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i need to catch up on your fics but i am chin hands about trans fem gerry. i remember you talking about it before but id love to hear any new or updated thoughts :0
some of it would be spoilers for the PBR epilogue so i'm going to keep that to myself until then, but! ultimately i just was thinking about the fact that he uses she/her pronouns and enters Girl Mode in his happiest moments, his most intimate and vulnerable moments with people he trusts to love him, and what that says about his actual state of being outside of those moments. it means he's not fully happy or comfortable, there's something holding him back, which i've gathered is a fairly common feeling.
he's still got an attachment to being A Son specifically it's just rooted in his being but look me in the eyes and tell me that ever made him feel safe in his own body or head or surroundings. y'know? there's spoiler territory there with that part of the discussion though so heehee.
(not that long i just don't want everything stretching the dash where i might not be able to edit it later)
i do think she's always going to identify himself as a fag though which is also pretty common because things are more complicated than they are binary and he's always a color wheel understander. his gender is faglady but realistically her gender is also just nothing you could comprehend if you're not open to contradiction. you can't expect him to fit into neat little boxes, she just won't do it, it's not anybody else's business but his.
so. transfem gay man is probably still where he's at in general at this point in time in my writing but as time has gone on his egg has increasingly cracked lol it's just a matter of like... what's going on in his life, who she's with, how safe he feels being herself. as of right now, she saves herself for tim and tim is nothing but reverent about it and i could go ON about how her sex life goes hand in hand with her gender but i don't want to flood the dash with BDSM discussion LOL even though i have thoughts for MILES about it. i talked a bit about it in the link above iirc. it's incredibly soft and meaningful and also, crucially, sexy. but mostly it just makes her feel so incredibly safe and desired and respected and these are all things that were previously missing from her life in such a huge way, like.
look at his life. look at the life he's lived and tell me he's ever been fully happy playing the role he was put in. the expectations his mother had of him, that gertrude had of him, the way he was expected to obey and sacrifice and even hurt people at times because that's just how the world works, right.
well, he's never wanted to participate in that way of living! and he only did it as a survival mechanism because where else could he go but always come back home to mary and her dreams for him which were always just an extension of herself, he was nothing to her but an extension of herself and her wants and her beliefs and he was anything but that, even when he tried to blend in. half the time he measures his life from injury to injury. his whole life felt like nothing but punishment and for a long time he wouldn't even know what for.
it can be such a transgender narrative if you look at it. the repression that he'd have had to deal with is insane even if you look at how loud and proud he is about his sense of style (which is extremely queer in and of itself.)
and i also just do not buy transmasc gerry i'm so sorry you can absolutely have that HC if you want and i will not attack you for it but look at him. listen to him. and also remember that eric, who died when gerry was 2 years old, referred to him as his son. sorry but that to me says he's amab because He Was Un Bebe. also in what WORLD would mary be a supportive parent to a trans kid. she literally insists on calling him by his full birth name that he DOESN'T LIKE BEING CALLED; classic trans thing! he canonly has a PREFERRED name. a preferred androgynous name!
it just makes more sense to me that he's transfem. i don't believe he has a desire to be all that traditionally masculine. he literally is so gnc in canon and his whole life just reads to me as "person who did not get the chance to fully embrace themselves because everything was just too damn hard." i also enjoy depicting people transitioning later in life, because it's never too late! it's NEVER too late to embrace who you are and work out who you've wanted to be for a long time.
i think he still lives in ambiguity and grey areas and blindspots. it may not have even occurred to him that she wanted to transition until later in life anyway because life never slowed the fuck down for him enough to let himself ask the questions! but he knew he wanted his hair long. he paints his nails. he wears eyeliner and dangly jewelry and alt clothes and yeah, cis people can do that, but it's also a way to flag! a very strong way of flagging! these are all the things that felt right to him in canon and no one stays that alt into their thirties without a little bit of gender going on somewhere in the mix, be serious, y'know? g-d. i'm so invested forever in gerry's gender jfhbnkjn.
he doesn't like labels, he really doesn't. and she might not ever call herself a woman as much as a lady in particular but she likes the phrases "good girl" and "princess" in bed, she likes being seen as feminine in comparison to a partner, she has feminine preferences. she would probably use more reclaimed slurs to refer to herself than i'm comfortable just tossing around but like, a lot of people prefer those as identifiers than "man" or "woman" like i refer to myself as a fag dyke all the time and it's more affirming to me than trying to decide if i'm a trans guy or if i'm a butch dyke At All Times. gender can be complicated! i think it IS complicated for gerry at the moment with his baggage but i imagine if he were ever able to really let go of that baggage, she'd be a very different, happier person. i think she would like it to be simpler sometimes. she treats it simply even if other people might not be able to. she's really calm about all of it, and even as it changes, it just makes her confidence grow. really comes down to the people she's surrounded by and the opportunities that she manages to grab a hold of in terms of finally letting herself just be. and i just think the results of it are really gorgeous.
anyway transfem gerry truther forever
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Ronologue
As I was scrubbing the last plate this afternoon, a sharp pain flared up in my lower back. I set the plate down in the sink half soaped up, grab my back and went looking for a chair to sit down on. Our landlord has disallowed all domestic help from coming into the building right now, any other kind of help, food delivery people, UrbanClap folk, all have been asked to stay away for the time being.…
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DANNY GOING 💥 ANON HERE. HEWWO. I AM SO GLAD THIS ISN'T CANON
this is perhaps??? the 8th time im rewriting this??????????? but i keep coming back to it. you're one of my favourite authors period so i HAD to just fuckging. absorb all of this so i could process it correctly.
okay okay so
1. widower tim breaks my fucking heart. like really there is no way to properly convey this to you over the screen. like. his whole thing is love, right? it's why he's the witness in literally every iteration of the gtcu. so for him to have to actually Witness gerry's death and be the most broken i have seen him across three aus where the world ends in every one of them breaks me. beyond belief. you and ren made him my favourite (next to danny) and then some. waugh
1b. 'a spire in the fog' A LIGHTHOUSE WITHOUT A LIGHT, YOU COULD SAY?
1c. i don't remember the ronologue it was exactly but it said that marriage wasn't a serious consideration but wife is a nickname that gerry loves?
2. pink is jon's honesty colour. he is wearing a pink kurta. i am going to sob.
2b. the description of the sunny day that gerry died on makes me wail.
3. MELANIE'S EVERYTHING. I LOVE HER SO MUCH. I LOVE LOVE LOVE THE IDEA OF HER MAKING A MEMORIAL VIDEO FOR GERRY FEATURING ALL THE STATEMENT GIVERS WHO WE HELPED. TIMOTHY HODGE. CAROLINE. CALLUM.
4. divishah and the cocoa. god. actually rewinding a little to say that i made it to 'no more estrogen' before crying. sasha did lose a sister!!!! HER BROTHER DIED AND SO DID HER SISTER. FUCK
4b. okay back to the cocoa. that was really kind of her to come all the way down to the archives just to bring them all a treat i love her so much.
4c. SASHA LIKE. REVERSE WITNESSING TIM? IDK HOW TO EXPLAIN IT BUT GOD. GOD GOD GOD /pos
4c(i) sasha and tim's sections ending the same then danny's ending as the inverse of that. they are the siblings 4ever.
5. DANNY. DANNY!
5b. okay i am really fucking pleased because i think i figured out a through line here. I will put it in a second ask because i need to back (9th time now!) to make sure i am correct so i will leave my miscellaneous observations here
danny only names himself in his dialogue once he recalls coming back when gerry can't
he calls himself the bull and Martin the tamer like how the contortionist did
tim standing in the doorway and blocking him out reminds me of hlm when danny comes to tims house the first time and tim refers the black out curtains he had to get bc of jon's stalking? that's like. the loosest connection ever lmao but it's a parallel and it hurts. (warm and solid vs cold and intangible...)
seconding this by the description of tim's eyes being the same way as the 'nothing. and nothing hurt' that keeps popping up in rtd.
also thanking you for letting danny cry? that sounds weird but it's nice to see a moc that just. is allowed to let it out. i am rotating him (all of them really) in my head
BOOM ANOOOON i'm so glad to see you! you really did just Infiltrate My Brain with that ask and i got completely overtaken and it feels like it's been more than 5 days ngl. thank you So much for the inspiration, i did have a lot of fun with this exercise, it was a challenge to kill my favorite LOL.
cracks knuckles here we go
1. widower tim breaks MY heart! "his whole thing is love, right?" you GET IT! his whole thing IS love! i can't see him as anything other than the witness at this point, even if pbr!witness is extremely different and Much Wetter than the original rtd!witness. him witnessing gerry's death in here is actually just fucking awful because he'd subsist on it in a very specific way; the arrangement renders it a suicide just as much as a murder. writing him this broken was so painful but so satisfying djhfkjdf tim is a worthy favorite to have! he's always been my favorite of the original archives crew, if it wasn't Blatantly Obvious by how much we center him LMAO.
1b. a lighthouse without a light.... you're krilling me, boom anon. shrimply krilling me.
1c. i believe it was the one about gerry being a transfem gay man!
2. pink! is the jon honesty color! yes!!!! he's been quite forthright this whole time i think, they're all really just. wondering what the point would be in anything else.
2b. i neeeeded that anachronism there so badly, just. it's a bright summer day! it's never actually raining or dreary when things like this happen (unless you recall that it was raining in venice when tim was drowned. that time it rained.) but generally, the world goes on. i think... i also just wanted that sunny day to be a little reminder of the kind of person gerry was at his core. symbolism etc etc.
3. i was SOOOO STUMPED ON MELANIE for a WHILE before i remembered she was a youtuber and then i exploded on the spot. her video is titled "the long overdue absolution of gerard keay" and she works for six months to make it perfect and it gets a lot of bad attention and skeptics but mostly condolences and maybe even a few people who had their own experiences but didn't recognize who he was until they saw a picture of him smiling. she'd include selfies they'd taken together as proof of her knowing him. i'm crying a little.
4. sasha losing a sister is a phrase i had a hard time with because there are so many ways to read it, like. that was her best friend's wife, and so kind of her sister that way, but also just. a sister. no more estrogen. no more joy.
4b. divshah is a sweet and thoughtful little bee girl and i am so sorry to her forever because people definitely make fun of her but GERRY NEVER DID! GERRY NEVER DID!
4c. sasha reverse witnessing tim GUHHHH yep! yep! her whole corruption thing is about grief, too, it crosses lines! they all have to do with loss in one way or another!
4c(i). YES YOU NOTICED THE INVERSE YESSSS my work here is complete
5. DANNY INDEED! FUCK!
5b. 9 times jhbfkjnfkjn wildman! i'm crying again!
observations:
YES I AM SO GLAD YOU NOTICED THAT TOO i didn't want him to name himself much in his pov section but i needed to use it there and GUH. you are the most observant and you made my night jdfhbdk
always comes back to the bullfighter and the bleeding man dunnit
that's a fun connection to make tbh!!!! i was saying to ren today "you know what'd Suck the most? if tim didn't even let him in the house and they just talked in the doorway" and they were like "then you have to do it. if it sucks the most that's what you have to do." and YEP! it sucks the most to me!!!! for precisely that reason!
tim's eyes also hurt me like hi mr. spooky man maybe work on that a little bit please g-d you're gonna scare a small child like that. very good connection to rtd though you are NAILING IT and i am over the MOON.
danny crying is extremely important to me for that reason too yes g-d. like. all the other men cried in this, too (especially tim YIKES, MAN) but something about letting danny just weep openly and in such a human way felt like. g-d he's needed this for such a long time. so much longer than anybody is able to count. he needed to let that out and be held through it and he needed to accept that comfort and it's not the first time, really! i try not to be too restrained with letting characters cry because there are a thousand reasons that somebody might like, feel good about seeing it just play out naturally and without shame.
thank you so much for your observations and your enthusiasm and just, everything, jfhbkjnfkjn gosh WOW thank you!
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Recently I've been thinking about writing a fic where a character is very suddenly injured and becomes disabled (something with the knee most likely), and I was wondering if you had any tips on how to write this respectfully. I have a cognitive disability and some minor physical stuff, but nothing to the same degree as what I want to write, and you always handle disability very well in your writing. (I'm thinking around the same injury severity as Jon's in tsp)
hey hey! first off, sorry this took a couple days, it's - surprise - the disabilities LOL. second, ahhh! i have a strangely warm feeling about this ask, so i'm happy to help however i can.
there's actually not too much to say! i've already written a big long meta about incorporating disability into writing, but i don't know how much of that one answers your questions, so i'll give an updated rundown on some more thoughts i know i've had pretty recently, too! you unlocked a really happy infodump, i actually love this topic so much and am very passionate about it so i'm excited to share!
the first question you should always ask yourself is "for whose sake are you telling this story?" ren talked about that concept in an ask about writing abuse dynamics, but the concept still stands. if you're telling the story of somebody else, you have to first ask yourself Why you think you should, what good is going to come of it, and be conscious of internal biases that may creep through it if you're not careful.
examine your work for trends or subconscious intention of writing disability for angst/whump purposes, so that someone else can cuddle the poor baby who got hurt and make them all better. one of the tag replies on this recent post talks about it some from the perspective of disabled people who see it in media, and how frustrating that can be! it's really painful sometimes, to see something that you live with and cannot take off at will be used as fuel to either get somebody off (really happens), or push the idea that love will cure you if you're lucky enough to find someone who doesn't mind that you're sick or hurt.
that is 100% bullshit! love and support are MASSIVELY important components to any healing process, yes, but it is Not a cure-all and should never be treated as the answer to any of this. someone approving of or loving you despite What You Lack is not romantic, it's not healthy, it's not okay to push. that's the top thing i'd warn you away from, personally.
also, don't get super graphic about the injury, necessarily? you say you were thinking maybe the severity of jon's knee injury in TSP, which is a pretty standard dislocation where most of the damage came from compression of nerves and tendons when it got stuck out of place. i honestly was scared of going too hard on that one even just by saying he could see the misalignment through his pants! that's my own nerves, but i can say looking back it wasn't actually that bad all things considered and you should be safe describing the most obvious sensory details if it comes up.
it's the grieving period after that matters most, i think. handling that with care is important, which means being honest without going too far, OR sanitizing it to a saintly degree.
