ahaha I decided to check out this Beleth's Toybox blog out of curiosity and stumbled upon this.
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> Make a character with broad shoulders, no breasts, large hands, and wearing a tuxedo (which does have a skirt but the character is only shown from the waist up most of the time) and then get salty about your soggy knees when people understandably assumed the character was male:
Honestly, I can sort of understand why people were confused at and disappointed at the revelation that Amdusias was, in fact, female.
I'm not going to describe her again, but, yeah, her design leads people to believe she's male. Isn't design an important thing to consider when creating characters, especially characters that are cartoony and also not humans? Doesn't that add to what the character is and does? Isn't it a relevant attribute that sends messages about the character to the audience?
If you're going to be misleading, for whatever reason, then accept that people will "feel scammed" when the truth comes out (especially if you're dealing with Tumblrites). In PK's world, though, it wasn't misleading at all, because typical male clothes are wore by females on a regular basis and nobody assumes anything gender-related, ever. It's just that easy, as it's been this way for centuries! What an absurd notion for people to separate clothes the same way they separate genders!
I do agree that women wear suits too (I wear them myself on important occasions), but, on a regular basis (and also in real life), suits are more frequently associated with men, period. Also, women have (usually) shorter, thinner frames than their male counterparts, their breasts often give them a curvy silhouette and most of the time, they look like... well, women. And not horses. So, yeah, it's easy to say "that character is a woman despite the fact her clothes are typical male clothing", but not so much when we're talking about giant bulky kemono equines.
I personally thought Amdusias was female from the start because a) I'm used to PK's SJWism, b) her thin face frame and hair led me to think so, and c) I'm familiarized with Bifauxnen characters and personally adore them, so that was a personal bias.
I mean, compare Amdusias with "apparently-male-but-actually-female" characters such as
Lady Oscar,
Haruka Tenoh or
Utena. They're all female characters who are supposed to be mistaken for males but still have something about their design that is feminine. Take a look at
Claudine, who was born female but identifies as a man. In
this picture, you can see Claudine alongside his brothers. I can't speak for everyone, but it is clear to me that Claudine's brothers are more masculine than him, and Claudine is intentionally designed less manly, as a means of representation, to tell him apart from ordinary cis men. The creator did it on purpose, giving Claudine feminine features, to lead you to interprete Claudine as a transman. And it works.
If you want to give your female character an outer "manly" appearance, but also want people to know they're female, the LEAST you can do (if you can't give them a voice or use another tool, such as animating them or something else) is give them typically female physical qualities, even subtle clues work. If you don't do that, well, don't be upset and scream MISOGYNY when people get confused and make dumb yaoi hands jokes. Many people (rightfully, I suppose) mistook
Integra Hellsing for a guy but the author gave no shits.
What made me make a "derp" face was, in fact, Orobas. Of course the cute, girly, delicate pony is going to be the one to have the dick in the couple, and not the titanic, bulky, masculine giraffe-horse. Progressive. No problem there, honestly, to each their own, but really, instead of giving it a normal dick that is compatible to its size, they just had to attach to it a hyper-realistic, giant horse cock.
Orobas is the culmination of bad My Little Pony fetish art.
Also, they had to give it deranged faces to try to pass it off as "comedy".
As for Marl, he clearly is the best of the trio in terms of creativity and his writing is much better than PK's (after all, he doesn't have a self-insert so he can't really go down the mary-sue hole the same way PK does). But it's been claimed in the past that he can be very scary and manipulative in private chats. I don't know, he isn't as easy to figure out as PK or Eevee. I think this also tells us something about him being the most mature.
I've heard about that as well. It also tells that he might be the truly (and only) "dangerous" one of the group, whilst the other two are just vexatious inoffensive loudmouths. I've seen that post where Pengo refers to Marl, but I also remember seeing other people claim Marl to be manipulative and a child lover (in the unfortunate sense). Then again, these posts were made by Tumblr-users who also claimed to be teenagers with anxiety and other problems, so taking them seriously is really up to you.
