ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A KNIGHT...

the visual inspiration for this was a combination of Frederic William Burton's Meeting on the Turret Stairs and also Bernardo Cavallino's The vision of St. Dominic receiving the Rosary from the Virgin

this was supposed to be just a one off illustration to get the thoughts out of my system, but then I started thinking about medieval politics and warfare and plagues and a castle and home as both a place of refuge, a prison, and a tomb, so perhaps they will end up as ex voto characters as well.

you may say, hey! that rosary looks like it has too many beads! it's a fifteen decade rosary, probably. dominicans are really into marian devotions. it works out.

also. spiral style stair cases. oh boy. it was that unexpectedly more difficult than I originally thought it would be to draw. the more I think about it, the less I understand them, even though I had a million photos of the stairs in front of me while I was drawing it.

⭐ I have a tip jar (ko-fi)!

⭐ and other places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app

"What sucks is they don't say why"

First of all, have a fucking guess why lesbians are saying they don't want to date trans-identified males. Think on it for a moment, perhaps the answer will come to you.

Secondly, you know what happens to lesbians if they do come right out and say why? You dox them. You dog pile them, remove their support system, destroy their communities. You call them TERFs and Bigots, you re-write their language to justify why they "should" be attracted to you. So maybe that's why they're keeping it to themselves.

Hope this helps.

good omens + textposts

From Aug 2022

Sliding in right before pride month ends with some old Blup sketches that I really liked.

[ID: 3 sketch illustrations featuring Barry and Lup.

The first sketch is Barry and Lup, with the trans flag wrapped around them. Barry is leaning in to press a kiss onto Lup's cheek.

The second sketch is Barry and Lup doing a fist bump, smiling.

The last sketch is a full body of Barry and Lup, out on a walk. They are holding hands and smiling at each other. Barry is holding a coffee cup in his other hand, while Lup is holding an ice cream cone. Lup's skirt has the trans flag colors.

End ID]

Also I’m open for sketch suggestions yall I’d be happy to draw Taz fanarts.

I like the general fandom trend to just take the plot of Hyrule Warriors as a loose guideline at best and just use the whole concept as a good excuse to get blorbos to interact across timelines, BUT I'm very disappointed that everyone is missing the comedic potential of a very specific squad of characters:

Young Link (aka Mask), who walks out of the nightmare of Majora's Mask and immediately gets portal kidnapped into a temporal war, takes one look at the whole mess and decides that you could not fucking pay him to admit to being the resident expert on Time Shenanigans. He introduces himself with the title of Hero of Termina, and definitely doesn't have any other ones, that would be crazy. Hero of Time? Never heard of him.

Tetra, who is a kickass pirate captain with zero patience for people trying to shove her into the Designated Princess role, and realizes immediately that Oh Fuck, this Hyrule has a lot of Ideas about how the Hero and the Princess are supposed to properly play their parts, the second they realize she's technically a Zelda they're gonna shove her in a goddamn dress and damsel her again, that's not happening. So she's definitely just a really cool pirate captain, nothing else going on here at all, definitely not the heir of the Hylian royal family in her time, that'd be crazy.

Ravio, who is literally just a palette swapped Link, meaning that the second his hood comes off, things are gonna get Awkward. There's no way in hell he's dealing with all that Hero baggage, that's Link work, so that giant bunny hood/mask is practically superglued to his head, and he's not taking it off for love or money.

Spirit Tracks Zelda, who is just in the Phantom Armour the whole time, and passing herself off as just a friendly ghost posessing a suit of armour to help the Hero of Spirits. Of course she isn't Princess Zelda, that's ridiculous, if she were a Zelda then people would start getting really weird about her technically being dead, and boy does that ever sound like a whole Thing she doesn't want to deal with, so she can't possibly be Zelda, she's just a nice ghost knight. Also, her teenage grandma is here, and that's kinda weird, so it's easier to just not admit to being royalty and avoid that awkward conversation.

Finally there's Sheik, who is not the Princess Zelda of the era straight up abandoning her war torn country for months at a time so she can risk her life in extreme cosplay for no clear reason, but is instead the actual Sheik from Ocarina of Time, who just beat Ganondorf like a month ago and is still trying to process what the fuck to do now. Also, he's been pretending to be a boy since he was ten, and is realizing there's a pretty good chance that he isn't pretending anymore, so that's a whole other can of worms. But for the last seven years of his life, being Princess Zelda meant certain death, so he's not really inclined to introduce himself like when in a new and stressful situation (not to mention he might actually just not be a girl named Zelda anymore), so he automatically introduces himself as just Sheik the spooky ninja man, and fuck he's in too deep to back out now, looks like he's committing to the bit. If you think you sense the Triforce of Wisdom on him, no you don't.

