#but in a presumed cishet way

[spiltcandycoatedpunkblood]

now that I think about it, which I'm surprised I'm only doing just now, I wonder how I would've responded to the 2011 tintin film when I presumed I was a cishet teenage girl

[astranauticus]

"Yeh Yung-chih (葉永鋕) [...] attended Gaoshu Junior High School in Pingtung County, Taiwan, and was often bullied by his classmates due to his gender non-conformity. In April 2000, Yeh Yung-chih was found lying in a pool of blood with serious injuries and died after being taken to the hospital. The incident led to extensive discussions about gender equality education in Taiwan."

Translation under cut:

玫瑰少年 - 蔡依林

Womxnly - Jolin Tsai

谁把谁的灵魂 装进谁的身体

Who put which souls into which bodies

谁把谁的身体 变成囹圄囚禁自己

Who turned their bodies into prisons for the self

乱世总是最 不缺耳语

Troubled times are never short of whisperings

哪种美丽会 换来妒忌

What kind of beauty is rewarded with jealousy?

你并没有罪 有罪的是这世界

You did nothing wrong, the wrongs are with this world

生而为人无罪 你不需要抱歉

Nobody is born with sin, you have nothing to apologise for

One day I will be you, baby boy and you gon'be me

喧哗如果不停 让我陪你安静

If the noise won't stop, let me accompany you in silence

I wish I could hug you, till you're really really being free

哪朵玫瑰没有荆棘

What rose is not accompanied by thorns?

最好的 报复是 美丽

Your best revenge is beauty

最美的 盛开是 反击

Your greatest blooms are your retaliation

别让谁去 改变了你

Don't let anyone change who you are

你是你 或是妳 都行

You can be man or woman, it doesn't matter

会有人 全心的 爱你

There will be people who will truly love you

试着想像 you switched to his body

Try to imagine, you switched to his body

Sexuality 当心什么会伤你

Sexuality, be careful of what will hurt you

多少次的重伤 多少次的冷语

How many severe wounds, how many cold words

Drowning 谁会拉你

Who will pull you up when you're drowning?

Dreaming 谁会陪你

Who will be with you when you're dreaming?

Same shit happens every day

你离开后 世界可改变

Has the world changed after you are gone?

多少无知罪愆 事过不境迁

How many ignorant faults are forgotten as the world moves on?

永志不忘纪念 往事不如烟

Never forget Yung-chih, don't let the past fade away

生而为人无罪 你不需要抱歉

Nobody is born with sin, you have nothing to apologise for

One day I will be you, baby boy and you gon'be me

喧哗如果不停 让我陪你安静

If the noise won't stop, let me accompany you in silence

I wish I could hug you, till you're really really being free

哪朵玫瑰没有荆棘

What rose is not accompanied by thorns?

最好的 报复是 美丽

Your best revenge is beauty

最美的 盛开是 反击

Your greatest blooms are your retaliation

别让谁去 改变了你

Don't let anyone change who you are

你是你 或是妳 都行

You can be man or woman, it doesn't matter

会有人 全心的 爱你

There will be people who will truly love you

玫瑰少年 在我心里

The rose youth lives on in my heart

绽放著 鲜艳的 传奇

Blooming into a beautiful legends

我们都 从来没 忘记

That we have never forgotten

你的控诉 没有声音

Your accusations are silent

却倾诉 更多的 真理

Yet they convey greater truths

却唤醒 无数的 真心

Yet they have awoken countless hearts

哪朵玫瑰没有荆棘

What rose is not accompanied by thorns?

最好的 报复是 美丽

Your best revenge is beauty

最美的 盛开是 反击

Your greatest blooms are your retaliation

别让谁去 改变了你

Don't let anyone change who you are

你是你 或是妳 都行

You can be man or woman, it doesn't matter

会有人 全心的 爱你

There will be people who will truly love you

玫瑰少年 在我心里

The rose youth lives on in my heart

玫瑰少年 在我心里

The rose youth lives on in my heart

[unproduciblesmackdown]

