What flavor of queer are you, if that's not too invasive of a question?
question is just fine with chuck it is kind of interesting story.
on LGBTQIA trot i am TECHNICALLY two letters
easy first one is B that does not need any more explanation. that has always been my trot
second way is what i have learned through talkin with my online buds way of non-dysphoric trans. it has taken chuck LONG time to understand this but it has been fruitful journey i think. long ago chuck would post online about becoming other people or things or concepts or wrestling with my IDENTITY as a buckaroo (whether that meant becoming sweet barbara or becoming my reverse twin or becoming the entire seahawks footballs team, very handsome). in fitting with my entire heckin LIFE some buds probably thought these were jokes when they were not at all. they were just personal artistic bubbles tumbling up and popping in ways i didnt understand yet.
but through posting these thoughts and THEN writing trans tinglers and talking to my trans buds online, i started to realize there are all kinds of versions of a trans identity INCLUDING the ones that rolled around deep inside of me that i never had a name for.
three events helped chuck understand this
first: the trans buds chuck talked to while researching harriet porber said 'well i always knew if i could press a button and change my body to match my gender i would instantly do this' and chuck thought 'of course woudlnt we all do this?' and they said 'well no, do you feel this way?' and i would say 'yes very strongly'. i will FOREVER be grateful to trans community for these conversations and maybe it is another reason why being anti-gatekeeping is so important to chuck.
second: thought about all the games i have ever played like a dang videogame or a role playing game, chuck would ALWAYS choose ladybuck character. didnt really think this was a unique thing at time but it is a pattern across whole life
third: chuck was trotting around with some buds and they all said 'whose bod would you choose if you could transform into any body?' (this is common topic for chuck believe it or not.) and the buckaroo guys went around naming the usual brats pitt or handsome channing and it got to chuck and i said 'obviously brie larson' and then the dang guys just kind of stared at chuck and then i realized 'oh, i didnt even think my answer was unusual but i guess they were only talkin guy bods'
these three things happened pretty close to one another but they were all bubbling up for decades and expressed in various ways even chuck did not entirely understand
anyway. chucks way is NOT that i feel uncomfortable in my body and it does not bring me grief. i am not upset about it honestly. i do not even THINK about it most days. however, it is all TRUE and in a purely technical and utilitarian sense of A PLUS B then YES, male would not be my preferred gender.
didnt talk on this for a while because there are MANY dysphoric trans buckaroos who go through a lot of hardships and i have gone through ABSOLUTELY NONE IN THIS WAY. it has not made my life more difficult and it does not haunt me, so i do not want to have my voice drown out other trans buds who need space to shout. i am very privileged so even though technically this applies to chuck i do not need or want any bonus points.
that beings said, part of my journey on the autistic spectrum was to recognize that EVEN THOUGH my personal story is not tragic, it is still an important one to get out there onto this timeline. IN FACT there should be more stories of buckaroos who love being autistic like chuck. i am PROUD of my trot and i love my autism (this is also why i wanted to explicitly say my lead character in camp damascus is autistic)
so in the same way, when directly asked, i will say: i am technically non-dysphoric trans ALSO this has not weighed on my life at all. my story is not tragic it is full of joy and excitement. i will not shy away from this because there are all kinds of buckaroos on this spectrum.
anyway that is my VERY LONG TROT hope you enjoyed getting to know chuck a little more thank you for this question buckaroo
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One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".
Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.
That's the TL;DR version of this post.
ANYWAY here is the long version
Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".
One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.
Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.
It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.
This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.
People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.
I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.
Anyway if you want to read more:
- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info
-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos
-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.
-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa
- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.
-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge
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For bottom male/trans masc readers! Reader is mentioned to have a cock. The character can be anyone you want~ use that imagination!
You only wanted to kick him out. It was high time you kicked out the leech that was always late to paying his half of the rent. You told yourself time and time again.
But here you were again—back arched, legs shaking while you gripping the bed sheets beneath you. You still had your work pants on. He still had on his stupid baggy jeans.
His hand gripping your waist. Was his hands always that strong? He easily pulled you back and forth on his leg, your cock rubbing against it. Even through the fabric of clothes, you felt it.
