My Back Hurts

All the social norms. The standard of emotional detachment and performative machismo. The expectation that I treat men as competition and women as sex objects. The fact men tried to befriend me through boys club bullshit, endearing themselves to me by treating me as "one of the guys." The fact women were fully in their rights to feel threatened by me and avoid me, just because I was a man. The fact that there were privileges offered to me specifically because I was a man. I found it all deeply hollowing.

As I got older, my body disgusted me for all the reasons I was told men are supposed to like it. It was too large, too strong, too hairy. Too masculine. Which is frankly hilarious because in hindsight I was obviously like, a malnourished twink. Women in fact weren't afraid of me at all. I still vividly recall how my then-girlfriend from college approached me specifically because she thought I seemed "passive and non-threatening." And still it was too much. I was barely a man, and yet I was too much man. I could never like myself as a man. Could never lead a life worth living as a man.

The knowledge that I was a man felt like an immovable weight chained to my leg, something that kept me from ever becoming anyone I could be proud of being. Suffocating and meaningless. I turned to philosophy, learned all the reasons people choose to keep living, found none of them compelling. What meaning could I possibly construct in a life I had to live as a man? What god was worth worshipping if they had cursed me to live a life like this?... My options exhausted, I settled on repression. I'd just... bear with it. Work hard, raise a family, live vicariously through them. In a corner of my mind, a piece of me hoped desperately that reincarnation was real, so I could be a girl next time.

It's not that I didn't know transition exists. In fact I knew several trans people. But the concept had never been presented to me in a way I could see myself in. I didn't have some sense of absolute truth in my core that told me I was definitely 100% a girl, and the few trans women I knew were so confident in themselves, so accomplished and whole and liberated, that I could never in my life find them relatable. "That could never be me", I thought to myself.

I lost my virginity on my 20th birthday. I felt... numb, afterward. I didn't understand why it was such a hollow experience. Sex was supposed to feel good, right? It was supposed to. If I was going to be a man, I had to enjoy this. And I tried to seem like I did, but in our nakedness, all I could think about was how disgusting my body was, as I felt myself being sweaty and smelly and hairy and gross. And hers was so beautiful. So desirable. So... worthy of existing. Everything I wanted to be, but never could.

In the following months, the thought wouldn't leave. It felt like a raw, dull pain in my skull. I thought about my future. I thought about carrying this pain for the rest of my life. About being a man for the rest of my life. About growing old as a man. About dying as a man.

A year later, I came out as a trans woman. Two years after that, I started HRT. In march, that was six years ago.

roll confidence (determines who is most able to interject in the discussion)

roll to convince. depending on the argument you're making you roll for some number of rhetorical points.

opponent makes an obstinance save (on deep-set beliefs without rational foundations, this save is always a success)

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

A standalone (or added-on) game for 3+ Players, and 1 (optional) Arbiter

You Need

- 3 D6

- A Timer

Choose/roll 1d6 for ARCHETYPE:

1. Enigmatic Rival - Gains double points from Prick

2. Ancient Freak - Rolls +1 TIME Dice

3. Offputting Mascot - CONFESS is OOC, cannot roll below 7 on WOUND

4. Betray(ed/ing) Minion - Cannot be declared OOC, all points halved

5. Girl - May reroll one WOUND Dice

6. Insufferable Prick - Double OOC penalties, gains +1 from everyone

Arbiter chooses/roll 2d6 for sexy fatal WOUND and value:

1. Reroll

2. Soul Removed

3. Decapitation

4. Split Vertically

5. Split Horizontally

6. Torso Hole

7. Limbs Lost (Roll 1d6, - above 3, halve, round down and +1)

8. Gut Shot

9. Poisoned

10. Body Destroyed, Soul Intact

11. Heart Shot

12. Reroll

Roll 3 TIME D6s, multiply result by WOUND value.

Players must deliver a genuine, emotional dying speech to the other players (ONLOOKERS) for the duration of rolled time, in SECONDS. Onlookers award points for perceived sexiness, emotionality, etc. Players may CONFESS for +20 points from one Onlooker. Onlookers may declare OUT OF CHARACTER to subtract 5 points. Players may pause the timer to dispute. 10 points gained if other Onlookers/Arbiters agree.

