Mostly making this bc I felt my comment below didn’t deserve its own post as such.

    • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.netM
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      7 months ago

      dorley’s interesting and generally very good as an examination of the kind of fiction i read a lot of when i was younger that definitely wasn’t good for me to be reading

      the great scribblehub arms race is how i refer to a trend over the past couple years of trans authors on scribblehub to write stories about very dense eggs. one of my favorites is to own the libs, in which a conservative egg tries to prove that cis men will infiltrate queer spaces and ends up socially transitioning, starting hrt, legally changing her name, realizes that she was super shitty about queer issues and apologizing before realizing she isn’t cis. stuff like that. mainly about eggs finding excuses to do increasingly transgender things before realizing they’re actually trans.

      here’s one about an elf egg disguising herself as a woman to escape an arranged marriage and ending up very happy and trying to hide that she’s not a woman when everyone around her realized she was trans well before her. another about a school full to the brim with eggs who are all slowly forced to hatch thanks to some sort of magical contest they’ve been entered in against their will. here’s one about an egg making online friends who all think she’s trans. she doesn’t really know why they keep saying weird things but they believe she’s a girl which makes her very happy.

      also not part of the egg arms race, but The Harem Protagonist Was Turned Into A Girl!! And Doesn’t Want To Change Back!!!?? is a really fun sendup of classic harem comedy anime like tenchi muyo and the works of rumiko takahashi that just ends up as a polycule centered around the former everyman protagonist who realized she was a woman. i think it’s fun

      a lot of these are very white and they’re mostly very focused on like. upper middle class people in the imperial core (except for the fantasy ones), but they’re fun. in contrast unjust depths spends huge amounts of it’s word count talking about colonized people rising up against the colonizer and most of them are explicitly non-white, which is one of many reason’s it’s good. a muslim catgirl gives a speech where she tears apart colonizers for not realizing the extent of the historical injustices inflicted on her people