originally posted at https://comicalmomentum.tumblr.com/po...
At this point I took a brief hiatus, and resumed when overwhelmed by events in the news.
we’re picking up with… ok, so, to remind myself of everyone’s names, Elliot and Tedd are going to break into a government building to steal a thing that will cure Elliott’s acute case of girl. Grace is at home, and Greg the martial arts instructor is on guard (in case Grace’s fellow furries show up I guess).
We learn that Greg can detect a change in ‘power level’ when Grace changes forms, and Greg explains the nudity taboo to her, which is as bad as it sounds.
Commenting on Greg, who wishes he was more of a shallow cliché, Dan Shive talks about the anime trope of old martial arts instructors having no sense of boundaries and sexually harassing younger female characters (except he phrases it as a ‘dirty mind’).
Grace gets a call from Tedd from ‘another dimension’. I guess they’re going to scratch their session later.
In the AU, Elliott has a counterpart who’s a girl (presumably cis) named Ellen, who’s in a relationship with Tedd. Grace informs ‘Beta Tedd’ that Ellen is Elliot’s counterpart, which he considers a ‘mood killer’, because he’s a transmisogynist homophobic piece of shit I guess. :)
Apparently there’s a naming theme for the chapters in the Sister arc, recounting a board game that goes to shit and ends in a fist fight.
In the government facility, Tedd and Elliot find the Dewitchery Diamond without complications, and Elliott touches it. There’s a cliffhanger where he appears to split in two: a version with a normative male body, and a version with a normative female body.
F!Elliot (who the commentary calls Ellen, but I’m going to wait until the character asserts a gender and name) is afraid that death may come with the end of the curse, in less than a month.
Ellen adopts a name in the next strip, calling herself the ‘evil twin’ of Elliot. Do these kids have nothing but bad TV in their lives or what.
Awkward euphemisms for boobs ahoy.
Dan Shive talks about upper body strength in an awkward way. For the record:
- it is true that, as a statistical average, men as a population have a slightly higher average upper body strength than woman
- there is significantly more variation within each group than between them
- top male athletes generally have higher upper body strength than top female athletes in a particular discipline, but there are complicating social factors
- there is no natural definition of a ‘female version of’ a person. all sex characteristics can vary independently, at best we have statistical correspondences that are deliberately maintained by power (through coercive pressures on trans and intersex and gender-variant people to look like white supremacist norms of cis non-intersex people, and through non-consensual surgeries on intersex babies)
- for CAMAB trans people, taking anti-androgens often leads to a loss of muscle tone, and it takes more work to build muscle, but that’s not what this magic gun is doing
- in fact… the capabilities of a magic sex characteristic change gun are entirely up to the author! the author can say that it reduces muscle tone, reflecting the trans metaphor, but that is a choice - there is no ‘natural’ way to determine what loss of strength a ‘female version’ of a character would have
anyway Ellen has decided to fuck everything up for Elliot for some reason, but Elliot stops her from escaping. eh.
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