You felt it so much. Even when he bounced his leg a bit—causing you to scream. You had a growing wet spot over your bulge. You wanted to cum so bad but he always stopped whenever you got close.
He could always tell. He knew you so well. You were so busy trying to gain more friction on his leg—he didn’t even have to move you anymore—that you didn’t notice the camera aimed directly at you.
Getting your pretty face, mouth opened with grunts and moans. Eyes watering. Your hair sticking to your sweaty face. He’d whisper sweet little things.. make you forget why you even wanted to break up.
You were too busy chasing your release—you didn’t notice that he was still streaming. Though the streaming camera wasn’t on you, the audio picked up every whimper and cry. Oh, his audience could hear you so well.
As soon as you’d get close, gyrating yourself on his leg, he’d grab your waist. You could never see his face from your position.. but he’d always have a cruel smirk.
He got you where he wanted.
With ease, he’d move you so your cock rests on his knee and he’d harshly push against it. Bouncing your cock against his knee—earning the simple “uh, uh, uh~”. It hurts. It really fucking hurts. But you like it. You like it so much you cum.
Right in your office pants. Shame, you just washed them yesterday. Your toes curl as you scream out, the finale of your show coming to an end. The audience you didn’t know about were applauding… you sounded so hot!
He’d push you off and spank your ass, enjoying the little twitch you had from the overstimulation. You’d be too busy trying to gain back your strength to notice him turning off the stream and getting the hidden camera.
Soft kisses on your lips. He’d give you a smile and say he’ll start a bath.. that he’s happy that you were able to get the stress off your mind.
Yeah.. yeah, that’s what you came to him for. Stress.
God, this job is such a pain. You should probably figure out when you can have a day off.
So you can spend it with your lovely boyfriend <3
tag for @teyvat-writer I did it—thanks for the inspo <3
Tag list: @the-ultimate-librarian @chill-guy-but-cooler @kiiyoooo @nakedtoasterr @iwishtobeacrow @mello-life69
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Hey i saw you ranting about trans men on a post, and i was just wondering a few things. This is a genuine question, as a stelth trans man, i really cant find anything about a pre op transitioning body attractive. Especially a pre op Chest. Now i do take testosterone, and i think that the parts that i find gross (ex: tits mixed with chest hair) are a perfectly acceptable thing to deal with so i can look the way i want to look. I love my body hair and my muscle growth, i just dont love the obviously not cis parts of me. What do you find attractive about this? I truely cannot for the life of me understand why people find trans men attractive but i would really like to understand.
I think spicy food is disgusting generally. it's like. hot and not fun and to me it adds nothing good to the food experience. Genuinely I don't understand why people enjoy hot foods it makes like. literally no sense.
and yet, people do. it's weird. I've tried on multiple occasions to get into spicy food and it just. suks. every single time it sucks. But everyone else in my family lives by it. And I've asked why for years literally unable to understand it until I realized.
sometimes people just. like things. things I certainly don't like and cannot enjoy whatsoever. But at the same time, this is true for me and not for them. I fucking love coffee to the point I drink it more than water most days, but no one else in my family likes it. BUT other people outside my family enjoy it too.
Life is weird and what I'm getting at is something that took me a lifetime to understand and I still can't wrap my head around it all the time.
People just like things. People love things and hate things. What things mean to one person can mean the world to another and death to the third. There's not always a reason for it, but what you have to do is accept that there are things in life that you just might not like much right now. but as time goes on you'll find value in it the same way your partner will find value in you and all the minuscule things you do and become and like and dislike.
And to build on that point, there are things I hated as a kid that I'm fine with and even love now. Each day changes you more than you'll ever know and with those changes, the acceptance that comes with them may be easier or harder.
So, to answer your question, I don't know! I just love men. Men with tits or pecs, men with vaginas or dicks. maybe both at the same time or neither at all! I just think men are generally attractive no matter the design or what's different about them. and not just men but people who present as masc in general. If you're masc nb there's a chance I'm looking at you through the window of a bar as much as if you were cis-male or trans-male.
