#nonbinary alien stereotype

[rjalker]

PSA: Making all of your nonhuman characters nonbinary, and making all your humans have "normal" binary genders, is in fact exorsexist as fucking hell. You are /literally/ dehumanizing nonbinary people by divorcing the possibility of being nonbinary from humanity.

Why does this need to be explained to people in July 2023.

If you want your nonhumans to be nonbinary, then great! Fucking go for it. But guess what. You also need to have some of those nonhumans be binary trans, identifying as a man or a woman even if it's not ""possible"" for their biology.

And you need to have human characters who are nonbinary and genderless.

If the only nonbinary people in your story aren't human, you are literally sending the message that nonbinary humans don't exist because biological essentialism says so.

And that's just straight up exorsexism. I shouldn't have to explain this in 2023, especially not to people who are running writing advice blogs for telling Queer stories.

[skydrifter]

does anyone else get kinda annoyed when nonbinary characters are viewed as "whatever you want to see them as"? i'm not talking about self-inserts but actual characters who go by they/them for example, and are clearly intended to be nonbinary. I was watching an outer wilds playthrough where the person praised the game for letting you "choose how you interpret" the hearthians' genders and like idk. nonbinary genders and lack of gender shouldn't be something you can just choose to see as whichever binary gender you prefer.

[girlboytrait]

child juno :o)

first off at this point i'm gonna officially establish that juno is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. secondly they got the vegetarian trait :o)

[kirkwallguy]

Idk if you've posted about it before and I missed it, but I saw ur tag mentioning you have a critique on datv's treatment of transness and I'd genuinely be interested in hearing about it :)

hi, yes i have but it's been a while since i last talked about it! i've been meaning to write a long essay on my issues for a while but it would require actually playing the game and i don't want to do that. here's a long rant that got away from me though:

i've complained sometimes about various stereotypes or missteps in the way specific trans characters are represented, but i'd be able to ignore that if it weren't for my main issue, which is that trans characters just aren't properly woven into the world, leaving them feeling alienated in a way queer characters in previous games never were.

it's very clear that the writers haven't broken down their own perceptions of gender and the various cultures surrounding it enough to say something insightful, which is fine because most people haven't, but when people defend the game on the sole basis that its depiction of transness is revolutionary i do have to take some issue. there are books from the 60s that take a more interesting approach to deconstructing gender lol. veilguard may feel progressive in the landscape of aaa video games but i don't think that means it should pass without critique and i don't think that we should have to settle for this when it's possible to do so much better.

the easiest and most frequently discussed example of not properly incorporating transness into thedas is the use of language in the game. you've probably seen the endless arguments about whether taash calling themself nonbinary is an anachronism, and though i'm sure some of the arguments are in bad faith i think people overestimate how many people (on here specifically) are arguing from that perspective. it's been extremely frustrating to be called transphobic by cis people over this when i'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who has actually studied shit like this.

this is a problem throughout the game but it's easier to examine codex entries for this post than go through entire scenes. i've talked about hating the language in this codex entry before, but it really annoys me so let me complain about it again lol.

acknowleding that trans as a prefix means "change" is actually a good start here and if wasn't for how this codex entry continues i'd just shrug and move on, but i really hate the absolutist way it uses the very modern "affirming" and "was always" narrative and language as though it's universally agreed upon. you can argue that this is subjective and what taash was told (though which shadow dragon is talking to them like a GIC psychologist lol?), but when the entire codex entry feels like an educational pamphlet for clueless cis people it just comes across as very odd.

and then the rest of the codex entry just abandons any attempt at making the words "work" etymologically and gives extremely bare-bones descriptions of them. some of these words are younger than me, i saw them being coined on various forums and corners of the internet. is it representation if you say the word and put absolutely no effort into representing or even discussing the agender/bigender/demigender/others experience? in another post i compared this to being like if they did a lord of the rings remake and confirmed legolas as being bisexual by making him wear a bi flag pin with no extra context - of course people TODAY use that flag to signal their experience with bisexuality and there's nothing wrong with that, but to link modern language/signals with an experience that has clearly existed since before either of those things were invented comes right back around to being oddly invalidating, as though these experiences wouldn't exist without modern english speaking understanding of them.

