#duckland

Are you mean to kill me? You dare come to my house and try to tell me that you, YOU, one of the best writers of smut -and stuff- I have ever read in my whole life of reading any sort of stuff with words on it, YOU have had any doubt about your godsgiven craft??? Im crushing my car under your window.

I'm not sure if swapping Thessaly's gender would make it "better" in the sense that the character would still be a bigot. Actually, I wonder if from a fandom-meta perspective, I worry it might make it worse. Unfortunately, even with all else being the same except gender, I think the fans might actually LIKE guy-Thessaly, since in general they seem more willing to forgive male characters for being assholes than female ones, even if they're equally terrible characters. Especially if the actor they choose looks attractive. (For example, the amount of angry messages in my inbox whenever I suggest Dream might be less than perfect shows how insistent fans are that their favorite guy can do no wrong, even when him canonically doing wrong is a major part of the plot...) Is it bad that fandom probably agrees on hating Thessaly because she's female more than the fact that she's a TERF? Yeah, but at least there's the base level agreement that she does suck.

As for whether Morpheus would be attracted to guy-Thessaly? While comics-canon Morpheus seems pretty insistently attracted to women, I don't see why Neil wouldn't consider a male love interest for the show. The fact that The Corinthian is pan now shows he's open to expanding a character's options, as it were. Not sure about the implication of having Morpheus's worst love interest simultaneously being the male one, though. Especially if we go with the interpretation that his dating Thessaly was an intentional act of self-sabotage/self-destruction--framing his first onscreen gay romance as an act of self harm could be taken negatively. But I don't see any reason why it wouldn't happen based on gender alone.

If Morpheus is still straight though and Thessaly is gender swapped, then that WOULD be a big change, since that would change the entire sequence of events leading into the finale.

I am very open to just about any change to the later arcs! Those are the ones that, to me, seem the most "of their time"/aged poorly without historical context (and also insufferably edgelord-y), and I feel cautiously optimistic that just about any change Neil does to them would be an improvement. A change to the Thessaly relationship could potentially have a massive cascading effect, since it really is the start of the big downhill slide.

If Thessaly is a man and they change nothing else about the character or their interactions with the other characters, then I don't think there'd be much change to the resulting events--other than perhaps a greater fandom desire to "redeem" Thessaly if she's a hot guy. BUT if there's a more substantial change--like Dream not dating the asshole bigot (regardless of their gender), THEN I'd be super hyped to see what happens next and what changes are in store!

you have @laurelwen and @captainpoopweinersoldier to thank for it haha

we both know what we wanna do to that neck heehee

Here were the other choices I was considering:

Thank you 🥺

This message means so much to me! I stayed up late working on an assignment and I had to go in to work early. I got a 100 on the assignment and the instructors feedback was a motivation as well!

You amaze me and you were able to do all that alone!! You’re so strong and you’re such a beautiful soul 💕

Del fondo de mi alma, gracias por tus palabras!