when you get hurt like this, you DO grieve the things you used to be capable of that you might not be anymore. it's an adjustment! it's changing the way you live your life. even if you somehow managed to undo every ounce of internalized ableism you can and don't devalue yourself because of it, the limitations WILL be frustrating and at times painful. missing opportunities, needing accommodation that may or may not even be accessible, new hoops to jump through with doctors or transportation or seating at shows or events, all of that can weigh you down.
example: i had to bring my rollator to a wedding recently, which is a walker with wheels and a seat (which is very annoying to get on planes, might i add.) it wasn't my family! but i had to sit in the front row on the very edge, next to the bride's 86 year old grandfather who was Also sitting on his walker. being only 25 and already thinking that some people there might be looking at me sideways for needing the same accommodations as an 86 year old man, that i was making a "big deal" out of it just by being there, was something i had to work through in my head and get used to. it was a beautiful wedding! and not a single soul was unkind to me. but the little comparisons you make in your head when it's you, when you feel like you're being scrutinized, DO matter and exist.
so, consider what changes your character has to make to their life! what mobility aids might they use? cane, crutches, walker, rollator, wheelchair. how often? in what circumstances?
a lot of people who use mobility/stability aids are partial users! many of them can stand or walk or shuffle short distances, or even moderate ones, but keep their mobility aids nearby for emergency or precautionary purposes. i personally keep my rollator in my car for when i go to unfamiliar places when i'm not sure if i'll be able to sit down on short notice, but i don't need it around the house or on small errands to places i frequent enough to feel confident in. recently, i haven't even been taking it out at all! and i'm about to have spine surgery in two weeks. you have good days and bad days.
more examples: my latest chapter of PBR had a lot of focus on jon and adelard's respective disabilities and how strenuous activity pushed them to and past certain limits, which impacted the "action" scenes quite a bit!
that's something a lot of writers do feel worried about when they consider giving their characters a disability. some will even erase or lighten up the limitations they've previously established for convenience so that their character can get through an action scene that they technically shouldn't. of course you want your character to at least SURVIVE! so, find another way to get them through it that doesn't involve magically being healed for about an hour while shit is hitting the fan.
like i said in that older disability post, i was worried about this with gerry, too! and guess what? he's DEFINITELY going to be a partial wheelchair user by the 4th out of 7 fics, and more or less permanently by the very end of the story. i feel comfortable spoiling that because i'm not shy about the things he's dealing with and quite frankly, i'm excited to get to the point where he finally gets it because i just think he's EARNED it for christ's sake. it will make his life so much easier, even if running might not be feasible anymore.
in that last chapter, jon and adelard have to go down the stairs because there is no lift in the institute. elias not having a lift there has been a problem of the ableism variety since the first installment, that everyone is aware of and feels powerless to change. jon used to willingly have a routine where he'd go up to the library every day before work as a "substitute" for the PT he hasn't been doing in years, but since moving to the basement, that's like two extra flights, so he can't do it as often. and that's just everyday stuff!
with this? he's in a lot of pain by the end, he's going to need to be on bed rest for a while to just recuperate from the strain he put himself through by running up and down the stairs (counts) about 6 consecutive times in less than an hour. he's exhausted, and the only reason he pushed himself was because lives were literally on the line and adelard was even less equipped to handle the same work as him, being older and relatively new to functioning with a prosthetic leg.
so, sure! he DID it. but does that mean he could do it Every Day just because he did it Once? that he could do it without Consequence? hell no. not for a second!
the key word here IS "consequences." yes, disabled people often DO find themselves in situations where they have to push themselves past what they feel secure doing, and maybe they CAN get home in one piece, but that just means the aftermath is going to play an important role in what comes next. sometimes you'll need to be in bed for days on end to recover from something like that, or something even less severe than the above example. i know i have, before. depends on the injury, the disability, the strain.
the point is, if you need your disabled character to go beyond what they should be doing, make sure you take care of them afterwards; either by Literally having them physically recuperate, or by acknowledging the problems that come with not being able to, and making sure you respect that they cannot go on like that forever. eventually there WILL be a crash, and it can either be handled with awareness and intent in-story, or it will sneak up on them later and bite them in the patootie. eventually, your body forces you to rest.
the other thing is that this stuff doesn't just happen once. with a chronic disability, it's always a risk. be mindful of that as you plan out the situations they're going to get into! actually incorporating these things into the narrative will honestly make it feel more real than just brushing it aside so that things go "smoothly." people who experience these things themselves will appreciate it a lot more than wish fulfilment, in my experience.
now, you say you have minor physical stuff, and i'm not going to make assumptions about YOU when i say that often times, we downplay our own experiences because we think we can't possibly have it "as bad" as other people, so i'm pretty willing to give you even more express support.
writing about these things can often be an avenue towards realizing, "oh, wait. i DO actually feel this, and it's not really, uh. something i should sit on." i know that writing characters with EDS before i even realized i had it was a part of me eventually seeing a doctor, and i actually got it put on paper recently. shock of all shocks! it resonated with me for a reason.
if you're drawn to disability narratives in a way that feels far more personal than how some people are drawn to them for the torture porn (and you clearly know the difference, given that you're asking how to write it respectfully) then it's worth sitting with yourself and really assessing how you feel about your body and what things maybe shouldn't be so hard for you to do.
definitely refer back to the first meta i linked up there for some slightly more formal tips on how to frame things when you start tying them in, but i think you're already on the right track with being respectful! realism is respectful, and so is drawing lines between that realism and being overly graphic. listening to disabled people and taking them seriously is essential, and you're already doing that. giving disabled characters a support network is fabulous and you should do it, but don't infantilize them or Cure Them With Love.
and don't think TOO deep on it! you can psych yourself doing that, it's really easy to let the fear of messing up keep us from even trying. i think a knee injury like you describe is NOT a super inflammatory topic to be tackling, and you should be absolutely fine imo. a lot of people write characters getting brutally and supernaturally injured all the time and don't pay NEAR enough attention to the lasting effect some of those wounds might have in the long run, so the fact that you're taking so much care with something more ordinary and common is a good sign that you're going to navigate well going forward.
best of luck! thank you again for the patience, and for asking :'-)
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i think i’m finally snapping
some of you guys seriously listened to this entire podcast and made it to episode One Hundred And Ninety-Three and are still missing the point this badly, huh. you really made it This Far and have never questioned what the actual story is trying to say? to the point where you’ve somehow managed to dismiss a core component of it by almost completely negating the writer’s clear intentions?
this reveal was part of the completion to an ongoing allegory; it was representing the cyclical nature of capitalism and how heavily nepotism plays into that. the fact that og!elias was always just another facet of the main problem in the show was showing yet another root of the system. he was predisposed to this. it’s on purpose.
if you listened to that episode and were like “is for me? 🥺 👉👈” then, yeah, it clearly was. but not in the way you seem to think! this wasn’t meant to comfort you. if you Relate to this, it was meant to make you uncomfortable. and if it didn’t, well. leave it to the pissed off working class to fix that for you. allow me.
check out this post by @thedreadvampy for a more nuanced explanation of specifically what elias and jonah represent in terms of british class politics. i’m going to be a little broader about the implications of how hurtful the fandom’s interpretations of it i’m seeing are even from an american perspective.
by intentionally go out of your way to woobify this type of backstory and behavior, you are not only showing your entire ass but you’re missing. the. point. he represents nepotism and hereditary wealth. he represents rich white guys getting into higher positions due to their preexisting status and not their work ethic and qualifications. he represents things being handed to people who didn’t even consider wanting it beyond wanting to be at the top of some kind of food chain, and that is it.
“gifted kid burnout” is NOT applicable here — unless you are feeding into the way that phrase has been twisted from “an examination of overwhelming academic stress put on unprepared adolescent minds” and turned into “a flimsy, transparent, and largely white excuse for any situation that requires you to apply critical thinking when you don’t feel like putting forth the effort & a desperate attempt at clinging to a wrongly applied idea of superiority.”
if that’s what you mean by it, then yeah, sounds about right. but i’m not seeing anybody say it like that. i’m seeing people operating under that warped definition because they see themselves in him, but don’t seem to get what it is they’re actually seeing.
this reading of these characters is indicative of a basic ignorance to privilege and the fact that many of you have it, and have never had to examine it in a serious setting. yeah, this is a fandom for a piece of media that “isn’t real” except that it IS real. it’s direct commentary about a real thing and by actively dodging the Point you are effectively alienating everybody else here who is now exposed to your garbage.
you are outing your allyship as performative. you are advertising just how out of touch with reality you are, and you can’t throw a tantrum when people bring that to your attention. if someone brings it to your attention, it’s usually because they trust you Just enough to hope that you’ll put down your pride for a second and try to listen to them.
so if you take “you’re doing x harmful thing” as a personal attack on an intrinsic part of your character that you can’t do anything about, you need to think about why you identify a particular form of bigotry as a core part of your being. why don’t you want to question yourself? why don’t you want to let it go? what are you holding onto?
ask yourself these questions. if marginalized people aren’t exempt from examining their own internalized biases (from being raised in a society meant to cater to you,) then you damn well aren’t excused from the lesson.
poor people and POC in particular don’t want to have to see your FREEZING cold takes flooding the tags and the dashboard when they’re trying to go about their day. you are just PROVING to A Lot of people that you are not likely to understand our experiences enough to afford us genuine respect when the time actually comes.
because if you can’t understand it in the context of a fictional story that is Intentionally SCREAMING it in your face and begging you to spit out your silver spoon, then how the hell can you be trusted to identify injustice and unethical practices in the real world right in front of you.
your treatment of these subjects informs the level of safety YOU give off to other people, who, Yeah! are taking the subject more seriously than you! because they’re subjugated by these people and it’s inescapable lmfao. it’s not even escapable in fandom spaces. if you can just turn off your awareness of it, good for you i fucking guess. not everybody has that luxury.
it’s exhausting to deal with people like this lmao we get more than enough of it offline we don’t need it here, especially when the whole show is Literally About pointing out that This Is Bad. it’s About This. this is the Plot of the Story you listened to 193 episodes of.
i am past asking y’all to do better now i’m honestly just begging you to shut the fuck up
clowning in the notes or my inbox will get you blocked before you can say praise bezos
#original elias bouchard#og elias#elias bouchard#jonah magnus#the magnus archives#tma#ronologues#fandom critical#r.txt#i'm usually pretty fucking nice even when i call things out but you've unlocked actual anger in me#i have so much more to say about this fandom environment in general but now isn't the time.#top
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Hello!! Please ignore this ask if you feel like it, its not crazy vital or anything. But your (and titanfallings) fics r so sensitive and well researched when it comes to touchy topics like abuse, assault, etc. And Im wondering if you had any advice about that! I've grown up pretty sheltered, so I dont have a lot of real world experience to draw on, and I am very worried about writing something disrespectful. I know the solution is research, but I don't really know where to start ? Because I assume things written by actual survivors are the best way to go, but all I know how to reliably find is stuff like research papers. Do you have any tips? Again, no pressure! I can probably fumble my way into a solution eventually, haha
first of all, thank you so much — it's wonderful to hear that we’re handling it in a way that speaks to people who don’t have the experience, as much as fellow survivors who do. there’s speaking in our own language, and then there’s making sure other people can understand and connect, and it’s good to hear that it’s coming across well. telling these stories means a lot to us, and having them be received positively means even more.
so, over the past four days, ren @titanfalling and i whipped up a big giant google doc for you and anyone else who might be interested in learning more! there is a link to a super special second document, too, if you want to see us break down the different presentations in our own work, but it’s Very Longer™ so i cannot stress enough how optional it is, though it does contain more direct examples of how to put the tips into practice (and also we worked really hard.)
i hope this helps! and thank you again for your patience. 🧡
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do you have any specific or lengthy fat/chubby jon thoughts or hcs bc if so id love to hear them, its what he deserves <3
hi, thank you for being patient with me while i gathered the spoons and thoughts to answer this! it took me longer than i’d hoped for to go back and edit my fic a little bit, despite how teeny tiny the edits are, but it also gave me some inspiration to combine this HC with some of my cooking, family and university HCs for him! i have a lot of love for it and i think it’s really warm.
i just think that he ate well as a child.
i don’t think he was underfed or neglected, i don’t think he had the capacity then to neglect himself the way he might later in life during the stressful and traumatic events of the canon storyline, and i think even with a “metabolism out of some sort of mirror dimension” (as i had georgie describe it once) there’s still a chance that for a while, he was just... comfortable!
particularly having grown up on grandma food :’-)
(which is a phrase that lives in my brain now because of this wonderful art & HC post by @b-e-n-j-a-m-i-n-s! thank HIM for the push towards chubby jon in the GTCU!)
i’d been thinking about it ever since he posted this and after ren drew this little number here, i was like, fuck it. going back to edit the first couple of chapters of two ships passing, since that’s the one where i spent the most time talking about him as a kid & some time in university! i think he would still have some baby fat around then and it’s just adorable.
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i just think a lot about gaining weight as healing, to show signs of progress and comfort, especially when there is such a large culture surrounding weight loss as a signifier of being Healthy when the methods pushed to get people there are so often harmful instead.
as a fat person myself, i’d like to see (and so write!) more stories that don’t condemn bodies for whatever shape they naturally take, and allowing characters within them to embrace themselves and each other as they are! and, when applicable, explore insecurities and the mental toll that society’s treatment of particular bodies will inevitably take on a person, in a way that explores how to recover from it.
that’s something i plan to do with martin especially, but there’s definitely some of it in my concepts for tim, georgie and melanie, as well.
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in terms of jon, i still think he’s on the thinner side of that spectrum, but i almost want to emphasize that it’s less, like... Traumatic Emaciation and more simply. not being fit? he’s just. not Fit.
he doesn’t exercise regularly! he scurried around a lot as a kid, but he was also a hypermobile asthmatic who had no interest in sports or getting sweaty or any of that. he had good endurance for walking, he could walk for ages, but that was about the extent of it.
the most physical activity i really put any focus on is the fact that he definitely did used to do some DDR when he worked in an arcade, and he learned some of the dances from favorite bollywood films! so he spent a lot of time just dancing around his bedroom and he never showed ANYONE that until he taught some to georgie, leo and alma in uni.
then his knee injury at 22 really benched him for a while! but he still remembers the moves ( >:3c )
so, he was a chubby kid! outright had a round face and was made of soft shapes and was still very Short so he was, like. so tiny and compact.
and then he hit a few growth spurts and it all leveled out over time, but there are always going to be little places your body just says, “okay, genetics say to anchor some fat here, so here it is!” and you just have to live with that sometimes.
it stays mostly around his tummy! little muffin top over his waistband.
g-d i love him.