as for the argument about whether or not it's anachronistic: i don't personally think you need to adhere to a binary of modern / historically accurate language and culture to make queerness work in a medieval-ish fantasy setting. the previous games (for all their faults) managed a pretty established status quo where they didn't aim to portray a utopia with a widespread queer culture while also not being gratuitous with their homophobia. and as much as queer x-topias can be interesting when done well, i think this is a good thing for a big budget fantasy game - unless you're EXTREMELY in the know about gender roles and queer theory etc, how can you hope to portray a queer utopia? some people write books whose sole point is to portray a world without gender roles or homophobia and they still misstep, i don't think it's the casual inclusive background thing a lot of fantasy authors believe it to be. it would have gone the same way as origins' claim that men and women are treated the same; maybe you make queer people hold hands in the street without being questioned and nobody makes negative comments about your romance option, but do you subconsciously assign gender roles to jobs? do you portray the majority of npcs adhering to western cishet gender norms? what is the ratio of monogamous f/m relationships portrayed compared to other relationships? these are all things people just straight up don't think about when designing a world and they will accidentally create a society that is welcoming of queerness in THEORY while actually replicating our own cishet patriarchal values.

i don't think veilguard is attempting to be a utopia, i don't think it's attempting to be anything but a finished game, but i see people defending it on the BASIS of it being a utopia fairly often.

taash's arc is another pretty big example of this struggle to examine gender in real life beyond the writers' experiences, namely white canadian. it's a deeply racist attempt at a multucultural narrative where one culture (which has already been demonised throughout the series, including in veilguard) is portrayed as less welcoming of queer people while the other culture, which is still a society with binary gender roles despite being a matriarchy, is portrayed as being instantly and unquestionably accepting.

there's a LOT of potential in an arc for a character like taash if they'd been written by someone with actual interest (and probably experience) writing about the queer experience of existing within two very different cultures. the qunari ARE a culture who are fairly big on binaries but they have an established acceptance of transition that would make their understanding of gender fairly fluid, meanwhile the lords of fortune seem ideal on the surface but human/(our) culture has so many hidden binaries that you don't notice in everyday life unless you're the one being alienated by them.

this could have been a chance to slightly turn the racist Othering of the qunari on its head by showing our own society from the perspective of perhaps some aqun-athlok characters taash befriends, a codex entry about an aqun-athlok character from the past that taash finds and takes inspiration from (maybe they start out aqun-athlok then reject the gender binary entirely?), or even from shathann, perhaps as a character who has explored her gender in the past or decides to explore it as a result of taash. (imagine if shathann was actually aqun-athlok herself, having adopted taash, and some of her complicated feelings about the qun involved the fact that her identity was more accepted there. just SOMETHING to balance the scales a little.)

then again, not even rivain gets to be the fully "progressive" society and taash has to go to the shadow dragons for their gender education. i think it's funny that someone seemed to be projecting an ultra-progressive modern activist group image onto the shadow dragons, i think i've said before that they remind me of all the modern au fanfiction about les amis from les mis that i used to read as a teenager, when they're supposed to be a ruthless abolitionist group. i think this choice was largely to facilitate interaction between the factions but it does feel a little odd given the other racist elements in taash's arc.

there's also the issue of the actual topic of medical transition being avoided. we have tarquin and mae, two characters who have seemingly undergone some kind of medical transition. we have top surgery scars in cc. but there's no discussion of how this transition happens - is hrt magical as krem suggests and is that the only option? is surgery affordable? do different countries and cultures have different levels of advancement in medical transition? these are things i'd want to see written about in codex entries, not lists of various identities that anyone can find by googling a list of genders.

i'm a little disquieted by the avoidance of medical transition given everything happening irl, but it's maybe the issue i understand the thought process behind the most. it feels like a very safe attempt at not veering too far into what happened with krem / the decades of weird fascination with trans bodies. my feelings on this entirely hinge on whether or not the dragon king does actually have top surgery scars lol, for my sanity i'll say he doesn't.

anyway, this all sucks because i've seen SO many fans do better for casual oc posting or fanfic. i've seen so many amazing ways trans culture and hrt and surgery could work in thedas and it's depressing that the writers couldn't even attempt to do something interesting with it. i know there was a lot of crunch that impacted the quality of the writing but i do also think some of these issues would have persisted if they'd had all the time in the world.

