#*in the same way conventional femininity does

[spittingoutthebloodandscreaming]

The way that form of like. Breaking mainstream gender norms but still making a new sort of Acceptably Masculine way of doing it is so consistent and so interesting. Different enough from normal gender roles to be a fuck you to the mainstream but still maintaining a distinction from femininity

[emcads]

still thinking about that line. women as barometers of society’s politeness.

[this-is-exorsexism]

acting like nonbinary passing is a thing forprivileged nonbinary people.

this is exorsexism.

nonbinary passing does not exist, for anyone. even if nonbinary is your only marginalised identity, no one is going to correctly assume that you are nonbinary in a society that doesn't recognise nonbinary people the same way it does men and women.

as a visibly disabled and fat enby, i've been excluded from gender and overly gendered by different people, and conventional androgyny doesn't represent me.

however, the nonbinary people who do have access to conventional androgyny, i.e. abled, thin, white nonbinary people, still don't have access to nonbinary passing - because no one does.

having your gender expression recognised isn't the same as having your gender recognised. like, at all. it's why feminine men aren't magically recognised as women and masculine women aren't magically recognised as men. the most androgynous nonbinary people only have the option to be seen as androgynous men or women, not as nonbinary. gender and gender expression are two different things and being able to express your gender how you want does not equal passing, especially when there is no such thing as passing for nonbinary people. most people don't even know nonbinary people exist. we cannot be seen as something that people don't know even exists, even if we starve ourselves and cure all our disabilities.

"the more privilege you have, the easier it is to pass as your gender" is only true for binary genders, i.e. genders that society actually recognises. no amount of privilege can undo the deep-seated nonbinary erasure that leads to our consistent misgendering.

multiply marginalised nonbinary people will experience exorsexism very differently from privileged nonbinary people, but no amount of privilege can make nonbinary passing a thing that exists. we need to talk about how marginalisations affect nonbinary experience without completely erasing a core part of exorsexist oppression that is universal to all of us.

acting as if nonbinary passing could be a thing for any nonbinary person in our current society is exorsexist in itself by dismissing the fact that nonbinarity itself is not recognised as a valid category by mainstream society.

[multidimensionalguidance]

🌫️🌷Venus Observations #2 🌷🌫️

Venus and Neptune have a really interesting interaction when in aspect to each other, particularly with the conjunction, opposition, and square. It’s not that sextiles and trines are not important, but since they are softer, the energies tend to flow with more ease and therefore, less difficulties.

Venus is exalted in Pisces, so it would bring no surprise that individuals with this planetary aspect would display similar traits to the sign, if not maybe even stronger.

Natives with the strong aspects (preferably less that 6 orbs) are perceived as distinctively beautiful in some way. Not necessarily in a conventional way, but more so in their aura field, which then translates to the physical on some level. When Venus makes a strong aspect to the angles (specially ASC or MC) the native can be seen as classic beauties or it simply just draws a lot of judgment from others when it comes to their appearance or mannerisms. Venus with any other planet in general enhances and beautifies it. Pleasure becomes associated with the traits of the planet that its touching it.

When Venus meets Neptune, the planet that represents inspiration, spirituality, illusions, healing, and loss it causes the same effect but much stronger.

Therefore, these natives can find joy, pleasure or become enamored with the Neptunian topics mentioned above. Since Venus thrives the most in relationships that are inherently spiritual, “rose-colored”, or somewhat obscured from the public it encourages to only feel that inner harmony when love comes from a source that isn’t material or seen at all.

In essence we understand love to be a non-physical experience, even if we’re used to being brainwashed by the notion of pursuing this experience through physical or material experiences. The media tries to lead us to filling a void, that simply cannot ever feel complete without spiritual consciousness.

Venus in Pisces or Venus-Neptune natives despite being seen as those who foolishly and innocently love others almost to a detrimental level, understand this the most. They feel as if love can only be found in the moments that are filled with emotions and spiritual connections. A moment where the love they feel seems to be connected with everything, which it is, since the universe thrives when its in energetic harmony.

Does it mean these placements have an easy time simply because of its exaltation? Yes and no. They are given the blessing of finding beauty in everything, but that is exactly the same reason why they are prone to looking for love and beauty in all the “wrong” places. To them, there’s no such thing as an experience that can’t be filled with love and beauty. They will romanticize and beautify absolutely everything, including those who only wish to use them for their own benefit.

For example, if Neptune squares or opposes Venus, the person might choose the wrong partners in life and will tend to idealize them/not see them for who they really are.

At their most difficult moments they become victims of a lot of traumatic experience in love and struggle with understanding feminine energy (which is not exclusively related to gender), which can only be restored by recognizing that love truly lies within them, and in that which is the most connected to the universe, like nature. Many who have a harsh time with recognizing this can end up trying to transform themselves into a version they’ll love or others will, without noticing that they already embody that beautiful version they so desperately seek. They forget that their beauty truly comes from their own inner world and the amazing gifts that lie in there. They are creative geniuses, in every sense of the word. Similarly to Venus-Ketu/South Node natives.

I’ve personally noticed they tend to succumb to enhancing their bodies wether permanently or temporarily, as they initially may try to pursue their best outward self. They crave for others to see them, as they feel within.

It is advised for these natives to be extra careful when involved in romantic scenarios and with the uses of substances that can make them feel more connected to their inner world or the spiritual realm. You are already tied to the universe’s waves by nature, and without much effort. Instead of pouring the oceans of love you have to others all the time, do it instead consciously towards your passion, creativity, and those who are truly interested in your well being.

Note: Venus in the 12th house can also apply to this post to a certain extend.

[attyattlaw]

cross posting yesterday's rambling thread for posterity and because tumblr lets me edit things. anyway this is a sorta long thing and i might add things i forgot to mention in the twt thread

i tend to draw on-model canon because im a coward + just personal preferences. but the way i convert the canon designs into my artstyle is that i take the distinct features oda gives them and then combine it with personal headcanons to complete what should look like a unique human. Starting with Trafalgar Law, who is unfortunately a bland-ass conventionally pretty boy

someone commented a while ago the law hat drawing tutorial i made a while ago didn't make much sense and i realize its bc of the specific way i draw law's face: heart shaped (ba-dum-tss). That meaning, a narrow chin widening into a mild defined jaw, wide cheekbones, and up to his know-it-all brain dome.

given that, the pudgy guitar pick shape of his head i mentioned here should make a lot more sense.

i don't think this design point is unique to me, as most conventional pretty anime boy gets given jaws like this. a lot of law artists tend to veer into this head shape. just how life be sometimes. other points: flat, thick eyebrows is bc im a hairy gal and i need to feel better about myself.

