#transfem roxy

for @dyke-stuck's prompt list

ive been trying to figure how i wanna respond for a minute now but the longer i wait the worse this gets 😂

some of y’all are getting real nasty in my inbox (not all — some of you guys provided clarity and stuff which i appreciate) and im only gonna address this anon here.

but listen.

transfem roxy and transmasc roxy are bffs actually and both are valid af.

why do y’all feel the need to harass someone being excited over the fact a character that used she/her pronouns is now using he/him??

there is so little transmasc representation so when we go to our little corners to be happy and excited about it please don’t shit all over us

im hella out of the loop on everything so if the writers actually are weaponizing roxy being transmasc that’s super fucked up and we absolutely should be talking about it. but the issue isn’t transmascs getting excited the issue is the writers.

i also would like receipts on that if any of you have it. because i interpreted some of the writing to actually address this issue, but again, hella out of the loop and with the amount of problematic things with Homestuck in general i just want to know more about this.

i literally did not have it in mind as a reveal until writing the final version of the epilogue. based on screenshots in the work server, i wrote that conversation on december 30th, 2021, just a few days before the epilogue would go up!

so initially what this epilogue was gonna be was the scene with VV saving July and sending her on her way to do tasks, and then they would deliver to us some basic narrative mechanics exposition. then at the very end there would be a reveal that the "you" they were talking to throughout the epilogue's narration was not us but Roxy and Callie, and that'd be the end.

i had MOST of this written back in july (the month), but as i was writing the descriptions of VV's room it hit me that this would be a perfect time to do some spritework. by that point we'd long since decided to turn 3.2 into something approaching a more traditional mspfa, so it made sense to use the epilogue as a testing ground. this turned out to be an excellent choice because we learned a LOT about what is and isn't sustainable-- ah but we're getting off topic.

when janet showed us her Roxy and Callie sprites, i knew i couldn't just leave 3.1 on that cliffhanger. these two have been orbiting the background of this story for a while, particularly in chapter 8, and where i think Jade & June's sides of the story going into 3.2 have been set up relatively well, Roxy and Callie were a big blind spot.

as per usual with godfeels, once i started writing them as characters in the scene instead of plot vehicles, a whole whole lot of important shit clicked together for me. the epilogue was always meant as a statement on the metatextual nature of godfeels up to this point, and to draw attention to some of the weirder implications thereabouts, but it was only at this point in the writing process that i understood how it mattered on a personal, emotional level.

so both Roxy and Callie get important character moments in the epilogue. Callie, of course, deliberately lets VV deliver whatever exposition they want so they can piece together what's really going on, because of course Callie has ample experience being a semi-omniscient narrative guide. but it was really Roxy that i puzzled after the longest.

honestly, Roxy has probably been the single hardest character for me to wrap my head around. partially this is an inherited problem, in that i wrote gf1 & 2 under the assumption that no one else but June was trans, and much as i prefer transfem Roxy as an interpretation of her character, transmasc Roxy from the epilogues looms large. if she were to be transfem, not only would that contradict the epilogues timeline in a weird way, i was also worried that it'd piss off the fandom crowd who were still up my ass all the time in late 2019/early 2020. that latter bit isn't really a problem anymore, thank fucking god.

i'd never considered making Roxy textually trans until VV blurted it out on the page. me, as the writer watching the scene, just sorta stopped and stared at my screen. there's a lot of stuff in the wider expanse of godfeels that i only know in abstract, stuff that i've earmarked for explicit development once we start the planning phase in a couple months. chapter 8 is constructed in a way that tactically obscures certain information and plot beats that i didn't want to introduce yet or that i felt like i didn't have a strong enough grasp on to feel okay committing to canon. Roxy and Callie were in that camp, and to an extent a lot of VV's stuff was in that camp. one of my frustrations while writing the ch8 epilogue was the realization that i basically had to rapidly go through the planning phase for this particular corner of the narrative out of the blue. 3.1 just had to get one last surprise hit in on its way out the door i guess.

so i spent a lot of time running over transfem godfeels!Roxy in my head, and the more i thought about it the more perfect this reveal felt. there've already been so many gestures at Roxy's voidy relationship with narration & internality, but i think what really opens the door to it IS VV's bastardization of reader response theory (itself an evolution of Alt-Callie's "a martyr died and said fuck" speech from the epilogues). after the realityquake and VV's exploration of cosmic relevance & denexustic radiation, the very same inconsistencies that made me shy away from exploring Roxy's gender in the past suddenly became the very reasons it was worth doing.

that epilogues timeline Roxy is transmasc but godfeels timeline Roxy is transfem feels narratively curious and interesting and troubling in a way that is so much more compelling now than it would have been at any other point in the story. and it just made sense that of course someone else would reveal the fact of her transfemininity to the audience, and then directly call attention to the ways a non-binary construction of gender just feels completely incompatible with dramatic storytelling. like the idea of someone just having a moment and realizing, no, i'm a different gender actually, it just comes outta nowhere! it doesn't feel satisfying in a story because it doesn't feel satisfying in real life, either (assuming you're a cis person who's never or only rarely encountered a trans person).

it works in tandem with June's own coming out, too, where everyone was skeptical of her insistence that she knew herself better than her friends did- only now the relationship has been elevated by an order of magnitude, making it a conflict between the character and the reader, making us the outsiders to her internality and being forced to ask ourselves, "does this make sense?" and just like Rose et al back in gf2.1, we don't MEAN that question in a transphobic way. obviously trans characters are great! we're more interested in whether or not it's a satisfying dramatic beat...