Now Say “you Were Born In The Wrong Body” To A Disabled Or Neurodivergent Person. Congrats! Sounds

😔

I still think this is my best comic.

Alternatively, the Warp from Warhammer 40K. Heavy metal space-hell infested with demons and madness. If your ship isn’t shielded properly you get invaded and and driven insane. Fun stuff! John would have loved it.

The River is essentially just the Warp combined with the aesthetic of Hades’ soul whirlpool at the end of Disney’s Hercules.

the argument between john and mercymorn over what metaphors to use to describe river travel to the baby lyctors is so funny to me as i’m rereading slightly behind my best friend reading the series for the first time.

bcuz when they told me they were still kind of confused by it, i first went ok did you ever read a wrinkle in time? it’s similar in concept to the way they travel in the book

no? ok wait it’s actually like minecraft. which i now think is the best metaphor. you go into the nether, have to deal with difficult terrain and a bunch more shit that can kill you, but you travel a short distance in the nether and end up much farther in the overworld

I’ve been noodling on a trans hexblood alchemist artificer D&D OC for almost a year now. So when this post crossed my feed it felt like my mind was being read. It’s great to know I’m not the only one who’s thought of how to get transed into a coven lol….

Ok, so idea time. In D&D it's firmly established that Hags are girls. They primarily reproduce asexually and through rituals, making near clones of themselves, keeping that up. If the DO reproduce sexually it can end up as anything, but only girls ascend to haghood. The others stay as hagspawn, basically changelings. Now interestingly, Crawford has stated that in his home games he's run hags as male or female or neither regardless of apparent sex, because they're fey. If you combine those two facts, you get fascinating options. 1- It's entirely based on your body. This could give you a hagspawn trying to magically HRT in a way that arcane law accepts. 2- Being practically clones means that the original simply passed her preferred pronouns as well. If they're cis it's mere happenstance of the first one in the chain being that way. It's only by adding some mortals into the mix that things can get complicated. This could result in a family ignoring thier child's fear, thinking them safe from the local hags...only to find out they were secretly trans, and now have a hag with a personal vendetta against them. 3- The Sinister Sisterhood isn't just what the network of hags calls itself, it's basically an ancient fey contract that created them, and only accepts women. This could result in a hagspawn waking up one day as a hag, happy for the power but realizing they apparently have some stuff to unpack. It could also result in a hag reverting to a hagspawn, because they got too introspective and decided gender was bullshit. Conclusion- write an adventure about a trans hagspawn trying to take down the sinister sisterhood. Not because of the general cruelty and dedication to evil, but because if she can't get in she'll bring it to ruin. Ending with a new hag cackling off into the world, ready to spread evil and misfortune as her true self.

Low key would LOVE to be able to attach computers to myself like this. Imagine the memories you could store and retrieve with this tech. Plus it just looks cool… that may be the main reason… body modification 🤖

Nerd and jock from yesterday’s illustration

For me a lot of the horror lies primarily in the fact that the culture, traditions, and tactics of the nine houses stem almost entirely from the mind of one eccentric depressed nerd with a (literal) vengeful god complex.

Like, John lives in a space station where the walls are coated floor to ceiling in the corpses of people who have died serving him over the span of 10,000 years, one of his houses is a literal army of cloned child soldiers sent to the frontlines like a slaughterhouse conveyer belt, and the entire toxic necro/cav dynamic is based entirely around him being unable to trust his closest friends to stay by his side without emotional manipulation.

This entire universe is built on the hypothetical what-if of what would happen if someone was allowed to reshape the universe to their liking at the expense of everyone else, and that someone happened to be terminally online.

It’s like when authors jokingly say they’re terrible people for what they put their characters through but in this case, John’s fanfic is real. It’s like if Paul Atreides had a Tumblr account.

For me, I guess, the locked tomb is really superficially a good story and has lots of aspects that are good in isolation and appeal to a wide variety of queer readers but I think this series would have been better and more satisfying if Ms Muir had leaned more into the gothic and away from the internet humor. In my mind there’s no reason why each House wouldn’t be entrenched so deeply in things we consider taboo and repulsive that it’s unpalatable to most readers. Instead it’s like if Homestuck 2 was good

While I love and personally feel very seen by the allegorical* butch transfem/gnc/non-passing rep we get from Pyrrha, the circumstances that lead to her current gender situation somewhat muddy the waters on this imho….

Functionally*, Pyrrha becomes a butch trans woman who works dig-sites to feed her found family. This is entirely due to G1deon dying to Varun and leaving her behind in his body though, so whether this is her preferred presentation can’t really be called here.

Before lyctoral consumption, Pyrrha was head of intelligence for the Cohort, and a cop long before that. She’s great with guns and swords, and falls for people capable of burning empires down single-handedly. Classic femme fatale shit historically, but slightly gender-fucky given the cavalier dynamic.

On the other hand again, she calls her family “daddy’s treasures” after coming home late one night, and leaves her/G1deon’s hair cropped. 🤷

So in short.. Pyrrha is a woman who died alongside her nerdy polycule in a nuclear apocalypse, got resurrected as the bodyguard of her best friend, got killed again and magically consumed by said best friend, spent the next 10,000 years give or take intermittently regaining consciousness in his body after having part of her soul eaten away, and now lives in his body full time while undercover in an active war-zone. Anyone got a niche gender label and pride flag for that?

….

*While I wouldn’t want someone in these books to just say “Hi! I’m trans and go by -/-” as this would clash with the subtler baked-in queerness of the post-resurrection world building, there are other ways to write explicitly trans characters that don’t require the plot hoops that Pyrrha had to be thrown through in order to be classified as representation.

my daily mental exercise is trying to determine where pyrrha falls on the butch-femme scale

Mood

lyctorhood

Goals

My girlfriend told me this once a night out and it's lived rent free in my head since

And then transmeds took it back and ran with it. 😔

But like, what did people we would define as trans do back before we had lab-grown HRT like we do today? Did we used to just, roll over and waste away? I don’t think so.

Modern HRT is a wonderful thing (I should know), but I personally see it as a societal bandaid solution and a “cure” for cis people’s perceptions of us. I LOVE what it is doing to my body, but if I lived in a world where transness and gender roles where fundamentally permeable, would I think the same way?

At that point it would just be another form of body modification I suppose 🤔

the “born in the wrong body” model has never been a correct and universal explanation for being trans, it was always just a simplification to get cis people to understand things better. but then cis people took it to mean “there is something fundamentally wrong with trans ppl that can only be fixed with hrt” and its making me lose my mind.

Selfish indeed.

But you don’t understand, Mercy. If he had let you guys do it perfectly, then you might be more powerful than him and you might not need him anymore! He wouldn’t be able to control things! How could you ask him to do something like that, when that might mean he ends up alone again?! Especially when you could just kill your very best friend and stay dependent on Jod instead, thereby guaranteeing him company for eternity? Pretty selfish of you…