Killer gets to be more interesting, because he shouldn't be considered conventionally attractive. my idea behind killer's is that those individual features is smth he would be insecure with enough to hide himself in a helmet but i draw him with all the love in the world actually. i'd like to think its how kid sees him or yknow, law, bc he's my kin assigned blorbo and maybe you ship lawkill as a guilty pleasure too i mentioned before (and ruined people's days) when i said whenever i draw killer he looks like griffith before i put on his goatee. the upper half of his face is distinctly feminine, with the lower half kinda over compensating. other than that uhh...idk. stan killer

Kidd is the bane of my existence, i feel like i can never draw his face consistently. yet at the same time he's so damn fun to draw everyone gotta try it.

my problem with kidd is that this mf does have eyelids. most kidd painters out there interpret this as him having deep set eyes (think Matt Smith or jeffrey star) . and yeh skill issue on me i should practice that. other notes, i try to make him younger than canon makes him look. he is my babygirl and he deserves to look cuddly. my band au kidd version has the honor of being allowed some chubs. he's just tries to look older and more menacing with edgy makeup. also i try to give him dimples when i can because, well i can.

Rosinante last bc i lost steam after kidd. the thing abt cora is that aside from not having eyebrows, everything is structured with the generic one piece man template. which means i gotta do everything myself doffy is there bc the way to figure out how to draw these two is to give them minor differences from each other, that being doffy gets slightly sharper features. in canon, these two are also rly wide boys (more of an oda style feat tbh) but i make them long. though bigger brained donquixote artists know that of these two brothers, doffy should be the wiry-er built. anyway that's it. in conclusion, i need to draw more girls actually i feel like im becoming misogynistic by osmosis from oda's style and now i draw girls all looking the same too.

[deepcolorobserver]

I really want a terf lesbian to coax me into detransitioning

At first she pretends to support me and my transition, pretends to be a trans ally, says all the right things to befriend me and we hit it off. She's cute, funny, and for a while we're just friends.

We flirt a bit, always silly and joking and friendly. The kind of thing close friends do, until one day she admits she sees me as more than a friend. And god it's exciting, it's exhilarating, it makes my heart flutter. Who cares that she's a lesbian, maybe I'm the exception. Someone she likes enough to look past conventional desire.

So we start dating, a casual fling, but the sexting is HOT. She doesn't use preferred terms for my anatomy, always says clit instead of tdick, always asks for tit pics, but it's okay, a lot of the transmasc terms are a little clunky in dirty talk anyway.

She tells me I would look good with long hair. Men can have long hair right? I would be so pretty, such a pretty boy, so I grow it out for her. My hairline starts receeding on T and I'm worried about it, I confide in her, and she suggests stopping T. I got the changes I wanted, right? It's better that I don't hate myself for the changes I don't want, and she's right, even if she says it's mutilating me now. So I stop.

The whole relationship has been digital, and we talk a lot about meeting in person. Joking around, of course, neither of us have plane ticket money. But one day she asks for pictures in panties and a bra. I don't own those anymore, so she offers to buy me a pair. It's not feminizing, and I'm into degradation, she says. Men in lingerie can be degrading, and it would suit me. So I agree, because the idea is kinda hot, and I dress up for her. She's right, it is hot, even if it feels so wrong.

Slowly, she starts to introduce terf rhetoric to me. Very subtly, starting with ideas I can agree with and pushing more extreme views onto me. It makes me hate myself, of course, for transitioning and living as a man. There are lesbians that use he/him, she tells me. And if I were a lesbian, we could make "I'm in lesbians with you" jokes. The rhetoric swims in my head. I'm a lesbian, yeah. I still identify as a man, for a while.

One day it comes to light that we live in the same city. We can meet up easily. And it's like a revelation, a sudden flip. I'm with her almost every day, I'll stay over several nights at a time. Always in the lingerie she keeps buying me. I'm wearing it all day, wearing it to work, just so she can take off my clothes and see it when I get to her place. It's not long before we move in together. She calls me girly pet names, things you would never call your boyfriend. And the wrong feeling, all it does is turn me on and endear me to her.

The day I bring up top surgery, she spends a very long time sucking on my tits, kissing them all over. Don't do it, she tells me. I look so good like this. It compliments my body type, I'm meant to have tits. She makes me say it, say I love my tits. She makes me say that I love my pussy, I love all the things that make me feminine. I'm crying as I say it, but I tell her I think I might be a girl. She says I always was, and always will be. My biology was made with a purpose, and I'm meant to be a woman. I ask her to use she/her pronouns, to use my dead name in bed. We scissor and I cum harder than I ever have, all because she uses my deadname. If it feels this good, how can it be wrong?

She misgenders me outside of bed anyway. Soon everyone is using my deadname and she/her. I'm so wet all the time. She takes my body every night and uses me to pleasure herself. She makes me cum while telling me what a beautiful woman I am.

She convinces me to get pregnant with a surrogate. We both want kids, and this is the only way to do it. The whole time she talks about how beautiful the process is, what a lovely woman I am, fulfilling my purpose. She holds my hand as I birth our child. I forget all about wanting to be a boy.

[sharkboywrites]

I am a very feminine trans guy and sometimes I'm embarrassed or don't feel valid because I am infact feminine. It would honestly mean the world to me if you could write something about Vil x a reader who's going through my issue! (I hope this makes sense I'm not good at explain)

Vil with a Fem Trans Male S/O

A/N: I'm not really a feminine trans dude, i don't really dress fem unless it's for special events or cosplays (like once a year for one convention), but I do think feminine trans guys are valid. Sending feminine trans guys all my love.

Male reader, feminine male reader

Let's get one thing straight: Vil hates gender roles

He actively defies them, and he doesn't stand for anyone trying to enforce them

When Vil first met you, whether he knew you were trans or not, he really admired you for how openly feminine you were

While he didn't put the two of you on the same level in his mind, he did see view you better than most people at NRC

It was the catalyst for the two of you getting closer

You both bonded over how you expressed yourselves and how it made you feel

As the two of you got closer, you tried to hide those days where you felt like being fem was wrong from him

You knew it wasn't true, that the way you dress didn't determine who you were, but you couldn't help that little voice in the back of your head that told you otherwise

When the two of you started to date, it was practically impossible to hide it

You eventually had to open up to him

He caught you on one of those days, when you felt like the only thing you could do was put on a big hoodie to feel like you were valid in your identity

He noticed your change of usual attire, but didn't ask until the two of you were alone

He questioned you on why you dressed so differently that day, and you broke down, telling him how you felt

You told him about how you felt embarrassed to be feminine as a trans man, how it felt like you weren't really valid enough

He put a stop to that immediately, gently cupping your face and telling you that it wasn't how it worked

He assured you that you're valid in how you identify and that how you dress doesn't change who you are

He used himself as an example

He's a cis man, but dresses very fem and wears makeup almost every day

He does very feminine things, and it doesn't make him any less of a man, and everyone respects his identity as a man

After calming you down, he let you know that he loved you, and that who you are won't change based on how you dress

From then on he's constantly giving you small reassurances, whether you look like you need them or not