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i have a particular fondness for, like... the small idiosyncrasies in bodies.
things being a little uneven or a distinctive mole or birthmark somewhere or an unconventional gap in the teeth or small ears or thick eyebrows or how someone’s tummy might not quite “match” how their torso is shaped, but it’s very distinctly theirs.
in TSP CH7, when i describe jon wearing a saree for the first time, he describes his body type in relation to insecurities about it:
“It never felt like he could wrap himself up so securely, and that the problem lay with him. Him and his narrow hips and the bit of belly fat that doesn’t match his skinny chest or shoulders, how little muscle he has to his name. Even if he managed to get it to stay, it would still outline the wrong silhouette.”
most of this is social dysphoria, and the important part of the scene is how absolutely enamored georgie is the second she sees him, and they actually Talk about how important it is for him to feel safe wearing something he’s always wanted to try wearing.
but going back and adding the bit about belly fat there was important to me! the outfit included a choli top that stops just under his ribs, and he’s never really been very used to wearing clothes that show that much skin, even if he covers it up with the saree itself. baring his midriff was totally new to him, both in a gender way and a general body image way.
it was a big step for him!
and it’s nice to explore some insecurities with him because we all have them, and i like to focus on him living his life anyway with people who find him charming and love him wholly.
other people can’t heal our insecurities, but they can certainly help!
(g-d. i love writing pre-canon jon. filling in those blanks is my favorite thing to do.)
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i think he’s very drawn to people who just appear at home in themselves. people who are solid and warm and good to hang onto when they’re walking together. he likes the balance. he finds them miraculous.
(i’ve said before that his type is “Big Handsome” and i stand by that.)
and frankly? i think sometimes he wishes he was structured more like that, could keep more weight on and fill himself out, but it’s just not quite what his body is built to do!
his fat distribution shifted a little as he aged and it went into some funny directions and it takes him a bit to find peace with it, i think he’s just naturally predisposed to being critical of himself despite being so strong-willed in social situations.
(which sometimes was to scare people away before they could come to judge him for the things he can’t help or change. he’s so. eye. jhbkjn.)
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i also HC georgie as fat! you can see her here in this art of ren’s, too.
i really like the idea that jon and georgie both feel very at home with each other and each other’s bodies. the idea that they helped each other to love themselves a little more when they were together even if loving each other didn’t work out in the end.
i like that it was jon who suggested they deserved forgiveness for the things they spent so long denying themselves. i feel like it’s important that he said that. he was able to see that once and really mean it.
the effects of fatphobia ingrained into all of us do make it difficult for many fat people to even fathom relationships being possible much less being healthy. it’s important to me to see and portray fat people in relationships being loved and loving others and having that love be valued and sought after. georgie is a hot catch! she knows it! we all know it!
(she has her own things to overcome that i’ve written about before/plan to expand on when she’s able to have more of a focal point in PBR, but for now this will stay about jon!)
so i just really like the idea of georgie — someone jon adores and respects and feels safe with and encouraged by — being fat, and how that might make him feel more comfortable with a part of himself that certainly was involved in whatever bullying he experienced growing up.
and i especially like this because in my mind, i connect it directly to his family life and history, in a positive, nostalgic way that extends into adulthood as something that brings him great comfort.
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time for the family, history and cooking HCs!
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jaya @tolbyccian and i were talking just the other night about their HCs for jon’s family, and we can agree wholeheartedly on one thing:
jon grew up feeling at home sitting on kitchen counters.
as a kid, he loved being sat up there and passing utensils to whoever was doing the cooking, helping stir things, dropping stuff in pots, anything they’d let him or ask him to do.
both of our HCs for him differ greatly from one another, but race and heritage plays an important role in both of them! all the way from grandma to georgie.
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i personally HC jon as jewish and indian!
his mother (sarika) was indian, and his father (isaiah) was a quarter indian himself, with a mixed race jewish/indian mother and a white father who converted to judaism for marriage.
that's a large part of jon’s grandmother's story (i named her miriam, and he calls her his dadima! which is a hindi word.)
miriam knew of her ancestry but didn't have exposure to culture due to being displaced during WWII.
her primary connection was to jewish culture through her surrogate sister, ruth, who was with her in the farmhouse that she ended up in when she was moved to england.
ruth insisted that they both remember their prayers and recipes and everything they could while they had to suppress themselves, and so miriam held onto that for a long time.
she and her husband agreed to raise isaiah jewish, and isaiah and sarika agreed to do the same with jon, as sarika was never particularly religious herself and they all agreed that given the family's history, it was important to keep this part of it alive.
a large part of keeping things alive in their house meant food.
many of the recipes that miriam ended up with were from her friends at synagogue, people she met as she grew older and established herself within that community in the absence of recipes from her own parents.
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what sarika also had, was food!
it’s her recipes that really made the difference, and that really linger in jon’s head for the rest of his life. miriam’s recipes were comfortable, but sarika’s were fun.
she used to cook a lot in the house, all-day-long sort of cooking, and jon remembers that as best he can given how hazy his memories of his parents are.
sarika and miriam connected on this, as well. they all lived in the same house together (all the roomier when miriam’s husband died, even more so when isaiah fell, and so on.)
miriam had been able to cling onto her jewish heritage on her mother’s side, but not so much indian culture on her father’s!
having sarika in the family was something she loved very dearly. they worked together, they uplifted and encouraged each other, and they held things together in the short time when they were the two that were left.
but even before that? sarika introducing indian recipes into the house was something miriam latched onto with her entire heart.
miriam, like jon, is autistic! and cooking was one of her special interests, alongside maritime history and the ocean.
so, she was very good with establishing routines.
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after sarika's death, miriam started up a new tradition: bebe night!
every year on sarika’s birthday, she and jon would cook what they still had of her favorite recipes: chana masala, simple biryani, dahl with rice, paneer, naan and raita, so on and so forth.
jon loved bebe night. it made the time surrounding those anniversaries a lot less painful, and gave them a means to celebrate sarika’s life instead of dwelling fully on the loss of her, or sweeping it under the rug.
his associations with “tradition” as a concept are very strongly rooted in his very small family and the glancing memory of when he had a bigger one, if a little less in the grand scheme of broader community.
he’s very much someone who tends towards a narrow focus in most areas of life (very beholding of him, again.) and so being able to have this is really important to him.
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i just think food is one of his love languages.
food was a huge part of how he was shown love and nourishment and encouragement growing up, and so it’s a part of how he expresses it as an adult!
he makes big batches of things and then gives away leftovers as necessary, even if he pretends it’s not a big deal.
he will NOT let you help him with the food itself, but he will occasionally let you stand in the kitchen, or sit on the counter (if there’s a lot of room very far away from his work station.)
and if he asks for your help?
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i think one day in uni, he was cooking aloo gobi.
(for georgie, of course. he spent some time looking for new recipes that didn’t rely on meat to fill the space left by all of his bebe’s old favorites that did. it was nice to look through websites and books together marking down things they were both interested in. it was nice to see him get excited to try something new.)
georgie was leaning on the counter and chatting with him while he diced the russet potatoes and he asked her to get a head start on frying the cumin seeds for him, the same way he might ask her to glance out the window for the weather.
until they pop, he said. i should be done with these in time to stir in the onions myself.
i think that’s the moment she knew for certain. not that she loved him — she figured that out a few months ago listening to him rip apart some cheesy paranormal investigation show they’d left on the telly, until she offered to turn it off and he said, what? no, i’m having fun.
she knew she loved him. he’d already said he loved her, too.
that was just the moment she knew he meant it.
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it’s also just one of his favorite things to do in the autistic way!
he loves the mathematics of following a recipe. of getting something exactly right, and feeling accomplished.
but what he loves even more is being able to become so confident in what he’s doing that he can comfortably deviate from the guidelines and make adjustments that make it just right. special, and memorable, and fun.
this is why the indian recipes are his personal favorite when he wants to decompress; the spices!
the sheer amount of spices he gets to work with is like a puzzle. there are so many pieces, and one little addition or missing something else can change the whole taste.
it’s one of the only times he enjoys the pursuit of discovery. the “maybe i’ll try to put a little spin on something i know i love.”
it won’t scare him out of trying again, or frustrate him into giving up on it.
bebe never got angry at him for tapping too much turmeric into a pot. dadima never got angry at him for a bit of shell falling into the bowl with an egg he almost cracked perfectly.
no one will be angry with him if it’s not exactly the same or better than the last time he made it; they’re just going to be happy to eat.
so he doesn’t get angry with himself when he makes a mistake, either. it’ll still be worth something. it’s a very forgiving art.
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he likes feeling proud of himself! it’s a productive activity that results in a tangible show of his effort and skill, it provides actual benefit, and he can give it away. he can show off a little! he can have something that’s his, and that people know him for, and look forward to, and cherish.
that feels amazing to him, you know? it makes him feel peaceful, and happy. it’s something he really, truly loves.
even if he doesn’t do it near as often (or, eventually, at all) when things go south for him, there was a time in his life when it was his favorite thing to do! and in an ideal world, it’s something he can get back.
just like the little bit of weight on his belly that says he’s doing well.
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put simply, then:
if his heart was a room in a house it would be a kitchen.
#jonathan sims#jon sims#the magnus archives#magnuspod#tma#ronologues#HC#asks#autisticreigen#thank you for this i had fun writing it!!!! i learned some new things too as they came together naturally 🥺
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Ive only followed u for a little while so apologies if u've already said this but do u have any opinions on gerry and goth culture etc, like how it ties into their narrative? And do u have any goth bands u like or that u think gerry would listen to
For me i feel a little weird when people put gerry with emo stuff / dont know that goth is a music based subculture, that might come from growing up around goth elitists though haha
i MIGHT have mentioned it somewhere but i honestly also forget so let’s just speedrun it again aaaand this is not a speedrun oh no okay.
my general philosophy with gerry + subcultures is based in the fact that the only Anything that got a name put to it in canon was his mastodon t-shirt in 2002? lots of music gets called “death metal” when you don’t listen to it (or are, for example, perpetually falling and have no idea where you are and are also a theater nerd who probably doesn’t give a rip about that distinction anyway) and i have a hard time buying that leitner could properly identify someone’s specific subculture just based on their style. everybody who wears a lot of black is An Goth to old people who don’t know what any of the words mean.
so while i definitely do think goth obviously does work for his style and taste, i personally write him with a hefty serving of punk in there too, and music wise there are any number of possibilities. aster said once “for all we know he could be a metalhead,” and i think there’s some truth to that!
most of the times gerry has been described by other people, they’ve missed, assumed, or subtly misidentified something about him! it’s actually an interesting part of his character i really like a lot, because it gives some extra weight to the person he’s revealed to be when we finally get to hear him speak.
there’s a lot of room for interpretation basically is all i’m saying! and i’ve seen some really cool takes on it that i don’t really go with myself (there are just so MANY), but i see where they came from.
i personally don’t, like. go with the heavy goth makeup for him or have his clothes get very complicated because it feels like he doesn’t really have the time for that. for my gerry, punk is more where it’s at (DIY jackets and stuff, uses lace code on his boots, etc) but he does wear Almost Exclusively Black while doing it, sure. to each their own! not saying my way’s the only way or anything.
but i DO 100% agree with you that the emo music does not feel right dkfjhdj. please.
hard NO on the MCR, the joke is tired and i'm tired. aster said wisely, “he’s not a fan, it’s just something people play around him he nods his head to” and i agree Yep. he probably is like that about a Few of the bands that people throw on him here. not a bad sound! but he doesn’t know the song names or give a shit about the band, and he’s not going to remember to google it.
the guy was born in the ‘80s he’s got like. a little different of a music pool to splash around in than some of us really pay any attention to. it’s not bad music i just really don’t see him getting into the stuff that’s more well known around (american) teenagers-20somethings TODAY when he’d have found the stuff he liked way beforehand and fell down whatever pipelines came from it through that.
i think “if it hurts your head he probably loves it”, but also i think the general tone of it matters to him y’know like i don’t think he wants the sad dreary stuff ALL the time! i think he wants passion and Refusal and fight and the sometimes-paradoxical brightness you CAN find in the lyrics of some of the harsher sounding stuff. lover of contradiction. lover of also just annoying the shit out of people around him who he thinks won’t want to bother to understand. whatever music he likes into his 30s, i don’t think it’d be the sort that puts a romance to suffering.
venting is all well and good and surely something he’s done but i think if i were going to make his music such a big baseline for how he kept himself together all this time, kept his identity in check and gave him something to get excited about (“i’ll try to stick it out until X month next year because that’s when Y band is gonna release a new album and i want to hear it” — that stuff can actually save your fucking life sometimes, y’know?) then i would personally lean more towards something with more hope in it. hope and fire.
a more narratively impacting HC i have is that whether he chooses to hunt it down or not, he IS aware of and knows the words to a lot of mainstream pop shit among other maybe-unexpected things just because he travels so much and surely spent time in places that had their own music playing and you can’t always have headphones on when you go places. he has a wide array of useless knowledge and trivia and lyrics on hand just by pure osmosis.
i think Boredom, Curiosity, and Spite drive a lot of his littler habits and hobbies because my g-d what else is he doing. hanging out with friends? aha. ahahaaha. aaah ,,, :-I
(my) gerry likes all sorts of random ass international bands, too, because he’d have more exposure to THAT stuff, too, and also a reason to do some research just for fun. van canto is a german a capella metal band what the fuck that’s so cool. harmaja is also good, they’re finnish. i think if you put some SKÁLD on in front of him he WILL be choreographing a dramatic music video as he walks down the street to it. like, no, he’s not gonna download them but if he fell into a youtube autoplay rabbit hole while he got distracted with something else you know he would have like a solid weekend of being super into “some random french folk group that based their whole schtick on norse mythology.” he would totally have obscure kicks like that every now and then even if he has something more stable to return to for comfort later!
he’d also just be fine listening to some rock bands when they’re just On, etc, and there's probably stuff outside of A Set Genre he DOES enjoy because human beings aren’t just one-dimensional “i only like this specific thing always forever and everything else sucks” and i think he’s spoken enough in canon about his adherence to the notion that Everything Has A Grey Area that he’s not too pressed about it. he’s got his niche, totally! but he’s not completely boxing himself in, either. i think he probably has had Enough of feeling isolated and only exposed to one perspective that he actively seeks other experiences and tries to see what other people love about things he’s not immediately familiar with!
movies and television, too, for similar reasons! for something to DO when he's stuck in a hotel room or to have on as background noise when he’s restless, even if it strays out of favored genres. just. watch whatever’s on, or whatever he hasn’t seen before. he can scroll IMDB in his own brain, can recognize actors from the most obscure single appearances on a show with 20 seasons that he half-watched 4 years ago. ridiculous. hilarious.
in general that’s how i have him consume media BEYOND whatever music he uses to keep a tighter grasp on his identity, but i haven’t gotten too specific with artists and bands in anything i've published yet because it just hasn’t come up! the only band i've referenced by name in something i’d written before WAS the mastodon (i have a lot of feelings about how his attachment to the lifesblood EP in particular), but i tend to play it safe and use that as like a Starting Point if that makes sense?
other suggestions from my group chat were joy division, and like. as far as “off brand” bands go, he might like the killers well enough. i do think he'd like against me! because. punk rock, yeah, and also laura jane grace herself is just. somebody i think he’d really enjoy, from the perspective of also coming out as Gender later in life. she’s so cool,,,
i could see symphonic metal being enjoyable to him. within temptation is so strange but he’d vibe with it, especially since they were popular overseas first. the Drama of it all. apocalyptica is fun, so is sonata arctica. probably enjoys seether in the same way of like “digging it when it’s on, never bought an album himself, but DOES remember where he was the first time he heard Broken.” he knows the local scene in sweden. why is he singing along perfectly to this german song he doesn’t even speak german.
also because it happened to come up in the GC i’m also gonna paste this here but it was generally agreed upon, too, that like. with his “music taste and Fashion taste not necessarily being the same umbrella i feel like he’d love the aesthetics of glam rock and hairspray punk even though it wasn’t his favorite musically.” and he’d probably really love drawing people he's encountered with those aesthetics. i think he’s just appreciative of a lot of stuff out there even if it's not the CD he's gonna pop in to try and sleep to.