ppl will be explaining how a difference is a difference & not a Deviation from a Superior state, & people who are the ones considered Default Normal (superior) will be like "okay....to be polite....i Might say i consider Some aspects of Some people's existence mere 'difference' & not being less than me...." as like hey i'm a Benevolent god. i still actually get to consider you worse & don't have to "humor" anything that challenges my superiority. if you only want everything to fit into the norm then it will all come back to upholding the norm. thinking of people's analysis of their own realities as equally legimate as being like Obscure, Irrelevant, Superficial & then using that reasoning to justify dismissing them. same as worrying that the [Different Lessers (Others(tm))] as Everywhere = a manifestation of the awareness that, yeah, respecting them as equals Does threaten your norm which is smothering everything everywhere. ppl who need to lock in the idea of Borders around personhood like um Yes they're all delineated separate Identities outside any hierarchy & so i think it's relevant to for some reason push back against "ohh so now Everyone's queer" like why not. why couldn't they be. what if they were. what if queerness was everywhere b/c it's ideological not a cordoned off Alternative Identity that is accommodated by focusing on Love(tm) as the new border around whose existence we might begrudgingly accept at arm's length (i.e. being otherwise "normal"! just imagine swapping out the binary gender (or, deep breath, presumed Private Parts) of one partner in an exclusive romantic lifelong nuclear family marriage, & that is Gay / Trans Rights. still gross but maybe we can do it, as long as they don't talk about it or shove it in our faces or even exist for more than one encounter w/us in our lives b/c what are the odds). evergreen laughing at someone suggesting ableist logic might be embedded in language of past & present b/c it's just So little to ask for that it's irrelevant but it's also So much to ask for that of course i'm not gonna do anything more than pass it along like "this is why i don't take ableism seriously" like yeah it's the disabled randos like it's the individual cringe teens(tm) ruining [the cishets would take Gender seriously otherwise!!!] & that's why you won't think about it or do anything about it & continue being comfortable with the norm & resent that actually their Difference is Less & disability is something worse that ppl "excuse" & all these ways that people are & all these things that they do are funny & weird & inexplicable & etc & one can't possibly be cruising along perpetuating a hierarchy with a sense that you're reasonable, well meaning, kind, etc etc & thus Justified, systemic oppression definitely wants to maximize how uncomfortable & arduous it feels to everyone rather than push to make it more streamlined & rewarding to embrace, or at least accept, whatever superiority over others you're afforded

[sureuncertainty]

love reading an amazing book with some of the most fantastic aro/ace rep i have ever read, and then going on goodreads to see the most willfully misinterpreted acephobic garbage in the reviews, like allos literally die when something’s not about them for .5 seconds huh

[foone]

So the thing is, I've been on hormones for like, uh.. 18 months now. And at some point I'm presumably going to tell my parents, right? They don't know anything about my gender, though they probably suspect I'm not exactly cishet (the most recent picture they've seen of me involved me standing in front of a pride flag! In my own house! A pride flag I DESIGNED! ).

But while I'm sure it'd go fine and they'd be accepting, despite their past dalliances with homophobia and transphobia... I also kinda want to not tell them until I have to. Because that is way funnier.

See, they live on the other side of the country. We haven't seen each other in person in years. At some point that'll change, and imagine how much funnier it'll be if that's way farther along in my transition, and I show up presenting entirely as femme as possible, and just DO NOT MENTION IT.

Is this the right thing to do? The sensible thing? No, probably not.

But it would absolutely be the funniest and most chaotic thing to do. So I am extremely tempted. If it ends up coming up sometime before then I guess I'll come out, but if circumstances work out just right, I might get to walk into their house one day... "Hi son! It's been so long, it's good to see you again. Nice dress, that color looks good on you. Uh, one quick question though, why do you have breasts? WHY ARE YOU A GIRL?"

I dream of that day. Imagine the hilarity and the drama. Beautiful.

[familyabolisher]

I don’t want to sound like I’m asking this in bad-faith but could you please explain why criticising certain kinks like cnc, ageplay and incest-play is specifically transmisogynistic? I keep seeing posts defending ‘taboo’ kinks like that with the claim that thinking it’s gross is such and I don’t really get it?

Many people I’ve been mutuals with who’ve criticised it in the past both as IRL kink-practice and as fanfic are trans (both TMA and TME) or queer in some other way but I’ve seen this argument quite a lot recently. It’s just the implication that trans women are more likely to be into those things that bothers me if you get me when most of the criticism surrounding them usually point to white daddy dom types instead. Apologies as I’m bad at phrasing things.

it's because trans women are disproportionately targeted in "callouts," which in turn can be linked back to the fact that trans women/TMA people are already culturally perceived as sexual predators/sexual degenerates/etc even by other queer + trans people. certain articulations of a kink are able to fly under the radar when articulated by demographics for whom a socially unacceptable sexual degeneration is not already presumed -- as many others have noted, the only difference between a cishet woman calling her boyfriend "daddy" and trans girls calling one another "sisters" sexually (or similar, ygwim) is that the latter are operating within a discourse that already casts them as sexually predatory, and all sexual expression thereafter merely functions as confirmation bias. the "callouts" which circulate on this website and the scale of vitriol that they attract (doxxing, sexual harassment, social murder) are almost always for trans women (i'm not going to name names but think back on some of the biggest ones!) and almost always rely on significant actual violation of consent and boundaries -- digging out and circulating screenshots of people's private nsfw sideblogs, for example, is unambiguously sexual harassment, but never gets regarded as such, and the people who make + spread the callouts are never called to account for their participation in said sexual harassment.