If you're comfortable with it, he might post you every so often and show you all the positive comments you get, and how everybody treats you just like him

Just like a man, the man that you are, feminine or not

[literallyaflame]

transgender masculinity will never be regarded in the same way as cisgender masculinity because transgender masculinity opposes the “natural order.” trans men do not magically gain oppressive power over cisgender women simply by calling themselves men, or by behaving in a masculine way. in fact, the opposite tends to be true. i was a “masculine woman” for many years and my cis female peers treated me like dog shit garbage, because if you’re masculine in opposition the sex binary, you’re a threat and an outsider

this is why i’m not comfortable with cis women making bold claims about the overall transmasculine relationship with sexism. it’s not as simple as “you’re a man so you’re the oppressor now.” the social power of masculinity is inextricably tied to biological essentialism. some trans men pass as male, yes, but some don’t. others pass as feminine men, some are indistinguishable from butch lesbians. hell, some transmasculine people still identify as butch lesbians. transmasculine experiences are not universal, and depending on where you fall, you’re going to have utterly different day-to-day experiences with sexism & misogyny

the thing about conventional cis womanhood is that, while oppressed, it doesn’t oppose the natural order. trans manhood does. trans men often don’t have a place among men or among women, which is the isolating effect of living in opposition to the sex binary. it sucks, it’s difficult to manage, most trans people deal with it at some point, and the majority of cis women frankly have no stake in that conversation. i resent the idea that i have some kind of universal privilege over a group of people who were (historically) some of my worst oppressors—not because they identify as women and i identify as a man, but because their femininity did not defy expectations and my masculinity did

don’t get me wrong, anyone can be a misogynistic loser, trans guys included. also, cis women are not exempt from experiencing oppositional sexism. but some of the weird exclusionary shit i see from cis “allies” is borderline indistinguishable from the “ummmm she can’t be in the locker room with us, she’s technically female but she’s… you know… i’m sorry but it’s just not appropriate” nonsense i endured as a teenager lmao

[raining-anonymously]

okay deltarune fandom! i haven’t posted to or gone through these tags in a while, but in light of recent events (me deciding to replay the games just in time for the newsletter), i have some things to share concerning our friends The Weather.

ID in alt text, and aforementioned “things to share” under the cut.

this message tells us some interesting information about the Weather. for those who don’t know, i believe the Weather were first introduced during the spamton sweepstakes under the link https://deltarune.com/weather/. the page functions similarly to lancer’s. despite having no information on these new characters—other than that they’ll probably appear in the next couple chapters, are called “The Weather,” and always stick together—the deltarune fandom immediately latched onto them, because that’s what we do.

and now, after the newsletter? we have names. do we know which name goes to which sprite….? not really. but there’s something interesting about what those names are.

when i first looked at the names Lanino and Elnina, one of my first thoughts was that they sounded gendered. in english and in romance languages, names ending in -o are often thought to be masculine, whereas names ending in -a are interpreted as feminine. not a common name convention in undertale and deltarune, where most names end in constants or “-ee” sounds, and obviously not an absolute rule — for example, chara is not feminine-presenting, but its name still ends in -a. still, many english-speakers, as well as speakers of romance languages and any other similar languages i’m not thinking of, will see “lanino” and “elnina” and assume masculinity and femininity respectively.

at this point, i was still thinking of romance languages because i’m autistic about words, and noticed that the endings of the names are very similar to the spanish words for boy and girl: niño and niña. then i noticed the beginnings of the names, “la” and “el,” are the spanish words for “the.” funny thing, though? “la” is feminine and “él” is masculine.

so… they’re mixing and matching gendered terms!!!? bigender weather real!!!!!! post over!!!!

…except it’s NOT over. put linguistics aside—it’s time for some environmental science.

this graphic (which has an ID in alt text) is a lot of information, so i’m going to break it down: the earth experiences something called El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. it’s a climate phenomenon that consists of two main phases: El Niño and La Niña. each one of these phases is a global event that can last years, and leads to changes in wind patterns, sea surface temperatures, and extreme weather events. it affects everything—how dry the land is in certain places, how many fish can be found in the ocean, etc.

to differentiate between the two, most simply: el niño is the warm phase, and la niña is the cooling phase.

why does this matter, you ask? because el niño and la niña climate events are largely inverse and opposites. that’s a simplification, but it does lend us some potential insight into the weather’s devoted and apparently monogamous relationship dynamic. or it would, if they hadn’t mixed up their names… but hey, that’s food for thought too!! could it be that the weather is so devoted to each other that they blended together? maybe that’s why their color palettes are the same—they balance each other out!

either way, i’m quite excited to do battle with them in the next year or so. they’re going to have such fun bullet patterns, i just know it… i hope they heal each other with photorealistic milk. or something weather-related, idk.

anyway. BIGENDER WEATHER REAL!!! post over!

[familyabolisher]

cws for incest: i'd honestly love to hear you talk abt john and kiriona's quasi-incestous/emotionally incestous relationship if you're up for it! i did get a Vibe from kiriona saying she wants to be her father's cavalier

>:) So I'm not trying to argue for a reading of John and Kiriona as "incestuous" in the sense that I believe they are literally having an in-text sexual relationship with one another; I think that would be pretty easily refutable, lmao. What I'm trying to get at is how the slippery multiplicity of cavalierhood as a subject position combined with the three-way parallels drawn between Kiriona, Alecto, and Harrow (with particular emphasis on Kiriona and Alecto, just because that's what the bulk of Nona focalised) casts the spectre of potential incest such that the kind of exegesis that a patriarchal incest reading provides gains explanatory power.

I'm using a typically Gothic approach to patriarchal incest relations to explain the theoretical model I'm working with not because I think Muir is unilaterally invoking the Gothic in her interpersonal relationships (though it's definitely there, lol—I've written a Lot in the past about reading Gideon/Cytherea as a development on the traditional beats of lesbian Gothic texts, but. Anyway not the point) but just because it's the kind of discourse I'm more familiar with & one that I feel has a pretty significant amount of exegetical use here. I am also, inevitably, going to talk about Lolita (audience groaning). If you’re not familiar with the Lolita reading, you can read it here or a shorter, clearer summary of it here; I’m going to write this on the assumption that we’re all on the same page irt what Lolita does in the text because otherwise I’ll eat up easily 1000+ words just trying to cover ground I’ve already covered elsewhere.

