#arcee and howlback and lug and anode are all canonically trans lol

[cleverthylacine]

Are we doing literary/media analysis here or are we writing fanfiction here?

I'm not saying that literary and media analysis are worthless, although I'm not the least bit interested in them when I write fanfiction unless they're theories I agree with and would like to play with.

If we're having a talk about the source material in the context of the real world, then yes, those things are valuable.

But I never hear the issues of "coding" or "authorial intent" come up in critical discussions of fanfiction unless someone is trying to say that writing a character against coding/authorial intent or shipping a character against coding/authorial intent is somehow morally or politically problematic and doing it makes you a bigot or an abuse apologist.

Beneath the cut, for your amusement: the quiet parts I'm not saying out loud where anyone who doesn't want to read them can't avoid it, aka, some recent fandom wankery by people who want to canonise coding and authorial intent not actually present in the text in order to make people stop writing stuff they enjoy.

(It is no longer about Gravity Falls and how everyone who says writing Ford in a relationship is ace erasure can bite my entire ass--if he's ace-coded, why is he always talking about how sad he is that he fails with women so much? Now it is about Transformers, but probably not the TF characters you were thinking of. Anyhow, I thought Roxy was the Lalonde who was transmasc, and that wasn't coding; you can say it was an AU if you want because Homestuck is full of them, but in at least one universe in the Homestuck multiverse, Roxy was explicitly an FTM egg that hatched.)

I don't want to hear some anti bawling about how John Barber's remark that "if either one of them was the parent, it was Ravage, not Soundwave" means my Ravage/Soundwave fic is incest fic, because I'm not writing the characters as parent and child.

(Especially not if they're too chicken to admit they are squicked by the fact that Ravage's frame is cat shaped, because they know I'll throw the Harkness test at them, as in "Ravage is smart enough to have arguments with Megatron that Megatron actually feels the need to respond to respectfully, and Ravage's entire fucking story arc is about how looking like an animal doesn't make you one.")

The parental relationship is not in the canon. I wasn't there when he made the quip and I don't know how seriously he meant it, and he wasn't the only writer on that series of comics, and both of those characters were living on their own when they met.

Soundwave wasn't doing very well, but it was because he had a disability that he wasn't handling well. He turned out to be a perfectly capable adult after Ravage, who had a similar disability, taught him some coping methods.

I personally have issues with the infantilisation and desexualisation of disabled people, so I have a really hard time not telling these antis exactly how and with what they should fuck themselves.

The way people talk about their blorbos is so funny "can't explain it but [character they relate to heavily] definitely [trait they share]" like yeah sometimes it's coding and sometimes you've discovered headcanons. Congrats.