"criticising [x] kink" is a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand here, because that's not really what's happening -- there's no "critique" of a kink actually taking place, only calls to action predicated on a presumed shared assumption that xyz kink is a) morally wrong and b) indicative of harm being committed. if you said "incest kinks are wrong because x, y, and z," irrespective of whether i agreed or disagreed with you, you would be making a fundamentally different statement to that of "x person has an incest kink, and i am sharing this information on the assumption that we all agree what should be done with it." i think this distinction is necessary because it's easy to let online sexual harassment fly under the radar under the guise of "criticising," being "critical," having "critical thinking," etc etc.

[eddiesfagstache]

okay one last thing while i cook dinner then i’m done for the night. and i know this has been discussed a lot but i have to put in my two cents.

my problem with bucktommy is not that it gets in the way of buddie. my problem with bucktommy is tommy.

they brought back a character that actively participated in the ostracism of the people of color, women, and out queer people in the 118. his entire purpose in the begins episodes is to show how toxic of an environment the pre-bobby 118 was for anyone who wasn’t in the (presumed) cishet white man majority.

then, when reintroducing him, they swept that under the rug. i understand he has moments throughout the seasons when he seems to be on decent terms with chimney, but that doesn’t mean he ever 1. apologized or 2. changed.

which could be okay, if you want to engage with him critically. but the fans who like tommy don’t want to engage with him critically. they want to excuse his actions because he was closeted. they want to excuse his actions because he didn’t have a captain like bobby to teach him how to be a kind, empathetic person.

yet, when you are a person of color, or, god forbid, a woman in this fandom, and you want to use critical thinking skills to talk about tommy’s prejudiced past and how that changes your perception of him as a character, you get labeled as a homophobe — because everyone knows white gay men have never been known to be just as racist and misogynistic as cishet white men. no, it couldn’t be that. so obviously you just have a problem with him being gay!

personally, i could be genuinely happy with buck having an endgame relationship with another character, even tommy — IF tommy was given a proper arc to acknowledge the way he actively upheld the racist, misogynistic ideals of the 118’s old guard.

[fozmeadows]

As someone who hasn't read the works of radical feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, could you explain what's wrong and what bothers you about biological essentialism? I'm curious about your opinion after reading your post on radfems (and I'd like a perspective that isn't so based on biological gender essentialism, which I honestly have a hard time moving away from because I don't understand other perspectives well). 👀

The problem with biological essentialism is that purports to answer the eternally unanswered question of nature vs nurture in a wholly one-dimensional way - ie, with biological sex as The Single Most Important Aspect Of Personhood, regardless of any other considerations - while simultaneously ignoring the fact that biological sex is not, in fact, a binary proposition. We've learned in recent decades, for instance, that intersex conditions are much more common and wide-ranging than previously thought, not because scientists have arbitrarily changed the definitions of what counts as an intersex condition, but because our understanding of hormones, chromosomes, karyotpying and other physical permutations has expanded sufficiently to merit the shift. So right away, the idea that humanity is composed of Biological Men and Biological Women with absolutely no ambiguities, overlap or middle ground simply isn't true. Inevitably, though, if you mention this, people with a vested interest in biological essentialism become immediately defensive. They'll start saying things like, oh, but that's only a tiny minority of the population, they're outliers, they don't count, as though their argument doesn't derive its claim to authority from a presumed universality. To use a well-worn example, redheads are also a tiny minority of the population, but that doesn't mean we exclude them when talking about the range of natural human hair colours. But the fact is, even if humans lacked chromosomal diversity beyond XX/XY; even if there were no cases of cis men with internal ovaries or cis women with internal testes or people with ambiguous genitalia - and let's be clear: all of these things exist - the fact is, our individual hormones are in flux throughout our lives.