TL;DR - j summed it up pretty well just now with “i think gerry is a combo of ‘knows bands you’ve never heard of’ and ‘has never learned the name of the very popular universally known band you’re telling him about even if he recognizes the song.’ he likes the american idiot album but could not summon the name Green Day if you put a gun to his head.” and i just think that’s beautiful.
aster just said the best thing, too, about how i said he tries to branch out on purpose: “it may be your first week in this country and maybe you dont speak the language but that cool girl with the leather jacket bought you an iced tea so all is right with the world. like it doesnt make ppl more likely to help him or anything but it makes very specific people more likely to i guess? sense of community even in transit”
and j responded: “i think that fits well on the fact that punk and its adjacents are so community focused, so if anyone was going to give him experiences like that, being alone and having a stranger stand up for you in some little way before you both move on, it would probably be the alts around the world. just like his genres are all over the place, he wouldn’t probably call himself goth but the attraction to alt and it’s media was basically nurture for him so he was always gonna land there”
that’s the shit it comes down to!!!! matters way more to him than being an elitist about specific artists, i think.
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i would really love to hear more about bpd martin that you mentioned briefly in your c-ptsd martin post. i have bpd and i’ve never related emotionally to a character more than i do him. i’d also like to hear your take on his relationship with jon in light of his bpd? :)
yes hello hi! i actually went and passed this along to my server when you sent this because i have some Martin Enthusiasts™ in there who definitely had things to say, and i appreciate them for helping me find some scaffolding and a starting point. i completely get it, he’s really easy to relate to through this lens.
so, round of applause for @mxrspider, @ofdreamsanddoodles, @treeroutes, and @femmedionysus! and our chats that introduced cluster B jon, which definitely plays into my take on their relationship.
BUT because it became so long, you get a google doc! thank you for the request, and your patience 😊🧡 i hope this lives up!
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I have a question re: transfem Gerry. So, I'm all over this like syrup on pancakes, it's delicious, it's good, it's gender envy, it's just.. ugh, I Cannot get enough of it. My question is, how does Gerry, being a transfem gay man in your HC, respond to the concept of "being one of the boys". Would he feel.. uncomfortable? Okay with it? Is his relationship to his manhood similar to that of "I am a man, but only conveniently"? Kind of like how some afab nonbinary people still kind of have that "older sister"/"eldest daughter" relationship to gender, even if they don't feel connected to womanhood or gender at all, is that similar to how your Gerry feels? You mentioned Gerry uses she/her in intimate moments, and while I know that pronouns ≠ gender, ofc, how do you see Gerry experiencing gender in those specific moments? (I haven't read all your fics yet so these may be questions answered in those. If so, I'll gladly read along and find out, but I'm just transfixed on transfem Gerry and I want to Behold.)
oh hello! i'm glad that you like the HC, it's one i put a lot of love into and am very attached to & happy to talk about, so i'm thrilled that you sent this! time for me to get very passionate.
(small warning: section four touches on his sex life and mentions some bottom dysphoria! not graphic or super explicit, it’s largely thematic & just explains how it plays a huge role in how he expresses his gender feelings.
also there’s a bit at the bottom that’s just some accessibility feedback for you!)
01. intro
in regards to being grouped in as “one of the boys,” i think honestly it depends on who is doing it? for the most part, it’s actually exactly what he wants.
at the end of the day, what he’s usually going to identify as first would probably be the words “gay” and “transsexual,” depending on the context in which it comes up. with most people, he doesn’t care to tell you or want you to know he’s transfem unless you’re close to him, because it’s not anyone’s business and he’s a very private person with a lot of understandable trust and intimacy issues. he spent so much time isolated that even though he knows he wants more connection, he’s not going to just dive into it and tell you everything about him from minute one (barring very specific circumstances, but Even Then.) and this is something he’d rather keep close to the chest. not out of shame or fear (anymore) but because he legitimately just does not think most people are entitled to this information, and he’s right.
he’s got a fairly androgynous face, and while that used to be a source of conflict for him, too, that conflict came from thinking he shouldn’t like it as much as he did. and he did like it. i always emphasize that he got his father’s shoulders and hands and jaw, but he has his mother’s cheekbones, and a lot of her basic shapes. he learned his expressions from her. he was mary keay’s child.
gerry used to look in the mirror as a teenager and be upset not that he looked so much like his mother, but that it was something about himself that he loved. he didn’t want to love the things she gave him, because he was afraid it meant he emulated her. it’s very much the opposite, but he didn’t learn that until later.
02. perception & public presentation
if it’s total strangers he’ll never speak to at all, he’s content with just being unidentifiably GNC. there are times he is just a guy with resting bitch face you’re not sure how to approach, and sometimes he’s a lady reading a book in a big chair at the bookstore with her head down, and then the closer you look at him in any of those scenarios, you think, “oh, maybe that’s not quite right.”
this is why, every time i’ve written someone seeing him but not knowing who he is, it defaults to they/them pronouns! that’s chapters 9, 14, and 15 of TSP, namely. even in chapter 7, when he knocks georgie over in dublin by accident, jon refers to him as they/them even when their friend leo pins him as a guy.
he likes the contradiction! one of the first words he ever really liked to describe his gender was just “genderfuck” which he would have seen being used in zines growing up. very punk, frankly.
if it’s strangers-to-acquaintances, people he’ll do business with or encounter briefly at places he frequents, he would much prefer just be read as a man and stay that way.
regarding the “eldest daughter/sister” comparison — YEAH. that’s a huge thing across the board in general. the way that we’re brought up is always going to have hooks in us somewhere. for gerry, he was explicitly raised as a son by a violent woman who had expectations of him as a son, and that’s? something he will always feel conflicted by.
sometimes, he did want to be the son she wanted to be proud of, he still wants his broad shoulders and general silhouette to be read as masculine, his strength and disposition was and is generally masculine first and foremost.
i don’t really depict him as wearing lipstick or anything of that nature, mostly his makeup is centric around the eyes! and he doesn’t tend to wear feminine clothing out in public when he’s just going about his day doing Spooky Errands because what’s the point? being just some guy gets the job done and he doesn’t want to answer anyone’s questions, he doesn’t have time and more importantly, he really couldn’t give less of a shit about most people or their opinions of him.
typically, socially speaking in that way, he doesn’t tend to get overwhelmed with dysphoria when he’s perceived as a man. he likes and prefers it! because he knows he’s a particular kind of man, and frankly, there’s a level of satisfaction to it. he’s a GNC guy and he likes being a little intimidating about it (in the sense that it’s a bit flustering) because it makes him feel secure, and comfortable, and protected.
for a long time, it was like. being able to be what he needed to be at home to survive his mother, while still being Gender about it. he’s a man more often than not! just not the man you expect or maybe even want.
03. sexuality & relationships
until you’re a prospective interest, in which case: at first, yeah! he still wants to just be seen as a man! if he’s going to a gay bar, he is going to be flirting with men in a way that will lean into his masculinity first. he still wants to be seen as a prospective interest to other gay men, which to a degree does necessitate some connection to manhood (even if his connection to it IS his attraction to other men In A Gay Way, same as how many lesbians feel that way about their connection to womanhood.)
it’s when you get past that point that it starts to change.
in cases where he has an actual long-term partner, he’d like to be more or less seen as feminine in a complimentary way to them, if that makes sense? i see him as drawn a lot to masculinity in general, usually guys with a build like how ren and i HC our tim. he’s a pretty big, solid dude, and gerry likes the security in that, he likes being held and supported.
that doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to that trend, though! people are people and if there’s a connection, there’s a connection. gerry’s type is “makes me feel safe, and better.”
EDIT 1/24/22: after some reflection on this topic, i wanted to clarify that i think he would use “gay” as an umbrella term more than a rigid thing! even canon shows that he’s not interested in using strict definitions and labels for HUGE things in the universe, so i find it hard to believe he would get all that granular with himself. plus, i personally interpret him as having DID, which would muddy things plenty Especially if he goes so long without knowing he has it.
in the early days i do think he would be deeply averse to being with women largely as a trauma response, and so for a while would just reject the idea entirely and ignore it as long as he could. not even that he has to fight it or struggles with denying something, he really just doesn’t spend time thinking about it. however, i do think he’s got a capacity to be with maybe A woman after he’s unlocked a Girl Moment and can approach that situation in a decidedly gay way, too, but in most universes i don’t think that would really happen for him! and so he doesn’t think about it too hard. he’ll just say he’s gay and you’ll make your own assumptions about it and he won’t care to correct you because whatever he’s doing, it’s gonna be gay. that’s the way it can feel sometimes when your gender is just “yeah.”
he’d like to be called someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend equally (usually when using she/her with boyfriend and he/him with girlfriend!) but tim in that one scene in PBR wasn’t wrong when he said he’s pretty sure gerry would prefer to be called “wife” instead of “husband” if things were to progress that far in the theoretical universe where marriage didn’t scare them both. if they were to joke about it, make it a pet name, “wife” would be the comfortable one to him! there’s just something about it. when he’s this far into an intimate relationship with someone, i think he would trust them enough to want to eventually use feminine terms more exclusively.
04. the role his sex life plays in his gender
because it actually is an intrinsic part of things for him. i think it’s disingenuous to discount the fact that it’s like this for a lot of people out there, and i think it makes a lot of sense for him given everything he’s been through.
he likes explicitly feminine terms of endearment in bed! like princess, “good girl,” stuff like that. he likes being treated like a lady in these situations! being called beautiful or pretty instead of handsome, having particular aspects of himself focused on and others not brought up. this is where lingerie comes in handy; the sort of thing that only his partner is going to see, that he can save for special occasions. that makes it so somebody is looking at him in a little bit of awe, especially after he starts getting a little softer around the edges on HRT. it’s extremely affirming and helpful and again, very private!
(save for melanie as his eventual lingerie shopping buddy. they give each other coupons and stuff. friend chip<3)
i also write him as having some bottom dysphoria for a number of reasons, too, so typically that’s a no touch zone, but there comes a point in two relationships in his life that it’s eased somewhat by being able to embrace his femininity and start associating it with that! being able to see people who love him in this way regard something that has brought him such distress throughout his life as a part of the side of himself he’s most protective over, cherishes the most, only trusts them with after a certain point — it’s very healing. VERY gender euphoria.
honestly, his sex life is actually a massively important part of his story in how i portray him. i really think that writing him pursuing and obtaining physical intimacy, particularly gay and T4T sex, is a lot more radical than just. trying to find ways to make his traumatic isolation something he’s okay with or had even sought out on his own. let him want, seek, and find attention and connection in whatever ways he can, whether it’s tethered to lasting love or just a brief thing that makes him feel more present in his body for a while. that isn’t shallow, or inherently harmful or unhealthy. gay sex isn’t regressive or deviant.
also an important HC that goes along with gender for him, tbh:
EDIT 1/24/22: appending this! i do imagine that he’s a switch in terms of D/s, but in a very specific way. i think he has the capacity to dom and would reserve that approach for any time he does sex work, which i do incorporate into his backstory generally, because it would come with a sense of control and security, and basic safety. he’s NOT going to let himself be vulnerable with strangers, he has never subbed for even a random hookup for fun and never will. it would take him a while to actually learn how much he not only enjoys playing a submissive role but sort of needs to in serious, trusting relationships. and thus:
he prefers playing a more submissive role as somewhat of a reprieve from how much of his life he’s spent hypervigilant and thinking too hard and fighting for a more physical control of his surroundings, and as a way to reclaim his autonomy given that he really is the one in control of things this way, and a way to really establish/strengthen trust with a partner because, just. he’s spent his whole life taking orders and getting hurt, it’d be nice to recontextualize putting his body and well-being in someone else’s hands, and have them actually take care of him.
just. let somebody touch him with kindness and reverence and make him feel like somebody actually wants him, wants him around, wants to make him feel good instead of hurting him, literally any of that is something that can be so important to acknowledge for a character with a backstory like his.
he deserves it! and it IS intrinsically tied into the way he experiences gender. it ALL comes back to reclamation, trust, privacy, and making choices about who has access to what parts of him.
