#let's get these boys dressed!

[neonponders]

Another small part two for @wrecked-fuse ‘s pocketverse ~

Part 1 here ~

(also I’m putting these on ao3 so they’re easy to find.)

🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹

Steve never expected to be in a doll boutique, but his latest, high maintenance residents refused the stiff, itchy clothes that came on commercial dolls. So now he walked around with the two little ones hitching a ride in his shirt pocket. 

It was odd, shopping for tiny and overpriced linen and stretchy knit fabrics. But clothes were clothes, and he kept looking around to make sure onlookers wouldn’t spot the tiny people in his pocket.

“See anything you like?” he whispered, but the replies were not helpful.

“Biwwy, is it scarwy in here?”

“The cwreeps aren’t wreal. But we’wre not tall enough for this.”

He had a point, there. These dolls were simply too big. Steve pivoted toward a section of the store which would arguably be worse: the porcelain harlequin section. But this boutique was organized by doll size, and unfortunately more clothing options went on larger dolls...

Steve sent a harmless smile to the shopkeeper, who eyeballed him suspiciously. His jacket easily covered small Billy and Steve, but their voices were not so easy to mask. Steve hoped the visible ear buds and cord hanging around his face would make anyone think the voices were from the radio.

“What the hell, Steve?”

He sighed. “Ignore the clowns. What about these overalls?”

“How do we piss in overwalls?” Billy retorted.

Steve sighed and continued along the shelves. “How about Grease lightning over here?”

“YEAH!”

“Shhhhhh, sh,” Steve panicked. “Quiet, all right? The owner already thinks I’m going to steal something.”

“Sounds fun,” Billy declared, wiggling in the pocket to get out.

Steve hastily cupped his hands around his shirtfront to catch the daredevils climbing - naked - from his pocket. He set them gently on the shelf and thankfully still had his hands up to catch the doll little Steve promptly knocked over. “Hold ‘im, Steve! I’ll get ‘is pants!”

“Guys, I can just buy the dolls and you can get dressed in the car.”

Tiny Steve paused to give that some thought, where as Billy had already removed a faux leather jacket and put it around his body. “This smells cheap.”

“It’s not real leather. Real would be too stiff with all the stitching. Is it comfy or not?”

“No,” Billy disregarded, throwing the jacket down. Then he pointed past Steve’s shoulder. “I want him.”

He glanced nervously at the shelf behind him, only to lift his eyebrows with relief. “Oh. Fighter pilot, huh?”

He brought the doll over, complete with tiny aviator sunglasses and...real rabbit fur on the bomber jacket collar. Steve groaned inwardly, Mom’s going to kill me.

But Billy’s little mouth dropped into an O of wonder when he touched the jacket. He couldn’t be bothered to take it off the doll, he just hugged the porcelain pilot tight, burying his face in the fur. “This one!”

“Okay, B. Back into the pocket. We gotta pay for it first. Steve? How you doin’?”

“I want this one,” his voice called, and Steve felt a spear of panic in his chest because he couldn’t see him. Then, right out of a horror movie, a doll shuffled across the shelf, knocking others out of the way as little Steve pushed its standing pedestal to the front.

The doll was another Grease model, but it was Danny from the beach scenes in the beginning: light blue jeans, white t-shirt, and pastel blue collared shirt.

From big Steve’s pocket, Billy critiqued, “The other one’s cooler.”

“Hey,” Steve chided softly. “You got the one you wanted. He can have the one he likes.” Then he added to little Steve as he took the doll and offered his other hand to magic carpet him back to his shirt pocket. “I think you have excellent taste.”

“Thank you, Stewie,” he sang, landing in the pocket with a solid tug on his shirt fibers.

Steve took a deep breath, his heart doing that painful pinch again. He tried to hang the discarded jacket on its doll’s shoulder before leaving, and made sure his own jacket hung over his pockets. “Miss? Do I bring the ones I want to the front or do you get them?”

