(Let's be real this story already exists and it's buried in a channer thread)

Yeah, people often don't like their narratives having the see-sawiness of real life. Except in the romance genre of course, there it's all the more crucial!

And Beth's story is (partially) that story of struggle and self-fashioning. We have had one major shift, but there's more to come. In that light (and in regards to the story as a whole), I was glad to read your response as finding that believable

That being that transitioning is effectively like flicking a switch - one moment you're one thing, and the next something else. Sometimes it's supposedly pronouns. Sometimes 'the surgery'. All of it obfuscating that it's an evolving process with starts, stops, and, at times, retreats

We can litigate forever on whether being trans and/or transitioning is a 'choice'; people's thoughts on it differ, and you already touch upon some of that in your own reaction to the chapter. But I do think the book shows the falsehood of something that a lot of cis people tend to assume

Steph coming out as a woman? Sure, but she was 'trans all along' or whatever, and her story was more so about self-acceptance than self-change. Not so with Beth though; here we have our first ostensible-former-cis-guy-becoming-trans-girl, and that's something else entirely... right?

I'll be honest and say that I was really curious to see your response to this chapter, because this is where the central conceit of the story becomes real, in a fashion. I was wondering if you'd find it believable

The gap between what we want to be and what we are forced to be is the core of gender politics and a lot of queer people don't want to think about the latter bit.

"Oh, and it started as an eroge, but has since become simultaneously less sexual and more thirsty?"

Finally all of the inner senshi are complete!
It will be a while before starting the outers

*This being bad not because the mass incidence of violence, sexual and otherwise, was somehow justified or a myth, but because the same people will for some unfathomable reason never mention the same things happening wherever the Nazis went, let alone all their other atrocities

Holy necropost (apologies, got here via the live-reading thread), but uuuuh no I think it's worse! I think she's doing a 'Soviet hordes SAing their way across poor defeated Nazi Germany'* analogy (the focus is more so on the 'sexual exploitation' than the 'hedonistic excesses')...