05. how i write him experiencing and expressing it in TSP and PBR
as for the intimate moments where he experiments with she/her pronouns, i’ve only written that in PBR so far because it’s the only time i’ve actually captured him being able to pursue transition while in a relationship with someone who he can actually explore that feeling with! i imagine he never really did manage medical transition before Dying in canon, for a hundred different reasons, and usually it’s a big thing i use to signify/mark his recovery after i find ways for him to survive in my AUs.
i won’t NOT encourage you to read my stuff since i promise it’s saturated all throughout, but i also won’t Demand it or anything & i’m always happy to explain these details! i like being able to be straightforward and clear about what exactly i’m exploring with him.
i’ll get TSP out of the way since it’s completed: i had him start medically transitioning, but not change any terminology or even how he thinks of himself. he just wanted his body and face to be softer, to feel healthier physically, and it helps! it’s sort of a reward to himself for surviving past where he didn’t think he would, and it’s very peaceful.
PBR is where i’m exploring his gender with a lot more depth and complexity than i got to in TSP because it actually involves him being in romantic and sexual relationships that open up doors to express things that never became relevant, because he didn’t get to a point where he HAD that kind of relationship with jon in that story.
they’re just not compatible in a sexual way! and that’s OKAY. even jonny said in a recent Q&A, the reason they worked so well as friends in canon IS because they only met the once, but there are definitely other universes where they could be excellent in a long term way, even without that particular need intersecting.
(take I’ve Got His Number From The Great Beyond for example! also read it right now immediately! there’s gerry gender in there AND unbearable amounts of love and connection between jon and gerry that rekindled my love for them after a while of dampened zeal. everybody say “thank you aster!”)
so, in PBR, gerry started hormones with sasha’s help (she helped him get them grey-market, because it’s not always possible to go through a doctor, especially in the UK) and celebrated his first dose with the archives team, but he hasn’t asked them to change how they refer to him or treat him gender wise yet/may not ever.
it’s more or less concentrated to private moments with tim, or letting tim refer to him with alternating he/him and she/her when talking to their friends. particularly sasha, due to her close involvement in even getting this part of gerry’s life off the ground & being such a major presence in tim’s life, too.
the way i’ve been having gerry use them in his own POV bits has really only been as he’s remembering intimate moments with tim while they’re separated and he’s struggling with something, kind of... zooming in on times he’s at his happiest and feeling the most like himself, like he can trust people.
and for tim, i also have him do that! he uses he/him for the most part, but in the latest chapter, when he thinks back to moments where they’re particularly soft and usually being sexually intimate, or if it has something to do directly with gerry’s transition, he’ll alternate between he/him and she/her within the same sentence. he thinks back on it this way out of respect, effort, and absolute affection.
(at the juncture in the story when i originally wrote this response, it’s tied back to his developing chest & how much it’s going to literally Hurt for a year but tim really wants to be able to show love to that part of him, too, and so he helps rub lidocaine on his nips when they get really painful. candid tenderness is my middle name. as things progressed, it’s revealed that tim uses she/her exclusively within a scene they’re doing together.)
for both of them, it’s almost ALWAYS tied to a sense of longing! for closeness, for things to just be okay between them, for being able to just. be at their most vulnerable with someone who they know is also laying themselves bare, in any sense of the word.
so, that kind of means that for gerry it’s an expression of, like...
“this is something i have always wanted, but i don’t think the whole world has a right to it. the whole world wouldn’t treat me the way i want to be treated as i embrace this part of myself, and i know that because it has never treated me well. no one has ever seen me the way i want to be seen, and it’s too late for me to even want to change that now.
you treat me well. you already saw me before i told you this. i trust that this part of myself is safe in your mouth.”
and tim is pretty blown away by that! that’s the sort of thing that means the most to him, being trusted to safeguard someone’s vulnerabilities and the things they’re most selective about sharing. it makes him feel important and valued and that’s something he really needs out of a partnership that’s intended to last.
gerry honestly isn’t Planning to work himself up to a point where he can just have Everyone call him different pronouns or refer to him differently in general. he’s a private person by nature and nurture, and already this is beyond any of his wildest dreams. he likes the idea of saving it for behind closed doors, for a very small selection of people, because it means he has enough going for him now that he can even make that choice. he doesn’t just have one person, he has more than that! he doesn’t have to pick just one thing, one way to be, and certainly nothing linear.
he likes getting to be different in different peoples’ eyes. for him, his transition has more value as something that he keeps contained! across the board, he’s still going to identify himself as a gay man before he even identifies himself as trans at all, because him being a man is what defines his transness.
06. accessibility feedback!
okay quick thing! since i think that’s what you were going for here bit it may have backfired a little bit. no harm done! but for future reference since even i had a bit of trouble reading this the first few times.
i’d suggest being, like, more sparing with your bolding & try to read your messages out loud to see where the emphasis falls so that you can use it to highlight the most important things and break it up only a little bit. this is kind of jumbled and makes the eyes kinda bounce all over the place. definitely keep it narrowed in when you do stuff like this, especially since the message was pretty short!
here’s an example of how i might have formatted this one if i thought it was necessary:
I have a question re: transfem Gerry. So, I'm all over this like syrup on pancakes, it's delicious, it's good, it's gender envy, it's just.. ugh, I Cannot get enough of it. My question is, how does Gerry, being a transfem gay man in your HC, respond to the concept of "being one of the boys". Would he feel.. uncomfortable? Okay with it? Is his relationship to his manhood similar to that of "I am a man, but only conveniently"? Kind of like how some afab nonbinary people still kind of have that "older sister"/"eldest daughter" relationship to gender, even if they don't feel connected to womanhood or gender at all, is that similar to how your Gerry feels?
You mentioned Gerry uses she/her in intimate moments, and while I know that pronouns ≠ gender, ofc, how do you see Gerry experiencing gender in those specific moments? (I haven't read all your fics yet so these may be questions answered in those. If so, I'll gladly read along and find out, but I'm just transfixed on transfem Gerry and I want to Behold.)
only two bolded bits, if at all! honestly, it was clear enough that you could have gone without, too. the most important/helpful thing would have been the line break, which usually isn’t a big deal in asks if formatting isn’t an option, but since you bolded i’m figuring that it is. i just thought i’d let you know since you clearly seem to care about this and i appreciate the effort.
thank you again for this ask! i actually discovered some things about how to articulate how i portray his gender that i hadn’t been able to put into words before, and this made me really happy.
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WAIT. beatrix kiddo is from KILL BILL. martin canonically references the movie (let's go full kill bill!!!!) martin gets shot by the slaughter bullet. DOTS are being CONNECTED,
oh HELL yes i get to finally explain why beatrix kiddo the baseball bat is actually symbolic YES.
good catch on the reference! the other enormous piece of this, though, is that beatrix kiddo was danny’s baseball bat from secondary school.
...which TIM kept and used as a go-to weapon when he and gerry would go on field trips in the early days. when MARTIN tried to use it the day he first met leitner, it wasn’t there, so he had to resort to his own devices. which nobody was happy with at all. he takes that reaction to heart.
it sounds a lot like:
these people won’t always have my back if i need them.
they don’t approve of my choices when i try to protect myself.
i can’t tell them about my choices, then, because them getting angry at me for making them is better than letting myself die for their approval.
which results in martin feeling even more alienated than he did before, which was the reason he even ended up taking this on solo in the first place. he’s still got those canon lonely inclinations, those can’t be taken out of his character, but this world’s circumstances lead him to lean more on grudges and resentment, and creates an even stronger “me vs. them” mentality.
not good! and really sets the stage for what’s about to happen.
back to the bat, though!
this whole story began because tim was on a revenge quest over danny. tim brought pieces of the danny that he knew into the archives and stained their whole purpose with it. he relied on the bat when all he has was memory, when he thought that was all he would ever have again. when he could use it to strengthen and motivate him, not slow him down or backfire.
and then they actually find danny! but he’s not really tim's danny anymore.
martin, though? he never got the chance to even meet that version of danny. martin never got to use the baseball bat for anything.
(the closest he got to it was when tim threatened him with it when he came up out of the tunnels before he finally confessed to his manipulation of leitner and the notthem revealed itself. a lot of loaded stuff there!)
the ceramic wolf busting out of storage was the first situation they all face together with this version of danny present. the first post-venice example of what he is going to be like from now on, how different he is, what he’s capable of now.
it’s here that beatrix kiddo takes its first big dent.
it was tim who swung it down on the music box, the slaughter half of the equation, and it didn’t work.
the thing that worked was letting danny lean into the stranger and distract the wolf until enough anger subsided that the music box was finally able to be taken from martin and dismantled by someone else.
(do with that hook what you will<3)
and after that? martin goes out of his way to secure himself a much more lethal blunt weapon for when they deal with not!leitner. (the result of the first time he reached for the bat and couldn’t find it; a thing of the stranger, which only got so close to them because of martin! hm!)
martin isn’t secure in using an old, too-light, damaged thing that has now proven it isn’t what they need anymore; their situation has escalated too much, and he doesn’t find the same comfort in holding onto it that tim does.
martin responds to seeing tim fail to use it the way he used to know how to (on the SLAUGHTER artefact) and goes “i need something stronger. i could put my trust in something stronger.” and then embraces using the same concept, a blunt weapon you swing, only he meets their needs in the middle by choosing something more powerful and objectively scarier.
martin embraces the version of danny he’s been presented with and he adapts to those circumstances in ways nobody else does. he isn’t scared of danny as he is; he trusts him.
by the time martin has graduated to sledgehammer status, his “me vs. them” has become a steady “us vs. them.” he and danny often stand back to back and strategically cover each other in confrontations, naturally gravitating towards each other to make sure the other person gets out alive.
the music box had dance-fighters standing back to back inside it. JUST saying.
and ALSO!
while the bat is referenced in the second installment, it doesn’t get its name until martin thinks it in the third. and so narratively speaking, martin names it.
(and we all know how important names are)
when it’s first said, this is the way it’s framed:
[...] and that’s not saying much now that Beatrix Kiddo the baseball bat doesn’t faze him anymore.
maybe the bat never helped martin, but it stopped unsettling him pretty quickly. the idea of a weapon being necessary doesn’t scare him. he understands why it’s needed. he adapts, accepts it, and gets really good at using one.
because it’s become pretty clear to him that this is the only function he can serve while he’s a part of this group that seems to be the right, useful thing. and maybe it would have stayed fine and sustainable had that very function not led him to going to india with melanie!
martin never would have chosen to tie himself to an entity, much less something like the slaughter. he is, however, extremely vulnerable to it as a victim, and — as the current arc suggests — as a vessel.
so! let’s just hope he doesn’t go full kill bill!
#asks#anon#pbr tag#martanny#ronologues#everything has a purpose and a meaning EVEN beatrix kiddo#martin#danny#tim
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alright, yeah, enough. so, i’ve said something similar to this before in regards to the concept of jewishness in the delano-keay family, but something should probably be said about the seriously uncomfortable implications of depicting either mary or eric as anything but white.
this is primarily directed at white people who draw gerry or eric as POC because they want them to be Interesting or Cool, or whatever else goes into people’s heads when they make a character Ambiguously Brown for Clout without thinking about the can of really racist worms that it can open up.
i’m going to talk about why it’s different when artists of colour do this, but the fact is that most people in this fanbase are white, and it’s times like these where it really shows.
EDIT 1/26/2021: this post is 6 months old but now certain things seem to be getting a little bungled so let me state the conclusion right here quick. it's not saying no bad characters can be black or jewish it’s purely saying you should not perpetuate harmful stereotypes of a group you are not a part of, and just be careful about Why you’re doing it.
that’s really it, i swear. i reiterate this like four times throughout and the conclusion states it just as clearly.
---
no numbered sections, just dividers to make it easier to read. i got heated with this one, sorry! except that i’m not sorry, and i sure as hell am not the only person who feels this way.
let’s start with mary! someone worded it pretty nicely in my server when i brought this up (for the nth time, because we all see this enough to get upset every damn time), and it’s as good a place to kick off as any.
“given mary’s obsession with a legacy and the potential implications that like she got with eric bc he was obedient but also bc she wanted a kid and he was a good candidate are uhhhhh really really bad if she's white and he's a moc”
which. yeah. that’s not great.
she is a violent abuser and murderer with a particular motive and backstory that means making her a WOC is fucking disgusting. making her jewish would be awful. she literally performs blood rituals. please research “blood libel” to see why that’s a big red fucking flag.
there are things this woman cannot be.
and so that leaves us with Erics Of Colour and what that means. that means that a white woman did all that to a MOC, brutally murdered him for the high crime of being “useless” (read: newly disabled, because mary’s canonly and consistently ableist as all unholy fuck, too), and then went on to do unspeakable things to their Child Of Colour after he was dead.
you know, to groom him into starting a dynasty with her, “without [his] understanding. Or consent.”
yeah. that whole thing!
it is already canon that she isolated gerry from a lot of real world experience and opportunities for natural growth and development and peers and family. that she abused and conditioned him to the point where he was trauma bonded to her so severely that he could not leave even before she started haunting him.
why the HELL would you want to add the factor of her white ass completely stripping him of access to a culture he has a right to? because you know she wasn’t raising him the way eric would have, if he was actually a damn POC beyond just being drawn with darker skin in fanart.
what is his ethnicity? did you pick one? how connected to it was he before he died? what have you taken away from him by doing this? what are you taking away from gerry by doing this?
the “white parent abuses child of colour” narrative is not something a white person should be taking on. if a POC wants to do that, yes, go to it, but you should not touch that unless you’ve lived it. i’m respectfully asking you to consider this and how much it hurts to see it shoved under the rug, or fetishized.
