#(-ish)

[connor-swain]

carla connor is so fucking hot. rail me pls.

[dduane]

In the "Renders You Forgot You Did" dep't

...In the "Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms" Test Kitchens: Lorn gets ready to carve the pumpkin.

(From the "YWiztober" sequence started last year.... re-rendered just now for slightly better lighting and to address some set-dressing issues.)

[sukimas]

A Belated Retrospective on "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter"

Obligatory disclaimer: critiquing a work on the basis of beliefs it seems to reveal does not mean that the critic believes it is morally acceptable to mistreat the author of said work. It is not, in fact, morally acceptable to mistreat the author of said work.

The first thing the reader learns about the narrator of the short story "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter", by Isabel Fall, is that it* sexually identifies as an attack helicopter.

The second thing the reader learns about it is that its body is "an XX-karyotype somatic female".

In a vacuum, this choice doesn't mean much of anything. There is a deliberate contrast (reinforced half to death in the story) between the nurturing softness expected of the feminine and the inherent violence of a machine like an Apache attack helicopter. The motif is deliberate, sprinkled into every paragraph, in the same way that an early-transition trans person will reflexively point out (in their mind or out loud) everything that makes them feel like they are in essence their gender, every way that they didn't fit in their old role that was assigned for them, every incongruence.

It becomes a little more interesting once one observes patterns in the way that the narrator describes its gender, though. It tells that becoming an attack helicopter was a deliberate choice; that this choice was born out of resentment for the womanhood forced upon it. It describes womanhood as characterized by fear; of surveillance, of violence, of impotence. It characterizes its transition as one from a societal patient to an agent. Is this a meaningless decision?

But what an agent it is. The story makes no bones about this being the wrong choice; the mission that it has been set is to blow up a high school. It does not view this as simply carrying out orders; it views inflicting death and imperialism on the part of a dying state as an integral part of its being, as its calling, its purpose. It has transitioned from the face of the "innocent dead" to their nightmare. As skillful as the narrative is at getting the reader into its head, there is not a single moment when it presents this as a morally ambiguous act; there was no belief in justice in the narrator's choice, never the slightest question that it was simply doing what suited it personally best. Is this a meaningless decision?

Neither is. But the narrative plays coy with its thesis; snippets of the narrator's military gender studies class... "If gender has always been a construct, why not construct new ones?" it says. In the world of the story, the work of generations of queer activists against the pressures of societal gender essentialism led directly to the production of new weapons of war. In the epilogue, the narrator's gunner detransitions. The narrator tells us that this is a necessary new queerness, that maybe you, the reader, can see the narrator's gender as a perversion of liberty that generations fought to gain. It tells us that it has tried to show us who it is, that it has tried to leave us without judgement, so that we can form it for ourselves.

"I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" is a phrase born from a specific context. Maybe you've been conditioned to think about it as a meaningless snarl phrase against transgender people sensu lato. Tell me, then, what image does the phrase "blue hair and pronouns" conjure up in your head?

Our narrator chose on a whim to become an attack helicopter, even though it had not considered itself to be anything besides a woman before. Our narrator's body is "an XX-karyotype somatic female". Our narrator believes that gender is a construct, that there is no essence within us that makes us who we are. Our narrator's transition is a vehicle for it to acquire agency. Our narrator tells us to imagine it as no longer a member of the "innocent dead"; the inhabitants of the stock phrase "women and children". Our narrator says that it is still in some ways a woman, when it comforts its copilot.

That is to say, of course, that the narrator is exactly the type of person who the snarl phrase is aimed at. A nonbinary person who transitioned away from femininity and towards a gender not recognized by wider society not because of a deep, internal sense of identity, but by choice.

In a different story, told differently, this might indicate agreement with these beliefs, the perspective that perhaps what counts as "gender" truly is flexible, but that we cannot allow our movement to be co-opted by powers that wish to misuse its ideology.

This is, however, a story where the narrator blows up a high school. Its thesis, despite coming from the perspective of its transgender author, is as follows:

*Aircraft are sometimes referred to as "she", much like ships; this is less common than for ships in general, and is significantly more common in fixed-wing aircraft than in rotary-wing aircraft like the narrator. I choose to use "it" here based on the latter.

