#then you can find the original CYOA story as 'Puella Magi Adfligo Systema'

[azdoine]

@canmom

say... what is the canon for this homunculus... >///<' 

i ask bc transfem fic is an all too rare thing no matter the context and the figure of the homunculus is a very good one in most cases I've met it!

I mean, you can go and read it if you want, but IDK if “homunculus” was even the right word, or if you’d get anything out of reading my fanfic, or out of reading the fanfic that my fanfic was based upon, because this was an utter fanwank singularity of petty drama.

To make a very long story slightly shorter, I was spoofing a long-running play-by-post CYOA, a fanfic where readers could collectively decide upon the OC protagonist’s actions through first-past-the-post voting. Somewhat uniquely, the CYOA author explicitly invited his readers to use all of their collective knowledge and skills in making decisions, including not only their IRL expertise but their knowledge of the original canon that the fanfic was based upon; in this way, before the OC protagonist developed a personality and grew into her own character, the author even once went so far as to describe the protagonist as a kind of collective self-insert, a “blank slate avatar” of the forum on which this CYOA was played.

So the protagonist naturally became hypercompetent in many ways, if not in others, and she was able to intuit things she should have had no way of knowing. This was then justified in-setting with a strong implication that the protagonist was specifically purpose-built with revealed knowledge by and from a higher power, or even that the protagonist’s soul was a gestalt assembled out of countless other souls from a defunct alternate timeline.

Anyways, I liked this CYOA a fair amount for its own merits as a fix-it fanfic, but I was also interested in what seemed to me to be this amusing interplay between diegetic and extradiegetic story elements, right. (Because yes, I was the kind of person who e.g. thought it was SO DEEP AND CLEVER when Hussie had the carapacian exiles send commands to the SBURB/SGRUB players in Homestuck.)

Furthermore, there was a brief eruption of forum drama surrounding this CYOA some years back, when someone tore into it for having a female OC protagonist in a sapphic relationship with another girl, despite running on a voter base/reader base primarily consisting of heterosexual men; I ignored the vitriolic “men fetishize lesbians and that’s why it’s ok for me to use transmisogynistic slurs whenever i see bad yuri media” style discourse and put all my thoughts on the matter in my back pocket for another day. Likewise, much more recently, someone proposed that a peripheral character in this CYOA might have been a trans woman, at which point the CYOA author had to step in and say that the theory was wrong, and that all of the characters in his story were cis more generally, because he didn’t think he’d done enough research to be able to write a trans character sensitively.

At that point I was vaguely and pettily fed up with the way people were and weren’t reading gender into this story. So I wrote one or two thousand words of meta-fanfic about the OC protagonist of the CYOA being a trans woman herself, with the intention of somewhat gently ribbing on the idea that anyone could unironically treat her as a direct extension of her male voter base without also having to see that as a cutting commentary on the gender identity of her voters, and the intention of gently ribbing on the way the author had excluded trans experiences from a story with a literal blank slate reader-insert character.

The rest is history, lol. I rather expected a response from the other readers and voters something along the lines of “hey, how dare you imply that I’m a tranny just because I’m still deeply emotionally invested in this five-years-on-and-going-strong million-word-fanfic about my sexy anime girl self-insert and her waifu?”, or at least along the lines of “this is too meta for me, go write your trans girl metafiction on the SCP wiki like everyone else does”.

Apparently I was somehow still far too subtle, though, because instead I got responses like “why did you write our collective self-insert as a trans man? just because we’re men doesn’t mean she would be too” and “yea, I dunno fam, our collective self-insert reads as AFAB agender to me”. IIRC, someone even made fanart about the latter, at which point I decided to violently suppress my memories of the entire sequence of events.