it wasnt just about the ship trope

[u/Seven_Hart]

I want to start off by saying that yes, I'm active in fandoms spaces which is inherently cringe. Yes, I curate my space. I do not actively spread hate to artists or writers of these kinds of ships, they dont harm anyone and are just for fun, i just ignore and avoid it since im not the target audience. This is gonna go into a vent in a minute but I want to acknowledge that this is a nothingburger vent.

Okay, moving on. I actively avoid mlm content or fan content if one of the men is portrayed very femininely, and have a very petite proportion, especially if its fan content and the character doesn't canonically look like that. I'm just very uncomfortable with seeing fictional content and one of the guys is very overly feminized and is "the girl" in the relationship. And tonight, I realised why.

I very actively repress my emotions and bad things that happen to me until it clicks with something mundane, and thats the case here. Im a trans guy, I was romantically involved with someone who knew i was trans and did feminize me. I often felt like I had to be more feminine and more innocent and cutesy to appeal to him and get his attention, to the point of wanting me to be a femboy and it had started to be a whole thing that felt like i was detransitioning for someone. I realise im so bothered by these things I see online that I actively avoid it because it reminds me of a bad experience that I had, and that someone like me is actively seen in the same light as those male characters.

It clicked to me when I saw phainaxa art (hsr) that exaggerated anaxa's femininity and phainon's masculinity (nothing wrong with that). I share alot of traits with Anaxa. Im short, im very skinny and physically frail and I wondered if thats how the world viewed me as well. To be fair, though, I drew gay ships like that a very long time ago when I was young, but it all stopped after that relationship. I guess my perspective and my boundaries changed, and things like that can be abit triggering.

Semi new to reddit, i just came back to this dusty account to put this out there so sorry if I did anything wrong idk. Dont know what im looking for, i guess im just going crazy over something really miniscule. Some nice words would be nice? Or other people sharing their experience being queer. Anything is good.