Cue shenanigans as the five of them attempt to hide that they're all actually kind of A Big Deal. The group motto is "Nobody says shit", which is usually delivered as a frantic hiss whenever someone slips up. Just the reunion between Sheik and Mask alone would be absolutely buckwild given how they parted, and how they're both frantically pretending to Not be involved with each other. For added hilarity and/or drama, Sheik gives his semi-bullshit cover story of having just been a friend of the Hero of Time, then runs into said Hero of Time and they both have to desperately pretend not to know each other, because if anyone picks up on the mountain of baggage between them then Mask is busted, and he won't hesitate to drag Sheik down with him out of sheer spite. Not to mention the weird balance of Sheik being used to this Link being a teenager that's actually a small child, and now has to adjust to Link who is a small child that's actually a teenager.

Also, i really feel like we're all missing out on the comedy potential of Ganondorf recognizing Young Link on sight and the two of them immediately launching into a grudge match with some extremely personal and specific insults on both sides. Meanwhile literally everybody else is just standing there watching, trying to process the fact that out of every single person that's been pulled out of time, Ganondorf only has personal beef with a literal nine year old.

I just feel like we're all really sleeping on the potential for Shenanigans here. The whole thing is an absurd mess, why not have some fun with it?

A frustrating development with the growing lack of reading comprehension I've personally noticed is an emerging fervor of insisting things aren't canon unless they are explicitly stated beyond all reasonable doubt.

I can not emphasize enough how harmful a mindset this is to have. Yes, it's wonderful to have characters outright say "I'm trans," but to deny a character's identity for not saying that is dangerous.

Plenty of real people prefer not to use specific labels. Historically, people didn't have our modern terms or modes of expression. Many modern cultures don't use these terms, either, and plenty of people within those that do can't safely openly identify.

If the only representation you accept as canon is within modern (and let's be honest, wealthy white able-bodied American) standards, then you are denying yourself and others a huge amount of representation and seriously limiting the media around you.

tradwife is a neogender for mostly cis people. change my mind

you say machete has to be closeted then why's he always wearing them little heels

Maybe he thinks he's a tiny bit nicer looking in them.

What if: the animorphs were trans

I think I've written most of them as trans before, but I could also see each of them having a different experience with trans-ness.

Jake: Would just not bother to start performing femininity? Like, he'd mean to get around to it some time, but then he'd be at puberty and still wouldn't have bothered. And it's just so much easier being a boy. It requires less mental effort. His brain just defaults to boy-ness, and anyway he's bored of this subject already and wants to get back to fighting yeerks now.

Rachel: Is not only the girliest girl ever to girl, but has read all the feminist theory. She has clear opinions on her name, her clothes, her earrings, her hormones, her makeup, her hair... This is a girl who gets gender euphoria from spending up to an hour crafting her look each morning, and will never be caught with lipstick that doesn't color-coordinate with her blouse. There are a lot of TERFs in her town who keep ending up mauled by grizzly bears, but that's not Rachel's problem. She hears it was some other grizzly doing all that.

Tobias: Arguably he's already genderqueer and/or trans in canon, but he'd be the polar opposite of Rachel when it comes to talking about gender. He just is a boy, okay? Except when he's not. And that's just how it is. His gender is hawk. And sometimes it's hork-bajir. And sometimes it's andalite. And sometimes it's human. And if you ask follow-up questions he's going to disappear up a tree and never interact with humanity again.

Cassie: She's happy in her own body. Overalls are comfortable, dresses are fun, and anyone who can't figure out her pronouns at a glance isn't her problem. Okay, that one guy (#14) who called her a "boy" deserved to get kicked in the face, which is why she kicked him in the face. But everyone else trying to figure out her gender has their own problems, and she's not here to solve them.

Ax: Again, arguably not-cis in canon (his human body is implied to be intersex) but he'd be gung-ho about his gender just like Rachel. Andailte masculinity doesn't line up with human masculinity (e.g. Elfangor's comment about how Real Boys don't like STEM), so it'd be a lot of Ax Doing Boy Things in a way that doesn't make sense to Americans. But if gardening or sharpening his tail or refusing to learn math is what Ax is feeling, his friends aren't likely to question it.

