#they can't produce like they did; one transgression for another etc

[normalbrothers]

"Ignacio and Antonio's relationship equates the terms "brother" and "lover", producing a metonymically violent combination. The reoccuring images throughout the novel of anal eroticism further accentuate the significance of the boys' transgressive behavior in that it represents a completely non-(re)productive expression of sexuality (what Georges Bataille called la dépense) which propels their relationship beyond the bounds of the dominant system."

shout out!!

[whetstonefires]

What are Green Lantern and Sinestro in your Earth-3?

Thank you! :D What a neat question. I have in fact had a lot of this written up for years and even more lore worked out, and then have never beaten any of it into postable form.

The Green Lanterns are the Power Rings, per I think most of the major canon mirrorverses? They still have the 'Guardians at Oa distributing Rings of (Will)Power' deal but there's not really an...ethical component.

The Guardians just believe that the stability of the universe is helped by concentrating power in the hands of strong-willed individuals and they facilitate this. I just kind of took their existing cop thing and rotated it 30 degrees and got incoherent naked fascism. There is only power and those too weak to seek it etc etc.

In exchange for power, which the Rings usually use to conquer their home planets and a varying number of neighbors, the Guardians expect their beneficiaries to uphold certain rules and agreements for them, as relevant--like, they're the guarantors for certain space treaties with the implicit promise of getting your ass beaten by Power Rings if you transgress. If the Power Ring doesn't cooperate with enough of these the Ring gets taken away. It's a fairly functional though brutal system. Any justice it produces is coincidental or the result of decisions made by specific agents within it, but it does work.

Sinestro is still very much the kind of person who'd get recruited to this system, he's actually a prominent example of characters who need very little fundamental alteration to kick them around to the other morality pole. Mostly he gets opposite direction character development instead, although I think his overall decency stat did go up a few notches to facilitate this.

In canon usually his defrocking as a Lantern is associated with using his ring to impose his will on his whole planet? Here that's encouraged but he gets into conflict with the Guardians about some of their demands not sitting right with him--he is trying to be a benevolent tyrant here he can't be flying off on his people to go do questionably ethical things in space.

And ultimately gets in contact (through his ring that's on the verge of being taken away) with Parallax, who's still imprisoned in the Oa battery, but rather than as a remediation for its evils because this is a mirror universe and fear isn't inherently an evil force, it's on the principle that fear is a weakness that must be suppressed. And they've had Ion the Will Whale leaching Parallax's energy in there so they can support more Rings at a higher energy rate, which is probably the actual main reason.

Some layers going on there about repressing your feelings of pain and fear and using them to fuel violence because that's more socially acceptable, and stoicism and the consequences to self and others. Honestly Sinestro and Harvey Dent have a lot of points of resemblance in this setting which if I'd ever gotten there would have come up when Jon Crane started hanging out with Sinestro lmao.

So anyway Sinestro eventually broke with the Guardians when they called him out on a job and it was hella unethical and he had a moment of realization and put his foot down.

So they took his ring, which was bad for him in that he nearly died due to being in space, and bad for his home planet in that as it turned out a lot of the existing social problems had only gotten worse as a result of using force to stop people from fighting one another, so by the time he got home there was full-scale war and as failed dictator with no more super-weapon he was not welcome.

So after some Big Sad he snuck onto Oa and busted Parallax out of the power battery because that was the one person he felt like he could still help and also Fuck This System.

And Parallax was like hell yeah wanna team up, and they did! I think Parallax probably kinda possessed Sinestro for a while, at least long enough to get them both off Oa and maybe for the duration of its recovery, but I don't think it's a full-time thing after that.

They've got a space vigilante group they call the Golden Lights, although Sinestro's still a law and order type, so he kind of acts like they're space cops without a government behind them. As a result one of the things they do is imprison people so dangerous their home planets can't hold them--Ultraman gets extradited to the Left Hand of Justice once he's sentenced after the Injustice War, because he had an escape record a mile long before he murdered President Obama and spearheaded world conquest.

Strawman had a building come down on him during one of the late battles in the war and was having a truly epic panic attack about getting slowly crushed to death, but fortunately for him one of the Golden Lights that came to help with the war got killed around then (I think Superwoman ripped them in half) and the ring came and found him because he was stark terrified at that exact moment, is in the habit of working pretty effectively through crippling anxiety even when putting himself in life-threatening situations, and is really good at scaring people on purpose when he wants to. Definitely best candidate on Earth.

His hair levitates when he's got the Ring powered up making him glow yellow, just because I think I'm funny.

One of my favorite details on a similar note is that part of how the Lights power their interstellar flight is by thinking really hard about the void of space and how super dead they'll be if their rings power down. Ability to freak yourself out on command without becoming nonfunctional is an important space sheriff skill.

Ah hm got stuck on the Sinestro track there because, you know, due to the nature of this setting the good guys are the main characters and that's Sinestro and Jonathan Crane here. Mirror universes are very entertaining.

Okay, Power Rings:

Hal is a First Gulf War veteran who was one of those guys (a significant fraction of coalition casualties) whose plane went down because he was so bored with the vast technological superiority enjoyed by his side that he was doing loops and flirting with RPGs while out on bombing runs.

He lived but lost an arm, and lost his first few civilian jobs at Ferris Air by lashing out and drinking on the job, until he quit the last thing Carol offered him in disgust for it being bottom-tier office work with no contact with planes at all, let alone piloting. (The first job was as a flight instructor; he lost that real fast.)

When he first gets his ring and goes on an nice unhinged villain rampage that includes the classic 'make me absolute dictator over this city or i will destroy it' the person that takes him down is Cyborg Ultraman, who is just as suicidal as ever but not evil about it.

