MAZE - Chapter 1022 - Hard to Master

aToTeT

Feels odd, the ‘that’s fine, girl’ section; even the non-speech follow-up suggests it’s a bit odd. Does it _have_ to happen that way? Truthfully, it doesn’t feel necessary to either character from my admittedly limited understanding of them—they seemed fine and ‘complex enough’ without that additional section? Maybe it’s my bad take. Hard to say, but that seems odd coming from Hera’s background and subsequent friend groups—and odder still with her political training/efforts. Odd is a good word. Seems strangely meanspirited or ‘traditionalist-coded’… neither generally apply to Hera; but people aren’t ideological labels, and are generally incoherent as well, so that’s a wash… certainly Hera has said her fair share of indelicate things, but to her credit: they were racial and propagandistic blindspots regarding differences between Human and A-Mazing Mana-integrated Lifeforms. Honestly, gender is a touchy subject that is rough enough that a person at the beginning stages of ego coalescence is likely to find myriad offences from far more innocuous, less dunderheaded phrases—ones which aren’t alien in Hera’s mouth. I don’t have a main document to easily control find, but in 1000 chapters: I bet Hera hasn’t once referred to a single person as ‘girl’ unless prefixed by ‘a’. Edit: also, entirely plausible I wholly missed Pandora being described in any way other than ‘a dwarf’, by my association with their namesake’s pressure on gendered normatively (which if they are using ‘Pandora’ and we’re not born a Pandora, is fairly monogendered in typical application—but I’m all for pushing the envelope), and by the relatively bubbly-if-edged personality exhibited by them through the text (which I attributed to ‘youthful’, aligning with the general suggestions of lacking experience in life/as an Explorer). But I read this literally: ‘could you have become a man’, as being combined with a sense of longing commonly associated with such figures seeking form–psyche parity. In which case, my read was born femme-presenting, but with these lines and the cracked voice; wishes they presented otherwise… to no support of their clan. Seems an odd take unless sourced from ‘youthful abashedness/cautious uncertainty’ rather than particular socially-fraught elements… given King Rutigan’s celebration of novel cultural touchstones, the surprisingly uncontested acceptance of a relationship between Silah and Hera (itself a doubly novel thing to my memory (inter-special, lesbian)), with only a handful of old ‘fuddie duddies’ who were raised in the more conservative culture preceding Rutigan’s avant-garde rule. They exist, to be sure… but the greatest enemy to ‘coming out’ to people you care about is the concern about whether they will continue to care about you in your truest sense of persondom—once it’s revealed that a largely pointless distinction associated with a person has instead swapped to the other common variety. That is: the self is its biggest barrier whether to admit to being a furry, being of a different gendered cultural preference, or unironically liking the Iliad (that last… I doubt). Which works in this case fairly well from my perspective so far… BUT! Ultimately, if it *is* indeed the case that I have misread the character (and they are instead born masc-presenting in eyes that cannae see beneath the outermost layers of reality, and Hera’s comment here wasn’t *meant* to feel as rude as it landed): The follow-up line and term of elderly endearment/chiding *still* don’t fit in Hera’s mouth. And in which case, there are many less… aged, terms for picking amongst the vernacular she traditionally uses. Apologies for the novel o____o Big thoughts and small words don’t play nice in my just-right sized noggin. I’d like to say I just about follow, and I’d like to think I do… but it’s a bit ambiguous and interpretable every way except for that one word that seems to come from another mouth entirely. If that was intentional, cool—I have words in my lexicon I almost never use too… for good reason. Edit “2”: forgot the valley girl/camp usage… but that absolutely doesn’t fit either. Definitely odd; many keys have I to hand, yet nary an open door.