Anghraine

She-Ra meets rambling (very rambling) personal/family angst:

So, I’ve mentioned that She-Ra was one of my first fandoms, for a loose value of “fandom.” I was too young for the original show itself (it came out a year before I was born), but my aunt wasn’t, and she gave me all her She-Ra books and figurines, which were the only superhero-ish things I ever loved. And I loved them with my entire five-year-old soul!

In fact, I loved them for several years afterwards, and only reluctantly surrendered the books/figurines when my aunt asked if I still had them. I wasn’t really ever a “now I’m Mature and the things I used to like are Cringy and Bad” person, so I retained a strong affection even when I was older and enjoying more advanced things.

As did my aunt, who is only five and a half years older than I am. She was like my cool older sister for a long time, even though we were very different people, and I vaguely associated this relationship with She-Ra in my head. Regardless, we played together, we shared clothes and toys, she taught me how to ride horses, etc, until we drifted apart.

That happened partly because five years was actually vast at certain ages, partly because my parents moved, but mostly because of our enormous differences in personality and interests. Still, I continued to think of her as Cool Big Sis until various things happened that led to her becoming much more insular and conservative, even for a pretty conservative family (my centrist parents are radical leftists by their standards).

The Bush administration kicked off around the time I started high school, and by the time I graduated, I was determined not to ever vote for any Republican for the rest of my life (I enthusiastically voted for Kerry in my first election and was baffled that so many people I knew hadn’t bothered or, worse, actually voted for Bush out of ~patriotism). End result: I’ve been a firm and reliable Democratic voter for sixteen years, while my aunt gets more far-right every year (…and day, it feels like).

And it’s like … she long ago ceased to be “cool” given that she’s become a raging bigot (by nearly all accounts more than she ever was before, so not just something I missed because I was a kid). She dismisses the racism my father experiences when she's not personally perpetuating it, she’s ~so much for the tolerant left~ about her homophobia (and I’m lesbian), she’s awful and goes off on these asinine screeds to my mother every. single. day. Like, she earnestly argued the other day that Kate Brown is an agent of Satan.

Meanwhile, back when the new She-Ra was about to come out, she heard about it and excitedly forwarded me the link. Whatever else our differences, it’s our thing!

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Back in January (of 2024!), I saw sqbr's fantastic post on gender, female characters, genderswap, and original female characters. It's here and it's great. A nuanced, complicated take on this kind of genderbending is basically a bat signal for me personally, and at first I was going to comment directly to them, but my response grew as I thought about it, so I figured I'd put my response here instead of spamming their blog. I've basically been thinking about it off and on for the last two months. If you're reading this, I'd advise you to check out their post.

So, backing up a bit: I've often found the genderswap/genderbending and original female character (OFC) discourses to be—well, in all honesty, incoherent, unfair, and deeply stupid most of the time. I feel like a lot of "the discourse" around these things is contingent on 1) a “why are we not about me” approach to gender and 2) a sort of internalized fandom hierarchy, especially with regard to original female characters vs canon female characters. As I see it, all characters are someone’s OCs. As a consequence, the framework in which female characters produced by a generally male or male-dominated creator/creative group should be considered more authentically female than female characters produced by fans who are very often actual women can seem profoundly unjust and also simply very strange.

For instance, I love a lot of the female characters in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time and would not argue that they aren't actually women. Moiraine Damodred is one of my favorite female characters in fantasy, partly because she's a woman in a role that goes to men most of the time. But the "fictional women created by a male author" vibe is intense and inescapable in these books. The idea that fans' OFCs reflect a less authentic femaleness than Jordan's powerful women getting sexily spanked over and over feels pretty bizarre.

And this extends to genderswap/genderbending, given that when influential people in Hollywood or the broader entertainment industry change a male character's gender to female (either the character was previously conceptualized as male in the creative process, or the work is an adaptation of a source in which the character was male), the same wing of fandom that condemns fannish genderbending tends to be completely supportive and to see the new version as a legitimate female character. We can see this with Ripley, Azula, Joan Watson, etc. And even going the other way, nobody seems to think Luke Skywalker is somehow not a real male character even though George Lucas kept changing his gender, or that there was anything wrong with Lucas doing that. The condemnations of genderbending cis male characters to female ones are pretty specifically about fans doing this, especially female fans.

That's a longer rant than I meant it to be, but the reason I bring it up is because this has always struck me as a baffling argument as well as an unfair one. But I think sqbr's post highlights an important distinction between arguments about characters' femaleness and arguments about characters' female characterness, if that makes sense. The ways in which female characters tend to be framed by the narratives they appear in shape our sense of what female characters are and what is desirable for them to be.

For me, M->F genderbending is partly about my own wobbly, weak sense of gender, but also partly an expression of affection. It's satisfying to give the kind of centrality and/or Very Special Boy treatment that my male faves typically get to a girl or woman, and to explore the ways in which the kind of frameworks typically given to male characters collide with generally patriarchal settings, all without sacrificing my fave. So, say, my female Luke Skywalker has to deal with The Space Patriarchy and with being Special and Important and centered in a way typically reserved for male characters.

