This has been rattling around in my brain for like a month on and off, and I’ve got to get it out and talk with somebody about it. Pardon the infodump interruption!

CW: transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia, mentions of sexual violence and also spoilers for A Sour Peach

So I know somebody who is really waist-deep into ao3 original works, which is super cool. I was raised on traditionally published novels and other such wretched things, so when I wanted to have queer rep in my books, I went to Goodreads instead. That’s all well and fine, but a publisher getting in the way means that cool and weird stuff like Darkfalli’s Wellness Check is unlikely to ever see publication, if someone were to try. All publishers being too cowardly to stamp their name upon the BDSM alien-polycule puppygirl hypno fic, of course.

I never really expect much crossover in theme between these two worlds, mostly because a lot of the stuff that the tradpub novels cover is depressing and sad and sucks. I was surprised when this woman I know recommended me A Sour Peach by Gentle_Breeze, though, because in a way it hits many of the same beats.

The concept itself is pretty simple; small sad femme girl meets tall stronk butch lady at college, and they will kiss. Butch lady (Ash) even saves small sad femme (Sara) from falling over at one point, so that’s fun. There’s also a neat cast of queer n trans secondary characters; I was fond of Sun, myself. The catch is that Sara is awful and I hate her!

Sara is a deeply self-hating, depressed little bitch. Her reaction to meeting Ash is as follows:

The familiar, nasty feeling of jealousy crept over Sara. She resented women who looked like Ash, just a bit. They could look however they wanted and still hold onto their womanhood at the end of the day. No one could strip it away as easily as they could hers.

Which, wow gee, sure can’t say I’ve ever felt that one before, nuh-uh! Not digging up old ugly feelings at all! For all the world, Sara resembles a typical /mtfg/ poster, all brainworms and transmisogynistic (as well as plain misogynistic) internal monologues and such. I’ve never really seen… anything, ever, touch on this? Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rummfitt might mention 4channel dot org, sure, but no book or fic I’ve ever read meaningfully examines what it’s like to be the “self-hating dork” at the end of the pipeline, much less what it’s like to work through it. I was pretty well fascinated by this.

The end result is that Sara is somewhere between “such a sad depressed bitch I want to give her headpats” and “such a bitter insufferable bitch I want to yell at her”. As much as she’s relatable and I feel bad for her while she’s griping about her forehead, or desiring to shed her “old life” wholly and begin anew, she quickly becomes someone I want to punch, really fast. Like, after she and Ash meet in the dorms, Ash introduces Sara to a bunch of her friends, and Sara makes a fittingly sheltered, decent observation about visibly-nonbinary Sun:

Sara didn’t think people who looked like Sun existed outside of the internet. She wondered how much confidence Sun had to have to walk around like that and not care.

But immediately after that, her narration drives off a cliff into bullshit when she meets Emily:

Emily was trans. She had broader shoulders and a jaw that was unfortunately pretty square. A smattering of freckles called attention away from the more masculine parts of her face though,

Like gee, get fucked, Sara! Read a fucking book and get better! I think the issue is that she’s too often seen turning the internalised transphobia outward. She’s like if Katrina Nguyen (Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki) was a total fucking bitch and hated everyone. She’s clearly not inherently an asshole, and I can feel bad for her when she’s beating herself up about queer things, but she’s frustrating to watch and her internal monologue is atrocious.

I at least like Ash a lot, which is cool. She is an infinitely appealing butch dyke: her carefree attitude, matter of fact discussions of her own life and wry sense of humour are great on top of all the butch-ness. She has that cool-confident thing going on. There’s kind of a question-mark hung over her cisness, or lack thereof, early on when Sara wonders immediately if Ash is trans too, but it’s kind of weird. There are many bits that imply that Ash is indeed cis, (like Sara considering if Ash could really win a fight against a man, don’t worry I’ll get to it) but she is kind of trans-coded, honestly. I mean, her friends are all cool queers, mainly trans, but they don’t even joke about her being the token cis one, ever? Plus she is strong and tall and broad shoulders blablabla, she is screaming out to be the extremely-rarely-seen trans butch. My headcanon.

Her dynamic with Sara, of being an evil lesbian temptress fixing to woo the good little het trans girl to the dark side can be summarised easily:

spoiler

Suddenly, Ash pulled Sara forward. Sara yelped. Her leg swung over Ash’s and landed on the other side of her. Ash held her there. Ash shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut. A woman was touching her right now. A woman who had her hand on her hips and her face. A woman she was straddling.

“Are you okay?” Ash asked.

“I — you’re —”

“I’m what?”

