so thank you to Monica Rose for her indispensable help in getting Silver Wings kickstarted. Hopefully I'll be able to stay on track as I write this thing. It's going to be my attempt to tackle and dismantle some of the tropes in TG fiction that bother the hell out of me. I will also be trying to show that good intentions do not a good outcome make, nor are they warrant for forgiveness. Simply put, sometimes even the best of intentions can end in complete disaster and your victim has the right to accept or refuse any apology.
and that is sort of the crux of the matter, a lot of TG fiction starts from the assumed angle that our protagonist ultimately wants to be a girl, which is absolutely fine in my opinion. However my issue comes from the fact that so many of our protagonists who are transformed for some slight (whether real or imagined) just limply accept it. They don't fight to preserve their identity, or they allow others to construct their new identity while floating along on a dream cloud of shopping, makeup shoes and boys while completely forgetting that these do not make a girl. At all.
Shoes. Makeup. Shopping. Boys. Chicks Flicks. These are the trappings of womanhood but are NOT exclusive to girls in fact they do not even define a girl by any real stretch. When I went ot highschool, I saw boys dropping 200 dollars on shoes alone, let alone clothes and cologne, movies and video games. These interests are not gender defining, and it annoys me when they're used as some kind of concrete definition of womanhood.
What makes you a girl is what's in your heart and mind. A gender-changed character can still pick up a gun and be female, she can be clad in full armor; fighting in the thick of battle and STILL be a woman. Being a woman isn't just being fragile, submissive and soft. There are many countless definitions of what a woman is, and none of them are wrong.
I will be trying to explore an alternate definition of womanhood in Silver Wings, which leads me to my final point...I need a bit of help in ensuring that i keep my fantasy/medieval references correct. When I was 12, I did a project on the dark ages but i'm 30 now and my memory of that project is...slim. So if anyone with a better understanding of medieval times could help keep me from doing smoething odd, it would be most appreciated.
Comments
sounds like a good story, I look forward to it
break those tropes !
Tropes
Many tropes deserve to be averted, subverted, inverted, etc. But some tropes are tools. Not all are bad.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Red or Black, it is almost all good.
Me, and the Lady Licorice have had a lengthy conversation on the topic.
I side that some trope are useful and necessary.
Licorice, sided that yes they can be useful, but ones like forced fem, is not realistic or necessary.
So, she is of a mind to rewrite the trope of trapped of threatening changes need not be part of her story as they are in other tales.
My opinion is the best way to deconstruct a trope is use a different one, much like the destruction of two items of similar size from the MOHS hardness scale of the same density. "takes one, to know one", "only you can, know your own mind" like the old disagreement of the best favor of licorice, we did not see eye on whats was best, just that all the people involved like licorice.
P.S. I like red vines.
And again, to Licorice, good luck in writing, just do not use all of it up. :-)
"Sometimes you need a little space to grow up or start over"- Me
Unexpected feminization
Out of the two dozen or so stories I've written, I think only one of them was voluntary feminization and in fact most are barely TG. I'll be interested to see where you go with this if I can find the story.
Silver Wings
I do not see "Silver Wings" or Licorice listed. What?
Silver Wings
I just finished the first chapter, however i feel like it's more of a skeleton than a story at the moment. I need to flesh a lot of it out, go over it, and polish it up. With luck i should have it out in the next two days.