Your questions, answered! (Mostly)

Thank you everyone, for participating in our Q&A! We've done our best to answer your questions below.

Antinoe

Q1: Is the story happenning in a full on alternate universe or is it a uchrony? If the latter, what was the inflection point?

A1: Definitely one of those!

Q2: Is there a list of forbidden RCBG strats considered cheating/unethical? I'm assuming implants and lipofilling are in there, but what about bootleg gene therapy? Are CRISPR strats forbidden? What about other things one might consider very dangerous, like weight cycling?

A1: Surgically increasing breast size is generally off the table, but the rules beyond that are generally a lot more concerned with closing loopholes in the gender identity area.

Emma, Maybe

Q: Have you hit any major points of disagreement/diverging intentions as cowriters yet? Or is the writing process just you both going sickos yes back and forth to each other?

A: It’s pretty much all sickos-yes, but on a few occasions we’ve had to take a step back and synchronize our intentions a bit due to slightly divergent interpretations of how to execute the thing we agreed on already. The big example here is Nichole’s characterization, where some of the nuances of how she approaches the competition needed to be adjusted to make her more actively involved, as opposed to someone who acts like she’s being fooooooooorced to do it.

MapleFlakes

Q: I have found it engaging to try and keep track of which of the girls are aware of their own gender and which are aware of their crush's/partner's gender; it's become shockingly difficult to keep up. Is there any chance for a visual or something of the sort to remind us who knows who is what? I'm still unsure if Laura genuinely thinks she got bottom surgery purely for the optimization 😭

A: We’ll level with you. The characters themselves don’t really know what they know for sure. If you ask them the answers will depend on what they think is the correct answer, and if they’re narrating at you, they don’t really know if they’re lying to themselves. We forget what they know sometimes, which is why for instance Katherine is confused about Nichole’s gender at times.

HeyItsJess

Q: In what aspects do the characters have traits of the authors and how much do they don't? (Like in an exaggerated form of someone for example). Reading Beth (fictional)'s bsky, she says that Kathy has taken some mannerisms from her.

A: Well, Kyle’s storyline deals a lot with the gendered expectations of being the eldest son in a Indian household, which is a deeply personal struggle for Beth, while Talia resonates with Kathy’s unique challenge of being a white woman who is too into anime.

Besides those obvious examples, however, it tends to depend—we’re both drawing from our own experiences in social groups, activist spaces, friends and exes and relationship drama that we’ve gained enough distance from to laugh about, or at least write about in a way that can make a poignant piece of art instead of meaningless, infuriating, unjust trauma.

We can also confirm that Beth talks like Katherine in real life. Eyewitnesses have noticed and said “wow, this is obnoxious.”

Kerosene

Q: How much inspiration would you say you draw from real life and actual people for your writing? Also if I may, what are your favorite pieces of trans fiction?

A: So we definitely draw on a lot of tendencies in trans culture, but try to approach it less as “Jeff is this one specific person we know” and more like “here are several tendencies we’ve observed, let’s examine the underlying issues and how they can turn harmful for both the person dealing with them, and in their outward behavior causing harm.”

In terms of the structuring of the RCBG competition and its culture, we’re also taking inspiration from a lot of online spaces that are just, horrendously transphobic. The setup of the competition naturally lends itself to a comedic mirror universe of genuine transphobia by showing a bunch of obvious trans women loudly declaring themselves as men.

As for our favorite pieces of trans fiction:
Beth: Sisters of Dorley
Talia: Hades Calculus

Roscoe

Q: Is Kathy plural?

A: Katherine is of two minds about this. The subject of whether she is plural or not is one that she has hotly debated with herself, and no consensus has been reached as of right now.

Arda McDiarmid

Q: What led the choice to separate aspects of the story's setting from real life? For example, the invention of 'Lokesætt' (which I did try to look up after naively assuming it was a real thing, for like, half an hour, you got me good) or the recent repositioning of IKEA from a real Swedish business to a fictional quasi-American one?

A: We prefer to reference real-life brands, countries, and concepts as little as possible while still being recognizable and traceable to real-life analogues. This lets us have a degree of fun with commentary and the absurd twists and spins our characters put on serious topics without necessarily misrepresenting or over-emphasizing any particular issue, and allows us a degree of freedom in what we want to write. Fiction should never be constrained by the real world, after all, especially when you want to say something about the real world.

Mattilda Castillo

Q: What are character's majors?

A: This is something we’ve noted down in our big lore document and are going to get around to revealing as it comes up naturally in the story.