yeah, referring to june as a 'fringe headcanon that got big because of a publicity stunt' is also an inaccurate and pretty bad faith read of everything, as is saying people referring to her as june is 'john erasure.' june isnt a different character to john, more june is more john, just with a different name and pronouns.

this actually ties into a thought i was having earlier but couldnt say cause i was at work. its actually very possible to hold progressive worldviews but still be kind of regressive and reactionary. you can respect peoples pronouns and say trans rights and go to pride but still also participate in harrassment campaigns or see people as lesser than you over an opinion, and believing that youre a progressive person can cloud your judgement in this regard. this relates back to the june/john discussion because this plays into it a bit. to give a demonstration: i believe june is a trans woman. i believe that she's an egg in homestuck proper and in postcanon, and in my mind 'june' is the default way to refer to her. however, when im discussing this character as appears in hs1, and im not talking about the transfemness of said character, i refer to him as john and with he/him pronouns. i dont believe you can deadname a fictional character in the same way you can a real person, or at the very least not in this particular case. insisting on referring to john as 'june' looks progressive and positive, sure, but it hinders discussion and analysis, and at points i think its the wrong thing to do. i dont like calling the character who ectobiologizes himself and all his friends in a lab 'june,' because at this point in the story john was not fully transitioned or going by that name, its inaccurate and at times it even feels a little revisionist to me. treating a trans character as if she was always fully transitioned and indistinguishable from a cis woman doesnt really make a good transfem story, as the transition is inherent to the experience of being trans. (this is also why i see it as a red flag (a minor one but still) when people insist that referring to most recently revealed nymph in hsbc as 'del'fi' instead of dagger is an act of transphobia.) some people would rather ignore the realness and the nuance of a character in favor of watering them down to show how much of a good ally they are, (or to ignore that same realness and nuance to insist that people are trying to crowbar Woke Ideology into everything.)