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fogwitchoftheevermore · 2 months

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wither rose alliance........gneder

i assume this is in reference to the transgender/appearence headcanons post so thank you for your service anon gender you will get. for all of them, even. you will get it under the cut however because empires has so many members to discuss and they're all getting a good two paragraphs worth of thoughts.

ok so first things first just wanna establish the rules we're working with here, cause i think about this a lot. for humans (so the entire wra, joey, joel, and pix), we're living in a sort of medieval era in terms of science for trans folks, though not medieval attitudes. this is not to say there’s no transphobia or anything, cause like, there is and there isn’t. i’m not gonna be discussing anyone experiencing really aggressive transphobia here, but i’m still gonna be discussing gender norms and worries and passing and stuff, y’know? it’s a much more modern attitude towards gender than medieval times, that’s for sure, but it’s not a perfect world cause i like to project. but generally they don't have like, hormone therapy or anything like that. for the non humans, each race has varying approaches to gender, so i'll touch on them when i get to them.

starting with the humans!

fwhip

fwhip uses strictly he/him pronouns and is a trans man. he's the shortest member of the wither rose alliance, not because he's actually particularly short, but because the rest of them are all 6' or taller. depending on how i'm feeling for the day, he's somewhere between 5'6" and 5'9", but he's also constantly wearing shoes with subtle lifts in them, so most of the emperors are under the impression he's about two inches taller than he is. he's also the skinniest of the wra due to being just slightly malnourished (a thing i could get into but i will not do that here).

fwhip realized he was trans when he was in his mid-late teens, around 15-16, and spent no real amount of time in the closet. this was also around the time fwhip was beginning to be abruptly trained to be the emperor of the grimlands after gem ran away, so he didn't have great control over his gender presentation until he became emperor. at that point, fwhip chopped his hair off and began to present significantly more masculine, binding (i am giving them binders, for no reason other than i want to), speaking in a lower register, and defaulting to more bulky/form concealing clothes. this is partially because of the gender, but also because of the aforementioned "kinda small and malnourished looking in comparison to most of the people he hangs out with" so it is also in an attempt to look more intimidating.

gem

gem uses she/her pronouns and is a trans woman. gem is the tallest of the wra, standing somewhere around 6'2"-6'3". she is similarly lanky to fwhip (as she also is a bit malnourished, again for reasons i could but won't get into), with most of her being legs, but she gets a bit more muscle as the series goes on and she starts training more in martial fighting alongside magic. she also has a tooth gap, and is very pale and freckles easily.

gem leans pretty heavily into feminine presentation, skirts and very long hair and chest padding and all that, as she is much more used to the gender presentation of the grimlands, moreso than any other empire. gem realized she was trans not long before she ran away, and had slowly begun to come out of the closet when she decided to run away (that and the wizard thing are not related to her being trans, no more than they are related to her being alive, y'know?) the crystal cliffs has only ever known her as a woman, and she greatly prefers it as such. generally, the roseblings are the members of the wra who care the most about passing. gem also got her name from her late mother.

pearl

pearl uses she/her pronouns with most people, but if she likes you enough you might get he/him privileges, and is transfem. her gender is probably most adequately summed up as lesbian. pearl is about 6' even, and she's very muscular, with broad shoulders she's a huge fan of. she's built like someone who fights regularly, but also like someone who's been doing farm work since she could walk. powerful bones and muscles.

she has long hair, with an undercut, in order to make keeping it out of her face easier and to keep her cool in the heat. other than the long hair, she doesn't tend to lean wildly feminine in her presentation. she wears dresses pretty frequently, but it is simply not practical to do most of the work she does in a dress, so her closet's about a 50/50 split. she also doesn't do any of the cosmetic stuff (including shaving super frequently, but she also doesn't grow much facial hair naturally, just some stubble) and doesn't wear a bra. simply not her thing! also, pearl is her birth name, her parents were going for cool and gender neutral and then she became transgender.

sausage

sausage uses he/any, in the way that he knows exactly how he looks and presents and that most people will default to gendering him as male because of the way he looks, carries himself, dresses, etc. and he doesn't really care enough to correct them. their gender would probably most accurately described as genderqueer, but the better descriptor for both his gender and sexuality is bear.

as you might've guessed sausage is FAT and STRONG and HAIRY. she has very dark and thick hair literally everywhere, including a very thick beard. he's the middle of the road in terms of height for the wra, either the same height as pearl or a hair shorter but it evens out when they're in shoes. and i'm saying it again because i truly cannot stress it enough- sausage is fat and has a lot of muscle mass. that custom sword was a great sword those things are fucking heavy.