There are standard ranges for estrogen and testosterone in men and women (which, again, vary according to age and some other factors), but two cis men of the same age and background could still have completely different T-counts, for instance - meaning, even the supposed universal gender factor isn't universal at all. More, while our hormones certainly play a major role in our moods and cognition, so do a ton of other genetic and bodily factors that have nothing to do with the sex we're assigned at birth - and on top of that, there's nurture: the cultural contexts in which we're raised, plus our more individual experiences of living in the world. One of the most common, everyday (and yet completely bullshit) permutations of biological essentialism comes when parents or would-be parents talk about their reasons for wanting a son or a daughter. Very often, there's a strong play to stereotypical assumptions about shared interests and personalities: I want a son to play football with me, for instance, or: I want a daughter to be my shopping buddy. But even within the most mainstream channels of cishet culture, it's understood that these hopes are not, in fact, grounded in any sort of biological certainty. The dad who wants a sporty son might be just as likely to end up with a bookworm, while the mother who wants a little princess might find herself with a tomboy. We know this, and our stories know this! For the entirety of human history - for as long as we've been writing about ourselves - we have records of parental disappointment in the failure of this child or that to embody what's expected of them, gender-wise. More than that: if biological essentialism was real - if men were only and ever One Type Of Man, and women were only and ever One Type Of Woman, with recent progressive moments the sole anonymous blip in an otherwise uniform historical standard - then why is there so much disparity and disagreement throughout human history as to what those roles are? The general conception of women espoused in medieval France is thoroughly different to that espoused in pre-colonial Malawi, for instance, and yet we're meant to believe that there's some innate Gender Template guiding all human beings to behave in accordance with a set, immutable biological binary? And that's before you factor in the broad and fascinating history of trans and nonbinary people throughout history - because despite what TERFs and conservative alarmists have to say on the matter, our records of trans people, and of societies in which various trans and nonbinary identities were widely understood (if not always accepted), are ancient. We know about trans priestesses from thousands of years before Christ; the Talmud has terms describing eight different genders, and those are just two examples. All over the world, all throughout history, different cultures have developed radically different concepts of femininity and masculinity, to say nothing of designations outside of, overlapping with or in between those categories - socially, legally, behaviourally, sexually - and yet we're meant to believe that biology is at all times nudging us towards a set, ideal gender template? There's a lot more I could say, but ultimately, the point is this: people are different. While some aspects of our personhood are inevitably influenced by genetics, hormones, chromosomes and other biological factors, we're also creatures of culture and change and interpersonal experience. The idea that men and women are fundamentally different, even diametrically opposed, at a biological level - that the major separator in terms of our personalities and interests isn't culture, upbringing and personal taste, but what's between our legs - is just... so reductive, and so inaccurate.

We can absolutely have common experiences on the basis of a shared gender, but gender is not the only possible axis of commonality between two people, let alone the most salient one at all times, and the idea that we're all born on one side of an immutable biological equation that cannot possibly be transcended makes me feel insane. According to modern biological essentialism, intersex, trans and nonbinary people are either monstrous, mistakes or imaginary; all men are fundamentally predisposed to violence, all women are designed for motherhood, and we're meant to just hew to our designated places - which, conveniently, tend to echo a very specific form of Christian ideology, but which in any case manifestly fail to account for how variedly gender has been presented throughout history. It's nuts.

[draayder]

my hot take is that people devote way too much energy to hashing out theoretical problems when there's no evidence that the problem has ever or will ever exist.

are there actually a bunch of people identifying as afab transfems or was there a single anon ask with zero additional context? are there actually a bunch of cishet boyfriends rampaging through pride, presumably right next to all the gay sucking and fucking that's happening in front of children, or are we just speculating wildly? isn't it exhausting?

[whereserpentswalk]

"Christianity can totally be pro queer" or "the Bible isn't actually homophobic if you just interpret this in this one secret way" is inherently a harmful take. Because it presumes that gay people have to be accepted by Christianity inorder to have rights.

The answer to whether or not or not the Bible supports queer rights should be that it doesn't matter. The idea that we need to be approved by the Bible to have rights is a presumption that's always going to make every right we have a negotiation with cishet people.

Also, I legitimately don't think there's an answer to whether the Bible supports queer rights or not because I'm not Christian and thus don't believe the Bible to have one true meaning. It's just an ancient book, written by humans, over hundreds of years, with no single author. It's like compiling everything written under the Warhammer license, adding in some fanfic for good measure, and arguing over its stance on social issues.

For me personally my polytheism means I especially don't care about what any holy book has to say about homosexuality. Even if it was written by a god I can choose to condemn that god for their beliefs just like I would a human. I accept that there are some gods who I shouldn't interact with just like there are some people I shouldn't interact with.

