[Emily]
deeply funny to me that HDG continues to have weird meltdowns and pit people against each other because their approach to collaborative community writing is so aggressively hierarchical it's trained the entire community to think they're entitled to have complete control over what other people write
you'd think florets would be more willing to go touch grass but no
One of the central structural tensions in indie tabletop RPG design is the tension between seeing, being, or fucking Some Kind of Creature. You might think these are compatible design goals, but in practice they're often not; the thematic heart of "what if you saw Some Kind of Creature" hinges on a sense of remoteness that's at odds with being and/or fucking it, and likewise, "what if you fucked Some Kind of Creature" doesn't hit the same when you yourself are also Some Kind of Creature.
(There is, of course, an overlap where "what if you were Some Kind of Creature" and "what if you fucked Some Kind of Creature" can coexist in a game about Creatures fucking other Kinds of Creatures, but if you don't want those themes to undermine each other it's a hard target to hit!)
[Emily]
this articulates something we've struggled with for years, honestly, which is that there's a huge difference between ERPing human/Creature stuff versus Creature/Creature stuff. a lot of the fun of roleplaying a Creature is the ways you differ in capabilities and attitude from a human baseline! if you're measuring against another Creature, even a different Creature, that's a very different experience than measuring against a human!
You really should make the risks of DIY HRT clear to people who may use it. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist, but there are very real risks involved in taking any sort of hormone based medication without frequent checking of your hormone levels and it is your responsibility as someone advertising this product to equip people with the information needed to make a complete decision. Unless you're a psyop trying to kill trans women which isn't out of the realm of possibility.
Readers, let's take a walk.
A span of time ago: I created this blog with a friend's encouragement to post about my relationship to martial arts, etc. My intended audience is and remains exclusively other trans women.
September 3rd, 2025: By this time, this blog has become larger than my main. A banwave crosses my dash. It is huge, and predominantly targeting transmisogyny-affected users and users who are outspoken about transmisogyny. In a moment of frustration, i grab a link to the best DIY HRT resource that I know of and trust at that time, and post it, with intent to crack as many eggs as possible before I go, in the event I too am terminated.
October 17, 2025: I check my blog's activity feed. The DIY HRT post has become my most popular post. I notice that it has begun to circulate among red-on-shinigamieyes users, many of whom are finding bad-faith reasons to criticize it, and many of whom I block.
Today, October 18, 2025: I receive this clearly in bad faith anon accusing me of advertising !dangerous! DIY HRT and trying to KILL trans women!
This is not a coincidence. This is how users on this site really attempt to kill trans women. This anon is obvious and classic concern trolling, treating me as both a voice of authority with attendant responsibilities ("it is your responsibility as someone advertising this product") and as a dangerous influence ("a psyop trying to kill trans women"). Many avenues of responding to this message by engaging with its subject in good faith would only provide fodder for inevitable bad-faith harassment campaigns. If you receive similar messages, I advise you to delete them. Install shinigamieyes and block accordingly.
To any of my readers who may be dissuaded by fears of "dangers" of feminizing HRT, I recommend thoroughly reading pghrt.diy, which is an excellent resource I have since been turned on to. Transmisogynists want you scared. Don't let them win. Happy injecting!
i wrote this post over on bluesky today and, after receiving a few of the predictable "but what if i Want to write badly" responses you get to any opinion that can be taken as prescriptivist writing advice, i thought i'd talk more about what i'm getting at.
basically, it's an issue of suspension of disbelief. there are a lot of things in fantasy and historical writing that we're willing to look past. dragons, potatoes, the divine right of kings. we are able to suspend our disbelief that a monarch could be anything but a despicable tyrant if the story we're being told is convincing enough, or plays to our comforting worldviews about nobility and Great Man theory. we can also suspend it if we straight up didn't know that europe didn't have potatoes pre-columbian exchange. basically--it means it doesn't bother you that these elements aren't perfectly realistic. fiction is not required to be realistic. clue's in the name.