[vivitur-moritur]

going to be attending a party on october 18, but unfortunately it's completely unrelated to the fact that that's when mag 160 happened... so obviously i'm going to wear green and as much eye-themed jewelry as i can get away with before it becomes obvious and concerning.

[threegoldfish]

Good boy Steven! Yes you are! *headpats* Sorry, Marc, only good boys get headpats. (Bad boys get handcuffed)

Regarding this :D

...Okay, that's... a little odd - Steven's not a dog, after all! - but... it's also kinda nice? As weird as it should feel, all things considered, there is a happy, bubbly feeling rising inside Steven's chest instead; He smiles, widely so, and shrugs about a second later before clearing his throat - all sheepish and shy, but excited.

"---I-I like to be good, yes!" It's much better than being bad, after all.

Marc squints at the sight of... this, yeah, all of it; He inhales, then exhales at that stranger somewhat-commenting that bad guys get handcuffs instead---

"---Un par de esposas le vendrían bastante bien a Marc, considerando todas las circunstancias." A chuckle, a shrug. "Feisty lil' thing he can be. Besides, he's lookin' good when handcuffed---"

"---Did you just---"

Steven's eyes widen and he blinks profusely; Where he'd felt confused at first, the whole innuendo of Jake's spoken words does hit him about a couple of seconds later, causing an intense blush to appear there, the tips of his ears and cheeks burning---

"---Guys! C-can we not?!" A huff, a pout, as he tries to push that mental image of Marc in handcuffs away - as far as he can, befre it, uhm, causes, erm, things to happen...

[dduane]

The Bad Armor Drinking Game

In the digital art dep't...

So, having just sorted out the new figure for Queen Eftgan in the Middle Kingdoms books, I spent most of last week (while continuing to recover from the household upper respiratory infection) doing preliminary planning for the visual of a scene from The Door Into Sunset in which all the MCs are out on the battlefield. The big battle (or the final one of a sequence) will be the next day, and last-minute tweaks are being made to strategy and tactics. Which means putting most of the our-side protagonists together in a command tent, bent over a table covered with maps. (The "sketch" for this scene is over here.)

But sweet Goddess in a bucket, the shopping I had to do to make sure I had those guys' armor the way I wanted nearly drove me around the bend. From the digital artist's POV, the main problem with this is realistically arming the female characters. And the reason for this is simple: Almost all of it that's currently available from Daz is crap.

There are a very few notable exceptions. In Eftgan's case, for example: she's wearing the female-fighter version of the male-fighter harness that Herewiss has on. Sickleyield and Moonscape Graphics have done good work here.

But almost all the other female-use armors available at the moment? Argh. It had been ...a few years, I guess? since I last went armor-shopping. Last week I'd hoped there might at least be some new possibilities in the Daz shop. But instead I found so much more useless crap than before that I was tempted to start day drinking. And by evening, there were enough drink-triggers to start my very own drinking game.

I am not going to illustrate the triggers enumerated below, as I don't want to embarrass the artists. But if you look at the items turned up by this search, you'll have little trouble finding the things that would have left me in a drunken stupor within an hour or two.

My baseline: if I'm going to buy digital armor, either for male or female characters, it has to be something that I myself wouldn't be embarrassed to show up wearing at a swordfight. Otherwise, I start hitting the virtual bottle.

So I'd drink when I see:

Armor that fails to cover or at least protect vital vulnerable areas. Not just vital organs, but seriously important places like the insides of thighs and arms, the throat area, etc. (And yeah, I know and enjoy the various webcomics that illustrate, for humor's sake, the idea that the more bare flesh a female warrior displays, the safer they somehow are. But I'm dealing with the "realistic" side of combat here. Yes, some of my characters are magic workers, but the reason they go out and get themselves armor is so they don't have to waste precious magical ability dealing with something that steel will manage perfectly well without them having to think about it.)