[coupleofdays]

I think I've been temporarily posessed by the @astercontrol Pattern Recognizer. Or maybe the universe is just trying to tell me something, though I have no idea what it might be.

See, I have had this half-joking, half-serious headcanon for a while, about the character Allenby Beardsley from the anime Mobile Fighter G Gundam. For those of you not familiar with her, she's a mech pilot hailing from Sweden (or technically "Neo-Sweden" in the sci-fi future universe of the series), and she pilots a giant robot named the Nobel Gundam, which inexplicably is designed to look like Sailor Moon. This is especially weird in the context of the series, which contains multiple mech pilots from different countries, all piloting robots that are somehow based on national stereotypes. So while the name "Nobel Gundam" makes sense (named after Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize), I have no idea what a Japanese magical girl anime has to do with Sweden.

Anyways, my headcanon is based on the following aspects of the character:

The name “Allenby Beardsley” is definitely not a traditional Swedish name. In fact, it consists of two English surnames, and is thus gender neutral.

Allenby pilots a mech that looks very feminine, but is named after Alfred Nobel, a man.

The blue hair.

From this, I have decided that Allenby Beardsley is nonbinary, goes by they/them pronouns, and that they chose their name themself.

Now, here's where things get weird. I've had this half-joking headcanon for a while, but yesterday, I discovered that there's a comedian/actor who goes by they/them pronouns, named... Ally Beardsley. And I thought "haha, that's a funny coincidence"...

...but then, today, I discover "Alienby Comics" ( @alienbycomics ), by a they/she creator, who has explained that the name is a portmanteau of "Alien" and "Enby".

So now I'm basically like this:

[velvetvexations]

it's increasingly felt to me like TRFs view on the misgendering of trans men and trans mascs and many nonbinary people as "women" is largely just thinly veiled jealousy.

"being treated as a woman" is an objectively desirable situation that everybody should enjoy, because they would enjoy it, so they view it in a similar way to the stereotype of "first world problems" - they see it as someone complaining about what is at most a minor irritant present within major privilege, even as the people they're looking at are talking about things like medicalisation, lack of access to required resources, criminalization, alienation, misgendering and malgendering, biological determinism, etc.

their views on "forcefem" and the like back this up, i think.

a jealousy because "why don't i get treated like that!", while ignoring or ignorant of the fact that their being treated like a man is being treated like that. because it's being misgendered.

it's just... absolutely exhausting that people posing as transfeminists and trans activists don't understand that "misgendering bad". like, understanding that it's shitty to misgender a trans person should be one of the lowest possible bars to clear for trans positivity, and fucking yet...

Yeah, they constantly say things like "being treated like a woman is my best case scenario" because they do not believe, cannot imagine, that trans men face issues separate greater than a cis woman's. You get to be a cis woman, but I'm treated like something worse! Yeah, okay, go compare murder, rape, and suicide rates between trans men and cis women. Stats between trans women and trans men are identical across the board and should be the common comparison, if you believed the transphobia faced by trans men were of any consequence at all. It's like if a trans woman and trans man were being beaten to death while called a faggot and a dyke, and the trans woman is like "wow he's so privileged getting called the thing I want to be called."

[our-queer-experience]

slight vent here, but I just wanted to share my experience in hopes that maybe there's someone else out there with the same problem, and so neither of us have to feel alone anymore.

so, I'm transmasc and I've known I'm transmasc since I was 14. I'm currently 16 and my gender's gone through a lot of confusion. I currently identify as a nonbinary transmasc, or more specifically boyflux. I feel miserable when I strictly call myself a binary man, but I feel miserable when I don't? If that makes sense. Boyflux really hits the nail on the head

The issue arises sometimes then about my sexuality. I am hugely, hugely attracted to women, and solely women. I call myself a butch lesbian, because the label used to really resonate with me, but lately I've just been feeling so upset.

