I have this idea about the reason Taako is The Way He Is because I was the kind of trans child that was very worried about Gender Rules. For some reason I allowed myself to be a certain level of tomboy but there was a line I wouldn’t cross, that I looked at with actual fear thinking “but I can’t do that it’s a boy thing” and I was supposed to be a girl.
So I’ve got this image of young Lup (maybe as the elf equivalent of a preteen) who was brash and confident and lit things on fire for fun most of the time, but would sometimes freeze up because she wanted but couldn’t, and Taako would ask what was wrong and she wasn’t quite able to explain but she could point at a woman on the street and say “I want to wear that” and Taako would say “okay so wear that” and she would say “no, I can’t.”
But Taako comes back the next day in the poofiest dress he could find, and he looks like an idiot because it doesn’t fit right at all and he doesn’t know how to accessorize (frankly, he still doesn’t know how to accessorize) but he keeps wearing it, won’t wear anything else until Lup finally works up the courage to get some skirts and dresses of her own, since she at least can’t look dumber than he does.
And then there’s two of them, and of course they look completely adrogynous because they’re elf children, and they’re wearing second hand ballgowns and very large hats and four scarves at once and tattered tuxedo jackets with the sleeves rolled up, and if you have a problem with one of them you have a problem with both of them, and one of them could burn your eyebrows off and the other thought he could turn you into a frog. People tended not to argue because the side effects of the second one were completely unknown.
Anyway, I’m thinking about how Lup feels when she finds out he’s still doing that, half a lifetime after forgetting she ever existed.
(via feywildwest)