Armor that should serve a useful protective purpose but nonetheless doesn't because it's been twisted by the armor maker, for design purposes, into a shape that means it's now essentially useless. Drink, for example, on seeing an example of "Silly Pauldron Syndrome:" i.e., shoulder pieces that will not only not protect you from a shoulder cut, but will direct it toward the space between neck and shoulder. ...Drink again if the pauldron also somehow blocks your view of what's going on around you. Another drink for pauldrons, gorgets or neck pieces that poke your eye out when you turn your head.

Armor covered with decorative doodads that do nothing but get in your way or serve as something for your adversaries' weapons to catch on. The proper purpose of armor is to deflect blows away from vulnerable areas, not to catch and keep them there. No one is going to waste expensive metal (and armourers' labor time) on decorations that are a liability. Anything that would catch a thrusting sword? Drink. Drink twice if spikes are involved.

Poorly thought-out attachments to armor (loincloths, capes, etc), Drink if these would inevitably trip you or otherwise interfere with you if you tried to run in them: or that would make it easier for an attacker—especially from behind—to pull/knock you down and kill you. Two drinks if the attachments are asymmetrical. (Because, what, this is supposed to help somehow?) And drink for loincloths in general, because, FFS, why.

Boob armor. If you're a woman who's fought with the sword at all, you know that unless you're absolutely dead flat in front, you bind up somehow to get the frontage safely restrained before the action begins. Armor that purports to separate your breasts into two different casings is simply idiotic. All that it does do is signal that you're female. (And you're doing this why, exactly? On a this-world battlefield, this strikes me as nothing but a recipe for trouble.) One drink for boob armor. Another drink for conical boob armor that would make even early!Madonna look askance. Two drinks for boob armor that covers only the tops of the boobs. Honestly, WTF!!

And: Armor that just looks silly. Armor that makes you go "Oh FFS, give me a break now" and look away. Two drinks (or more) for armor that covers hardly any of your character, but for which the designer is possibly charging you even more than for an intricately made and well thought-out piece of work with a lot more protective real estate.

...(sigh) So many drinks. And so little armor worth having. ...Anyway, I got away from that series of shopping sessions with my sobriety intact. Small mercies.

But let me show you something hilarious that came up along the way.

Very, very few of the people making and selling armors on Daz betray any sign of a sense of humor in their marketing images. The rig below, though, popped up suddenly and reduced me to gasps of helpless laughter.

This, I kid you not, will come up in that "armor" search above. Let's be charitable and refer to it for the time being as "fighting gear".

I haven't shown you the best of this, though. These two figures weren't alone. There was another.

This guy should be an example to us all. He's thinking, "They're gonna make me go out there wearing some stick-on leather nipple straps and half a rug from IKEA? Fine. I'm gonna make it work." ...And he not only owns it: he rocks it. This is a badass of some kind or another, and he has my sword, or axe, or whatever.

All I can say is: Good on the product designer for doing something genuinely funny for a change: because at that point, I seriously needed it.

(sigh) And now back to work.

ETA: A quick note per various recommendations of others online doing this kind of analysis: Thanks, but I don't need to go outside the household for more of the same. I'll just yell up the stairs to @petermorwood, who probably has some that's way more acerbic than mine. :)

[konstantya]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Oh, hey, I wrote a follow-up chapter to this story:

Chapters:  2/2? Fandom:  Original Work Rating:  Mature Word Count:  852 (1,586 total) Warnings:  No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships:  Outlaw Heroine/Deputy Hero Additional Tags:  Western, Bandits & Outlaws, Female Anti-Hero, Morally Ambiguous Character, Murder, Implied Revenge, Bondage, Chair Bondage, Gunplay, Non-Consensual Kissing, Femdom, Enemies to Lovers, (except they never really get to the "lovers" part sorry), EDIT: and now we've got, Gay Male Character, Male Character of Color, Self-Destruction

Summary:

They really should have gagged him. That would have been the sensible thing to do. (An original piece inspired by a pulp magazine cover. Image also included inside the story.) UPDATE: This was originally meant to be a one-shot, but whoops, looks like I’m continuing it? No promises it will ever reach a romantic conclusion, but we’ll see where it takes me, one step at a time.