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And yet transphobes can write about witches, with unfortunately great success.
honestly it’s kinda fitting. if witches were real you just know that harry potter would be a total bastardization of their culture and practices
just like all the real cultures depicted in harry potter as total bastardizations
and add a little anti-semetism and racism into mix in her books.
“You were a fool to challenge me. No mortal man may do me harm.”
stabbing my thigh with Estradiol “I. AM. NO. MAN!”
transing my gender back and forth like ikaruga to bypass the final boss’s multiple layers of mortal-man-proof and mortal-woman-proof armor
Daughter: Mom, Dad. I’m… I’m a girl.
Dad: MOTHERFUCKING FAIRIES! Not you honey, sorry I didn’t mean to yell. You’ve done nothing wrong.
My mom once got told by a psychic that she’d have a boy and a girl. But then they corrected themself in confusion that she’d have another girl sometime later, and that something was different/special about this correction that they couldn’t fully make out.
Turned out to be very true…
Not that I believe in that stuff but it’s a neat little anecdote this reminded me of.
Opposite story, parents stressed out about a prophesy/curse that will kill their daughter at her 16th birthday, and he comes out as trans and the parents are relieved.
We’re cooked chat.
In the short story White Water, Blue Ocean by Linda Raquel Nieves Perez, the protagonist’s family suffers from a curse where the women can’t lie, and the men can’t fall in love.
Except the protagonist is nonbinary, so she doesn’t have either affliction.
Haven’t read it, but I love the premise. I think it would be better if they had both though.
I can’t say I fully understood the story, but I think thematically it played a bit with the resentment some people feel towards the LGBTQ community for “playing outside the rules.” Their elderly family kept misgendering them, etc.
I think more restrictions on the protag. does make for a “better” story, often.
However, the curse-as-social-gendered-bonds analogy fits much better if they are excluded from both spheres. (From what I’ve heard; I don’t have any experience as nonbinary.)
Yeah, like I’m imagining an epic where the MC goes on a quest to find a way to love, and has to play clever word games with monsters and villains because they can’t lie. And at the same time is a slightly more bumbling John Wick character because they have trouble with empathy due to the lack of loving relationships, but they can’t quite pull off the slaughter that he can. They don’t know exactly what they want, but they can see the contrast between the lives of the people who love and care about it, and the people that don’t. And they meet friends and allies that have all flavors of loving relationships, before eventually managing to raise the curse. Details and BBEG are left as an exercise for the writer lol
I’m not non-binary either, but it sounds like a sweet premise, and I’d read the hell out of it. You’re probably right about the analogy though.
Enby here, and yeah the analogy is almost spot-on. It’s only missing a weird emphasis on everyone else’s assumption that one of the curses would apply to them, and their grappling with the choice to either exploit or correct those assumptions in various circumstances.
If you’re interested in the story, it can be found in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023. It came out right after Roe flipped, so a lot of the stories cover gender related issues.
Wait, wait, wait… You can lie? But… Wait. Who is the sociopath in the relationship?
I mean, like, the only unisex bathroom at work is a 5-minute hike down three floors from my desk but there’s a gendered restroom less than 30 seconds away. I can exploit the fact that everybody assumes my gender incorrectly to use the more convenient facilities and nobody but me cares.
Well, that’s a pain in the ass. Sorry you’ve got to deal with that.
The Buffy reboot should do something like this with a character. That’d be nice
I thought one of the twins in the comics was male …
Yes, Fray’s brother was male, and split the Slayer ability suite with her.
In the Supergirl tv show, there’s a hero called Dreamer. Basically, the powers are passed down from mother to daughter, and while everyone accepts Dreamer as a girl, they’re surprised when she inherits the powers and not her sister.
I think there is a villain in the Flash series that’s played by a trans women and (iirc) she has gender bending powers
The Desert Prince by Peter V Brett.
Intersex (and gender fluid) but same deal.
I want to read that book.
I have $5 I’m willing to chip in for an author, if anyone wants to start a crowd fund?
Hell, make it $50. It’ll have to wait until payday though…
I would read the shit out of this.
lmk if you find an author, id read it
I doubt she’s in need of commissions, but Charlie Jane Anders could write the hell out of that premise.
Came for the recs, stayed because $50 is $50.
Eh, I’ve had ideas in my head similar to this, percolating around.
I’ve done retelling of Cinderella through trans lensing as a bedtime story, and have kinda sketched it out for eventual writing down in detail, but I’ve got three projects ahead of it that are going really slow because that’s how I write: slooooooow.
This specific idea is a good one, but I think it would work best as a short story rather than a longer form. Maybe novella length at most. I can kinda see the layout of the story, and without a very clear vision of what happens after they’ve stepped into their prophecized role, it would fall apart past that point.
So it would be best served as a story with an open ended finish rather than a conclusion. That’s not something that satisfies most readers. They don’t think “and Rebecca walked out the castle gate, sword in hand” is an ending. But that’s what the natural ending of this idea is. Once the girl is her full self, it’s just another fantasy trope unless you’re really careful, and even then wouldn’t sustain very well without some serious passion on the part of the author.
This is, in the vaguest sense, similar to how Dreamer worked in the Supergirl show, just with less acceptance by her family. Not familiar enough with the character to know if that’s true outside of the show as well.
This sound like some Margaret Killjoy level stuff.
Bridget in Guilty Gear XX