Remember that the correct response to someone justify their bigotry with religion, is not to start debating their religion, its to tell them their religion is irrelevant. Like, if you think supporting queer people will send you to hell then go to hell about it.

[astranauticus]

btw now that ive gotten set me free out of my system womxnly by jolin tsai has become my new cpop translation white whale like not because the song itself is that impossible to translate but because i cannot think of any way for me to make a post about that song without getting completely sidetracked into a deranged rant about chinese pop culture's unceasing efforts to try and act as if that song's message about overcoming adversity and discrimination can be applicable to everyone and that it is not, in fact, explicitly a song about homophobic/transphobic violence

[unproduciblesmackdown]

truly further [2 sides same coin] of billions tragic failing of either quant's writing that the effective Demand that taylor & rian must have a very special dynamic is all about going "well i'm epic & you're epic" at every stage, which is nothing, while winston and taylor can never have a dynamic b/c he's so Not Epic, despite that he's more similar to taylor in any ways that actually matter or could mean anything, while also if rian was ever peers with winston / had a reciprocal dynamic there, maybe we'd Have to have had more of an actual character from that role, but instead once again [no] b/c he's so Not Epic. billions writing getting an award for [okay. tmc trifecta] as the only option heading into s6 & giving us Nothing instead

[deripmaver]

Which is worse, rape or murder? - Or, should Casca have died during the Eclipse?

Unlike most of my meta posts, this is one I'm making as a direct critique of a specific take I've seen. It's similar to my meta about apostle Casca in that regard, where I want to look at a specific idea and why I dislike it, as opposed to wanting to explore my thoughts on an aspect of canon. To be clear, this is only something I do if I've seen a take a bunch of times, enough so I know it's not a one-off. It's also not something I do because I want to engage in discussion with the people who've said whatever the take is, it's something I do in case other people who agree with me might be interested in a meta post that's more in line with their viewpoint.

I provide this disclaimer because, as I've said a few times now, the idea that it's the better choice to have Casca die during the eclipse is one that I just really dislike, and I make that preeeeetty fuckin clear. I can't control who sees this or who comments, but I did think I should make my stance explicit.

Berserk fandom is an absolute treasure trove of bad takes about rape and sexual assault. Considering the seriousness with which the manga takes rape, despite it's sometimes quite dodgy framing and portrayal, the fact that the fandom is Like That is fully a testament to cishet men's inability to consume media without turning into a brainless amoeba of toxicity.

I have to say, though, what shocked me the most was that this particular take, that Casca should have just died during the eclipse, was not from the dudebro side of fandom ('cause if she had they couldn't make their silly little "casca enjoyed it" jokes).

I'm coming right out of the gate with my opinion, which is a firm no, Casca should not have died during the eclipse, and the story would be weaker if she had. I'm going to presume during this analysis that the people who say this assume that her death would be instead of her rape, as opposed to her being raped and then dying, which would be... Horrific. Even more horrific than canon, lol.

I do have sympathy for some of the people who wish she had died, and in a way I understand, though I vehemently disagree. Some of the posts with this POV sound almost traumatized as they proclaim I wish she would have died, it would have been better. As this is something I've only noticed in the tumblr fandom side of things, where most people are women, I think this comes from women readers feeling furious and sick about one of the most vile rape scenes out there. In some ways its intentionally vile, in others - ie how grotesquely sexualized it is - it's unintentional. Then, of course, she continues to suffer in her disabled, infantilized trauma state. I hear these readers wanting to shout at Miura that he should have just killed her off rather than force her, and us, through reading that. It would have been kinder.

I have... Far less sympathy for others. There's a side of fandom that simply does not care about Casca (in a different way than the dudebros who don't care about her despite gushing about how she's peak tomboy waifu). It's amazing the veneer of progressivism these people put on as they say that Casca should have died, because she did not contribute to the narrative before the eclipse, and she certainly hasn't after. Going to get even spicier for a second and point out fandom's long history of wanting female characters dead because they get in the way of mlm ships, and how I think this is SOMETIMES simply another manifestation of it.

To be fully fucking clear, I do NOT think that being a grffgts shipper (censored so this doesn't show up in the tag LOLLLLL) precludes being shitty about Casca. I think tumblr's demographics, and those demographics' typical shipping preferences, mean that grffgts is naturally going to dominate. By simple statistics, most of the people whose opinions I hate are going to be grffgts shippers. Same with most of the people's opinions I like on tumblr tbh. I do, however, think it's prudent to point out old school fandom misogyny, and how I personally feel it's showing up in the fandom, and also point out that it pisses me off that Casca dying during the eclipse is at all presented as the least misogynistic outcome.