but there are some things we just can't ignore. some things hit us as out of place for the setting we've been presented, or the world as we understand it. it pulls us out of the story by reminding us, in that moment, that we are reading a constructed narrative made of a series of choices by an author. and for whatever reason, they made a Wrong choice, like plucking the wrong guitar string.
bdsm safety protocols are the classic example, since a majority of people that encounter this sort of thing often enough to identify it online are reading fanfic and romance. things like a red light/green light system appearing in a chinese fantasy world where cars have not been invented, or cowboys intuiting the concept of a safeword while having spit-lubed anal sex in the desert. absurdisms that break suspension of disbelief, because who is teaching these cowboys the principles of consent. nobody.
now, we've beaten the dead horse of 'don't write like you're afraid of a callout post' a million times when it comes to including bdsm best practices in writing. you are allowed to write whatever you want forever, and if what you want to write is perfectly safe, negotiated sex between two adults who would have never received sexual education and probably thought a woman's uterus wandered in the body depending on the temperature, you are free to do that. i'll think your writing is bad, but you don't have to care what i think. you don't have to care about the people who'd get upset at cowboys doing unnegotiated "lasso tricks" either.
anyway, i'm getting off track. the actual point of the post above was that i see this same kind of thing with modern terminology for queer concepts in completely incongruous settings, and it pulls me out just as bad as any cowboy therapyspeak. i simply do not believe the local dirt farmer who binds his chest and changed his name from helen to troy would call himself "trans". i do not believe the wizard who has no time or interest in sex would call himself "asexual". and 1800s english dandies would not be calling themselves "gay" unless they were in a holiday mood.
that doesn't mean they couldn't understand those concepts, but it's not the language they would use to express them, because they would not have it. you see this with discussion of actual literal history--we technically cannot call historical figures "gay" or "transgender" with 100% confidence, even when their behavior lined up very closely with our modern idea of those concepts, because those people did not have our modern idea of those concepts. would they have identified that way, if a time traveler taught it to them? possibly! but we can't know that. they might like "transsexual" better, even if it's no longer in vogue.
and much like nobody is teaching cowboys the concept of aftercare, nobody is teaching our dirt farmer troy the word "trans", which is itself a shortening of several words that have come in and out of fashion as recently as the last century. troy would be calling himself something else, if he even has a word for what he is.
and that's where you, the author, have a Choice. there's plenty of reasons to default to the modern term--you're writing for a modern audience, you want to be clear about your representation, you're afraid of getting yelled at for getting something wrong--but i think it's the wrong move in any serious writing. because what you're losing by doing that is an opportunity to get creative and actually say something with the character, rather than tick a box.
troy might describe himself as a man trapped in a woman's body, because that is how he experiences it, and that experience informs his character. or he might think of himself as a man who just has breasts, because he's always been a man and has been treated as a man, and he's never had to examine it. or he might call himself a "rock", because he lives with dwarves and that's the dwarven word for masculine-presenting.
or he can just say he's "trans", and you don't explore what it means to the character in the world he lives in, while also implying somebody sat this boy down on a stump in the dirt fields and said the word "transgender" to him, and then said it often enough he shortened it to "trans". while living on his dirt farm. where he would never have seen a pineapple.
i am more interested in a troy who doesn't have a perfectly modern understanding of what he is and what he wants, because that's where a story lives. i don't read to see my understanding of things perfectly mirrored back to me, i read to experience something different. i want to read about the guy who calls himself a slur because it's the only language for himself he has, and what that means to him. i want to read about the guy who never calls himself a man, but understands implicitly that he's something different. i want to read about messy, complicated people who don't know shit from fuck. it'll absorb me a hell of a lot more.
anyway.
this is all opinion and i am just one guy so you're allowed to disagree with me. i just won't be interested in your work if you do. and that's only a loss if you make it one.