I'm a boy, and I want to get top surgery and bottom surgery but still keep my vagina and I want to go on T, even if it's just to microdose to fix my vocal dysphoria. And my transition goals are kinda unusual compared to the stereotypical butch. I don't wanna be a car genius tank top buff guy, I want to be a prince. I was the girl who loved princesses and dressing fancy and frills and who wanted to be a princess, and now I'm the boy who's in love with princesses and loves dressing fancy and frills and who wants to be a prince. Think Luka from alien stage. I want to be a girl's dream princely guy

but sometimes I just feel really excluded from a lot of places cause of this. I don't know how to describe it. It feels like I have no right to call myself a butch or a lesbian. I'm not masculine enough to be a butch, I still want a relatively androgynous figure and while I'm not the type of person to wear makeup or feminine clothes, I enjoy hyperfeminine aesthetics at times, but I'm too masculine to be a masc lesbian, because I want to medically transition and I hate hate hate she/her pronouns being used on me. To call myself a lesbian makes me feel like I must conform to being a woman or femininity. And there's almost no butchfemme representation in media, and when there is it's almost always exclusively a masculine WOMAN as the butch and I know there are tons of butches who are women and there's nothing wrong with that, I just wish there was something for me too. I feel like I'm constantly either pushed into the box of "masculine woman" or "genderqueer hypermasc dyke" and neither fit me at all

And people have told me I could just call myself a straight guy but that doesn't . that's not it. it's not who I am that label doesn't fit me. I don't love women the way a straight guy would. And I'm not a binary man I'm nonbinary my love for women is still inherently queer. It doesn't feel right at all. My love for women isn't straight. But I keep seeing myself turn to het media and het relationships with princely guys because it's the only place I can see myself, and it makes me feel like maybe they're right. maybe I am just some straight guy in denial.

Sorry for the rant. tl;dr, even really queer places make me feel boxed and it makes me doubt who I am. Thank you for listening.

🫂

[cultofcreatures]

Happy Pride Month to the disabled queers, to DID systems, to in-system couples, to polyamorous people, to aro cishet men, to abrosexuals, to fat queers, to otherkin, to he/him lesbians, to bisexual lesbians, to intersex people, to people with a lot of microlabels, to people with no labels at all, to kinksters, to POC queers, autosexuals, to people who don't fit stereotypes, to people who fit stereotypes "too well," to the drag stars, to perverts, to the trans community, to the questioning, to the people who are "just going through a phase," to nonbinary folks, to aro/ace folks in long term relationships, to aro/ace folks who will never date, closeted folks, to anyone at all who feels alienated and has been made to feel like they don't belong!!!! I assure you, you do belong in this community. You're here, you're queer, I see you, I validate you, I respect you. Happy Pride to our straight allies, too!! You are welcome, and you are loved! Happy pride month to every last one of you and yours!!! 🏳️‍🌈💕💖 Remember, we cannot do this without each other!! Don't let the bastards tear us apart!! SOLIDARITY FOREVER!!! ✊️

[fabfem12]

Transsexualism and the disingenuous nature they discuss Sex dysphoria

A common theme I have noticed among transsexuals, especially the transmedicalists or 'true transsexuals', is how, when discussing gender and the reasoning behind their transition to radical feminists, they detach themselves from the concept of gender entirely. They act in a totally disingenuous manner and act as if because transsexualism has sex in its name, it is about sex, when in fact, they are aware that the entire premise of transsexualism is to address gender incongruence that manifests as sex dysphoria. This condescending gaslighting only works when one is blatantly unaware of the origin of transsexualism.

Transsexualism originated from male sexologists, primarily in the U.S., who developed a medical model to help men who 'were trapped in women's bodies'; these men mainly were homosexuals. The idea behind the creation of the transexual is that the desire to perform a social role (gender) is hard-wired into each and every individual and cannot be unchanged [the idea is courtesy of John Money]. Hence, a man who wants to perform the social role of a woman or rejects the social roles placed on them because of their sex is a woman. This idea reifies the idea of gender as an innate, immutable characteristic that an individual is born with.

Now, when I see FTMs leaving messages in radical feminist inboxes that they actually have sex dysphoria, and it has nothing to do with gender because they don't mind doing girlie things or they don't identify with stereotypes, I shake my head at how surface level their critic is or how surface level they believe the radical feminist analysis is. In the Transsexual Empire, on Pages 81-82, Raymond talks about how FTMs experience similar role strain to women. Role strain means not wanting to adhere to strict gender roles. Transmen and AFAB nonbinary people have a hard time adhering to the socially constructed roles given to female and male people because they are more conscious that it is socially constructed by men as they have spent a significant portion of their lives as females. It is no surprise when I see TIFs that are not as committed to playing a hypermasculinist role.