The argument that I'm making rests on a particular understanding of incest between the father and the daughter as an expression of this nexus of ideas concerning power, violation, subjugation, and control of the sort that normative kinship relations facilitate. Sex, and the currency of power we give to sex, becomes a metonym for broader structures of power such that sexual abuse can carve out a discursive path for situating these power structures within hegemony and the social stratification that sustains it. In short: the father who desires/covets/rapes the daughter A) exists within a system of normative kinship relations by which that desire/coveting/rape is socially viable; and B) can illuminate, through the use of metaphor, the nature of those very same kinship relations. When the father treats the daughter as property through his sexual coveting of her (or even through the refracted potential of sexual desire), we can start to open up questions about the daughter as de facto property of the father under the patriarchal relations which govern their kinship; we can consider sexual control as metonymic for other forms of absolute or totalised control that the father holds over the daughter, and we can start to interrogate why that control is possible. In readings wherein the father intervenes on the relationship between a daughter and an ‘outsider’ (if you will), rendered as an intruder in the bourgeois home, we can start to pick at questions of consanguinity as blood preservation and contamination in the white bourgeois household. The point is, patriarchal incest is a versatile exegetical tool for examining systems of power, violence, exploitation under hegemony.

(Of course, I use “the” father and “the” daughter here to refer to undifferentiated archetypes of the form; rather than straightforwardly unspooling from these archetypes, John and Kiriona introduce a number of compelling caveats on the convention that I will come to towards the end of this essay. For one thing, there’s the fact of Kiriona being a butch lesbian, distinguishing her from the heterosexuality and normative femininity of the conventional Gothic daughter-heroine; for another, there’s the fact that both John and Kiriona are indigenous, separating them from the typically white bourgeois Gothic family model. I say ‘separate’ rather than ‘distance’ because I read these distinctions not as a movement away from the paradigmatic blueprint to which I refer, but as discursive developments on the norms that that blueprint presupposes; again, I’ll come to all this towards the end after I’ve laid out the basic groundwork.)

Anyway, building from the explanatory power we can get from this sort of reading, I intend to talk about:

Cavalierhood as a subject position, and the multiplicity of hegemonic sites it can align itself with, and what this multiplicity accomplishes;

Kiriona and Alecto, parallels between the two, and what those parallels manage to do;

Having made my case for the ‘incest reading,’ if you will, what I think that incest reading can illuminate within the text;

The divergences I indicated above and how those divergences manage to expand on the prototypical father/daughter incest literary model.

At any given point in the text, ‘cavalierhood’ (and the necromancer/cavalier relationship) can be expounded upon to represent the discursive fabric of a number of normative social relations. One of course is, as I have talked about before (wrt Gideon/Cytherea), an enfolding of butch/femme into imperialist configurations by which the constructed subject of ‘the butch’ becomes a site for sexual objectification and a retraction of sexual agency. Another is marriage: this one is pretty consistent, but we can refer to, for example:

The recurrent use of the Book of Ruth citing a passage sometimes used at lesbian weddings to describe Gideon and Harrow’s relationship;

The plot of The Necromancer’s Marriage Season which playfully cribs the Ianthe/Harrow/Gideon trifecta and figures Gideon as Harrow’s ‘saintly husband’ to her ‘tedious widow’;

The part during Cytherea’s funeral where someone (Augustine?) misremembers Cytherea’s surname as having been ‘Heptane,’ and we learn that she used Loveday’s forename as a surname—this, to me, is reminiscent of marital surname conventions;

C— and N— getting married in Nona and their resurrected selves being a necromancer/cavalier pair, thus suggesting that those relations can be made roughly equivalent to one another;

Kiriona telling Cam to ‘marry a moron and then die’ and saying that she knows the feeling [of doing so], seemingly comparing Cam’s relationship to Palamedes to the one she has to Harrow and invoking marriage as a shorthand for that relationship in the process;

John and Alecto as the origin point and blueprint of the relation; John and Alecto as Humbert and Dolores or as Annabel Lee and the speaker of the poem; Annabel Lee as ‘my darling, my darling, my life and my bride’;

& of course just, the general obvious resonances of a ritualised relation ratified through a ‘vow’ imbued with immense social significance.’

Diegetically, it’s both a sexually perverse and sexually charged relationship; the conditions under which Magnus and Abigail’s marriage is socially taboo are the same conditions as the ones that, for example, allowed Cytherea to do All That. It bears a relation to how gender functions in our world as a division of labour and a socially imposed imperialist ordering with attached normative articulations; it’s also a military formation that facilitates imperialist expansionism and makes use of its internal logics to indoctrinate and employ child soldiers (cf. of course, Jeannemary and Isaac; cf. also AYU where Judith describes her teenaged self).

Crucially, it bears a relation to structures of kinship, often compatible with rather than contradictory to the sexual currents undergirding it; Augustine and Alfred and Ianthe and Corona (the latter of which are near enough explicitly incestuous) are the obvious touchstones here, but Nona expands the metaphor to encompass not only sibling-sibling relationships (which could very much make for its own separate post) but those of the father and the daughter, ie. John and Kiriona.

There are a number of significant points where Alecto and Kiriona are drawn into one another’s orbit, such that I think it makes sense to read them as narrative parallels (and, as I’ve written about before, to read that narrative parallel as a process of identifying the connective tissue between rape, conquest, weapons of empire, and kinship relations). The key points where this process of paralleling happens has been written about extensively already, so I won’t waste time rehashing them; send me an ask or something if you want me to talk about that parallel in a separate post. Crucially, Alecto and Kiriona represent divergent articulations of the same exertion of control practiced by John; the one that’s given to us through the ‘doll’ metaphor (Alecto as the Barbie to Kiriona’s Midge) in which the subject of John’s [necromantic] control, abuse, extension of power, etc. is stripped of agency beyond what he can turn them into. (It’s the metaphor which powers Lolita, in which Dolores is frequently compared to a doll, has her home with Dick Schiller described as a ‘dollhouse,’ and shortens her name to Dolly; all of this collides with Humbert’s transformation of her into ‘Lolita’ ie. a being entirely controlled by and dependent on his literary discourse, and this transformation then being the process by which his rape of her can be made sense of.) For Alecto, this is her very creation; the creationof the labyrinthine body stylised to represent Barbie, the body that she hates and finds ‘terrible,’ ‘a hideousness,’ of Alecto herself existing as a composite construction of referential touchstones (Adam and Eve, Galatea, Barbie, Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair; Annabel Lee, Annie Laurie, Dolores Haze, Alecto the Fury). For Kiriona, this is becoming an incorruptible, impenetrable living-dead weapon of empire.

The third iteration of the doll reading is U— and T—; how the figuring of them as John’s ‘kids’ aligns them with Kiriona, whilst the use of sexually charged language (‘breached with a thermometer’ as penetrative; the constant touching) and the emphasis on a static, dormant state onto which a slightly covetous status is projected, thus refracting sexuality onto the state of stasis (‘frozen brains and perfect internal temperatures’) aligns them with Alecto, and the two of course work in tandem to signpost a CSA-type reading reminiscent of Lolita. U— and T—, once made into Ulysses and Titania, become the totalised subject of John’s control to which we can refer back when thinking about Alecto and Kiriona; through the imposition of the new name(s) and the dead-undead state of the bodies, we can see the immediate parallels, and we can also see how Alecto and Kiriona are each placed in a position relative to John functionally equivalent to the reanimated corpses under his control.