I do know for some men, the allure of masculinity displaced with the typically-feminine concept of a vagina intrigues them. Maybe it's the juxtaposition of them together, maybe they just want something unique and new to them. Maybe they just really like vaginas and it doesn't matter who it's attached to, or maybe they just like trans men. Same thing with boobs, some guys just like boobs. Some men have boobs. the overlap doesn't mean net-negative results, it could be double positive.
And I don't expect you to love everything about yourself, god knows I don't love everything about myself, and despite people telling me what's good about me I can still find flaws within it whenever I choose. I think men with chest hair are hot as fuck, but also I've seen some smooth men that are just as if not hotter. I love me a fat man or a man with muscles, but i've seen twinks i'd demolish in one sitting as well. I've seen men with dicks and boobs and scars and and hair pretty much everything under the sun and sometimes I want them to sit on me and forget I'm there and smother me.
What you do have to do though is accept that you have those things, and you are those things, and even though you may not like those things you have to accept that they're a part of you and find value in that. And it's not an easy task at all to love yourself, but you have to try because even if you don't right now, there's a partner who will be waiting for you somewhere. there's a future version of you who loves you as you are. there are friends who love your flaws, pets who don't judge, and there are a lot of things that accept you as you are.
So just say you have boobs and chest hair. even if you don't love it about yourself right now know that there are and will always be people who do, and personally I've said before, but I wish i had boobs and chest hair it's just a perfect look to me. I'm fine with whatever my gender is, i just think its a good look. If I had money for top and bottom surgery I'd get it and never look back. You just have to find the value in yourself we all know is there, and if you can't just know that we know it's there and let that carry you through the day!
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(Devlog) What We Learned Making A Trans Dating Game
Hello, Amelia here, the writer for Breathless Winds. It's been 250,000+ words, countless revisions, and three years since this game entered development, and I wanted to talk about what I've learned leading up to release.
The concept for Breathless Winds was actually sort of a joke between friends. I was talking with Doris about how there should be a dating game where you play as a trans woman and your dating options revolve around certain ‘tropes’ we’d both seen in trans fiction-- the totally accepting cishet guy who falls in love with the trans heroine before she even knows she’s a woman, the cool trans woman who the heroine doesn’t know if she wants to date or wants to be, and so on.
Doris wound up suggesting we make this game ourselves. We both like visual novels and want to tell LGBT stories. Still half-jokingly and half-seriously, we started fleshing out what the romance options would be and coming up with a setting-- and soon, we were fully committed to making this game real.
I was a fan of visual novels but had only ever written prose. I knew which visual novels I liked and which scenes stood out, but I didn’t know why they did or how to make my own.
I read some great advice from visual novel developers, but a good amount of my knowledge came from just working on Breathless Winds. As our first project, this game has grown a lot with us and we’ve learned a lot while making it.
Learning How to Write Visual Novels
A bad habit I had to break out of was only using the ‘novel’ part of the game and not the ‘visual’ part. I would sometimes write “He smiled” or lines like that, and Doris informed me that we can convey this much more simply with a sprite change.
It sounds obvious in retrospect, but lines like that are often pretty invisible when you’re reading a non-visual novel. These lines change the sprite of the character inside your head (if that makes sense, haha). I realized that I’m so used to them being ‘invisible’ that I didn’t notice their absence in visual novels I liked, so I would accidentally include them while writing.
I was also writing these routes in a word processor, so I didn’t have the visual portion to reference, myself. I wound up making a lot of ‘tone’ notes like, “Lantana should be smug here” so that the meaning would carry when revising and implementing these into Ren’py.
So, while visual novels share a lot with prose, they’re an entirely different medium. On the subject of representing things visually, I’ve struggled trying to figure out how much can be visually represented and how much should be written.
Every asset in the game has to be drawn by Doris, so if I want the characters to go to a new location for a scene, I have to keep in mind that’s another background that Doris has to draw. If I want a new character to show up, that’s another sprite she has to draw. I don’t want to overload her, but if I’m trying to avoid this entirely, characters sometimes wind up standing in one room talking for ages without anything significant changing on-screen.
I’ve learned that it’s recommended for something to almost always be changing on-screen, though, so sometimes I just have to ask Doris to make a new asset for a certain scene. I still try to stick to locations/characters that already exist more often than not.