My first time operating CCTV cameras I was handed control over what was essentially 50 independently moving eyes that collectively covered an area about the size of a football field and from that experience I now know that
Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass
It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE
After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.
Once you are aware of an unreachable blind spot it nags at you constantly and you can feel it like a hard little lump under your skin you need to poke and scratch at and it’s ardghgguychgghhbhhhbhhh
And on top of that, having operated CCTV at multiple locations now- my favourite and most comfortable one having excess of 60 cameras- it can be REALLY hard to suddenly jump to a different operating interface and display configuration, because all the muscle memory is wrong
On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.
Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet
The closest I imagine I can equate it to is like. Getting really really good at painting with a pair of prosthetic hands, and then suddenly having them swapped out with someone else’s
"Morning, Captain. We've got high-gain jamming, triangulated in no man's land, starting some ten minutes ago. All receivers we had online are slag. We're deaf and mute, as are all forces in the field."
"Enemy action?"
"Unlikely. Distortion patterns suggest it's our equipment, not theirs. Witch Corps," the staff sergeant nods at the specialist stood at permanent attention next to her, "believes it to be one of our pilots."
"Was once one of our pilots, dear," the witch cuts in. "Several of our mechs went down a month back, when we tried to break through opposing lines. My sisters and I believe a poor doll may have survived without being recovered."
"So she's, what, deserted and rigged a jammer?"
"In a manner of speaking. Dolls need regular bonding; the timeline befits tineamorphosis."
"She has wings now, sure. So why the fucking jammer?"
"I believe that it is most likely making a kind of distress call. It wants to not be abandoned. It is screaming to be helped. To be loved."
The captain mutters something about 'fucking dolls.' "Sure. Alright. Sergeant, get on the horn and tell her you love her too."
"Negative, Captain, there's no chance we can be heard through the noise. And any transceiver I switch on will fuse."
"If I may, ma'am." The witch allows just the barest hint of irritation to slip past her practiced neutrality. "I believe the best course of action is to send a retrieval team to recover it."
"Is she still an asset?"
"Militarily, no. There's no process to return it to dollhood, and moths are too unpredictable for service. Certainly not in a mech. But it was mine, or one of my sister's. It should not be abandoned."
The Captain squeezes the bridge of her nose. "Sergeant, do we have time or manpower for that?"
"Negative on time, Captain. We have forces expecting engagement with the enemy any minute now. Each moment they're in contact without radio is more casualties."
"Settled, then. Scramble a bomber, tell them to drop at the epicenter of the noise. Specialist, give me a yield to ensure we have comms back online on the first pass."
The witch is silent for a heartbeat, then two. Her face is carefully placid. "50 tons TNT equivalent, minimum. I built it to last."
My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.
Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.
So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)
Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.
Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.
Couple people taking this to mean I think every fantasy world should be heteronormative and homophobic, and no man I just want people’s worldbuilding to be more interesting because I love worldbuilding and also queerness.
Just… build your world around the story you want to tell, rather than dropping your story into Basically LOTR or Basically Star Wars or whatever.
A lot of people talking about Gay Arranged Marriage in the notes and I fully agree. It makes for a great example because if you just plop it into Standard MedievalEurope-esque Fantasy, But Everyone’s Cool With Gay People, it makes no sense at all! And like if you just want to write an arranged marriage royalty AU of your favorite M/M ship because you like the ship and you like the trope then whatever lol, but that is boring to me. (This is an opinion! It is not objective fact! It just appears to be one a bunch of you share.) The thing is, if you want to write Gay Arranged Marriage, there are SO many ways to make the world around it support what you want the vibe to be like! But it requires thinking about what arranged marriages are FOR.
Often this is in a royalty/nobility story. Generally, royals arrange marriages with other royals to produce heirs that tie the families together through bloodlines: both families are now invested in the well-being of the grandchild and less likely to go to war with each other. Kingdoms get unified, property gets consolidated, etc. If the characters in question are cis, gay arranged marriages can’t possibly be for that. Then why do it?