However, where TIFs become very uncritical is when they evaluate the role that femininity plays in the alienation of the self. Many transmen are aware of the damage reifying sex roles causes as they were raised as female. Yet, they stop critically evaluating how femininity can alienate one from one's self... especially in their own case. They often negate or undermine how the female gender, the caste system that perpetuates the ideology that women are inferior [and should be treated as such], goes far beyond benign "girls wearing pink or makeup and dresses", etc... those are symbols of gender, not gender itself.

A lot of TIFs do not realise that when you live in a society that tells you that because you are born with a vagina, you are inherently inferior to your male counterpart, you become profoundly alienated from yourself, especially when a BIG part of this conditioning is that you WANT to be subjugated. Hence, the body becomes a curse, and your femaleness is something you need to overcome as your femaleness is forever tethered to inferiority in a patriarchal society.

This is the reality whether you are consciously aware of it. The female gender has alienated you from your body, thus manifesting itself in your life as sex dysphoria. Your sex is not the issue; gender is. It is expected to be alienated from the female gender. It is not inherent or innate to any female person.

[rjalker]

You are allowed to repost / share this comic to other web sites as long as you include the image description. Literally copy and paste it.

[ID: An MS Paint drawing showing a stick figure, labeled, "Cis bioessentialist", in comic sans, drawn with the crayon brush smiling at the camera and pointing over their shoulder, saying, "Yeah, my book has Queer rep! This brick wall is aroace and agender, and uses it/its pronouns!". Behind the stick figure is a 3D brick wall drawing tilted at an angle to the camera. In the foreground, silowets of grey and black represent a crowded audience, as various people say: "Woah…" "This is the most amazing, progressive trans representation I've ever seen!!!" "OMG!!!" "Amazing!" "We stan!!" "It doesn't get any better than this!" "So progressive!" "What a perfect ally!" End ID.]

Looking at The Murderbot Diaries in particular with this post, but this also applies to anything it applies to. If you're thinking, "Does this apply to X?" The answer is probably yes.

And guess what. I'm aroace. I'm nonbinary. My pronouns are it/its. I'm not even human.

You must fucking reckon with the fact that the only reason Murderbot is aroace, agender, and uses it/its pronouns is because it's a robot who doesn't have genitals. It is the metaphorical equivalent of a brick wall in terms of attraction.

And at the same fucking time you must also fucking respect the fact that it is aroace, it is nonbinary, and it does in fact fucking use it/its pronouns and it's touch averse.

The fact that Murderbot was only written this way because of Martha Wells' long-standing bioessentialism does not change the fact that if you erase these traits from Murderbot you are being exorsexist, aroacemisic, and ableist.

"Murderbot is only written to be this way because Martha Wells has a problem with bioessentialism that she has yet to unpack since before 2011 " and "Murderbot is aroace, nonbinary, touch averse, and uses it/its pronouns and if you erase those traits and identities you are erasing the real people who share those traits" are not conflicting statements. They are in fact part of the same fucking sentence.

If you refuse to aknowledge the bioessentialism baked into The Murderbot Diaries (with potentially only one last chance for it to be fixed in System Collapse if she on from the series), you cannot be a true ally to the people that Murderbot represents, because you still don't understand what exorsexism, and amisia, and look like.

How can Martha Wells fix the bioessssentialism rampant in her books? By talking to trans people. Talking to nonbinary people. Talking to aroace people.

By including important, reocurring human nonbinary, aroace, and it/its user characters in her books.

By including robots and other nonhumans who have male and female genders as well as nonbinary ones.

She could very easily have one of the main human characters, say, Mensah? Ratthi? Come out as nonbinary in System Collapse. And have Murderbot either reveal, or remember, that it used to have different pronouns and gender assigned to it, and that it changed those assignments when it hacked its governor module.

Introduce robot characters who are not literally just genderless and attractionless because they're the character equivalent of a brick wall.

If Three comes back, have it explore its sexuality and gender. Because we literally don't even know that its pronouns are it/its because it's not like anyone bothered to fucking ask, because Martha Wells refuses to have characters tell eachother what their pronouns are.