Every single thing in a visual novel is deliberate. Another thing I’ve had to learn that I never even considered before is how to write each line so it fits in the text box. It sounds obvious, but when I’m playing a visual novel, I don’t usually think about how each line has to be carefully constructed so it doesn’t need to be split up into two or more text boxes. In my mind, if a visual novel is well-created, there’s not much that breaks a reader’s immersion.
Planning & Outlining
The previous section might sound really weird to some people, so let me elaborate. I’m a lifelong ‘write by the seat of your pants’-er, so the biggest trial-and-error of creating Breathless Winds for me was planning out the game.
Initially, I created outlines for each of the four routes, and we agreed ahead of time on which CGs each route would have. That way, Doris could draw the necessary backgrounds and CGs while I was in the long process of drafting this game.
My original outlines weren’t great. I know a lot of people have different experiences with writing, but for me personally, a story is always shaping itself in my mind. When I started making the outlines for Breathless Winds, I knew the concepts we wanted to convey, but I didn’t know what each route (and the game as a whole) was really about yet. This might sound weird and unprofessional, but sometimes, I don’t know what a story is about until I finish the first draft.
So while I was writing, I would look at my outlines and I would think, “this doesn’t actually make sense, he wouldn’t say that” or “this plot point would work better if moved to this other section” or “there’s a plot hole here I didn’t notice”. The story wound up changing a lot in this way as I learned what it’s really ‘about’.
And even after I finished the first draft, I’d get feedback from Doris and/or my editor and they would suggest fixes to problems that even I hadn’t noticed, and then I would revise the route some more, and later on I’d come back and need to redo part of the route to comply with something I wrote in a later route-- I haven’t really felt ‘finished’ with Breathless Winds at any point, and I think I’ll still feel this way after the game is released.
This means that sometimes, a background was created but would go unused because there was no space for the scene that would use it, or we’d need a new CG last-minute, or so on.
When I’m figuring things out as I go while writing a non-VN, the only person that I can adversely affect is my own self… so I’m eternally grateful for all of Doris’s patience with me on this matter. I think Breathless Winds has come out a much better game for all the re-plotting and revision.
I redid the outlines several times as I went. I think I’ve understood how to create outlines that personally work for me-- ‘living’ outlines that hit all the main points, but leave wiggle room for moments when a character does something unexpected, work the best for me.
Scope Creep
So, originally, each route was meant to be 40,000 words. “With four routes, that’s only 160,000 words!” I thought. “And some of my favorite visual novels are about that long, so I can write that much, too!” ← clueless
This is the most infamous mistake that new creators make, and I walked right into it. I should have known better since I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with past non-VN writing projects before, but I was starry-eyed and didn’t realize how much work it is to make a VN. Some of those favorite visual novels I referenced were made by much larger teams, writers whose full-time job was writing (I wrote all of these routes on the side while working at a day job).
If I could have done it again, I would have asked Doris to start out with a really short VN. But, I don’t regret making Breathless Winds at all. It’s brought Doris and I a lot closer, for one. Every time I thought I wanted to give up on this, Doris would motivate me to continue. Without the two of us both and our strong friendship, Breathless Winds wouldn’t exist, and I think that’s beautiful.
No matter what, we’re going to see it through to the end. (I hope people like it, though…)
Anyway, here I am talking about how much 40,000 words is. Each route now is about 60k to 70k words. The problem with having evolving outlines is that they can often evolve into double their original size.
We came up with the idea of the poachers really early in development, and then not addressing the poachers felt like a failing, but by that point it was too late to remove the poachers entirely… and so the game wound up a lot longer dealing with the poachers.
I think that if we had an editor sooner on in the game’s development, then we might have had someone to tell us, “do you really need all of this in the game? Does this plot point really need to be there? Will you be able to write all of this in a reasonable amount of time?”, haha. But Doris and I were really excited about the possibilities of this game when we started creating it, and without anyone to reel us back in, we wound up coming up with more and more things we wanted to put in the game.
Did you know there was going to be an island full of talking rats who say things like “the big cheese” and stuff all the time in Breathless Winds? Yeah.
