I read a lot in the last two weeks, no don’t worry it’s not going to be another essay. Unfortunately I’m not sure when the frenzy started exactly as the first book I tore through was Sundered Moon and I started reading the first page about 4 times in the first week of January, but almost always at about 3 am and promptly passed out before even completing the first paragraph. (I did eventually start reading it at a reasonable hour, don’t worry)
Two weeks ago I put out a movie review that was overtly negative, and then had an entire week waffling about wether posting a pained tirade about a 25 year old movie was wrong, before realizing that I was deprioritizing my own experiences. Wrote a whole thing about that too if you’d like to read it. I came away from the experience refreshed, reinvigorated to interact with, for lack of a better word in the moment, good media. Media that is saying something, even if that something is as simple as monarchs are bad and dragons are cool.
That’s not all there is to Vyria Durav’s The Dragon and Her Princess, though those elements are certainly present. It’s a short enough story that I do fear my overly verbose style will drive me to spoil it, so let me attempt brevity.
It’s adorable. Just fucking precious. A cute trans girl egg and cis dragon girl romance that beautifully reflects the egg experience, with an element of wish fulfillment for every trans girl who just wanted to suddenly feel at home in her own body.
I want to recount my own blissful joy as a character realized what she wanted as her name, especially as I feel uncomfortable using her dead name now, and her real one is, well, not a spoiler. You just deserve to experience it for yourself. I want to tell you how the sex scene mirrors my own experiences around bottom dysphoria and also drives the character development. I want to compare every interaction our heroine has with her father to my own, but I really just can’t do that to you, dear reader.
I don’t know if I can truly recommend The Dragon and Her Princess to a cis audience, because I truly don’t know if they have the context. I was recently asked my opinion on a boy one of my partners is seeing, and as a lesbian, I just couldn’t answer her. I just don’t see what straight girls see in men, I’m not saying it’s not there, I just can’t see whatever it is because, well, I don’t like guys that way. The few I do find attractive I do because of their minds, the character they’ve shown over the years.
So I don’t really know how a cis audience will interpret the character’s struggles without the context of having experienced similar themselves. I actually fear that some would read the “hen” comment, a quite sweet moment, as humiliating or belittling. But suppose I assume good faith from a cis reader, yeah, you should love this too.
Before I leave you, hopefully to go get a great book, I want to make one last point/note and use the book to do it.
I love the depictions of the two ex-girlfriends. Something about cis women recognizing that the main character was a trans woman, cracked egg or not, fills me with hope. There’s an idea called the Egg Prime Directive in many trans circles, and it needs to be purged with fire. It holds that one should never tell someone else that they might be an egg, no matter how much their experiences sound like a trans person’s before coming out. You have to let them get their themselves.
It’s bullshit, it only makes sense if you treat telling a cis person they might be trans as an insult. And, yes, I welcome cis women telling eggs that they might be eggs, or getting a dragon to kidnap them to safety so the revolution can also depose the monarchy and let her transition in this case. Because while some are collaborators or actively against us, cis lesbians are, just as every trans woman is, my, and our sisters.
Go read The Dragon and Her Princess, I mean it, it’s great! You can get it on itch.io because there’s no physical edition, so get the DRM free version that isn’t a shitty amazon license rental that can be revoked at any time AND gives most of the money to the author damn it!
https://vyriadurav.itch.io/the-dragon-and-her-princess
Added like 2 hours later but I feel that context is important! The epilogue setting up a lesbian polyam quartet is mean, but only because it’s an epilogue, gimme more!