joey

joey is a trans man who uses he/him pronouns. he stands around 5'9" (the lucky bastard) and is very twink-ish. just generally very lithe but in an actually well fed way this time. he doesn't wear a binder because he doesn't really feel the need for one, and also he's in the jungle hanging out with solely animals all the time anyways. who even cares. joey kind of naturally passes well but he truly doesn't care about it at all outside of keeping his hair short, and even that's more a practicality thing than anything else.

joey has been locked into his gender ever since he was very young, and most of the people he grew up with only ever knew him as a man. he also absolutely abandoned those people and moved away, but this is also the only way the other emperors have ever known him to be, so. joey generally doesn't put a lot of thought into his gender outside of "i am a man", and frankly, good for him. also yes i'm implying he's just walking around tits out all the time and YKNOW WHAT. good for him. fuck it who cares.

joel

joel uses any pronouns, though he usually defaults to he/him, she/her, and whatever neopronouns you want forever. joel is the shortest of the human emperors, standing around 5’5” (sometimes shorter depending on how i’m feeling), and he only accuses his friends of transphobia when they make fun of him about it sometimes. ze is a very compact person, fitting a surprising amount of muscle into a (comparatively) small frame. joel is definitely wider than ve is long, y’know? also joel’s a butch lesbian argue with the wall if you think otherwise.

joel, despite being human, doesn’t quite have the usual human conception of gender. she's been on her own for a very long time, as her parents passed away when she was very young. he’s been a wanderer for most of his life, never really settling down long enough to get entirely mixed into the culture of any given place. the only human empire that joel spent any significant amount of time in as a kid was pixandria, which already had a laxer approach to gender than most of the other human empires (i’ll get into it), and most of joel’s childhood was spent in various small settlements or caravans that had a ton of non-humans in them anyways. this results in a joel who doesn’t really have a grasp on “traditional” human views of gender, and who doesn’t really care to learn. like, if you asked, he’s probably going to tell you he’s a man, or maybe transmasc if you really press, but it’s not a label that xe particularly cares about.

pix

pix uses they/he pronouns and is agender. they’re one of the tallest human emperors, standing somewhere around 6’2”-6’4”. gem’s usually still taller than them in heels, but they’re probably around the same height if neither of them has shoes on. pix is strong, i’m thinking like an mma fighter build. you can’t really see the muscle under all those flowy desert fabrics, but if you get into a fight you’ll know it’s there.

pixandria, due to being so far away from most of the other human empires, has a lot of more notable cultural differences. one of these things is their approach to gender, which has always been a lot more lax in regards to people who aren’t really a man or a woman. as a result, pix has been agender basically his entire life. as a side effect of this and being the oldest of the emperors, he was also inadvertently gender awakenings for a lot of them when they first met for diplomatic reasons. and sexuality awakenings for some, because they’re also so pretty. they’ve got very beautiful tan skin and hair that falls somewhere between their shoulders and mid back, depending on the time of year, and a bit of facial hair and they are just peak gender.

and now for the non humans!

lizzie:

lizzie uses she/they pronouns and is probably most accurately described as transfem, but labels get weird in this section. she’s about 5’7”-5’8” when in her human form, and then solidly 10’ in her ocean queen form. they’ve got broad shoulders as well, and is pretty much the definition of a swimmer’s build. she presents very femininely solely for the joy of it- flowy dresses and spiny skirts are so fun!

lizzie and jimmy are not the only fish people in this world, but they’re the only ones who are Like That, but they do both have experience with the fish folk that is reflected in their views on gender. due to becoming an amnesiac after crawling out of the water, a teenaged lizzie was taken in by some of those aforementioned fish folk who integrated her into some of the land dwelling fish cultures before she struck out on her own. fish folk do not have anything even approximating the human concept of gender. some fish can change sex depending on what their environment needs, like, let’s be real with ourselves here. the fish folk are aware of the concept, obviously, they interact with humans all the time, but most of them don’t do that and never have. lizzie, as such, has no concept of gender either. she uses she/they pronouns because she sound nice next to her name and just Feel Right for them as a person. they don’t have the gender attachment to these pronouns in the way a human would, but an attachment is absolutely there, and it feels very weird and strange for her to be referred to with any pronouns outside of she/they.

jimmy:

jimmy uses he/they/se pronouns and is a trans man. i know jimmy didn’t get the same ocean orb transformation lizzie got, but i’m letting him be at least a bit different on either side of getting his memories back. when he’s at his most human, jimmy’s about 5’6”, when he’s at his most fish, he’s about 6’7”. yes se gains literally a foot of height, it pisses off everyone in seas immediate vicinity. jimmy is very gangly and even after living on land for years, not super used to walking like a person, and it shows. he and lizzie are also two of the palest emperors, as they both are deep sea fish who are not meant for the amount of sun they get.