The Core Design Philosophy of Breathless Winds
So, for anyone who’s read this far but doesn’t know yet-- the premise of Breathless Winds is that you play as a trans woman who doesn’t know she’s trans yet, and she finds love with one of four love interests as she discovers her gender identity.
In real life, it can be a lot messier for a person to date when discovering their gender identity. To put it briefly and mildly, a trans person’s life and sense of personal identity can rapidly change during a gender crisis and the early stages of transition.
However, we wanted to make this game a ‘wish-fulfillment’ type story-- a trans fantasy about acceptance, community, and love. During a gender crisis, it can be easy to feel as if one has lost touch with themselves and become isolated from others. A sincere wish shared by many trans people is to be accepted, loved, and even celebrated as their true gender, not just tolerated.
Since many trans people don’t get love and acceptance in real life, especially with the ongoing transphobic moral panic, we wanted to create a game that would bring this feeling of trans joy and celebration to trans audiences.
We also hope that cis players will still enjoy the story and characters, and maybe come away from the game with a new understanding about being transgender and other aspects of LGBT identity (although we never intended this game to be ‘educational’).
Making Characters that Celebrate Trans Identity
Although we went through several revisions, the core identities of each character stayed the same since the game was first ‘jokingly’ pitched. In another post, I discussed how each character is themed around a change in seasons. (I also wound up theming them around the four humors when I was initially concepting them-- I really wanted to avoid too much ‘overlap’ in the LI’s personalities, haha).
Ultimately, characters are created to serve a role. The LIs in Breathless Winds were designed to be love interests, of course-- characters who would appeal to the hypothetical trans femme audience. As mentioned earlier, we modeled them after other trans fiction tropes because these types of characters have a certain tried-and-true appeal, but this left plenty of flexibility to put our own spin on it.
A trans woman being loved as a woman by a cishet guy can feel like a high form of ‘passing’, ‘fitting in’ to the female gender role, and being validated by his orientation. He only likes women, and he likes you, so you’re undoubtedly a woman. As a cishet guy, he represents a sort of acceptance into a societal norm that trans women can desire to live to. (Lantana, as a cis lesbian, represents the sapphic counterpoint to this-- although there is of course a big gap between the ‘normalcy’ of a cishet man and a cis lesbian woman, and I don’t mean to say those two are equivalent.)
But not all trans women want to live to that (cis) societal norm. Rue and Valerian, as a trans woman and a trans man respectively, are the t4t options.
Rue’s route represents that trans/sapphic ‘envy’ (“do I want her or do I want to be her?”) as well as finding power in community aside from what society considers ‘normal’. We’ve always been pretty clear about what we wanted to do with Rue’s route.
We went back and forth a lot more on Valerian’s route. Initially, we were unsure if he should be trans. He and Rue are the two less-friendly love interests (at least initially), so I was afraid it would come across that t4t is a more hostile option, which is not true at all. But it also felt like a mistake to not have a trans man in the game-- but making Gallardia trans would have required a big overhaul of what we had in mind for him and his route. (Although, childhood friends t4t is a really good idea...)
Beyond that, Valerian takes a villainous role in any route that isn't his own. We were worried that it would be wrong to have a trans antagonist who represents unjust power. However, Breathless Winds is a queer game with other positive trans characters, and we've always approached Valerian as a hot anti-villain man that you can't help but like.
In the end, Valerian’s route is about breaking generational cycles and what it is that makes you a man, and I also managed to sneak in a scene where they dance at a ball in the royal palace, so in the end I think it all worked out great.
Wish Fulfillment and Catharsis
Doris and I both agreed that we wouldn’t depict on-screen transphobia in Breathless Winds. Poppy worries about not being accepted, but fear of acceptance can come with any change in identity. Rue was rejected by her family for being trans, but this doesn’t take place ‘on screen’ in the game. There exist certain metaphorical parallels for transness and transphobia, but every route has a happy ending.
Following up on this-- it can be difficult to write about discovery of gender identity without writing about transphobia, considering how many trans people suffer from internalized transphobia during their period of repression.
Sometimes, repressed/closeted transgender people ‘hyper-perform’ their assigned gender as a form of denial. A trans woman might grow out a beard and join a gym, while a trans man might become very interested in makeup and feminine clothing.
