What about stuff like Sailor Moon, where Usagi is described by tons of characters as being chubby and needing to watch her weight and what she eats, but is drawn as being just as rail-thin as every other female character? (Which probably gave a lot of little kids complexes.)
Stuff like that, yeah. I went back and looked at the picture I was referring to and I have to take back what I said, I was remembering the depiction as being bigger than it was, but the picture still doesn't look a lot like the character in question to me. Maybe I was just mentally making it look even less so.
It's also fun when people take a character who's canonically a member of a marginalized group and... headcanon them as a different marginalized group instead, with no acknowledgement of the canon one, leading to the uncomfortable implication that either it wasn't exciting/Oppressed Enough to count or they didn't even notice. (And the sister trope where someone headcanons a character as X for representation purposes, with no indication they even noticed the canonically X character from the same canon.) I remember once seeing someone complain about an Ace Attorney mental hospital AU (often a warning sign in and of itself) in which Edgeworth was there to be treated for... schizophrenia. In spite of the fact that he already has a (completely different) mental illness in canon. Because apparently PTSD wasn't interesting enough for a fic about mental illness?
Unfortunately, erasing Edgeworth's PTSD is a terribly common trope. I get what you're saying, @ChelG - I up till recently followed someone who drew the RWBY characters so... far-fetched marginalized that it just looked like OC's cosplaying the RWBY characters. It was... bad.
Which sucks, because it's honestly handled really well in canon. It's not often you see fiction that has a big plot point about discovering the truth of a traumatic thing in someone's past and giving them closure, and then years later they've still got major triggers and phobias that affect their life and nobody gives them grief or acts like they're weak for it.
Permanency can always be dispelled. You'd need Polymorph Any Object for a permanent transition, which is fairly high level. (Also, speaking of resurrection spells, one of those is Reincarnation, which brings the character back in a new, different body, which... maybe could be used.) The problem with this whole business is that in D&D, spells and magic items are really expensive, and the economy actively makes no sense, so all of this stuff would be out of reach for any but a successful adventurer. Except for a spell in the Forgotten Realms, granted to priests of a certain god (not sure which...), which performs the function of causing the subject to assume 'the true form of their soul'. This can be used to reverse someone else transforming them, but it also explicitly has the ability to change gender, race, various physical characteristics, etc to match the character's 'inner self'. Magic pregnancy is not, I believe, included in any canon sourcebook because D&D is not GURPS, and only includes spells that are likely to be useful in combat. It may or may not be in the scope of D&D magic, because D&D magic doesn't really have a 'scope', so much as power levels, and those are dubious. One of the hard-ish rules is 'no messing with the inside of other creatures' (intended to prevent shenanigans like, say, Create Water in someone's lungs), so... maybe. (Of course, there are... a lot of things re:magic pregnancy in BoEF...)
Reincarnation is randomized, though. You're as likely to come back as a badger as the species you were before.
This is probably just me, but tying into the "giving new marginalisation" gripe; characters with spiky or slicked-down straight hair being drawn with un-straightened African hair just won't go into my brain as looking like that person. Dave and Dirk get this a lot. I can easily see them as black but their hair is just a pickiness of mine. Tight curls don't form that kind of point.
It's not just you--it bugs me a bit too. Like, I get that Homestuck has super abstracted designs, but at least the hairstyles are like...a thing. Though I will say that it'd absolutely make sense for the Striders to carefully style their hair every day, so them naturally having curly hair COULD work in theory? (Related gripe: People drawing Aradia with super straight hair. HER FLOOF IS IMPORTANT OKAY.)
Agreed wholeheartedly. Edgeworth's PTSD feels INCREDIBLY real in canon, and it's sad to see people fucking that up. :(
I've seen a fair number of characters with wavy or curly hair get their hair turned dead straight in fanart, yeah. or official art no I'm not bitter about the RH remake portrait art being terrible whatever gave you that impression
Also, this is SUPER dumb and petty, and I actually know of several really good fics that use this headcanon, but...for some reason it seems to be almost fanon that human!Pearl would come from a wealthy family, but given Pearls' roles on Homeworld in canon, I can't actually see human!Pearl as having come from the lap of luxury? Like, in Pearl, Interrupted I have her coming from a (shitty, but for unrelated reasons) lower-middle-class family, and in my college AU that I need to work on she grew up super poor and was only able to pay for college because she got a bunch of academic scholarships. And I know that's just me, but somehow I feel like those fit better than her being rich?
Human!Pearl being from a poor or disadvantaged household makes a ton of sense, actually. Think about it: She and other pearls are nothing but servants to the diamonds, a toy for the diamonds and other advantaged gems to dress themselves up with to look far more important and valuable than they really are. They are absolutely part of the common rabble trying to work their way higher in a society that hates them by virtue of existing.
Gods help me, the not making senseness of making her rich makes me want to have a slave AU. no aon bad aon