Sara opened her eyes and there it was. That intense expression that Ash had been hiding. It was the same look as the restaurant. The same one she’d seen in her room that first day. The look of a big cat that knew it was at the top of its food chain. One that could pounce at any moment, but was choosing to watch for now. It was terrifying. Sara couldn’t get enough.

“You’re doing the thing,” Sara said.

Ash pushed Sara’s hip’s down until she was properly straddling her. Sara didn’t know what to do with her hands. There was so much touching already, she didn’t know what would happen if she reached out and added to it. What she needed to do, was leave. She needed to get off Ash and just go. The weed had been a great idea until Sun and Emily had left.

Ash moved her hand from Sara’s face to the back of her head. She scratched at the skin there, then started to massage her neck. Her fingers pressed in deep, soothing muscle that Sara didn’t know was sore. She let her head hang. Shocks of pleasure danced down her spine.

They needed to stop, but Ash would enjoy this for a bit longer. Ash seemed to know exactly how to touch her. Her fingers started to scratch again. A humiliating, low noise of pleasure forced its way out of Sara.

“Feel good?” Ash asked.

Sara remained still and silent. Saying the words aloud would make everything more real. She didn’t want to deal with that. She wanted to indulge for a little longer.

Ash was still for a moment. Where her hands rested simmered with warmth. It was like Ash’s hands were brands permanently marking her skin. Sara was never going to forget how they felt.

Sara breathed out. As she did, Ash ran her hands up from Sara’s hips back to her shoulders. She held them for a moment, then let them trail back down, before they found Sara’s hips again and squeezed hard enough to bruise. A part of Sara wanted that.

“You’re tiny,” Ash said.

“You — what are you doing? Why —?”

“Because I want to,” Ash replied.

“Oh.”

:::

New desire: have a hot butch lady with big strong hands say that you are tiny. Nice, that’s the good stuff.

So she has a lot of internalised homophobia and heteronormativity to work through as well, which would be interesting if not for the fact that it means she’ll be fucking around with some GUY for the first six chapters out of twenty-three. Ricardo is an absolute nobody, and I’m not sure why he’s even in this honestly. His job is mainly to give Sara a brief taste of what queer assimilation is like:

It made her feel so normal. Every compliment, every second she spent with him wanting her, was proof that the people in high school were wrong. That her parents and most of the help and so much of what she read online wasn’t true. A man liked her. He had no idea she was trans. She was just as good as any other cis woman.

Before freaking out badly in a “Oh My God You’re Trans” moment and leaving the plot forever. Sara doesn’t seem to get all that much out of it, even though Ash’s buddy Emily is there to tell her that she didn’t do anything wrong by not being forward with the guy about her gender. Mostly it’s just an excuse to self hate again.

At this point you may be asking yourself, ‘Ashinadash, where did Sara get all the self-hate from?’ You might also not be, because it’s way harder to not pick up tons of internalised transphobia in our godforsaken western society. I was really curious myself though, and it turns out the answer is really bad and adds a whole layer of pointless, terrible complication to the proceedings! Turns out Sara has rich-ass parents:

“Damn, your parents really are rich,” Sun said.

“Yeah. They are,” Sara replied. It wasn’t something she liked to dwell on.

But not just any old rich parents, no, they are rich in The South. Sara was raised in a literal mansion by the standard-issue jet-setting rich parents, and had “hired help” attend to her every need as a child. When she goes out to eat with Sun, Emily and Ash, she observes that the food “isn’t as good as what the help made back home”. Hmmmmmm! She makes all kinds of terrible comments internally, like when the gang pulls up to Sun’s family home, and they poke fun at it:

Sara held her tongue. She had seen tacky houses. This was not one. It had style and character. It wasn’t a copy-pasted McMansion or a millionaire’s overdesigned dream.

It’s like ‘Oooooh look at these fucking peasants don’t realise this mansion was commissioned explicitly by fucking Stonewall Jackson’ or whoever the fuck, get off your high horse, daughter of the confederacy. And this:

Sara pulled in behind a Telsa and a Porsche. It was a good sign. The neighborhood and cars meant Ash’s parents were wealthy. At least Sara had experience dealing with wealthy people.