(An earlier example of this might be the three-way placing of Gideon, Loveday, and the puppeted Protesilaus alongside one another as—essentially—Cytherea’s three cavaliers. The killing of Protesilaus and puppeting of his corpse is discursively equivalent to the killing and consuming and reconstitution-through-batterisation of Loveday, and both are equivalent to the sexual subjugation of Gideon. Like, three different articulations of the same core subject position, to be sexually subjugated is to be killed/eaten/reconstituted by the means and abilities of the instigator. The kind of interpretive work we do to make sense of that is the same as the kind I’m trying to do with Alecto/Kiriona/U— and T—.)

The point is, the metaphorical work done here pits Alecto and Kiriona’s respective relationships to John as discursively the same. Already you can probably see the outline I’m drawing; that the incest reading comes through this suggestion that the relationship between John and Alecto (romantic, sexual at least at the metaphorical and possibly at the literal level) can be rendered equivalent to the relationship between John and Kiriona (that of kinship).

Alecto and Kiriona are also both paragons of cavalierhood; Alecto is one half of the blueprint from which the social formation emerged, and the driving force of Gideon is process of Gideon ‘learning’ and internalising the subject position of cavalierhood to such a severe extent that she becomes capable of killing herself by the end. Crucial to this paragon state is the fact that Alecto and Kiriona are more than just ‘dead,’ but undead; resurrected on the terms of a third party (ie. John!) in a manner that the Lolita posts outline in more depth. Their various interlocking and changeable subjectivities can be thought of under the encompassing umbrella of cavalierhood.

Crucially, Alecto and Kiriona are not distinct; it’s not enough to flatten this into a reading which claims that Alecto represents the ‘sexual’ subjectivity of cavalierhood and Kiriona represents the familial subjectivity. These categories collide at crucial points, and it’s from these collisions that the incest reading emerges. Alecto, in her ‘creation,’ can be read as effectively becoming John’s ‘daughter’ inasmuch as she is created by and grows out of him, constituted in his image; this reading is then further bolstered by this passage in Nona:

John loved her. She was John’s cavalier. She loved John. For she so loved the world that she had given them John. For the world so loved John that she had been given. For John had so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.

This passage is an ironic echo of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” In positioning Alecto as the ‘Son’ of that passage, we of course can see how she again finds herself shifted into a kinship relation; it of course also aligns her with Kiriona as the ‘Son’ proper and the most elaborate Christ metaphor (though Alecto on her own is already a body lying in state behind an unrolled rock to whom her worshippers pray; she doesn’t need to be linked back to Kiriona to be one of the several Christ-equivalents that Muir introduces).

As Alecto shifts between subject categories under the umbrella position of cavalierhood, so too does Kiriona in desiring to effectively defeat and overthrow Alecto and take her place as John’s cavalier. Setting aside the obvious (that Kiriona was, first, cavalier to Harrow, in what was/is a pretty clearly sexually charged homoerotic relationship, such that John coming to her as a Harrow stand-in is already making some incestuous gestures), Alecto’s relationship to John is—if we are to use the language of Annabel Lee and Lolita—that of being a ‘dead bride.’ We can, therefore, understand Kiriona’s desire to usurp Alecto as a metaphorical gesture towards the common ground between ‘bride’ and ‘daughter’ and the gateway by which the father’s daughter might desire to become the father’s bride.

Crucially—the slipperiness of ‘bride’ and ‘daughter’ hearkens back to the Lolita reading, by which we understand Alecto and Kiriona to occupy positions relative to John that can be strongly connected to the position Dolores Haze holds relative to Humbert Humbert. Humbert’s abuse of Dolores Haze becomes possible through his marrying her mother and thus gaining access to her as her stepfather; he leverages the position of what is effectively fatherhood in order to conceal his rape and abuse, keep her close to him and economically dependent on him, and rhetorically leverage the possibility of state intervention were his abuse of her to be discovered in order to keep her quiet. Fatherhood in Lolita is a sexual and a social violence and one of the clearest and most straightforward articulations of this idea of fatherhood-daughterhood as a patriarchal property relation extending into the realm of sexual abuse.

So what does this John/Kiriona incest reading do? If we refer back to the ideas I outlined at the very beginning of this essay, patriarchal incest can function as a metonym for normative articulations of the father’s power over the daughter and the violence that such a power embodies. In that reading, we’re often talking about the bourgeois father and the bourgeois daughter, seeking to preserve a concentrate of power through capital and regarding the daughter as, effectively, an asset. I think we can extrapolate a similar configuration from John as Emperor and Kiriona as Crown Prince, wherein she functions as his representative, an extension of his power, symbolically his heir (unlikely meaningful beyond this symbolism—I’m reminded of the part in AYU where Judith points out that John’s title being ‘King Undying’ renders functionally void the contracts which stipulate particular conditions on his death, lol—the point is that Kiriona extends his power beyond his own immediate space, much like how the empire is an extension of his power beyond his immediate space, much like how she becomes a weapon of his empire…etc); whatever relation exists between them, it exists in the context of a preservation and extension of John’s power. This necessarily renders Kiriona an extension of John, drawing on a discourse of familial control made possible through the idea of the child as an extension of the parent. The child as the extension of the parent (as the means by which the parent retains their control over the child) = the maintenance of the conditions of imperialism at the cost of the autonomy of the child, as we see through Kiriona’s being turned into effectively a weapon made out of her own dead body.

A lot of this, however, would be possible without the presence of incest. What I think the specifically incestuous dimension does is disrupt the extant distinction between a daughter and someone who is sexually available to the father, and places John’s ‘creation’ of Kiriona (as, if you will, distinct from Gideon; as reanimated on his terms, taking a name given by him, crafted into a weapon to fulfil his ends; you know) on a level with the creation of Alecto, and in so doing places it on a discursive level with rape. The creation of the daughter-bride-cavalier-etc as a meaningful subject position runs on the currency of sexual violence; to be a daughter or a bride under this configuration is to be articulated within a patriarchal order that exists within, and in servitude to, the interests of imperialism. Through the incest metaphor, we can see not only the reach of John’s control over Kiriona, but the way in which that control creates, feeds into, and fortifies other subjectivities, and lends explanatory power across the board. You could boil the metaphor down to just the statement that John incestuously raped Kiriona; whilst this did not literally happen in-text, the same as how Kiriona does not literally sexually desire her father and nor does he sexually desire her, the metaphor functions such that the violence of rape and the violence of what John did to Kiriona become equivocal. (I am thinking, as always, of that throwaway line in Nona where we learn that the twins’ equivalent of ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill’ is ‘Marry, Kill, Reanimate.’)

