I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.
The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man. I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little. I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests. I never cared about sports or cars or guns. I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts. I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.
It’s not physical either. I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard. If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume). I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.
I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me. I’m a man. I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated. I feel like a man because of something beyond that. Something ephemeral. So, why couldn’t others feel the same? Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?
And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one? Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?
Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form? If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap? If so, why? Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?
Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?
My grandfather, who had a difficult time coming to terms with it when I came out, has been working very hard to understand me and my experience. About 5 weeks ago, he asked me, almost offhand, “why are you so sure that you’re a man?”
And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward.
Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me:
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”
And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”
So, shoutout to my cisgender grandfather, for stumbling upon the essence of being trans accidentally, with very little help from me. I love you, grandpa.
When I wrote this (yesterday, for twitter) I somehow failed to take shipping into account but it's not even been a day and the the Jean/Varka ship gaining traction has proven my worst fears right. 😐
The thing is, shipping Jean and Varka is unfortunately just the logical endgame of the fandom's disregard of her.
It's the culmination of Jean being treated like a mere narrative prop for other characters and not her own person with needs, pain and boundaries, as well as the widespread reverence of Varka that allows him to cause her serious harm without it being acknowledged, or even recognised.
I have the feeling many Varka fans don't even *know* about it.
He is dressed up in such deceptive wholesomeness that his genuinely criticisable actions are recast as the cutest fun imaginable.
Jean and Varka is nothing but a horrible aesthetic. It is a ship devoid of any substance because it fundamentally misunderstands both characters.
It is rooted in an unwillingness to face Varka's deeply flawed actions towards Jean, let alone his age and role in her biography, and an unwillingness to regard Jean as a person.
The ship only works by reducing Jean, as a much younger woman with a dependency and power-imbalance in Varka’s favour, to a hollow accessory for the much older “Cool Guy” that Varka is made out to be.
A “Cool Guy” that has abused his position of power towards her, so that she would do his work since she was a teen by exploiting her most destructive habits of always putting herself second in order to serve Mondstadt/others.
This started in a stage of her life when she, by nature of being a minor, was particularly vulnerable and easy to manipulate (esp. because she was already heavily indoctrinated by both her mother’s damaging teachings as well as her profoundly unhealthy enmeshment with Frederica – a little spoiler but 6.4 will make this even clearer) because she didn’t have a fully formed identity yet and was, canonically, burdened way too early *by him*.
As soon as you allow to make room for Jean's individuality and more importantly her personal history, this ship falls apart.
Whereas Varka is allowed to just be, her role in this ship is only to complement him. She has to do his work for him, she has to "mother" him, she has to prop him up, she has to be the maturity, the seriousness and the responsibility that he refuses to display and instead conveniently "gets" to outsource to Jean.
She has to bear the consequences of his actions towards her when it is him who should have to carry them.
But he goes scot-free.
Varka gets to be the free-spirited, fun, unrestrained guy, not beholden to any interpersonal accountability towards her.
He is granted a full identity independent of this ship, whereas Jean's "identity" (superimposed on her by the game and the fandom) as everybody's personal helper, manager and organiser, that tidies up after them and cleans up any mess, everybody's "backbone" at the cost of her own self, is consolidated.
Shipping Jean and Varka is an admission of not caring about understanding either character.
It’s about placing a male-centered aesthetic over the acknowledgement of a female character, who has been and continues to be treated unfairly by the man she is supposed to be shipped with.
I'm not saying this to slight Varka (for once) but I wonder in all seriousness if he was never "meant" to be grand master and it was due to circumstances he got the position.
That is not to downplay his martial skills but this description (spoiler image under the cut) makes it seem like "the wolf" doesn't actually *like* to be anything like a grand master because he is the type of person that desires to roam freely and doesn't want to be tied down.
I’ll also explore how Varka might somewhat resemble a more “adhd-typical” neurotype below and how his "wolf" nature might have led to him placing burdens on Jean's shoulders when she was still much too young.
(You'll have to scroll a bit for that part. Sorry lol. orz
But I've marked the beginning of that section.)
>>Full image/lore text
The wolf is explicitly contrasted with the "stately lion" and Jean, in her story quest, also says that the dandelion/lionfang title was the title of the KoF's masters (some thoughts that expand on this are shared at the end)*.
I assume she means grand masters, esp. bc of the title’s historic link to Venessa but I guess you could also argue it might be for "the master of knights", which seems to be the grand master's deputy/second in command (based on Jean’s vision story).
Because what I wonder is: who was the lionfang knight before Jean?
