Listen I'm going to make it exceedingly clear that above all else I blame the 4chan dudebros who have turned him into a weird homophobic/transphobic meme forcing us to have the gender discussion and be loud about reminding people that men and male-aligned people can wear whatever they want for reasons that have nothing to do with sex or "deception" and that the idea of doing things as part of both the men's group AND the women's group is a thing that people can want to do for reasons that are NOT just some otaku shitpost joke -

HOWEVER because it is Pride Month and we are critiquing the fuck out of performativity and pinkwashing and lack of intersectionality we're gonna talk about this for a second here.

Sieg is disabled. Like, there's no way around this. When he escapes the basement he has birth defects that amount to a terminal illness. Even after his magical heart transplant this still affects him in a way that actually pretty well parallels the risks involved with a mundane organ transplant - he uses up all his Command Spells, his heart rejects and he dies. This has painful effects on him still, especially toward the end.

In other words, we have on our hands a protagonist with a life-threatening chronic illness that definitely has a major fantasy spin but is still portrayed in a pretty believable, grounded way.

And how did he get here?

By running into a definitely neurodivergent guy who saw someone who needed help and, unlike a lot of people in the world including MANY ACTUAL FUCKING DOCTORS IN THAT WORLD AND OUR OWN, heard "this guy is only going to live about 3 years at most" and said "oh, shit, then we REALLY need to get him somewhere safe because he doesn't deserve to spend any more of that time laying around suffering than he absolutely has to" rather than the far more common "what a ~tragedy~, what's the ~point~ in breaking out at all if that's ~all~ he's going to get?"

And through all their time together, what is the one core thing that Astolfo constantly pushes?

Live.

You deserve to live.

You're not obligated to sacrifice yourself.

You have the right to live.

You have the right to be happy.

You have the right to want to be happy.

You should live.

I want you to live.

You know. Things most disabled people - especially chronically ill people - are constantly hearing the exact opposite of, especially as of right now in 2021.

Like, it's great to acknowledge an openly, visibly queer character - but let's not forget that his main character arc was basically him screaming "DISABLED RIGHTS" over and over and over again until he was blue in the face.

His gender presentation is basically window dressing; his neurodivergence and belief that life is worth living no matter what are CENTRAL to his character.

The fact that it was a visibly queer character who did this should only add to the value of it, not serve as a reason to sweep it under the rug.

Hell, it was what made Siegfried give his heart up, he basically told him, "I'm a Paladin of Charlemagne & that means saving anyone who needs me, no matter how long they have to live." 3 years, 30 years, 300 years who cares?

Someone needed help & he helped because it was the right thing to do, & that Siegfried had no right to call himself a hero if he can't save one person who needed his help. He says all this shit to someone who could easily kill him, but Siegfried couldn't because he knew how right Astolfo was & that this sick & dying boy deserved to live just as much as anyone else & gave him his heart in an act of atonement.

Astolfo was always Sieg's biggest supporter. He was always by his side no matter how sick or injured Sieg got. Astolfo is the most true hero of Apocrypha because he knows that all life has value worth preserving, even that which some or many would consider worth objectively less.

I was gonna just quietly add this edit I made but I’ve gotta appreciate the addition too

“I don’t know if I will ever see peace in my lifetime. I am so scared for the future and so angry at the present. I weep for humanity- 2 TONS? OF SQUID?”

This is why I get all my news from Tumblr, The Daily Show, and John Oliver.

Don’t. I have been spreading misinformation. It was actually 20 tons of squid. Not 2 tons. 40,000 pounds of squid. Astronomical unfathomable amount of squid.

Reminds me of last year when a semi crashed into a creek in Oregon and spilled out 100k live salmon

that rocks. seafood disaster GOOD ending

I don't have proof but the salmon planned it

They were adolescent captive-bred native chinook salmon on their way to be released in stocked fishing areas (so fishermen can fish to their heart’s delight without hurting the native population) so they did a prison break when they were already on their way to freedom. The Department of Fish and Wildlife employee who was driving was okay. It is hilarious that the salmon were like “Mmm. Actually, I think this is our stop. This looks like a nice place to live. We’re getting off here.”

Truth. Experts can be wrong but if they are mostly right or we wouldn't have modern medicine or satellites or computer chips.

Years back, Jay Smooth called this "arrogance in ignorance," something that has stuck with me. I've always thought of it as a particularly American mindset--not just being proud of not understanding a topic, but believing that one's ignorance somehow gives one a leg up on experts. Please, y'all. If you don't know something, then you don't know!

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” —Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, 21 January 1980

Also, I had no clue Rhode Island loved calamari like that. The most surprising part was the Rhode Islanders being like ‘Yeah, that tracks.’ ‘Of course this happened in Rhode Island.’ ‘Maybe a week’s worth of squid during tourism season.’ smallest state in the U.S. and 40,000 pounds of squid is an appropriate amount of squid. If a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of squid crashed in North Carolina, that would be a completely baffling amount of squid. Shrimp or catfish would be a tragedy but expected, squid would be crazyyyyy.

i can unfortunately confirm that some people in real life will panic and do the same thing and it doesn’t tend to go as well as in the movies

On the one hand I'm sure everyone else is very heavily emphasizing that magneto is Theee big bad of all time and so on and so forth the whole time the new ones are training but also. Like. Imagine you're the new new new mutants or whatever and somebody manages to actually knock magneto over and he stays on the ground for a second and you're kind of looking at each other like. Guys isn't he *really* old what if we just killed magneto & then the entire city starts shaking while he's getting back on his feet & you're like ohhh he's just REALLY ANGRY now. Ok :) oh that's bad :/ oh shit. Uh oh

[ID: tags from @transguyhawkeye that read, "#having a panic attack over whether you just broke magnetos hip meanwhile he just separated wolverine into recycling and organics for the #third time this week" /end ID]