowed to just make a canon character trans if they’d never been mentioned as being trans before or made explicitly trans.

What was it that stopped me?

My own dysphoria? Perhaps a little. Maybe some lacking self-confidence.

Most of all, it just felt as though I couldn’t justify it. I couldn’t justify seeing a cis man written by cis people in a cis show and saying, “Hey, no, he’s like me, actually” — even though I could easily do it about the same character being gay or Jewish or even chronically ill or disabled.

It was like there was a mental block inside me I just couldn’t get past.

I still had a lot of the old online cultural expectations stamped onto me, I think, even being an out trans man who knew many many other trans and intersex and nonbinary people of every gender imaginable in fandom.

I think for Welcome to Night Vale and then especially for The Magnus Archives, part of what made it so easy for people to write and envisage different characters as trans, the fact that there was such limited physical description of characters, the fact that you were attached to them by their voices alone, allowed people to envisage them in whatever way they liked.

In The Magnus Archives, most of the main characters are envisaged as trans in one way or another — Daisy Tonner particularly is explored with all flavours of butch dykey complexity, trans in whichever ways or directions are juiciest and most interesting. But for so many of the characters — from Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood to Sasha James and Tim Stoker to Elias Bouchard to Peter Lukas to any of the other Entities — there is no end to the characters people will explore or envisage as trans or nonbinary or just straight-up outside of gender or gender-weird.

No one has to justify a period character being trans with no problems. Loads of people write Izzy Hands or Stede Bonnet or Edward Teach, as being trans in Our Flag Means Death alongside the canonic nonbinary character Jim Jimenez. Any and all characters, trans or otherwise, are invited to participate in ye olde top surgery performed by Roach, the ship’s surgeon, or somehow get hold of ye olde hormones in whatever handwavy way necessary, and it’s cool and fine.

And what’s wonderful for me is the way I see the current approach to trans characters gleefully and delightedly applied to fandoms that are years if not decades old.

I see people write House MD fanfic now where they just go, right from the beginning, yeah this or that character is trans, and they’ve always been trans, and it’s chill. What if James Wilson was trans? It’d rock, that’s what. What if Greg House was trans? Yeah, he’d probably do his own T-shots under the table.

People write Spock as trans now, or guys from M*A*S*H, or Jean Valjean.

What if in the X-Files Dana Scully and Fox Mulder were T4T? Makes complete sense, and also, the idea fucks absolutely. They’re already so lesbian vibes for each other, it fits perfectly.

I wrote a silly little Tumblr post a few weeks ago envisioning Morticia and Gomez Addams as T4T, and it blew up immediately — I think about how if I’d made that most a decade ago it would have been met with crickets, if not a bit of scorn, and not just from transphobes, but just people who like me at that time hadn’t been able to relax and have fun with it.

That’s the real crux of the matter, the impact a lot of fandom has made on me and the way that trans characterisation is approached, the hunger I have for trans characterisation now — it’s the idea of being trans as joyful and delightful, as inherently fun and sexy, but also just as being something every day and normal. A detail you can include as casually in your interpretation of a canon character as any other headcanon.

There’s a beautiful freedom in it, and I’m so grateful to have been able to learn from and grow because of other trans people paving the way with their confident headcanons and delving into trans ideas in their fic.

It’s done wonders for me everywhere — not just in my fanfic, but most of all in the original works I pen now, each one of them featuring trans character after trans character.

[bimblescribbles]

"Hey, my Ghibli movie looks a little different than usual..."

Woe, screenshot redraw be upon ye. Originally I was going to just do a straight screenshot redraw, but I saw so many people on here redraw shots from Castle in the Sky with their blorbos, I thought it'd be fun to draw Jack and Rose Red recreating a scene from one of their inspirations! It's super adorable I must say, and I hope I captured that "ghibli essense" in my own rubberhose cartoon artstyle.

[transmorolians]

I think a common reason is sometimes when a post gets popular it can be annoying to see the same post in your notifs or seeing the same (bad or not) takes in the tags, so some people change it to a silly picture so it's bearable or at least funny out of context, like a post that was made for a specific niche interest in mind breaching containment and people vastly misunderstanding or removing the original context so they change the picture to the blorbo so everyone knows this is a blorbo post and you should reblog this post if you love blorbo wow so many people love blorbo

There's also 'op was made was misinformed when they made the original post and has since learned, but people in the notes keep correcting them, and because editing the og will not edit any reblogs and people will continue correcting them without checking the og post for clarification, so it'd be funny if people were being 'um well actually that was actually misinformation that was found out to be a rumor exactly 10 minutes after you posted this so maybe fact check before you just lie to people on the internet :///' and you look at the post and it says 'in Deltarune chapter 3 Toriel will have an epic yuri moment'

i get that and that would be funny to me if i was the op of one of those posts

but when people do that thing it messes with my brain like. "oh wow cool post! i wonder what op's thoughts are? do they have anything written in the tags?" and then i click the post and it's "Minecraft Steve Except The One You See In Animations On YouTube" Jumpscare

it's also very ironic when it happens on posts about like. autism or mental illness. because processing changes differently than others is a commonly-noted autistic trait and is very common in quite a few mental disorders so like i check original post to see if op has any additional tags about the topic or whatever and Thomas The Tank Engine's Massive Tits are there and it inflicts psychic damage on my autistic self like woe. unexpected change be upon ye!

[mt07131]

I wasn't lying when I said I've been thinking about my favorite little blorbo from @earcandy-if recently, so have a proper introduction to her since I apparently have never done one (oops) (Template)

[bohebabbitt]

Woe, blorbos be upon ye

Happy 413, and thanks for the stupid webcomic and fandom that replaced my personality in middle-school permanently .

I originally made a doodle of this concept to prove that you could swap ones cothing colors for the others and have no noticable difference. I was feeling so vindicated about it, that i just now finished this drawing months later.