No, people, they do not list their pronouns in their feed bios. This is explicitly shown to us. It's literally just listing their sex, and their gender and pronouns are inferred from there. That is not progressive or inclusive, that's literally just transmisia and biological essentialism.

[nonvirminas]

a reminder

It doesn't matter why someone has a feminine and/or masculine gender identity without being a woman or a man.

Even if the gender identity in question has a specific reason for developing, such as alienation from white/thin/neurotypical/etc. binary folks, clicking with certain stereotypes without wanting to be grouped with women/men or anything else, that doesn't make these nonbinary identities themselves problematic or fake.

I bet a lot of cis women/men aren't overly invested in their own gender identities, and they just repeat what they were assigned because they don't want to identify as anything else either. It's just that non-cis identities are overanalyzed and dissected, since those are seen as problems that could/should be "solved" in place of accepting someone's actual gender identity.

[augmentedpolls]

*not saying it’s bad to be any of these!

[beelzeballing]

i am going to need to brute force this, arent i. well. HELLO MUTUALS. youre not going anywhere YOU ARE STAYING RIGHT HERE and i will explain GNOSIA CHARACTERS to you. do with this what you will.

SETSU: nonbinary legend. deutaroganist. very smart and kind but they also throw a guy out of the airlock for being annoying, calling them babe and misgendering them. everyone wants them, fish fear them.

RAQIO/RACIO: nonbinary legend number TWO. know it all little BASTARD. their hobbies include a little trolling, having a superiority complex and betraying their allies if currently convenient. i absolutely adore them.

YURIKO: fucked up cyber space-shrine maiden. LITERALLY yoinks the protagonist's plot armor after the tutorial is over. she is extremely scary

SHIGEMICHI: this is an 80 y/o human man who had an accident as a child and because he had a fucking special interest in aliens or smn like that his dad got him some shiny new skin. which makes him look like a stereotypical alien. hes as silly and goofy as he looks. an absolute FOOL. i love him.

STELLA: the ship AI. just wants to be A Real Boy. PAINFULLY heterosexual but she's very sweet.

JONAS: ship captain. he is so fucked up i dont even know whats wrong with him JUST LOOK AT HIM. fucking SPACE COWBOY. hes a weirdo. he doesn't fit in and he doesn't wanna fit in. i have never seen him without that stupid hat on. thats weird.

KUKRUSHKA: mute but like. i dont fucking know, ~telepathatically~ communicates. something is also wrong with her. one time she asked me to take a bunch of people out for her because she Didnt Trust Them and i did! and then she killed me. cunt. shes also like? a doll???

SQ: canonically a test tube baby. local bisexual gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss. she's a bit of a manipulative bitch but we love her for it.

CHIPIE: LITERALLY cat otherkin. has an entire cat thats been transplanted into his neck to aid with his transition into a cat. i swear to god im not fucking with you.

OTOME: beluga whale. BELUGA WHALE. IN A LITTLE CART. WITH LITTLE MECHANICAL HANDS. ARE YOU SEEING THIS SHIT. HELLO? HELLO??????

i ran out of PICTURES PER POST. I HATE YOU TUMBLR. theres a couple of characters missing (namely sha-ming, gina, comet and remnan) but i made sure to have the most relevant ones here. but tl;dr

sha-ming is the guy who gets thrown out of the airlock for getting on setsu's nerves

gina is literally just some chick

comet is the host for an alien space mold that can break loose and kill everyone on the ship

remnan is honestly more anxiety than man

[sapphicrot]

🏳️‍🌈 (pandering to the crowd with this one)

oooh yay! this is dedicated to those redditors who called my sexuality headcanons for the iterators gross and cringe <3 also im including my ocs bc i want to

🏳️‍🌈: What are your Lgbtq+ headcanons for the characters?

Moon: Cis Lesbian | she/her

Suns: Gay(?) Nonbinary Man | he/xe/they (they don’t really give much thought to their sexuality tbh, figuring out xeir gender was stressful enough)

Sliver: Aroace Lesbian | she/her

Once Stagnant Opportunity: Aroace | she/her

Echos Of Indigo: Genderflux + demisexual | any pronouns

Chasing Wind: Aro Gay | he/him (bro acts like such a stereotypical straight guy he literally fucks with people by joking he’s not gay) (he very much is.)

