anon · 16d
(this is in response to something you posted a couple days ago but neosprng stopped working and i wasn't sure if you still check this site until you responded to someone else here)
tbh, at least part of why i've started unapologetically using pronoun hcs for characters is in hopes it will inspire other people to do the same (generally, or, at the very least, in conversation with me). some of my gender/pronoun hcs are incredibly dear and personal to me and i can't deny that i'd feel a bit sad or discouraged if people were to ridicule them. but i care about encouraging people to express what's important to them and giving them a safe space to do so more than i care to listen to what people who feel the need to be unnecessarily rude about personal hcs i'm sharing in a relatively small corner of a fandom have to say. this is not meant to dismiss your concerns - i get how you feel, i used to be more nervous about it too - i'm sending this in support! i love they/them wawu! so much. i'm cheering whenever i see you using they/them or alternating between pronouns for wawu (or any other characters, i just know you're especially passionate about wawu)!
I DONT CHECK RETROSPRING OFTEN ANYMORE but i have been since neospring stopped working. functional websites all around.
but yeah i feel the same way about pronoun hcs? it can still be mortifying out in the open to me, e.g. like in a qrt of a livetweet if i go off on some tangent. i'm explicit that this is something i do because i both want to give people the option to Opt Out on seeing it AND primarily and connected to that because i dont really want to deal with the consequences of someone i didn't know finding an issue with it.
it's not something i'll stop doing because to me the idea of someone enjoying the hc/it being equally important to someone else as it is to me now is like. more important to me than the ways in which this "limits my reach" as a writer even if i complain about it sometimes. and also complain about how it can feel mortifying.