And that's often a major part of the appeal of M->F genderbending for me—a female character getting the structural narrative benefits typically reserved for various kinds of male characters, but without fundamentally disrupting the structure of the cast as given in canon. So turning Luke into Lucy feels fundamentally different to me, and much more satisfying, than inventing, say, a female triplet to take his narrative place.

And this is basically the exact opposite motivation as the one described in sqbr's post, of relating to female characters because of the narrative framework typically given them. I don't think either of us are wrong, factually or morally, we just sometimes have different tastes in terms of how we do fandom and gender.

I do think they're very correct about how a lot of female characters who are kind of presented as badass or whatever by way of receiving traits often assigned to male characters don't hit the same note as female characters who are given the kind of narrative framing often assigned to male characters. And I also think sqbr is right that what we all get out of female characters, what we find appealing in them, or gratifying, or admirable (or cringey, reminiscent of painful RL experiences, an annoying trope given female form Yet Again, etc), is hugely variable between people in ways that can actually be entirely legitimate for those different people. I've known female SW fans, for instance, who couldn't latch onto Leia the way I did because of the ways she's sidelined by the narrative structure of the OT (particularly ROTJ). I think that's perfectly fine, actually, even though I don't feel the same.

In addition, I had some amorphous thoughts about how when canon female characters click for me, they tend to really click, which sqbr also discusses in their post. An easy example for me is Attolia Irene in The Queen of Attolia, whose experiences and choices are profoundly shaped by patriarchy and who is given the kind of messy sympathy and resourceful triumph that is often reserved for characters like Gen and who is beautiful in a way I personally find hot as a lesbian. I briefly thought about what f!Eugenides/Irene would be like—cool to be sure, but tbh I'm not that interested because I'm so invested in Irene specifically.

Sort of relatedly, I do find it annoying when there's a discussion going on about favorite female characters in a canon, especially a male-dominated canon, and people respond with canonically male characters "because he's a lesbian to me" or whatever. I’ll defend a lot when it comes to genderbending, but that’s not cool.

nycxi responded to this post:

Can you send me the article please 🤓

I replied:

It’s journal-locked at Project Muse, but if you have access, here’s the link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/592118

I just found a scholarly article on the homoeroticism of “Jolene” and my world got a little better.

An anon asked:

For the character meme: Ancalimë

Another fave!

1. Sexuality Headcanon: gayyyy

I feel an unexpected solidarity with straight men and other men attracted to women who play games as hot women, because I also do this!

I mean, I feel my, uh, tastes in hot women are rather better than many of theirs (to go by their character creation choices, lol), but I was thinking about how I make characters I find attractive and interesting more than characters I want to be, even if Who I Am As a Person bleeds through (I feel so bad about taking people's stuff, even if it's not marked as theft...). They're not really idealized Elizabeths.

At the same time, I was thinking about it some more, because I was talking with a (cishet male!) friend of mine about how he doesn't really get the link a lot of other men have between their sense of gender as men and their attraction to women—for him, these things feel completely separate. But that's not the case for me. Insofar as I have a sense of alignment with womanhood, it's tightly bound up in my attraction to women. I'm most comfortable presenting as wholly female when I can present as the kind of woman I find attractive. My "womannness" does feel pretty purely like an artifact of socialization and convenience, to be sure. But while being ... female-adjacent rather than female per se can feel a bit uncomfortable at times (I definitely don't feel like I have an internal, intrinsic gender, just a sort of affiliation by force of habit), I'm most comfortable with it in a specifically lesbian context.

IDK where this is going, just something I've been thinking about, mostly via BG3 and my disinterest in playing as someone with my own wobbly sense of gender.

actuallygomezaddams on Tumblr posted a screenshot of an ad gone wrong: one which started "How To Tell if a Guy Likes You" and in the second half, added "Causes & Risk Factors. Interesting Facts. Preventative Measures. Signs & Symptoms"

I reblogged it and tagged it #ancalimë

An anon on Tumblr asked:

this may be a super invasive ask but i'm having some ace issues of my own. feel free to ignore. as an ace lesbian, do you feel attracted to women you post a lot like holliday grainger? or do you just think she's aesthetically beautiful, like a mountain? is it somewhere in between?

I replied:

Oh, it’s okay.

I’d say somewhere in-between. It’s definitely distinct from what I feel about attractive men (which is very much of the mountain type). But it’s not quite the same as being attracted in real life, either—less visceral and more aesthetic, in most cases.

However, I’m grey-ace for one, so I do feel actual attraction once in a blue moon, and I’m autistic for another, so positioning myself wrt other people is difficult. My experience is probably different from what most ace lesbians feel—though I expect it’s always messy.

(Of course sexuality is complicated for everyone blahblahblah but for me, the ace/lesbian line is very fuzzy, since my preference for women colours pretty much everything.)