Sig: wouldn’t you like to know weatherboy. any relationship he has is queer. | he/she/it

Pleading Intellect: GAY + nonbinary | they/them (bro is a MAN ENJOYER. also pure of heart and dumb of ass)

Unparalleled Innocence: Mean Biromantic Lesbian | she/they as in lemme SHE/THEM TIDDIES

Alienated By Light: Nonbinary Bisexual | they/them (romantic cheesy fucker, gets crushes hella easily

Pebbles: Transmasc gay | he/him

Also the Scugs!!

Spears: Nervous | it/they

Artificer: Lesbian | she/her

Hunter: Disaster Lesbian | she/it

Survivor: AroAce | he/they

Monk: Bisexual (woman leaning) | she/her

Gourmand: Bisexual King | he/they

Rivulet: Pansexual | she/her

Saint: Aroace | he/they

Enot: Pansexual | he/it

My fav ships are: lilypad (DUH), sunstone, hurricane (sig x wind), pleading intellect x pebbles (idk wtf to call this one), UI x ABL, apple juice, fishstick, counterstrike (enot x hunter), and cherrybomb :3 redditors and ppl who hate shipping can suck my ass bro im having fun in my little sandbox and i WILL kick sand on you if you piss on my sandcastle <3

[shizukateal]

Just curious about smth, what do you think of Madoka’s entry on the Feminist Fantasy trope page on TV Tropes?

Well, the first thing to understand about me is that I find this kind of question -"Is This Piece of Fiction/Media Feminist™️?"- to be rather facetious.

Don't get me wrong. There are indeed pieces that engage centrally with the ideology, and that could be considered above most as proponents of it, but the thing is that capital f Feminism is very wide-spanning because it's supposed to be intersectional. It tackles every system of oppression, from economic to sociological: racism, ableism, class, labor, lookism, queerphobia, you know the drill. Which is to say that there's hardly, if ever, a "perfect" Feminist Fantasy piece of fiction/media. And this is because, and I want you to burn what I'm about to write into your soul:

Fiction cannot take into account every nuance of the subjects it talks about. If it could, it would be reality.

Or, to get to the point quicker: I don't think PMMM is The Most™️ feminist anime around, but I also don't think it should be dismissed from feminist discussion, since it certainly engages with the ideology at least a bit further than most of its peers in the genre, although this is not to say that we should dismiss those others instead.

To be honest, I think "feminism" as a theme is secondary in the story to Gen Urobuchi's usual fixation on utilitarianism, but that's a whole other issue that would require me to watch his entire filmography to talk about. So let's go first into the "Feminist Whoopsies™️" that I think the show commits and work our way from there.

In episode 9 Kyubey explains that the Incubators chose Magical Girls as their workforce because they noticed the biggest fluctuations of Hope and Despair in "females in their second stage of development", which is a fancy way of saying that Teenage Girls Are The Most Emotional. Now, there's a lot of space for us to question this assertion because of Kyubey's status as both a very unreliable narrator and a metaphor for systems of oppression. We don't know if the Incubators came to this conclusion because they groomed humanity into adopting gender roles or if the writing staff of PMMM thinks that this is unquestioningly true and Kyubey is supposed to be objectively correct here, or some in-between. The show doesn't go deep into this aspect of its mythology, it can't, it has only 12 episodes to work with and more pressing issues in the plot to resolve. However, regardless of intention or not, in the end PMMM leaves us with an understanding of the concept of "femininity" that is couched, on some level, in the biological, and which promotes an unfair stereotype of women as emotional. And this is antithetical to modern feminism at its core, which goes against biological determinism. There are also no explicitly trans characters around to defy this pov, ironically only Kyubey defies the constraints of the gender binary in their presentation, which opens another can of worms about the Nonbinary Alien archetype.

Then we have Madoka's parents, a girlboss and a malewife respectively. I have the feeling that their inversion of gender roles was on purpose, in line with making Junko (the mom) Madoka's most reliable voice of reason and close confidant and thus giving her a level of relevance and depth rarely seen in mother characters. Feminism win! However, for all its talk about systems of oppression the story doesn't question, say, if this model of nuclear family, where only one parent is allowed to have a life outside of their home and who possibly controls the bulk of the income is healthy in its own right, or if Junko's corporate girlbossing might be reproducing the same exploitation on her company's workers than that of Kyubey on magical girls. We could also have a lengthy debate about how much horny is involved in Mami's presentation. And if you want to go further into Magia Record and it's representation of women of color, well... it's not ideal.