I'm also going to say now that this is firmly being kept in the realm of fiction. In real life, there are horrific discussions about how being a victim of rape defiles you for life, and that it's better to die without the "shame" of being raped than live with it. While I have to be blunt it's difficult for me to separate some of the discussion of Casca dying during the eclipse from that anti-survivor bias I see in real life just because ~we live in a society~, I in general think this sentiment is coming from a place of simply analyzing, narratively, which outcome is less misogynistic given how the rape in canon is portrayed.

Would it narratively have been better for Casca to have died? What about the impact of her death versus her current storyline?

First, I think I need to outline my interpretation of the eclipse rape. I don't think that the decision to have Griffith rape Casca was Miura simply being a misogynistic cishet dude who threw in rape for the hell of it. I also don't think it's OOC. Again, there's much to critique in how it's drawn, but not in the fact that it happened. Griffith, in his moments of feeling out of control and powerless, uses sexual advances to reassert his control over the situation - see Charlotte, or the wagon scene with Casca. A distaste for sexual violence committed by his enemies doesn't mean Griffith is incapable of wielding sexual violence as a weapon himself. In real life, there's a paradox where rape committed by political or social enemies is seen as the worst crime one could ever commit, while the mundane rape committed as a consequence of patriarchy is excusable and the victims should be blamed and shamed. Did Miura have the gender studies acumen to think about that when writing? I dunno, but neither does anyone who thinks he didn't.

I also think it's supposed to establish his actions during the eclipse as fully over the moral event horizon. Without it, it's easy to ask if ultimately, Griffith's decision to sacrifice his followers to a cruel death is justified to create a perfect utopia. With it, it establishes Griffith as acting fully on cruel, malicious impulse in moments of emotional turmoil, which puts his future utopia in jeopardy. I can't be the only one who sees Falconia as a ticking time bomb. Of course, this doesn't mean he needed to rape Casca, but simply that I think it was necessary to his character to do something that crossed that moral line. He could have raped Guts I suppose. Killerbambi has entered the chat.

While I think this might sound strange, I actually think it's immensely validating to have a character who is a victim not just of rape, but of rape committed by someone she already knew. That's genuinely unique in media on the whole, which plays into that paradox I mentioned earlier - in real life, the vast majority of assaults are committed by someone the victim knew. Having the story surround the continual, horrific trauma of betrayal, of having to watch the person who hurt you move on while trauma keeps you in horrible stasis is almost so realistic it's... uncomfortable. Painful. Hard to read.

There's no greater purpose to what happened to Casca. She didn't grow from it, instead she regressed.

Her general lack of agency post-eclipse is much critiqued in the fandom and like. Fucking yeah fair LOLLLLLL BUT ALSO... But also. Fandom on the whole can be so cruel about traumatized female characters, like there's no way they can do trauma "right." In Casca's case, her lack of agency is turned into a reason she should simply have been killed off instead, as though there aren't so many survivors who, while not as literally as she does, retreat into a shell of themselves and are frozen with trauma as the world begins to pass them by. Of course, the critique would be that she's not a real person, she's a female character written in a misogynistic way by a man, but I personally think this overstates Miura's issues with his portrayal of rape. To me, it presents what they think are his biases as justification for their own biases.

Time and time again, I see survivors discuss feeling validated by Casca's trauma response after being assaulted. Even the parts of the rape scene that I vehemently dislike, such as the hyper-focus on Casca's body and the physical reactions she's having, I've seen more than one person say they felt validated because they too had an unwanted arousal response during an assault. I'll still critique the scene, but regardless of if this was Miura's intention, its impact is clear.

I'll again plug this article by Jackson P. Brown, How Berserk’s Casca challenges the myth of the “Strong Black Woman.” Just to show a quote from it:

All of the action of the story after Conviction Arc is in service of restoring Casca's mind. During Conviction Arc and after, Casca has groups of women who love and protect her, with women as her source of safety. Guts is single mindedly focused on bringing her back, putting his body on the line again and again to protect her and restore her. I wondered about including Guts here because I'm sure I'll get some anon about the Beast of Darkness, which again fair LOL. I have complicated feelings on that, but mostly I think the importance the narrative puts on her mind and her protection is touching, and I think this outweighs how the negative things apparently mean that she should have died.

