being posted on lolcow- a retrospective

warnings: lots and lots of transphobia

about six months ago, i was informed that some rather unsavory individuals on lolcow were talking about an unfiction project that me and my friends were working on. this unfiction project is a fan website for a fake anime called "neo-transgender: ultimate woman!!" (heretofore referred to as "NTUW" for the sake of brevity), a show that combines shounen battle drama with magical girl transformation sequences.

the power macguffin of this series is pronouns, and the different pronouns assigned to oneself give one different powers, but they would also be different depending on the person's latent aptitudes. the pronoun powers were more like stat buffs that heightened certain areas, but in rare cases they were where the powers stemmed from in the first place. i won't go too in-depth into the world building for fear of infodumping in a blog that isn't actually about that, but if anybody else is interested, let me know and i'll get on to fixing the website sooner because last time i checked most of the images were broken. shoutout to discord for getting rid of their image host.

this project is mostly inspired by "sparkle on, raven: the life of drill girl", which i guess was mostly inspired by "nyan neko sugar girls", so it's a parody of a parody of a parody. that's a lot of layers lmao. it's a culmination of my friend group's feelings on what it means to be trans and how much fun could be had with the concept of gender. yeah, my identity gives me strength. quite literally.

ultimately, the mission statement of NTUW is that pronouns are just funny little nicknames we make up and call each other to make that person feel more like themselves, and one of the greatest acts of kindness you can do for a person is to help them feel more comfortable in their own skin by calling them one of these little nicknames. in a way, you're helping them get stronger in doing so.

however, the people on that thread did not seem to pick up on that, but not in the "oh look at these fucking cringe neopronoun kids, ugh" kind of way. 

they thought we were on their side.

now that i'm thinking about this, that's probably on me for not fleshing out more of the website and making it more obvious that this is a labor of love and not an act of mockery. that's on my checklist for the next website update, i guess, but i have to figure out a way to do it without immediately giving the illusion away. i suppose that means we just have to pour even more effort into it than a joke project would have been given. more art, more story, more pages, all sorts of stuff.

will we take out all the bits that are actually just jokes like the tf2 mains? no. because heaven forbid we like having a little bit of fun. plus, during the age of fan websites that we're trying to emulate, who didn't inject a little bit of their headcanons into the character bios? hell, i do that on my main site's webshrines. you'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't, especially back then.

now, if these people had just left it at that, then i wouldn't be writing this. this next part is the one that scares me a little bit, which is so embarrassing for me to say because fear is exactly what they want out of us so that we hide ourselves more and don't make projects like this.

the person who let me know that this was happening was a user right here on spacehey. i won't link back to their account for fear of them being harassed especially since they are very much a minor, but they commented on one of my blog posts informing me of the thread. i took a screenshot of their comment-- being careful to crop out who sent it-- posted it on the website's blog page, and talked about it in a way that would make sense in-universe. at the time, i thought it was hilarious that this was happening, that they thought we were just shitposters looking to make a mockery of trans identities when in reality there is not a single cis person on the team.

they got wind that i got wind of it, and they found my main site. thankfully, what i thought was going to happen from that didn't happen: they didn't flood any of my guestbooks with slurs or anything unsavory. weirdly enough, they found my main site in the most roundabout way. there's a button at the bottom of the page that links back to my site, but instead they found it by looking at the footer below it which is not a link and then typing in my username completely by hand from that. 

they took a screenshot of my about page to reveal that this was made by a trans person, somehow found the kid who sent in the comment, misgendered and insulted me and that kid on more than one occasion, insulted my music taste bc for some reason that was relevant to me being trans, implied that me and my friends were groomers because of course they would say that, and still there were people in that thread who thought we were just shitposters.

we tried to show them. the second-in-command on the project told me to post his artfight link to show that he's been creating trans characters for years, and i even threw mine into the mix too. looking back now, that was probably the worst thing we could have done to preserve the prestige and mystique of this project being unfiction in nature. in layman's terms, the intention was always for it to be the goncharov of anime. plus, they could have found my friends' other socials on there and harassed them. hell, they already insulted one of my friends' art style for the twist villain of the series.

so why am i posting about this? why am i giving them the time of day and the space in my mind again? why am i digging this back up?