The player with the most points wins.

and Space Elon Musk who wants to Gaslight her into being his Ex and also into killing the Tenno and he’d probably want to make them suffer in the process.

The Entrati family are the only ‘normal’ ish family and they’re already pretty dysfunctional.

The fact that both of you can be like "yah Lotus doesn't deserve to be hated but she Did Do This To Her Kid tho lolll" betrays your understanding of the Operator's agency as a person. The Operator is a child soldier whose mentality and sense of maturity can be debated, but a child still deserves dignity and respect.

The Operator exercising their agency by reclaiming the past is seen as pure torture when it doesn't have to be. The Operator is willingly doing this alongside Lotus, who has continuously been a grounding presence for them, who is someone who wants to guarantee their safety even if they, by their own will, still want to put themselves in risky situations.

The act of confronting your past is fine. It can be painful of course but it's such a valid way to progress with your healing. I wish I had someone like Lotus who would just be there for me when I wanted to figure out what the hell happened to me as a child.

The "Lotus being a bad mother" argument never holds water but especially not here because she's actually being a good supporting figure in the Operator's journey to reclaim their past. (A past that she had some hand in erasing mind you; this could be Lotus' way to make amends for the cryosleep amnesia/Margulis erasing the Tenno memories)

The victim of misogynistic abuse and lack of free will since birth is helping her child recover their own past and agency. It's touching. It's powerful. It's healing.

Lotus & Operator fics

No Rest For The Wicked (~1k words)

Tenno Mothers, Tenno Children (~700 words, ongoing)

Lotus, Natah & Margulis System fics

A Shell Unbroken (~3k words)

Of Light and Memory (~7k words)

little lotus petal (~3k words, ongoing)

These aren't all our works, but I'm predicting that a lot of the content in these may be either debunked or confirmed once the Tau arc fully sets in. Because the psychology of the Lotus is very important to us, I'd love for more people to have a chance to read some of these before TOP makes potential changes to the trajectories of her character.

her spirit guide: i've been waiting for you to get this far! i'm so proud of you!

magical girl: what

spirit guide: you're transgender! i've been trying to make you realize all along! every challenge you've faced so far was to help you gain the courage to be your true self:

magical girl: ...dude.

spirit guide: what?

magical girl: what do you mean it was all to make me realize?

spirit guide: i may have been behind the shadow beasts. a little.

magical girl: i already knew i was trans, dipshit! i didn't need help discovering that, i was struggling to find time to act on it because i've been running myself ragged dealing with multiple life-threatening crisis situations every fucking week!

spirit guide: but you never said anything!

magical girl: you're a magical fucking rodent thing that hands out magic powers to people! why would i involve you in my personal life like that?? you're my boss for my unpaid part-time job!

spirit guide: our bond transcends work-life balance, does it not?

magical girl: no the fuck it doesn't. and also quit dodging the main issue here, which is that you created some of the threats? the threats with real human casualties? the threats i can't get therapy about because this whole thing is outside the realm of mundane human perception?

spirit guide: it was important that you faced those dangers so that you could grow stronger!

magical girl: how many times do i have to tell you I was not, at any point in our time working together, a fucking egg? I was looking for gender clinics when we made contact. you are some kind of alien bug creature, so I didn't bother explaining what trans people are. now, you're going to tell me how to transform into this form permanently, before I take the crystal of pure hearts and shove it up your cloaca, you fucking monster.

spirit guide: this hostility isn't very pure-hearted of you!

Hints:

The "civilian form" is a "guy" in quotation marks.

She has a stated preference for the magical girl form

"why are you barging into trans men's spaces to bully them?"

i'm a trans man. i'm not anywhere i'm not already welcome.

"why are trans women allowed to have their own specific term for their oppression, but trans men aren't?"

in greater society, men are viewed as the default while women are viewed as the other. women are subjugated under a patriarchal society. this is the foundational concept of feminism, that women deserve equal treatment as men. society also views cis as the default and trans as the other.

trans women's experience differs from trans men in that they experience intersecting oppression, both as trans people and as women. the term "transmisogyny" was coined to describe exactly this.

trans men experience gender based oppression on the basis of being trans. the term to describe the oppression of trans men is transphobia. "transphobia toward trans men," if you want to really be specific. there is no way to create a word for that without directly implying cis men also face gender based oppression.