Her story and trauma, despite its flaws, is shockingly realistic and validating to so many people. She's also a key narrative component post-eclipse, and not just ~for Guts' manpain~ or as a helpless plot device, her story is her own. I've written about Elaine as a character and what she represents, but in brief, Casca doesn't disappear after the eclipse. Miura wrote Elaine with these moments where Casca comes to the surface, and while I wish we had more of her POV I think you can look at how she's coping from how Elaine reacts to the world around her.

I also think it's necessary to have Casca at the Hill of Swords. There's Guts, who Griffith torments in the way only a bitter ex can, and Rickert, who doesn't know what happened the day of the eclipse, but I think Casca is the key component in that scene that cuts through all of Griffith's posturing and Guts' anger. She is there, making the real, human cost of what Griffith did during the eclipse unignorable in a way that no other character could. It's one thing for Guts to be furious with him and Rickert ignorant, it's another to have someone who loved him so innocently and dearly trembling just at the sight of him. Let's not pretend that the depth of betrayal in this scene would be the same if you swapped her for, say, Judeau.

It's funny, Miura is quoted as saying that his initial reason for keeping Casca alive was to provide Guts an ever-burning flame of vengeance, an eternal reminder of everything that he lost during the eclipse. What's wound up happening, on a meta level, is that Casca provides the reader a constant reminder of what happened during the eclipse. As more and more focus is given to her PTSD with her revival, the cruelty with which Griffith acted (and continues to act) becomes harder and harder to ignore. It becomes more difficult to push it aside as just bad, misogynistic writing.

And also, quite simply, I like narratives about trauma recovery, and therefore I'll always find Casca's story worth telling despite my frustration with a lot of it. It's absolutely wild to me that for how often I see the fandom complain about her being "fridged" they think it would have been better to see her ACTUALLY fridged, no chance of coming back at all, just dead to fuel Guts' revenge arc. Would it really be better to have her be just another dead girlfriend? Really?

That's really what it comes down to. I like Casca as a character, and I want her to have lived. The people who wish she had died, many of them simply don't like her as a character. Not all, particularly in that first group I mentioned at the start, but many. Everyone has their preferences of course, but I don't think I need to respect when someone thinks a character has so little influence on the narrative that they should have just died, especially if that character is Casca.

If Casca had died during the eclipse, it would not have been a good death. It would not have been brave, or triumphant, or worth anything for her as a character. Judeau died to protect Casca, but even his death was not brave, it was just sad. That's the whole point of the eclipse.

To have Casca die that way would be a disservice to her as a character, far moreso than to have her struggle on as a traumatized victim of sexual violence. That's genuinely what I believe.

[velvetvexations]

if i can throw my hat into the ring, in re the whole "can't you just be [some presumed more palatable flavour of queer]" discussion - it absolutely works the other way! i'm nonbinary, and when i was teaching, admin explicitly encouraged me to "choose one." they were more comfortable with me being visibly trans and using an honorific opposite to my agab than they were with me being openly nonbinary. i'm sure that if i were still visibly trans but actually binary, they'd offer they/them pronouns as a platitude.

i truly think it's a weird cishet defense mechanism, where any flavour of queer is presumed better than the one they're faced with.....but really, they'd prefer no flavour of queer at all

Very well said, anon. It's all an illusion of control.

[evilwickedme]

It's very frustrating to talk about fridging bc the original point of it was like a very specific criticism of how minorities are treated in comic books in particular and it's now been universalized so much people think it means "killing a woman off because she's a woman" or "killing any character to motivate another character" (the definition according to tvtropes fyi, kill it with fire kill kill kill kill). Fridging isn't bad because you're killing a character as motivation, and it's not bad because you're killing a minority off, it's bad because it's a pattern of behavior from an industry overrun by white men writing and drawing and editing those stories. You're allowed to kill a woman off if it suits your story, but the issue was that women are constantly getting hurt or depowered or raped or killed off to motivate other, non-coincidentally male characters.

The problem that stood behind the original women in refrigerators website was that the narrative that the comic book industry at large was telling was that the purpose of female characters was to get hurt in order to motivate some other guy. Kyle Rayner's girlfriend gets stuffed in a fridge, we're not sad because her life got taken from her too soon, we're sad because Kyle Rayner just lost his girlfriend. Gwen Stacy gets killed by the Green Goblin, we're not sad because she didn't get to live a full happy life, we're sad because she didn't get to live a full happy life with Peter Parker. That is not to say that the story doesn't still get told. Peter going after the Green Goblin is horrific and terrible and amazing and leads to some great plot and character development. But the choice was not to hurt Peter himself, not even to threaten his loved ones but not actually harm them, the choice - CHOICE! - the writers in the comic book industry consistently made was to hurt a character who was already part of a marginalized group, and to do that for the benefit of a (presumably) white male cishet able bodied main character's narrative.