It takes him two defeats to stop wearing the ring on his energy-construct arm that he makes himself with the ring, even though it's a) hard to do that at all and b) really fucking dumb because if he gets hit hard enough that construct collapses this means he doesn't have his ring until he can call it back to the hand he does have, huge vulnerability.

Eventually ex-Marine John Stewart kills him for his ring, which the Guardians of Oa consider a perfectly valid succession practice, and John's the Power Ring on-deck during the Injustice War. Idk about Guy and Kyle and everyone.

Wow! This is a lot! I really should...fic.......

[thedeadflag]

Hey, I have a question, if you don't mind. I wanted to write a fic with lgbt characters in medieval times, and the main problem I can't find a way around is that, from my researches, a very important aspect in medieval times, at least among nobility, were heirs, and without modern technology, most mlm and wlw can't have children without involving a third person. Now, I could use magic, but in the world I'm using magic is rare, and so it wouldn't be a universal solution. Can you help me?

P.S.: The reason I need a universal solution is that the characters want to overthrow the current regime, and among the changes they would legalize homesexual relationships P.S.2: Also, I’ve done some research on the topic, but any info you can give me on trans people on medieval times would be appreciated

Okay, so you might not like my answer to this but I’m kind of going to be a little frank with you on this.

I’ll touch on the magic bit first because it’s less important, but might address an issue of perspective here and what kind of creative freedoms you’re willing to allow yourself, and which you’re not, for whatever reason.

I’m not sure why you are where you’re at re: magic pregnancies. I don’t see why it’s not also a solution when…if you’re going to play on the statistics of magic being rare as a reason for it not being a universal solution…so are lgbtq+ folks, and our relationships, at least in contrast to the cishet masses. A spell existing to help lgbtq+ folks specifically with fertility in cases where they feel it’s necessary…its use wouldn’t be any more common than magic in general in such a world. So why not allow it? 

What kind of solution did you come to me looking for? If magic is off the table, and you seem locked in on the notion of two people creating life on their own in some manner of way, then…what exactly are you trying to get from me in regards to trans folks in medieval times? Like, you’re specifically bringing up trans folks in the context of fertility, pregnancy, family-building, etc., so I could draw some very common and overdone conclusions that I’ve already written at length about, but I’m not going to tread into those waters yet again, at least not today.

I want to remind you that this is a universe you’re building. “Medieval” is a term concocted in the 19th century to describe a loose collection of societies and shared elements within a loose range of centuries. You transgressing one of those common elements (homophobia) by pushing for a social endgame friendly to mlm and wlw, or by adding magic of all damn things, is no more difficult to do than transgressing the somewhat common element of bloodlines in determining ancestry.

You’re looking at this from a skewed perspective (perhaps one informed by cissexism, as is all too common). One that you are entitled to keep holding if you really want to, but it’s not necessary, and it’s adding far too much work onto your plate when there’s a very simple solution to your problem that doesn’t involve using trans folks as fertility devices as many folks tend to do.

Yes, heirs in families of status was important in a general sense. Being of shared ancestral blood was not always so necessary. “Birthright”-based stories in fantasy genre media and fairy tales have led a lot of people to some skewed perspectives on what life was like in the past. 

Are you aware that adoption was something that happened within such families when heirs could not be produced between partners? IIRC Marcus Aurelius was adopted into status to provide an heir. Sure, that was Roman times, but I’m 99% sure other such families did the same in the middle age periods that you’re seeking to emulate.

I mean, how else do you think the Catholics got so deeply entrenched into the adoption business? It was part imperialism/assimilation, absolutely, but it was also a way to keep Catholic family trees going strong regardless of fertility. Sure, some in nobility decided a solution was to find another more fertile partner, but adoption was a thing back then. Maybe not like, in the highest echelons of royals, but certainly within nobility still. It’s not a stretch to alter rules of succession to more openly approve of adopted children being heirs. 

So yeah, a really easy (and historically feasible, if that’s at all importantin your worldbuilding) solution is adoption

I also know that there’s a lot of tension in fandom around the building of family units in our creative works. People have long been taught to attach certain meanings and feelings and morals with certain types of family-building, and that has long leaked into fanworks. 

Hell, g!p exists as a category in some degree as a fetishistic solution for folks to use trans women’s bodies in a scientifically inaccurate way as a means of creating biological children, all to establish a family narrative and the associated intimacy. In short, people value families where one partner was impregnated and gave birth more than other options involved.

Adopted children in fanworks, much like their real life counterparts, are often devalued and not seen as ‘real’ or ‘worthy’ members of a family unit, and that’s shitty. We need more positivity in fanworks around adoption, and I say that as a writer who could also do better on that front, something I hope to improve on in future works.

So yeah,.if your universe is capable of having lgbtq+ folks’ relationships accepted by the end of the narrative, if you’re willing to infuse magic into a loose translation of middle ages mythology, then you can 1000% bring in some adoption to your narrative as a solution to the issue you brought up given it’d be the most historically accurate worldbuilding element out of the three. There’s no need to tread over to trans people in search of a solution to a problem that doesn’t really need solving, certainly not through trans characters. 

And if you’re already going to be supporting mlm and wlw in your narrative, and allowing magic, I sincerely hope you’re also including some form of transition-related treatment for trans and NB folks. Because we all know that it would be irresponsible and transphobic not to in an AU that by all means could and should have that included due to not being strictly historically bound into a specific time period here on earth. That should, of course, go without saying, but I did feel a need to tack it on just to cover all bases here.