partially due to having integrated into land dwelling society when they were younger and partially due to the codlands being right on the border of mythland (and having a lot more shared culture than most human and non human empires would usually have), jimmy has a much more human understanding of gender than lizzie. hence the fact that he identifies as a trans man- when they crawled out of the ocean, people called them a girl, and jimmy found that to be not right, so here we are. the cod folk have different concepts of what being a certain gender means than humans, since they’re incorporating the idea of gender into a culture that didn’t originally have anything even close, but they have still picked up the gender thing more over time, y’know? jimmy’s more open to fucking with sear gender due to being a biologically different species from everyone sea grew up with, so yes, sear a man, but only in the ways that matter to sear, not everyone else (codfather vs codboy is partially a gender thing for jimmy. trust me. this is the voice of a person who thinks about this jimmy clip everyday.)

katherine:

katherine uses she/fae pronouns and is a trans woman. she’s 5’4”-5’5”, and has a very lithe and lightweight build so that her wings can actually support her body. those things are so small her bones have simply GOT to be light as hell. she has very long hair, coming to around her butt, that she spends a whole lot of effort on perfectly maintaining. fae presents very femininely, less out of a desire to pass and more because that’s just how fairies present in general, regardless of gender.

fairies have a concept of gender, though there’s a lot more nuance to it than human gender, with it being a wide spectrum rather than a binary. (obviously i am aware gender is not binary i am literally nonbinary but you know what i mean here). the fairies have just wildly different social hierarchies and systems going on, so their views on gender are a lot more complicated and tied into that. because fairies are also so tuned into magic, they’ve also got the closest we can get to medically transitioning in this universe. y’know the shrine that the wizard has in stardew valley that allows you to change your name, appearance, and gender, and nobody will ever comment on it and they’ll act like you’ve been like that the whole time? yeah that’s basically what katherine did as well. fae’s got her own gender she presents as to the fairies, but it has a similar sort of effect on non-fairies as well. no one remembers faer name before fae was katherine, for example, and she likes it that way!

shrub:

shrub uses he/she pronouns and is non binary. this is one of the most important ones on this list to me, to the point that i forget it's not canon and think people are misgendering shrub sometimes by accident, lol. shrub is the smallest of the cast by far, at 4'3", and is short and stocky. she is also fat btw. important for you to know this. his hair is quite short, mostly because he hates putting in more than the absolute basic amounts of work to keep it maintained. as such it never gets to be more than a bob. similarly, he defaults to shorts and pretty simple shirts because it's the easiest things to wear and run around in.

the closest things gnomes have to a gender binary comes in the form of pronouns. they don't have gendered pronouns like we do, but they do have different pronouns that are specifically used to signal what type of job the person in question holds. this means they have a ton of them, as you might expect, though there's obviously not one for every individual job, but rather groups. this also means that depending on the locale you're in or the dialect you're speaking in, what jobs correspond to what pronouns can vary a bit, for fun and profit. shrub is kind of aware of the human concept of gender, but her closest friends on empires are a fairy and a man who doesn't super care about all that, so the grasp she has on it is slim. as such, he doesn't lean particularly into any given presentation of gender, and defaults to he and she pronouns when asked because he likes the mouthfeel of them, honestly.

scott:

scott uses he/they pronouns and is nonbinary (though this is another one where the labels are weird). scott is tall for the emperors, at about 6'7", but actually pretty short for an elf. he is all limb, with very long arms and legs, and they're on the skinnier side. they also have the light bones thing i mentioned with katherine, but their wings are much more adequately sized, so it's not as intense. scott tends towards more masculine gender presentation, but in the ways elves are usually masculine in fantasy media. it's a very pretty and flowy masculinity that also sometimes includes skirts if you're scott, but only sometimes. also his hair is naturally blue. elves just have weird as hell hair colors (xornoth's hair is naturally magenta, for example).

elves simply live too long and are too generally disinterested in human matters to have human concepts of gender. that's a human problem, not theirs. due to scott's status as a diplomat and prince/king of rivendell, however, he's been engrossed in human life and culture his entire life, so he's very aware of the concept. this is doubly true for him specifically because every other emperor in his generation is also trans, and because the closet human empire to him growing up was the grimlands, which has the closest equivalent to real life strict gender roles. scott is well aware of the fact that he doesn't really have the same understanding of gender as his human friends, but he really wanted to fit in as a kid so he just started grabbing at things that they heard about from various humans they interacted with frequently. thankfully for him he gravitated towards nonbinary as a label very quickly, and he and they pronouns were just what everyone was calling him when he went places, and it didn't feel wrong, so, sure, why not?

(i'm not giving xornoth a whole paragraph due to the.... craziness, but xornoth is also nonbinary and uses he/they/it. when it was human, it defaulted to a more masculine presentation, such as growing facial hair, and never really going for skirts in the way scott does.)

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