However, I think we can also consider the ways in which John and Kiriona intervene in (or at least develop) some of the assumptions baked into the traditional patriarchal incest configuration. As I said already, this configuration presupposes whiteness and heterosexuality, and a normative articulation of gender that tends to come part and parcel with both. Alecto is, in a sense, a force of hegemony to which John aspires (in short, an aspirational whiteness; also, I think, the kind of power that can be courted from her subjugation; part of the driving tension of Nona and indeed of portions of the rest of the series comes from this question of how, where and why disempowered people will seek empowerment within hegemony where they can get it). Alecto is white, and normatively feminine, by and large because she was formulated in the image of something which John coveted ie. a symbol of hegemony (and I think it’s significant that she hates the body she was put into, for reasons that could be attributed at least in part to gender or whiteness or both); whiteness and normative femininity are both categories from which Kiriona is excluded (even in a world where race + gender diegetically operate somewhat differently to how they operate in ‘our’ world, this still has explanatory significance), and this discourse of patriarchal incest and sexual violence similarly tends to exclude the ways in which people outside of the white, bourgeois household configuration are dragged into the mire of the violence it perpetuates. In incorporating Kiriona as a necessary counterpart to Alecto (and indeed, in figuring Gideon’s inculcation into cavalierhood as a predatory seduction by a white woman within which her masculinity was objectified), the myopia of the bourgeois house with the bourgeois relations whose violence appears wholly inward-facing is somewhat alleviated; it’s a far more expansive vision of what gendered violence is, what sexual violence is, where it takes place and why.

I don’t think the details of the John-Kiriona relationship are developed enough for me to confidently commit to a position on what eg. his renaming her with a te reo transliteration could be doing in regards to all of this, though I am v interested in this development towards an imperialism which still operates on an axis of Catholicism and antiquity but incorporates indigeneity; I do however think that Kiriona being brought into this circle of sexual violence as socially legible within it (as able to be subjugated by Cytherea and then Harrow and then John) kind of responds to the limitations that Alecto alone would place on the narrative; without this mitigation, there would be a unilateral focus on Alecto and the fantasy of whiteness + its preservation as the driving force behind all of this narrative development, whereas the incorporation of Kiriona (and, I imagine, Harrow, though as I said at the beginning I don’t think Harrow’s role here has been developed all that far just yet) allows us to map these interpretations out across a far broader range of gender expression and subjectivity.

To recap, because I’m well aware that this ran away with me somewhere and ended up absurdly long:

An analytical lens that considers the interpretive function of patriarchal (father/daughter) incest imagines the incest to metonymically reveal the violence baked into normative relations between fathers and daughters under patriarchy; the daughter as extended property of the father, including sexual property.

Cavalierhood can make discursive gestures towards different external relations at different points in the text. Significant ones include: butch/femme, marriage, gender, and kinship relations. All of these converge on the fact of the necromancer/cavalier relationship being an imperialist bolstering; its multitude of metaphorical functions all necessarily circle back to that common denominator.

Alecto and Kiriona are rendered discursively equivalent in relation to John; they both exist, under the ‘doll’ metaphor, under his control as semi-resurrected beings. They also both function as synecdoches of cavalierhood, making clear the subjectivity that the necromancer-cavalier relationship imposes.

Alecto and Kiriona operate within the categories of ‘daughter’ and ‘bride’ relative to John, but these categories are porous. They overlap such that, much like how John’s ‘creation’ of Alecto renders her functionally his daughter, Kiriona’s attempt to effectively coup Alecto and take her place renders her functionally John’s ‘bride.’ All of this takes place at the metaphorical level, but it opens us up to considering what the raised possibility of incest here can do.

What it can do is illustrate an understanding of Kiriona as a literal extension of John, allowing us to ask questions about the social order which understands the child as an extension of the will and power of the parent at the expense of their own autonomy. This is a social unit coherent within and endemic to imperialism. It also allows for a reading within which the daughter is sexually available to the father and the other readings around how Muir figures rape in the series can be brought to the fore; part of the maintenance of John’s control requires the (metaphorical) rape of Kiriona, much like how it required the (metaphorical) rape of Alecto by which the social ordering of the necromancer/cavalier relation was established.

We can also consider how gender and racialisation take this reading beyond the confines of the typical patriarchally incestuous text to think about how Alecto is only one piece of a far more expansive puzzle and Kiriona is another; the subjugation of an indigenous butch woman carries just as much significance irt hegemony and attached pathos as does the subjugation of Alecto, and both are presented not as totalising statements but as portions of a far broader discourse.

This is only tangentially related because obviously we're now talking subtext and speculation rather than actual textual content, but something that makes the possibility of Ianthe and Kiriona's weird little chussy entanglements so appealing to me is how each can manage to act as a proxy for about three people at once for the other; or to put it more clearly, as repositories for a displaced desire (however extracted or metaphorical) that cannot be directly realised and so has to undergo some kind of mimetic transformation. It's the displaced desire for Harrow, obviously, but also a displaced desire for Coronabeth, and a displaced desire for John. (It reminds me a lot of what Cytherea was doing with Gideon, wherein she couldn't oust John in any real sense because she held no meaningful power over him, but the site where she did hold power was the site where particular social structuring made it so that she was able to manipulate and seduce his daughter, who of course represented the absolute proof of very betrayal that she was turning against him for. Like, sex as a currency of power is a very recurrent theme here.)

Anyway—I hope this was helpful lmao!

[ingravinoveritas]

The people that keep saying not to ship Michael and David together in real life because of their relationships to Georgia and Anna are also the same ones who keep begging to have the two girls appear in the next season of GO as a couple because of Anna’s little joke of making out with Georgia. Seriously people saw that tweet of hers and immediately decided to ship them together and call them the “ineffable wives” but Michael and David have come out with soooo much more adorable moments of the love and joy they have for each other and everyone starts saying that it’s disrespectful to ship them when their “married” to females in real life 🤷‍♀️ I mean…. The hypocrisy is astounding and disturbing on levels I can’t even comprehend. The fact that Georgia, who is known to search her and David’s name on Twitter and answers back to anyone that tags or even mentions her didn’t even acknowledge Anna’s tweet says sooooooo much about this “best friend dynamic duo”. The fact that Anna is resorting to jokes about kissing another woman just for attention also…. WHEW. If this isn’t the biggest cry for attention I don’t know what is. And the fact that people feed into her attempts also and are petitioning for them to kiss and show up in GO!

Lord. I've seen so much talk about casting female actresses in regard to fem-presenting Aziraphale/Crowley over the past week, and while it is disappointing, I am not at all surprised. The first inkling I had was upon seeing the reactions when a behind the scenes photo of Crowley as Bildad the Shuhite was posted just before the release of GO 2:

It seems that a lot of folks were expecting/hoping for fem!Crowley, as we saw in Golgotha in season 1 (on the right), and when that turned out not to be the case, the reaction was to call Bildad!Crowley ugly, to say that he should shave, and other comments essentially making fun of this particular look. Obviously, much of this could have (and likely was) made in jest, but the overall consensus was clear: You can't be feminine with a beard.

