I received some hate mail from a very entitled anonymous pissbaby yesterday accusing me of genderbending characters as a fetish and having internalised homophobia from M/F ships I’ve done. I responded with:

If you believe the only reason to genderbend a character is for a fetish, you’re either incredibly foolish or incredibly ignorant. Creative fandom is about imagination; thinking about relationships that didn’t happen in canon, or happened in different ways; how characters might be different if they’d made different choices, or come from a different background. Genderbending is just one of the ways we can reimagine characters, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. If you have time to waste on this, you should have time enough to see all the M/M art in my archive.

Basically, if you don’t like it, don’t look at it. You’re welcome to draw and write your own versions. I’m going to keep drawing them as I like, whether it’s M/M or M/F.

Peace out.

—

It’s strange how they accused me of doing genderbending as a fetish even though this fem ryou for example spiralled out mostly with talking about it with Rin like sexism in the tabletop rpg industry and if we made Ryou female, she’d have a difficult time in that area. Same with Malik too. I won’t lie, a female Malik is more fun to draw than male Malik (design wise) but it’s not a fetish.

If it was, I’d have constantly drawn very sleazy art of them just like in those seinen anime/manga with triple D boobs and always having those voyeuristic shots in my art. But I don’t.

All these genderbend stuff wasn’t created because it was a kink/fetish but because we wanted to explore how things would be like with them being affected by society, patriarchy, sexism and other issues.

Rin replied to that post because she’s much more coherent and blunt, haha. (thanks for having my back, gurl. ILU <3) and she explains that concept better. Here’s an excerpt:

Genderbent characters are just characters reimagined to have been born as a different sex and gender. That’s it. What kinds of stories are told with those, and what the author’s motivations are, vary from person to person. If you think you can take one look and assume you know why someone’s done that, you’re either a bigot or an idiot. Or – and this is my theory – a bigoted idiot. Frankly, even if we pretend there are no other reasons – which, when it comes to Millie’s comics, there are – personal preference is completely valid, and if you actually looked before you tried to cancel, you’d realise she’s drawn a tonne of M/M versions of those ships, too.

Speaking as a transgender, bisexual woman, and the writer of most of those comics we’ve worked on together….If you don’t like them that way, draw your own or just shut up. Imagining a character genderbent isn’t homophobic just because the ship was previously M/M. It would be homophobic if the gender was bent because it was M/M….Which, I can tell you from spending hours working out fem Ryou and Malik’s backstories and different circumstances because we wanted to explore how they’d be affected by sexism and patriarchy….It’s not.

—

It’s annoying it has come to this for Rin, though. Rin is a very private person like me, much more private than me when it comes to anything personal especially with identity. We don’t bring it up unless it’s needed for example, when we’re talking about anti-Asian hate, cultural stuff, racism, colourism, transphobia, etc.

Like,I’m a bisexual, mentally ill, disabled SE Asian woman from a very conservative third world country while she’s a transgender, bisexual white woman in the UK aka TERF island. But we don’t bring these up because we don’t think it’s that important when were busy making comics.

In terms of ID politics, we’re actually more “oppressed” than most people in the fandom, lol. The audacity for that coward to tell me I have internalised homophobia is extremely ignorant because I’ve done a great deal to support the LGBT community for years; like educating conservative people here on LGBT especially trans issues and donating to such charities especially with trans ones. Honestly, I really didn’t want to brag and bring all these up because I hate having to be very performative with what I do offline. I don’t see the point in having to list and announce every single act of virtue you do all the time online because it reminds me of ppl deperately wanting approval and showing off how morally righteous and superior they are.

I’m very reserved in talking about those except when a death happens, or a family problem crops up that it hinders me from drawing or posting. But it shows how superficial that anon was, not to mention, cowardly because they had to hide in anonymous mode to tell me all that.

You can call me whatever you want, but you don’t really know me. If you want to judge, go ahead. I don’t control what others feel about me but I won’t stop what I’m doing to please you.

I know deep down I’m not what they’re accusing me as so I’m not affected by their words. I’m just exasperated with how shallow and ignorant people seem to be, lol.

welppp.

Although, I find it strange though how calm I was when I read their message. If this happened a year or two ago (or years ago) , I’d have been more inflammatory and angry but perhaps I grew up. I used to be a hot-tempered, edgy twat back then. It is awfully embarrassing to remember all the cringey stuff I did years ago, lol but hopefully, I grew and matured.

And as an adult, I have other responsibilities and things to worry about than online/ fandom crap and petty drama. I got no time for that anymore, lol. The only thing this message did for me was actually give me more fuel to motivate myself to finish a p! citron comic in the works so thank you anon for actually helping me get off my butt and finish it. Without your message, I’d still be in a fatigued state. ^3^

Anyway, gotta go finish my stuff now, lol.