"all you ever do is complain" that's not true. I also resent.

If you’re not into butches when they’re fat you should have to walk around with a sign that announces to the world that you’re a tasteless idiot who probably also hates beautiful sunsets and autumn leaves.

Something I really struggle to get people to understand is that like. Sometimes there was no intentional homoerotic subtext, the author was just extremely misogynistic. Sometimes the author wasn't "secretly shipping" those two men, the author literally just hates women so much that they see them as being literally incapable of relationships with depth. Like this is kind of a big thing with misogyny actually. A lot of extremely misogynistic people truly believe that a man can only have meaningful and complex relationships with other men because they literally just think women are so inferior they only exist to birth children and clean the house. It's like when people say along the lines of "no one worships exclusively men quite like straight men do". It's just that phenomenon actually. That happens to be manifesting in a raging misogynist's writing. Writing a man character who literally only puts effort into his friendships with other men while completely ignoring his literal girlfriend or wife is actually an extremely straight thing to write. And that doesn't mean you can't ship those men or that there are no stories with actual intentional homoerotic subtext. I just think it's important to be able to recognize extreme misogyny in writing and acknowledge it without brushing it off and assuming good intentions when literally all evidence is screaming that this was a misogynistic writing choice and not a representing gay men choice.

>"you only think this character is transfem bc they're feminine!!" >look inside >actual analysis of the character's self image, beliefs, and relationship with gender that lends itself to a transfem interpretation

Tbh I don't understand anyone who denies their favorite character's flaws and acts like they've never done anything wrong when that is like consistently the most interesting part of any character ever

they're not super common but i really do appreciate characters who are introduced as one gender and later revealed to be closeted trans. i like that it challenges the audience to really think about how they perceive trans people because realistically not every trans person you meet is going to be out to you at first. yes we introduced this character as a man and now we're asking you to reframe her as a woman after you've already gotten to know her. can you be normal about that? can you be normal when it happens to people you know in real life? i hope you can.

The BEST trope is when a character tells another “let’s run away together, we can leave all of this behind and start a new life somewhere” and gets rejected. And then the rest of the tragedy unfolds