Ooh, so glad you won’t have to deal with any of them POORS! Thank the lord for symbols of excess and capital! This is actually the real meat-and-potatoes of the problems with Sour Peach, I think, and why I chose to display it & flog it publically for you all. Generally, it’s hard to tolerate Sara’s insufferable internalised & externalised self hateful transphobia, mainly because she’s a bitch to nice people, but also partly because her backstory is totally unrelatable, pretty scuffed & kind of incomprehensible… even before you get to any sort of political analysis of things like where her family’s doubtlessly-inherited wealth came from. It introduces strange problems to the plot that didn’t need to exist:

But then she came out at 13 and a switch flipped. If they couldn’t have the son the doctor told them they’d had, then they were going to have a perfect daughter. Mom had dropped her off at makeup classes with some of the help once a week for six months. She picked out all of Sara’s clothes and approved outfits until Sara turned 15. Dad had sent her to etiquette classes. He taught her how to lie and misdirect about the sort of woman she was. How to show no vulnerabilities.

Like what, all this because her rich-bitch southern gentry parents sent her off to a feminine politeness school that totally exists, because they wanted a perfect daughter??? Not because society taught her so, not because she hung with the wrong crowd or read the wrong stuff, no, it’s actually her “suffering from success” of her unbearably privileged upbringing??? It really feels like Sara doesn’t have a critical bone in her fucking body, either for her parents’ shitty mansion with servants or their deeply queerphobic behaviour. Like, nobody ever challenges her about her intolerable rich-girl worldview, classist assumptions, and frankly combined with the way the story isn’t critical enough of her, it gets to feeling like Sour Peach doesn’t wanna challenge Sara to change at all.

Take, for example, this stupid bit from when Sara goes to watch one of Ash’s fights: (she does cool MMA stuff very rad)

“She’s been into boxing and stuff for a while,” Sun said. “It was her thing in high school. She was on the wrestling team for a bit too, but the coach said she didn’t play well with a team.”

“She’s really good, yeah,” Emily said.

“Bet she could beat up a guy like that,” Alex said.

Sara finally found her voice. “Yeah, probably some guys, for sure. She’s good.”

“Just some guys? You can put her in a ring with someone from here.”

“She might be okay,” Sara admitted. “But testosterone is — it makes you so fucking strong. I don’t think she’d win. Maybe in a different context. If you gave her brass knuckles, that’d be even,” Sara said. She didn’t know why she was defending Ash. She’d done so much reading on differences between men and women in sports. It was one of those things that cis people always brought up when they were talking about trans people.

Of course Sara absolutely cannot resist running her mouth off about a bunch of transphobic bullshit she read in The Guardian or whatever. Of course the other three trans & nonbinary peeps she is with happen to disagree, so she does in fact go full terf here, with a nice side of NB-phobic gatekeeping dogshit:

Alex didn’t flinch. “It doesn’t matter. You sound like TERF.”

“Oh fuck off!” Sara said. “You don’t take HRT and you don’t even have dysphoria! You have no idea what it feels like to suffer from it. What give you the right to police my opinions on this?”

“I’m policing you? You’re the one doing the policing right now. What does it matter if I’m HRT or have dysphoria or not? Suffering isn’t what being queer is predicated on. Don’t be self-hating.”

People were looking at them. Sara needed to stop, but Alex was sitting there looking so fucking smug. Sun and Emily had gone quiet. They looked uncomfortable. It was like she was back at Colton with Ricardo’s friends. At least she’d been here once already.

“Fuck you. Don’t you ever try and tell me what I do and don’t know. You’re barely fucking trans.”

So what we have here is some whiny, self-hating assimilationist trans bitch from a moneyed family spewing disgusting transphobia about who is trans and not. I’m supposed to relate to & like Sara? This is our POV lady, seriously?

But nobody, neither the characters in the story nor the author, seems interested in challenging Sara about her shitty beliefs too much:

“Yes,” [Emily said,] “and I can tell you firsthand they feel bad about what they said too. Honestly, the two of you are more alike than you think. I think the problem is that you both have a hard time accepting someone else can have a different perspective.”

I said “what the fuck” out loud. Alex did not do anything wrong here, they just defended their own existence from some vomit-inducing self-hating Blanchardite terf. Sara’s “perspective” is garbage. This is the best the story can do for character growth right then:

“Okay,” Sara said. “I understand what you’re saying. I get it. I don’t — I don’t totally agree, but I get it,” Sara said.

“The point of this is just to say you can’t invalidate them. That’s wrong,” Emily said.

“I’m not going to. I promise,” Sara said.

The comments under this chapter & chapter 12 I found to be kind of sickening. All of my sympathy for Sara has bled out by this point, about the halfway mark. It gets worse, too - Sara is also a fucking cop lover, which I find to be ridiculous for a trans person, I mean lmao. Ash is an orphan and of course the state has failed her in the usual ways, so she tells Sara this, and Sara has the gall to react in shock:

“Because I was a shithead and I got away from him more times than he caught me. He also got injured chasing me once. Took him out of the field for a bit. Maybe permanently. I don’t know. I think he deserved it,” Ash said.

