The Words You Can't Spell

[maladaptive]

Anybody have the words they can't spell?

Maybe you know how it's spelled, you just can't type it out.

I'm finally getting around to writing up a retelling of "Prince Lindworm" I mentioned back in December, where I wondered how you get two sons from eating a red rose that'll give you a son and a white rose that'll give you a daughter. Sure, I can

Comments

[swan_tower]

I'm finally getting around to writing up a retelling of "Prince Lindworm" I mentioned back in December, where I wondered how you get two sons from eating a red rose that'll give you a son and a white rose that'll give you a daughter.

It says something about how certain topics have become a totally mundane part of my life that I read that and thought "one of them is trans, obviously."

[maladaptive]

OBVIOUSLY.

Though I went the "she pretends to be male to rule because fuck primogeniture I'm a dragon" route, the trans one is also one I really want to see now....

I appreciate that I can share this bad fairy tale math online because I mentioned it to my family and they looked at me like I was nuts.

[swan_tower]

Yours works, too!

I suspect I thought of the trans thing partly because one of the short stories I haven't written yet is a retelling of Shikhandi's part of the Mahabharata. In some versions of that story, the king gets told "a prince is about to be born to you!" and then when a girl-baby pops out, he shrugs and says, okay, I guess I'll work with what I've got.

(Shikhandi was a woman in a past life and is female-bodied but raised male now and then marries a woman who flips out because her husband is lacking in some relevant equipment so Shikhandi swaps sexes with a yaksha in the forest and really, I'm not sure it's possible to cram more gender fuckery into that story, unless you have male-bodied Shikhandi cross-dressing as a woman for some reason later on.)

[maladaptive]

I might have to steal that, actually. I was waffling on genderfluid but trans works too! We'll see what the lindwurm says when I get there.

...And that Shikhandi story sounds amazing. I look forward to seeing your take on it because dang. Though it reminds me a little bit of a European fairy tale about a princess who goes to save her worthless brothers and is turned into a boy during her quest?

[rachelkachel]

I have problems with "receive". It just looks wrong to me. I have to recite the i before e rule pretty much every time I write it and even then I'm sometimes not convinced.