@vastdweller said something pretty significant in my DM’s as well:
“😬 omggg like... as someone who is kaqchikel + biracial i do not like eric or mary being portrayed as poc. at all. there are awful implications for each--marys being obv but like. with eric??? a white woman literally manipulating a man of color and murdering him??? that is actually gross. and then by that logic gerry should not be portrayed as one Either bc that implies some kind of yikes stuff with either of his parents
and with mary being white, white women are Very notorious for using their privilege against black + brown men specifically to make them targets of hate crimes like lollll”
yeah, they sure are. lol.
i’ve literally seen people actively acknowledge the connection of her behavior and motives to fascism, which i don’t even disagree with considering how close she edges to eugenics and raising her version of a child soldier and the antisemitic sentiments in her statement, and then still going out of their way to depict her husband as brown. her husband who she trapped, manipulated, used to bear a child (and then she couldn’t anymore after!), and then violently murdered when he became disabled and therefore “useless.”
i was literally raised by a violently abusive neo-n*zi who severed my mother and therefore me from a culture we had a right to connect with, i know how this goes. i literally could write gerry this way if i wanted to and i could do it just fine.
but i fucking won’t because it’s just too g-ddamn much. i sure as fuck don’t want to see anyone else doing it if they don’t have a clue what that kind of hostile environment is like, what kind of lifelong damage that does to you. my hands are shaking lol.
see, a creator of colour might very well be thinking of that kind of storyline because they have their own experience with assimilation, might want to vent about generational trauma, maybe they’re a survivor of abuse and race played a part in it. and that is no one’s business, they don’t have to justify their stuff by sharing personal experience.
but if it’s an artist of colour, i’d at least assume they’re actually coming at this from a place of understanding, and are treating it with due respect, and i’d move on because it’s no one’s call as to whether they “have a right to” or not.
but that’s not what i’m seeing. 99% of the time, that’s not what i’m seeing.
once again, to be so clear, i’m addressing white people who Do Not Understand how deep this goes. (even if i wish that this specific one still wasn’t happening At All because the way it circulates and spreads can lead white people into uncritical regurgitation of that HC.)
even creators of colour can still end up putting something out into the world that was personal and well intended, and white people will take it and run in the wrong direction. does that mean Nothing should EVER be explored? no, not at all. just clarify your angle when you do something this loaded, so that it can’t be twisted or watered down or swept away.
the fact is, in a largely white fanbase to start with, this kind of thing is only done BECAUSE the implications are already not being considered. and it’s not a white person’s story to tell in the first place.
i personally do not actually know any POC who would go out of their way to HC this, beyond being told in passing of one person who is evidently more casual about just liking gerry and wanting him to be like them, and nychtaa, who i only just met while writing this, that would like to see this angle explored specifically by POC.
which only means that doing this Right has specifications. it can be done, but it is not often done the way it needs to be done in order to be effective and not outright harmful.
it isn’t even that white people directly put the racism into a story! it’s that they IGNORE race and ethnicity COMPLETELY, slap a skin tone on someone, and then call it a day. this doesn’t even happen just here, it happens to all SORTS of other characters that are popularly depicted as POC.
but this specific storyline as it is presented to us is so brutal and ends so bloody and is so deeply saturated with seriously bad implications even just in mary’s statement alone about who she is, what she does to people, and how her family suffered for it until literally beyond their deaths. there is not a lot of room for resolution or recovery or reclamation here.
it could be done! but that’s not what i’m seeing when i see it on my dash.
what i see is done in fanart that i scroll past that has no context given whatsoever, no story behind it, no explanation, no intention beyond just wanting to draw a Handsome Brown Eric. and that is a problem.
actually, that’s seriously fetishistic, too, and i need y’all to realize! i need you to REALIZE what it means when you think that you have to make a character ambiguously brown to make them more attractive, while not considering what that all MEANS. people do this shit to tim, too, and it drives me up the WALL.
don’t exotify and fetishize POC! don’t water them down to just being nebulously more attractive! don’t do this lightly!!!! don’t do this at ALL.
white people have the privilege of not really thinking about race. most any privileged class is usually going to have that in common: not needing to think about it. they don’t NEED to think about how the world treats them because the world is designed by now to cater to them, and they’re comfortable.
white people are not made uncomfortable enough by their race alone to need to question the world without seeing someone else being treated like shit for theirs, and even then. even then, they don’t always go much deeper than just hoping they’re not like Those Other White People.
and then there’s gerry himself. the one who i know most people WANT to make a POC, because they think it’ll make him more Valid or something. that because he’s Good, that means “oh, people must want me to make sure i don’t think this good person HAS to be white!”
except... he sort of has to be! sadly! believe me, i say that with chagrin! i am not even white! and gerry means so much to me! you think i don’t LOVE to sit here and think of the ethnic backgrounds of characters and incorporate them into the stories i tell? that’s the POINT of making those headcanons, and i jump at the chance when there is an opportunity.
i would LOVE to consider gerry having all of those things but he was already canonly robbed of them. and intensely abused his literal entire life, mutilated post-mortem by another lady (who imo is also very much white) so that his spirit would be tethered to a fractured plane, and THEN kept captive (by people who are tied to the *entity that is also tied to police as an institution) until he was mercy-cremated.
*yeah, julia and trevor aren’t cops but the biggest canon association we have with that entity is Still the police and it’s Still loaded.
if you see those things happening to someone and your first image is of it happening to a person of colour, i’m asking you to step back and think.
gerry is honestly written as very white to begin with, in a white story written by white people for white consumption. that’s just how he reads, and the most respectful way to read him. you will not look More #Woke for drawing him or his father brown if you don’t think about what that means, you just look insensitive and you’re making a lot of people wicked uncomfortable.
yeah! this is a tragedy podcast. EVERY single character is going to suffer, that’s the nature of it, and that should NOT mean that there is No diversity whatsoever because “minority demographics can’t be written as going through anything.” the way people reacted to francis as if it was NBphobic because they were a statement giver going through something; no! that’s just the world, and at this point, it’s the apocalypse. everyone’s got something.
but in NO WAY is that plotline of widespread suffering actually supposed to be racially charged. even as the crew has done some terrible stereotypical shit, too, it stems more from ignorance than trying to tell a racially charged story. they’re not trying to tell a racially charged story, and that’s part of why there’s so much racism in TMA in general.
so, when you have a storyline as CLEARLY charged as this specific one, the literal specific instance of the way that mary keay traumatized her husband and son, you really need to leave it alone.
it is the kind of storyline that becomes racist if you add this element. it canonically carries elements that do not need to be made worse.
more things i think people don’t consider: gerry’s actual thought process and behaviour and the littler details of his backstory!
we know his general plot and the direction it goes, which should be reason enough to think critically about this, but there are actually so many other little details that, if you are white and peg him as a POC, start to perpetuate stereotypes that we in general NEED to be more mindful of.
gerry says in canon that “there was a part of [him] that thought a life in prison was an alright price for freedom.”
WHY do you want a MOC to say something like that. why would you be alright with a MOC being made to feel like that, given how prison life would treat him? the disproportionate rates of who actually fills prisons in the first place?
people are constantly suspicious of him in public, too! andrea nunis literally goes over to yell at him for staring at her and making her uncomfortable. the guys in old passages threaten to tie him up/call the police on him for trespassing. lesere saraki was terrified of his incredibly high pain threshold, and yeah, that’s pretty scary considering how doped up he was (after being set on fire! hm.) but now think about the ages old stereotype in the medical field that black people don’t feel pain, etc.
if you’re hearing the accounts of how people regard gerry in public and immediately think “he’s a person of colour!” then you almost certainly have some stereotypes to unscrew from your subconscious.
these things do not make him Coded as a person of colour. if you are white (or honestly nonblack POC in particular, too) and you pick up on them and identify him that way, that’s on you.
i also get wanting rep for goths of colour because YEAH we need more of that! but oliver and annabelle are right there, jon georgie and melanie all have pretty alt poc fanon designs. you HAVE stuff to work with; gerry isn’t the only option for that.
@nychtaa made a great point, because i sure am talking to other fans of colour as i write this so that i can cover all of the bases:
“the fact that he likely received no education, perpetuating further more the image of illiterate poc. and at the hands of an abuser.”
and i physically shot up out of my chair to dance angrily, because it’s absolutely true. that is literally. there it is! that’s literally a big huge thing and i do not think a lot of you thought of it that way before.
you may not think that the nitty gritty stuff like this matters. that “oh, no one’s thinking about it, they just see a pretty art and hit reblog.”
that’s true! white people aren’t thinking about it, and they do just uncritically reblog, and then it circulates, and then it picks up traction, and then more people do it because they think it’s cool, and then it becomes well known and widely accepted, and then people are afraid not to do it, and then it’s just ambiguously brown jon all over again lol.
it matters, dude. it actually does matter.
@/nychtaa also said:
“oh, and the white audience bit reminds me, that a white fan base has more chances to relate to white/racially ambiguous characters precisely because it's created for them. poc fans can only relate to said characters because there's not really more choices, and if there are, they're the chinese cannibal man or the manipulative black lady, and that directs more harm towards poc consumers”
and it’s true! there are limited options! that’s where diversifying headcanons comes in, and why people are so quick to make as many characters of colour as possible.
but there are some that you just Shouldn’t do that with. some people just need to fucking stay white.
i’ve seen black emma harvey when LITERALLY the ONLY backstory we have for her is that she was a vile gaslighting abuser who tormented people over decades, and she’s tied to the web, which is also tied to annabelle cane, who is canonically a black woman (and people have expressed discomfort with how annabelle is one of the only characters with a confirmed race while she’s placed as a villain, despite the backstory that gets so ignored in order to make her a ~seductive sexy manipulator mastermind~ yadda yadda?) huh. wild.
feels a little recycled and thoughtless actually. feels a little fetishistic (considering the response i saw to emma’s entire thing, as if she wasn’t. deeply abusive.)
jonah magnus is fucking white! and ambiguously brown elias has some pretty nasty fucking implications! you really want this privileged old white man to have stolen the body and life of a brown man, just so that you can draw a sexy brown elias? you don’t think it’s weird that OG elias’ only traits are stoner and life stolen and that you’re inclined to just go “yep, he’s brown.”
you don’t think that jonah wouldn’t have purposefully kept bodyhopping between white people to maintain his privilege? as soon as he’s not white, people will look more into the things he’s doing at the institute. he’s trying so hard to fly under the radar, his whiteness is a TOOL that he USES.
there are some characters who need to stay white.
when white people take horrific villains and go out of their way to make them POC in a piece of media that already really Only highlights the race of villains, it’s a little funky to me!
but then you have people who seem to think that because gerry is Good and we Love Him, then surely then he must have Every Notch On His Minority Belt in order to really drive home that he’s good or valid or whatever the fuck and that is just. completely ignoring the concept of intersectionality, for one, and also treats minority demographics as cosmetics.
it makes race into an accessory. a shitload of other things, too, but i’m going to try to keep this narrowed down.
the point is, you do not need to have All the trauma possible for the trauma you do have to matter. ADDING racial trauma to this specific backstory is unnecessary. i get that you think you’re not allowed to like white characters because you’re afraid of being seen as someone who only likes white characters, but sometimes a character is white! and they are also perhaps disabled, traumatized, clearly LGBT in some way, and sometimes you just like them. that’s it.
as soon as a white person goes from ignoring characters of colour in media to Performatively Hyperfixating On Them, congratulations! you’ve found a new problem. it’s called...
white guilt!
look, i get it. i seriously do. i understand wanting to give your faves (in this case, gerry and eric) a little more depth and backstory and perhaps culture but i and others have seen a lot of white artists draw them as POC without understanding the implications there in their canon history and treatment that they receive.
but it really does fall into a similar vein as people regurgitating the ~ambiguously brown jon~ designs that are geared towards white comfort and consumption because they think they’re not allowed to depict him any other way, except they have no idea how they’re even depicting him when they do that.
what MAKES a POC more interesting in the first place, to you? i can tell you right now that it goes a lot further than just colouring them in a few shades darker in your art to masquerade diversity.
and do NOT spin this as me just saying “white people are interesting, too! more white characters!” because that is absolutely not the point of this. the point is, “if you depict a character as nonwhite, you need to consider what that actually means.”
this is not saying, “stop trying to diversify your headcanons!” i’m saying that when you diversify your headcanons — because you should — you cannot just slap things together without cause or care, because you can and will end up perpetuating harmful stereotypes.
when you’re doing this in a predominantly white fanbase, it’s VERY slim that you’ll be informed about it before it’s too late. i have literally never seen anyone publicly speak on why ambiguously brown eric is uncomfortable (beyond the fact that he’s ambiguously fucking brown in the first place), only had miserable conversations about it in private with people who hate seeing it and are hurt by it enough to fear saying something.
so, i’m saying something now. and i had plenty of POC in my DMs backing me up on this. this isn’t isolated. this issue is still small right now, too, but i’m starting to see more of it. i don’t want this to get out of hand the way some other things have. sometimes, things that are widely accepted fanon, are worse.
and once again, i just a reminder, that this is not directed at any POC who are projecting, who care about this HC because it feels personal to them, or even just who LIKE gerry and want him to be like them. that happens all the time, that’s fine, that’s not something i’m saying is Wrong — POC aren’t a monolith and i sure don’t speak for everyone.
and honestly, even when other POC do it. i get it. just keep in mind, though, that when your art is just floating around with no context and no one knows who you are or what your angle is, it can still hurt to see if there’s no clarification about where it’s coming from. the kneejerk panic is real. AND, worse, white people will see it and think they have a free pass to do the same thing. so, even though i know why and i support you wholeheartedly, i get it, i still want to implore you to consider coming at this differently (even if that just means clarifying somewhere, y’know?)
EDIT (8/2/2020), @ebonyphd had some nice input, also, that i feel should be put here!:
“I was also trying to say there was a story to be told about that dynamic bc of the toxicity. Whether how bad it is or even what recovery from it would look. That was what I was trying to get at. It sometimes rubs me the wrong way when it seems like stories that relate to the negative aspects of POCs existence are constantly being measured and corralled. If that makes sense”
could NOT agree more. this is pretty much exactly what i was already saying, yeah, like. it’s like what i said about francis way up there; it’s not that you can’t write characters going through things or having a struggle like this, these things DO happen. again, i’ve lived it. i know.
the reason i’m saying to be careful is Because i’ve lived it, and i when i see this specific HC (i need to keep repeating that i’m talking about this specific one), there is never any context, it’s never in writing, nothing.
i think of mary’s connection to fascist ideology and i just really do not think this one narrative is suited for casual exploration. the amount of time and nuance you’d need to dedicate to that kind of storyline is biting off a lot more than anyone even wants to chew. you literally CAN’T tackle that in just, random art pieces. it’s better suited for writing, but even then, i wouldn’t wanna fucking read that especially if OP half-assed it.
i’m saying don’t half-ass it.
i’m still not saying do not explore this at all, ever. i’m still only saying that when you do, do it with care. these stories and experiences do need to be talked about and explored, but it has to be done deliberately and with consideration.
overall, i just think white people need to fucking Think for Two Seconds about whether what they’re doing is for the Points, and whether they’re perpetuating something insidious because they’re operating under stereotypes or are simply ignorant to the implications of race.
that’s it, man.
i’m tired.