"i can't believe you'd say trans men aren't oppressed."

this is not what i said.

like i said, i'm a trans man. i grew up ostracized as a teenager for expressing gender in a way that wasn't "normal." i've had family members tell me, to my face, that they'd be happy if republican politicians stripped away my right to hormones and surgery. i've been denied jobs after telling hiring managers i am trans. i understand this intimately, i've dealt with it my entire life.

this is a semantics issue. guys are ascribing trans men's oppression to the term "transmisandry." and then, when people say transmisandry doesn't exist, that gets interpreted as "trans men do not face oppression" rather than the actual, intended point of "misandry does not exist because men are not oppressed on the basis of being men. therefore, trans men's oppression is based on being TRANS, not as men."

"trans men experience misogyny since they're afab. shouldn't they be allowed to use the term transmisogyny to describe that?"

trans men should be included in things like abortion rights and discussions of menstruation. we agree on that.

i'll try to draw a parallel. a common form of gay male homophobia is to say things like "anal sex is unnatural. men aren't supposed to have sex with each other because they both have penises." but some trans women have penises and have anal sex. should straight trans women be use the term homophobia to describe disdain towards the type of sex they have? the answer to that is: sort of.

misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, intersexism, and so on all exist in this big, ugly, interconnected ball. they all stem from the same idea: there is an ideal standard that all men and women should adhere to. any deviation from this norm should be met with social stigma and violence.

this is why the mainstream terf movement is closely tied pro-lifers and right wing pundits. when you define womanhood with a set of strict, natal rules, you also attract the type of asshole who is against women's liberation, against queer liberation, against intersex visibility.

anyways. another semantics issue. transmisogyny does not just means "transphobia + misogyny." it is specific to trans womanhood, which is why trans men should avoid using the term to describe their experiences.

"but cis men do experience gender based oppression! what about gender non-conforming men?"

see my above point regarding misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and intersexism all being connected. if a man is experiencing oppression, its likely tied to one of these.

"you sound like a terf, op."

i am saying trans women experience misogyny because they are in the social class of women. this is the opposite of what terfs believe.

"we should kill op with hammers because he uses reddit."

Well, it sort of depends which version of the Final Fantasy VII story you're talking about, because certainly in the original game, Sephiroth actually doesn't care very much about Cloud at all.

During the events in Nibelheim, Sephiroth has a relationship with Zack as a friendly coworker (arguably an actual friend), but Cloud is just some Shinra goon nobody whose name and face Sephiroth doesn't even know. It's not until Cloud confronts him in the Mako reactor and successfully kills him that Sephiroth even sees his face for the first time. Sephiroth doesn't even know Cloud's name in the last few moments of his life, he just sees this enraged kid suddenly find the strength to overpower him and throw him into the reactor core out of nowhere.

After Cloud kills him, well... I would make the argument that Sephiroth never actually comes back. He dies in the throes of a psychotic break where the Jenova cells inside of him are using his emotional anguish to manipulate him towards her own ends, promising him all the love and family and fulfilment and sense of identity that Shinra violently abused out of him. And when he dies, whatever parts of Sephiroth's mind that were left are fully replaced with Jenova's single-minded superobjective to consume the planet and move on to parasitize again.

And so the version of Sephiroth that haunts Cloud for most of the narrative isn't actually Sephiroth the man. Almost every part of that person is long gone. Just like how Jenova used the psychological hook of Sephiroth's mother to control him, "Sephiroth" is mostly the Jenova cells using the hook of Sephiroth's influence over Cloud to try and control him.

And that's why Sephiroth seems so fixated on Cloud - not because Sephiroth the Person actually cares about him, but because the Jenova cells that are spread out across a thousand organisms are calling for Reunion, and they will use whatever psychological hook or crook that can manipulate their hosts to make it happen. The other Jenova victims presumably saw visions just as vivid and personal, urging them on towards the Northern Crater.

