To use one example of that realism factor as applied to queer people in my stories

I use three approaches. First, the queer people in these stories are fully rounded people with lives, family histories, interests, histories of doing things, and in all of that they’re queer, either lesbian, bi, gay, trans, or what have you. It is a part of their lives and neither all-consuming and a substitute for anything else with the character, nor is it minimized and given only lip service. Meaning, in short, that if two queer characters have sex with each other it gets the same level of attention as straight characters in the story. Short of outright smut stories, it gets treated as a matter of fact part of life, not all of it. Which is how sex and sex lives work in the real world.

Second, there is a diversity of body types, appearances, and multiple types of queer people. Including specific efforts to include people who get left out in real world discussions. Two of my main original characters in one fandom are a butch lesbian and the bi lover of a deceased (or not) canon character. One of them is a survivor of one of the roughest, most brutal units in her society’s wars and comes out of it with a wee bit of an Eddie Blake from Watchmen vibe. She works as a foil to the canon character she’s usually shipped with and the two embody the gap between ideal societal self perception (canon character) and much more unpleasant reality (original character).

The other is the partner of a deceased character in many stories but not in all of them, who sticks together with the other person in the triad…..and while bi and a man he also has a hypermasculine macho aura that is in its own way a blatant bit of queer performance art that subverts the pretense which is no small part of how he gets away with it under the Sozin laws. He’s basically a gender flipped de Maupin for the Sozin era who’s basically ‘fuck your rules.’

And of course there’s Azula, who is neither butch nor femme, but somewhere in between with a clothing choice that’s both/and and not either/or.

In the Sailor Moon fandom Kunzite and Zoisite are portrayed as gay in both past lives and the present, and no less badass than their canon selves. They’re both very pretty men in one way, but also showcasing that pretty/femme gay men can be every bit as badass as the more conventional 'macho’ types.

Haruka and Michiru are written in a specific way that goes for a different approach to standard fandom. The Kaiohs do not like Michiru’s gayness, so she gets booted out and lives with everything provided for her but nothing from her family but that. She is 100% gold star lesbian, and a femme hyper-feminine lesbian.

The Tenohs do accept Haruka, who is butch, lesbian, but like lesbians in real life she did date a man and her first relationship was with a boy. Said character sometimes shows up and isn’t entirely reconciled to Haruka being gay, in some storylines, and is entirely accepting in others (and not actually the main villain in any case but more of a sitcom arch nemesis for Michiru in the sense that he sees himself as this and she barely deigns to notice his existence at all).

So in this sense it subverts things in standard Sailor Moon style that the more obviously gay character is the one who has full heartwarming familial acceptance and the lipstick lesbian is the one who got kicked out and 'we don’t talk about Michiru'ed.

With Adora and Catra, they’re both gay as I write them, with Catra being more butch and Adora more in between/not really giving a damn about clothes. Adora is 100% Catra-sexual, Catra spends a lot of time in denial of feelings that drive her actions and which shape their dynamics in the Magicatra AU while giving Catra the Mistress of Mixed Signals moniker in a way that makes, of course, things fun to write. LOL.

There are a variety of different experiences and realities with this in real life, and I aim to capture that in fiction while using it to amplify that sense of realism.

In my Magicatra AU I am applying various elements I use in other fandoms to the She-Ra fandom as well:

The big one, in terms of war, is the Great Gods Logistics and Budget. The canon does not truly specify how a lot of this stuff worked and there’s a lot that can be done to enhance a sense of realism while keeping all the fantasy bits and simultaneously allowing for both softer comedy and gallows humor over the logistics/REMF types. The Accounting Department of Brightmoon and the Princess Alliance will hate She-Ra with the passion of a thousand firey suns, the Horde’s ability to smash anything as long as Adora does it herself relies on her using futuristic sci-fi weaponry against not nearly so futuristic a set of enemies.

Imagine taking the (admittedly after-leavings of Horde Prime’s forces after around a thousand years but still) equivalent of a Category 2 Kardashev civilization against high fantasy that has serious power dampeners and drawbacks. Flip side of that is that Adora monopolizes the repair facilities and is slightly vindictive at the people she blames for driving Catra away, ensuring a few Horde captains either bite it or surrender because Adora is leaving them out to dry and to die and they know it.

The second is that other side of deconstruction as I like to do it where Shadow Weaver somehow opened a portal to Eternia and nobody sought to look back into that and how she did it and to ramrod themselves through right back. Randor, Marlena, and Adam/He-Man are all alive and well, but they’re leading the resistance against ol’ Skeletor, who has all but won his own war as a mirror of Hordak.

Skeletor’s actual voice retains the hilarious helium factor but he uses Evil-Lyn’s enchantments to give him an infrasound-resonance factor evil voice, which is one of the first signs for any reader that remembers their He-Man that Skelos/Skeletor might be pretending to be affable and honest with Adora, but he’s really lying and scamming his way to manipulate her to things as bad as canon Catra but from opposite POVs.

Also as far as Catra’s own background I do go with elements of the standard AO3 version of Brightmoon and the Magicats, with the slight twist that they are *also* on Eternia, and that her (equally immortal as Randor, Marlena, and Skeletor) mother happens to be the one hosting the runaways while her father goes out to fight with He-Man and Battle Cat, finding it a hilarious thing in the worst ways.

This leads to a major twist on how and why Catra showed up on Etheria at all and to a technical twist with the ‘Sword chooses an Eternian’ factor that’s already been laid out pretty plainly here. Catra *is* Eternian, just like She-Ra, she’s just one of a species that shared the world with the human aliens of Eternia.

Bringing in Skelos is also intended to work with the established elements of cartoon canon on the Eternians and showcasing that them versus Horde Prime is very much Saddam Hussein vs Ayatollah Khomeini (analogies chosen quite deliberately) but in his own way Skeletor is 100% anti-Horde Prime and very much a Token Evil Teammate for the greater war. Or so he says, not bothering to note the elephants in the room with what he actually intends to do with and to Etheria.

Horde Lord Adora Redo