If it's passed down from generation to generation/grandmaster to grandmaster then shouldn't there be someone in Varka's age bracket (or perhaps older/slightly younger) who holds the title and shouldn't that person be the grand master right now?
I feel like if there was a "former lionfang knight" that was still alive then this person would definitely have been mentioned by now. They'd be a living legend and an important guide to Jean (and I don't think Frederica ever held it because people do praise her as a hero - if she used to be the lionfang knight why would they not mention that in their praise for her? That makes no sense to me.)
But whenever it comes to the lionfang knight Jean seeks guidance from Venessa who is long deceased. As if she can't ask anybody around her on matters concerning the lion title.
If there was a lionfang knight that died within Jean's lifetime then this would also imply that Varka might not have been grand master for a long time (relatively speaking).
But Jean calls him the legend of his generation and if there had been another lionfang knight in his generation then that person would surely have been a legend in their own right. I think Jean would have known about them and probably revered them in a similar way.
So I think we can, with caution, draw the conclusion that there was no lionfang knight in Varka's generation and he hadn’t just been grand master for a few years prior to Jean inheriting the title.
It seems as if the lionfang position had been "vacant" for quite some time/several decades for unknown reasons until Jean received it, so she might be its first holder in a long time.
Maybe there was no person who fulfilled the requirements. At the same time, with Varka there *was* a person who fit the wolf. But that wolf was missing his lion counterpart.
So perhaps, since there was no one who could succeed the lion and with that the grand master, they needed to find another knight with outstanding combat skills to take over the KoF's leadership.
I think it might be possible that due to this crisis the wolf, who originally never intended to become grandmaster took over this responsibility out of necessity even though this role was completely at odds with his desires and disposition.
-----
His "Wolf" Nature (expeditions, placing responsibility on Jean too early)
I think this could also explain why he leaves on expeditions so often and made Jean the dandelion knight so early (at 15).
His expeditions are completely in line with the description of the wolf's nature and they almost feel like some kind of escapism for Varka so that he doesn't have to deal with the very lion-like tasks of a grand master.
(I don’t necessarily want to diagnose him with neurodivergence (though I guess it’s not an unreasonable head canon).
But he reminds me of an Adhd-er for whom sitting down and doing desk work is hell, someone who needs to be on the move all the time, who needs action/changing tasks, who is impulsive, spontaneous, a thrill seeker and somewhat scatter-brained (but who can connect well with people because of his enthusiasm) and who procrastinates boring serious work with all kinds of “adhd-friendly” activities.
In contrast, Jean feels a lot more similar to the prototypical idea of a level-1 autistic woman who thrives when she has a routine and is much fonder of structure.)
So when Jean came along he might have seen this as the solution for his conundrum: Finally a candidate that can fill out the role of the lion properly.
And we do know that Jean definitely has the skill to fill out the role of the grand master.
But that doesn't negate the effects of her receiving this burden at such a young age. She already had to sacrifice her youth to her mother's training and then she immediately switched into one of the most difficult roles within the KoF (the dandelion knight) at 15. She was never given the space to mature (let alone reach adulthood first) and grow into her own person outside of her responsibilities.
Instead of recognising she was not ready yet and patiently helping her to grow into the role of a grandmaster I think Varka might have seen Jean as "his way out" that he latched on to almost immediately.
Jean's story about her receiving the title makes it very clear that she "remained wholly unprepared for the task that lay before her" when she became the dandelion knight at 15.
Wholly unprepared is a really strong description in my opinion. Not just a little, but pretty much totally unprepared. Mona's voiceline also mirrors this ("Leo Minor [...] represents strength and responsibility shouldered too young").
Genshin talks about this in a very passive way but Jean didn't just become the dandelion knight out of thin air.
That title and that responsibility didn't just materialise on her shoulders like a natural phenomenon. It was (most, most likely) Varka, as the grand master, who appointed her dandelion knight. Perhaps the church was involved too but I think if he can just knight people then I believe he, as the grand master, is also the person with the biggest say in who gets the next grand-master-worthy lion title.
Simultaneously, "responsibility shouldered too young" is perfectly in line with Varka's own admission that Jean had "basically been doing his job for years now, anyway". And even from a logical standpoint, it would be him who places responsibilities of leadership on her shoulders.
All this means, that he did not recognise Jean was not ready yet and instead of being a responsible adult, who keeps doing his job until he can ensure the person he selected as his protégée has matured enough to succeed him, he put all the "lion-y" responsibilities on a teenage girl (if it wasn't directly at 15 it was still in her late teens - I'll link a calculation of her age) as soon as possible and made her his de facto replacement way too early.