#the magnus archives#magnuspod#gerard keay#mary keay#eric delano#gerry delano#gerry#eric#r.txt#ronologues#putting it in the character tags because fuck it lmao#top#racism#antisemetism tw
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i’ve been sitting on this for a while, but i’m tired.
there is an undercurrent of transmisogyny here, as is true in every space, and i’m far from the first person to point it out. however, a recent, more direct instance of it has made it clear that some more explicit conversation is in order.
this post is only intended to encourage you to ask yourself some questions, as we should all be doing anyway. so, if you haven’t done so in a while, this is your sign to pause and reflect.
EDIT 3/15/2021: okay, really quick! i received a heads up that this post has some unintentionally misleading phrasing, so i’m going to fix a bit of it, but i want to make some things EXTRA clear from the start to avoid any misinterpretation.
while this post is talking about transfem HCs on a broad scale, it did start in response to a specific instance regarding an amab nb/transfem guy HC, and i want to make it very clear that when i talk about him, i’m not HCing him as a trans woman.
in trying to make this broader and more educational, i DID miss a few steps, and for that i apologize! i was admittedly caught up in my feelings about that situation and in turn didn’t broaden the discussion quite enough — i should have said most of this when i first wrote the post.
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as a rule, and as many trans women have said themselves, do not portray canon men as trans women. don’t do it! just don’t.
it gives off the impression that trans women are just men, or are related to them in a fundamental/functional way, which is bioessentialism and transmisogyny.
if you’re going to HC anyone as a trans woman, look at the female characters in whatever you’re consuming! they are right there. they could be trans!
so do NOT base your trans HCs on the sound of someone’s voice, or anything physical like that. it speaks loudly about how we view trans women, and it’s rooted in some dangerous lines of thinking.
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in terms of myself, i want to make clear that the HC i primarily discuss here is not my only transfem HC. i personally HC sasha and georgie as trans women, jon as amab nb who rejects western terminology altogether and never transitions in any way, and gerry as a transfem gay guy who just goes on E as a major part of his recovery process, and as a way to reclaim his sense of self. that is it! so in no way is the discussion below about gerry insinuating i HC him as a trans woman: i emphatically do not, and reject that idea loudly.
for more information on how “transmasc” and “transfem” encompass a wide array of experiences, check out this post that ren linked in an ask they got dismantling the idea of a trans girl tim HC, which is a bad move.
once again, the post below did mainly begin in response to a conversation about amab nonbinary visibility, and i should have been more careful about shortening it to “transfem” broadly because it could have been read as me saying that this guy character is a trans woman. not at ALL what i meant, and if any TME folks reading this do that kind of thing yourselves, i kindly ask you to cut that shit out.
so, now, i’m just editing some of the wording below to align with these clarifications, but i still wanted to be fully transparent about the fact that i did overlook how certain phrasing might sound and achieved the opposite of what i meant! full responsibility, am very thankful that i was told. here we go!
for context: a friend of mine made a post about how some trans HCs actively diminish important elements of the story and of those characters, and it received an unsolicited, frankly hostile response that more or less said, “you’re right that [character] reads as amab nb in canon, but i still HC him as transmasc because i want to lol.”
conversation about the issue of erasure did continue and become more civil, but it didn’t result in a change in behavior which leads me to believe they have no idea what their intial response implies. so, i just want to shed some light on that, because there are things we ALL miss, and it’s good to have a chance to correct ourselves. even this person should have that chance, and they won’t know to seize it until someone points it out.
i’ll end up repeating this a bunch of times to be sure i’m coming across: this isn’t me getting petty about someone’s HCs just because they’re not my own. no one can stop you from doing what you want, i’m not an authority, and i’m not saying transmasc HCs are suddenly problematic. i’m literally transmasc myself, and share in many of the popular HCs around here, too.
this is just me saying the justification that was given in that response to the very idea of a character being an amab trans person didn’t come out of a vacuum. this is about the reason, and its foundation.
frankly, it comes down to rejecting the idea of particular anatomy, and that is tied to all sorts of rhetoric many of you claim to stand against.
this isn’t just about one person. there are a lot of people here, and in other places, this is also about. the amount of people who respond to ANY sort of criticism or undirected, thorough attempt to broadly raise awareness with “just let people have fun” is tone deaf. it means you have a deeper problem that you need to examine that has nothing to do with fictional characters.
even some people in the tags of ren’s recent post have completely missed the point that:
horizontal erasure is still erasure.
there is a time and place for projection! we all do it, it’s natural, it’s so much fun, it can really bring life to something and make our depictions of things all the more organic. this isn’t saying don’t project; that’d be hypocritical of me.
it’s about how seeing something that is not about you and deciding that it Should be about you Instead is ALWAYS a bad look, no matter what marginalized experience it’s about. chiara wrote a wonderful analogy before that explains it pretty well, too.
making the active decision while fully informed, to just go “But What If I Do It Anyway” does not actually set you apart or excuse you. in fact, it sort of makes you worse than someone who hasn’t put enough thought into it to even consider the possibility because now it’s a choice. you’re not the only person saying “but what if i do it anyway.”
break once again to remind everyone that this still isn’t me coming for your HCs. i’m a big boy, i know how to scroll past things that aren’t my cup of tea.
what i can’t just ignore is seeing just how easy some of us find it to knowingly dismiss our trans sisters, amab nb people, any transmisogyny affected person because you... can’t relate to them?
i know how to scroll past HCs that aren’t my own, and even enjoy, respect and uplift them. but the frequency with which i would have to scroll past things like that is just an example of how the conversation that sparked this post is not an isolated thing.
so, what you need to ask yourselves is:
what is it about transfems that you can’t relate to?
why are you afraid to portray them? what are you scared of doing wrong?
who do you fear conversation with a transfem who might point out a mistake? what do you think will happen?
why is the wide spectrum of transfem experiences not interesting enough to explore? do you polarize it into meaning only trans women? do you just not consider it?
if you do only think of it as trans women, why are they not enough?
what is it that makes these experience something you just can’t depict with love and care?
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what are you projecting, exactly, that means you can’t just... pick a different character to project it onto?
what does being transmasc lend to that character in the first place, if you fully acknowledge that it doesn’t align with the story that you already relate to?
why can’t you relate anymore if they’re transfeminine? why does that make what spoke to you about their story just go away suddenly? what is uncomfortable to you about saying that you relate to a transfem?
even if you think you have an answer that doesn’t rely on bioessentialism, chances are you still have some underlying instinct to distance yourself from our transfem sisters that you need to address within yourself.
transfeminine people are still trans. amab nonbinary people have, like, next to no visibility and are treated horribly in many community spaces if not outright turned away at the door. there are going to be differences in our axes of oppression, but that does not take away the root of it being that they are trans, and their stories do need to be told? the commonalities between our experiences don’t go away, and our stories are not more important than theirs. do not fall into bioessentialist traps.
the point of this post is mostly to raise some awareness for the following things:
this has happened multiple times in this space
people can see it when it happens
it has been brought up before
and it does have an impact
if you feel threatened by ANYTHING that was said in this post, then yes, it must be about you. no, that doesn’t mean i’m going to come to your house and steal your computer to delete any and all of your content where our HCs don’t align. it doesn’t mean anyone is holding a gun to your head and making you change your designs and depictions. that’s never been what this post is about.
it is only meant to make you ask why getting defensive might be more important to you than simply asking yourself the above questions. if you want to be told you’re not being transmisogynistic more than you want to reject and fight against transmisogyny without being asked to: that isn’t enough.
if your own answers to those questions make you uncomfortable, you may be regurgitating lines of thought that you should reconsider.
needing to unlearn something is not the end of the world! the inability to accept that you can be/have been wrong in the past is the real thing that will stop you.
but being able to admit that you might have been wrong, or biased, or had been going by a sour belief takes a lot more guts than standing your ground when you’re hurting people and they’re telling you step by step how you can stop. it’s a lot more respectable, that’s for sure.
this conversation has been going on for a while, and not just here. this isn’t new.
so, to fix this specific problem you might not have realized you had?
talk to transfems. talk to trans women. talk to transfem gay guys! talk to amab nonbinary people. they are out there, and they are incredible.
follow more of them on social media and listen to what they have to say.
read more books about their history, their experiences, their joy and success and love.
consider the ways that you could just buckle down and include them with the same ease with which you write about yourself and whatever other experiences outside of yours that you consider digestible.
but overall, just. consider being respectful when something is not about you. do not be that guy. be a better guy, and remember that you honestly owe transfems everything. all of your pride, all of the rights that were fought for, we owe transfems everything. particularly trans women.
so do whatever you’re gonna do with your HCs. this still isn’t me individually policing your content. i have no power over you and what i say has no bearing on what you create unless you let it. i’m sure you have your reasons.
i am just asking you to be mindful and examine why you might be averse to change, to learning, and apparently to the overall transfeminine existence in specific. fandom is only an escape for the privileged. don’t be another part of the reason it can be so hostile to everyone else.
#transmisogyny tw#the magnus archives#tma#magnuspod#magpod#ronologues#r.txt#fandom critical#if i get so much as one person misinterpreting the point of this i will actually throw a brick#also if anyone accuses me of yelling bc i use bolding for accessibility: just don't. it's for readability. i got my anger out before.#edited this!
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hello! i am temporarily back on my bullshit. let’s talk for a minute about the infantilization of abuse survivors in this fandom! there sure is a lot of it.
it can be hard for some folks to recognize some of the stereotypes that find their way into their work when it comes to this topic; it’s not easy to talk about, so we often don’t want to, but the fact of the matter is, you run just as much of a risk of disrespecting and hurting survivors of abuse as you do any other group of people who experience(d) something that you haven’t.
i’m mostly going to be focusing on gerry this time around because it was some posts i saw/asks i received about him that inspired this, and i think it’s something that doesn’t get brought up a lot in his case. this is by no means an exhaustive dissection! there are obviously other characters this gets done to, in and out of this fandom, but gerry’s treatment has been eating at me for a while and some recent conversation has finally given me a reason to bring it up. let’s hit it!
disclaimers and summaries, so everyone’s up to speed:
i’d already made a post earlier about this topic, in response to a post that a friend of mine replied to, which you can read here. this and a second post (also rightfully and respectfully deleted!) created somewhat of a stir even outside of my group of friends; algie also made a pretty good post about it here, too.
but GOOD NEWS! the original poster DID apologize for real, i trust it to be Completely genuine, and i do NOT want anyone going after them at all! it takes time to learn these things, and showing that you have taken the steps to listen and revise your thought process/the way you speak is a deeply respectable thing. i’m still linking the OP solely because it’s connected to a wider trend that i have been seeing since i joined this fandom, and it’s an accessible point of reference to explain that trend. i’m happy this was resolved!
i’m not even really reacting to that post. genuinely, i’m just happy i can put this feeling i’ve had for over a year now into words finally.
after the first thing, though, i got a nice ask about gerry’s hair (possibly to cheer me up from having been upset about a gerry thing earlier LMAO) and a follow-up that led to me writing enough that i figured i’d just consolidate it!
yes. this is going to talk about gerry’s hair. i know that probably sounds out of left field, or stupid, or too menial to really be a big deal, but honestly? the way this fandom loves to take one (1) circumstantial mention of something to unrealistic, often OOC extremes? it can become kind of weird, depending on how you do it. and after seeing that other post before, i finally understood WHY some things i see here rub me so wrong! believe it or not, it does tie back into the way people characterize him in response to his trauma, and that is what bugs me. when people do that. which i’ll get to in the second ask.
the hair is just the tip of the iceberg. don’t come at me for Making A Fuss About His Hair, it’s just one example. it’s not the only one i’m going to make!
now for the disclaimer: i’m not at all upset anymore, and this isn’t an angry vent rant as much as, like... finally putting to words why some depictions of gerry make me uncomfortable as a survivor of very similar abuse to his, and someone who has a lot of the traits being made fun of in that first post despite my “formal” western education.
so, if you take anything i say here as aggressive, “policing headcanons,” Projecting Too Hard or being sensitive, then that’s a You Problem and something you need to deconstruct within your own self because all this is? is a survivor writing something for himself, on his own blog, that you are deliberately choosing to read, that expresses a feeling about something that personally impacts him. i’m not telling you what to do, or insulting you, or any of that.
you take from this what you want to take from it! i’m just talking for me, and people who feel the same way as i do, so that they know i see them and understand why it can be frustrating to see your experience mocked, belittled, patronized, romanticized, or all of the above at once. and if you tone police me on this, i swear to g-d you have to be Purposefully misreading me because i’m honestly just passionately infodumping and that is it.
anyway! i’m just going to paste the first ask and its original response now (with a few tweaks), then the follow up ask, and expand accordingly at the end!
anon: everyone takes badly dyed black hair to mean roots grown out but i think (as someone who dyes eir hair very frequently) that gerry should have missed spots behind his ears and the spots at the base of his neck always fade a little weird ♡
i 100% agree thank you for saying this! okay, not to take it too seriously but i am pretty tired of people taking the single citing of “poorly dyed hair” (when he was. literally a few months way from dying of a fucking brain tumor????) to mean he looks terrible at all times on purpose<3 or that he just straight up lacks the general ability TO dye his hair at all on a normal day despite. doing it for years. dkfjhd like, come on, man! have mercy!
sometimes it’s simply obvious someone dyes it because:
it catches the light funny
it has sort of a matte look
some spots that are are harder to reach fade at a different pace than other places because you put less dye there
it could leave stains on the collar of your clothes, other fabrics
it’s faded by the ends or the back in particular
it’s just cheap quality dye and Looks artificial, even if it’s covering everywhere
it can be that simple. i have dyed my own hair so much and sometimes i see things that make me Wince because i’m like. he’s committed to his whole Look why wouldn’t he be trying harder to maintain it when he’s not Literally Dying. jdfhjd. the roots are literally the easy part.
i could see them growing out some if he had to go a little while on some trip with mary without fresh dye, but you know what’d make more sense? he packs dye when he travels, but he runs out and has to buy new dye from a store he’s never been to, so they’re two different fucking blacks. he could have to rush to apply it so he missed some spots more in the middle (common with thick hair!), anything. but the roots are the easy part and that’s typically what you retouch first when you’re maintaining your dye! it would be the rest of it that gets patchy or fades out. if he’s unable to retouch it for long enough that his roots get like that, the rest would be dull as hell.
