#“femme nb” is in the post title; i continue to use he/him pronouns throughout & most of the body is about why i think hed reject masculinit

[untitledgoosegay]

trans femme/nb dedue

is a headcanon i hold close to my heart

he is at minimum strongly gender-nonconforming -- despite the protective shell (literal; it's made of steel plate and chain) he wears, his key interests are cooking, gardening, and sewing. this is not someone who aspires to be the big manly protector. moreover, he never talks about his relationship with his dad; if his bio page didn't mention that he was a blacksmith we would know nothing about the man. dedue only ever talks about his relationships with his mother and sister, and how that shaped his interests and the way he prefers to connect with people even now -- especially now that it serves as a way to preserve their memories. his mother taught him to cook.

in his ideal life, Dedue gets to stay home and make sure the people he loves can come home to good food and warm clothes and beautiful things ... but that life was severed at the root, right at the time where gender and sexuality start becoming increasingly unavoidable; there will always be the question of who Dedue would have been in that other, peaceful world, and it will never be answered

headcanon -- at fourteen Dedue was just starting to run into the mounting pressure to join his father as a blacksmith, and, correspondingly, running into his instinctive reluctance/resistance to do so. at the time Dedue didn't yet understand why, and couldn't verbalize what was wrong, and his dad is -- was -- even quieter by nature than Dedue, so it remained this unspoken but increasing tension. sooner or later it would have had to break, and they might have had a fight about it or it might have resolved more quietly; Dedue knows -- he thinks he's certain -- that his dad loved him, and that ultimately that would have mattered more than having A Son™ ...

... but he'll never get to know.

maybe in that other world he would have grown into a woman. maybe, with a version of masculinity he didn't find abhorrent, he could still have been a man. maybe he would have settled between, or two the side, or never been asked to define himself in that way at all.

but in the world-that-is, the world of the Tragedy, where he's the last surviving Molinaro and right hand to the crown prince of Faerghus, he's not exactly given time or space to think about his gender. in the aftermath, embedded in the heart of Faerghan power, still very much a grieving, terrified child, his preferred presentation is "whatever's safest," and he's trying his hardest not to have an identity at all. he's submerged in Faerghan masculinity -- in the standards of Faerghan masculinity applied to its nobles -- which is inextricable from Knighthood™ and which prizes violence, and that is absolutely not helping. it's hard to make any concrete statements about the version of masculinity Dedue was raised with, but I think it's safe to say it was very different. and Faerghan manhood is absolutely not something Dedue aspires to.

and that state of affairs holds until the timeskip, where he gets five years to finally reconnect with other Duscur people, other survivors, out of Dimitri's shadow and away from the constant crushing threat of Fódlan's nobility -- five years to reconstruct a sense of safety and a sense of self; to live as part of a community, in (relative) peace; to start thinking about who he wants to be, not just what.

& then ... ?

i think, if you asked him, and if he thought you were worth an honest answer, Dedue would say that he's not sure whether or not he's a man, but he did (does) want to be a wife.

in the world-that-is, rejecting manhood & claiming femininity is a private rejection of the world that assumes of him -- & thereby demands -- masculinity-as-violence, and stoicism, and sacrifice. it puts space between him and the outward-facing self he's constructed; it frees more space for the heart he keeps secret, separate and protected. the part of himself that is safe, and untouchable, and unassailably his own. it's a claim to the softness, warmth, and fragility that Faerghus denies not just him but everyone around him, that it refuses to acknowledge is necessary or absent. it asserts that he is not expendable; his duty is not to inflict and endure violence; he can be beautiful, and precious, and worthy and deserving of protection

i don't think he'd ever be 'out' to more than a handful of people -- his partner(s), his absolute closest friends. Maybe more amongst the people who saved him, but not many. Not so much out of fear or repression -- Dedue is just a private person by nature, which is unfortunate, given that he's found himself in an extremely public position. He prides himself on being a cipher to strangers (check his B-support with Sylvain); he prefers to keep very tight control over who knows anything personal about him, especially given how much of his life is in the public eye. He sure as hell does not want a whole continent's worth of people feeling entitled to an explanation of his gender which most of them won't get anyway. Knowing things about Dedue is a privilege and it is not one he grants lightly.

To whatever extent she's a woman -- i don't think she could define it herself; self-knowledge is not one of Dedue's strong suits -- it's reserved for the few people she feels truly safe with

#fe3h #fire emblem three houses #dedue molinaro #fe3h dedue #bird original #dedue tag #this post got a lot longer than i thought it was going to #this is my femme dedue manifesto #edit: i had this under a readmore at first but since people evidently read the first paragraph and thought i said #''he like cook therefore he woman'' #you get the whole thing up front. #“femme nb” is in the post title; i continue to use he/him pronouns throughout & most of the body is about why i think hed reject masculinit #given that he was violently & forcibly subjected to a standard of masculinity that treated him as an expendable vessel of violence #at a critical stage of development