The shopkeeper got a flash in her eye at the use of Miss instead of Ma’am, and came around to assist him. It didn’t get him a discount, though.

[biillys]

BILLY WEEK → DAY SIX

[joeythefrog]

No thoughts just David leaning in as soon as he hears the words ‘you may now kiss the groom’ and giggling, whispering to Jack “Unioned we stand” before Jack kisses him

[luck-of-the-drawings]

EPISODE 2 AND 3 HAVE BEEN SOOOO FUN im already so emotionally attached to each of these characters.. if anything bad ever happens to any of them im killing everyone and then everyone.

[katimanki]

Lesbyler at 6, 12 and 22 🌈

[thesherrinfordfacility]

one thing you have to know about me is that 1941 spins around in my head like a neverending carousel. tonight's special feature is glozier's line, "what if this angel - mr fell - uses his heavenly powers against us?" because you and i both know that aziraphale is going to fuck their everloving shit up when they come to interrupt the hanky panky

[vagueiish]

i don't vibe with astarion as a father for a host of reasons

i do vibe with him being a 'grunkle stan, if grunkle stan were played by bayonetta' type of relative, tho

[taichouu]

It is so fucking evil and humiliating that my first experience of trans joy and euphoria will forever be intertwined with Harry Potter. Sickening actually.

[lavenoon]

Would Sun/Moon ever consider wearing dresses?

Ramble momentarily halted, because Yes.

During missions maybe not their first choice - pockets are a rarity, and some cuts really restrict movement, but in general?

I might be biased, but they'd be stylin'!

Dresses, and perceived femininity don't bother them at all - they're animatronics, and gender doesn't mean too much to them. They are careful not too draw too much attention while on the job, but other than that, everything's fair game!

(Dresses do have the advantage that if the skirt is a bit too short, it doesn't really matter unless it's a short dress. With legs like those, they have a hard time finding clothes already! Some "eh, fits well enough" is a welcome reprieve)

But they cut quite the figure in a dress, and Y/N also has a simp crisis over that <3

Eclipse, too, for that matter <3

[autisticlegolas]

mothers and their inability to accept the masculinity of their lesbian children

[hgduo]

I find it really funny when people draw or make posts about c!Q and k!Q where c!Q is the 'evil, sneaky, scary and cruel' one to k!Q's 'innocent, doe-eyed, kind, and good" self, because like I feel rather confident in saying that k!Q is the worse one of the two LOL

/pos

[regallibellbright]

Played Fashion Dreamer until my Switch battery went low, so at least for short-term entertainment I suspect I’ll be able to get my money’s worth out of it personally, and spent some time afterwards reflecting on what I think it’s doing good at and where it’s falling.

As predicted I log into Online Mode and I am greeted by a vast and wonderful array of lolita clothes fitting into at least two distinct subgenres. Since I played more online than off, I’m pretty sure I got an overrepresentation of that branch of the design options, and the comparatively understated but still distinctly dainty stuff, but I saw at least a couple people preferring the more professional or cool looks, respectively. Relatively little of the cutesy pop stuff, which I’ve always had a soft spot for, but I DID get a very cute oversized sweatshirt dress with a polka dot stegosaurus on it in several colors, and that served me quite nicely.

You’ll notice all of this is talking about women’s fashion in a game that also has playable men in a first for Syn Sophia’s fashion games. The gender lock’s aggressive and annoying, and the fact that fucking SOCKS are gendered when headwear and earrings aren’t is baffling. I have to assume it’s something to do with the modeling by this point, because you can give a Type B body a bunny-eared maid headband and whatever earrings your heart desires, and I have. I struggle to see why you would then draw the line at equal opportunity fishnets. Hair isn’t gender-locked, awesome, and Type A bodies can actually have facial hair, which surprised me because my expectations were in the toilet by this point.