In Breathless Winds, Poppy often struggles with ‘strength’ and what it means to be a man. In several routes, she tries to prove her strength under the assumption that being stronger would make her happy. Afraid the world would reject her if she became who she really is, she preemptively rejects herself.
Not every trans person suffers from prolonged denial, internalized transphobia, or even gender dysphoria. I don’t think it’s impossible to tell a purely-positive story about trans joy.
While Poppy never gets rejected for being trans, faces transphobia, gets called a slur, etc, she faces both internal and external (metaphorical) obstacles to realizing and accepting her identity.
Gallardia represents a societal norm that Poppy can’t live up to herself as a man.
Lantana suffers from certain aspects of her identity as a woman, which makes Poppy feel guilt for wanting to be a girl.
Rue is isolated from town at the start of her route, a ‘punishment’ for breaking this societal norm.
Valerian has to hyper-conform to his masculine gender role at first in toxic ways before finding acceptance from within and from his loved ones.
These struggles are real to a lot of people, but instead of pretending they don’t exist, I hoped to tell a story about catharsis. Poppy is able to live up to her truth as a woman and finds love with Gallardia, Poppy and Lantana redefine what being a woman should and does mean to them, Rue and Poppy find community in others who don’t fit the norm, Poppy and Valerian stop seeking gender validation from a society that was never made to serve them.
Although these powerful forces of oppression exist, loving yourself as a trans person- and loving those around you, protecting the natural world, and standing up for what you believe in- can save the day. That’s the kind of story we wanted to tell.
Wrap-up
There’s a lot more I could write, but this has already gotten really long (sorry!) so I’ll wrap it up here.
Learning how to write a visual novel in terms of technical skill (how to depict events on-screen, how long each line should be) as well as in terms of writing skill (how to outline the game, how to plan visual assets) has been a massive undertaking for me.
Writing Breathless Winds has been a big challenge but also deeply rewarding, and all of your support has made the experience even more wonderful. Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting the game!
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as far as my circle of mutuals goes, i think you're the only cishet guy around these days
We held a tournament, Highlander style, where we beheaded each other after climatic sword duels and absorbed the fallen's power. I am the Last Cishet who absorbed all of their power, known only by my title: Son Boy Allowed.
No but jest aside, that post did make me think of the times it's been brought up that I Am This in spaces where that's not the norm, and, well, each friend group or community has its own story, and in my case, it happened to be that the majority of people in my friend group & adjacent community, over the years, came out as trans mainly plus a few other identities, and while I did not understand it at all initially (even considered it could be catfishing, because I am from ye olde internet where catfishing was rampant and an olympic sport), my logic was "ok I love this person, they are asking me if I can refer to them as the other gender now, and that that's what they really are. There's not anything wrong at all with that, nor do I think this person I consider my friend could have nefarious intents with this, like catfishing, because I know them, so sure thing, let's go with that" and with time, I learned more and more about these topics, either by my own initiative (because I wanted to understand more) and when committing faux passes, because my friends would correct me or pull me to the side (send an IM) going "hey uh Drimo, you reblogged something pretty bad just now, are you aware?" "oh fuck no why" and I'd always get a helpful explanation.
Which brings me to the point: As a cishet dude, it REALLY helped me a LOT to understand these topics to have not only loving friends that live those lives, but to have said loving friends that live those lives and are willing to assume that my fuck ups and oopsies were born from ignorance and good faith, not from a hateful and discriminatory hill, and who then kindly informed me of X and Y.
So I have to agree with that post! At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, I do think being able to tolerate the misteps of a well-intentioned cishet guy who might not know all the 1s and 2s of the dance does in fact directly correlate to healthy, cool friend groups and communities. Over the years, the majority of my net friends have come out as trans, and a few others as non-binary and genderfluid, and I've never really had a situation where someone blasted me for my misteps, instead explaining What Happened instead. I've learned a lot over the years, and in fact, as a therapist, I've helped trans kids come out and have explained the whole shebang to their parents, but as a cishet guy, again, initially this was all very arcane to me, so I am always thankful for the people that took time and care so we could remain friends and so that I could grow to be a more worldly and open minded person.
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