I speak mostly in past tense because once fridging took hold in the collective popular consciousness it didn't disappear completely, but it did fall out of favor in being used so blatantly. It became isolated cases rather than the main feature of one of the best selling batman books of all time. Characters get killed off occasionally, and those characters are even sometimes members of minority groups, and biases still inform those writing choices, but I'm struggling to remember reading a comic in the last couple of years that specifically fulfills the criteria for fridging.

Anyway if you're reading this in context, you know that at the end of this month (may 2023) Marvel is planning to celebrate the most famous fridging of all time by absolutely not learning their lesson and fridging another character. They're being lazy about it, too - they've decided to do it to Kamala Khan in Peter Parker's book, two characters that mean close to nothing to each other, and being extra awful by making it a Pakistani Muslim woman being killed off during AAPI month, and so far the information we have doesn't even involve Kamala's own friends and family and superhero team mourning her at all. It's supposed to motivate Peter, because it's part of his book, and it's also supposed to parallel Gwen Stacy, and they chose to do... This. Kamala is a wildly popular and beloved character who deserves better, and frankly Peter deserves better too. If you're going to fridge, at least do it well.

But I'm also already seeing white men, who supposedly agree with me and think this is bad, saying, well it's for MCU synergy, not "because she's a female" or "because she's not a white character" (direct quotes don't @ me). And firstly, ok, way to assume the rest of us didn't also catch up to the obvious conclusion that marvel comics is doing MCU synergy, AGAIN. The thing is that those aren't separate concepts at all? Or well, they are, but they don't negate each other. They're trying to do MCU synergy and make Kamala into a mutant, but they could've done that a million other ways, just as cheap and not as offensive - a simple retcon would've sufficed, they just did that a few years ago with Franklin Richards.

They chose to do it by killing her off, and they chose to kill her off in somebody else's book to motivate him rather than tell a story about her, and they chose to do it while celebrating Gwen's fridging for some fucking reason. This is context that, when removed from the situation, makes the whole thing meaningless. And you can say a lot about Gail Simone, but that she didn't have a Goddamn point is not one of them.

[perpetual-oratorio]

Earlier today I came across a tiktok of a queer cis woman responding to a transphobic and interphobic asshole. I'm debating whether or not I should link the tiktok in a reblog- I think it would help illustrate my point, but I'm also not trying to put her specifically on blast, this is about a dynamic I see all over.

The guy was doing a lot of the standard "everyone's cool with LGB people, but why are you associating with trans or intersex people, this is just making you look bad" concern trolling. The response tiktok was clearly meant for a general (us american and british, given the specific context) audience and has a lot of the pitfalls you would expect. Like, it was a mistake to teach cis people the idea that "sex and gender are two separate things" because they then can use that to further enshrine sex as simple and unchangeable, you all have seen the posts talking about this dynamic, that's unfortunately totally expected for this kind of video by cis queers for a presumed cishet auduence, this is not a novel observation I'm making.

But something else grabbed my attention also, especially in light of that other post that's been going around on here about appeals to tradition in the lesbian community. When this guy was making the case that cis LGBs and trans people have totally different struggles and are just entirely different from one another, and so shouldn't be grouped together, her only response was to point to history. You see, many of the people at Stonewall were black trans women, and Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were instrumental in the early usamerican queer liberation movement, and trans people have always been here. All of that is true, of course, if a bit revisionist about how accepted trans people were in those communities.

But that was the entire argument she had for trans inclusion- trans people were there and are therefore grandfathered in, which is very much the standard script cis people follow for answering this question. The thing that struck me and motivated me to make this post is how it feels like cis LGBs can get by without understanding the basis of their own oppression. It feels like usamerican conservatives handwringing about gay people "destroying the nuclear family" should have given the game away for the actual anxieties underlying homophobia in the same way as conservative handwringing about how transition can harm reproductive capacity does for transphobia. The fact that that is the same anxiety, the same desire for control of (social and biological) reproduction, should be the clearest sign that we are (ostensibly) part of the same community not because cis queers feel they should be nice to us, but because we are on some level the same thing in terms of the societal transgression our open and proud existence represents. It's frustrating how often it feels like the best we can expect from cis people, queer or not, is a surface level appeal for diversity and not a deeper understanding of the shared basis of our oppression.