Wait, I Don't Know If This Is An Appropriate Ask But You Said Sp Was Inspired By Your Fear Of Men, Why

Wait, I don't know if this is an appropriate ask but you said sp was inspired by your fear of men, why choose a super hot character like Leon? 🤔

oooo this is a good question actually

so obvi i love leon. i love him dearly. and i think that most of us can agree canon leon tends to do his best to make choices based on his morals but still within the confines of being forced to do his job, and those two things don't always align.

throughout the course of my life i feel like i've struggled a lot with realizing that men who i trusted and thought were "the good ones" actually thought and acted a lot differently when they weren't in front of me or other women. i've been let down by a lot of men i really believed to be good, and applying that concept to leon feels like an accurate way for me to express that

i think in fandom, women/feminine people tend to attach themselves to fictional men because it gives us the power to imagine them in our image, to imagine them as the good ones who would never do something like that, to imagine them as people who understand the female experience and perspective

but my personal experience (NOTE: personal, not universal) is that 99.999% of men harbor some degree of rot in them without even realizing it, and that rot has them wired from a young age to think and feel and act in certain ways that seem moral/normal/justified to them despite not being those things at all.

and sometimes that's seemingly small things like assuming women can't open jars, but sometimes it's massive things like men assuming they have a right to women's bodies based on whatever their bullshit metric is, be it religious, political, ideological, or in sp!leon's case, for the purpose of 'protection.'

for me, sp!leon is a manifestation of the way men tend to insist they're doing the right thing-- often to make themselves sleep better at night-- while continuing to twist the knife and blatantly misunderstand the root of the issue with their behavior.

thank you for coming to my ted talk :3