I feel like anyone writing a hot take about characters being not feminine enough should legally be required to flip through a photo album of butch women to establish a baseline
“Having Peach wear pants is anti-feminist because it implies strong women have to be masculine”
Do you hear yourself? Why is your standard for gender presentation based on Dickensian England?
This post has breached containment and reached people who don’t read before posting, so let me clarify:
This isn’t even a “it’s fine for women to be masculine” post. I personally DO think that more characters should be butch, but that’s not what this post is about.
It’s that these characters ARE feminine. Peach wearing a pink jumpsuit with matching earrings and a face full of makeup IS feminine. Especially feminine, even. It’s not even androgyny, much less masculinity. I’ve somehow stumbled into an alternate universe where gender nonconformity is the exact same presentation in two different outfits. I canNOT believe that you people interact with gay or trans people in real life
I just want to point out that this was like 6 weeks into the lockdown in 2020 and we were only just starting to understand how much this was going to mentally break us all
it was a book from 2005 that never really took off until they put it in the Macy’s parade for some reason. the title being coercively named “A Christmas Tradition” seemingly made a bunch of parents panic and think they were withholding some beloved christmas tradition from their children, leading to the book and subsequent elf doll to receive its first ever surge of popularity. at that point it just started spreading through cartoon adaptations (creating the expectancy of this product from children to uphold Christmas Lore) and online memes showing the elf in silly locations. anyone who was a child from 2012-2014 will tell you that it literally appeared out of thin air one year.
a truly unique American christmas tradition fueled entirely by marketing and parents’ need to one-up other parents by proving how much more fun they are with their kids
as someone else in the notes also pointed out, the emphasis on this tradition is that the elf is “always watching you” and reporting everything you do to santa clause, but you aren’t allowed to interfere with the elf’s surveillance or touch him or else he loses his christmas magic, and you literally just murdered an innocent elf.
coincidentally the year Elf on The Shelf gained popularity was also the year Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents proving that the U.S. government has been surveilling everyone using invasive techniques regardless of criminality