He sold this as "her helping him out so he can do the really important tasks" but coincidentally those tasks where all the things that aligned with his wolf nature (his expeditions) and came easy to him.
Unintentionally or not he sacrificed Jean's well-being for his "way out", because his avoidance of his responsibility fed into Jean's worst learned habits and views about herself.
Hoyo says "his influence on her has been great", implying his unruly nature was a counter-weight to Frederica's strict treatment.
But it was the opposite.
He was basically a magnifying glass of all her unhealthy teachings.
The way Frederica raised her is a whole topic for itself so I won't delve deeper into this right now.
Here is a small snippet but it doesn't capture the full extend of the impact it had on Jean. There is so much more.
Jean, who was taught she has to live for Mondstadt and that she, as a person has to come second, would *of course* commit way too strongly to the inofficial grand master duties placed on her.
The teaching ingrained in her since childhood that she should first and foremost be a vessel for Mondstadt’s well-being was a spark on dry grass and Varka putting all those tasks "for Mondstadt" onto her plate was a fire accelerator that made her throw herself into her work to such a crass extend that her (mental) health had deteriorated significantly by her early 20s (remember Barbara telling us in Jean's story quest that Jean collapsed and ended up at the church all the time which is basically Mondstadt's hospital).
The fact that Varka must have observed this for several years and still did not acknowledge/recognise that he was burderning her way too early does not exactly shine a favourable light on him.
Nor does the fact that he apparently always demanded a lot of her while also taking her for granted a little too often.
To be honest, it was incredibly selfish of him, despite any potential "good intentions".
Even if those dry governance tasks were really horrible for him in the same way they are horrible for Adhd-ers it still doesn’t justify his course of actions.
Being an Audhd-er myself I do understand that he really might have struggled with them and I really empathise with him if he needs support. But his strategy to manage his brain type shouldn’t come at the cost of a vulnerable young girl/woman’s health.
It would still have been his responsibility to find different compensation mechanisms (e.g., hiring assistants/advisors who can take over high-level secretary/accounting/administrative tasks to ease the burden on him and support him in his governance/decision making) because he as grand master out of all people would have had the power, finances and resources for those kinds of aids.
(And please don’t tell me there was nobody who could have done advanced office/accounting work until a teenage girl came along. That would be the biggest confession of failure Mondstadt could produce. And if you can’t find anybody in Mondstadt, hire somebody from another nation. Ask Ningguang or somebody from the Academia if they can refer him to somebody.)
It doesn't help that some of his behaviour can be downright immature.
SPOILER: Some leaked lines reveal how Jean might have had to put him into solitary confinement.
And of course it's played for laughs but I'm sorry, the fact that this young woman basically has to "mother" a grown-ass adult that could be her father because he'd partake in shenanigans so childish they'd warrant reprimand is beyond silly at this point.
There is also another line about Varka getting on Seamus' nerves because he asks nonsensical and somewhat self-centered questions while they're attacked by the wild hunt. Seamus has to remind him to please focus so they don't get overrun.
It's supposed to add some goofy charm to his character but in the broader context of how he avoids many of his “boring and serious” grand master responsibilities at Jean's expense the extend of that goofiness just feels unbefitting of his role. SPOILER OVER
What is incredibly frustrating is that Hoyo consistently confirm that Jean was burdened too early, that her health suffered, and that Varka didn't acknowledge her properly, but then still try to create a narrative that, at the same time, everything was also alright.
They do this by telling us how Jean "was fine" with everything.
This is a reversal of responsibilities because it means the validity of the harm she has experienced depends on whether or not she agrees it's harm.
But Jean is not a reliable narrator on this issue. She has proven that she is not actually a good judge of what is good for her when it comes to her duties. Even at the start of the game, when she is an adult, she is unable to recognise her own boundaries and repeatedly tries to fight the limits of her own health to fulfil her duties. She pushes herself too far and overlooks her own needs.
Hoyo's justification attempts follow a pattern:
Introduce something negative and then immediately try to neutralise the negative feeling with a positive justification rooted in Jean's "agreement". If Jean feels positively about it then it can't actually be bad, right?
I'm saying feeling because that's all this is: No substance. None of these "counters" actually change the harmful nature of what happened to Jean.
She still remains too young and wholly unprepared. Even if she gains a feeling of conviction it doesn't mean she is suddenly less unprepared.
Even if she doesn't feel angry when she has to pick up Varka's work it doesn't mean this extra work has no effect on her.
