Yay on writing the fic prompts (and I loved the Scott meets Matt one), but from this one and the last time I sent you a Klaus/Zan prompt, it...

There’s more than a little casual-brutality-against-women scattered throughout the pages of Girl Genius. Even with the fact that ladies are capable of fighting back I found it… disturbing.

So I flipped the tables a little too heavily there. I wanted Klaus to go from Lord-in-his-own-right to dirt-beneath-the-sandals and figure how he’d manage to turn this to his advantage in the fulness of time. That, and highlight the turning point where Klaus changes from Being Along For The Ride to getting some agency of his own.

Writing it made me slightly uncomfortable, too. In recognising the unholy glee I had in turning those tables on the brutal edge, I had to face why I wanted a man in general and Klaus in particular punished retroactively. Yes, I am mad at Klaus for being horrible to Agatha. I’m also mad at the whole darn world for perpetuating male privilege and rigid gender roles. And I’m mad at the whole damn world for having that culture exist for so long.

All humans, no matter their skin colour or plumbing, are capable of wonderful things. All humans can work together as teams. The fact that we allow plumbing and skin colour to factor into whether we actually do this is… abhorrent to me.

And a lot of it came out in that fic. When the casual abuse, racism and status structure is upturned on a white man (the “natural” peak of our society as it stands) we feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and unwell. I’m sure that if I was worthy of Neckbeard notice, I’d be doxxed in no short order and threatened for that story.

But when it happens to a woman, or a person of colour? Business as usual. Move along, nothing more to see here.

And it’s very sickening to me that I have to condense all the evil in the world, and make it happen to a white man, in order to prompt a discussion on those exact evils.

Or I could be pissed off because Cashmas makes me cross. I don’t always know what’s going on inside my head. But I think this one’s a compound metaphorical fracture.

So thanks for giving me a story prompt so I could get it out of my head and not, say, aim it at my family. I’ll try to keep my Dark Side on a shorter leash in future.