Plus, fandom seems to WAY overblow Taako’s femininity? In the show he only ever really *flirts* in a super lowkey way and only in desperate situations (ie Klarg), and his use of pet names is limited almost exclusively to people he doesn’t like and/or wants to distance himself from, while he calls people he ACTUALLY cares about by their real names or some variation thereof. Also in canon I’m pretty sure he only wears a skirt ONCE and it’s attached to a pair for shorts. He dresses up as Captain Ron for one of the festival episodes while Merle is dressed as Ursula from the little mermaid ffs.
When he calls Lup “Lulu” she gets ANGRY at him, and he reacts similarly when she calls him “Koko”, because that is their DISTANCING TECHNIQUE, and I’m not sure he ever once is described as wearing makeup
Yet content creators (and, you know what, your art is your own, do what makes you happy! But also! Let’s be aware of these harmful trends!) seem to consistently depict him as overly flamboyant, ALWAYS wearing dresses and skirts, obsessive about makeup (which actually makes no sense in canon, unless I’m forgetting something, because Taako’s whole “I’m beautiful” schtic has nothing to do with makeup or tricks, it’s him genuinely and naturally just being the hottest person and most confident person in any given room, and what he’s wearing never has anything to do with it), calling everyone by pet names all the time, and generally being LOUD in a manner that’s uniquely gay, even though in canon he doesn’t even disclose that he went on a date with DEATH, the guy who was HUNTING THEM, which would have been relevant to Magnus and Merle also, specifically because Taako is a private person and felt like they didn’t need to know this detail of his personal life.
We all have different interpretations of characters, but Lup is canonically a transwoman who is attracted to men, but she’s so often depicted as so butch it’s unbelievable, while Taako floats on Lisa Frank clouds and blows kisses to everyone and wears high heels and miniskirts everywhere.
In some cases this shit isn’t even SUBTLE in how it fetishizes gay men, which is… that’s reductive, y’all! And ignoring the femininity that Lup can lay claim to as a woman, in favor of masculine energy that coincides with her birth gender? That’s erasure of her true gender identity.
TLDR: Taako as a gay man does not and canonically should not fall in line with harmful stereotypes, and Lup as a transwoman is allowed to dress however she goddamn pleases and there is no canon evidence that she’s allergic to dresses, heels, and long hair.
This just… as a cis female I’m not exactly an expert on either of these identities, but I have friends who are and I’ve encountered plenty of fucked up shit on the way to discovering my own sexuality and feeling confident in my gender identity. I’ve gone into some dark spirals when it seemed like every way I turned, I was encountering other people’s harmful ideas of what my label meant, or how someone with my label should act, and the idea that if I wasn’t presentationally ostentatious in how I carried myself, I wasn’t *really* what I claimed to be.
That’s why I can’t read a lot of TAZ fics, because while there are so many great writers out there, and I’ve read some great stories, and they’re making the art they want to see which is great, there’s the prevailing idea that you have to continually validate Taako’s gayness with behavior like him ALWAYS being the one to wear the dress on his dates with Kravitz, or wearing big heels, and shit like that, and Lup is always some magical butch icon which is a mess all on its own.
This kind of thing turns me off so much because it’s so prevalent it seems to invalidate everything about your sexuality not being your entire identity, and it makes Taako’s entire existence revolve around the fact that he’s Sparkly! And gay! And fashionable! and if you take that away from fanon Taako, he doesn’t exist anymore.