“Did you — was that your fault? Did you injure him?” Sara asked.

“I don’t want to answer that,” Ash replied.

Sure. Ash may have attacked a cop. What did it matter at this point? Sara was already so many red flags deep and nothing terrible had happened to her yet. She meant what she said outside. Ash had changed. She wasn’t going to have a go at her for things that were in the past.

In what universe is this a red flag?? Gee, I fucking WONDER why Ash might have been fighting with cops. An orphan in the US’ system? I just cannot fathom. Sara seems really quite incapable of looking outside of her own experience, and I hate it sooo much. So does it get better, at all?

Well, I thought Sour Peach was gonna be about moving past all of this stuff, but in actuality it’s like 80% of the runtime spent wallowing in it, and the last three chapters actually do the self-crit, kind of.

On a trip home to hang with Ash’s parents for the holiday, and after some pretty-okay sexual tension followed by a quick masturbation to dirty thoughts about a dirtier butch dyke, Sara just up and leaves, apropos of nothing. Shame was what I expected, but the direction things took here surprised me, when Emily inevitably asks Sara why she ran the hell away from Ash:

“It’s me. God, I sound so stupid saying it, but it’s me. I can’t…I can’t be in a relationship with her. I’m such a fucking mess and I’m always going to feel guilty about who I am and she doesn’t deserve that. I’m not going to put that all on her. I don’t care if she says she can handle it. I don’t want to. And that’s why I left. Because I didn’t want to draw it out when I knew it had to end like this.”

I was like, wow, finally, some self awareness, very cool! I didn’t expect it’d wrap up well in three chapters, though. Hilariously, Ash pretty much just agrees, in her usual way:

“If you think you’re too messed up for a relationship, then you need to work that out first. I don’t think you’ve done that in less than two weeks.”

Not only does she point out the pacing issues, but thank fuck somebody else said it! Ash has basically spent a month’s time watching Sara throw tantrums about how much she hates herself for being gay and trans all day. After all that, when Sara wonders “Couldn’t they be better? Couldn’t Ash help her with that?”, Ash and I were unified in our responses of “lmao, fuck no”. This ‘she can fix me!’ vibe is extremely silly, like did Sara learn nothing? Girl needs twenty straight chapters of therapy.

Instead, she gets a condensed montage in one chapter. She sure is lucky to find a queer-friendly therapist, too, sure am glad that wasn’t hard enough to warrant even mentioning on-page! It’s literally a few paragraphs of ‘she did lots of therapy and she tolerated those weird queers at the queer club on campus’, and then she gets to go be with Ash, happy ending. The actual arc this story should have is squished down into the last fifth.

It’s a pretty unfortunate thing, because A) I kinda love ‘transfem with big strong butch lady’ pairings, and B) the idea of tackling the internalised queerphobic rhetoric that’s so common among trans women is really rad! A Sour Peach is kind of a disaster though, I think. As a story, it doesn’t seem to know what “intersectionality” means, and so we get a protagonist who is still basically a rich-kid bootlicker at the end of the day. This sucks, partly because there’s still a lot to like about A Sour Peach. It has a really vibrant secondary cast and a likeable love interest who might have more going on. Honestly, if you cut most of the self-loathing bs and all of Sara’s backstory, it would be a pretty good little romance, but alas. So what else can I recommend?

Nothing else really jabs this theme directly, that I know of. If you have suggestions, suggest 'em! The closest I have is Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. It hits on some of the same themes of queer assimilation and the trials of community building, but it’s set in a zombie apocalypse in which the real zombies were the terfs, just like in real life. Manhunt is hard to recommend because it’s gorey (and sometimes sexually violent) to the point of being nauseating, and it is pretty in-your-face with some of its commentary, since it pretty much seems like the author’s trauma dump in book form. But it’s got more in the way of intersectional considerations and as far as pulpy transfem fiction goes is well worth engaging with, even for its many failings.

This does suck though, I had a ton of Gentle_Breeze stuff on my list to read… like, why not just cut Sara’s backstory? Seriously, rich parents? Sigh…

Addendum: There’s a part of me, the one that tries desperately to pick up on social cues, which suggests that posting a big negative rant about someone’s original work isn’t cool. I think it comes from A) the culture against criticism that seems to exist on ao3, B) the literal internet harassment that Goodreads authors have been known to take part in regarding negative reviewers, and C) the fact that it’s bitching and griping about something someone wrote & offered for free. But I don’t think any of those factors free A Sour Peach from being criticised, and I don’t think I was overly rude or mean in this, so uh I’m posting. The other part of me is the one that will explode if I don’t post this!