The question to ask is, well, what advantages could a prince NOT having children bring to his family? Then the options start opening up.
Maybe he’s a second or third child, and marrying him to a man means he can have no legitimate heirs to challenge the crown prince’s children. Maybe this is common practice to do with younger sons to prevent too many royal family branches vying for the throne, the way European royals might send younger sons into the clergy for the same purpose. Maybe it’s a form of soft disinheritance: yeah, we’ve decided we don’t want you to procreate. Maybe it’s the socially acceptable way of getting the first son who SHOULD inherit out of the way if the current king decides he is actually a bad fit for the throne and wants his younger son to inherit instead.
Or maybe a conquering kingdom demands the princes of the conquered kingdom marry men from their own court, a way of cutting off the opposing royal line while also basically creating hostages that still get proper treatment as royalty and disincentivizes the conquered kingdom from attacking back. Maybe this is a common way of flaunting your royal power and controlling conquered territories.
Or maybe you don’t want gay marriage to be “basically a punishment.” Maybe you want it to be celebrated and respected. Maybe you can have a kingdom that has a succession system similar to the Inca one: the emperor would choose which of his sons (or sometimes a nephew) would be the heir and become emperor, but that son didn’t inherit any wealth or land, the wealth and land got split up among the other sons. So the son who became emperor had the incentive to go out and conquer more lands and build his own court. (That’s how the Inca Empire grew so big so fast.)
Maybe your fantasy emperor is always same-sex married. After all, the emperor is an embodiment of the sun god and therefore divine perfection; (s)he should be married to an equally perfect spouse, which of course, to be equally perfect, must be the same gender. This also means the emperor has no children, and thus cannot show favoritism to their own genetic line; they must choose an heir from their nieces or nephews, or from the children of the people in their court or of the nobility. The heir will become the next emperor and be obligated to be same-sex married and have no children of their own either. This encourages everyone in the court to want to impress the emperor and show their loyalty, so they/their family might be chosen as heir. Boom, worldbuilding that supports The Emperor Is Always Gay Married. Then you start to ask the question, do nobles get more prestige if they get gay married like the emperor, in exchange for losing the chance to have children who might get chosen to be the next emperor? Is it prestigious for commoners to be gay married like the emperor, or is it kinda cringe like “oh you think you’re as good as the emperor,” or is it kinda sacrilegious like “oh you think you’re as good as the emperor”? Does that change if the kingdom is patriarchal, matriarchal, or if the emperor can choose a boy or a girl equally as their heir? Do two women married have more prestige when there is a female empress, and two men married have more prestige when there’s a male emperor? What kind of backstabbing court politics happen to get your preferred person chosen as heir?
Gay-normative fantasy setting ripe for gay royal arranged marriages! And introduces so many hooks on which to hang political intrigue plots! Maybe trans people have a special adulthood rites ceremony where the sun god burns away their old gender and imparts their new one and if a trans person is chosen as heir to the emperor they still have to be same gender married of course but now you have to make sure they have magic birth control and if necessary mandatory abortions because the emperor is Not Allowed To Have Children! You don’t need to be obsessed with pregnancy or bioessentialist or institutionally homophobic, you just have to think about how your setting works and why it works that way! It actually makes things MORE interesting when you do!
[Emily]
spiderfolk we came up with! the boys are smaller and lighter and also they wear makeup so girls will pin them down and ruin it. as a courtship thing.
spiderfolk can spin silk from their fingertips, using their hand-pairs like a loom to weave complex designs.
i mean, like, academically and on my resume, the time i spent as a body without self after getting abducted by the alien hivemind was a disaster, you know? and then the trauma of it all informs every decision I've made ever since being rescued and having my old personality surgically reasserted.
but you've gotta admit i look hot in those old pictures where I'm the nameless emissary ordering entire urban centers to stand down and accept assimilation into the whole, right?
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