But yeah. The menswear. It may just be because I was playing mostly in online mode and therefore more at the whims of player choice the way I could recognize the heavy weighting towards lolita style for the women’s fashion wasn’t representative of the game as a whole, but all the Type B characters I ran into were generally dressed in an aesthetic I’m going to call “slightly generic 2020s boy band”.

Which sounds unflattering, yes, but I consider this a genuine improvement, because the 3DS games’ menswear was mostly an aesthetic I struggled to place for a bit before settling on “totally generic stock photo model.”

I’ll get comparative pictures for you all at some point, but genuinely. Legitimately. The 3DS games were bleak. There were maybe eight aesthetic categories for men’s fashion, total, to the fourteen non-bag women’s fashion brands with corresponding aesthetics. (Granted, one of them was “costume”, so you could argue thirteen, but especially in the later two games there was still a fair bit of depth to that brand such that it had a defined aesthetic.) All of the women’s brands and aesthetics were very distinct - you could tell the difference between “professional officewear” and either “preppy” or “luxury” at a glance, even if there were items that could fit into one of those aesthetics secondarily. With the men’s brands, you had four or maybe five, and there was heavy bleedthrough of the aesthetics they listed. Both the men’s and women’s fashion had categories for “bold” and “edgy”. For the women’s fashion, “bold” is clearly inspired by gyaru fashion and “edgy” is clearly punk rock. They have different brands. For the men’s… “edgy” is SLIGHTLY more punk, but it’s by degrees, and it’s not going nearly so far as the equivalent women’s fashion. They share a brand. In addition to those two, you had “basic” (simple items, solid colors and maybe some stripes,) “preppy,” (school uniforms and stuff, self-explanatory,) “bohemian” (also pretty self-explanatory, but you never saw it in the international versions - it was cut outright for Trendsetters and while some vestiges of the style existed in Style Star, no customers ever asked for it there,) luxury (you want suits? Here’s your suits,) and “contemporary” (more patterns and material textures than basic but the same general aesthetic.)

So: You could wear a suit, you could dress a bit like a rocker but a pretty mediocre one, or you could dress like, as I said before, a stock photo model. With an above-average tendency towards vests in Style Star, but still very much a stock photo model, or maybe a midbudget CW show.

And the more I think about it, the easier it is to articulate the issue with how the men’s fashion has been treated in Syn Sophia games. The women’s fashion has all these distinct and recognizable styles, including a bunch of varieties of streetwear - you’ve got gyaru and punk styles, you’ve got Decora/Pop Kei, you’ve got girly fashion that’s somewhere around cottagecore/mori aesthetics, you have stuff that would be suitable for an office. Gothic and sweet lolita have their own separate brands. While Style Star folded its athletic brand into the pop one, the first three games all had a dedicated brand for that… for the women’s fashion.

The menswear never had a dedicated athletic aesthetic. Not even a brand, since as mentioned there were like four of those. It didn’t have an aesthetic. And THAT is why Fashion Dreamer feels like an improvement to me already, because as sparse as my options are for the men’s fashion there are at least plenty of sweatpants at long last. (I am however struggling to find men’s jeans, and it took me WAY too long to figure out where the bit specifying what type a pattern was for was located.)

The men’s fashion in Style Savvy was consistently an afterthought. And you can tell, because athletic/athleisure clothes were a staple of the women’s fashion for the first three games and still present in the fourth, but totally absent in the men’s fashion. I can trust that there’s more variety for the women’s fashion in Fashion Dreamer and that I was getting an overrepresentation of the lolita stuff because that’s what’s most popular with the playerbase, because I know from past games that there was that depth and that the lolita fashion was particularly popular. I don’t have that same trust for the men’s fashion, not yet. And honestly I doubt the game will deliver for me, much as I’d love to be proven wrong.

But hey! At least this time around, I’ve yet to see an outfit that makes a male character look like the Distracted Boyfriend meme!

[transzilla]

Ik I shit on city people quite a bit but the trans ppl are marginally better adjusted xnsjfjzjz trying to approach other gay people in a homophobic area as like a passoid trade working trans man is like a cruel and unusual punishment

[mighty-poop]

Define a woman!