Sephiroth seems obsessed with Cloud because Cloud is obsessed with Sephiroth. Sephiroth is this avatar of his trauma, his self-hate, and his deep internal identity crisis, the representation of his every doubt and insecurity. Hence Sephiroth's gleeful constant accusation that Cloud is merely a puppet, Cloud has no personality, Cloud isn't real - these are Cloud's own fears being verbalized against him by the Jenova cells. And it's deeply ironic because the only puppet here is Sephiroth, being piloted by Jenova like an ant by cordyceps.

Hence the very final battle with Sephiroth which takes place not in the depths of the Northern Crater with the party confronting Safer Sephiroth, but in a black and undifferentiated void-space at the end of a psychedelic mind-trip, that Cloud undertakes alone to confront the ghost of Sephiroth in his mind and banish his influence forever. Like, that final moment really is the most This Is Only Happening In Cloud's Mind-ass final boss confrontation imaginable.

But that's the original Final Fantasy VII. The extended FF7 universe pivots hard off of the popularity of Sephiroth as an Iconic Villain and goes about building out him as the central antagonist of the entire universe, and centering him almost obsessively in the extended narrative of Final Fantasy VII.

Advent Children basically retcons the end of Final Fantasy VII, where it turns out oops Cloud didn't actually fully reject Sephiroth's influence over him, here's some Geostigma to represent the haunting malice of this singular villain and here's a 1-to-1 recreation of the final scene from FF7 where Cloud destroys Sephiroth with Omnislash extended out to a gratuitous anime fight scene that ends with an even more awesome ultra-final ultimate Super Omnislash... but then even THAT isn't enough as Sephiroth promises ominously to "never become a mere memory" and he's going to haunt Cloud forever and ooooh maybe he'll be coming back for another seven sequels or something, because the franchise is never ever ever going to let Cloud move on, heal or get better, not so long as Sephiroth is this popular.

Same deal with Kingdom Hearts, which represents Cloud's character as basically revolving entirely around Sephiroth, and Sephiroth as almost romantically obsessed with Cloud, while games like Crisis Core get into the Star Wars Extended Universe business of attaching portentous mythological weight to originally inconsequential objects like the Buster Sword, and building out a grand conspiracy of gene manipulated One Winged Angel People all chasing the coat-tails of Sephiroth's popularity.

All of this comes together in the Final Fantasy VII Remake games, which try to reconcile the extended post-FF7 narrative with the original Final Fantasy VII story, adopting the idea of Sephiroth as the singular operatic puppet master villain of the story, rather than Shinra or Jenova who were the original game's thematic central villains as representations of parasitic and extractive capitalism.

So in these games, Sephiroth is obsessed with Cloud, and seems to see Cloud as his own best chance of salvation from his fate, and there's deep homoerotic tension between the two as Cloud struggles between wanting to kill Sephiroth, and wanting to be with or become him.

Oh, and to be clear, I do love the extended FF7 universe and all the post-original fluff that gets attached to it, I do love Sephiroth and Cloud as this pair of Doomed By The Narrative romantic lover-enemies fated to Toxic Yaoi each other to death forever, and I'm very fond of my good boy Zack, who deserves all the love the games have shown him. I cackled like an absolute hyena when I realized just how far the Final Fantasy VII Remake was going to go in rewriting the story.

It's just also hard not to see Square's treatment of Final Fantasy VII after it became The Iconic JRPG™ as anything other that corporate self-mythologizing and Star Wars style brand management, obsessively building more a marketable facade around the original game focused on its most popular surface-level features, at the cost of obscuring a lot of the subtler themes and ideas of the original game.

Sephiroth is not the main villain of Final Fantasy VII. Extractive capitalism is, and it is embodied by Shinra in the first half, and Jenova in the second half, and both of those antagonistic forces use Sephiroth as a puppet to do their bidding, and a veil to hide the primitive brutality of their consumption. But nobody would ever think that seeing how Sephiroth has been elevated as King Bad Guy of Villain Mountain in the aftermath.

Why dual wield a sword and a spell? Because it's incredibly fucking cool. Is the tradeoff from being in close combat casting spells, and less specialized in actually using your weapons, worth it? No.