Midground

pairing: Yelena/Kate (Hawkeye)

rating: E

chapter word count: 16,730

summary: Yelena decides to go to college. It just so happens to be the same one Kate Bishop attends.

preview: 

With both classes and exams finished, the steady roll towards graduation continues smoothly, right up until the point when Sonya decides to kidnap Kate. ("Kidnapped isn't the right word," Kate had reassured her, via video phone. Sonya's arm wrapped around Kate's shoulder hadn't exactly inspired confidence in the words, but Kate had seemed remarkably at ease, despite calling from Italy. Despite having only just been in Providence that morning, preparing for the 'surprise' party Lerato and Antonia were throwing them. "She's calling in her poker favor, fair and square. Plus, it's a good bonding trip! And I haven't been to Florence in ages!") The timing is bad. Worse, when she'd said so, Sonya had been especially annoying about it (teasing her about codependency) and Kate entirely too unbothered (an annoyance of its own). Which is probably why — only a day later — she uses the exact word Kate had claimed to be the wrong one when she's explaining the situation to Greer and Franny, instantly undoing all the work Kate had (apparently) done to placate them. "Kidnapped?" Greer repeats, and then simply stands there — her mouth open — when Yelena nudges past her into the townhouse. "But — we talked to her. Or. She texted us to let us know that she'd be late for movie night, but it sounded like Kate! It sounded just like her! Ugh. Classic thing to happen, to be honest, though. Franny, Kate's been kidnapped!"

And body autonomy does include things that you don’t personally like either. I was prompted to write this post after a series of bad takes from progressives, but one of them was re-hashing the Sabrina Carpenter album cover drama with “I don’t think it’s conservative of me to think that the album cover is a bad look when we’ve seen images of women being abused in this way” because I do actually think you’ve failed to understand feminism by projecting your morals onto a woman who was consensually expressing her own autonomy just because she expressed it in a way that you didn’t like or that made you uncomfortable.

Body autonomy also means unhealthy choices. Body autonomy also means regret rates. Body autonomy also means freedom of sexuality. Body autonomy also means mutilation. If you believe body autonomy has limitations and exceptions, then your feminism is most likely surface level.

If you're uncomfortable with the human cost of war and don't want to glorify it... good news, you don't have to! A tournament arc gives you all the fun of competition and rivalry and struggle to improve, without the uncomfortable knowledge that your protagonist's subordinates are likely doing awful things offscreen.

Similarly, if you like getting into your antagonists' heads and humanizing them, but don't like writing the kind of monster that makes a good high fantasy antagonist- good news! In a tournament arc, the only thing that makes an antagonist an antagonist is that they want the same thing Blorbo wants and are fighting them to get it.

Struggle to come up with a plot? Tournament arc has defined beats. Struggle with making high stakes feel cool and not corny? Tournament arc. Want to write a big ensemble cast? Tournament arc.

number one check yourself. Number two comparing TMA/TME to anti-Blackness is a false dichotomy and I need white queer people to stop trying to compare themselves to Black people every single chance they get. oh my god

The two are NOT similar. If you really wanna play the game of equating race and gender, then the equivalent to “Black and nonblack” would be transfem/trans woman and non-transfem/trans woman, not TMA/TME. I can assure you that NO black person is going around saying “antiblack racism affected vs antiblack racism exempt.” Because That Is Stupid.

EVERYONE is affected by antiblackness, because of how deeply it’s ingrained into our entire societal structure. You cannot write off specific demographics as not being affected by certain forms of oppression or discrimination, because the nature of living in a white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy is that ALL of these systems are INTRINSICALLY connected with each other, and affect EVERYONE to some degree. There are countless historical examples of antiblack legislation directly impacting poor communities of other racial groups- including white people. There are primary targets of discrimination, obviously, but nobody is truly “exempt” from any sort of oppressive system unless they are at the VERY top of the damn food chain.

In the same vein, the intersection of transphobia and misogyny is ALSO deeply ingrained into our society. And because of that, nobody is truly “transmisogyny-exempt.” Even people who aren’t the primary targets are still directly impacted and negatively affected by transmisogynistic systems. I find TMA/TME to be useless in terms of categorization because it directly posits that everyone who gets sorted into the latter group just doesn’t experience any oppression or discrimination derived from transmisogynistic bases at all, which is ridiculous, because that happens All the time.

A trans man or enby who’s mistaken for a trans woman and is assaulted for it, a cis man who’s belittled and attacked on the basis of being Too Feminine, a cis woman who’s publicly shamed, derided, and transvestigated for having testosterone levels that are “too high,” are all examples of non-transfem/trans woman groups being negatively affected on the basis of transmisogyny.

Poor white people being affected by legislation meant to target and attack Black populations and the massive trend of colorism throughout Asian communities are examples of nonblack groups being negatively affected on the basis of antiblackness.

You cannot sort people by what oppression they do and do not face, and attempts to do so are inherently exclusionary and are bound to lead back into denying people of their lived experiences, just because they don’t line up perfectly into these specific categories of “this genre of person goes through this” vs “this genre of person doesn’t go through that.”

I believe that TMA/TME was coined with the best intentions, but the problem is that it’s a clumsy dichotomy and the way a lot of people tend to use it ends up leading back into the same issues of being binary (“amab trans people experience this, afab trans people don’t experience that”) and then THAT leads back into a whole heaping mess in and of itself

Talking about the way transfeminized people are targeted by transmisogyny is not a bad thing in and of itself! But like, you can just say transfem/non-transfem- or even just “transfeminized” to describe the position oppressors will often place people into in order to enact transmisogynistic violence against them- instead of directly trying to state what different groups of people Do And Don’t Experience. you can say “primary targets of transmisogyny” without directly implying that certain groups are exempt from it all together.

I mean, they could easily refer to the brother and the sister as, well, "The Brother" and "The Sister" as a match, but instead they chose "The Sibling". There's gotta be something behind it. (Although it is just a Nightspring episode, which was written by Alan and not canon.)