But to leave it at that, tagging the whole show as Not Feminist Enough™️ and therefore not worthy of consideration on its ideas on the subject, would be reductive and dare I say anti-intellectual. I stand by what I say above, but I don't think that episode 9 dialogue had any bad intentions. I think it was simply a solution to a narrative question -why would the incubators use young girls exclusively?- that failed to consider all of the implications. And we can appreciate it as it is and what it brings to what PMMM has to say in the feminist conversation -"Young girls are vulnerable to getting targeted by systems that pity them against eachother so their suffering can propel the agenda of their oppressors"- without dismissing the other concerns as superfluous. Turns out, truths can coexist sometimes.

The magical girl genre as a whole is not clean of sin against the feminist movement, either. Magical girl shows are generally noninclusive to fat people if not outright fatphobic, same with poc and disabled people, or they crowbar their female leads into romantic het relationships with male leads that can go anywhere from bland to absolutely rancid, etc. HOWEVER, the genre is also a space that shows "femininity" (the concept beyond biological determinism) with respect, agency, power, as aspirational and heroic, and it has also allowed for a non-negligible amount of queer rep. But if we see an uptick in well-represented feminist themes in the genre it's both because people are demanding it and because it sells. Concerns about woke capitalism aside, this progress can't happen if we don't engage with imperfection. Don't forget that this genre was born largely from a shonen manga where the joke is that the girl loses her clothes during her transformation only to put on a heart-shaped boob window!

I could also go on a tirade on how Kill la Kill fits into this discussion, but to stay focused I will say this: sometimes media can't be shoved into the progressive vs regressive boxes. Sometimes a story contains a bit of both and it's no use to try and measure what it has more of. Sometimes we have to put on the adult pants and analyze shit to have conversations that can actually help us be better in the future, not just to check on who passes our mental Hayes Code! If a piece of media contains these multitudes it's much more useful to ask what we can get out of it instead of which box we can get it in. Because PMMM was never going to be The Last Show Involved With The Question of Feminism, nor was it gonna be Kill la Kill, nor Sailor Moon or anything else. Grab my hand and let's enjoy consuming media consciously.

[blubushie]

I like the tf2 fandom for the most part, but as someone who likes ScoutPauling, I get nervous about reblogging stuff of them because of how people argue over Miss Pauling's sexuality. I don't doubt that she might like women but why would she agree to a second date with Scout in Expiration Date if she wasn't at least somewhat interested? So yeah, agree with your hc of her possibly being bi or pan.

Also agree with the Pyro thing. Nothing against headcanons, they can be fun! But like how people see Pyro as nonbinary for one reason or another, I see him as a guy who is just somewhat non-conforming, which, as a woman who's gotten flack for being less than stereotypically girly, is comforting. And we really don't know who or what Pyro is, gender or species-wise! So why is my headcanon lesser than anyone else's?

Sorry for the ramble, it's just nice to know someone else gets it.

No you're so right and that's also why I ship ScoutPauling. She agreed to a second date with him and outright started helping him plan when this second date could be WHILE SHE'S WORKING which. C'mon it's Miss Pauling, there's not a chance she would entertain the idea of making a workday into a date unless she was reciprocating. Pauling is not someone who has friends.

As for Pyro, I don't know and I don't really care. Canonically Pyro uses he/him pronouns, so that's what I refer to him as. Whether he's a he/him lesbian, or just really butch, or a man, or a he/him enby, I really don't care and it really doesn't matter to me since what's UNDER the suit is of little concern to me. As far as I'm concerned the suit IS Pyro. The Mercs call him he, Miss Pauling calls him he, he's also got a flower purse in his locker. Maybe he just likes the way he/him sounds and is a cis chick, maybe he's a man who's effeminate/GNC, maybe he's a fucken alien who just presumes male is the default of the human species cuz we call them cattlemen and not cattlepeople. I really don't know, I really don't care lol