usually i just look the other way because it’s not a big deal but you'll NEVER see me writing him as having 5 mile roots unless he’s in a bad enough funk that he can’t keep up with it. which would totally have happened! yeah!
that’s actually a really great way to display when he’s starting to really succumb to exhaustion from mary’s haunting, or his cancer developing, all of that. it CAN be a very useful tool, and i’m not saying never do it! i’m just saying that assuming it’s the default is kind of weird, and if you’re making it all Cutesy when it’s pretty much canonly just a sign of the decline of his health and well being? that’s when i’m kind of. shifting in my seat a little.
honestly i feel like maintaining his Aesthetique™ was probably one of the most consistent ways he could reclaim and assert his own agency over his body and while he might not have been Serving Looks every day he was probably at least on the ball with his hair, like. if Nothing else.
except the little spots behind his ears and the base of his neck because he IS only human :’-)
@wytchcore: (off anon now bc why not)
but yes!!! especially when your roots are lighter than the dye, i dont know anyone who lets their roots grow out that much, honestly. and somewhat re the 'his hair is the only thing he has agency over', i also hate it when people say his hair is damaged to hell and back because like... people who dye their hair regularly, especially if you have long hair, tend to know how to take care of it. and a little shameless projection but dry/damaged hair is a Bad Feel like, sensory speaking. so no.
okay, now this isn’t pasting/revising a previous answer. flat out new stuff here.
i’ve already gone on way too long about the specifics of gerry’s hair, which probably looks pretty unnecessarily pedantic and petty, so i’m not gonna beat the dead horse on that one anymore. it’s no longer about that!
the bolded bit in this ask is what i want to emphasize, because THAT is the line that made me connect this conversation back to the post from before.
once again we cycle back to “infantilizing the abuse survivor” <3 because. yeah, it happens a lot with him and this particular thing seems to be no exception to that pattern? that i’ve noticed, anyway. like... give him some credit, man.
he’s a genuinely resourceful, adaptive, self-sufficient guy with a lot of ground knowledge and everyday skills that had to have gotten him through when his mother was less than reliable. in what world would he have not picked up on how to take care of his hair, especially if it was something he clearly took pride in and was more than likely styling that way in attempts to keep some control over a choice he kept deliberately making?
it’s nowhere near the severity that it gets put on jon, but this also reminds me a little of. people projecting bad hygiene or outright cluelessness about the whole subject on the super traumatized characters?
we all know executive dysfunction and depression is a thing and i’m not about to pretend i don’t think gerry would have a mountain of that to battle, but people don’t always seem to come at it from that lens with him anyway. it’s just. it does read sometimes as people just applying an unconscious stereotype where the traumatized/sheltered abuse victim Doesn’t Know How To Take Care Of Themself Or Navigate The World, which is. categorically untrue when it comes to gerry and also pretty hurtful to see in the patterns that i’ve seen it in multiple different fandoms.
and no one really goes into it thinking they’re going to do that on purpose! but it does still happen. stereotypes exist for all kinds of experiences and no, you’re not always going to notice especially if you don’t even consider a particular experience to be marginalized or at a disadvantage.
abuse and trauma overlaps with every marginalized identity, too. mentally ill and disabled people, LGBT people, and POC do have higher rates of abuse and trauma within their demographics. it is a part of the discussion of those things, so why is it that we don’t always think to be more careful when we speak about the subject broadly? if so many people are more likely to have experience with it? so many of the people you know here have this history, are going through it now, are struggling to get out. it’s not some mythical thing, it’s actually one of the most prevalent experiences across the board that exists in every sphere of human nature.
i think we all just have to be more careful, especially given how many survivors of trauma and abuse do flock to online spaces because it’s safer here than at home a lot of the time. it sucks to run into content that makes the incredibly painful, long-lasting results of your trauma into some gag to be laughed at, or some Cute Quirky Thing that no one fully examines the consequences of.
a small reminder that the initial post was completely resolved, and that OP displayed exactly how you’re supposed to respond to this kind of critique. i’m still going to talk about why it was hurtful, but i want it to be clear that it’s for educational purposes for those who don’t understand why OP took the post down, and not as an attack over something that’s finished.
even just the title — “Gerard Keay Can’t Do Math” — inspired kind of a wince reaction. i don’t think everybody understands just how much that can fuck up your life, well into adulthood? even if i didn’t have dyscalculia, i still might have bawled my way through math classes being taught by cruel teachers who didn’t care if you understood or not, and continuously went out of their way to make you feel stupid.
to struggle with giving someone their change, tipping at a restaurant, doing your own bills and taxes, going to the bank at All, knowing what to withdraw and what to save, balancing a checkbook, delegate what services you can afford to cover and maintain your home and daily life — those things are crushing, my dude. it is agonizing to feel behind on those things, to have never been taught them, to be berated and belittled and laughed at for being Developmentally Behind your age group because you’re learning so late.
genuinely, i’d have thought a lot more people on here would understand that experience than not? it fucking sucks. what’s funny about it? feeling stupid, useless, like a failure, like you’ll never grow or be able to support yourself, like you’re a burden on anyone you ask to help you — what’s funny about that?
in gerry’s case, who the FUCK was he asking to help him? he would have had to learn those things first and foremost, so this doesn’t make Sense to put on him.
okay dumb comparison here, bear with me, but you know the “don’t stay in school” video? This Is VERY Gerrycore. this is probably how he’d be reacting if he DID go to school, and frankly? he’s probably pretty fine with the fact that he didn’t! because the Practical Knowledge he got instead is FAR more useful to him. he learned that stuff FIRST; the things directly applicable to his life.
who cares if he wouldn’t know calculus: when the fuck are YOU using it?
the weird significance that people place on the western education system is Bothersome because, like... we have been criticizing and trying to deconstruct that system for ages, it’s a pretty big political talking point, it’s like. not helpful to reinforce the inflated sense of superiority that it fuels itself on.
like angel said above, he literally spends his whole life being taught how to run a small business with his mother. a small, niche, business that would require him to know how to do math and be pretty well read in general! yes, about history and language and the world (to balance science and the eldritch, to explain certain phenomena and then cross-reference it with the powers, ad nauseum.) about all sorts of things i’m willing to bet none of us understand.
because we didn’t have to.
treating gerry like he’s Stupid is a pretty bad look! do you have any idea how smart you have to be to navigate the world with, yes, such an inconsistent education from a notably unskilled teacher like mary? OP was right about that much, and i understand what they were getting at; his knowledge WOULD be pretty sporadic and mostly self-taught!
but again, this is far from the only time i’ve seen this kind of joke get made; it’s not actually even the worst one, just the most recent i’ve seen. i sure as hell didn’t go out of my way to collect them over the past year because seeing them was upsetting, but there have been enough that actually go out of their way to make him being Clueless about the Ordinary World be some, like. cute thing or some running joke.
EDIT 11:00 PM - and this isn’t even to mention the stereotypes about Weird Homeschooled Kids being socially inept and just not knowing how the world works in general. like. we know he was Forcibly Isolated (which isn’t something to joke about anyway), but that stereotype DOES hurt actual human beings who were homeschooled for any number of reasons, be it disability/injury/illness, finances, global location, or literally just because the parents don’t want their kids to get fucking hurt the way that kids always do in school. sometimes, a parent CAN give better education than a fucked up system that targets SO many children for reasons out of their control, and to act like they are DOOMED to be Stunted is just plain insulting? we aren’t better than anyone because we went to public school, gang. we just have PTSD.
stop regurgitating propaganda about the western education system! it does no one any favors, and it honestly gets bootlicky after a while.
so now for the other thing people do that kind of infantilizes or softens him in ways that contradict why he’s so compelling in the first place.
the reason he couldn’t integrate himself into the ordinary world wasn’t because HE felt ignorant; he felt that everyone else was too ignorant. remember that?
i know we don’t like to admit that our favorite boy has an arrogant streak, but being raised by mary? he’d have absorbed plenty of her thought patterns regardless of how much he resisted her goals just by dint of such long and consistent exposure to her. we think of him as The Good Guy so we don’t want to think he ever had a bad thought in his life, ever did a bad thing for the wrong reasons, but the fact of the matter is, he would have. what makes a good person is having those impulses and choosing to work against them, which he DOES eventually do when he’s able to.
but he had to make himself think like her to survive her for a long time! as a teenager, he was canonly out there doing her bidding! he was out there not caring about the safety and lives of other people in order to get what he was told to get; for all we know, he killed that one guy in the tunnel to get the stupid bone book! we don’t know. but it sure is possible!
he DID have a time where he just went and adhered to the way she taught him to live. no, that’s not fully analogous to the Rebellious Good Samaritan Action Hero everyone kind of likes to act like he was because he advised andrea nunis on escaping the lonely and he handled diego molina himself before lesere saraki could touch him, and that’s the thing.
andrea nunis was probably one of the first things he made the choice to do By Himself, because he was Actively running from mary that time (immediately after being acquitted), and the diego thing? sure, he could have been fucking around with the desolation on orders (given how he said he did do what she asked, and she was “around” to pick him up from the hospital), but that was even later in her haunting and he says he “covered leads” as revenge against her when she faded for a few days at a time, to keep books AWAY from her. killing a guy just to do that is SUPER interesting characterization (as a kindly anon pointed out!)
ren’s going to talk about that some in a future meta of theirs, so i won’t get too far into it now since it diverges from my initial point. but, y’know, i just. i think people water down his character a lot in ways that aren’t supported by canon. usually in ways that minimize his intelligence, confidence, and ability to look after himself despite us knowing that he was largely self-reliant all his life. his moral compass is skewed due north when it’s honestly Not Even That.
he is self-assured in his intelligence, and seems to think the shit he gets sucked into is the fault of other people’s lack of knowledge. he probably gets annoyed when people don’t magically know what he knows (see: him literally talking about the entities in front of civilians, etc.)
take this comparison, too: i know a lot of us here don’t feel like we can connect with cishets, with abled/neurotypical people, even just people who don’t share a neurotype with us, Rich People™ — it’s literally the same feeling. i know i struggle to be close with people who aren’t similarly traumatized! and it’s not because i want more people to have been hurt like that, but i find it easier to communicate with people who were because we don’t have to watch what we say or justify why we behave in a strange way to each other. we can skip all that and just go about our day.
gerry has no interest in censoring himself. it’s frustrating to interact with people you have to explain yourself to. he wasn’t spending all of his time pressing his hand to the glass and yearning for normalcy. he was busy, he was getting by, and he was — in a twisted, unsavory way to us, the listener — comfortable.
there were things he was obviously angry about, things that irreparably hurt and changed him, things that fueled his incredibly spiteful nature, but honestly? even then, it’s not what you think about 24/7. sometimes you are just living your life. sometimes you’re just running errands, keeping shop, talking to your mother at the dinner table, seeking and accepting her praise for the things you genuinely love to do, and just touching up your hair dye in the bathroom because it’s something that comforts you in the day to day.
and you get good at all of those things.
i’ve officially hit Ramble Town so i’m going to stop finally, but! i hope at least some of this was clear. it just sucks to see someone who clearly was presented with useful information, who knows how to use it, who CAN rely on himself, being reduced to a sheltered, nervous nitwit that doesn’t know how to upkeep his own hair — which, again, is a choice he continuously makes for Over A Decade.
and, you know, other things. but that’s all been said already by smarter people than me, and will be said later by the same! ren’s going to touch on what gets done to martin, too, more often than probably anyone in this podcast, so keep an eye out for that bad boy coming soon.
#gerard keay#gerry delano#gerry#the magnus archives#tma#magnuspod#magpod#r.txt#ronologues#abuse tw#cancer tw#top#3.8k words... oops.
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time for a zesty autistic opinion! by an autistic about autistics for autistics.
jon has a complicated relationship with empathy; empathy defined as intuition.
it can get overwhelming, which could have contributed in part to his S1 attitude and the distance he put between himself and other people. i can see that as being a defense mechanism to keep himself from getting overloaded at work and potentially appearing “unprofessional.” (ow.)
it also plays a part in his paranoia! with intuition like that, you end up reading more into other people’s judgment of you, and it can be scary. a lot of the time, people’s negative emotions are that much easier to pick up on, especially to someone who is already very sensitive to the way others perceive him.
add the RSD from childhood experiences and the dude is in hell.
it’s probably more accurate to attribute this to RSD in general since it’s definitely less centric around Other People’s Feelings and then connecting back to sympathy/compassion, and more about him being very quick to pick up on negativity and assume it’s directed at him. domino effect going on.
martin is a low empathy* autism, but with a heavy focus on cognitive empathy/deliberate compassion.
he’s here to take care of you! but he’s not here to take your shit.
he doesn’t preoccupy himself with the idea that he might hurt someone’s feelings if he has to say something important so much that he can’t let himself say it. he’s very objective and can step back.
then you get episodes like MAG 110 (and many others) that imply his instinct to make people tea largely stems from an apparent belief that “this affectionate gesture makes people feel better when they are unhappy, and so i will do it often and then everyone will know i care about them! perfect. wait, not perfect? shit what now. uhhhh.”
(*remember that empathy is not an indicator of morality, it doesn’t indicate a capacity for sympathy, it doesn’t just determine whether you’re a Good Person™ or not, some people with low empathy will be the kindest people you’ll meet because they try that much harder to put effort into the way they relate to and treat other people, etc.)
i might elaborate on this if there’s interest, but feel free to add, too! i’d really love to hear from more low empathy autistics about this kind of thing since i feel like i don’t see it very often, especially not for characters like martin who people kind of assume has to have high empathy just because he’s, like. friendly. which is a bit disappointing! empathy and compassion aren’t the same! he can be friendly without taking on other people’s feelings to the point of detriment, just like jon can be very attuned to the feelings of others and respond to it with signs of distress that make him look a bit more unfriendly at first glance.
#jonathan sims#martin blackwood#r.txt#hc#if anyone assumes that i'm insulting Either of them with this i WILL blow a gasket#these are both equally and deeply valid manifestations of autism!!!!#autism party#jon#martin#ronologues#see this was gonna be a single bullet for them both but then i got carried away so i'm stopping myself now!!!!#i linked my martin cptsd post there it doesnt say anything abt autism but does examine his motivations and boundaries!#WOW the dash removed my indenting so i had to add dividers gvjnm SORRY!#top#edited one last time lol.
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