I’m gonna rant this here cus this argument keeps returning on the clock app and one day, I’m gonna be stupid and leave a comment in the wrong thread or smthn so I’m just gonna get it out of my system:

“How do you define a ‘woman’?”

Answer for idiots: you can’t.

You cannot possibly make a definition for the term ‘woman’ without excluding someone from the group when they clearly ARE part of the group (even if you’re a piece of shit transphobe and don’t want to include trans women). A woman is someone who has the potential to give birth? You just excluded every child before puberty, every infertile woman and every woman on menopause, next. A woman is someone who has a uterus? You just excluded a bunch of intersex women and all women who had a hysterectomy, next. A woman has a period? Excluded the millions of women who never get their period for various reasons AND all the women who take continuous birth control AND women who are pregnant AND again, little girls and women on menopause. A woman has to have XY chromosomes? Are you gonna check that for every feminine-looking person you’re gonna meet? How? Do you not think women with down syndrome are women?

Decades of feminism working so hard to make sure women are more than their genitals and potential to give birth, all flushed down the drain because you refuse to believe trans women are more than men in wigs? You’re weak as shit.

So answer for people who actually want to use their brain:

Woman is defined through experiences. Which experiences? Entirely up to whoever defines themselves as a woman.

The ‘female experience’ is so broad. You cannot possibly define it in one sentence and stick it on everyone who calls the word ‘woman’ their own.

You feel feminine and empowered by doing your nails? Congrats, that’s the female experience and makes you, therefore, a woman.

You feel feminine and empowered by wearing plaid and splitting wood in two with a giant axe? Congrats! Female Experience. Woman.

You feel feminine in a dress? Woman. You feel feminine in a tux and suit? Woman.

You feel empowered as a mother and love being pregnant? Woman! You despise the idea of being pregnant but find empowerment in your career? Woman! You feel like your period makes you more in tune with your femininity? Woman. You feel like your period makes you less than human and getting a hysterectomy makes you feel more comfortable in your body? Woman.

you love long hair? Woman. You love short hair? Woman.

You love loving men? Woman. You love loving women? Woman. You love both? Woman. You love everyone? Woman. You don’t feel like love is your thing? Woman!

Sitting at home with a good movie and a bottle of wine? That’s a woman. Getting bloody in a game of soccer? That’s very woman! Taking a walk with your dog? How very woman! Going to the gym? Such woman! Eating out with friends? Friend woman. Shooting a gun in the yard from the patio you built yourself? All woman!

Whatever the fuck makes you feel in sync with your femininity is your female experience, and if you have female experience and you like it, you are a W O M A N ✨

Same goes for men and the male experience btw! Since the question “what defines a man” is never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER asked for SOME 👀 reason. (We all know the reason….) Also same goes for my fellow enbies and the non-binary experience. If painting your nails bring you closer to your enbie side, you’re non-binary.

Gender is such a deeply personal experience, it’s just dumb to define it for someone else, let alone the entire human species. It’s like asking to define a chair, like, you KNOW what it is but you can’t possibly define it without excluding some chairs (“has at least 4 legs”, that’s a horse also swivel chairs exist).

Sidenote: If some idiot tiktokker shoves a microphone and a camera in your face and goes “WHAT IS A WOMAN” or “HOW MANY GENDERS ARE THERE” just go along with whatever dumbass scenarios they come up with. “How many genders are there?” “My dude, as many as you want!” “Oh so like 40??” “Yep!” “Can I identify as a helicopter lol?” “Sure, who cares, do it!” “Should I demand everyone at my job calls me a helicopter” “You can go to your local townhouse, request to change your name to ‘helicopter’ and they’ll most likely let you. You’re an adult, you can do whatever you want as long as it’s not hurting others.” “You don’t think it would be dumb of me to do that?” “Why would I care, I don’t know you?”