We see this because the tangible results of her taking on so much responsibility are still the same.
In case of her lionfang title they even try to invoke a spiritual level because "the wind" whisking away her doubts could symbolise Venti and/or Venessa subtly "reassuring" her.
And then there is the line that it falls down to her to "do the right thing" in conjunction with the part that there "may be wisdom to his conduct", when she does Varka's job. As if her having to pick up his work is a moral imperative that just logically/organically follows instead of recognising that the moral imperative lays with Varka because it is his responsibility to do his own work.
This begs the question: If they clearly show all this is bad on the one hand why do they constantly say it's fine on the other?
They certainly don't want you to dislike Varka based on his treatment of Jean. So instead of having Varka treat her irresponsibly and then twisting their narrative into all kinds of contortions to reassure you "It's fine though! You can still love him without worrying about it!", why did Hoyo not just scrap that part?
They could literally just have made him her cool, carefree but still responsible mentor.
The reason is (most likely): aesthetic.
They want to eat their cake and have it too.
They want the aesthetic of the self-sacrificial maiden who underwent lots of hardship in her youth without actually having to deal with the consequences of it.
Yes, she had it rough so you can have sympathy with her but at the same time she also loves nothing more than being there for others. So you can find that trait of hers appealing without feeling guilty about liking something that actually ends up harming her.
At the same time they also want the aesthetic of the goofball, who's an absolute badass when it counts but also chaotic for the sake of comedy.
Unfortunately they insist that their backgrounds are directly intersected and that his comedic chaos comes at Jean's expense because his chaos and her seriousness "complement" each other. They just wrote it in the worst way possible.
So for the sake of Varka's aesthetic, they also do not want to commit to the logical consequences of the actions they have written for him.
And if Jean is fine with them, then you don't need to feel bad about his actions either.
---
Additional thoughts:
*To my knowledge the only other known holder of the wolf title besides the knight from the poem is Rostam, the Wolf Pub, and the only other known lion title besides Jean and Venessa is Arundolyn, the Lion of Light. (There should be more throughout history but those are all Genshin's lore has mentioned until now.)
In this small pool of title holders, all lion titles were (soon to be) grand masters, whereas all wolf titles except Varka were not.
Afaik Rostam wasn't a grand master in waiting. His position was very specifically one to contrast Arundolyn in his work, mirroring the juxtaposition from the poem.
(He wasn't necessarily the same type of "free spirit", but kind of like Kaeya he worked in the shadows/outside the boundaries of the law so in that sense he was "roaming freely" I guess.
It also fits the thoughts on knights and bandits Kaeya shares in his sailwind shadow skin text.
So I assume Kaeya is a strong contender for the next wolf title.)
someone ordered our new limoncello cocktail, took one sip, and sent it back, and when the bartender saw it he just whimpered "they didn't like it...?" and looked at the waitress like
"i want a dislike button on ao3" so you want less fanfic. even if you don't think you want less fanfic you want less fanfic. because when people start getting dislikes on their fanfic they will want to write less fanfic. hope this helps <3
for fanfic? for things people put their hearts and souls into for free? for creative works where there is literally no reason to downvote a fic except to just be mean? where negative reception (and even just unwanted constructive criticism) could potentially kill someone's passion for their fic or even their motivation to ever write again? You're right! They're actually not that bad!
They're terrible! And it would be a terrible idea to ever implement them.
if you dislike the fic just fucking leave you're not being forced to finish something you're not enjoying. back button. if you're feeling especially hateful you can even block authors now.
Imagine meeting the most handsome goofiest genderweird butch you've ever seen and she has a dedicated probably monogamous boyfriend who to be fair is actually a pretty cool dude and you're devastated that you can't shoot your shot. Then you find out that up until last year boyfriend was certain he was gay and then he met this handsome goofy genderweird butch and was like oh I like women. Or at least women who are also men sometimes. So I'm bisexual. Also to make things more confusing they're both veterans who are actually pretty staunchly anti-military and hate every admiral they've ever encountered and the butch only went into the military because she desperately needed healthcare coverage for her father and the boyfriend was like. A legacy military brat who realized this is all pretty fucked actually. Congratulations you have encountered modern day Mulan and Li Shang
i can't lie to you i loveee bad endings sometimes. what if nothing worked out. what if the characters gave into their worst instincts. what if they became worse. what if there's truly no hope left. what will they do out of desperation? who will they become as their worst selves?
forever cursed to be addicted to rhythm games @mecakeandlove - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
