#like throughout undertale and deltarune they constantly write really smart sendups of gender roles and cisnormativity and related tropes

[mc-cookies]

Cannot get the transfemininity of Deltarune out of my head today, specifically Dess Holiday as a kinda tragic and beautifully transgressive perspective on womanhood. This was gonna be a tag rant on another post but I got sick of trying to cut it down short enough to fit in relatively few tags so I guess I'm just gonna throw it out there as an original post? This might get a bit long and tangent-heavy but god I need to get it out of my system at least a bit.

Okay so. Dess is so so so resonant to my experience with (trans)femininity, especially given her thematic connections to the Knight. Like. What if you were constantly told that, if you’re gonna be a woman, there’s only one way you’re allowed to do it. What if you were constantly compared to your sister and your mother and expected to end up becoming them rather than being your own person. What if you had to hide and downplay your interests because if you made them too apparent people would ignore your identity and write you off as a problem child and a bad influence. What if people criticized your clothes and your music taste as offensive and inappropriate. What if, when you changed too much of yourself in response to both self discovery and trauma, you ended up being removed from the narrative, from the only community you’ve ever known. What if your name became scandalous and everyone tried so so hard to forget you. What if they left you for dead, but never put up a gravestone under your name. What if you became something new, something mysterious that pokes holes in the logic of the world and challenges the basic social fiber. What if people used that as an excuse to frame you as a legendary villain, the monstrous beast, the antagonist in the story that they have told for time immemorial. What if you decided that maybe the world as we know it does need to end, to be replaced with something that can accommodate a boisterous and weird and confident and self-assured woman like you. ghhhhh i’m biting and tearing this is literally what it’s like to be a trans woman!!!!!