(Which...I'd like to see someone tell that to Michael Sheen, because yes, the fuck you can...)

So from the outset, I was already bothered by what seemed like the hypocrisy of on the one hand celebrating a show where the characters are genderfluid/nonbinary by definition, and then on the other hand getting upset when one character doesn't fit into a prescribed, conventional idea of femininity.

When Neil subsequently mentioned that there had been a storyline for female-presenting Aziraphale and Crowley in the 1960s, it was dismaying (but again, not surprising) to see these same fans casting female actresses in the roles. Never mind that you already had David playing female!Crowley and Nanny Ashtoreth in season 1. Never mind that both Michael and David have played...well, "drag" doesn't seem like exactly the right word, but they've played women, and brilliantly subverted gender roles in their own ways. There is no reason to think that they couldn't do a fabulous job as fem!presenting Aziraphale and Crowley, except that (again) some fans seem to have a specific idea of femininity that they think does not or cannot apply to Michael and David.

Which then brings us to the apparent clamoring for Anna and Georgia as female Aziraphale and Crowley, which has again left me scratching my head. In all of the tweets and hubbub, I have not seen one person say why they think AL and Georgia would do a good job in said roles--like, "Oh, Georgia was so good as [insert role]" or "I loved Anna as [insert role]"--only that they would be "so amazing." This leads me to think that the only reason these fans want AL and Georgia in the roles is because they are Michael and David's partners. They are assuming that this is somehow a guarantee of the same profound understanding of the characters and their connection, despite there being no evidence of such a correlation. (I mean...I fooled around with my former grad school professor last year, but that doesn't mean I have a PhD...)

What it also seems to indicate is that these folks are not thinking of what is best for the characters, either, or indeed if playing female!Aziraphale and Crowley is something AL or Georgia would even want to do. Neil recently said that Georgia turned down a role in GO 2 supposedly because the character was older than her and she didn't feel it was appropriate. If this is the case, why would Georgia want to play the role of a middle-aged character? Because that is what Aziraphale and Crowley are--ageless celestial beings, yes, but beings who have chosen to present as middle-aged. That is a key part of who they are, so to have the female versions of them played by younger actresses makes no sense and seems downright disrespectful.

There is also what you said, about AL's cringey tweet from a little over a week ago. Georgia could have absolutely responded to or acknowledged it by now, as she has responded to several other tweets since then...but she hasn't. Not a reply, not even a 'like.' And I agree with you that that seems to speak volumes, and that it would probably be a good idea if people looked beyond the Staged-driven narrative of "Georgia and AL are BFFs" to see how Georgia actually seems to feel about her.

(And to echo another thing you said, I will never understand how it is somehow completely fine for fans to ship Georgia and Anna/want to see them make out despite neither of them showing that level of affection toward each other or having any visible chemistry, yet not okay to ship Michael and David who do have that chemistry and have been making their feelings for each other very obvious for the last several years...)

So yes, those are my thoughts on the whole female Aziraphale/Crowley fancasting situation. I just hope that if we do get them as fem!presenting in season 3, that it is Michael and David, because there is no way any other two actors could give us what we got with Aziraphale and Crowley the way Michael and David did. I guess we'll see what happens...

[mashounen1945]

A poll for Rouge the Bat fans (and Sonic fans in general)

I just wanna do a little... "thought experiment", if you will.

Feel free to vote and reblog this poll so it reaches more people, as well as going into more detail in case you chose Option 3.

[After the Read More, I've added some summarized arguments in favour of each of the first two options.]

I've seen people making some variation of the following arguments for both options (I apologize in advance if they feel rushed, I tried not to make this a massive wall of text):

Some who assign more blame to SEGA/ST pointed out Rouge's 3D model in Sonic Adventure 2 having The Physics™ and generally looking even more provocative than the official art made by Yūji Uekawa, which would prove that SEGA/ST were fully aware of what they were doing with/to the character and shouldn't be neither surprised nor offended by all the... interesting Rouge fanart because "they had it coming". Her treatment by SEGA/ST story-wise in other appearances of the character after SA2 is sometimes compared to Samus Aran's treatment by Yoshio Sakamoto around the time Metroid: Other M was released (and the way Nintendo at large treated her when she debuted in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and re-appeared in Smash 4).

Meanwhile, others are more inclined to hold fans responsible for this. They point out that people who would be "sexy" according to society's beauty standards/conventions should just be seen as normal instead of being so blatantly objectified, in the same way that people who don't conform to those same beauty standards and are therefore labelled "ugly" (or merely "average" or "uninteresting" or "not really noteworthy") should be treated as actual human beings; as for when other fans respond to this trend by trying to convince everyone else of de-sexualizing Rouge, that would actually be a knee-jerk reaction from people with rather puritanical morals. They also posit that SEGA/ST designing Rouge like that might actually be genius and something they did on purpose, because it "challenges" the audience's preconceived ideas, makes them think whether or not their reaction to Rouge's figure is actually okay, and encourages them to unlearn some toxic behaviour when interacting with women in real life. As for the comparisons with Samus Aran, they draw a different comparison between some Sonic fans' attempts at de-sexualizing Rouge and some extreme reactions to Metroid: Other M where fans would try to make Samus less feminine in an attempt to fix the damage done by Other M; they point out that Rouge is still badass, smart and competent at her job while being sexy, in the same way that Samus was always meant to be simultaneously sexy and badass ever since the Metroid series started back in 1986, and people (both those being horny for Rouge and those trying to stop others from being horny for Rouge) should learn that –as someone else has succinctly put it– "Being attractive does not devalue as a person".

[zxphy]

🌧 Imagine Incel! Scaramouche x M! Reader.

Tws/cws: Masc aligned reader, forced feminization, misogyny, incel behaviours, Scaramouche is his own warning, mentions of non con.

Sorry but this imagine is gonna be really shitty, I'm not a very good writer.

Smut written by a minor, dni if uncomfortable.

Incel Scara! Complaining about how no "females" want to date him.

Incel Scara! Talking and complaining about low iq women and how he deserves to be in a relationship with a female but can't because all girls are the same or something.

Incel Scara! Being told to date a boy if he's so upset.

-------------------------------------------------------

He ends up finding one of your selfies in a dicord server he mods. You look so CUTEE with your kitty gaming headset and your soft face, Scaramouche could almost mistake you for a female! He immediately sends you a dm and you both hit it off.

You got an instant role rank up and get bombarded with compliments and praise from Scaramouche, get invited to game nights and discord calls like "meetings".

Scaramouche continously spam pings you until you respond. Doesn't he understand that you have a life unlike him?

He'd 120% stalk your other social medias if he had access to them, (he does.) Through that, he learns that you have a girlfriend?? How come you get to have a girlfriend and he doesn't?! It's so unfair!! :(

Scaramouche finds that out that you're going to an anime con by yourself in the near future, luckily for him, he lives in that area.

