Look. It’s simple. I will play a lot of games that don’t do this BUT if you let me play a woman or nb character AND you let me be bi or gay I will love the game a LOT more
“Jesus christ eat the goddamn mac and cheese.” scowls the hero “I can hear your stomach growling through your armor, you know.”
The villain blinks “You-”
“Are feeding you, yes. If all I wanted to do was punch people and throw criminals in jail, I would’ve become a vigilante. Heroism involves kindness, dipshit.”
“Heroism involves kindness, dipshit” is the most amazing phrase I’ve ever read. I need to incorporate it into all my work.
I wear clothing from the men’s section of the clothing store. My leg hairs are longer than most of the hair in my head. I never wear any makeup, no matter if I’m going out to buy bread in the morning or if I’m going to a party. People often call me “sir”. Others hurl slurs at me, sometimes calling me a “dyke”, sometimes calling me a “faggot”, both showing their disapproval of my physical presentation. I see little kids asking their mothers, in whispers, if I am a boy or a girl. And people ask me all the time, why do I want to look like a man?
The answer is simple. I don’t.
And I do not look like a man.
I look like a woman who refuses to perform femininity.
My unshaven legs do not make me like a man, they’re MY legs, and MY hair, and I am a woman. My “boy’s” clothes are worn on my body, the body of a woman. My naked, unpainted face is the face of a woman. I am a woman, and this is not defined by a haircut or a choice of attire, or by lipstick or high heels, or boxer briefs and men’s deodorant worn over fuzzy unshaven armpits. There’s nothing manly about me.
I am a woman, not by choice, but by fact. Because “woman” is a reality imposed to me, from the day I was born and given a woman’s name, to the day I was six and I was told I couldn’t take off my shirt in a blazing hot summer day because one day I would have breasts, to last night when I walked home in a state of hyper-awareness, my house keys tightly clutched between my fingers, tracking the movements of every man in the dark streets.
I am a woman because, since before my own birth, when an ultrasonography picture informed my parents that I would be born with a vulva, I have been groomed to be a member of the woman class, the breeding stock class, the sex class, the lower class. I was taught to be accomodating and speak softly, to not bring attention to myself and to spare men’s feelings. I was taught that the boy who pulled my hair and threw his toy train at me, aiming for my head, probably did it because he liked me, and boys will be boys anyway. I learned that, if I did the same to him, I was a troublemaker. That my assertiveness is unladylike. That one day I would bear some man’s children, and this was pretty much destiny. That my worth was in my looks, more than in my brain. I am a woman because I was taught all these things, and I am a woman because people expect me to know these lessons by heart, and follow every one of them.
When people ask me why do I want to look like a man, what they’re actually asking is why am I not marking myself as a woman. They’re asking why do I fail to perform the role of femininity, to make myself pleasing and unthreatening to the eyes of the upper class, the man class. My mother once voiced her concerns to me, that my looks would make me a target for male violence, and she is right to be concerned. I am perceived as a member of the lower class who refuses to bear the marks and play the role imposed to me. I refuse to shave my legs to look like a pre-pubescent girl, innocent and vulnerable, or to wear shoes that force me to walk on the tips of my toes, slow and precariously balanced, and this makes men angry, because this is a counscious act of rebellion. This is me saying I am not theirs. I will not please them. I do not desire their approval or their attention. And men often get violent when we refuse to cater to them.
My choices of visual presentation make me a cautionary tale. I am the hairy, ugly, lesbian feminist, the one they warn other women about. “Don’t be like her”, they say, “or no man will ever want you”. But I don’t want them either, and I do not want to look like them, or be like them, or have anything to do with them. I want to be free from men and their bullshit standards. I want to strut around proudly, shamelessly unladylike, looking like a woman looks when she’s not covered in face paint and restrictive clothing, when she doesn’t care about pleasing men.
I do not look like a man, and nothing will ever make me look like one. I am pure, unadulterated woman. I choose myself over them, I choose women over them. If that makes them hate me, so be it. Because I am a woman, they would hate me no matter what I did.
This is so purely golden and real scaldering hot tea
when people are like “the hunger games just stole the plot of battle royale” like listen everything steals from the plot of everything the lion king is just furry hamlet westworld is jurassic park but sexier lost is edgy gilligan’s island there are no original stories and the only good piece of media is jennifer’s body
Michael crichton wrote westworld and jurassic park tho so he just pirated himself
michael crichton keeps TRYING to tell y’all about the evils of capitalism impeding on the progress of science when will y’all LISTEN
Maybe he just doesn’t like theme parks
michael crichton in line for a roller coaster at six flags: fuck this
What this means is, that ever single one of the following
Jack Be Nimble (who jumped over burning candles for fun)
Jack the Giant Killer (who sold his cows for magic beans then robbed and killed a giant)
Stingy Jack (who tricked the devil so many times he was banned from both afterlives)
Jack of Jack and Jill (who splattered his head open falling down a hill)
Jack o’ Lantern (the headless horseman spirit of halloween)
Jack Frost (the spirit who heralds the end of autumn and the start of winter)
Are literally the same jackass who made so many bad life choices he ended up an immortal ice dullahan with a pumpkin serving as both his head and flashlight
but what an incredible journey he had getting there
