I love you he/him butches. I love you butches with beards. I love you butches who call themselves men. I love you butch boyfriends and husbands. I love you butches with body hair. I love you intersex butches. I love you trans butches. I love you butches with weird genders. I love you butches whose gender is butch. I love you butches who are perceived as male. I love you butches who embrace their masculinity. I love you butches on hrt. I love you butches who are questioning. I love you butches who are disabled. I love you butches who are poc. I love you butches who are not as acknowledged.
The lesbian and butch community has always included you and it always will.
So I follow N. D. Stevenson (comics writer and animator, most famous for Nimona and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) and his husband Lee Ostertag (also a comics writer and animator) on Instagram. When I started following them, they were both publicly presenting as women, and then a few years ago N. D. came out as transmasc nonbinary, and then earlier this year Lee also came out as transmasc. Anyway this is all setup to say that Lee had the chance to make the funniest post of all time and he took it:
I want to throw in that part of the context behind this meme was N.D. talking about how he sometimes gets hatemail for marrying a man as a former lesbian, and how many people seem to think he divorced his wife.
I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.
i think what really gets me the most about catradora is just how intimate they are. it's not entirely subtle (especially to sapphics), yet the way they show affection may also be taken as a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of thing, especially compared to ships that came after ─ i mean, look at the contrast in how most fans always knew they were gonna be endgame while plenty still didn't pick up on it until we were almost there (to be fair, the latter sentiment is/was common among people in the audience who aren't queer and never had to pick up on that sort of subtext).
she-ra as a show was done well for its time, as queer representation in cartoons was still relatively new and going through a test phase for general acceptance despite positive reception from its predecessors. stevenson stated he had to fight for catra & adora's arcs to logically conclude with a romance, and the way they were produced by writers + animators alike let them sit in a perfect middle between external post-ending confirmation online (korrasami) and loud-and-proud romantic love as the series continues on (lumity).
if you think of popular WLW ships as a timeline, then i appreciate staying behind in the past while occasionally going on to visit and enjoy newer content as it comes out, because then i get to focus on the finer deeply emotional details such as:
the princess prom dance/dip
flirting undertones and sexual tension while fighting
raging heartbreak / the one that got away
"what could've been" alternate reality
repeated words (win, want, stay, choose/chose, leave/left, love, etc.)
the significance of sharing a long history together
knowing each other better than anyone else ever could
the intense ways they look at each other in all different contexts
parallel scenes of dying in each other's arms
holding hands / cupping faces
passionate hugs
soft, tender touching
mutual, quiet pining
begging, pleading
all the special tropes not listed that give them flavor!
and probably many more i'm forgetting since i just cycle through rediscovering everything that makes catradora so legendary over again!
to me, catradora is perfect. you'll never convince me otherwise.
I think it was definitely not always a given that we would be able to have this relationship as canonical and central as we were able to end up having. I really wanted to be careful in case it turned out that we couldn't have this relationship be so textual. I didn't want it to feel frustrating or like a betrayal. We were definitely trying to play it in a way that was sensitive early on, but I really think if you're going to go for it, then go for it. I think incidental representation and seeing it normalized in ways that are just a part of the fabric of the world that these stories take place in, that's really important.
But I also want to see those stories be central. I want to see them be the actual arc of the show. And having the opportunity to do that with Catra and Adora, in a way that spans all five seasons, it was risky. Sure. But this is what we're going to do. We just have to go for it and have it be something that's so central and important to the plot and the characters. [The show] really doesn't work without it. Getting it to the point where it felt realistic and it felt fulfilling and satisfying and earned, it was something we really worked hard on. It's really great to see the initial reaction to it. I wanted this to be what the show was about because I think this [relationship] really is what the show is about.
"i want them to make each other worse" i want them to have an impact on each other that's hard to define as objectively good or bad but is still sure to change the trajectory of their lives and alter their very being on a fundamental level forever
Our Story is the Story of the Universe @le0sbian - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