He invites himself to hang out with you at the convention, not like you can say no! You don't have a say in the matter. He is joining you.

When Scara FINALLY meets you in person, you're in a cosplay of one of his favourite anime characters. He's absolutely fucking astonished. Ain't no WAY you're a guy. You've got such soft feminine curves, a pretty face and a thin waist, almost ANYONE would mistake you for a female.

How dare you be so deceptive. You must be put in your place.

On cue, you leave to go to the bathroom, and Scaramouche follows. Since no one is around, he forces himself in the stall with you and rapes you, "it's what you deserve" he said.

He some how manages to drag you to his stinky apartment after he's done, where you wake up in a completely different change of clothes. From your cosplay to a frilly dress and thigh highs!!

He tells you that you don't need to worry your silly little head about anything, all you need to do is be an obedient girlfriend.

I'm sorry this is REALLY shitty and I have absolutely no fucking CLUE what I'm doing. 🏃🏾‍♂️

Welp, first post lmao

I'M CRYING IT'S SO FUCKING BAD

[ms-all-sunday]

its not actually a bad thing that oda only depicts women he finds attractive because as far as the content of the personalities of women he finds attractive he has amazing taste. he just really needs to diversify how he draws them visually.

i am insulted generally when people dont acknowledge that the visual designs and the personalities of women he depicts come from the same place. (i think it says more about you than you think when you say "i cant believe oda would want to design (insert female character) as attractive!") while on face value this is contradictory because oda does like to play with the idea of feminism repeatedly in his work to various degrees and various amounts of success and failure if you think about it from his perspective it is absolutely not. and in general i would say that the depiction of nami and robin as attractive is a good thing (because of their personalities and because the reasons they are framed as attractive have substance. i think nami speaks for herself here)

it's just that he draws them as overly conventionally attractive and that it gives off the impression they need to be conventionally attractive to have the substantial framing of their unconventional traits as attractive in the first place.

every woman in one piece gets this treatment. (which is bad, obviously, but it does come from logic that makes sense.)

at worst though it gives off the impression that even women with personalities outside of what the patriarchy deems palatable need to be conventionally attractive to have substance or weight.

im a big advocate for namis design as a design i think is good for her specifically but I can argue for a more unconventional design (making her fat for example) and i will do so now.

I think what's lost in Nami's design is nami is constantly playing with what is acceptable for a woman and what isn't, the juxtaposition in her personality is a key component of her character, which is lost in her design. she just appears as a "normal girl character" and looses the tension that makes her so compelling. one can argue namis design is too conventional and that she wouldn't adhere this closely to what is expected of her, visually. she doesn't need to be this conventionally attractive, as the core competent of her design that conveys important elements of her character is her femininity, not her conventional attractiveness. it doesn't actually matter if she's conventionally attractive or not, because what she subverts is the expectations of women, femininity and how hyper-femininity is perceived within the context of the norm. none of that requires her to be conventionally attractive, and I think in the beginning her design aimed to juxtapose and create tension in the way I'm thinking here (her early early designs, pre ts base design) but that over time became more and more feminine and so the tension was lost. but if she were fat for example, the tension wouldn't have been lost at all. even in her post ts design, where she remains ultra feminine making her fat gives back the tension between conventional and unconventional in her design, as well as having her visually take up more space, indicative of her personality. she's not afraid to take up space.

I would go into how robins design is bullshit now but robins design is just pretty obviously bullshit there's no argument to be made over whether it'd be better with a different body type it just would.

[itellmyselfsecrets]

“One of the most ironic domains displaying the hyper-sexualization, or at least hyper-feminization, of women may be one of the more paradoxical ones — women’s sports. Women’s athleticism is rendered unthreatening and feminine whereas men’s athleticism is the real deal— masculine and strong. The process of feminizing the professional woman athlete tends to occur for white women athletes more readily than black women. Because African-American women have been historically denied access to full-time homemaking and deprived of sexual protection, black womanhood has not been tied in the same way as white womanhood to activities and attributes defined as distinctive and different from masculine attributes. Therefore, African-American women historically have been located outside dominant culture’s definition of conventional (white) femininity. African-American women athletes are seen as more conventionally athletic (i.e., masculine) than white women because black women’s strength does not threaten traditional notions of beauty and femininity (coded as white) in the same way that white women’s strength does. Therefore, media coverage of black women athletes is more about their athletic accomplishments compared to coverage of white women…The hyper-sexualization of women in post-feminism is indeed raced and classed.” - Kristin J. Anderson (Modern Misogyny: Anti-feminism in a Post-feminist Era)

[gacha-incels]

Two questions I want to ask you: One, how do you personally feel about how all the discussion on Stellar Blade is mainly focused on the character designs rather than ShiftUp as a company and two, are the discussions in SK about the game in any way similar?

this is frustrating of course but not surprising. the design is a product of a misogynist company that exists in a violently misogynistic society, I don’t believe even a conversation that just tries to critique the design alone can happen without acknowledgement of this. of course this isn’t always the case, you can have seemingly non-hypersexualized character designs like some of them in “Limbus Company” and the company that makes this game will still engage in antifeminist incel pandering with their actions in real life, just like there can be a company producing media that seems “progressive” while engaging in fucked up shit in reality. this is common and is often weaponized. but I think the link between company politics and character design is relevant here so we can move forward with this discussion. on the western web you get the “FINALLY A GAME WITH A SEXY FEMININE FEMALE” guys and then you get the “she looks like a sex doll unlike MY favorite sexy video game female” guys who disagree but don’t want to come across as prudes. who creates these designs, who puts them in the game and for what target market? how is it advertised and why? typically this is never mentioned and therefore these conversations just become another childish “my favorite videogame VS your favorite videogame” internet fight. it just feels shallow and pointless. You have shifted the conversation that should at least acknowledge antifeminism in South Korea to stellar blade girl vs nier girl or whatever. it’s easy to react immediately/make memes or quippy twitter posts about the way something is designed based on your own feelings so this is what most people will do. again I do think part of this is because misogyny simply does not register for most people as a serious form of oppression. this is compounded with the fact that the Korean feminist’s struggle is not broadcasted across the western web with the same frequency and in the same way that something like the Hogwarts Legacy controversy was. Personally I find it disingenuous for reviewers especially to not mention Shift-Up’s antifeminist history. It’s not hard to find!

from the accounts I’ve checked the reaction is not as “explosive” as the gamergate 2 attempt that’s happening from western grifters. Shift-Up’s antifeminism has been discussed in regards to the firing, their partner company, the Nikke 🤏 censorship and the game’s designs. their Nikke display at a games convention that resembled a red light district was highly discussed by Korean feminists on twitter when it happened last year. Stellar Blade is not something a lot of people are constantly posting about from what I’ve seen at least. Usually someone will post screenshots from incels on one of their messgeboards but I haven’t seen anything like that recently regarding SB and tbh I don’t really go looking for it.