All Things Grow

renach4n:

ragestuck:

sharonabot9000:

valle-de-la-sombra-de-la-muerte:

Because people love to find ways to make characters “tortured” and “misunderstood” and “edgy”. Most other fandoms use plot elements like growing up in a bad neighborhood, abusive parents, beling bullied, or the pulling the fan-favorite closeted homosexual act on characters to pull this off.

Homestuck is the first I’ve seen to do the trans shit though. And to my knowledge the only one. I think this is because Homestuck fandom likes to be inventive and find new ways to make themselves even more of the asshole of the internet.

i have feelings about this secret i would like to express, awkward feelings. bear with me.

i think a lot of the transstuck content comes from actual trans fans, i think the ftm!dave thing originated from an actual ftm? i can’t remember. i think some of this comes from the issue of trying to find a relatable character. you notice that there are scarce few well-done trans characters if fictional works. homestuck has a lot characters known for being relatable on a wide variety of levels, but there are no characters canonically proven to be trans.

there is also a prominent trans* homestucker community on tumblr (from what i see), who probably haven’t seen an actual character like them before, or at least one done in such a way they can relate to them. when you look at the transstuck thing this way, this secret doesn’t seem all that relevant(or some other word i can’t think of right now). maybe they wish their beloved characters to feel the same pain they do, because few writers take up the cup to make a character that is truly for them?

this may not actually be they case after-all, but these are my observations on the subject, at least.

Holy fucking shit, a user with a lick of reason.

Someone pinch me.

Though I do have to add OP jumps to the conclusion that all trans* individuals have body dysphoria / all trans* character reinterpretations have said character experiencing dysphoria, which simply is not true.

As someone who is Trans* but who suffers next to no body dysphoria, most of my reason for doing trans* stuff with Homestuck and other series falls to the need to deal with someone similar to myself. And it’s not all about focusing on “Oh they’re trans*!” it’s having that be one part of who they are, and going from there.

I don’t think I can really explain how powerful an experience it was the first time I ran across fiction with a non-heterosexual character, much less how much Torchwood meant to me as one of the first times I saw anything with characters who were pan or bisexual. And that mattered because of how rare it was for me to know someone like that in real life. Online I made friends who were gay, or bi, or any number of things when I was a teen, but it really wasn’t until college that I meant anyone in real life that I knew was not heterosexual.

Even if media was doing things poorly at times, or I didn’t agree, it was at least acknowledged it by having it there. Having someone like you on TV can really help to affirm you growing up, or even as an adult, that yes you are not the only person like you out there. You are not alone. People like you exist.

Now take all of that and apply it to trans* people and just….. I know a very small handful of people online who are trans* and it was only two months ago, at the age of 23, that I met the first person IRL who was also trans* and I still need to work up the courage to say something to her about that. Bluh real life keeping me too busy for meetings, but yeah. 23 years can seem short from some points, but that is really fucking long from here.

So I write stuff with friends, and by myself, because I want to look at topics related to being trans* and explore that. And I’m not going to get that elsewhere, so fuck it I will carve out my own space if need be.

Because you know what? We do kind of live in a shitty world where you have bigots and idiots and it’s not safe for people, but even with all that I wouldn’t have wanted to be born as anyone but who I am. I’m happy to be trans* and any unhappiness is thanks to society, which frankly I won’t change for.

This also doesn’t say I never explore body dysphoria with characters, I do, and others do as well. As I said earlier stories are a way I love to poke at subjects and topics, to think about things. It’s a safe way to explore, because at the end of the day you are dealing with fictional characters, and the things they are going through are not something a real person is handling. You can look at a real problem, and try to think about it, in a removed way.

…..And all of this is me talking personally, as clearly I am very willing to talk about the subject as long as it’s online. This is what’s true for me, and something very different could be true for others.

I just know that I’m a bit sick of dealing with trans* in fandom being treated like the next lipstick lesbianism. A lot of OPs post bothers me, making a lot of very wide assumptions about why people touch on subjects like abuse and troubled pasts in fandom, but the trans* stuck hits the most. Yes some do do it just to be a special snowflake, but to make such a wide assumption that that’s the only reason? Ignoring people who do it to play with the topic, or because of past history, or as just a story point because why should those topics be off the table for everyone?

I’ll be happy for the day people can just write and draw, but I do not expect that day for a very very long time.

I’m about to be a lot less nice than you, Rena.

Thanks for treating my identity like a miserable burden, OP! It’s good to know that you wouldn’t wish my existence, as well as that of most of my friends, on anyone! It’s good to know that you think that being trans is the most awful thing that could happen!

And you’re dressing it up all, “Oh, I’m just worried about the poor trans people and how they suffer”, but you know what? Fuck you. The solution to people being discriminated against isn’t to do away with the oppressed groups, it’s to tell everyone else that bigotry is fucking wrong.

Some of us write trans characters because WE’RE TRANS. I know, this is a scary idea! Trans people? In MY fandom? Try to fucking adjust, though, and realize that we are people who enjoy things and sometimes even write or draw and sometimes? We want to see people like us.

Because we don’t, ever. Name one fucking trans character, OP. In anything that isn’t on the internet. Hard mode: name one trans character in anything that isn’t on the internet that isn’t specifically ABOUT trans people, where the fact that they’re trans isn’t necessarily a huge fucking deal.

Impossible mode: name one trans character in anything that isn’t on the internet, that isn’t specifically ABOUT trans people, where the fact that the character is trans isn’t a huge fucking deal, that also isn’t offensive, hurtful, or misinformed.

So yeah, we want to make characters trans. It’s not misery every goddamn second of the day. I do have dysphoria, sometimes it’s pretty bad, to the point where I have fantasized about radically mutilating my body, and I still manage to not writhe around in indescribable pathos all day. 

Come back and write about trans headcanons when you actually know something other than nasty Tortured Trans Person tropes, okay?

PS: Not a single character in Homestuck is confirmed for cis, so you can just bug right the fuck off.