[lgbt rep rambling][ocs-tangential] A thought that's been simmering since a conversation with ғᴏxʏᴍᴏʀᴏɴ recently

so, it's no surprise - and also extremely good - that all our OC casts inevitably end up as like Oops! All Queer

but I think there is one part of the big wish fulfillment that is lost as a result

and that's the fun escapist LGBT fantasy of casual, enthusiastic acceptance by the cishet community

if Elvis the OC is trans and all the other OCs in Elvis's cast are cool with it, that's great, but it's also like...

if all Elvis's castmates are also LGBT it's sort of like, yeah, of course they're cool with it

they're all in the same boat

If the cast has a Shounen Battle Manga Love Interest Girl and she's trans, and there's also a Shounen Battle Manga Protagonist straight guy who's head over heels in love with her then it has a different kind of impact

a different energy

in conclusion, vague shrug

sometimes I guess cishets serve a valuable purpose if they're sufficiently valid

This isn't the MAIN reason I make a lot of my characters mostly straight?

But it's one of them

To Be Tom

I only barely remember Tom

there it is

Straight guys who are unabashedly in love with their trans girlfriends are good.

yeah... yeah. basically this is something I think about a lot.

one I honestly actually can't think of seeing ever in any context? is

the reverse of that

very straight girl very in love with trans boyfriend

This is a thing that comes up in yuri - you have some stories that are, like, set in an all-girls' school where everyone seems gay for everyone and there may as well be no men or boys on the planet, and you have others where the couple(s) are conscious of being in a minority and deal with hostility, comphet, and supportive straight friends

(Which doesn't precisely map to what you're talking about since you're describing situations where the whole setting is fictional, but...)

Straight girl/trans guy has less toxic masculinity to overcome, so while that is also definitely good, I think it hits the wish fulfillment buttons a little more softly.

It's something where ideally you'd want to see both it and the converse, but the converse is a little more immediately compelling

It's a thing in non-OC contexts as well yeah

for that example (and in all examples) both kinds of stories are absoutely 100% valid

one touches more compellingly on parts of the LGBT Experience(TM) that the other doesn't, but one of them is also just lighter and more fun in a way that a lot of more mainstream LGBT fiction isn't

I mean like....

coming from the T portion of LGBT,

I feel cis LGB people aren't inherently less transphobic at least

there IS that

so there's still a "oh cool they're not transphobic" from them too

there's an equivalent reaction to what you're describing for a trans woman in a relationship with a cis lesbian for example

yeah

it's almost like having a wide variety of different kinds of stories and relationships in stories about LGBT characters

is good

yes that