Marco: ???? TBH I'm stumped. He both pulls genderfuckery (having long hair, being a clothes horse, going in drag in #51) and obsesses over being masculine enough. Him being the resident bicultural bisexual probably has something to do with it, but...??? Other fandalites, send help.

no but really the focus on pronouns Determining Actual Gender And Having Unique Social Roles in lgbt spaces is absolutely bizarre and beyond any form of basic material analysis of gender it exists in the real world. like speaking from experience you can literally be a stone butch lesbian who goes out of ur way to exclusively dress in traditionally masculine clothes, who uses a masculine name, who intentionally and explicitly plays a complex and deeply nonconforming gender role as both social performance art and for personal fulfilment, and then get lumped in by other lgbt people in the category of "she/her type" (and, more broadly, if you use she/her and are afab, you inevitably get labeled as 'cis' regardless of your actual gender performance as interpreted by the world writ large) just because you dont care enough about pronouns to determine and enforce the use of any others for yourself

I love it when bitches make nico di angelo disabled and a little bit transgender

Gender Tournament: Final Round!

Tournament master post

Drawing this while listening to the Forrest Gump original soundtrack extended this by about seven panels.

It’s gender-swap because I felt like it. I’ll stop the day the concept stops being fun, fight me.

More Eden squad comics coming soon! (Bill is now incorporated in them because all of you and your good ideas)

New oc time :D

They dont have a name yet but will think of something eventually

I love mer preds but i dont see any octopus ones!And i need to get better at drawing tentacles anyway soooo ye take em -

Was watching a ContraPoints video (popular trans lady YouTuber) on some gender philosophy and got to thinking about trans girl Ani nuances.

OKAY SO: Contrapoints makes a comment in the video (transcript here) that she views herself as a boy who became a woman, not a girl who didn't realize it yet, which is a relatively uncommon approach among trans people, and that's in the middle of a longer discussion on the flaws in radfem theology (which I watched right after this PhilosophyTube video, and accidentally conflated the two since the former talked a lot about systems/structures of gender).

Anyway, I'm rotating that in my mind with regards to Anakin, who grew up in a setting that could easily be interpreted as having a much foggier distinction between Man and Woman than between Slave and Maste,r or human and twilek, etc.

It's entirely feasible that, on Tatooine in particular, the social elements of gender came down to very practical concerns (reproduction) and very superficial signs (e.g. hairstyle could maybe broadcast intended gender, and who wears skirts) outside of the specific situation of highly gendered and sexual forms of slavery (Jabba's dancing girls), which was relatively rare compared to more standard forms, like shop work or janitorial or what have you.

So you have an Anakin who grew up in a setting where "am I a girl?" isn't necessarily a question that would have the same answer as in another setting with more defined gender distinctions, in terms of both expression and role, and of the matter of identity at that confluence.

Then he--still he, at that time--meets Padmé and the handmaidens (very feminine, very girl, but not in a way that's at all like the way women on Tatooine willingly engage with), and encounters Coruscant culture (lots of gender dynamics due to the culture mash, but a low-key Western Misogyny vibe in the Senate and other non-Jedi settings Anakin's liable to encounter), as well as the Jedi classes on gender and sexuality and respecting/navigating those parts of culture on other planets.

As a result, Anakin starts developing a new, more nuanced and expansive understanding of gender, where it's more than just a few small differences, and the people around are mostly Jedi, who are also pretty dang open to nontraditional gender approaches etc And Anakin sort of… grows into wanting to be woman? In a way that isn't the usual "I always knew I was a girl" and more of an "I've learned what people consider a girl, and I'd like to be one."

And like. Ani COULD go back to thinking of gender in Tatooine terms, but why bother? Being a girl makes her happy. She wasn't unhappy as a boy in that gender framework, but she's happy as a girl now.

But because she didn't mind being raised a boy, she might say things a "when I was a boy" or "back when I was still living as a boy"

Me every time I hear a new, interesting take on gender: How can I apply this to a fictional character?

Also tbf this settles pretty well with my general thoughts on nb Anakin as well, where gender is like… It Sure Is A Thing That Exists. Anyway, Where's The Blasterfire?